Bob Taccini, a 52-year-old vice president of finance at Cisco Systems, does not consider himself a trendsetter. “I’m not a management fad follower, unless I’m so far behind on the last fad that I’m considered ahead when it comes around again,” he says. “I look at applications and technologies pretty skeptically. But when we cut our travel budgets, using social technologies helped meet my need for personalization with my team. Even when I had a travel budget, I could maybe only get to some of our sites once a year. Management now requires spanning distance, even though we can’t span time. Certainly, as we continue to build a multigeneration work space, social technologies will become more and more the norm.”

For Taccini, the last five years—marked by constantly changing market conditions, the introduction of more distributed leadership throughout Cisco, and the increased availability of virtual meeting technologies—have demanded a change in how he views his job. As he explains, “The way in which we make decisions is more iterative and two-way. It’s definitely more of an inclusive environment. So the groups involved in the decisions—say, in the budget planning stages—have better buy-in. There is a closed loop of feedback.”

During this time, he has also become an adept user of social technologies. Now he conducts virtual offsite meetings, using TelePresence and WebEx, with blogs, discussion groups, and online forums as needed. As shown in figure 7-1, TelePresence is richer than e-mail or voice mail. The engagement is as if it is real and physical because participants are able to see the other life-sized virtual people involved.

Digure 7-1: A Cisco TelePresence Meeting

Source: Cisco Systems.

One of the most effective tools Taccini has used is a monthly video blog (vlog). “It has been one of the best ways to communicate, supplemented by calls with everyone in my reporting chain,” he said. “Even though it’s not two-way real time, I get more participation from the vlog. My team sends questions, and they also have Web spaces to create collaboration spaces.”

Taccini is not alone in forging a new approach to leadership. Our goal in this chapter is not only to define what leadership and management may look like in 2020 but also to show ways in which 2020 leaders can be developed now.

DEFINING THE LEADER OF THE FUTURE

All of the principles of Workplace 2020 come together in leadership. Creating an environment that is collaborative, authentic, personalized, innovative, and social requires leaders whose management behaviors create and reinforce that environment. In the world of 2020, with information about leaders freely shared through Twitter, text messages, IMs, and hundreds of sites where employees can publicly rate their bosses, consistency and authenticity across what is said and done will become even more important. Gary Hamel, a professor and management expert, predicts that in the future, “every employee will have a leadership score” based on ratings using social media and other input. In our model of the 2020 leader we emphasize integration of leadership and management, which, when woven together, lead to consistency and trust in the workplace.

A number of leadership gurus are predicting what the leader of the future will look like. According to Marshall Goldsmith, the important characteristics that it took to be a great leader in the past, such as integrity, customer commitment, and vision, will be retained. However, he also says that “Five different qualities [will come] out as much more important for leaders of the future: global leadership, cross-cultural appreciation, technology savvy, building alliances and partnerships, and sharing leadership.”¹

The ability to reach beyond the borders of the enterprise to collaborate with government and non-government agencies will also become increasingly important. “The CEO of the future is going to have to be somebody who deals well with government,” predicts David Gergen, a media and political commentator.² The leader who focuses solely on quarter-end results, without a view of the role of the organization in society, may win for a few quarters but cannot create a sustainable organization where employees want to work and to which they give their all.

In his call for action, The Future of Management, Hamel argues that the companies that succeed in the future will be those that innovate and adapt their management practices. Some of his principles for leaders include:

• Leaders are accountable to the governed.
• Everyone has a right to dissent.
• Leadership is distributed.³

Sounds a lot like the principles of democracy, doesn’t it? Of course this is his argument. As we have democratized information through the growth of social media tools, our need for bureaucratic hierarchies has been eliminated, and self-governing, involved employees have both the information and power to be involved in the organizational governance process. Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist, agrees. “In the old organization, you had to have this whole army of people digesting information to be able to feed it to the decision maker at the top. But that’s not the way it works anymore: the information can be available across the ranks, to everyone in the organization. And what you need to ensure is that people have access to the data they need to make their day-to-day decisions. And this can be done much more easily than it could be done in the past. And it really empowers the knowledge workers to work more effectively.”⁴ Henry Mintzberg of McGill University also calls for defining leadership to be sensitive to communities. “A healthy society balances leadership, communityship, and citizenship,” he says.⁵

In our research, we interviewed dozens of executives at companies to find out what they are envisioning as the leader of the future. General Electric has commissioned an internal group to study the leader of 2019, while Cisco created a council to look at the company in 2020, including leadership capabilities. So clearly the requirements of the leader of the future are on the minds of not only leadership and management thought leaders, but also executives at forward-thinking organizations.

THE 2020 LEADER MODEL

In figure 7-2, we cover five leadership areas that seem to be emerging as requirements for the leader of the future.

The process starts with selecting leaders who have demonstrated a collaborative mind-set and who work comfortably in a networked leadership. Second, we focus on leaders who see the development of people as one of their most important goals, including providing honest feedback, career guidance, and learning opportunities. Third, the leader of the future will need to be digitally confident and able to speak the digital language of the newest generation of workers. The fourth facet of the 2020 leader is being a global citizen, in the broadest sense. This means being not only a leader who can work well across cultures but also one who realizes the value of working with governments and nongovernmental organizations in the intertwined dependencies of the future. Finally, anticipating the future and building the capability to address it are the fifth capability area required for the 2020 leader. As Hamel says, “There’s little that can be said with certainty about the future except this: sometime over the next decade your company will be challenged to change in a way for which it has no precedent.”⁶

Figure 7-2: The 2020 Leader

Source: Future Workplace.

Bringing the disciplines of leadership and management together into an integrated model will require a reevaluation of how we develop leaders. In the 1990s and into the twenty-first century, a popular HR practice was to identify competencies, assess them, and create development activities aimed at specific competencies. Eventually a sizable consulting industry arose around this model, making it especially enticing to be able to purchase off-the-shelf products to jump-start leadership development programs. For the leader of the future to project an authentic, genuine, and believable approach, these capabilities must work together and be integrated into a whole experience for followers. The integration of skills and knowing when to use them is far more important than measuring and commenting on each part by itself. Effective leadership needs to live in the day-to-day environment of operational execution and therefore must be integrated with management.

To use an analogy, Michael Pollan, the author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, has challenged the prevailing nutrient-by-nutrient approach of thinking about what food and vitamins we need—what he calls “nutritionism”—and proposes an alternative way of eating that is informed by the traditions and ecology of real, well-grown, unprocessed food. Our personal health, he argues, cannot be divorced from the health of the food chains of which we are part.⁷ Likewise, our leadership and management practices must be informed by the ecology of the organizational environment in which employees reside and in which markets change constantly. Leaders do not live apart and distinct from the employees who are a part of the overall chain of an organization, and leadership skills are more useful when developed holistically, rather than in isolation.

WHAT THE GENERATIONS WANT FROM THEIR NEXT MANAGER

Recent research into the psychology of leadership suggests that the person who is seen as the leader of a group is often determined by looking at his or her followers, which means there is no single set of personality traits that would predict good leadership. Leadership involves leading from within, fitting into the group, and exerting influence, not imposing views from above.⁸

To understand what people want from their managers, we asked our survey respondents to rate the importance of a number of factors that correspond to the leadership areas in figure 7-2. In our “Workplace of the Future” survey conducted with three hundred heads of human resources, we asked these HR executives to rate managers in their companies on each of those same areas. The rank-order comparison of how important each of the attributes is, compared with HR executives’ rating of their managers’ overall skills, is shown in table 7-1.

TABLE 7-1: MANAGERIAL CAPABILITIES AND STRENGTHS

Rank Order of Desired Managerial Capabilities

Rank Order of Managers’ Skills

Will help me develop my career

Traditionalists: 7

Baby Boomers: 7

Generation X: 1

Millennials: 1

HR Ratings: 5

 

Will give me straight feedback

Traditionalists: 2

Baby Boomers: 1

Generation X: 2

Millennials: 2

HR Ratings: 8

 

Will mentor and coach me

Traditionalists: 5

Baby Boomers: 6

Generation X: 6

Millennials: 3

HR Ratings: 7

 

Is comfortable with virtual and flexible work schedules

Traditionalists: 3

Baby Boomers: 2

Generation X: 3

Millennials: 4

HR Ratings: 6

 

Will sponsor learning and development opportunities

Traditionalists: 6

Baby Boomers: 5

Generation X: 4

Millennials: 5

HR Ratings: 3

 

Is confident with new technology

Traditionalists: 4

Baby Boomers: 3

Generation X: 5

Millennials: 6

HR Ratings: 1

 

Works well across generations

Traditionalists: 1

Baby Boomers: 4

Generation X: 7

Millennials: 7

HR Ratings: 4

 

Works well across cultures and countries

Traditionalists: 8

Baby Boomers: 8

Generation X: 8

Millennials: 8

HR Ratings: 2

 

Source: “The Generations @ Work” survey and “Workplace of the Future” survey, Future Workplace.

 

Some notable findings emerge here. The biggest gap is how high all generations rated the importance of a manager who would give them straight feedback, compared to how HR professionals rated the capability of their own managers. Dead last on HR professionals’ rank order list of skills, giving straight feedback appears to be a skill area that, if improved, could be a differentiating managerial capability for an organization. Joseph Grenny, the best-selling author of Crucial Conversations and Influencer, says that in his work with organizations, “Creating an ability for managers to give straight feedback is not only satisfying for employees; but organizations also accrue real benefits. Our research shows that when organizations improve the ability of their employees, and especially their managers, to have honest conversations and to give straight feedback, the bottom line improves. We’ve seen productivity improvement, reduction in scrap and rework, earlier notification of emerging problems, and improved retention. For example—at one telecom company a 20 percent improvement in people’s candor about crucial issues corresponded with a 50 percent reduction in unwanted turnover during one of the tightest labor markets in years. At a major defense contracting firm, every 1 percent improvement in survey measures of crucial conversations was accompanied by $1,500,000 in recurring productivity improvements. Not many solutions do all that while improving employee morale.”⁹

Another interesting outcome from the survey was the difference in what the two older generations are looking for in a leader versus the two younger generations. Generation X and Millennials want a manager who will help them develop their career; this is viewed as high on their priority list but is low on the lists of Traditionalists and Boomers. The four generations also pair off in rating having a manager who works well across generations, with it being important to the older generations but not as important to the younger generations. When organizations are making decisions about who the next manager of a group will be, it is important to match the demographics of the employees in the group. If the group is composed of largely younger professionals, employing a manager who is good at developing careers could help ensure a good match. If the group has older employees, finding a manager who respects the experiences of the more senior employees and balances that respect across the generations might be a good fit.

Finally, we were surprised that working well across cultures and countries was rated last by every generation, especially considering that this was perceived as a strength of managers. Was it rated lowest because of the relative importance of each of the other items or because the respondents cared more about how they were treated and not as much about how managers might work well in a broader setting? Nearly every organization offers inclusion training, which may help to explain why employees don’t expend much thought on their managers’ skills in this area.

BUILDING THE LEADER OF THE FUTURE

Changing demographics pose difficulties for a long-term leadership development program. Millennials may be thrust into leadership roles sooner than previous generations were, as there are not nearly enough Gen X workers to fill the ranks of departing Boomers. Millennials may also be placed into leadership roles faster than any others leaders in the last thirty years. Think of it as the “Prince Charles syndrome”: will the Gen X leader ascend to power late in life, or will the leadership mantle skip to the next generation?

Organizations have become accustomed to a leisurely leadership pipeline, in which an emerging candidate is allowed diverse experiences and a predictable path through an orchestrated plan. However, for most organizations, the year 2020 will bring a new sense of urgency to develop emerging managers’ skills as rapidly as possible, since leaders will be promoted into positions as much as a decade earlier than previous generations. As a result, accelerating leadership development will become necessary for organizations in 2020. A few organizations are using techniques and strategies now that are likely to set the tone for the future in how we think about developing leaders.

Cisco Systems: Redefining the Practice of Leadership and Management

Cisco Systems, the world’s largest provider of Internet networking and communications equipment, is leading the way in building the 2020 leader. The dot-com bust of 2001 set into motion a rethinking of the management and leadership practices at Cisco, starting with how it organizes to prepare for the future. John Chambers has been the CEO of Cisco since 1995, at a time when the average tenure of a CEO is less than seven years for large, U.S.-based companies.¹⁰ Chambers describes himself as someone who was quite comfortable with a command-and-control style of leadership but had to shift his style to accommodate marketplace changes. “When you’re a command-and-control CEO, individuals impacted by your decisions can choose not to buy in and either slow, or even stop, the process. That is especially dangerous in an industry that moves as fast as this one. In my view, the days of being vertically integrated and having everything within your control will never return. The entire leadership team, including me, had to invent a different way to operate.”¹¹

Brian Schipper, the senior vice president of human resources, agrees. “We’re evolving from fairly traditional leadership practices to a culture that leverages collaboration for accelerating the pace of innovation and for driving execution. John developed a strong vision for the connection between technology, process, and policy to drive the changes he knew the company needed to make in order to address rapid shifts in the marketplace. If a company misses a single transition in high tech, history has shown that it’s not inconceivable that even a large company can fail. The importance of having an organization that can rapidly adjust to market and technology transitions is absolutely critical. Speed of innovation and the imperative to execute is impacting more than just technology companies. It’s not the products companies sell but rather the impact of technology on the way people work and live that’s driving a revolution in the practice of management.”

Designing Collaboration Through Councils and Boards

Chambers believes that “only those companies that build collaboration into their DNA by tapping into the collective expertise of all employees—instead of just a few select leaders at the top—will succeed, as more market transitions occur at once…. At Cisco, our major priorities are managed not by our top five to 10 executives but instead by cross-functional, collaborative councils and boards.”¹²

The councils and boards are a relatively new form of organization structure for Cisco, according to Schipper. “There were probably a half-dozen councils in place when I joined several years ago, but they did not have a long track record of success. Councils and boards emerged from the need to address the strategic opportunities that cross organizational boundaries in a largely functional organization. If you want to develop a viable entry into a heretofore unexploited market segment, you really need to work laterally across functions to make that happen. Another way the boards and councils got started was to solve problems for customers with similar needs. A big part of our customer base now is in the service provider segment. Five years ago that customer segment was much smaller for Cisco. In order to develop solutions, we had to get all functions focused on service provider customers in new and different ways. John believes, and I share his belief, that what most companies would do when faced with that kind of market opportunity would be to reorganize on the pivot of the customer. Our belief is companies often trade off known negatives for unknown negatives. Companies lose time and, in the rapid change of the high-tech world, risk missing a market transition while focused internally on reorganization. Our view is that serial reorganization creates unnecessary business risk when responding to the pace and scale of opportunities and challenges in the marketplace.”

Cisco has carefully defined what is chartered as a working group, board, or council. “Without some clear system for making distinctions based on the scale of the work, everyone naturally wants to establish or join a council,” Schipper says. A council at Cisco typically develops vision and strategy for five-to eight-year opportunities that involve market adjacencies with at least $10 billion in revenue. “Councils address big, hairy strategic problems and, as such, require a solid, repeatable governance process, including conducting operational reviews. Boards address challenging issues that require coordination and collaboration across Cisco. For example, the CIO, the controller, workplace resources, and HR decided that we needed to look at the intersection of work and the employee experience. We could have each played our position, but we chose instead to form a board and be more deliberative and collaborative in our approach to harmonize the work and improve the experience for employees,” he elaborates.

The Role of Human Resources

What role can HR play in pioneering such a massive change of approaching management of a large company? “One of the things that I bring to the discussion is greater deliberation about which people systems we use to drive change and the order in which we adjust them to ensure enduring culture change,” says Schipper. “My experience is that one of the last places to look is the reward system, even though that’s often where most people would instinctively look to create change. Evolving a culture is by its very nature complex. Rewards, in contrast, are necessarily simple. Often rewards provide only a sound bite of a metric, so it is often ineffective if the intended outcome is lasting change. One of the things we did early was change the leadership competency model. We had a model that could have fit any traditionally led organization. We changed to a model that emphasizes the importance of collaboration. Of course, the model is only as good as the implementation process behind it. We use it to select leaders from outside the company, and our 360-feedback process internally, to vet people moving up from director to VP or from VP to SVP.”

The HR leadership also had to change to support collaborative management. All HR leaders spend a substantial part of their time on work that would often be viewed as nontraditional for a human resources function. Members of the HR team are coparticipants in the many boards and councils. Rather than running a traditional staff meeting, Schipper includes everyone inside or outside the function who can help contribute to the content at hand. In other words, the formal organization chart rarely determines who participates in which initiatives.

NAVIGATING CAREERS

Perhaps one of the challenges of a complex organization is how people get feedback and learn where the opportunities exist to advance a career. Schipper chairs one council, and he must contribute to their performance expectations and reviews of everyone on that council, even though they don’t report to him. Are the career paths at Cisco difficult to navigate? Schipper says, “Technology jobs are not like those in companies where roles don’t change much over time and the opportunity exists to define key jobs for people to rotate through to accelerate their development. In this fast-changing environment, the incumbent and his or her background often shape the job.”

In any organization, Schipper insists, people’s behaviors are constantly scrutinized to determine what roles they might best fill in their next assignment. “Like many companies, we have an organic social system that rides alongside the organization chart. Decision makers are always looking for the right behaviors in emerging leaders who might be able to step up and lead the next initiative.” In one of Cisco’s leadership development programs, the Action Learning Forum (ALF), leaders are presented with a strategic business challenge. They team with others to solve the challenge and then present their results to a leadership board. Each idea is either funded or rejected. The teams that are funded then go on to work the cross-company idea, giving them valuable experience analogous to that of a board or council. Cisco has funded dozens of initiatives and developed strategies to address market adjacencies through the ALF program.

At Cisco, emerging leaders have the opportunity to chair a working group or board, where they can hone their skills on solving an important strategic problem for the corporation, but through an approach that allows for cross-functional support and therefore is less risky for the leader’s long-term career. If the initiative is not as successful as anticipated, the leader of a working group can apply his or her learning to the next functional role or assignment, without moving downward or being brushed aside, as can happen in a traditional organization.

A Personal Journey

Adapting to a new style of leadership has required Schipper to change the way he works and behaves. “Although I’m very comfortable with setting strategy and vision, at Cisco I have to intersect what I do with how John leads. He lays out a clear model of the vision of the future, and I have to adapt and translate that to people, technologies, processes, and tools. What I’ve learned, working with the Cisco leadership team, is that you have to sometimes subordinate an HR-led vision in order to support a business where all leaders are expected to establish vision and strategy. At Cisco, my role is not to create an HR-led vision but rather to build the supporting people and organization systems to ensure that the business-led vision is realized and can endure.

“This collaborative model of working with other senior leaders is infinitely more fulfilling than the model where one simply hopes that others will buy into and align with an HR-led vision. What is often forgotten is that what drives company success is having leaders who have a shared understanding of the company’s values; that gives me and my team the opportunity to build the supporting culture. For example, our practices employ increasingly collaborative processes to govern work at Cisco, but we all agree that an important underlying value is to continue to care about our people and show that care through our words and actions. What’s deeply satisfying for me is that because we’re clear about our shared values at Cisco, I have the opportunity to execute better and respond faster than those who are serially negotiating for strategic alignment with their senior leader or peers.”

General Electric Sees the Future of Leadership

One company that has long been admired as a leadership development factory is General Electric. In 2008, Bob Cancalosi, the chief learning officer of General Electric Health Care (GEHC), began a special assignment to determine the skills and capabilities needed by GE leaders in 2019, as part of an assignment on cultural transformation. Several business changes drove the need to see the future. For the first time in GEHC’s history, more than 50 percent of its revenues and 50 percent of its employees were from outside the United States. The accelerated market opportunity in emerging markets suggested there needs to be a shift in how GEHC defines leadership.

While on assignment for a year to help GEHC assess its current and desired state culture, Cancalosi and others talked to more than two hundred thought leaders and experts in the field of leadership and conducted interviews with key leaders in GEHC. Altogether they determined more than 125 competencies through their interviews and research. From there, using Pareto analysis, they narrowed down the themes. Though it is still a work in process, they acknowledge seven competency areas to be important. They are, according to Cancalosi:

• 1. Just plain smart. Has both book and street smarts.
• 2. Results-oriented. Has a great execution quotient.
• 3. Unwavering ethics. Leads by example and does the right thing when no one is looking.
• 4. Financial acumen. Understands the relationships of the income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow of a business.
• 5. Quick study. Has the ability to pick up data, trends, issues, opportunities, etc.
• 6. Values diversity. Team reflects a balance of strength.
• 7. Passionate. About the business, the people, and the driving purpose.

Then GEHC identified ten leadership characteristics to fit these competency areas. Although they are more detailed, these GE characteristics provided by Cancalosi closely align with our 2020 leader model. These leadership characteristics include:

• 1. Cultural agility. Leveraging the unique skills of all global cultures within the organization.
• 2. Boundaryless collaboration. Focusing on the whole, collaborating across the organization chart and not just within their own business.
• 3. Legendary builder of people and teams. Coaching and mentoring both face-to-face and virtually; challenging people to achieve more than they believed they could.
• 4. External focus on excellence. Deep knowledge of the customer, their industry, and the global regulatory forces.
• 5. Generationally savvy. Leading well across all four generational types.
• 6. Digital proficiency. Leveraging technology to accelerate speed of decision making and business impact.
• 7. Harmonious blend of EQ and IQ. Personally self-aware in order to motivate team performance.
• 8. Multiple-horizon thinking. Rationalizing the distribution of resources and effort across the present and future to balance incremental and bold moves.
• 9. Innovative proliferation. Creating a climate of ongoing invention and creative thinking.
• 10. Inspirational communication. Motivating employees in both good and bad times; communicating effectively externally with stakeholders and media.

Once the characteristics were defined, Cancalosi and team looked across GEHC to see where the biggest gap existed between the current capabilities and the ones needed for the future. The goal here was to use this to develop a curriculum strategy to match GEHC’s future growth strategy. Each year the team intends to tackle a new future competency for development, so that by the time 2019 arrives, with continuous adjustment, they will be well under way in having the bench strength they need. How many companies do you know that have a three-year leadership development plan, much less a ten-year plan that is updated regularly? GE is now working on the corporationwide review of the requirements for the leader of 2020, which will be incorporated into the curriculum planning of its corporate university at Crotonville in Ossining, New York.

Zappos: Twittering Away to Profits

Sometimes failure is the best teacher. Not that anyone would describe Tony Hsieh as a failure in any way. But when asked what the biggest mistake he has ever made was, he answered, “With my first company it was not paying attention to the culture. We hired the right people with the right experience and skill sets, but we didn’t know to look for a culture fit. By the time it was 100 people, I didn’t want to go into the office anymore. That was a weird feeling. That’s why we ended up selling the company.”¹³

As the CEO of Zappos, the online shoes and clothing retailer recently acquired by Amazon.com, Hsieh focuses first and foremost on culture. Every employee at Zappos was allowed to collaborate in the process of crafting the values of the company. Collaboration requires openness and transparency, and Hsieh achieves that through creating a culture using a number of strategies, including numerous social media tools. Here’s how he describes how Twitter has helped him grow personally:

For me, it comes down to these 4 things:

1. 1. Transparency & Values: Twitter constantly reminds me of who I want to be, and what I want Zappos to stand for.
2. 2. Reframing Reality: Twitter encourages me to search for ways to view reality in a funnier and/or more positive way.
3. 3. Helping Others: Twitter makes me think about how to make a positive impact on other people’s lives.
4. 4. Gratitude: Twitter helps me notice and appreciate the little things in life.

Since the CEO is such a fan of Twitter, it’s not surprising that nearly half of the Zappos employees also tweet.¹⁵ With the company’s $1 billion in revenue, employees’ ability to get to know other employees’ interests helps build the sense of family spirit that is at the core of Zappos’ values and that led to Zappos being named as number 23 on Fortune magazine’s 2009 100 Best Companies to Work For list.

Even though he describes himself as introverted, quiet, and shy, Hsieh’s openness with his employees and his Twitter followers, which now number more than one million, help him create the culture that he sees as foundational to the success of Zappos.¹⁶ Certainly the use of Twitter helps him reach customers, but his primary focus is building Zappos’ employee culture.¹⁷ “Our company culture is based on ten core values that our employees came up with,” he says. “My style is to make sure we’re always living by those core values and making decisions based on them. A lot of bigger companies might have what they call ‘core values’ or ‘guiding principles,’ but it’s usually something lofty-sounding, like it comes out of a press release and the employees might learn about it on day one but then it’s just a meaningless plaque on the wall. For us, we actually hire people based on these values, and we’ll fire people based on these values even if they’re doing their job perfectly fine. Part of my job is making sure that is implemented as a policy.”¹⁸

By using a platform that encourages feedback and response, Hsieh opens himself to collaboration with everyone, including anyone with a relevant point of view. Since that interchange is open to the world, those who watch him also have the opportunity to learn how he conducts himself, which is one of the best ways of developing people.

Most leaders say that the higher they move in an organization chart, the less feedback they get. The use of social technologies not only opens up the possibility for a leader to communicate authentically with the people in the organization but also allows a leader to get immediate feedback on how the message is being received. Any feedback for leaders is helpful, but in this case, social technologies allow that feedback to be in real time and instantaneous.

According to Aaron Magness, who heads up business development and brand marketing, “Zappos is a more accessible and transparent leadership team than I ever imagined. Tony gives out his e-mail and personally responds. In today’s world, at many companies, there are so many gatekeepers. Tony will personally respond to e-mail sent to him from anyone in the company. He doesn’t have other people read his e-mail and respond. It sends a message to the rest of the company. Openness is not only welcomed, it’s expected. We all feed off of it.”

When hiring leaders from outside, Zappos listens carefully to what questions they ask as a clue to their management style. Magness says, “What you’ll find is people will ask who they report to or what their title will be or their office space. That means they’re focused on themselves. Also, people who keep work and play separate won’t fit with us. As a leader, we are asked to spend twenty percent of our time with our teams outside the office. We do work outside the office. You’re building trust, so you make faster decisions.”

Reverse Mentoring at Burson-Marsteller

In Mark Twain’s novel The Prince and the Pauper, Tom Canty, the youngest son of a family of beggars, trades places with the Prince of Wales, Edward VI. Each learns valuable lessons about the other’s life conditions, social environment, and worldview. Edward, who will eventually become king, gets a glimpse into the injustices of the kingdom he will one day rule, which changes his perspective and approach as a ruler. Though they swap places for only a few weeks, the future king learns valuable lessons that shape him forever. In a sense, reverse mentoring in organizations accomplishes many of the same learning experiences as Tom Canty and Edward the Sixth experienced.

Burson-Marsteller, a global public relations and communications firm with offices in eighty-one countries, has implemented reverse mentoring in its U.S. division. According to Michele Chase, the managing director of worldwide human resources, Burson-Marsteller decided to pilot a program of reverse mentoring to bridge not only generational divides but also ethnicity and specialty experience, allowing each side of the mentoring relationship to appreciate their differences.

“Our whole U.S. leadership team of nineteen executives participated—all the practice heads and market leaders, as well as the U.S. CEO,” Chase says. Young and/or ethnically diverse mentors across the United States volunteered and were assigned to senior team members based on where they might have had the greatest opportunity to understand another perspective. “For example, the CEO, Pat Ford, is being mentored by a director in another location. Pat conducted an ‘all hands’ town hall for the U.S. and spoke to his mentor to get her reaction and her general feeling of her office’s reaction to the messages. The mentor gave Pat insights that he might not have otherwise heard. Letting someone else take control of what they’re teaching you and telling you is the difficult part for a senior executive, when you’re used to being looked to for the answers.”

In order to accomplish this, the company conducts training for both mentors and mentees, establishing ground rules around confidentiality. Typically the mentoring pair is not in the same location, so when an executive is traveling, he or she will arrange a meeting. Otherwise, they rely on phone calls or Adobe Connect. “It’s difficult not to slip into our traditional roles,” Chase commented. “But this arrangement is building relationships. The mentors are getting access to more senior people, and they get to go behind the scenes, so to speak, to see how leaders think and offer insights. In addition, the mentee, who typically might not get feedback from a senior executive with whom they do not have a reporting relationship, is able to receive thoughts and advice from someone who differs from them in many ways.”

Chase holds meetings with the mentors to ensure that the relationship is working, and the mentors give one another tips and tell stories about what’s working for them. Several of the mentors have helped their mentees set up Twitter or other social networking tools. “Reverse mentoring accelerates development for mentors,” according to Chase. “To have conversations with these high-level employees is development in and of itself, but the mentor also gets better known in the organization. They’ve built a relationship, and when the next assignment comes up, there is a natural tendency to go to someone you know. Also, some of the mentors have never managed people, so they get a chance to preview that experience.” For the executive mentees, gaining more perspective on, insights into, and appreciation for differences such as age, race, and cultural practices is a great benefit and helps foster a more inclusive culture.

Team-based Learning at PricewaterhouseCoopers

Leaders often work in an environment with a high need for technical excellence, intense pressure, time constraints, and a high cost of failure. Tom Evans, the chief learning officer for PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) in the United States, began to wonder if there were ways the natural work environment could be used to accelerate learning for the next generation of leaders.

“In our world,” Evans said, “the question is, how do you develop the next generation and ensure they have the capacity to act on behalf of the firm in a way that drives differentiation and excellence—levels of distinction? Our firm has spent a lot of time tackling that question, so I started a project to understand how we can help our new associates understand globalization, technology, and the complex tasks they face.

“The generations are approaching work differently. So we in turn have to look at the workplace environment as a fertile field for accelerating the development of our people, using client problems as the day-to-day means of learning and building trust and collaboration in our teams.

“From that we started to think about how to build leaders by asking ourselves if there was a way to accelerate developing leaders without taking them out of their natural work environments. That’s when we hit upon the idea that training to be a doctor is done on the job. We went out and studied teaching hospitals, and we noticed differences between hospitals, how they approached training their doctors, and the results they achieved. Johns Hopkins really stood out to us, not only because of their long-standing ranking as a top teaching hospital but also because they remain profitable, despite working in the constraints of an environment where most of their funding is from government aid.”

The training of doctors, Evans learned in his conversations with the administrator at Johns Hopkins, is not considered a special event or program. It’s just part of what it does and who they are as a teaching hospital. The learning is integrated with work, and the dialogue that occurs between the members of the medical team is focused on practices and a style of learning that has become natural.

“We decided to call it team-based learning—TBL—when we translated the practices from the teaching hospital back to our environment,” Evans says. “We realized that an underlying foundation in order for TBL to work was to be open to a philosophy of development—a basic understanding at a teaching hospital. Our senior leaders needed to realize that, like doctors, our associates have gone through a vigorous recruiting process and there is a valuable asset in front of them. But the associates need developing and shaping; the performance bar just keeps on getting higher.” To help the teams get started, Evans, in partnership with Duke Corporate Education, created a launch session to build a common understanding of the process and ensure that the underlying philosophical approach required was in place.

Borrowing from practices observed at Johns Hopkins, TBL relies on five routines:

• 1. Rounds. This practice requires moving work to the most junior eligible team member. “The reason for emphasizing ‘eligible’ is that any assignment requires a certain level of background. At Johns Hopkins, they would do three to four patients on their first day on the job and then present to others. A resident might flash an EKG to interns and then give them fifteen seconds or less to interpret and state what needs to be seen. When you get to know EKGs, you realize that there really are a few striking things that even the newest doctor should be able to recognize and interpret almost immediately, so they get that experience on the first day.” At PwC, this means letting junior members of the team work directly with clients much earlier than they might have otherwise, but not solo.
• 2. Formal observation and feedback. This second routine ensures that people are given responsibility early in their tenure, have plenty of opportunity to be observed on the job, and receive feedback not only from the leader of the team but also from other team members. The observation and feedback can be either impromptu or scheduled.
• 3. Shadowing. As an associate progresses in his or her capabilities, a senior partner schedules a time to observe the associate at a client site. “It is cultural to expect feedback from multiple sources in this environment. Even though hierarchy and structure are alive in this environment, the organization structure flattens when it comes to feedback. The same thing was true at Johns Hopkins. I watched the interaction between a cardiologist with twenty-five years’ experience and a resident. When it came to discussing a patient, the resident was able to point out something to the cardiologist, who I expected to bristle and react to feedback from someone so junior. But the cardiologist listened and thanked the resident for the feedback.”
• 4. After-action reviews (AARs). An AAR is conducted by the management team as a way of diagnosing how a client engagement worked. “If we get it wrong, we talk about it and learn,” said Evans. “If we get it right and unique, we talk about it and learn. It’s very valuable to sharing when you want to bring something to the team as a new way of approaching a particular problem or client set. It also helps seal in the learning experience.”
• 5. Team workshops. As a team is set to launch each new routine, it holds a workshop to ensure that everyone understands the process and that the new routine can be easily embedded into the team’s forthcoming natural work. That way it helps build an integrated approach to both work and learning, in the hope that the routine will be sustained long after the formal program ends.

According to Evans, in the places where he has conducted early pilots, “the teams are showing good results, with increased competence, good business economics, and high client satisfaction.”

DEMOCRATIZATION OF INFORMATION CHANGES EVERYTHING

The structures of management common to most organizations evolved in order to control and pass information from level to level in the hierarchy. New technologies have not only made that unnecessary but have also freed people from this hierarchy. The more management tries to exercise control of information, the more likely there will be a backlash. Not only does the front line get access to information, but CEOs can now hear directly from customers. Brian Dunn, the CEO of Best Buy, says, “I…have a program that searches the Internet anytime somebody mentions Best Buy out there. Sometimes it’s really great things, sometimes it’s obscenity-laden, but I have a huge appetite for it. If I see customers have problems with things, I will contact the appropriate person in our company and have them contact that customer. Sometimes I contact the customer.”²⁰

Because people at all levels have access to information across the corporation, engaging the minds of everyone will lead to changing our models of what we expect in leaders, how we manage, and how to accelerate the development of the next generation of leaders. We call the leaders of the future “citizen leaders.” They will reinforce the principles of openness and democracy through access to information and social collaboration in order to deliver sustainability within the overall society in which the organization operates. Our connection to nearly anyone else on the planet is only a mobile device away. Citizen leaders who embrace collaboration across all levels will be those who thrive in 2020.

SUMMARY

• Tailor your leadership styles differently for audiences of different generations. The Traditionalists and Baby Boomers, the two older generations, desire different qualities in a leader than do the two younger generations, Generation X and the Millennials. When organizations are making decisions about managers of groups, factoring in the ages of the employees in the groups is important information in selecting a leader. If the group is made up of largely younger professionals, look for a manager who is good at developing careers. If the group is mostly older employees, find a manager who balances respect across the generations.
• Integrate leadership and management. Define your leadership competencies in a way that matches not only the strategy of the company now but where the organization is headed. Will your workforce mix change and require new competencies? Develop those competencies before your competition does.
• Ensure openness, honesty, and transparency among your leaders. Encourage leaders to use policies that open processes to feedback from, response to, and collaboration with individuals at all levels in the organization. This allows developing leaders the opportunity to learn how leaders conduct themselves, one of the best ways for them to learn these skills.
• Understand that the timeline for leadership development is changing. Organizations are used to the luxury of a leisurely leadership progression. Although this has not entirely disappeared, as we move into the future, growth in new technologies and increases in the speed of business will mean a need to develop skills as rapidly as possible. Accelerating leadership development will become necessary for organizations in 2020.
• Enact team-based projects to foster collaborative learning. Working and learning in teams allows employees to learn from one another and all to benefit from the differing perspectives and experience levels of the team members. Additionally, working in teams helps make observation and feedback facets of the regular workday.