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HBR CLASSIC

The Manager’s JobFolklore and Fact

by Henry Mintzberg

The classical view says that

the manager organizes,

coordinates, plans, and

controls; the facts suggest

otherwise.

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The Manager’s Job

Folklore and Fact

by Henry Mintzberg

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harvard business review • march–apr

The classical view says that the manager organizes, coordinates,

plans, and controls; the facts suggest otherwise.

If you ask managers what they do, they willmost likely tell you that they plan, organize,coordinate, and control. Then watch whatthey do. Don’t be surprised if you can’t relatewhat you see to these words.

When a manager is told that a factory hasjust burned down and then advises the callerto see whether temporary arrangements canbe made to supply customers through a for-eign subsidiary, is that manager planning, or-ganizing, coordinating, or controlling? Howabout when he or she presents a gold watch toa retiring employee? Or attends a conferenceto meet people in the trade and returns withan interesting new product idea for employeesto consider?

These four words, which have dominatedmanagement vocabulary since the French in-dustrialist Henri Fayol first introduced them in1916, tell us little about what managers actu-ally do. At best, they indicate some vague ob-jectives managers have when they work.

The field of management, so devoted toprogress and change, has for more than half a

century not seriously addressed the basic ques-tion: What do managers do? Without a properanswer, how can we teach management? Howcan we design planning or information sys-tems for managers? How can we improve thepractice of management at all?

Our ignorance of the nature of managerialwork shows up in various ways in the modernorganization—in boasts by successful manag-ers who never spent a single day in a manage-ment training program; in the turnover of cor-porate planners who never quite understoodwhat it was the manager wanted; in the com-puter consoles gathering dust in the back roombecause the managers never used the fancy on-line MIS some analyst thought they needed.Perhaps most important, our ignorance showsup in the inability of our large public organiza-tions to come to grips with some of their mostserious policy problems.

Somehow, in the rush to automate produc-tion, to use management science in the func-tional areas of marketing and finance, and toapply the skills of the behavioral scientist to

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The Manager’s Job •

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Henry Mintzberg

is the BronfmanProfessor of Management at McGillUniversity. His latest book is

Mintzbergon Management: Inside Our StrangeWorld of Organizations

(Free Press,1989). This article appeared originally inHBR July–August 1975. It won the McK-insey Award for excellence.

the problem of worker motivation, the man-ager—the person in charge of the organizationor one of its subunits—has been forgotten.

I intend to break the reader away fromFayol’s words and introduce a more support-able and useful description of managerialwork. This description derives from my reviewand synthesis of research on how various man-agers have spent their time.

In some studies, managers were observedintensively; in a number of others, they keptdetailed diaries; in a few studies, their recordswere analyzed. All kinds of managers werestudied—foremen, factory supervisors, staffmanagers, field sales managers, hospital ad-ministrators, presidents of companies and na-tions, and even street gang leaders. These“managers” worked in the United States, Can-ada, Sweden, and Great Britain.

A synthesis of these findings paints an inter-esting picture, one as different from Fayol’sclassical view as a cubist abstract is from a Re-naissance painting. In a sense, this picture willbe obvious to anyone who has ever spent a dayin a manager’s office, either in front of thedesk or behind it. Yet, at the same time, thispicture throws into doubt much of the folklorethat we have accepted about the manager’swork.

Folklore and Facts About Managerial WorkThere are four myths about the manager’s jobthat do not bear up under careful scrutiny ofthe facts.

Folklore: The manager is a reflective, system-atic planner. The evidence on this issue is over-whelming, but not a shred of it supports thisstatement.

Fact: Study after study has shown that man-agers work at an unrelenting pace, that their ac-tivities are characterized by brevity, variety, anddiscontinuity, and that they are strongly orientedto action and dislike reflective activities. Con-sider this evidence:

Half the activities engaged in by the fivechief executives of my study lasted less thannine minutes, and only 10% exceeded onehour.1 A study of 56 U.S. foremen found thatthey averaged 583 activities per eight-hourshift, an average of 1 every 48 seconds.2 Thework pace for both chief executives and fore-men was unrelenting. The chief executivesmet a steady stream of callers and mail from

the moment they arrived in the morning untilthey left in the evening. Coffee breaks andlunches were inevitably work related, andever-present subordinates seemed to usurp anyfree moment.

A diary study of 160 British middle and topmanagers found that they worked without in-terruption for a half hour or more only aboutonce every two days.3

Of the verbal contacts the chief executivesin my study engaged in, 93% were arranged onan ad hoc basis. Only 1% of the executives’time was spent in open-ended observationaltours. Only 1 out of 368 verbal contacts was un-related to a specific issue and could thereforebe called general planning. Another researcherfound that “in not one single case did a man-ager report obtaining important external infor-mation from a general conversation or otherundirected personal communication.”4

Is this the planner that the classical view de-scribes? Hardly. The manager is simply re-sponding to the pressures of the job. I foundthat my chief executives terminated many oftheir own activities, often leaving meetings be-fore the end, and interrupted their desk workto call in subordinates. One president not onlyplaced his desk so that he could look down along hallway but also left his door open whenhe was alone—an invitation for subordinatesto come in and interrupt him.

Clearly, these managers wanted to encour-age the flow of current information. But moresignificantly, they seemed to be conditioned bytheir own work loads. They appreciated theopportunity cost of their own time, and theywere continually aware of their ever-presentobligations—mail to be answered, callers to at-tend to, and so on. It seems that a manager isalways plagued by the possibilities of whatmight be done and what must be done.

When managers must plan, they seem to doso implicitly in the context of daily actions, notin some abstract process reserved for twoweeks in the organization’s mountain retreat.The plans of the chief executives I studiedseemed to exist only in their heads—as flexi-ble, but often specific, intentions. The tradi-tional literature notwithstanding, the job ofmanaging does not breed reflective planners;managers respond to stimuli, they are condi-tioned by their jobs to prefer live to delayed ac-tion.

Folklore: The effective manager has no regu-

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How often can you work

for a half an hour

without interruption?

lar duties to perform. Managers are constantlybeing told to spend more time planning anddelegating and less time seeing customers andengaging in negotiations. These are not, afterall, the true tasks of the manager. To use thepopular analogy, the good manager, like thegood conductor, carefully orchestrates every-thing in advance, then sits back, respondingoccasionally to an unforeseeable exception.But here again the pleasant abstraction justdoes not seem to hold up.

Fact: Managerial work involves performing anumber of regular duties, including ritual andceremony, negotiations, and processing of soft in-formation that links the organization with its en-vironment. Consider some evidence from theresearch:

A study of the work of the presidents ofsmall companies found that they engaged inroutine activities because their companiescould not afford staff specialists and were sothin on operating personnel that a single ab-sence often required the president to substi-tute.5

One study of field sales managers and an-other of chief executives suggest that it is anatural part of both jobs to see important cus-tomers, assuming the managers wish to keepthose customers.6

Someone, only half in jest, once describedthe manager as the person who sees visitors sothat other people can get their work done. Inmy study, I found that certain ceremonial du-ties—meeting visiting dignitaries, giving outgold watches, presiding at Christmas dinners—were an intrinsic part of the chief executive’sjob.

Studies of managers’ information flow sug-gest that managers play a key role in securing“soft” external information (much of it avail-able only to them because of their status) andin passing it along to their subordinates.

Folklore: The senior manager needs aggre-gated information, which a formal managementinformation system best provides. Not too longago, the words total information system wereeverywhere in the management literature. Inkeeping with the classical view of the manageras that individual perched on the apex of a reg-ulated, hierarchical system, the literature’smanager was to receive all important informa-tion from a giant, comprehensive MIS.

But lately, these giant MIS systems are notworking—managers are simply not using

them. The enthusiasm has waned. A look athow managers actually process informationmakes it clear why.

Fact: Managers strongly favor verbal media,telephone calls and meetings, over documents.Consider the following:

In two British studies, managers spent anaverage of 66% and 80% of their time in verbal(oral) communication.7 In my study of fiveAmerican chief executives, the figure was 78%.

These five chief executives treated mail pro-cessing as a burden to be dispensed with. Onecame in Saturday morning to process 142pieces of mail in just over three hours, to “getrid of all the stuff.” This same manager lookedat the first piece of “hard” mail he had re-ceived all week, a standard cost report, and putit aside with the comment, “I never look atthis.”

These same five chief executives respondedimmediately to 2 of the 40 routine reportsthey received during the five weeks of mystudy and to 4 items in the 104 periodicals.They skimmed most of these periodicals in sec-onds, almost ritualistically. In all, these chiefexecutives of good-sized organizations initi-ated on their own—that is, not in response tosomething else—a grand total of 25 pieces ofmail during the 25 days I observed them.

An analysis of the mail the executives re-ceived reveals an interesting picture—only13% was of specific and immediate use. So nowwe have another piece in the puzzle: not muchof the mail provides live, current informa-tion—the action of a competitor, the mood ofa government legislator, or the rating of lastnight’s television show. Yet this is the informa-tion that drove the managers, interruptingtheir meetings and rescheduling their work-days.

Consider another interesting finding. Man-agers seem to cherish “soft” information, espe-cially gossip, hearsay, and speculation. Why?The reason is its timeliness; today’s gossip maybe tomorrow’s fact. The manager who missesthe telephone call revealing that the com-pany’s biggest customer was seen golfing witha main competitor may read about a dramaticdrop in sales in the next quarterly report. Butthen it’s too late.

To assess the value of historical, aggregated,“hard” MIS information, consider two of themanager’s prime uses for information—toidentify problems and opportunities8 and to

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Today’s gossip may be

tomorrow’s fact—that’s

why managers cherish

hearsay.

build mental models (e.g., how the organiza-tion’s budget system works, how customersbuy products, how changes in the economy af-fect the organization). The evidence suggeststhat the manager identifies decision situationsand builds models not with the aggregated ab-stractions an MIS provides but with specifictidbits of data.

Consider the words of Richard Neustadt,who studied the information-collecting habitsof Presidents Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisen-hower: “It is not information of a general sortthat helps a President see personal stakes; notsummaries, not surveys, not the bland amal-gams. Rather…it is the odds and ends of tangi-ble detail that pieced together in his mind illu-minate the underside of issues put before him.To help himself he must reach out as widely ashe can for every scrap of fact, opinion, gossip,bearing on his interests and relationships asPresident. He must become his own director ofhis own central intelligence.”9

The manager’s emphasis on this verbalmedia raises two important points. First, ver-bal information is stored in the brains of peo-ple. Only when people write this informationdown can it be stored in the files of the organi-zation—whether in metal cabinets or on mag-netic tape—and managers apparently do notwrite down much of what they hear. Thus thestrategic data bank of the organization is notin the memory of its computers but in theminds of its managers.

Second, managers’ extensive use of verbalmedia helps to explain why they are reluctantto delegate tasks. It is not as if they can hand adossier over to subordinates; they must takethe time to “dump memory”—to tell subordi-nates all about the subject. But this could takeso long that managers may find it easier to dothe task themselves. Thus they are damned bytheir own information system to a “dilemmaof delegation”—to do too much or to delegateto subordinates with inadequate briefing.

Folklore: Management is, or at least is quicklybecoming, a science and a profession. By almostany definition of science and profession, thisstatement is false. Brief observation of anymanager will quickly lay to rest the notion thatmanagers practice a science. A science involvesthe enaction of systematic, analytically deter-mined procedures or programs. If we do noteven know what procedures managers use,how can we prescribe them by scientific analy-

sis? And how can we call management a pro-fession if we cannot specify what managers areto learn? For after all, a profession involves“knowledge of some department of learning orscience” (Random House Dictionary).10

Fact: The managers’ programs—to scheduletime, process information, make decisions, andso on—remain locked deep inside their brains.Thus, to describe these programs, we rely onwords like judgment and intuition, seldom stop-ping to realize that they are merely labels forour ignorance.

I was struck during my study by the factthat the executives I was observing—all verycompetent—are fundamentally indistinguish-able from their counterparts of a hundredyears ago (or a thousand years ago). The infor-mation they need differs, but they seek it inthe same way—by word of mouth. Their deci-sions concern modern technology, but the pro-cedures they use to make those decisions arethe same as the procedures used by nineteenthcentury managers. Even the computer, so im-portant for the specialized work of the organi-zation, has apparently had no influence on thework procedures of general managers. In fact,the manager is in a kind of loop, with increas-ingly heavy work pressures but no aid forth-coming from management science.

Considering the facts about managerialwork, we can see that the manager’s job isenormously complicated and difficult. Manag-ers are overburdened with obligations yet can-not easily delegate their tasks. As a result, theyare driven to overwork and forced to do manytasks superficially. Brevity, fragmentation, andverbal communication characterize theirwork. Yet these are the very characteristics ofmanagerial work that have impeded scientificattempts to improve it. As a result, manage-ment scientists have concentrated on the spe-cialized functions of the organization, where itis easier to analyze the procedures and quan-tify the relevant information.11

But the pressures of a manager’s job are be-coming worse. Where before managers neededto respond only to owners and directors, nowthey find that subordinates with democraticnorms continually reduce their freedom toissue unexplained orders, and a growing num-ber of outside influences (consumer groups,government agencies, and so on) demand at-tention. Managers have had nowhere to turnfor help. The first step in providing such help is

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Research on Manag

In seeking to describe managerial wconducted my own research and alscanned the literature to integrate ings of studies from many diverse swith my own. These studies focuseddifferent aspects of managerial worwere concerned with the characteriwork—how long managers work, wwhat pace, with what interruptionswhom they work, and through whathey communicate. Other studies wcerned with the content of work—wtivities the managers actually carrywhy. Thus, after a meeting, one resmight note that the manager spentutes with three government officialWashington office, while another mrecord that the manager presentedpany’s stand on some proposed legin order to change a regulation.

A few of the studies of manageriaare widely known, but most have reburied as single journal articles or ibooks. Among the more important cite are:• Sune Carlson developed the diary

to study the work characteristics Swedish managing directors. Eac

to find out what the manager’s job really is.

Back to a Basic Description of Managerial WorkEarlier, I defined the manager as that personin charge of an organization or subunit. Be-sides CEOs, this definition would include vicepresidents, bishops, foremen, hockey coaches,and prime ministers. All these “managers” arevested with formal authority over an organi-zational unit. From formal authority comesstatus, which leads to various interpersonal re-lations, and from these comes access to infor-mation. Information, in turn, enables themanager to make decisions and strategies forthe unit.

The manager’s job can be described interms of various “roles,” or organized sets ofbehaviors identified with a position. My de-scription, shown in “The Manager’s Roles,”comprises ten roles. As we shall see, formal au-thority gives rise to the three interpersonal

roles, which in turn give rise to the three infor-mational roles; these two sets of roles enablethe manager to play the four decisional roles.

Interpersonal RolesThree of the manager’s roles arise directlyfrom formal authority and involve basic inter-personal relationships. First is the figureheadrole. As the head of an organizational unit,every manager must perform some ceremo-nial duties. The president greets the touringdignitaries. The foreman attends the weddingof a lathe operator. The sales manager takesan important customer to lunch.

The chief executives of my study spent 12%of their contact time on ceremonial duties; 17%of their incoming mail dealt with acknowledg-ments and requests related to their status. Forexample, a letter to a company president re-quested free merchandise for a crippledschoolchild; diplomas that needed to be signedwere put on the desk of the school superinten-

erial Workork, I

so the find-ources on two k. Some stics of here, at , with t media ere con-hat ac-

out, and earcher 45 min-s in their ight

the com-islation

l work mained solated ones I

method of nine h kept a

detailed log of his activities. Carlson’s re-sults are reported in his book Executive Be-

haviour. A number of British researchers, notably Rosemary Stewart, have subse-quently used Carlson’s method. In Man-

agers and Their Jobs, she describes the study of 160 top and middle managers of British companies.

• Leonard Sayles’s book Managerial Behav-

ior is another important reference. Using a method he refers to as “anthropologi-cal,” Sayles studied the work content of middle and lower level managers in a large U.S. corporation. Sayles moved freely in the company, collecting what-ever information struck him as impor-tant.

• Perhaps the best-known source is Presi-

dential Power, in which Richard Neustadt analyzes the power and managerial be-havior of Presidents Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower. Neustadt used second-ary sources—documents and interviews with other parties.

• Robert H. Guest, in Personnel, reports on a study of the foreman’s working day. Fifty-six U.S. foremen were observed and each of their activities recorded during

one eight-hour shift.• Richard C. Hodgson, Daniel J. Levinson,

and Abraham Zaleznik studied a team of three top executives of a U.S. hospital. From that study they wrote The Executive

Role Constellation. They addressed the way in which work and socioemotional roles were divided among the three managers.

• William F. Whyte, from his study of a street gang during the Depression, wrote Street Corner Society. His findings about the gang’s workings and leadership, which George C. Homans analyzed in The

Human Group, suggest interesting simi-larities of job contents between street gang leaders and corporate managers.My own study involved five American

CEOs of middle- to large-sized organiza-tions—a consulting firm, a technology com-pany, a hospital, a consumer goods com-pany, and a school system. Using a method called “structural observation,” during one intensive week of observation for each exec-utive, I recorded various aspects of every piece of mail and every verbal contact. In all, I analyzed 890 pieces of incoming and outgoing mail and 368 verbal contacts.

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FormalAuthority anStatus

InterpersonRoles

The M

Figurehea

Leader

Liason

dent.Duties that involve interpersonal roles may

sometimes be routine, involving little seriouscommunication and no important decisionmaking. Nevertheless, they are important tothe smooth functioning of an organization andcannot be ignored.

Managers are responsible for the work ofthe people of their unit. Their actions in thisregard constitute the leader role. Some ofthese actions involve leadership directly—forexample, in most organizations the managersare normally responsible for hiring and train-ing their own staff.

In addition, there is the indirect exercise ofthe leader role. For example, every managermust motivate and encourage employees,somehow reconciling their individual needswith the goals of the organization. In virtuallyevery contact with the manager, subordinatesseeking leadership clues ask: “Does she ap-prove?” “How would she like the report toturn out?” “Is she more interested in marketshare than high profits?”

The influence of managers is most clearlyseen in the leader role. Formal authority veststhem with great potential power; leadershipdetermines in large part how much of it theywill realize.

The literature of management has alwaysrecognized the leader role, particularly thoseaspects of it related to motivation. In compari-son, until recently it has hardly mentioned the

liaison role, in which the manager makes con-tacts outside the vertical chain of command.This is remarkable in light of the finding of vir-tually every study of managerial work thatmanagers spend as much time with peers andother people outside their units as they dowith their own subordinates—and, surpris-ingly, very little time with their own superiors.

In Rosemary Stewart’s diary study, the 160British middle and top managers spent 47% oftheir time with peers, 41% of their time withpeople inside their unit, and only 12% of theirtime with their superiors. For Robert H.Guest’s study of U.S. foremen, the figures were44%, 46%, and 10%. The chief executives of mystudy averaged 44% of their contact time withpeople outside their organizations, 48% withsubordinates, and 7% with directors and trust-ees.

The contacts the five CEOs made were withan incredibly wide range of people: subordi-nates; clients, business associates, and suppli-ers; and peers—managers of similar organiza-tions, government and trade organizationofficials, fellow directors on outside boards,and independents with no relevant organiza-tional affiliations. The chief executives’ timewith and mail from these groups is shown in“The Chief Executive’s Contacts.” Guest’sstudy of foremen shows, likewise, that theircontacts were numerous and wide-ranging, sel-dom involving fewer than 25 individuals, andoften more than 50.

Informational RolesBy virtue of interpersonal contacts, both withsubordinates and with a network of contacts,the manager emerges as the nerve center ofthe organizational unit. The manager may notknow everything but typically knows morethan subordinates do.

Studies have shown this relationship to holdfor all managers, from street gang leaders toU.S. presidents. In The Human Group, GeorgeC. Homans explains how, because they were atthe center of the information flow in their owngangs and were also in close touch with othergang leaders, street gang leaders were betterinformed than any of their followers.12 As forpresidents, Richard Neustadt observes: “Theessence of {Franklin} Roosevelt’s technique forinformation-gathering was competition. ‘Hewould call you in,’ one of his aides once toldme, ‘and he’d ask you to get the story on some

d

al InformationalRoles

DecisionalRoles

anager’s Roles

d Monitor

Disseminator

Spokesperson

Entrepreneur

DisturbanceHandler

ResourceAllocator

Negotiator

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7%

20%

The Ch

Dir

ClientsAss

Note: The fispent with efrom each gr

complicated business, and you’d come backafter a couple of days of hard labor andpresent the juicy morsel you’d uncoveredunder a stone somewhere, and then you’d findout he knew all about it, along with somethingelse you didn’t know. Where he got this infor-mation from he wouldn’t mention, usually,but after he had done this to you once or twiceyou got damn careful about your informa-tion.’”13

We can see where Roosevelt “got this infor-mation” when we consider the relationship be-tween the interpersonal and informationalroles. As leader, the manager has formal andeasy access to every staff member. In addition,liaison contacts expose the manager to exter-nal information to which subordinates oftenlack access. Many of these contacts are withother managers of equal status, who are them-selves nerve centers in their own organization.In this way, the manager develops a powerfuldatabase of information.

Processing information is a key part of themanager’s job. In my study, the CEOs spent40% of their contact time on activities devotedexclusively to the transmission of information;70% of their incoming mail was purely infor-mational (as opposed to requests for action).Managers don’t leave meetings or hang up thetelephone to get back to work. In large part,communication is their work. Three roles de-scribe these informational aspects of manage-rial work.

As monitor, the manager is perpetually scan-ning the environment for information, interro-gating liaison contacts and subordinates, andreceiving unsolicited information, much of itas a result of the network of personal contacts.Remember that a good part of the informationthe manager collects in the monitor role ar-rives in verbal form, often as gossip, hearsay,and speculation.

In the disseminator role, the manager passessome privileged information directly to subor-dinates, who would otherwise have no accessto it. When subordinates lack easy contactwith one another, the manager may pass infor-mation from one to another.

In the spokesperson role, the manager sendssome information to people outside the unit—a president makes a speech to lobby for an or-ganization cause, or a foreman suggests aproduct modification to a supplier. In addition,as a spokesperson, every manager must informand satisfy the influential people who controlthe organizational unit. For the foreman, thismay simply involve keeping the plant managerinformed about the flow of work through theshop.

The president of a large corporation, how-ever, may spend a great amount of time deal-ing with a host of influences. Directors andshareholders must be advised about finances;consumer groups must be assured that the or-ganization is fulfilling its social responsibilities;and government officials must be satisfied thatthe organization is abiding by the law.

Decisional RolesInformation is not, of course, an end in itself;it is the basic input to decision making. Onething is clear in the study of managerial work:the manager plays the major role in the unit’sdecision-making system. As its formal author-ity, only the manager can commit the unit toimportant new courses of action; and as itsnerve center, only the manager has full andcurrent information to make the set of deci-sions that determines the unit’s strategy. Fourroles describe the manager as decision maker.

As entrepreneur, the manager seeks to im-prove the unit, to adapt it to changing condi-tions in the environment. In the monitor role,a president is constantly on the lookout fornew ideas. When a good one appears, he ini-tiates a development project that he may su-pervise himself or delegate to an employee

1% 16% 25%

13% 8% 20%

48% 39%

ief Executive’s Contacts

ectors Peers

, Suppliers,ociates

Independents and Others

Chief Executive

Subordinates

rst figure indicates the proportion of total contact time ach group and the second figure, the proportion of mail oup.

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Over the years, one reaction hnated the comments I have recfrom managers who read “Theager’s Job: Folklore and Fact”: make me feel so good. I thougthose other managers were plaorganizing, coordinating, and ling, while I was busy being inrupted, jumping from one issuother, and trying to keep the lichaos.” Yet everything in this amust have been patently obviothese people. Why such a reacreading what they already kne

Conversely, how to explain tdifferent reaction of two mediawho called to line up interviewan article based on this one apin the

New York Times

. “Are wesomeone finally let managers hboth said in passing, a commestill takes me aback. True, theyread only the account in the

Ti

that no more let managers havdid this article. Why that react

One explanation grows out way I now see this article—as ing not so much another view agement as another face of it. call it the insightful face, in conthe long-dominant professionarebral face. One stresses commthe other calculation; one seesworld with integrated perspecother figures it as the componeportfolio. The cerebral face opwith the words and numbers onality; the insightful face is roothe images and feel of a manategrity.

Each of these faces implies aent kind of “knowing,” and thalieve, explains many managerstion to this article. Rationally, “knew” what managers did—porganized, coordinated, and cotrolled. But deep down that di

Retrospective CommentaryHenry Mintzberg

as domi-eived Man-“You ht all nning, control-ter-e to an-d on the rticle us to

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feel quite right. The description in this article may have come closer to what they really “knew.” As for those media people, they weren’t railing against management as such but against the cerebral form of management, so per-vasive, that they saw impersonalizing the world around them.

In practice, management has to be two-faced—there has to be a balance between the cerebral and the insight-ful. So, for example, I realized origi-nally that managerial communication was largely oral and that the advent of the computer had not changed any-thing fundamental in the executive suite—a conclusion I continue to hold. (The greatest threat the personal com-puter poses is that managers will take it seriously and come to believe that they can manage by remaining in their offices and looking at displays of digi-tal characters.) But I also thought that the dilemma of delegating could be dealt with by periodic debriefings—disseminating words. Now, however, I believe that managers need more ways to convey the images and impressions they carry inside of them. This ex-plains the renewed interest in strate-gic vision, in culture, and in the roles of intuition and insight in manage-ment.

The ten roles I used to describe the manager’s job also reflect manage-ment’s cerebral face, in that they de-compose the job more than capture the integration. Indeed, my effort to show a sequence among these roles now seems more consistent with the traditional face of management work than an insightful one. Might we not just as well say that people throughout the organization take actions that in-form managers who, by making sense of those actions, develop images and visions that inspire people to subse-

quent efforts?Perhaps my greatest disappoint-

ment about the research reported here is that it did not stimulate new efforts. In a world so concerned with manage-ment, much of the popular literature is superficial and the academic research pedestrian. Certainly, many studies have been carried out over the last 15 years, but the vast majority sought to replicate earlier research. In particu-lar, we remain grossly ignorant about the fundamental content of the man-ager’s job and have barely addressed the major issues and dilemmas in its practice.

But superficiality is not only a prob-lem of the literature. It is also an occu-pational hazard of the manager’s job. Originally, I believed this problem could be dealt with; now I see it as in-herent in the job. This is because man-aging insightfully depends on the di-rect experience and personal knowledge that come from intimate contact. But in organizations grown larger and more diversified, that be-comes difficult to achieve. And so managers turn increasingly to the ce-rebral face, and the delicate balance between the two faces is lost.

Certainly, some organizations man-age to sustain their humanity despite their large size—as Tom Peters and Robert Waterman show in their book

In Search of Excellence. But that book at-tained its outstanding success pre-cisely because it is about the excep-tions, about the organizations so many of us long to be a part of—not the or-ganizations in which we actually work.

Fifteen years ago, I stated that “No job is more vital to our society than that of the manager. It is the manager who determines whether our social in-stitutions serve us well or whether they squander our talents and resources.”

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The scarcest resource

managers have to

allocate is their own

time.

(perhaps with the stipulation that he must ap-prove the final proposal).

There are two interesting features aboutthese development projects at the CEO level.First, these projects do not involve single deci-sions or even unified clusters of decisions.Rather, they emerge as a series of small deci-sions and actions sequenced over time. Appar-ently, chief executives prolong each projectboth to fit it into a busy, disjointed schedule,and so that they can comprehend complex is-sues gradually.

Second, the chief executives I studied super-vised as many as 50 of these projects at thesame time. Some projects entailed new prod-ucts or processes; others involved public rela-tions campaigns, improvement of the cash po-sition, reorganization of a weak department,resolution of a morale problem in a foreign di-vision, integration of computer operations,various acquisitions at different stages of de-velopment, and so on.

Chief executives appear to maintain a kindof inventory of the development projects invarious stages of development. Like jugglers,they keep a number of projects in the air; peri-odically, one comes down, is given a new burstof energy, and sent back into orbit. At variousintervals, they put new projects on-stream anddiscard old ones.

While the entrepreneur role describes themanager as the voluntary initiator of change,the disturbance handler role depicts the man-ager involuntarily responding to pressures.Here change is beyond the manager’s control.The pressures of a situation are too severe tobe ignored—a strike looms, a major customerhas gone bankrupt, or a supplier reneges on acontract—so the manager must act.

Leonard R. Sayles, who has carried out ap-propriate research on the manager’s job, likensthe manager to a symphony orchestra conduc-tor who must “maintain a melodious perfor-mance,”14 while handling musicians’ prob-lems and other external disturbances. Indeed,every manager must spend a considerableamount of time responding to high-pressuredisturbances. No organization can be so wellrun, so standardized, that it has consideredevery contingency in the uncertain environ-ment in advance. Disturbances arise not onlybecause poor managers ignore situations untilthey reach crisis proportions but also becausegood managers cannot possibly anticipate all

the consequences of the actions they take.The third decisional role is that of resource

allocator. The manager is responsible for decid-ing who will get what. Perhaps the most im-portant resource the manager allocates is hisor her own time. Access to the manager consti-tutes exposure to the unit’s nerve center anddecision maker. The manager is also chargedwith designing the unit’s structure, that pat-tern of formal relationships that determineshow work is to be divided and coordinated.

Also, as resource allocator, the manager au-thorizes the important decisions of the unit be-fore they are implemented. By retaining thispower, the manager can ensure that decisionsare interrelated. To fragment this power en-courages discontinuous decision making and adisjointed strategy.

There are a number of interesting featuresabout the manager’s authorization of others’decisions. First, despite the widespread use ofcapital budgeting procedures—a means of au-thorizing various capital expenditures at onetime—executives in my study made a greatmany authorization decisions on an ad hoc ba-sis. Apparently, many projects cannot wait orsimply do not have the quantifiable costs andbenefits that capital budgeting requires.

Second, I found that the chief executivesfaced incredibly complex choices. They had toconsider the impact of each decision on otherdecisions and on the organization’s strategy.They had to ensure that the decision would beacceptable to those who influence the organi-zation, as well as ensure that resources wouldnot be overextended. They had to understandthe various costs and benefits as well as thefeasibility of the proposal. They also had toconsider questions of timing. All this was nec-essary for the simple approval of someoneelse’s proposal. At the same time, however, thedelay could lose time, while quick approvalcould be ill-considered and quick rejectionmight discourage the subordinate who hadspent months developing a pet project.

One common solution to approvingprojects is to pick the person instead of theproposal. That is, the manager authorizesthose projects presented by people whosejudgment he or she trusts. But the managercannot always use this simple dodge.

The final decisional role is that of negotia-tor. Managers spend considerable time in ne-gotiations: the president of the football team

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works out a contract with the holdout super-star; the corporation president leads the com-pany’s contingent to negotiate a new strike is-sue; the foreman argues a grievance problemto its conclusion with the shop steward.

These negotiations are an integral part ofthe manager’s job, for only he or she has theauthority to commit organizational resourcesin “real time” and the nerve-center informa-tion that important negotiations require.

The Integrated JobIt should be clear by now that these ten rolesare not easily separable. In the terminology ofthe psychologist, they form a gestalt, an inte-grated whole. No role can be pulled out of theframework and the job be left intact. For ex-ample, a manager without liaison contactslacks external information. As a result, thatmanager can neither disseminate the informa-tion that employees need nor make decisionsthat adequately reflect external conditions.(This is a problem for the new person in amanagerial position, since he or she has tobuild up a network of contacts before makingeffective decisions.)

Here lies a clue to the problems of teammanagement.15 Two or three people cannotshare a single managerial position unless theycan act as one entity. This means that theycannot divide up the ten roles unless they canvery carefully reintegrate them. The real diffi-culty lies with the informational roles. Unlessthere can be full sharing of managerial infor-mation—and, as I pointed out earlier, it is pri-marily verbal—team management breaksdown. A single managerial job cannot be arbi-trarily split, for example, into internal and ex-ternal roles, for information from both sourcesmust be brought to bear on the same deci-sions.

To say that the ten roles form a gestalt isnot to say that all managers give equal atten-tion to each role. In fact, I found in my reviewof the various research studies that sales man-agers seem to spend relatively more of theirtime in the interpersonal roles, presumably areflection of the extrovert nature of the mar-keting activity. Production managers, on theother hand, give relatively more attention tothe decisional roles, presumably a reflection oftheir concern with efficient work flow. Andstaff managers spend the most time in the in-formational roles, since they are experts who

manage departments that advise other parts ofthe organization. Nevertheless, in all cases, theinterpersonal, informational, and decisionalroles remain inseparable.

Toward More Effective ManagementThis description of managerial work shouldprove more important to managers than anyprescription they might derive from it. That isto say, the managers’ effectiveness is signifi-cantly influenced by their insight into their ownwork. Performance depends on how well amanager understands and responds to thepressures and dilemmas of the job. Thus man-agers who can be introspective about theirwork are likely to be effective at their jobs.The questions in “Self-Study Questions forManagers” may sound rhetorical; none ismeant to be. Even though the questions can-not be answered simply, the manager shouldaddress them.

Let us take a look at three specific areas ofconcern. For the most part, the manageriallogjams—the dilemma of delegation, the data-base centralized in one brain, the problems ofworking with the management scientist—re-volve around the verbal nature of the man-ager’s information. There are great dangers incentralizing the organization’s data bank inthe minds of its managers. When they leave,they take their memory with them. And whensubordinates are out of convenient verbalreach of the manager, they are at an informa-tional disadvantage.

The manager is challenged to find systematicways to share privileged information. A regulardebriefing session with key subordinates, aweekly memory dump on the dictating ma-chine, maintaining a diary for limited circula-tion, or other similar methods may ease thelogjam of work considerably. The time spentdisseminating this information will be morethan regained when decisions must be made.Of course, some will undoubtedly raise thequestion of confidentiality. But managerswould be well advised to weigh the risks of ex-posing privileged information against havingsubordinates who can make effective deci-sions.

If there is a single theme that runs throughthis article, it is that the pressures of the jobdrive the manager to take on too much work,encourage interruption, respond quickly to

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Self-Study Questio

1. Where do I get my informationhow? Can I make greater use of mytacts? Can other people do some ofning? In what areas is my knowledgest, and how can I get others to prowith the information I need? Do I hciently powerful mental models of tthings I must understand within thzation and in its environment?

2. What information do I dissemiHow important is that informationsubordinates? Do I keep too much tion to myself because disseminatintime consuming or inconvenient? HI get more information to others so make better decisions?

3. Do I tend to act before informain? Or do I wait so long for all the intion that opportunities pass me by?

4. What pace of change am I askiorganization to tolerate? Is this chaanced so that our operations are necessively static nor overly disruptedwe sufficiently analyzed the impactchange on the future of our organiz

5. Am I sufficiently well-informedjudgment on subordinate’s proposaleave final authorization for more oposals with subordinates? Do we halems of coordination because suboralready make too many decisions indently?

every stimulus, seek the tangible and avoid theabstract, make decisions in small increments,and do everything abruptly.

Here again, the manager is challenged to dealconsciously with the pressures of superficiality bygiving serious attention to the issues that requireit, by stepping back in order to see a broad pic-ture, and by making use of analytical inputs. Al-though effective managers have to be adept atresponding quickly to numerous and varyingproblems, the danger in managerial work isthat they will respond to every issue equally(and that means abruptly) and that they willnever work the tangible bits and pieces of in-formation into a comprehensive picture oftheir world.

To create this comprehensive picture, man-agers can supplement their own models with

those of specialists. Economists describe thefunctioning of markets, operations researcherssimulate financial flow processes, and behav-ioral scientists explain the needs and goals ofpeople. The best of these models can besearched out and learned.

In dealing with complex issues, the seniormanager has much to gain from a close rela-tionship with the organization’s own manage-ment scientists. They have something impor-tant that the manager lacks—time to probecomplex issues. An effective working relation-ship hinges on the resolution of what a col-league and I have called “the planning di-lemma.”16 Managers have the information andthe authority; analysts have the time and thetechnology. A successful working relationshipbetween the two will be effected when the

ns for Managers, and con- my scan-e weak-vide me ave suffi-hose e organi-

nate? to my informa-g it is ow can

they can

tion is forma-

ng my nge bal-ither ex-? Have of this ation? to pass ls? Can I f the pro-ve prob-dinates depen-

6. What is my vision for this organiza-tion? Are these plans primarily in my own mind in loose form? Should I make them ex-plicit to guide the decisions of others better? Or do I need flexibility to change them at will?

7. How do my subordinates react to my managerial style? Am I sufficiently sensitive to the powerful influence of my actions? Do I fully understand their reactions to my ac-tions? Do I find an appropriate balance be-tween encouragement and pressure? Do I stifle their initiative?

8. What kind of external relationships do I maintain, and how? Do I spend too much of my time maintaining them? Are there cer-tain people whom I should get to know bet-ter?

9. Is there any system to my time schedul-ing, or am I just reacting to the pressures of the moment? Do I find the appropriate mix of activities or concentrate on one particu-lar function or problem just because I find it interesting? Am I more efficient with partic-ular kinds of work, at special times of the day or week? Does my schedule reflect this? Can someone else schedule my time (be-sides my secretary)?

10. Do I overwork? What effect does my work load have on my efficiency? Should I force myself to take breaks or to reduce the pace of my activity?

11. Am I too superficial in what I do? Can I really shift moods as quickly and frequently as my work requires? Should I decrease the amount of fragmentation and interruption in my work?

12. Do I spend too much time on current, tangible activities? Am I a slave to the ac-tion and excitement of my work, so that I am no longer able to concentrate on issues? Do key problems receive the attention they deserve? Should I spend more time reading and probing deeply into certain issues? Could I be more reflective? Should I be?

13. Do I use the different media appropri-ately? Do I know how to make the most of written communication? Do I rely exces-sively on face-to-face communication, thereby putting all but a few of my subordi-nates at an informational disadvantage? Do I schedule enough of my meetings on a reg-ular basis? Do I spend enough time observ-ing activities firsthand, or am I detached from the heart of my organization’s activi-ties?

14. How do I blend my personal rights and duties? Do my obligations consume all my time? How can I free myself from obliga-tions to ensure that I am taking this organi-zation where I want it to go? How can I turn my obligations to my advantage?

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manager learns to share information and theanalyst learns to adapt to the manager’s needs.For the analyst, adaptation means worryingless about the elegance of the method andmore about its speed and flexibility.

Analysts can help the top manager scheduletime, feed in analytical information, monitorprojects, develop models to aid in makingchoices, design contingency plans for distur-bances that can be anticipated, and conduct“quick and dirty” analyses for those that can-not. But there can be no cooperation if the an-alysts are out of the mainstream of the man-ager’s information flow.

The manager is challenged to gain control ofhis or her own time by turning obligations intoadvantages and by turning those things he or shewishes to do into obligations. The chief execu-tives of my study initiated only 32% of theirown contacts (and another 5% by mutualagreement). And yet to a considerable extentthey seemed to control their time. There weretwo key factors that enabled them to do so.

First, managers have to spend so much timedischarging obligations that if they were toview them as just that, they would leave nomark on the organization. Unsuccessful man-agers blame failure on the obligations. Effec-tive managers turn obligations to advantages.A speech is a chance to lobby for a cause; ameeting is a chance to reorganize a weak de-partment; a visit to an important customer is achance to extract trade information.

Second, the manager frees some time to dothe things that he or she—perhaps no oneelse—thinks important by turning them intoobligations. Free time is made, not found.Hoping to leave some time open for contem-plation or general planning is tantamount tohoping that the pressures of the job will goaway. Managers who want to innovate initiateprojects and obligate others to report back tothem. Managers who need certain environ-mental information establish channels thatwill automatically keep them informed. Man-agers who have to tour facilities commit them-selves publicly.

The Educator’s JobFinally, a word about the training of manag-ers. Our management schools have done anadmirable job of training the organization’sspecialists—management scientists, market-ing researchers, accountants, and organiza-

tional development specialists. But for themost part, they have not trained managers.17

Management schools will begin the serioustraining of managers when skill training takesa serious place next to cognitive learning. Cog-nitive learning is detached and informational,like reading a book or listening to a lecture. Nodoubt much important cognitive materialmust be assimilated by the manager-to-be. Butcognitive learning no more makes a managerthan it does a swimmer. The latter will drownthe first time she jumps into the water if hercoach never takes her out of the lecture hall,gets her wet, and gives her feedback on herperformance.

In other words, we are taught a skillthrough practice plus feedback, whether in areal or a simulated situation. Our managementschools need to identify the skills managersuse, select students who show potential inthese skills, put the students into situationswhere these skills can be practiced and devel-oped, and then give them systematic feedbackon their performance.

My description of managerial work suggestsa number of important managerial skills—de-veloping peer relationships, carrying out nego-tiations, motivating subordinates, resolvingconflicts, establishing information networksand subsequently disseminating information,making decisions in conditions of extreme am-biguity, and allocating resources. Above all,the manager needs to be introspective in orderto continue to learn on the job.

No job is more vital to our society than thatof the manager. The manager determineswhether our social institutions will serve uswell or whether they will squander our talentsand resources. It is time to strip away the folk-lore about managerial work and study it realis-tically so that we can begin the difficult task ofmaking significant improvements in its perfor-mance.

References1. All the data from my study can be found in Henry Mintz-berg, The Nature of Managerial Work (New York: Harper &Row, 1973).

2. Robert H. Guest, “Of Time and the Foreman,” Personnel,May 1956, p. 478.

3. Rosemary Stewart, Managers and Their Jobs (London:Macmillan, 1967); see also Sune Carlson, Executive Behavior(Stockholm: Strombergs, 1951).

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4. Francis J. Aguilar, Scanning the Business Environment(New York: Macmillan, 1967), p. 102.

5. Unpublished study by Irving Choran, reported in Mintz-berg, The Nature of Managerial Work.

6. Robert T. Davis, Performance and Development of FieldSales Managers (Boston: Division of Research, HarvardBusiness School, 1957); George H. Copeman, The Role of theManaging Director (London: Business Publications, 1963).

7. Stewart, Managers and Their Jobs; Tom Burns, “The Di-rections of Activity and Communication in a DepartmentalExecutive Group,” Human Relations 7, no. 1 (1954): 73.

8. H. Edward Wrapp, “Good Managers Don’t Make PolicyDecisions,” HBR September-October 1967, p. 91. Wrapp re-fers to this as spotting opportunities and relationships inthe stream of operating problems and decisions; in his arti-cle, Wrapp raises a number of excellent points related tothis analysis.

9. Richard E. Neustadt, Presidential Power (New York: JohnWiley, 1960), pp. 153–154; italics added.

10. For a more thorough, though rather different, discus-sion of this issue, see Kenneth R. Andrews, “Toward Profes-sionalism in Business Management,” HBR March–April1969, p. 49.

11. C. Jackson Grayson, Jr., in “Management Science andBusiness Practice,” HBR July–August 1973, p. 41, explains in

similar terms why, as chairman of the Price Commission, hedid not use those very techniques that he himself promotedin his earlier career as a management scientist.

12. George C. Homans, The Human Group (New York: Har-court, Brace & World, 1950), based on the study by WilliamF. Whyte entitled Street Corner Society, rev. ed. (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1955).

13. Neustadt, Presidential Power, p. 157.

14. Leonard R. Sayles, Managerial Behavior (New York:McGraw-Hill, 1964), p. 162.

15. See Richard C. Hodgson, Daniel J. Levinson, and Abra-ham Zaleznik, The Executive Role Constellation (Boston: Di-vision of Research, Harvard Business School, 1965), for adiscussion of the sharing of roles.

16. James S. Hekimian and Henry Mintzberg, “The Plan-ning Dilemma,” The Management Review, May 1968, p. 4.

17. See J. Sterling Livingston, “Myth of the Well-EducatedManager,” HBR January–February 1971, p.79.

Reprint 90210; Harvard Business Review OnPoint 5429To order, see the next pageor call 800-988-0886 or 617-783-7500or go to www.hbr.org

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Further Reading

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Harvard Business Review OnPoint articles enhance the full-text article with a summary of its key points and a selection of its company examples to help you quickly absorb and apply the concepts. Harvard Business Review OnPoint collections include three OnPoint articles and an overview comparing the various perspectives on a specific topic.

The Manager’s Job is also part of the Harvard Business Review OnPoint collection Your Best Managers Lead and Manage, Product no. 5402, which includes these additional articles:

Managers and Leaders: Are They Different? (Classic)Abraham ZaleznikHarvard Business ReviewDecember 2001Product no. 8334

The Five Minds of a ManagerJonathan Gosling and Henry MintzbergHarvard Business ReviewNovember 2003Product no. 5364

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A R T I C L E

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Managers and Leaders

Are They Different?

by Abraham Zaleznik

Included with this full-text

Harvard Business Review

article:

The Idea in Brief—the core idea

The Idea in Practice—putting the idea to work

1

Article Summary

2

Managers and Leaders: Are They Different?

A list of related materials, with annotations to guide further

exploration of the article’s ideas and applications

12

Further Reading

Product 8334


http://www.hbr.org

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Are They Different?

page 1

The Idea in Brief The Idea in Practice

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Tough, persistent; smart, analytical; tolerant, and of good will—all qualities you

want

in your best managers. How else can they per-form their jobs: solving problems and di-recting people and affairs?

But let’s face it: It takes neither genius nor heroism to be a manager. Even highly val-ued managers don’t inflame employees’ passions and imagination. Nor do they stimulate the change that all organizations require. For

those

qualities, you need lead-ers, not managers.

In this 1977 groundbreaking article, Abra-ham Zaleznik challenged the traditional view of management. That view, he argued, omits essential

leadership

elements of inspi-ration, vision, and human passion—which drive corporate success.

Managers and leaders are two different ani-mals.

Leaders

, like artists, tolerate chaos and lack of structure. They keep answers in suspense, preventing premature closure on important issues.

Managers

seek order, control, and rapid resolution of problems.

Companies need both managers and lead-ers to excel. But too often, they don’t create the right environment for

leaders

to flour-ish. Zaleznik offers a solution.

Can Organizations Develop Leaders?

Zaleznik suggests two ways to develop leaders. First, avoid overreliance on peer-learning situa-tions, e.g., task forces. They stifle the aggressiveness and initiative that fuel leadership.

Second, cultivate one-to-one relationships between mentors and apprentices; e.g., a CEO chooses a talented novice as his special assistant. These close working relationships encourage intense emotional interchange, tolerance of competitive impulses, and eagerness to challenge ideas—essential characteristics of leadership.

MANAGERS LEADERS

Attitudes toward goals

Take an impersonal, passive outlook.

Goals arise out of necessities, not desires.

Take a personal, active outlook. Shape rather than respond to ideas. Alter moods; evoke images, expectations.

Change how people think about what’s desirable and possible. Set company direction.

Conceptions of work

Negotiate and coerce. Balance opposing views.

Design compromises. Limit choices.

Avoid risk.

Develop fresh approaches to problems.

Increase options. Turn ideas into exciting images.

Seek risk when opportunities appear promising.

Relations with others

Prefer working with people, but maintain minimal emotional involvement. Lack empathy.

Focus on process, e.g.,

how

decisions are made rather than

what

decisions to make.

Communicate by sending ambiguous signals. Subordinates perceive them as inscrutable, detached, manipulative. Organization accumulates bureaucracy and political intrigue.

Attracted to ideas. Relate to others directly, intuitively, empathetically.

Focus on substance of events and decisions, including their meaning for participants.

Subordinates describe them with emotionally rich adjectives; e.g., “love,” “hate.” Relations appear turbulent, intense, disorganized. Yet motivation intensifies, and unanticipated outcomes proliferate.

Sense of self

Comes from perpetuating and strengthening existing institutions.

Feel part of the organization.

Comes from struggles to profoundly alter human and economic relationships.

Feel separate from the organization.

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Are They Different?

by Abraham Zaleznik

harvard business review • march–april 1992 page 2

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Business leaders have much more in common with artists than they do

with managers.

What is the ideal way to develop leadership?Every society provides its own answer to thisquestion, and each, in groping for answers, de-fines its deepest concerns about the purposes,distributions, and uses of power. Business hascontributed its answer to the leadership ques-tion by evolving a new breed called the man-ager. Simultaneously, business has establisheda new power ethic that favors collective overindividual leadership, the cult of the groupover that of personality. While ensuring thecompetence, control, and the balance ofpower among groups with the potential for ri-valry, managerial leadership unfortunatelydoes not necessarily ensure imagination, cre-ativity, or ethical behavior in guiding the des-tinies of corporate enterprises.

Leadership inevitably requires using powerto influence the thoughts and actions of otherpeople. Power in the hands of an individualentails human risks: first, the risk of equatingpower with the ability to get immediate re-sults; second, the risk of ignoring the many dif-

ferent ways people can legitimately accumu-late power; and third, the risk of losing self-control in the desire for power. The need tohedge these risks accounts in part for the de-velopment of collective leadership and themanagerial ethic. Consequently, an inherentconservatism dominates the culture of largeorganizations. In

The Second American Revolu-tion

, John D. Rockefeller III describes the con-servatism of organizations:

“An organization is a system, with a logic ofits own, and all the weight of tradition and iner-tia. The deck is stacked in favor of the tried andproven way of doing things and against the tak-ing of risks and striking out in new directions.”

1

Out of this conservatism and inertia, organi-zations provide succession to power throughthe development of managers rather than indi-vidual leaders. Ironically, this ethic fosters abureaucratic culture in business, supposedlythe last bastion protecting us from the en-croachments and controls of bureaucracy ingovernment and education.

Managers and Leaders •

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Manager vs. Leader Personality

A managerial culture emphasizes rationalityand control. Whether his or her energies aredirected toward goals, resources, organizationstructures, or people, a manager is a problemsolver. The manager asks: “What problemshave to be solved, and what are the best waysto achieve results so that people will continueto contribute to this organization?” From thisperspective, leadership is simply a practical ef-fort to direct affairs; and to fulfill his or hertask, a manager requires that many people op-erate efficiently at different levels of statusand responsibility. It takes neither genius norheroism to be a manager, but rather persis-tence, tough-mindedness, hard work, intelli-gence, analytical ability, and perhaps most im-portant, tolerance and goodwill.

Another conception of leadership, however,attaches almost mystical beliefs to what aleader is and assumes that only great peopleare worthy of the drama of power and politics.Here leadership is a psychodrama in which abrilliant, lonely person must gain control ofhimself or herself as a precondition for control-ling others. Such an expectation of leadershipcontrasts sharply with the mundane, practical,and yet important conception that leadershipis really managing work that other people do.

Two questions come to mind. Is this leader-ship mystique merely a holdover from ourchildhood—from a sense of dependency and alonging for good and heroic parents? Or is ittrue that no matter how competent managersare, their leadership stagnates because of theirlimitations in visualizing purposes and gener-ating value in work? Driven by narrow pur-poses, without an imaginative capacity and theability to communicate, do managers then per-petuate group conflicts instead of reformingthem into broader desires and goals?

If indeed problems demand greatness, thenjudging by past performance, the selection anddevelopment of leaders leave a great deal tochance. There are no known ways to train“great” leaders. Further, beyond what weleave to chance, there is a deeper issue in therelationship between the need for competentmanagers and the longing for great leaders.

What it takes to ensure a supply of peoplewho will assume practical responsibility mayinhibit the development of great leaders. Onthe other hand, the presence of great leadersmay undermine the development of managers

who typically become very anxious in the rela-tive disorder that leaders seem to generate.

It is easy enough to dismiss the dilemma oftraining managers, though we may need newleaders or leaders at the expense of managers,by saying that the need is for people who canbe both. But just as a managerial culture dif-fers from the entrepreneurial culture that de-velops when leaders appear in organizations,managers and leaders are very different kindsof people. They differ in motivation, personalhistory, and in how they think and act.

Attitudes Toward Goals

Managers tend to adopt impersonal, if notpassive, attitudes toward goals. Managerialgoals arise out of necessities rather than de-sires and, therefore, are deeply embedded intheir organization’s history and culture.

Frederic G. Donner, chairman and chief ex-ecutive officer of General Motors from 1958 to1967, expressed this kind of attitude towardgoals in defining GM’s position on product de-velopment:

“To meet the challenge of the marketplace,we must recognize changes in customer needsand desires far enough ahead to have the rightproducts in the right places at the right timeand in the right quantity.

“We must balance trends in preferenceagainst the many compromises that are neces-sary to make a final product that is both reli-able and good looking, that performs well andthat sells at a competitive price in the neces-sary volume. We must design not just the carswe would like to build but, more important,the cars that our customers want to buy.”

2

Nowhere in this statement is there a notionthat consumer tastes and preferences arise inpart as a result of what manufacturers do. Inreality, through product design, advertising,and promotion, consumers learn to like whatthey then say they need. Few would argue thatpeople who enjoy taking snapshots need acamera that also develops pictures. But in re-sponse to a need for novelty, convenience, anda shorter interval between acting (snappingthe picture) and gaining pleasure (seeing theshot), the Polaroid camera succeeded in themarketplace. It is inconceivable that EdwinLand responded to impressions of consumerneed. Instead, he translated a technology (po-larization of light) into a product, which prolif-erated and stimulated consumers’ desires.

Abraham Zaleznik

is Konosuke Mat-sushita Professor of Leadership Emeri-tus at Harvard Business School and oneof the few certified psychoanalysts inthe United States without a medicaldegree. He has written 14 books andnumerous articles. His latest book is

Learning Leadership

(Bonus Books,1992). This article originally appeared inHBR May–June 1977.


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The example of Polaroid and Land suggestshow leaders think about goals. They are activeinstead of reactive, shaping ideas instead of re-sponding to them. Leaders adopt a personaland active attitude toward goals. The influencea leader exerts in altering moods, evoking im-ages and expectations, and in establishing spe-cific desires and objectives determines the di-rection a business takes. The net result of thisinfluence changes the way people think aboutwhat is desirable, possible, and necessary.

Conceptions of Work

Managers tend to view work as an enablingprocess involving some combination of peopleand ideas interacting to establish strategiesand make decisions. They help the processalong by calculating the interests in opposi-tion, planning when controversial issuesshould surface, and reducing tensions. In thisenabling process, managers’ tactics appearflexible: on one hand, they negotiate and bar-gain; on the other, they use rewards, punish-ments, and other forms of coercion.

Alfred P. Sloan’s actions at General Motorsillustrate how this process works in situationsof conflict. The time was the early 1920s whenFord Motor Company still dominated the au-tomobile industry using, as did General Mo-tors, the conventional water-cooled engine.With the full backing of Pierre du Pont,Charles Kettering dedicated himself to the de-sign of an air-cooled copper engine, which, ifsuccessful, would be a great technical and mar-keting coup for GM. Kettering believed in hisproduct, but the manufacturing division headsopposed the new design on two grounds: first,it was technically unreliable, and second, thecorporation was putting all its eggs in one bas-ket by investing in a new product instead of at-tending to the current marketing situation.

In the summer of 1923, after a series of falsestarts and after its decision to recall the copperengine Chevrolets from dealers and customers,GM management scrapped the project. Whenit dawned on Kettering that the company hadrejected the engine, he was deeply discouragedand wrote to Sloan that, without the “orga-nized resistance” against the project, it wouldhave succeeded and that, unless the projectwere saved, he would leave the company.

Alfred Sloan was all too aware that Ketter-ing was unhappy and indeed intended to leaveGeneral Motors. Sloan was also aware that,

while the manufacturing divisions strongly op-posed the new engine, Pierre du Pont sup-ported Kettering. Further, Sloan had himselfgone on record in a letter to Kettering lessthan two years earlier expressing full confi-dence in him. The problem Sloan had was howto make his decision stick, keep Kettering inthe organization (he was much too valuable tolose), avoid alienating du Pont, and encouragethe division heads to continue developingproduct lines using conventional water-cooledengines.

Sloan’s actions in the face of this conflict re-veal much about how managers work. First, hetried to reassure Kettering by presenting theproblem in a very ambiguous fashion, suggest-ing that he and the executive committee sidedwith Kettering, but that it would not be practi-cal to force the divisions to do what they wereopposed to. He presented the problem asbeing a question of the people, not the prod-uct. Second, he proposed to reorganize aroundthe problem by consolidating all functions in anew division that would be responsible for thedesign, production, and marketing of the newengine. This solution appeared as ambiguousas his efforts to placate Kettering. Sloan wrote:“My plan was to create an independent pilotoperation under the sole jurisdiction of Mr.Kettering, a kind of copper-cooled car division.Mr. Kettering would designate his own chiefengineer and his production staff to solve thetechnical problems of manufacture.”

3

Sloan did not discuss the practical value ofthis solution, which included saddling an in-ventor with management responsibility, but ineffect, he used this plan to limit his conflictwith Pierre du Pont.

Essentially, the managerial solution thatSloan arranged limited the options available toothers. The structural solution narrowedchoices, even limiting emotional reactions tothe point where the key people could do noth-ing but go along. It allowed Sloan to say in hismemorandum to du Pont, “We have discussedthe matter with Mr. Kettering at some lengththis morning, and he agrees with us absolutelyon every point we made. He appears to receivethe suggestion enthusiastically and has everyconfidence that it can be put across alongthese lines.”

4

Sloan placated people who opposed hisviews by developing a structural solution thatappeared to give something but in reality only

What it takes to develop

managers may inhibit

developing leaders.


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limited options. He could then authorize thecar division’s general manager, with whom hebasically agreed, to move quickly in designingwater-cooled cars for the immediate marketdemand.

Years later, Sloan wrote, evidently withtongue in cheek, “The copper-cooled car nevercame up again in a big way. It just died out; Idon’t know why.”

5

To get people to accept solutions to prob-lems, managers continually need to coordinateand balance opposing views. Interestinglyenough, this type of work has much in com-mon with what diplomats and mediators do,with Henry Kissinger apparently an outstand-ing practitioner. Managers aim to shift bal-ances of power toward solutions acceptable ascompromises among conflicting values.

Leaders work in the opposite direction.Where managers act to limit choices, leadersdevelop fresh approaches to long-standing

problems and open issues to new options. Tobe effective, leaders must project their ideasonto images that excite people and only thendevelop choices that give those images sub-stance.

John F. Kennedy’s brief presidency showsboth the strengths and weaknesses connectedwith the excitement leaders generate in theirwork. In his inaugural address he said, “Letevery nation know, whether it wishes us wellor ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any bur-den, meet any hardship, support any friend,oppose any foe, in order to assure the survivaland the success of liberty.”

This much-quoted statement forced peopleto react beyond immediate concerns and toidentify with Kennedy and with importantshared ideals. On closer scrutiny, however, thestatement is absurd because it promises a posi-tion, which, if adopted, as in the Vietnam War,could produce disastrous results. Yet unless ex-

Retrospective Commentary

It was not so long ago that Bert Lance, Presi-dent Jimmy Carter’s budget director and con-fidant, declared, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” This piece of advice fits with how managers think. Leaders understand a different truth: “When it ain’t broke may be the only time you can fix it.”

In the splendid discipline of the market-place, past formulas for success today con-tain the seeds of decay. The U.S. automobile industry has been cited so often as the prime example of the suicidal effect of continuing to do what one has been doing in the wake of success that its story borders on the banal. But it’s true. Top executives in the automo-bile industry, along with managers in many other industries in the United States, have failed to understand the misleading lessons of success, revealing the chronic fault of the managerial mystique.

As a consequence of placing such reliance on the practical measure of continuing to do today and tomorrow what had proven suc-cessful yesterday, we face the chilling fact that the United States’s largest export during the last decade or more has been jobs. We live with the grim reality that the storehouse of expertise called know-how has diminished. Perhaps most dismal of all, our children and

our children’s children may not be able to enjoy the same standard of living we worked so hard to achieve, let alone enjoy a higher standard of living as a legacy of the genera-tions.

When “Managers and Leaders: Are They Different?” first appeared in HBR, practicing managers and academics, including many of my colleagues at the Harvard Business School, thought I had taken leave of my senses. Don’t ordinary people in an organiza-tion with superior structure and process out-perform superior people operating in an or-dinary organization? To those indoctrinated in the “managerial mystique,” talent is ephemeral while organization structure and process are real. The possibility that it takes talent to make a company hum counts for less than acting on those variables managers feel they understand and can control.

Talent is critical to continued success in the marketplace. Yet most organizations today persist in perpetuating the develop-ment of managers over leaders. Fortunately, however, there may be an awakening. The chairman of IBM, John Akers, startled the business community with his announcement that IBM intended to abandon its long-held course of running its business as one large

corporation. Akers intends to break IBM up into a number of corporations. And while “Big Blue” will continue to be big by most standards, the businesses will run under a leadership and not a managerial mentality. The corporation will no longer rest on the false comforts of economy of scale. Nor will executives be preoccupied with coordination and control, with decentralized operations and centralized financial controls. Process will take a backseat to substance, and the power will flow to executives who are cre-ative and, above all, aggressive.

If other large companies follow this lead, corporate America may recharge, and its ability to compete may rebound. But if left to professional management, U.S. corporations will continue to stagnate.

Since “Managers and Leaders: Are They Different?” was first published, strategy has catapulted itself into the number one posi-tion on the managerial hit parade. No aspect of corporate life is indifferent to strategy. Every problem leads to strategic solutions, ranging from how to position products to how to compensate executives. We have a plethora of marketing strategies, employee benefit strategies, and executive develop-ment strategies. Strategy, it seems, has re-


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pectations are aroused and mobilized, with allthe dangers of frustration inherent in height-ened desire, new thinking and new choice cannever come to light.

Leaders work from high-risk positions; in-deed, they are often temperamentally dis-posed to seek out risk and danger, especiallywhere the chance of opportunity and rewardappears promising. From my observations, thereason one individual seeks risks while anotherapproaches problems conservatively dependsmore on his or her personality and less on con-scious choice. For those who become manag-ers, a survival instinct dominates the need forrisk, and with that instinct comes an ability totolerate mundane, practical work. Leaderssometimes react to mundane work as to an af-fliction.

Relations with Others

Managers prefer to work with people; they

avoid solitary activity because it makes themanxious. Several years ago, I directed studieson the psychological aspects of careers. Theneed to seek out others with whom to workand collaborate seemed to stand out as an im-portant characteristic of managers. Whenasked, for example, to write imaginative sto-ries in response to a picture showing a singlefigure (a boy contemplating a violin or a mansilhouetted in a state of reflection), managerspopulated their stories with people. The fol-lowing is an example of a manager’s imagina-tive story about the young boy contemplatinga violin:

“Mom and Dad insisted that their son takemusic lessons so that someday he can becomea concert musician. His instrument was or-dered and had just arrived. The boy is weigh-ing the alternatives of playing football withthe other kids or playing with the squeak box.He can’t understand how his parents could

placed business policy as the conceptual han-dle for establishing a corporation’s directives.

In relying on strategy, organizations have largely overlooked results. Strategy is an off-spring of the branch of economics called in-dustrial organization; it builds models of competition and attempts to position prod-ucts in competitive markets through analytic techniques. The aggregation of these product positions establishes mission statements and direction for businesses. With the ascen-dancy of industrial organization in the 1980s, management consultants prospered and faith in the managerial mystique was strengthened, despite the poor performance in the U.S. economy.

To me, the most influential development in management in the last 10 or 15 years has been Lotus 1-2-3. This popular software pro-gram makes it possible to create spread-sheets rapidly and repetitively, and that has given form and language to strategic plan-ning. With this methodology, technicians can play with the question, “What if?” Best of all, everyone with access to a computer and the appropriate software can join in the “what if” game.

Alas, while everyone can become a strate-gist, few can become, and sustain, the position

of creator. Vision, the hallmark of leadership, is less a derivative of spreadsheets and more a product of the mind called imagination.

And vision is needed at least as much as strategy to succeed. Business leaders bring to bear a variety of imaginations on the growth of corporations. These imaginations—the marketing imagination, the manufacturing imagination, and others—originate in per-ceptual capacities we recognize as talent. Talented leaders grasp the significance of anomalies, such as unfulfilled customer needs, manufacturing operations that can be improved significantly, and the potential of technological applications in product devel-opment.

Business imaginations are substantive. A leader’s imagination impels others to act in ways that are truly, to use James MacGregor Burns’s felicitous term, “transformational.” But leaders often experience their talent as restlessness, as a desire to upset other peo-ple’s applecarts, an impelling need to “do things better.” As a consequence, a leader may not create a stable working environ-ment; rather, he or she may create a chaotic workplace, with highly charged emotional peaks and valleys.

In “Managers and Leaders: Are They Dif-

ferent?”, I argued that a crucial difference be-tween managers and leaders lies in the con-ceptions they hold, deep in their psyches, of chaos and order. Leaders tolerate chaos and lack of structure and are thus prepared to keep answers in suspense, avoiding prema-ture closure on important issues. Managers seek order and control and are almost com-pulsively addicted to disposing of problems even before they understand their potential significance. In my experience, seldom do the uncertainties of potential chaos cause problems. Instead, it is the instinctive move to impose order on potential chaos that makes trouble for organizations.

It seems to me that business leaders have much more in common with artists, scien-tists, and other creative thinkers than they do with managers. For business schools to ex-ploit this commonality of dispositions and in-terests, the curriculum should worry less about the logics of strategy and imposing the constraints of computer exercises and more about thought experiments in the play of cre-ativity and imagination. If they are success-ful, they would then do a better job of prepar-ing exceptional men and women for positions of leadership.

—Abraham Zaleznik


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think a violin is better than a touchdown.“After four months of practicing the violin,

the boy has had more than enough, Dad isgoing out of his mind, and Mom is willing togive in reluctantly to their wishes. Football sea-son is now over, but a good third baseman willtake the field next spring.”

This story illustrates two themes that clarifymanagerial attitudes toward human relations.The first, as I have suggested, is to seek out ac-tivity with other people (that is, the footballteam), and the second is to maintain a lowlevel of emotional involvement in those rela-tionships. Low emotional involvement appearsin the writer’s use of conventional metaphors,even clichés, and in the depiction of the readytransformation of potential conflict into har-monious decisions. In this case, the boy, Mom,and Dad agree to give up the violin for sports.

These two themes may seem paradoxical,but their coexistence supports what a managerdoes, including reconciling differences, seek-ing compromises, and establishing a balance ofpower. The story further demonstrates thatmanagers may lack empathy, or the capacityto sense intuitively the thoughts and feelingsof others. Consider another story written tothe same stimulus picture by someone thoughtof as a leader by his peers:

“This little boy has the appearance of beinga sincere artist, one who is deeply affected bythe violin, and has an intense desire to masterthe instrument.

“He seems to have just completed his nor-mal practice session and appears to be some-what crestfallen at his inability to produce thesounds that he is sure lie within the violin.

“He appears to be in the process of makinga vow to himself to expend the necessary timeand effort to play this instrument until he sat-isfies himself that he is able to bring forth thequalities of music that he feels within himself.

“With this type of determination and carrythrough, this boy became one of the great vio-linists of his day.”

Empathy is not simply a matter of payingattention to other people. It is also the capac-ity to take in emotional signals and make themmeaningful in a relationship. People who de-scribe another person as “deeply affected,”with “intense desire,” “crestfallen,” and as onewho can “vow to himself” would seem to havean inner perceptiveness that they can use intheir relationships with others.

Managers relate to people according to therole they play in a sequence of events or in adecision-making process, while leaders, whoare concerned with ideas, relate in more intui-tive and empathetic ways. The distinction issimply between a manager’s attention to

how

things get done and a leader’s to

what

theevents and decisions mean to participants.

In recent years, managers have adoptedfrom game theory the notion that decision-making events can be one of two types: thewin-lose situation (or zero-sum game) or thewin-win situation in which everybody in theaction comes out ahead. Managers strive toconvert win-lose into win-win situations aspart of the process of reconciling differencesamong people and maintaining balances ofpower.

As an illustration, take the decision of howto allocate capital resources among operatingdivisions in a large, decentralized organization.On the surface, the dollars available for distri-bution are limited at any given time. Presum-ably, therefore, the more one division gets, theless is available for other divisions.

Managers tend to view this situation (as itaffects human relations) as a conversion issue:how to make what seems like a win-lose prob-lem into a win-win problem. From that per-spective, several solutions come to mind. First,the manager focuses others’ attention on pro-cedure and not on substance. Here the playersbecome engrossed in the bigger problem of

how

to make decisions, not

what

decisions tomake. Once committed to the bigger problem,these people have to support the outcomesince they were involved in formulating thedecision-making rules. Because they believe inthe rules they formulated, they will acceptpresent losses, believing that next time theywill win.

Second, the manager communicates to sub-ordinates indirectly, using “signals” instead of“messages.” A signal holds a number of im-plicit positions, while a message clearly states aposition. Signals are inconclusive and subjectto reinterpretation should people becomeupset and angry; messages involve the directconsequence that some people will indeed notlike what they hear. The nature of messagesheightens emotional response and makes man-agers anxious. With signals, the question ofwho wins and who loses often becomes ob-scured.


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Third, the manager plays for time. Manag-ers seem to recognize that with the passage oftime and the delay of major decisions, compro-mises emerge that take the sting out of win-lose situations, and the original “game” will besuperseded by additional situations. Compro-mises mean that one may win and lose simul-taneously, depending on which of the gamesone evaluates.

There are undoubtedly many other tacticalmoves managers use to change human situa-tions from win-lose to win-win. But the point isthat such tactics focus on the decision-makingprocess itself, and that process interests man-agers rather than leaders. Tactical interests in-volve costs as well as benefits; they make orga-nizations fatter in bureaucratic and politicalintrigue and leaner in direct, hard activity andwarm human relationships. Consequently, oneoften hears subordinates characterize manag-ers as inscrutable, detached, and manipulative.These adjectives arise from the subordinates’perception that they are linked together in aprocess whose purpose is to maintain a con-trolled as well as rational and equitable struc-ture.

In contrast, one often hears leaders referredto with adjectives rich in emotional content.Leaders attract strong feelings of identity anddifference or of love and hate. Human rela-tions in leader-dominated structures often ap-pear turbulent, intense, and at times even dis-organized. Such an atmosphere intensifiesindividual motivation and often produces un-anticipated outcomes.

Senses of Self

In

The Varieties of Religious Experience

, Will-iam James describes two basic personalitytypes, “once-born” and “twice-born.” Peopleof the former personality type are those forwhom adjustments to life have been straight-forward and whose lives have been more orless a peaceful flow since birth. Twice-borns,on the other hand, have not had an easy timeof it. Their lives are marked by a continualstruggle to attain some sense of order. Unlikeonce-borns, they cannot take things forgranted. According to James, these personali-ties have equally different worldviews. For aonce-born personality, the sense of self as aguide to conduct and attitude derives from afeeling of being at home and in harmony withone’s environment. For a twice-born, the

sense of self derives from a feeling of pro-found separateness.

A sense of belonging or of being separatehas a practical significance for the kinds of in-vestments managers and leaders make in theircareers. Managers see themselves as conserva-tors and regulators of an existing order of af-fairs with which they personally identify andfrom which they gain rewards. A manager’ssense of self-worth is enhanced by perpetuat-ing and strengthening existing institutions: heor she is performing in a role that harmonizeswith ideals of duty and responsibility. WilliamJames had this harmony in mind—this sense ofself as flowing easily to and from the outerworld—in defining a once-born personality.

Leaders tend to be twice-born personalities,people who feel separate from their environ-ment. They may work in organizations, butthey never belong to them. Their sense of whothey are does not depend on memberships,work roles, or other social indicators of iden-tity. And that perception of identity may formthe theoretical basis for explaining why certainindividuals seek opportunities for change. Themethods to bring about change may be tech-nological, political, or ideological, but the ob-ject is the same: to profoundly alter human,economic, and political relationships.

In considering the development of leader-ship, we have to examine two different coursesof life history: (1) development through social-ization, which prepares the individual to guideinstitutions and to maintain the existing bal-ance of social relations; and (2) developmentthrough personal mastery, which impels an in-dividual to struggle for psychological and so-cial change. Society produces its managerialtalent through the first line of development;leaders emerge through the second.

Development of Leadership

Every person’s development begins with fam-ily. Each person experiences the traumas asso-ciated with separating from his or her parents,as well as the pain that follows such a wrench.In the same vein, all individuals face the diffi-culties of achieving self-regulation and self-control. But for some, perhaps a majority, thefortunes of childhood provide adequate grati-fications and sufficient opportunities to findsubstitutes for rewards no longer available.Such individuals, the “once-borns,” makemoderate identifications with parents and

Leaders’ lives are

marked by a continual

struggle to attain some

sense of order.


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find a harmony between what they expect andwhat they are able to realize from life.

But suppose the pains of separation are am-plified by a combination of parental demandsand individual needs to the degree that a senseof isolation, of being special, or of wariness dis-rupts the bonds that attach children to parentsand other authority figures? Given a specialaptitude under such conditions, the person be-comes deeply involved in his or her innerworld at the expense of interest in the outerworld. For such a person, self-esteem no longerdepends solely on positive attachments andreal rewards. A form of self-reliance takes holdalong with expectations of performance andachievement, and perhaps even the desire todo great works.

Such self-perceptions can come to nothingif the individual’s talents are negligible. Evenwith strong talents, there are no guaranteesthat achievement will follow, let alone that theend result will be for good rather than evil.Other factors enter into development as well.For one, leaders are like artists and othergifted people who often struggle with neuro-ses; their ability to function varies considerablyeven over the short run, and some potentialleaders lose the struggle altogether. Also, be-yond early childhood, the development pat-terns that affect managers and leaders involvethe selective influence of particular people.Managerial personalities form moderate andwidely distributed attachments. Leaders, onthe other hand, establish, and also break off,intensive one-to-one relationships.

It is a common observation that people withgreat talents are often indifferent students. Noone, for example, could have predicted Ein-stein’s great achievements on the basis of hismediocre record in school. The reason for me-diocrity is obviously not the absence of ability.It may result, instead, from self-absorption andthe inability to pay attention to the ordinarytasks at hand. The only sure way an individualcan interrupt reverie-like preoccupation andself-absorption is to form a deep attachment toa great teacher or other person who under-stands and has the ability to communicatewith the gifted individual.

Whether gifted individuals find what theyneed in one-to-one relationships depends onthe availability of teachers, possibly parentalsurrogates, whose strengths lie in cultivatingtalent. Fortunately, when generations meet

and the self-selections occur, we learn moreabout how to develop leaders and how tal-ented people of different generations influ-ence each other.

While apparently destined for mediocre ca-reers, people who form important one-to-oneapprenticeship relationships often are able toaccelerate and intensify their development.The psychological readiness of an individual tobenefit from such a relationship depends onsome experience in life that forces that personto turn inward.

Consider Dwight Eisenhower, whose earlycareer in the army foreshadowed very littleabout his future development. During WorldWar I, while some of his West Point classmateswere already experiencing the war firsthand inFrance, Eisenhower felt “embedded in the mo-notony and unsought safety of the Zone of theInterior…that was intolerable punishment.”

6

Shortly after World War I, Eisenhower, thena young officer somewhat pessimistic abouthis career chances, asked for a transfer to Pan-ama to work under General Fox Connor, a se-nior officer whom he admired. The armyturned down his request. This setback was verymuch on Eisenhower’s mind when Ikey, hisfirst born son, succumbed to influenza.Through some sense of responsibility for itsown, the army then transferred Eisenhower toPanama, where he took up his duties underGeneral Connor with the shadow of his lostson very much upon him.

In a relationship with the kind of father hewould have wanted to be, Eisenhower revertedto being the son he had lost. And in this highlycharged situation, he began to learn from histeacher. General Connor offered, and Eisen-hower gladly took, a magnificent tutorial onthe military. The effects of this relationship onEisenhower cannot be measured quantita-tively, but in examining his career path fromthat point, one cannot overestimate its signifi-cance.

As Eisenhower wrote later about Connor,“Life with General Connor was a sort of gradu-ate school in military affairs and the humani-ties, leavened by a man who was experiencedin his knowledge of men and their conduct. Ican never adequately express my gratitude tothis one gentleman.…In a lifetime of associa-tion with great and good men, he is the onemore or less invisible figure to whom I owe anincalculable debt.”

7


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Some time after his tour of duty with Gen-eral Connor, Eisenhower’s breakthrough oc-curred. He received orders to attend the Com-mand and General Staff School at FortLeavenworth, one of the most competitiveschools in the army. It was a coveted appoint-ment, and Eisenhower took advantage of theopportunity. Unlike his performance in highschool and West Point, his work at the Com-mand School was excellent; he was graduatedfirst in his class.

Psychological biographies of gifted peoplerepeatedly demonstrate the important part ateacher plays in developing an individual. An-drew Carnegie owed much to his senior, Tho-mas A. Scott. As head of the Western Divisionof the Pennsylvania Railroad, Scott recognizedtalent and the desire to learn in the young te-legrapher assigned to him. By giving Carnegieincreasing responsibility and by providing himwith the opportunity to learn through closepersonal observation, Scott added to Carn-egie’s self-confidence and sense of achieve-ment. Because of his own personal strengthand achievement, Scott did not fear Carnegie’saggressiveness. Rather, he gave it full play inencouraging Carnegie’s initiative.

Great teachers take risks. They bet initiallyon talent they perceive in younger people.And they risk emotional involvement in work-ing closely with their juniors. The risks do notalways pay off, but the willingness to takethem appears to be crucial in developing lead-ers.

Can Organizations Develop Leaders?

A myth about how people learn and developthat seems to have taken hold in Americanculture also dominates thinking in business.The myth is that people learn best from theirpeers. Supposedly, the threat of evaluationand even humiliation recedes in peer relationsbecause of the tendency for mutual identifica-tion and the social restraints on authoritarianbehavior among equals. Peer training in orga-nizations occurs in various forms. The use, forexample, of task forces made up of peers fromseveral interested occupational groups (sales,production, research, and finance) supposedlyremoves the restraints of authority on the in-dividual’s willingness to assert and exchangeideas. As a result, so the theory goes, peopleinteract more freely, listen more objectively to

criticism and other points of view, and, finally,learn from this healthy interchange.

Another application of peer training existsin some large corporations, such as PhilipsN.V. in Holland, where organizational struc-ture is built on the principle of joint responsi-bility of two peers, one representing the com-mercial end of the business and the other thetechnical. Formally, both hold equal responsi-bility for geographic operations or productgroups, as the case may be. As a practical mat-ter, it may turn out that one or the other of thepeers dominates the management. Neverthe-less, the main interaction is between two ormore equals.

The principal question I raise about such ar-rangements is whether they perpetuate themanagerial orientation and preclude the for-mation of one-to-one relationships between se-nior people and potential leaders.

Aware of the possible stifling effects of peerrelationships on aggressiveness and individualinitiative, another company, much smallerthan Philips, utilizes joint responsibility ofpeers for operating units, with one importantdifference. The chief executive of this com-pany encourages competition and rivalryamong peers, ultimately rewarding the onewho comes out on top with increased responsi-bility. These hybrid arrangements producesome unintended consequences that can be di-sastrous. There is no easy way to limit rivalry.Instead, it permeates all levels of the operationand opens the way for the formation of cliquesin an atmosphere of intrigue.

One large, integrated oil company has ac-cepted the importance of developing leadersthrough the direct influence of senior on jun-ior executives. The chairman and chief execu-tive officer regularly selects one talented uni-versity graduate whom he appoints his specialassistant, and with whom he will work closelyfor a year. At the end of the year, the junior ex-ecutive becomes available for assignment toone of the operating divisions, where he or shewill be assigned to a responsible post ratherthan a training position. This apprenticeshipacquaints the junior executive firsthand withthe use of power and with the important anti-dotes to the power disease called

hubris

—per-formance and integrity.

Working in one-to-one relationships, wherethere is a formal and recognized difference inthe power of the players, takes a great deal of


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tolerance for emotional interchange. This in-terchange, inevitable in close working arrange-ments, probably accounts for the reluctance ofmany executives to become involved in suchrelationships.

Fortune

carried an interestingstory on the departure of a key executive, JohnW. Hanley, from the top management ofProcter & Gamble to the chief executive of-ficer position at Monsanto.

8

According to thisaccount, the chief executive and chairman ofP&G passed over Hanley for appointment tothe presidency, instead naming another execu-tive vice president to this post.

The chairman evidently felt he could notwork well with Hanley who, by his own ac-knowledgment, was aggressive, eager to exper-iment and change practices, and constantlychallenged his superior. A chief executive of-ficer naturally has the right to select peoplewith whom he feels congenial. But I wonderwhether a greater capacity on the part of se-nior officers to tolerate the competitive im-pulses and behavior of their subordinatesmight not be healthy for corporations. At leasta greater tolerance for interchange would notfavor the managerial team player at the ex-pense of the individual who might become aleader.

I am constantly surprised at the frequencywith which chief executives feel threatened byopen challenges to their ideas, as though thesource of their authority, rather than their spe-cific ideas, was at issue. In one case, a chief ex-ecutive officer, who was troubled by the ag-gressiveness and sometimes outright rudenessof one of his talented vice presidents, used var-ious indirect methods such as group meetings

and hints from outside directors to avoid deal-ing with his subordinate. I advised the execu-tive to deal head-on with what irritated him. Isuggested that by direct, face-to-face confron-tation, both he and his subordinate wouldlearn to validate the distinction between theauthority to be preserved and the issues to bedebated.

The ability to confront is also the ability totolerate aggressive interchange. And that skillnot only has the net effect of stripping awaythe veils of ambiguity and signaling so charac-teristic of managerial cultures, but also it en-courages the emotional relationships leadersneed if they are to survive.

1. New York: Harper-Row, 1973, p. 72.

2. Alfred P. Sloan, Jr.,

My Years with General Motors

(NewYork: Doubleday, 1964), p. 440.

3. Ibid, p. 91.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid, p. 93.

6. Dwight D. Eisenhower,

At Ease: Stories I Tell To Friends

(New York: Doubleday, 1967), p. 136.

7. Ibid, p. 187.

8. “Jack Hanley Got There by Selling Harder,”

Fortune

, No-vember 1976.

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page 12

Further Reading

A R T I C L E S

What Leaders Really Do

by John P. Kotter


May–June 1990Product no. 3820

Kotter expands on the debate Zaleznik started in 1977, agreeing that managers and leaders are very different—but also arguing that they are complementary and equally important. He stresses that organizations need both manag-ers and leaders to thrive, especially in turbu-lent times. Kotter explores their differences along the dimensions of

complexity and change

.

Management, he writes, is about promoting stability—bringing order and predictability to complex, chaotic situations. Specifically, man-agers focus on planning and budgeting, orga-nizing and staffing, and problem solving. They make it easier for people to complete their work, day after day.

Leadership, on the other hand, is about pro-ducing change: setting direction for change through vision and strategy, and aligning people behind initiatives. Leaders touch peo-ple at their deepest levels, getting them to be-lieve in alternative futures and to take initia-tive based on shared visions. They provoke a sense of belonging and idealism.

The Work of Leadership

by Ronald A. Heifetz and Donald L. Laurie


January–February 1997Product no. 4150

Heifetz and Laurie examine the unique role of leaders in the specific context of

adaptive problems

—challenges in which both prob-lems and potential solutions are murky. With adaptive problems, leaders must engage their entire organization in radically new ways of thinking and acting. To prevail under these conditions, leaders must resist the temptation to give employees solutions

and

employees’

desire to have problems taken off their shoul-ders. Leaders can resist both by following these six principles: 1) See the context in which change must occur, 2) identify the adaptive challenge, 3) regulate distress, 4) watch for signs of work avoidance and bring conflict into the light, 5) build collective self-confidence, and 6) protect people who point out contradictions and upset the status quo.

Covert Leadership: Notes on Managing Professionals

by Henry Mintzberg


November–December 1998Product no. 98608

Mintzberg also focuses on the responsibilities distinguishing leaders from managers, stress-ing that leaders are more vital than ever in the knowledge economy. More and more work is being done by trained and trusted profession-als who don’t need direction and supervi-sion—that is, others telling them how to do their jobs. Instead, they need inspiration, pro-tection, and support. Using the model of a symphony orchestra conductor, Mintzberg explores—and explodes—the myth that lead-ers must be in complete control. Through

co-vert leadership

—that is, functioning in a mid-dle realm between absolute control and complete powerlessness, and leading without seeming to—leaders quietly infuse in others the energy they need to excel.

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F R O M T H E H A R V A R D B U S I N E S S R E V I E W

A R T I C L E

What Makes a Leader?by Daniel Goleman

New sections to

guide you through

the article:

• The Idea in Brief

• The Idea at Work

• Exploring Further. . .

P R O D U C T N U M B E R 3 7 9 0

What distinguishes

the outstanding leader

from the merely adequate?

Emotional intelligence—

a powerful combination

of self-management skills

and the ability to work

with others.

T H E I D E A

Aske d to define the ideal leader, manywould emphasize traits such as intelligence,toughness, determination, and vision. Often left off the list are softer, more personal quali-ties—but recent studies indicate that they arealso essential. Although a certain degree of analytical and technical skill is a minimumrequirement for success, what is called “emotional intelligence” may be the key

attribute that distinguishes outstanding per-formers from those who are merely adequate.For example, in a 1996 study of a global foodand beverage company, where senior managershad a certain critical mass of emotional intelli-gence, their divisions outperformed yearly earn-ings goals by 20%. Division leaders without thatcritical mass underperformed by almost thesame amount.

What Makes a Leader?

There are five components to emotionalintelligence: self-awareness, self-regulation,motivation, empathy, and social skill. All fivetraits sound desirable to just about everyone.But organizations too often implicitly discour-age their people from developing them.

Self-management skills

1. Self-awareness. Emotional intelligence

begins with this trait. People with a high

degree of self-awareness know their weak-

nesses and aren’t afraid to talk about them.

Someone who understands that he works

poorly under tight deadlines, for example,

will work hard to plan his time carefully,

and will let his colleagues know why. Many

executives looking for potential leaders

mistake such candor for “wimpiness.”

2. Self-regulation. This attribute flows from

self-awareness, but runs in a different direc-

tion. People with this trait are able to con-

trol their impulses or even channel them

for good purposes.

3. Motivation. A passion for achievement for

its own sake—not simply the ability to

respond to whatever incentives a company

offers—is the kind of motivation that is

essential for leadership.

The ability to relate to others

4. Empathy. In addition to self-management

skills, emotional intelligence requires a

facility for dealing with others. And that

HBR OnPoint © 2000 by Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved.

starts with empathy—taking into account

the feelings of others when making deci-

sions—as opposed to taking on everyone’s

troubles.

E X A M P L E :Consider two division chiefs at a company forcedto make layoffs. One manager gave a hard-hitting speech emphasizing the number of people who would be fired. The other manager,while not hiding the bad news, took into accounthis people’s anxieties. He promised to keep theminformed and to treat everyone fairly. Many execu-tives would have refrained from such a show of consideration, lest they appear to lack tough-ness. But the tough manager demoralized his talented people—most of whom ended up leaving his division voluntarily.

5. Social skill. All the preceding traits culmi-

nate in this fifth one: the ability to build

rapport with others, to get them to cooper-

ate, to move them in a direction you desire.

Managers who simply try to be sociable—

while lacking the other components of

emotional intelligence—are likely to fail.

Social skill, by contrast, is friendliness with

a purpose.

Can you boost your emotional intelligence?Absolutely—but not with traditional trainingprograms that target the rational part of thebrain. Extended practice, feedback from col-leagues, and your own enthusiasm for makingthe change are essential to becoming an effec-tive leader.

T H E I D E A A T W O R K

I N B R I E F

artwork by craig frazier Copyright © 1998 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved.

very businesspersonknows a story about a highly intelligent, highlyskilled executive who was promoted into a leader-ship position only to fail at the job. And they alsoknow a story about someone with solid – but notextraordinary – intellectual abilities and technicalskills who was promoted into a similar positionand then soared.

Such anecdotes support the widespread beliefthat identifying individuals with the “right stuff”to be leaders is more art than science. After all, thepersonal styles of superb leaders vary: some lead-ers are subdued and analytical; others shout theirmanifestos from the mountaintops. And just asimportant, different situations call for different

IQ and technical skills are important, but emotionalintelligence is the sine qua non of leadership.

What Makes a Leader?

by daniel goleman

Daniel Goleman is the author of Emotional Intelligence (Ban-tam, 1995) and Working with Emotional Intelligence (Bantam,1998). He is cochairman of the Consortium for Research onEmotional Intelligence in Organizations, which is based at Rut-gers University’s Graduate School of Applied and ProfessionalPsychology in Piscataway, New Jersey. He can be reached [email protected].

E

types of leadership. Most mergers need a sensitivenegotiator at the helm, whereas many turnaroundsrequire a more forceful authority.

I have found, however, that the most effectiveleaders are alike in one crucial way: they all have ahigh degree of what has come to be known as emo-tional intelligence. It’s not that IQ and technicalskills are irrelevant. They do matter, but mainly as“threshold capabilities”; that is, they are the entry-level requirements for executive positions. But myresearch, along with other recent studies, clearlyshows that emotional intelligence is the sine quanon of leadership. Without it, aperson can have the best trainingin the world, an incisive, analyti-cal mind, and an endless supplyof smart ideas, but he still won’tmake a great leader.

In the course of the past year,my colleagues and I have focusedon how emotional intelligenceoperates at work. We have exam-ined the relationship betweenemotional intelligence and effec-tive performance, especially inleaders. And we have observedhow emotional intelligenceshows itself on the job. How canyou tell if someone has highemotional intelligence, for exam-ple, and how can you recognize itin yourself? In the followingpages, we’ll explore these questions, taking each ofthe components of emotional intelligence – self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy,and social skill – in turn.

Evaluating Emotional IntelligenceMost large companies today have employed trainedpsychologists to develop what are known as “com-petency models” to aid them in identifying, train-ing, and promoting likely stars in the leadership firmament. The psychologists have also developedsuch models for lower-level positions. And in re-cent years, I have analyzed competency modelsfrom 188 companies, most of which were large andglobal and included the likes of Lucent Technolo-gies, British Airways, and Credit Suisse.

In carrying out this work, my objective was to determine which personal capabilities drove out-standing performance within these organizations,and to what degree they did so. I grouped capabili-ties into three categories: purely technical skillslike accounting and business planning; cognitive

abilities like analytical reasoning; and competen-cies demonstrating emotional intelligence such asthe ability to work with others and effectiveness inleading change.

To create some of the competency models, psy-chologists asked senior managers at the companiesto identify the capabilities that typified the organi-zation’s most outstanding leaders. To create othermodels, the psychologists used objective criteriasuch as a division’s profitability to differentiate thestar performers at senior levels within their organi-zations from the average ones. Those individuals

were then extensively interviewedand tested, and their capabilitieswere compared. This process re-sulted in the creation of lists ofingredients for highly effectiveleaders. The lists ranged in lengthfrom 7 to 15 items and includedsuch ingredients as initiative andstrategic vision.

When I analyzed all this data, I found dramatic results. To besure, intellect was a driver of out-standing performance. Cognitiveskills such as big-picture think-ing and long-term vision wereparticularly important. But whenI calculated the ratio of technicalskills, IQ, and emotional intelli-gence as ingredients of excellentperformance, emotional intelli-

gence proved to be twice as important as the othersfor jobs at all levels.

Moreover, my analysis showed that emotionalintelligence played an increasingly important roleat the highest levels of the company, where differ-ences in technical skills are of negligible impor-tance. In other words, the higher the rank of a per-son considered to be a star performer, the moreemotional intelligence capabilities showed up asthe reason for his or her effectiveness. When I com-pared star performers with average ones in seniorleadership positions, nearly 90% of the differencein their profiles was attributable to emotional intel-ligence factors rather than cognitive abilities.

Other researchers have confirmed that emotionalintelligence not only distinguishes outstandingleaders but can also be linked to strong perfor-mance. The findings of the late David McClelland,the renowned researcher in human and organiza-tional behavior, are a good example. In a 1996 studyof a global food and beverage company, McClellandfound that when senior managers had a criticalmass of emotional intelligence capabilities, their

94 harvard business review November–December 1998

what makes a leader?

Effective leaders are alike

in one crucialway: they allhave a high

degree ofemotional

intelligence.

divisions outperformed yearly earnings goals by20%. Meanwhile, division leaders without thatcritical mass underperformed by almost the sameamount. McClelland’s findings, interestingly, heldas true in the company’s U.S. divisions as in its divi-sions in Asia and Europe.

In short, the numbers are beginning to tell us apersuasive story about the link between a compa-ny’s success and the emotional intelligence of itsleaders. And just as important, research is alsodemonstrating that people can, if they take the

right approach, develop their emotional intelli-gence. (See the insert “Can Emotional IntelligenceBe Learned?”)

Self-AwarenessSelf-awareness is the first component of emotionalintelligence – which makes sense when one con-siders that the Delphic oracle gave the advice to“know thyself” thousands of years ago. Self-aware-ness means having a deep understanding of one’s

harvard business review November–December 1998 95


Self-Awareness

Self-Regulation

Motivation

Empathy

Social Skill

Definition

the ability to recognize and understandyour moods, emotions, and drives, aswell as their effect on others

the ability to control or redirect disruptive impulses and moods

the propensity to suspend judgment –to think before acting

a passion to work for reasons that gobeyond money or status

a propensity to pursue goals with energy and persistence

the ability to understand the emotionalmakeup of other people

skill in treating people according totheir emotional reactions

proficiency in managing relationshipsand building networks

an ability to find common ground andbuild rapport

Hallmarks

self-confidence

realistic self-assessment

self-deprecating sense of humor

trustworthiness and integrity

comfort with ambiguity

openness to change

strong drive to achieve

optimism, even in the face of failure

organizational commitment

expertise in building and retaining talent

cross-cultural sensitivity

service to clients and customers

effectiveness in leading change

persuasiveness

expertise in building and leading teams

The Five Components of Emotional Intelligence at Work

emotions, strengths, weaknesses, needs, and drives.People with strong self-awareness are neither overlycritical nor unrealistically hopeful. Rather, they arehonest – with themselves and with others.

People who have a high degree of self-awarenessrecognize how their feelings affect them, other peo-ple, and their job performance. Thus a self-awareperson who knows that tight deadlines bring outthe worst in him plans his time carefully and getshis work done well in advance. Another personwith high self-awareness will be able to work witha demanding client. She will understand theclient’s impact on her moods and the deeper rea-sons for her frustration. “Their trivial demandstake us away from the real workthat needs to be done,” she mightexplain. And she will go one stepfurther and turn her anger intosomething constructive.

Self-awareness extends to aperson’s understanding of his orher values and goals. Someonewho is highly self-aware knowswhere he is headed and why; so,for example, he will be able to befirm in turning down a job offerthat is tempting financially butdoes not fit with his principles orlong-term goals. A person wholacks self-awareness is apt tomake decisions that bring on in-ner turmoil by treading on buriedvalues. “The money looked goodso I signed on,” someone mightsay two years into a job, “but the work means so lit-tle to me that I’m constantly bored.” The decisionsof self-aware people mesh with their values; conse-quently, they often find work to be energizing.

How can one recognize self-awareness? First andforemost, it shows itself as candor and an ability toassess oneself realistically. People with high self-awareness are able to speak accurately and openly –although not necessarily effusively or confession-ally – about their emotions and the impact theyhave on their work. For instance, one manager Iknow of was skeptical about a new personal-shopperservice that her company, a major department-storechain, was about to introduce. Without promptingfrom her team or her boss, she offered them an ex-planation: “It’s hard for me to get behind the rolloutof this service,” she admitted, “because I reallywanted to run the project, but I wasn’t selected.Bear with me while I deal with that.” The managerdid indeed examine her feelings; a week later, shewas supporting the project fully.

Such self-knowledge often shows itself in thehiring process. Ask a candidate to describe a timehe got carried away by his feelings and did some-thing he later regretted. Self-aware candidates willbe frank in admitting to failure – and will often telltheir tales with a smile. One of the hallmarks ofself-awareness is a self-deprecating sense of humor.

Self-awareness can also be identified during per-formance reviews. Self-aware people know – andare comfortable talking about – their limitationsand strengths, and they often demonstrate a thirstfor constructive criticism. By contrast, people withlow self-awareness interpret the message that theyneed to improve as a threat or a sign of failure.

Self-aware people can also berecognized by their self-confi-dence. They have a firm grasp oftheir capabilities and are lesslikely to set themselves up to failby, for example, overstretchingon assignments. They know, too,when to ask for help. And therisks they take on the job are cal-culated. They won’t ask for achallenge that they know theycan’t handle alone. They’ll playto their strengths.

Consider the actions of a mid-level employee who was invitedto sit in on a strategy meetingwith her company’s top execu-tives. Although she was the mostjunior person in the room, she didnot sit there quietly, listening in

awestruck or fearful silence. She knew she had ahead for clear logic and the skill to present ideaspersuasively, and she offered cogent suggestionsabout the company’s strategy. At the same time,her self-awareness stopped her from wandering intoterritory where she knew she was weak.

Despite the value of having self-aware people inthe workplace, my research indicates that seniorexecutives don’t often give self-awareness the creditit deserves when they look for potential leaders.Many executives mistake candor about feelings for“wimpiness” and fail to give due respect to employ-ees who openly acknowledge their shortcomings.Such people are too readily dismissed as “not toughenough” to lead others.

In fact, the opposite is true. In the first place, peo-ple generally admire and respect candor. Further,leaders are constantly required to make judgmentcalls that require a candid assessment of capa-bilities – their own and those of others. Do we havethe management expertise to acquire a competitor?



Self-aware job candidateswill be frank

in admitting tofailure – and will

often tell theirtales with a

smile.



For ages, people have debated if leaders are born ormade. So too goes the debate about emotional intel-ligence. Are people born with certain levels of em-pathy, for example, or do they acquire empathy as aresult of life’s experiences? The answer is both. Scien-tific inquiry strongly suggests that there is a geneticcomponent to emotional intelligence. Psychologicaland developmental research indicates that nurtureplays a role as well. How much of each perhaps willnever be known, but research and practice clearlydemonstrate that emotional intelligence can belearned.

One thing is certain: emotional intelligence in-creases with age. There is an old-fashioned word forthe phenomenon: maturity. Yet even with maturity,some people still need training to enhance their emo-tional intelligence. Unfortunately, far too many train-ing programs that intend to build leadership skills –including emotional intelligence – are a waste of timeand money. The problem is simple: they focus on thewrong part of the brain.

Emotional intelligence is born largely in the neuro-transmitters of the brain’s limbic system, which gov-erns feelings, impulses, and drives. Research indi-cates that the limbic system learns best throughmotivation, extended practice, and feedback. Com-pare this with the kind of learning that goes on in theneocortex, which governs analytical and technicalability. The neocortex grasps concepts and logic. It isthe part of the brain that figures out how to use a com-puter or make a sales call by reading a book. Not sur-prisingly – but mistakenly – it is also the part of thebrain targeted by most training programs aimed at en-hancing emotional intelligence. When such programstake, in effect, a neocortical approach, my researchwith the Consortium for Research on Emotional In-telligence in Organizations has shown they can evenhave a negative impact on people’s job performance.

To enhance emotional intelligence, organizationsmust refocus their training to include the limbic sys-tem. They must help people break old behavioralhabits and establish new ones. That not only takesmuch more time than conventional training pro-grams, it also requires an individualized approach.

Imagine an executive who is thought to be low onempathy by her colleagues. Part of that deficit showsitself as an inability to listen; she interrupts peopleand doesn’t pay close attention to what they’re say-ing. To fix the problem, the executive needs to be mo-tivated to change, and then she needs practice andfeedback from others in the company. A colleague or

coach could be tapped to let the executive know whenshe has been observed failing to listen. She wouldthen have to replay the incident and give a better re-sponse; that is, demonstrate her ability to absorb whatothers are saying. And the executive could be directedto observe certain executives who listen well and tomimic their behavior.

With persistence and practice, such a process canlead to lasting results. I know one Wall Street execu-tive who sought to improve his empathy – specificallyhis ability to read people’s reactions and see their per-spectives. Before beginning his quest, the executive’ssubordinates were terrified of working with him. Peo-ple even went so far as to hide bad news from him.Naturally, he was shocked when finally confrontedwith these facts. He went home and told his family –but they only confirmed what he had heard at work.When their opinions on any given subject did notmesh with his, they, too, were frightened of him.

Enlisting the help of a coach, the executive went towork to heighten his empathy through practice andfeedback. His first step was to take a vacation to a for-eign country where he did not speak the language.While there, he monitored his reactions to the unfa-miliar and his openness to people who were differentfrom him. When he returned home, humbled by hisweek abroad, the executive asked his coach to shadowhim for parts of the day, several times a week, in orderto critique how he treated people with new or differ-ent perspectives. At the same time, he consciouslyused on-the-job interactions as opportunities to prac-tice “hearing” ideas that differed from his. Finally, theexecutive had himself videotaped in meetings andasked those who worked for and with him to critiquehis ability to acknowledge and understand the feel-ings of others. It took several months, but the execu-tive’s emotional intelligence did ultimately rise, andthe improvement was reflected in his overall perfor-mance on the job.

It’s important to emphasize that building one’semotional intelligence cannot – will not – happenwithout sincere desire and concerted effort. A briefseminar won’t help; nor can one buy a how-to manual.It is much harder to learn to empathize – to internal-ize empathy as a natural response to people – than it isto become adept at regression analysis. But it can bedone. “Nothing great was ever achieved without en-thusiasm,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson. If your goalis to become a real leader, these words can serve as aguidepost in your efforts to develop high emotionalintelligence.

Can Emotional Intelligence Be Learned?

Can we launch a new product within six months?People who assess themselves honestly – that is,self-aware people – are well suited to do the samefor the organizations they run.

Self-RegulationBiological impulses drive our emotions. We cannotdo away with them – but we can do much to man-age them. Self-regulation, which is like an ongoinginner conversation, is the component of emotionalintelligence that frees us from being prisoners ofour feelings. People engaged in such a conversationfeel bad moods and emotional impulses just aseveryone else does, but they findways to control them and even tochannel them in useful ways.

Imagine an executive who hasjust watched a team of his em-ployees present a botched analy-sis to the company’s board of directors. In the gloom that fol-lows, the executive might findhimself tempted to pound on thetable in anger or kick over a chair.He could leap up and scream atthe group. Or he might maintaina grim silence, glaring at every-one before stalking off.

But if he had a gift for self-regu-lation, he would choose a differ-ent approach. He would pick hiswords carefully, acknowledgingthe team’s poor performancewithout rushing to any hasty judgment. He wouldthen step back to consider the reasons for the fail-ure. Are they personal – a lack of effort? Are thereany mitigating factors? What was his role in the de-bacle? After considering these questions, he wouldcall the team together, lay out the incident’s conse-quences, and offer his feelings about it. He wouldthen present his analysis of the problem and a well-considered solution.

Why does self-regulation matter so much forleaders? First of all, people who are in control oftheir feelings and impulses – that is, people who arereasonable – are able to create an environment oftrust and fairness. In such an environment, politicsand infighting are sharply reduced and productivityis high. Talented people flock to the organizationand aren’t tempted to leave. And self-regulation hasa trickle-down effect. No one wants to be known as ahothead when the boss is known for her calm ap-proach. Fewer bad moods at the top mean fewerthroughout the organization.

Second, self-regulation is important for competi-tive reasons. Everyone knows that business today isrife with ambiguity and change. Companies mergeand break apart regularly. Technology transformswork at a dizzying pace. People who have masteredtheir emotions are able to roll with the changes.When a new change program is announced, theydon’t panic; instead, they are able to suspend judg-ment, seek out information, and listen to execu-tives explain the new program. As the initiativemoves forward, they are able to move with it.

Sometimes they even lead the way. Consider thecase of a manager at a large manufacturing com-pany. Like her colleagues, she had used a certain

software program for five years.The program drove how she col-lected and reported data and howshe thought about the company’sstrategy. One day, senior execu-tives announced that a new pro-gram was to be installed thatwould radically change how in-formation was gathered and as-sessed within the organization.While many people in the com-pany complained bitterly abouthow disruptive the change wouldbe, the manager mulled over thereasons for the new program andwas convinced of its potential toimprove performance. She eagerlyattended training sessions – someof her colleagues refused to doso – and was eventually promoted

to run several divisions, in part because she usedthe new technology so effectively.

I want to push the importance of self-regulationto leadership even further and make the case that itenhances integrity, which is not only a personalvirtue but also an organizational strength. Many ofthe bad things that happen in companies are a func-tion of impulsive behavior. People rarely plan to ex-aggerate profits, pad expense accounts, dip into thetill, or abuse power for selfish ends. Instead, an op-portunity presents itself, and people with low im-pulse control just say yes.

By contrast, consider the behavior of the seniorexecutive at a large food company. The executivewas scrupulously honest in his negotiations withlocal distributors. He would routinely lay out hiscost structure in detail, thereby giving the distribu-tors a realistic understanding of the company’s pric-ing. This approach meant the executive couldn’t al-ways drive a hard bargain. Now, on occasion, he feltthe urge to increase profits by withholding informa-



People who have masteredtheir emotions

are able to roll with the

changes. Theydon’t panic.

tion about the company’s costs. But he challengedthat impulse – he saw that it made more sense inthe long run to counteract it. His emotional self-regulation paid off in strong, lasting relationshipswith distributors that benefited the company morethan any short-term financial gains would have.

The signs of emotional self-regula-tion, therefore, are not hard to miss: apropensity for reflection and thought-fulness; comfort with ambiguity andchange; and integrity – an ability to sayno to impulsive urges.

Like self-awareness, self-regulationoften does not get its due. People whocan master their emotions are some-times seen as cold fish – their consid-ered responses are taken as a lack of passion. People with fiery tempera-ments are frequently thought of as“classic” leaders – their outbursts areconsidered hallmarks of charisma andpower. But when such people make it to the top, their impulsiveness oftenworks against them. In my research, extreme displays of negative emotionhave never emerged as a driver of goodleadership.

MotivationIf there is one trait that virtually all ef-fective leaders have, it is motivation.They are driven to achieve beyond ex-pectations – their own and everyoneelse’s. The key word here is achieve.Plenty of people are motivated by exter-nal factors such as a big salary or thestatus that comes from having an im-pressive title or being part of a presti-gious company. By contrast, those withleadership potential are motivated by adeeply embedded desire to achieve for the sake ofachievement.

If you are looking for leaders, how can you iden-tify people who are motivated by the drive toachieve rather than by external rewards? The firstsign is a passion for the work itself – such peopleseek out creative challenges, love to learn, andtake great pride in a job well done. They also dis-play an unflagging energy to do things better. Peo-ple with such energy often seem restless with thestatus quo. They are persistent with their ques-tions about why things are done one way ratherthan another; they are eager to explore new ap-proaches to their work.

A cosmetics company manager, for example,was frustrated that he had to wait two weeks to getsales results from people in the field. He finallytracked down an automated phone system thatwould beep each of his salespeople at 5 p.m. everyday. An automated message then prompted them

to punch in their numbers – how many calls andsales they had made that day. The system short-ened the feedback time on sales results from weeksto hours.

That story illustrates two other common traits ofpeople who are driven to achieve. They are foreverraising the performance bar, and they like to keepscore. Take the performance bar first. During per-formance reviews, people with high levels of motiva-tion might ask to be “stretched” by their superiors.Of course, an employee who combines self-aware-ness with internal motivation will recognize herlimits – but she won’t settle for objectives thatseem too easy to fulfill.



People who are in control of their feelings can tame their emo-tional impulses and redirect them in useful ways.



And it follows naturally that people who aredriven to do better also want a way of trackingprogress – their own, their team’s, and their com-pany’s. Whereas people with low achievement mo-tivation are often fuzzy about results, those withhigh achievement motivation often keep score bytracking such hard measures as profitability or mar-ket share. I know of a money manager who startsand ends his day on the Internet, gauging the perfor-mance of his stock fund against four industry-setbenchmarks.

Interestingly, people with high motivation re-main optimistic even when the score is againstthem. In such cases, self-regulation combines with achievement motivation to overcome thefrustration and depression that come after a set-back or failure. Take the case of an another portfo-lio manager at a large invest-ment company. After severalsuccessful years, her fund tum-bled for three consecutive quar-ters, leading three large insti-tutional clients to shift theirbusiness elsewhere.

Some executives would haveblamed the nosedive on cir-cumstances outside their con-trol; others might have seen thesetback as evidence of personalfailure. This portfolio manager,however, saw an opportunity to prove she could lead a turn-around. Two years later, whenshe was promoted to a very senior level in the com-pany, she described the experience as “the bestthing that ever happened to me; I learned so muchfrom it.”

Executives trying to recognize high levels ofachievement motivation in their people can lookfor one last piece of evidence: commitment to theorganization. When people love their job for thework itself, they often feel committed to the orga-nizations that make that work possible. Commit-ted employees are likely to stay with an organiza-tion even when they are pursued by headhunterswaving money.

It’s not difficult to understand how and why amotivation to achieve translates into strong leader-ship. If you set the performance bar high for your-self, you will do the same for the organization whenyou are in a position to do so. Likewise, a drive tosurpass goals and an interest in keeping score canbe contagious. Leaders with these traits can oftenbuild a team of managers around them with thesame traits. And of course, optimism and organiza-

tional commitment are fundamental to leader-ship – just try to imagine running a company with-out them.

EmpathyOf all the dimensions of emotional intelligence,empathy is the most easily recognized. We have allfelt the empathy of a sensitive teacher or friend; wehave all been struck by its absence in an unfeelingcoach or boss. But when it comes to business, werarely hear people praised, let alone rewarded, fortheir empathy. The very word seems unbusi-nesslike, out of place amid the tough realities of themarketplace.

But empathy doesn’t mean a kind of “I’m okay,you’re okay” mushiness. For a leader, that is, it

doesn’t mean adopting otherpeople’s emotions as one’s ownand trying to please everybody.That would be a nightmare – itwould make action impossi-ble. Rather, empathy meansthoughtfully considering em-ployees’ feelings – along withother factors – in the process ofmaking intelligent decisions.

pened when two giant broker-age companies merged, creat-ing redundant jobs in all theirdivisions. One division man-

ager called his people together and gave a gloomyspeech that emphasized the number of people whowould soon be fired. The manager of another divi-sion gave his people a different kind of speech. Hewas upfront about his own worry and confusion,and he promised to keep people informed and totreat everyone fairly.

The difference between these two managers wasempathy. The first manager was too worried abouthis own fate to consider the feelings of his anxiety-stricken colleagues. The second knew intuitivelywhat his people were feeling, and he acknowledgedtheir fears with his words. Is it any surprise that thefirst manager saw his division sink as many demor-alized people, especially the most talented, departed?

strong leader, his best people stayed, and his divi-sion remained as productive as ever.

Empathy is particularly important today as acomponent of leadership for at least three reasons:the increasing use of teams; the rapid pace of global-ization; and the growing need to retain talent.

The very wordempathy seemsunbusinesslike,

out of place amidthe tough realities

of the marketplace.

For an example of empathy

By contrast, the second manager continued to be a

in action, consider what hap-

Consider the challenge of leading a team. As any-one who has ever been a part of one can attest,teams are cauldrons of bubbling emotions. They areoften charged with reaching a consensus – hardenough with two people and much more difficult asthe numbers increase. Even in groups with as few as four or five members, alliances form and clash-ing agendas get set. A team’s leader must be able tosense and understand the viewpoints of everyonearound the table.

That’s exactly what a marketing manager at alarge information technology company was able todo when she was appointed to lead a troubled team.The group was in turmoil, overloaded by work andmissing deadlines. Tensions were high among themembers. Tinkering with procedures was notenough to bring the group together and make it aneffective part of the company.

So the manager took severalsteps. In a series of one-on-onesessions, she took the time to lis-ten to everyone in the group –what was frustrating them, howthey rated their colleagues,whether they felt they had beenignored. And then she directedthe team in a way that brought ittogether: she encouraged peopleto speak more openly about theirfrustrations, and she helped peo-ple raise constructive complaintsduring meetings. In short, herempathy allowed her to under-stand her team’s emotional makeup. The result wasnot just heightened collaboration among membersbut also added business, as the team was called onfor help by a wider range of internal clients.

Globalization is another reason for the rising im-portance of empathy for business leaders. Cross-cultural dialogue can easily lead to miscues andmisunderstandings. Empathy is an antidote. Peo-ple who have it are attuned to subtleties in bodylanguage; they can hear the message beneath thewords being spoken. Beyond that, they have a deepunderstanding of the existence and importance ofcultural and ethnic differences.

Consider the case of an American consultantwhose team had just pitched a project to a potentialJapanese client. In its dealings with Americans, theteam was accustomed to being bombarded withquestions after such a proposal, but this time it wasgreeted with a long silence. Other members of theteam, taking the silence as disapproval, were readyto pack and leave. The lead consultant gesturedthem to stop. Although he was not particularly fa-

miliar with Japanese culture, he read the client’sface and posture and sensed not rejection but inter-est – even deep consideration. He was right: whenthe client finally spoke, it was to give the consult-ing firm the job.

Finally, empathy plays a key role in the retentionof talent, particularly in today’s information econ-omy. Leaders have always needed empathy to de-velop and keep good people, but today the stakesare higher. When good people leave, they take thecompany’s knowledge with them.

That’s where coaching and mentoring come in. Ithas repeatedly been shown that coaching and men-toring pay off not just in better performance butalso in increased job satisfaction and decreasedturnover. But what makes coaching and mentoringwork best is the nature of the relationship. Out-

standing coaches and mentors getinside the heads of the peoplethey are helping. They sense howto give effective feedback. Theyknow when to push for betterperformance and when to holdback. In the way they motivatetheir protégés, they demonstrateempathy in action.

In what is probably soundinglike a refrain, let me repeat thatempathy doesn’t get much re-spect in business. People wonderhow leaders can make hard deci-sions if they are “feeling” for allthe people who will be affected.

But leaders with empathy do more than sympa-thize with people around them: they use theirknowledge to improve their companies in subtlebut important ways.

Social SkillThe first three components of emotional intelli-gence are all self-management skills. The last two,empathy and social skill, concern a person’s abilityto manage relationships with others. As a compo-nent of emotional intelligence, social skill is not assimple as it sounds. It’s not just a matter of friendli-ness, although people with high levels of socialskill are rarely mean-spirited. Social skill, rather, is friendliness with a purpose: moving people in thedirection you desire, whether that’s agreement on a new marketing strategy or enthusiasm about anew product.

Socially skilled people tend to have a wide circleof acquaintances, and they have a knack for findingcommon ground with people of all kinds – a knack



Social skill isfriendliness

with a purpose:moving peoplein the direction

you desire.

for building rapport. That doesn’t mean they social-ize continually; it means they work according tothe assumption that nothing important gets donealone. Such people have a network in place whenthe time for action comes.

Social skill is the culmination of the other di-mensions of emotional intelligence. People tend tobe very effective at managing relationships whenthey can understand and control their own emo-tions and can empathize with the feelings of others.Even motivation contributes to social skill. Re-member that people who are driven to achieve tendto be optimistic, even in the face of setbacks or fail-ure. When people are upbeat, their “glow” is castupon conversations and other so-cial encounters. They are popular,and for good reason.

Because it is the outcome of theother dimensions of emotionalintelligence, social skill is recog-nizable on the job in many waysthat will by now sound familiar.Socially skilled people, for in-stance, are adept at managingteams – that’s their empathy atwork. Likewise, they are expertpersuaders – a manifestation ofself-awareness, self-regulation,and empathy combined. Giventhose skills, good persuadersknow when to make an emotionalplea, for instance, and when anappeal to reason will work better.And motivation, when publiclyvisible, makes such people excellent collaborators;their passion for the work spreads to others, andthey are driven to find solutions.

But sometimes social skill shows itself in waysthe other emotional intelligence components donot. For instance, socially skilled people may attimes appear not to be working while at work. Theyseem to be idly schmoozing – chatting in the hall-ways with colleagues or joking around with peoplewho are not even connected to their “real” jobs. So-cially skilled people, however, don’t think it makessense to arbitrarily limit the scope of their relation-ships. They build bonds widely because they knowthat in these fluid times, they may need help some-day from people they are just getting to know today.

For example, consider the case of an executive inthe strategy department of a global computer man-ufacturer. By 1993, he was convinced that the com-pany’s future lay with the Internet. Over the courseof the next year, he found kindred spirits and usedhis social skill to stitch together a virtual commu-

nity that cut across levels, divisions, and nations.He then used this de facto team to put up a corpo-rate Web site, among the first by a major company.And, on his own initiative, with no budget or for-mal status, he signed up the company to participatein an annual Internet industry convention. Callingon his allies and persuading various divisions to donate funds, he recruited more than 50 peoplefrom a dozen different units to represent the com-pany at the convention.

Management took notice: within a year of theconference, the executive’s team formed the basisfor the company’s first Internet division, and hewas formally put in charge of it. To get there, the

executive had ignored conven-tional boundaries, forging andmaintaining connections withpeople in every corner of the or-ganization.

Is social skill considered a keyleadership capability in mostcompanies? The answer is yes,especially when compared withthe other components of emo-tional intelligence. People seemto know intuitively that leadersneed to manage relationships effectively; no leader is an island.After all, the leader’s task is to getwork done through other people,and social skill makes that possi-ble. A leader who cannot expressher empathy may as well nothave it at all. And a leader’s moti-

vation will be useless if he cannot communicate hispassion to the organization. Social skill allows lead-ers to put their emotional intelligence to work.

It would be foolish to assert that good-old-fash-ioned IQ and technical ability are not important ingredients in strong leadership. But the recipewould not be complete without emotional intelli-gence. It was once thought that the components ofemotional intelligence were “nice to have” in busi-ness leaders. But now we know that, for the sake ofperformance, these are ingredients that leaders“need to have.”

It is fortunate, then, that emotional intelligencecan be learned. The process is not easy. It takestime and, most of all, commitment. But the bene-fits that come from having a well-developed emo-tional intelligence, both for the individual and forthe organization, make it worth the effort.

Product no. 3790 To place an order, call 1-800-988-0886.



Emotionalintelligence

can be learned.The process is

not easy. It takes time andcommitment.

ARTICLES

“The Manager’s Job: Folklore and Fact” byHenry Mintzberg (Harvard Business Review,March–April 1990, Product no. 90210)Whereas Goleman emphasizes emotionalintelligence, Mintzberg focuses on specificskills. In this HBR Classic, Mintzberg uses hisand other research to debunk myths aboutthe manager’s role. Managerial work involvesinterpersonal roles, informational roles, anddecisional roles, he notes. These in turnrequire the ability to develop peer relation-ships, carry out negotiations, motivate subor-dinates, resolve conflicts, establish informa-tion networks and disseminate information,make decisions with little or ambiguousinformation, and allocate resources. Goodself-management skills are characteristic ofmost leaders; outstanding leaders also havethe ability to empathize with others and touse social skills to advance an agenda.

“The Work of Leadership” by Ronald A.Heifetz and Donald L. Laurie (Harvard Business Review, January–February 1997,Product no. 4150)Successfully leading an organization throughan adaptive challenge calls for leaders with ahigh degree of emotional intelligence. ButHeifetz and Laurie focus on the requirementsof adaptive work, not on emotional maturity.The principles for leading adaptive workinclude: “getting on the balcony,” forming apicture of the entire pattern of activity; iden-tifying the key challenge; regulating distress;maintaining disciplined attention; giving thework back to the people; and protecting voices of leadership from below.

“The Ways Chief Executive Officers Lead”by Charles M. Farkas and Suzy Wetlaufer(Harvard Business Review, May–June 1996,Product no. 96303)CEOs inspire a variety of sentiments rangingfrom awe to wrath, but there’s little debateover CEOs’ importance in the business world.The authors conducted 160 interviews withexecutives around the world. Instead of find-ing 160 different approaches, they found five,each with a singular focus: strategy, people,expertise, controls, or change. The five com-ponents of emotional intelligence, singly or incombination, have a great effect on how eachfocus is expressed in an organization.

BOOK

John P. Kotter on What Leaders Really Doby John P. Kotter (Harvard Business SchoolPress, 1999, Product no. 8974)In this collection of six articles, Kotter shareshis observations on the nature of leadershipgained over the past 30 years. Without leader-ship that can deal successfully with today’sincreasingly fast-moving and competitivebusiness environment, he warns, organiza-tions will slow down, stagnate, and lose theirway. He presents his views on the currentstate of leadership through ten observationsand revisits his now famous eight-stepprocess for organizational transformation. Incontrast to Goleman’s article on emotionalintelligence, which is about leadership quali-ties, Kotter’s work focuses on action: Whatdoes a leader do to lead? And how will leader-ship need to be different in the future?

What Makes a Leader?E X P L O R I N G F U R T H E R . . .

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