CEO Use Case: Bill Gates, the Man Who
Would Be King
Paul Allen, the business entrepreneur who cofounded Microsoft with Bill Gates in 1975, published years later a biographical book called Idea Man, which collected his experience in creating and launching the technology giant. Much of the attention the book generated was due to the chapters where Allen wrote about his working and personal relationship with Gates, a highly divisive figure both in his business and in his philanthropic ventures for the last 30 years.
In one particular chapter, Allen includes several anecdotes about Gates’s managerial style, saying:
Microsoft was a high-stress environment because Bill drove others as hard as he drove himself. He was growing into the taskmaster who would prowl the parking lot on weekends to see who’d made it in. People were already busting their tails, and it got under their skin when Bill hectored them into doing more. Bob Greenberg, a Harvard classmate of Bill’s whom we’d hired, once put in 81 hours in four days, Monday through Thursday, to finish part of the Texas Instruments BASIC. When Bill touched base toward the end of Bob’s marathon, he asked him, “What are you working on tomorrow?”
Bob said, “I was planning to take the day off.”
And Bill said, “Why would you want to do that?” He genuinely couldn’t understand it; he never seemed to need to recharge.1
An article in the Harvard Business Review seems to echo and expand on this idea of Gates as a domineering leader:
Gates is the achievement-driven leader par excellence, in an organization that has cherry-picked highly talented and motivated people. His apparently harsh leadership style—baldly challenging employees to surpass their past performance—can be quite effective when employees are competent, motivated and need little direction—all characteristics of Microsoft’s engineers.2
Few stories resonate more with the general public than the rags-to-riches tale of a talented man. The technology industry, in particular, starting back in the 1970s seems a hub for exceptional individuals who, by sensing an opportunity or developing a brand-new technology, managed to change the world.
Bill Gates hardly fits the “rags” part of the story (his father was a prominent attorney and he enjoyed a comfortable upbringing) but the scale of the “riches” he achieved makes him a textbook example of success through determination. When he went from being a Harvard dropout to gaining the title of wealthiest man in the world, he did so by applying a radical mind-shift to the computer industry and looking at software as a business in order to fulfill his vision of placing a PC in every home (and having them all running Microsoft software).
Gates demonstrated early on in his career a style of leadership that was both task-focused and result-oriented, the two key components of the controller behavioral style. And control was, in fact, at the core of his concept of management. Coming from a technical background, Gates could keep a close eye on the product development being done at Microsoft, and that, paired with his personal drive, made him a demanding leader. His employees were required to report regularly to him in order to present their progress, and during those sessions, Gates would constantly interrupt and challenge their facts and conclusions.
This inclination to micromanage his organization abated with time. Gates had achieved leadership responsibility early on in his life, but personal maturity as well as decades at the helm of Microsoft and his charitable foundation eventually tempered him. His conduct evolved into a more communicative form where he increasingly delegated responsibility for decision making to his team.
The Bases of the Controller Behavioral Style
The controller is often depicted in fiction as a take-charge type of person, the one who jumps to the fore to assume control in moments of crisis. This is John Wayne in The Searchers, Darth Vader in Star Wars, and Aragorn in Lord of the Rings. Also common is the trope of disaster movies where a leader rises in a situation of crisis: a person who knows what to do and how to organize the party to secure survival, and in many cases, the drama of the story comes from the contrasting view of those who regard him as a savior and those who see him as a despotic tyrant. That is, certainly, the dichotomy that best summarizes the nature of the controller.
All those characteristics (competence, decisiveness, autocracy, etc.) do appear in the controller behavioral type, but reality is, of course, more complex than fiction. The controller is defined, first and foremost, by his or her formal behavior, which favors processes and tasks over people or relationships, and secondly, by a proactive, domineering style; controllers follow what they consider is the right course of action without much regard for how those actions are perceived by the rest of the community.
The controller is a natural leader and his or her greatest advantage is the ability to create binomial cause–effect relationships by leveraging natural virtues toward concrete goals. This makes the controller especially suited for the world of enterprise, where driving processes from beginning to end is the correct recipe for success.
The controller is, therefore:
- A task-accomplisher ➞ who delivers bottom-line results.
- A self-motivated worker ➞ who initiates actions.
- A fast decision maker ➞ who follows through with the results of such decisions.
- A disciplined worker ➞ who also expects and demands efforts from others.
Although the controlling leadership style may seem like a natural fit for a CEO, it can become limited and, if applied in excess, move into the realm of authoritarianism, which has many shortcomings of its own. An excessively controlling leader can be impatient, dictatorial, and overbearing, therefore hampering the effectiveness of the organization rather than enhancing it.
The Controller at the Table: Negotiation and Communication Style
When it comes to communicating their ideas, controllers take a very characteristic top-down approach; these are businesspeople who are less interested in establishing a dialog than they are in conveying a set of directives that need to be applied. This communication style has positive traits because it is clear, unambiguous, makes good use of available resources, and is result-oriented. Highly hierarchical environments or those under recurrent pressure are a good fit for the controller, but these same attributes, at their worst, can lead to people’s feelings being disregarded in favor of results, alienating other members of the community.
The controller communication style can also lose valuable inputs from other team members because of its noninclusive decision-making process. Furthermore, controllers tend to establish unidirectional communication lines, expressing an opinion and considering that to be an actual dialog.
When communicating with a controller, there are guidelines that would help any of the other three behavioral styles to more effectively engage his or her attention:
- The conversation needs to be clear and precise, avoiding rambling or excessive explanations.
- Argumentation works better if focused on the task at hand, and there is no need to make an effort to build personal rapport.
- Any disagreements should be contained to a particular issue and supported by facts, avoiding any emotional component.
The Controller at the Helm: Leadership Style
As mentioned before, of all the four behavioral styles, controllers are the ones who seem to fit best in a position of leadership because they are both organized and commanding. And because of their competitiveness, they are keen to absorb new roles and responsibilities, so the pressures of a dominant position are easier to assimilate for a controller than they are for any other behavioral style.
Controllers are surprisingly democratic, not in the decision system, where they see hierarchy as a natural status, but rather in the way they set high expectations for themselves the same as for everybody else. This is a very egalitarian perspective, where, with them at the steering wheel, everybody is under pressure to quickly and accurately deliver results for a large reward.
“Urgency” and “drive” are two key words for controller leaders, and they will make sure these are pushed down the organization so everybody feels the need to step up their game.
When reporting to a controller supervisor, the best way to gain his or her approval is to proactively work on solving the task at hand, all the while remembering that the controller is not concerned with process but with results. When working together, any other type of behavioral style benefits from the drive and brisk pace that the controller provides.
The Controller: Relationships Chart
1 P. Allen. 2011. Idea Man. New York: Portfolio/Penguin.
2 D. Goleman, R.E. Boyatzis, and A. McKee. 2001. Primal Leadership. Daniel Goleman.