by Anne Deering, Robert Dilts, and Julian Russell

Thought Leaders Forum:
Robert Dilts
Robert Dilts is a co-founder of ISVOR Dilts Leadership Systems Inc. and consults and trains on leadership and organization development. He is the author or coauthor of Visionary Leadership Skills, Skills for the Future, and Strategies of Genius, among other works. (3/2003)
More on Robert Dilts
Thought Leaders Forum:
Anne Deering
Anne Deering is a vice president of A.T. Kearney Ltd., where she works with senior executives on leadership, team development, organizational learning, and strategy. She is coauthor of The Difference Engine. (3/2003)
More on Anne Deering
Thought Leaders Forum:
Julian Russell
managing director of PPD Consulting Ltd., a coaching and personal    development firm for senior leaders. He is the author of Spreading Personal Growth in Society. (3/2003)
From Leader to Leader, No. 28 Spring 2003
? Table of Contents
? From the Editors
? Resources
? Leadership Action Guide
Additional resources for this article
n today's turbulent world, the spotlight on individual leaders and their performance grows ever brighter. Those organizations that are sustaining their value -- and the reputation of their leaders -- in these challenging times have one thing in common: leaders who pay attention to what they will leave behind them after they are gone. They ask themselves what values will sustain the organization over the long haul; what people will say of them; whether the organization they led will still be there to remember them; and if so, what position they will hold in the organization's memory.

The paradox at the heart of organizational leadership is that the leader must add value to the organization but must not take it away when he or she leaves. An essential part of a leader's job is to become dispensable through creating a culture of leadership that extends throughout the organization.

When an organization becomes incapable and falls apart after the leader departs, the subsequent ruin is, in a sense, a validation of that leader's talent and evidence of the value added during his or her tenure. But it is also evidence of that leader's failure to endow the organization with the qualities needed to transcend previous achievements, the failure to nurture the conditions under which leadership can flourish.

These reflections point to a critical question: Who will be running your company ten years from now? And what are you doing now to make sure you retain and develop your best future leaders? What will your legacy be?

The most impressive organizations are those with a string of conspicuously able leaders. Tesco, one of the world's most admired grocery retailing groups, achieved leadership of the U.K. market under the stewardship of Ian McLaurin. When he retired, some predicted that Tesco's star would go into decline, but instead, under the leadership of Terry Leahy, it has gone from strength to strength. It is one of the few consumer goods retailing groups to have made a success of its international expansions in eastern Europe and the Far East, and at the time of writing it was the only consumer goods retailer in the world to have made money from Internet shopping. In the United States, Safeway acknowledged this when it licensed Tesco's Internet shopping system.

Leahy is quite a different leader from McLaurin, but he would not have been so successful and become so admired in his own right if McLaurin had failed to ensure that the legacy he left behind him was "in the muscle" of the company.

A culture is much more durable and robust than a cult.
Some leaders fail to create a culture of leadership, and instead foster a personal cult. A cult is a rudimentary, incomplete, inherently ephemeral phenomenon that fades away when the personality that creates it departs. A culture is much more durable and robust than a cult, because its survival and power do not depend on the presence and personality of a single individual. Culture is generally something that arises from and is shared by all the members of an organization or social system. Merriam-Webster's dictionary defines culture generally as "the integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior that depends upon man's capacity for learning and transmitting knowledge to succeeding generations." Thus a key aspect of a culture is its ability to pass on knowledge and competence to its members. Because culture is shared, it can remain influential long after its creator has been forgotten.

The differences between cult and culture are clearly illustrated by the example of a retail organization whose family of founding entrepreneurs had generated many years of financial success. The organization was widely revered by both employees and the wider business community. However, such was the strength of the cult of the leader within the company, few felt able to speak their minds when results began to decline.

Lack of knowledge had become a weapon of control. As one former middle manager put it, "I never knew how my performance was viewed. I had no feedback and objective setting was unclear. I used to watch my boss when he passed me in the corridor -- if he smiled and greeted me, I knew it was all right. If he ignored me, I knew I was in trouble."

The organization began to struggle with severe marketing, service, and procurement issues, but leadership was still being shielded from the full extent of the difficulties -- nobody wanted to be the messenger who got shot for bringing bad news. Key managers were focused more on the challenging task of managing their boss's perceptions than on the customers who were leaving in droves.

Leadership cultures outperform leadership cults.
Organizations with leadership cultures will outperform leadership cults in each of the three key aspects of leadership practice -- anticipate, align and act:

By anticipate we mean getting ahead of the curve, which requires the mental agility to respond appropriately to weak signals or trends and create fluid organizations that can adapt quickly to new circumstances.

By align we mean achieving congruence in your own values and behaviors, and in the values and behaviors of others, so that you can create aligned organizations ready to act effectively in pursuit of the business's goals.

By act we mean establishing what is important to achieve the business's goals and doggedly persisting in areas that make a difference.
In our book Alpha Leadership, we discuss these key aspects of leadership in detail, along with nine associated principles. (See Sidebar: Nine Principles of Leadership.)

Anticipate

o be able to anticipate effectively, organizations and their leaders need to be on the alert for weak signals, and to be open to new information that may not fit the accepted wisdom of the organization.

In the cult of the leader, there is typically one powerful individual who makes the decisions and determines the direction the company will take. As a result, the organization's actions and plans are controlled by a single charismatic figure. People's plans and actions within the organization are primarily motivated by either their fear or their love of the leader. (A dictatorship, for example, is generally a fear-based leadership cult.)

Leadership cults foster the business equivalent of leprosy.
Cults tend to be characterized by a lot of rhetoric. Leaders don't listen, and people are afraid to speak openly about what they think. Valuable information about trends and threats on the horizon is not passed on, and the organization contracts the business equivalent of leprosy: with no incoming signals from its extremities, the organism is unable to operate within its environment without severe damage.

Take the case of one electrical products manufacturer whose CEO did little to manage his strong personality. Facing growing competition in the company's core markets, the CEO set up a team to redefine the company's strategy. Team members made a clear and insightful analysis of the threat and even identified restructuring options that could have proved decisive. Their proposals were creative and unexpected, but the CEO was so unused to ideas coming from anywhere other than his own mind that he could not accept them; he ultimately disbanded the team, saying they weren't coming up with what he wanted.

In a culture of leadership, many people are encouraged to lead and express their ideas and visions. There is genuine conversation -- leaders listen to what people say. People at all levels are encouraged and supported to speak openly and honestly about what they think. As a result, leaders pick up signals that give clues of coming opportunities and hints about emerging threats. With the openness and mental agility of truly anticipatory leadership throughout the organization, the organization is well positioned to survive and prosper.

Align

o create an aligned organization and a culture that is able to act, leaders must both embody their values and be successful in finding ways to build coalitions for change. Integrity and a sense of fairness are the glue that binds the organization together.

In a cult, the success of the group or organization is based primarily on the personality of the leader. The leader is the principal source of the organization's vision, mission, and values. Thus the organization succeeds almost entirely because of the leader's energy and charisma.

Cults are frequently based on the perception of fundamental inequality between people. They are founded upon a hierarchy in which people at the top are regarded as inherently better than those at other levels. As a result, people other than the leader are viewed as dispensable entities that can be easily replaced. The leader's welfare and interests come before those of the community.

In a culture of leadership, the success of the organization is based on the combined energy and efforts of many people aligned toward a common vision. The organization's actions and plans are determined by the desire and efforts of people at all levels of the organization, and the credit for success is spread to many contributors. The interests of the community are paramount.

In 1948, William McKnight, president of 3M, articulated a set of management principles that underpin the organizational culture within which 3M's innovations flourish:

As our business grows, it becomes increasingly necessary to delegate responsibility and to encourage men and women to exercise their initiative. This requires considerable tolerance. Those men and women to whom we delegate authority and responsibility, if they are good people, are going to want to do their jobs in their own way.

Mistakes will be made. But if a person is essentially right, the mistakes he or she makes are not as serious in the long run as the mistakes management will make if it undertakes to tell those in authority exactly how they must do their jobs.

Management that is destructively critical when mistakes are made kills initiative. And it's essential that we have many people with initiative if we are to continue to grow.

In a leadership culture, people are viewed as equals who are in different roles. Roles are based on the development of individual capabilities and are not a reflection of the intrinsic value of the person. As a result, people at all levels are acknowledged and valued as individual members and contributors -- even those who break the rules in order to deliver value to the organization as a whole. The culture of leadership can tolerate its "rogue monkeys" because it can see the innovative power of nonconventional views of the world.

Act

f action is to be timely, focused, and effective, leaders must be able to identify where they can add most value and either delegate or abandon the rest. They need to have the ability to take risk -- to get something out into the market and try it rather than wait until it is perfect (and the opportunity is long gone). They need to stick to what they know to be right -- even when the fads and fashions of management have moved on.

In a cult of the leader, there is room for only a few people to be leaders, and the credit for success is confined to the leader or to a few key individuals at the top. There are no plans or ongoing efforts to develop future leaders through, for example, the delegation of important initiatives.

People who try to be proactive and enact leadership in a cult are likely to be suppressed and punished. As a result, people wait to act until they are given permission by the leader or someone close to the leader, and are expected to follow orders and directives without question. Delegation and the development of leadership skills are a lost art, as fear and uncertainty freeze most entrepreneurial action.

Leadership cultures are self-sustaining.
In a leadership culture, on the other hand, people throughout the organization are encouraged and given opportunities to develop and express key leadership actions and qualities. There is a genuine and sustained effort to train and develop future leaders. People at all levels are encouraged to be proactive and take leadership, without having to send signals up the chain of command. Consequently, the organization will continue to run smoothly and effectively even in the absence of the leader. Because effective leadership becomes distributed throughout the entire population, leadership cultures are self-sustaining.

Leadership cultures still include symbolic individuals who have key responsibilities, represent cultural values, and provide an example of leadership, but many others in the organization are also empowered to make decisions and encouraged to have their own visions in parallel with the larger vision driving the organization.

When Dick Drew, a scientist for 3M, paid a visit to an auto body shop in 1922 to test a new batch of sandpaper (the company's primary product at the time), he heard a group of workers cursing vehemently. Two-tone cars had recently become popular, but painters hated them because they had to mask parts of the auto body with heavy adhesive tape and butcher paper, and when they later removed the masking, some of the new paint often came away with it. As he watched the craftsmen repair the torn paint, Drew thought of a solution to the problem: a tape with a less aggressive adhesive.

Even though tape was not part of his company's line at the time, Drew believed 3M was ideally placed to develop such a product -- it would be like sandpaper without the sand.

Drew went to the laboratory and began a long and frustrating quest for the right combination of adhesive and backing. After several fruitless years, 3M President McKnight told Drew to drop the project and get back to work on improving sandpaper. Drew complied, but a day later he thought of a new way to handle the backing problems and resumed his experiments. In the middle of one of them, McKnight paid another visit to the lab, saw Drew hard at work on his supposedly abandoned project, but said nothing.

Drew finally found the right combination of materials and asked McKnight to approve funding for a paper-making machine to manufacture the new tape. His request was rejected, but Drew wasn't about to give up. As a researcher, he had authority to approve purchases of up to $100, so he began writing a series of $99 purchase orders. He later confessed his strategy to McKnight while showing him the new machine.

And in this way, masking tape was born. Its launch marked the start of a new chapter in 3M's evolution, which would lead to the introduction of Scotch Cellophane tape (also invented by Drew) in 1930, and to 3M's current range of over 700 tapes for medical, electrical, construction, and dozens of other applications.

These exchanges between McKnight and Drew, Drew's insubordinate purchase of the paper-making machinery, and McKnight's relaxed response to his defiance, are an expression of a powerful culture of leadership. "They set forth a clear ethic for managers" the company states in its literature. "If you have the right person on the right project, and they are absolutely dedicated to finding a solution, leave them alone. Tolerate their initiative and trust them."

In summary, a leader whose success is based on the power of personality has only done half the job. As the American journalist Walter Lippmann said: "The final test of a leader is that he leaves behind him, in other men [and women], the conviction and the will to carry on." Effective leaders develop other leaders as their successors -- and develop wide-ranging leadership within their organizations.

The need to leave behind you a legacy of conviction and will obliges you to use the power of your personality with great care. Your objective should be to persuade people to follow you, not only because they admire and respect you but also because they trust you to keep faith with the culture you and they share. You can contribute to, shape, and cultivate the culture, but you will leave no durable legacy behind you if the organization does not learn to lead.

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