The literature shows that leadership is a multifaceted activity (a process), not an abstract concept. Effective leadership is all about change (Kotter, 1996), combining action, people, and organizational skills (Fiedler, 1967; Hosking and Morley, 1988). Leadership is a process, and it can be learned (Grint, 1997). Leaders and followers are inseparable (Burns, 1978), and leadership is a moral activity (Gardner, 1990).

Armed with this background, I have used my professional experience and subsequent research to build a simple leadership framework designed to analyze what leaders do and how they can all do better. This 4E’s framework (envision, enable, empower, energize) is focused on actions in use rather than espoused competencies, individual styles, or personality types. It attempts to isolate common characteristics of leaders, rather than create a “super-set” of perfect leadership. I explore details later, but in short:

The complexity organizations face today suggests that leadership must be distributed rather than focused on a small group of individuals (Gronn, 2002). Only then can organizations use the combined power of everyone in the enterprise to meet the challenge of the ever more complex range of issues they face. Distributed leadership as a concept was probably first suggested by Gibb (1954). But it is only relatively recently, with the growth of networks, virtual teams, and communities of practice, that it has been broadly studied. Gronn (2002) suggested that distributed leadership has two threads:

Building on this leadership base and to help us all grapple with the complexities of the global world, I have created a simple global leadership framework with four areas of focus:

And I am suggesting that we use the 4E’s—envision, enable, empower, and energize—to organize this framework.

Globalization has always been a force in the world, from the expansion of ancient empires through to the age of discovery and then the era of colonialism. These gave way to major industrial shifts and today’s drive for efficiency and lowest production costs from around the world. Add to this the interconnectedness of political and social concerns, unparalleled impact from computer and telecommunications technology, and the ubiquity of the Internet, and it is clear that globalization is here to stay.

What makes understanding leadership quite challenging today are several almost paradoxical pressures. There is an explosion of information and knowledge, and occasionally wisdom, from the burgeoning knowledge economy. This means that even the most efficient of today’s organizations struggle to keep up with rapidly changing customer needs and competitive innovation. They require ever more specialized responses, yet also a broader contextual understanding of customers’ issues. To compound things, there is a simultaneous convergence and divergence in science and technology. No one scientist can understand all science; specialization is essential. Yet there is much crossover, for example, from biological computing to the need to understand physical fluid dynamics in the practice of advanced surgery. And the multiplication of alliances, business networks, outsourcing, and the like, both internal and external to the enterprise, makes it hard to drive focus and simplification in delivering consistent results.

In the political and social arenas, we must also take account of the various views on terrorism and the ongoing tussle between developed and developing nations. And we have (it seems) more and more countries and nationalities to understand and contend with than ever before in history.

There are 101 definitions of globalization, although most of them seem to be economically based and are built around open markets in a borderless world. Globalization is an intense engagement in both economic and social openness, and today’s leadership must reflect this. Held and McGrew (2002) called it “a widening, deepening and speeding up of interconnectedness in all aspects of contemporary social life from the cultural to the criminal, the financial to the spiritual.” One of the better formal approaches to defining globalization is from the consultancy group KOF, which publishes annual indexes on how global countries are (Belgium is the current world champion). The index reflects economic globalization, characterized as long-distance flows of goods, capital, and services, as well as information and perceptions that accompany market exchanges; political globalization, characterized by a diffusion of government policies; and social globalization, expressed as the spread of ideas, information, images, and people.

So how should leaders think and act to embrace globalization and then manage it? I suggest that the economics side is now well-trodden territory, and although political policies need careful and systematic understanding, even these are getting to be manageable; witness the success of multinational companies and today’s interconnected world of commerce.

I focus here on the social side of globalization because it remains challenging for leaders. And as I have studied the issue, one question that always arises is which of the historic truths of the leadership process can we hold onto and which need to be modified to reflect our own era.

Many macrosocial drivers are forcing us to think in new ways, starting with technology and economics. But I also contend that individual human aspirations (the microview) suggest that people want similar things from their leaders as they always have.

We start an exploration of what seems new in today’s version of globalization and then examine how to lead in this world.

After the launch, we were walking through Visakhapatnam, the town on the east coast of India where we were test marketing. I was stopped by a lady who walked out of a shanty. She was clearly not very well off, but asked me in understandable English if I would like tea. She explained that she had seen the TV advertisement for the new product.

She told me in no uncertain terms that we were not giving her a chance to try it because she had not received a sample, and she could not risk the amount of money needed to buy a whole packet. She was also very clear that sending her children to school in clean, white blouses was as important to her as to richer people. Needless to say, we gave her and her friends samples.

Meeting the Indian woman taught me a lot about global common ground, the leapfrogging of technology in developing markets, and the

80:20 rule. Since then, my core operating principle has been that people are more the same than they are different. Of course, there are historical, cultural, and economic differences, but a good place to start any leadership dialogue is to figure out the common aspirations and needs.

The Indian woman wanted exactly the same as her European counterparts: the ability to choose for herself. She also had the same basic need: to get her laundry done as easily and cheaply as possible. Even the “meta need” (to send her children to school as smartly as possible) reflected the thoughts of parents the world over. She really did exemplify Pareto’s 80:20 rule.

So how can leaders’ get to grips with this 80:20 rule to isolate what is the same and then be able to understand and respond to unique local needs and characteristics? All over the world customers are continually upping their expectations of the products and services they use. And in the fastest-growing markets, consumers are leapfrogging traditional technologies. For example, China and India now have the world’s biggest mobile phone user bases. So from a product and services point of view, it is usually best to use highest-common-denominator technology for the most competitive delivery of benefits.

But what about the organizational side of things? What is today’s highest-common-denominator approach to global leadership and organization development? From a practical perspective, focusing on similarities allows us to build constructive discussion and move toward shared goals. But if you start by seeking out and highlighting differences, you will find it harder to create a shared understanding. Focusing on differences pushes us toward confrontation and a debate about who is right and who is wrong.

Can we therefore pick a few common-ground social drivers in today’s version of globalization that will allow us to do a better job? I do not mean the technology or the economic changes, but rather some of the deeply rooted social changes that drive people’s needs, ideas, and behaviors. As a filter, my premise is that leaders and their followers must develop congruent value systems for them to coexist and cooperate.

There are at least four major social trends to consider, and each has special leadership lessons:

In the developing world, there are struggles for more democracy everywhere and a demand for the rule of law. As these countries move swiftly into the twenty-first century, they work hard to keep the best of their traditional culture with the most helpful aspects of the modern world. Democratization tends to be a fundamental plank of modernization.

Late in 2007, Hong Kong’s chief executive announced that the Beijing government will allow the territory to directly elect its leader by 2017 and all its lawmakers by 2020. Although this is a long time in the future, it is an inevitable result of China’s social and political evolution on the global stage.

At work, we also want to be heard and respected, and we want people to abide by collective rules. The best leaders have always reflected the needs of their followers, and in that sense, they have democratized decisions. But the days of one leader deciding for everyone are long gone. Yes, leaders point the way, but they must be ever more cognizant of the needs and desires of their constituencies and stakeholders or they will lose their jobs.

Witness what has happened to so many CEOs in the past five years, and the move off-stage of a seemingly impregnable politician such as Tony Blair underlines that no one is above public opinion. The desire we all have to know what is going on and to have a voice in matters is amplified by today’s around-the-clock communications. Every leadership decision is scrutinized, from the highest level of political theater to the shop floor.

Hierarchy lost out to teams in the 1950s and 1960s, and matrices became trendy in the 1970s and 1980s. Networks are increasingly seen as the main metaphor of today’s organization, and within them, ideas, concerns, actions, and emotions move around constantly. Leaders can spring up in unpredictable areas and in unexpected ways. But what if an enterprise can harness this power?

Distributed leadership is a concept that is coming into its time. We need to have leadership responsibility move around an organization depending on the need, expertise, and opportunity rather than have it positionally frozen in an organization chart.

But today we also want to be part of nongeographical communities, both real and virtual. Increased leisure time has led to a myriad of clubs, sporting complexes, and entertainment facilities across the world. And in the virtual space, the explosion of social network sites such as MySpace, LinkedIn, flickr, and Facebook demonstrate the need in all of us to qualify our lives in terms of relationships and not just geography. It appears we see these communities as ways of defining who and what we are. And we are learning how to pick and choose the positives and negatives from all of our affiliations. We value our friends, we block those we do not value, and we pride ourselves in choosing to be with like-minded groups. Empires today are increasingly built on shared values, ideas, and common interests, whatever one’s geographical or ethnic origin. They are increasingly about personal relationships.

Once more let me tell a short story.

My role was company group chairman for the consumer business in Asia Pacific. Our management team had determined that we would create Asia-wide brand teams—maybe not a novelty since other companies started these in the 1980s in Europe, but certainly a change for J&J in Asia.

Early in the process I was having dinner with a group of marketing people from J&J’s Thailand company. A young brand manager asked, “Tell me, what it will be like when we do what you say we are planning to do?”

I answered:

People tend to trust what they know and are resistant to change. We all rely on existing relationships before we move to new ones. To change, we need to feel more comfortable with where we are going than where we have been. Leaders must build shared responsibility and trust, aiming to break down these silos at every level: enterprise, team, and individual.

Critical to trust is the sharing of values, clear roles and responsibilities in the new environment, and strong personal relationships within the group. Clear communication about what is expected in the future state is critical.

During a 2004 survey conducted by LeaderValues.com, a random group of leaders was asked what they believed were the critical components of trust. Each leader was only allowed to choose one answer, and the results were as follows.

In the business world, Western enterprises tend to view the value of their business as the sum of its transactions. The measurement focus tends to be on shareholder value. There is a transactional bias, in that stakeholders get a return based on the specific activities of the business.

In Asia, shareholder return is also important, but the perceived value of a business also usually includes the sum of its relationships. Effort is applied to building strong relationships with customers, suppliers, employees, investors, and even competitors. Witness the rise of Toyota, just-in-time manufacturing, and the Total Quality Movement as a whole, which all depend on excellent supplier relationships.

Today, Western companies are also working to improve their relationships with all of their stakeholders in what can only be described as a positive blurring of global paradigms. Tesco is a great example. It is one of the most successful retailers and, like many of its competitors, has a customer loyalty program. Tesco, however, says that the program is to allow it to be loyal to its customers, not the other way around. Leaders who want the loyalty of their followers would do well to remember this simple statement.

Leadership must clarify how these processes will work and offer a court of last resort to resolve issues if necessary. Sometimes a decision actually can build trust, not negate it.

Since the 1980s, most organizations, big and small, have created matrices and networks designed to balance functional and geographical activities, competencies, and learning. All matrices have flaws, yet generally the benefits are considered to outweigh these flaws. Matrices can be of many forms—for example, functionally focused, where employees remain full members of functional organizations; balanced between functions or geographies, service lines, or customer units; or project based, with movement between functions and geographies depending on need.

But all of these matrices lead to a high level of virtuality and multisite team dealings across functions and geographies. Experience suggests that some of the following get in the way of trust building:

Poor communication is at the root of many (if not all) trust problems with virtual and multisite teams. There is a need to systematically build communication into the day-to-day activities of teams:

The following story predates e-mail and other technology advantages but nevertheless illustrates some of these things and how to overcome them.

The first thing to define was how to make our product better than the competition’s. P&G’s centralized R&D pulled this off. They looked around the world for the best possible products, whether P&G’s or otherwise. Manufacturing then upgraded all production facilities to make the new products efficiently. This sounds easier than it was, as a series of massive and gutsy financial decisions was taken at the CEO level. But the principle of “Global Best in Class” was embraced by all.

However, marketing was quite tricky, as every country previously had autonomy. How should we market the new products? We applied similar rules: search out the best in class first. The most vital part of the Pampers business was in the Benelux, where the advertising and sampling mix had held market share in the face of major competitive challenges. But how could we get the Germans, the British, the French, and the Italians to accept what the Euro team wanted to do? In fact, that was easier than we had expected. First, everyone was desperate for a business fix. Second, the multicultural nature of the Euro team helped by making everyone feel part of the solution.

But we still did not want the Euro team to trample on national pride or responsibility. And we were paranoid about the need to encourage ever more innovation to stop disaster from happening to Pampers again. So we jointly struck a deal: copy the marketing success model from the Benelux, but when that was running in each country, the local teams were encouraged to test anything else to see if they could do better. The Euro team not only agreed to this but helped execute it with the local team.

It worked, and a good eighteen months ahead of schedule. Pampers remains the market leader in Europe today.

We need to create innovation processes that broaden the access to information and best practice and simultaneously drive down responsibility as far as we can in our enterprises. I call this “loose-tight innovation.” We must also use networks of trust to create innovation from outside the defined boundaries of our enterprises, because no one business can invent everything itself.

Organizations such as Innocentive help connect inventors with companies needing their ideas, and many enterprises now use such networks to boost internal invention. Toyota has done this for years through the supplier network, and P&G uses the well-documented Connect and Develop approach.

In the first month of my stay in Japan, I visited the plant at Shiga, near Tokyo. It was meant to be a first look around, meeting people and starting to form opinions. I was accompanied by Nozaka-san, the president before the acquisition, and one of the architects of the company’s success in Japan. At one point, I found myself speaking formally to fifty or so managers in the plant. During the question time, I was asked to describe the next ten years of Max Factor’s future in Japan. I felt I was a pretty experienced speaker and manager, so, helped by my translator, Yasaki san, I proceeded to do my best with the vision.

As I started to speak, everyone took out their notepads and started to write down verbatim what I was saying. I discovered later that the managers wanted to know not only the strategic vision but also what their role was in executing it. Talking “big picture” just would not cut it. No one would blindly accept the ideas, and everyone needed to know where they fit. And beyond understanding the plan, they also needed to get the measure of their new president: me.

Part of that engagement is strategic and relates to the personalization of the plan. And part of it is intensely personal, where the leader is constantly being measured, appraised, and either accepted or rejected by his or her followers.

Dave Hanna, a former colleague, once said that “every organization is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.” Leaders must always start with a clear understanding of the strategic choices of the enterprise and their goals. But how they are communicated and how employees engage with these choices is critical to success.

Unfortunately, establishing clear goals and communicating them effectively are common challenges for many organizations. A 2004 LeaderValues.com survey asked the question of what most leaders find makes their work most difficult. Here is how they responded:

All employees want to feel valued for their contribution. A working definition of employee engagement might be “the measurable extent to which employees are aligned with and emotionally attuned to the values, goals, strategies, and tactics of their enterprise.” This can be achieved only with what I call strategic engagement. The top-level strategic story must directly connect with everyone’s understanding of the task and their unique part in it. On the global stage, when dealing with so many diverse views, relationships, and cultural impacts, this is mission critical.

Too many new expatriate managers focus on the wrong things. I get tired of hearing them say, “They just don’t get it,” “They need to be taught,” or “It is so much easier at home.” We must respect diversity, and we must see going global as a personal learning opportunity. My advice to new expatriate managers has always been the same. First, accept an assignment because you want to learn, not because you want to get promoted. Second, encourage your family to learn what they can about the people around them to feel more comfortable in their new home. And third, learn from the new culture around you to better understand yourself and the society you came from. In all of the years my family has been on the road, home has always been where we were stationed at that moment, not where we were born or where we had a vacation home.

I get equally annoyed with an overreliance on superficial “cultural training”: how to use chopsticks, when not to sneeze, don’t point your feet at people, and the like. This is all useful stuff (and often necessary), but it is not sufficient. Serious leaders need to make serious attempts to understand and respect the cultures they are dealing with.

Giles Amado noted, “The intention of understanding is a key issue—perceived on both sides—to create a positive climate. Respect for others is a common language: This overcomes many cultural and communication barriers, if it is honest and not manipulative.” He also suggested, “Finding the Japanese in you is a way of respecting and working with other cultures,” which implies that we should all operate at a human level with other humans rather than attempt to create some artificial constructs of understanding and interaction. But to operate at that human level, we must understand the other person—not just the facts and opinions being communicated, but the cultural and social context in which they are being offered.

The discussion that follows is based on Hofstede’s Culture’s Consequences (1980). He published follow-up studies in the 1990s and updated the classifications. Fons Trompenaars and Charles Hampden-Turner (2004) built on his work, but to my mind, nothing seriously challenged his original conclusions.

Hofstede (1980) defined culture as collective programming: “Culture is the collective programming of the human mind that distinguishes the members of one human group from those of another. Culture . . . is a system of collectively held values.”

A leader cannot (and should not) attempt a personality shift when crossing cultures. You are what you are, and you must be authentic to yourself, or else no one will respect or trust you. But you can respect the needs of the people around you and how they want to be treated. That is the real lesson for a leader: that the combination of personal respect and broad cultural understanding is the key to mutual success.

Here, an observation is that the U.S.-U.K. special relationship comes to the fore, as the people of neither country like rules being applied to them. By contrast the French seem to really want to know where things stand, and most European countries seem to be in the middle. Interestingly, Japan, Mexico, Turkey, and Belgium were relatively high on avoiding uncertainty, and India, Hong Kong, and Singapore seem to thrive on it. This underpins the undoubted entrepreneurial spirit in all three countries.

The lesson is that leaders need to understand the basic innovation spirit in their people. But they must also be aware that great ideas come from everywhere and not just from the so-called low-uncertainty cultures. Their aim must be to get everyone more comfortable with uncertainty and ambiguity.

Individualism is one thing Americans, British, Dutch, Australians, Italians, and the French share. No wonder we are all trying to pursue our own agendas. In fact, most of Europe is moderate or high on this count. Europe might have been the birthplace of socialism, but apparently everyone there still prefers to be individuals. It is in Asia and Latin America where things really move toward collectivism, including countries such as Singapore. India and Japan rank about in the middle.

A leader’s role is, of course, to help everyone feel part of the collective endeavor. In that sense, it is a collective activity. Yet to become part of the whole, people need to feel free to be themselves. Helping people express themselves is often a way to get a shared sense of belonging.

Again, there is a lot of similarity between the United States, the United Kingdom, Italy, Netherlands, and Germany: all expect more democratic management. France and Belgium are at the other end of the scale, in the company of most Asian and Latin American countries.

Not surprisingly, I believe that the days of the benevolent dictator are just about numbered. Still, it is useful to point out to your team when you are in democratic mode and when you are making the decision. Leaders can do both as long as their teams know which is which.

The first is facilitation. Leading across geographies and cultures needs actionable facilitation rather than directive hierarchy. The best leaders must learn and then teach facilitation skills. Although I am grossly oversimplifying cultural differences, Westerners tend to expose their ideas with words, while Asians tend to expose their values with actions. Bringing both out in discussion is fundamental to successful facilitation.

The other approach is action learning. The most effective people and programs are built around real business issues, not theories, that deliver measurable results. In my experience, there is no substitute for getting diverse teams to work together on common problems. For example, at Johnson & Johnson in rolling out their Standards of Leadership initiative in the Asia-Pacific area, we used action workshops focused on actual business projects. This both encouraged learning about the leadership standards and drove results that could be used in the marketplace. We also grouped the workshops with a mixture of natural teammates and newcomers to the subject to encourage divergent thinking and innovation. It is often helpful to have teams that have no real experience of each other to tackle such problems, break down historic silos, and start to build trust.

Despite the massive changes in the world today, many aspects of the leadership process have not changed throughout history and seem to be independent of culture and country. There are many definitions of leadership, and I offer mine here: leadership is the energetic process of getting other people fully and willingly committed to a new course of action to meet commonly agreed objectives while holding commonly held values. (It is worth noting that this embraces leadership as a process, not as a position or an individual.)

Historically, leadership was defined by personal traits or “great man” theories, and transactional or output-based thinking tended to dominate. In the late 1960s to the 1980s, contingency and situational theories were advanced, and writers such as Chester Barnard (1935) and John W. Gardner (1990) infused leadership study with values considerations. In the 1990s, reengineering and innovation leadership were de rigueur, and today a range of approaches is on the table: visionary, charismatic, adaptive, transformational, and ethical. Time will tell what history will focus on.

As the literature has developed, several themes have appeared. Organizations have been designed specifically to achieve a certain task or set of tasks, and there is an increasing attempt to balance enterprise needs and human needs. There is a merging of leadership and organizational paradigms and methodologies, and a coevolution of thinking reflecting science and technology. The drive to be market focused has become ever more important, as has adaptation to meet the challenge of multinational and global operations.

But the fact is, whether they may be a politician, a soldier, a small business owner, a multinational leader, or president of the local PTA, all effective leaders require a clear vision, a useful (and competitive) tool kit, a sound organizational structure to meet the task at hand, and empowered and energized people within their organization.

So what appears to be common to all of these leaders?

Burns dismissed Machiavelli’s (and Nietzsche’s) theories of power as being amoral and favored what he considered moral leaders without the “will to power”: “naked power-wielding can be neither transformational nor transactional; only leadership can be” (1978). In Burns’s view, Hitler’s death camps disqualify him as a leader, as does the gulag of Stalin’s prisons. Thus, the amoral leader is neither transactional nor transformational; in fact, the term is an oxymoron. To be a moral leader, Burns believed, one must be sensitive to the needs and motives of potential followers. The purpose of the leader is fundamental, and the cult of personality is totally inappropriate.

Leadership comes from within us, in the sense that deeply held values and principles provide a road map for the way we lead and the way others respond. It is always the leader’s personal value system that sustains him or her in the quest, whether this is a person of impeccable moral fiber or quite disreputable. This is as true for a modern leader as it was for Gandhi, Churchill, or Mohammed. Gardner (1990) added to this thought and wrote: “We want effective leadership; but Hitler was [unfortunately] effective. Criteria beyond effectiveness are needed. Ultimately, we judge our leaders in a Framework of Values [even though] the Framework differs from one culture to the next and from one era to the next.” Gardner called for leaders who are able to renew values and can also train others—in essence, stating that such renewal is the true calling of all leaders.

One can be a leader only insofar as one is recognized by others, argued Ralph Stacey (2001). He also defined leadership as a social process. Followers must follow willingly, or else the leader is a dictator. Coercion will not build interdependence, and trust between leaders and followers is essential.

Leaders can get other people to do only things that are latent within them. Paradoxically, therefore, the leader is also a follower, in the sense of reflecting the wishes of others. Leadership is indeed as much an art as a science, with the implication that it cannot be imposed, as the follower has a choice and will need to feel motivated and inspired.

In a discussion of leadership and values, Jaques and Clement (1994) recognized that values congruence between leaders and followers is a key to handling complex organizations and situations: “If the CEO can establish over-arching corporate values and philosophies, which are nested within basic societal values, and which meet people’s own generic values, he or she can get the whole organization working effectively in the same broad direction. . . . It is our values that move us, bind us together, push us apart, and generally make the world go round.”

That said, I find that Jaques’s notion of accountability rests too heavily on the manager’s “getting it right” on behalf of the employees. Of course, this is partly true, but it does not allow the possibility of innovation, which breaks through traditional models of responsibility. Nor does it (in my view) do enough to encourage people at all levels of an organization to take accountability. Jaques also uses the hierarchy as the way of meeting customer needs. But in my experience, hierarchies are too concerned with the status quo to truly innovate on behalf of customers’ new needs. And in the global context, Jaques does not define how to distribute leadership at all levels of the organization, across multiple sites and cultures. His work was also focused more on organization design than on operational strategy.

So is this yet another call for better understanding of distributed leadership?

With a process orientation to leadership, everyone can develop and hone their leadership skills. We cannot all aspire to be Churchill, Kennedy, or Gandhi, but we can always do a better leadership job. We can learn to be better mathematicians, although we may never be another Einstein. And we can all learn how to play or sing some form of music even if we will never compose as Mozart did.

And because we can train, the results can be measured. Studies by Marshall Goldsmith and others clearly indicate that by using 360-degree development tools and mapping the process steps of leadership, personal progress can be made. As the old adage states, “If you can measure it, you can improve it.”

This framework (envision, enable, empower, energize) is focused on actions in use rather than espoused competencies, individual styles, or personality types. It attempts to isolate common characteristics of leaders rather than create some kind of superset of perfect leadership. In short:

The 4E’s framework has two axes (Figure 6.1). One deals with organizational issues (values, people, structure, rewards), and the other handles task or operational concerns (strategies, technology, tools). It is designed to include both strategic issues and leadership requirements. The first three E’s are the collective “what” and “why,” and the last E is the individual “what,” for the leaders and the team.

Envision is about the values-driven setting of goals and strategies. A robust view of the external world drives the formation of the mission and builds clear goals. Coherent values will be shared by leaders and followers to provide a solid foundation. It is helpful to distinguish between verbal objectives (the mission) and numerical objectives (the goals) and between strategies (choices of what to do and what not to do) and tactics (the actions to take). Measurement against the tactics’ progress is essential, as is being clear about the timing sequence.

Enable means that leaders must identify appropriate tools, technologies, organization structures, and people. On the operational axis, this includes tools, technologies, and business methodologies. “A better mouse trap” is a good mechanism to bring about change. The second set of enablers (on the organizational axis) includes processes and structure. It also requires ensuring that the right people and skill sets are in place to get the job done, building toward interdependence.

Empower refers to creating trust and interdependence between leaders and followers. The leader has a contract with his or her followers for mutual success and failure, reward and sanction, so the two are interdependent. Both sides are given mutual freedom yet are held mutually accountable. On the organizational axis, the team needs training to get the job done. Empowerment must also bring rewards and sanctions or challenges for improvement. On the operational axis, leaders and followers must measure progress, which encourages dialogue and continuous improvement.

Energize, on the organizational axis, means that the maximum energy will result from the combination of winning (in the marketplace) and achieving a sense of personal success and satisfaction. This requires clarity of purpose. The more energy the team generates, the more energy the leader has, in a virtuous circle of reinforcement. On the operational axis, continuous communication and course corrections are the key activities. This includes walking the talk and having a clear and persuasive story. The leader is a kind of motor for the change providing energy to the team.

This is a critical role of the leader, and team members are quite cognizant of the effect that leadership has on their collective performance. In the 2004 LeaderValues.com survey mentioned previously, test participants were asked to provide their input on how leaders best energize their teams. The table following shows the percentage of respondents who indicated each option:

The 4 E’s framework is a contingent approach, in that its execution depends on the situation the leader is in. But it is different from both contingency theory of leadership and situational leadership.

Fiedler (1967) moved away from “great man” and traits, and also largely from behavioral analysis, to develop contingency theory. This reflects the situations leaders find themselves in and is all about “directing and coordinating the work of group members.” Fielder also was clear that the essence of a leader’s personality will remain unchanged: you are what you are. He wrote, “The effectiveness of a group depends on two interacting factors: (a) the personality of the leader (leadership style), and (b) the degree to which the situation gives the leader control and influence, or, in somewhat different terms, the degree to which the situation is free of uncertainty for the leader.”

Fiedler’s theory states that leaders are either task motivated or relationship motivated, and they have power through their position. Contingency is well researched and a very helpful model: leadership depends on the situation at hand and the followers present. It is thus not a fixed individual characteristic, set of traits, or set of behaviors. Nevertheless, contingency theory misses the strategic and organizational dimension. Once one understands the situation, what framework is there for the leader to envision the future and understand and choose strategies and tools to enable success? And where is the focus on communicating with, empowering, and energizing others?

Blanchard and Hersey (1969) built on contingency and the Blake-Mouton grid. They measured behavior in different situations, using the complementary axes of task and relationship. Their proposition was that leaders can adapt their style depending on the situation they are in:

This is a popular training (and consultancy) model, and it is clearly helpful to leaders to be able to identify in which kind of situation they find themselves and how they might respond.

Yet personal development across the broad palette of strategic and tactical skills once more is open to question. What does the model do to help leaders decide what they have to do as opposed to how? There are thus similar questions as with contingency theory. And are we to change a leader’s behavior in a manipulative fashion depending on what we are trying to achieve? Finally, although there is a focus on degree of relationship, the model does little to help the leader authentically enter new relationships with followers.

Save the Children has field operations in over 110 countries. Organizationally it is a decentralized alliance of twenty-seven independent, individual country members (Save the Children USA, Save the Children UK, Save the Children Japan, and so on). Different members sometimes adopt different programmatic focus areas. For example, some members are focused on child rights and advocacy focused, whereas other are more field driven.

A 2004 project with three pilot countries within the Save the Children organization started by tailoring the organization’s leadership standards within a 4E’s frame, and then moved through online self-assessments to team workshops and follow-up interventions. The 4E’s were not used to score one organization against another, but instead formed a basis for internal benchmarking and action.

Two core findings emerged. First, the strengths of the organizations were very consistent across the globe, shown in the consistency of responses sorted by the top five answers, which included a focus on such things as values-driven activities, taking personal responsibility, and encouraging diversity. Second, relative weaknesses varied markedly, providing a fruitful basis for internal action planning. This allowed the 4E’s to become central to the alliance’s best practices in leadership, made available globally to all twenty-seven member countries.

Here is another short story, by coincidence related to Save the Children.

Early in 2000 we traveled to Trapeang Prasat, near the Thai border, an area that had been under Khmer Rouge control since the 1970s. We met a soldier’s family: he and his wife had four children, one of whom seemed to have a leg problem. They were clearly poor but proud and explained through an interpreter that all they wanted was for their children to go to school. There was a new school nearby, so the program helped extend it.

Just over two years later, we visited the school, now serving over six hundred students of all grades. A woman approached us, wearing a smart pink silk suit and holding her young son’s hand. It was the same woman we had met before. Now her son was in school and by all accounts doing well. Even more, she was deputy chair of the commune committee and heavily involved in school activities. All she and her family needed was to be offered an opportunity. The rest they took care of themselves.

Now we are armed with enough insight to create the global leadership framework.

First, most organizations have a large group of middle-rank employees who keep the wheels turning. These same people could, if suitably encouraged, trained, and rewarded, be increasingly positive contributors to the collective success. By contrast, an overfocus on top performers can distract from encouraging this middle group. Having a few outstanding managers is powerful, but imagine the strength in getting an entire organization inspired and feeling well rewarded.

Second, winning the external war for talent is of course important in keeping an organization vital and energetic. But it often seems easier to hire a high-flying manager than it is to help large groups of existing employees learn to do a better job, use their experience, and enjoy doing it.

It is my contention that the test of great leadership is to raise the standard across the entire organization, not focus on just a few key players—hence, the focus on distributed leadership. So the envisioning focus is on the creation of common values and creating common purpose. The aim is always to push responsibility out to wherever the decision can best be taken. Enabling demands that clear roles and decision processes be in place, and empowerment is about providing the necessary training and development throughout the enterprise. Cutting out nonessential organizational layers (note Elliot Jaques’s work) and using action learning programs are among the energizing activities.

The subtlety is in defining what is globally common and what is locally different. A success model needs to address these elements:

The leader’s role is to encourage (and sometimes enforce) the use of the basic success model, but then to encourage and facilitate innovation at all levels of the enterprise.

Dramatic progress is being made in understanding small worlds (we all may be within six degrees of separation of everyone else) and scale-free networks (represented by the Internet, the airline hub and spoke systems, gene expression pathways in the body, and so forth). These imply ways to make networks more robust and to speed up communication. Importantly, networks do not replace current structures but rather coevolve with them (Stephenson, 1998).

Experience suggests that there are certain characteristics of networks that must be built in if they are to be effective.

A prerequisite of actionability is that individuals must be able to engage in a useful conversation with other cluster members; there is little social distance. Recall the example I used of the Thai brand manager. She would need actionable links with her peers in Australia to be able to get her job done and probably needed to have been face-to-face with them at least once.

It is not necessary to predict an exact search path through a small world network, just to start it on the right trajectory. Peter Dodds, Roby Muhamed, and Duncan Watts (2003) note that a successful search is conducted primarily through weaker links (for example, through a friend of a friend), does not require highly connected hubs to succeed, and disproportionately relies on professional relationships. Successful search paths must be captured, stored, and reused as appropriate by other network members.

The process of engagement should start with an understanding of the changes facing the enterprise and work toward building a collective view of the future state. Choices define strategy, so development tends to be an interactive and iterative process to put the best ideas on the table and involve others in the solution early on.

A successful strategic deployment then ensures that all members of the enterprise understand and can contribute to the execution of the plan. A detailed plan should be built using objectives, goals, strategies, tactics, and measurements. This specific tool was pioneered in Procter & Gamble and is now used by many other enterprises. This not only details the plans, but also provides a way of tracking progress. It can be cascaded throughout the organization, with higher-level tactics becoming lower-level goals. This can align the entire organization around a common action plan and so help communication between all levels on what is working and what needs modification.

Adding to this, the RASCI definitions ensure that everyone knows who is responsible, who has to agree, who can support, who needs to be consulted, and who should be informed.

There are no easy answers, but there are many clues. I hope that this chapter has posed the right questions and laid out ways to think about finding the answers.

In 1997, he founded www.leader-values.com, a leadership development site that features Yates’s own leadership framework, the subject of his master’s degree thesis at Oxford University and HEC (Paris).

Until mid-2001, he was company group chairman of Johnson & Johnson’s consumer business in Asia-Pacific, based in Singapore and responsible for all aspects of the region’s operations. He was also a corporate officer and a member of the global operating committee. Prior to this, he spent twenty-two years at Procter & Gamble, latterly as regional vice president based in Hong Kong and then in Japan. In all, he has spent eleven years as a regional CEO of Asian businesses.

In 2001 he left Johnson & Johnson to engage in several new enterprises.