REALITY TV TEACHES ALL THE WRONG LEADERSHIP LESSONS
By Ruth Wageman
Are you, like me, a little hooked on those reality shows where star talents compete for a title such as Top Chef, Design Star, Face Off champion? If so, you hear a lot of advice about how to “be a leader.” Please don't take that advice to work with you.
I love watching gifted people execute their craft, especially when it involves food. I don't love everything that competition brings out in how people treat each other. Hopefully your own company is well past using competition as a cheap motivating tactic, with all its nasty side effects. But it's the judging session after the team challenges that really gives me heartburn. Typically, two unfortunate contestants are appointed to lead teams of their competitors to create a new restaurant, design a fashion collection, decorate a house. One contestant is always sent home—almost invariably the leader of the losing team.
Then we get to hear a judge—Tom Colicchio or Michael Kors or Vern Yip—provide some parting coaching about how to lead a team. "You didn't execute your vision," they say. "You let them move you off your plan." "A leader has to be able to step up and direct things." The underlying assumption seems to be that if you are the leader, it's your job—and yours alone—to have a vision. The rest of the group merely executes, and you make sure they do so to the highest standard.
To be sure, that is a common take on leadership. It’s also one that is increasingly irrelevant and problematic in modern organizations. As someone who has studied and taught about leadership for decades, I don't like seeing that same misguided message conveyed in so many popular settings.
What the expert judges say about leadership probably describes what has worked—or at least not failed—for them. It may work well in a kitchen or a design studio (although I don't for a moment believe it's the only way to lead effectively in a kitchen or a design studio). I don’t mean to suggest that the celebrity chefs are espousing a 19th-century Escoffier-style military dictatorship in the kitchen. None of the designers seems to run an actual sweat shop. But they essentially are advocating leadership practices for running a high-end assembly line. No room for the team members’ vision or initiative, no acknowledgement that the leader can’t have all the answers. Maybe ok in a restaurant kitchen—but these celebrity leaders are not trying to lead via the complex negotiated collaborations that are so necessary in modern matrixed organizations. Matrix leaders are people who have the tough job of holding accountability for delivering bottom-line results, under uncertain or even disrupted conditions, while relying on people and resources not under their direct authority. These leaders’ success depends on the whole enterprise working together freely and well toward a shared purpose.
With colleagues at what was then Hay Group, a management consultancy, I undertook to learn more about how the Best Companies for Leadership create conditions for matrix leaders to be effective in their challenging roles. Hay Group's annual Best Companies for Leadership listed top companies from around the world, nominated by their peers and their own employees, that best develop high-quality leadership for the future. Here are two characteristics of the best organizations, as described by their own staff, that strongly distinguished them from the rest:
- The best organizations for leadership have programs designed to develop leaders who can creatively bring together resources across different parts of the organization (100% of the best, compared with only 65% of the rest).
- They expect people to lead regardless of whether they have formal positions of authority (90% of the best as compared with only 53% of the rest).
The wake up call is in the flip side of these findings: Some 35% of companies that responded to the survey do not focus on developing leaders who can mobilize others to collaborate, and 47% do not expect you to lead unless you hold a management position. They are not prepared—and they are not preparing their employees—to lead in the world of the future.
The best companies recognize: The more leadership the better. The more people who can mobilize others to identify a challenge or opportunity, craft a shared vision, and solve a problem together, the better off any organization is to meet the future.
Matrix structures exist because functional or product-based or geographic structures alone do not enable companies to bring their resources to bear in creative, swift ways to identify and meet the opportunities they find. Matrix leaders inevitably share accountability with their peers for making things happen—without ever having complete control over the resources they need. In a qualitative study of outstanding matrix leaders, we sought to learn what distinguishes them from those who struggle in such roles. Here's some of what we found:
- Outstanding matrix leaders have a solutions orientation, a willingness and ability to work with colleagues to understand their needs and to create a joint vision.
- They are courageous. They not only speak up to senior leaders about obstacles to their negotiated vision, they are accepting and even welcoming of wildly different points of view from their peers.
- They are emotionally mature. They can set aside their individual interests for the greater good, are comfortable with the ambiguity inevitable when disparate parties have to work something out together, and they have patience for time needed to collaborate with colleagues.
Working toward shared vision, showing courage and patience. A kind of leadership that is not realistic when you are leading a team on TV under a crazy time limit, to be sure. But the world of reality, as opposed to reality TV, demands it. But the contestants on these shows are stuck with the rules of the game they agreed to play. How might we change the rules in our workplaces?
Ruth Wageman has taught leadership at Columbia University's Graduate School of Business and the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, and has been a visiting Leadership Fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. She has spent more than 30 years studying what it takes to lead teams effectively, especially the unique challenges of leading teams of leaders.
Original published in Forbes, Feb 18, 2011, 12:00pm EST.