Leadership Virtuosity: New and Revised Edition

Copyright © 2018 by Lee Thayer.

Library of Congress Control Number:      2018904162

ISBN:            Hardcover            978-1-9845-2051-7

                      Softcover              978-1-9845-2050-0

                      eBook                   978-1-9845-2049-4

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

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Rev. date: 05/08/2018

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Contents

Introduction

Lesson #

1. The "Lucky" Leader

2. The Good Leader

3. The Real-World Leader

4. The Imaginative Leader

5. The Trustworthy Leader

6. The Triangulating Leader

7. The Articulate Leader

8. The Responsible Leader

9. The Defining Leader

10. The Caring Leader

11. The Accomplishment-Minded Leader

12. The Learning Leader

13. The Seductive Leader

14. The Intolerant Leader

15. The Potent Leader

16. The Omnipresent Leader

17. The Frugal Leader

18. The Strategic Leader

19. The Passionate Leader

20. The Performing Leader

Afterword

For Further Reading

About the Author

Introduction

Real virtuosity in leadership is complex. It is comprised of a multitude of factors. It cannot be reduced to six or even twenty-one secrets. As Colin Powell said, There are no secrets (roughly at the same time Oren Harari’s book, The Leadership Secrets of Colin Powell was published).

This might lead you to wonder if the gurus know what they are talking about. Peter Senge once remarked somewhat as follows: The reason we find it so difficult to talk about leadership is that we don’t know what we’re talking about.

We are a reductionist culture. We would like to reduce everything to one cause with one effect. That is not possible with human endeavors. Not only are there a multitude of factors, but they seem to interact in inexplicable ways.

The first thing to take notice of is that explanations of human performance are not the same as the performance being explained. In fact, the performance and the explanation exist in two separate universes.

Why would anyone want to reveal the secrets of any celebrity leader’s success when he could keep them to himself and become a celebrity leader by deftly applying those secrets to his own endeavor? To attempt to further one’s own career by ostensibly revealing the secrets of some celebrity leader’s success is not—was never—the same as achieving in the world that had to be faced by that leader.

We would love to have the panacea and be done with it. We would love to be able to grasp it with minimum effort on our part. But an idea is not the same thing as a real achievement in the real world. To speak of bulls, the Spanish saying has it, is not the same as being in the bullring.

The measure of anyone’s virtuosity is whether or not you have achieved a level of virtuosity in some role that the rest of us value and want to reward. Those who compete at the highest levels in Olympic competition may be virtuoso skaters or gymnasts. But this does not qualify them to fix your plumbing.

Those who excel in a leadership role are often not even qualified to explain how they did it. So they get a writer or journalist to explain it. Notice that there is usually an easily-consumed explanation. That explanation is usually invented after the fact.

The simpler the explanation, and the more it fits the folklore of the day, the more it appeals. When the journalist John Case went down to Missouri to ask Jack Stack how he did it when he was head of Springfield Remanufacturing Corporation, he found that Stack wasn’t really sure.

Knowing that his readers wouldn’t be very interested in a don’t-know-how-I-did-it article, Case made it out to be an open book success—a fashionable idea being promoted by (who else?) Mr. Case at the time. But Stack’s success could have been explained in a hundred other ways. It just happened that Case got there first and thus precluded other explanations—a la Microsoft’s early strategy.

The point is that there is never just one explanation—just the one that somehow gains the most traction. The real reasons for anyone’s success in a leadership role may be obscure and inexplicable.

That’s likely because those reasons are complex and they interact in ways that make the whole achievement irreducible to simple explanations. Take away one factor, and the results may have been different. Add a factor, and the result may have been failure. There is always uncertainty. We never know what events could have made a big difference in the outcome. We never know when a butterfly in Brazil is going to flap its wings and cause a change in the global economy.

Add to that the fact that leadership achievements are always a one-time thing—that person, those circumstances, at that time and place, etc.

Writers and theorists have tried for decades to make leadership a kind of scientific discipline—like physics. Break it down into its component parts, and then predict outcomes from different configurations. That doesn’t work. The world in which leadership has to be performed is too dynamic, too complex, too random, too uncontrollable.

No matter how you try to make a virtuoso out of a child prodigy, you can neither predict nor control the outcome. It is the same with leadership. We can understand it—according to our favorite explanations—but we cannot control the outcome, no matter how much we know about it.

I have chosen virtuosity as the measure of leadership performance for two reasons.

The first was to capitalize on the notion of virtuosity as that word is used in music and the arts to recognize the best of the best. It has long been understood that performing artists had to be masterful even to earn a place on the stage.

Yet there was the need to identify those performers who were beyond skillful, beyond impeccable technique, above and beyond those who could play all of the notes and do all of the phrasing perfectly. So there were those who were in the category of learners.

Thus there were those who had mastered all of the tools of their instrument and all of the nuances of the music. From them, we expect a perfect performance.

But from time to time there emerged a performer who seemed to live in a world above technique. This was the virtuoso—the person, like Pavarotti or Beverly Sills, whose voices and range and sheer performance surpassed all others of their time. One might also think of George Balanchine or Twyla Tharp, of Einstein, of Lewis Armstrong, of Miles Davis, of Mozart, of Aristotle. It is the virtuosi who establish the level that has to be surpassed, who become the reigning definition of the best of the best. They become the measure of performance for all who would pursue virtuosity.

There have been those few who performed their leadership role well, and the many who performed their leadership role in a mediocre fashion. We could certainly imagine a rank-ordering of leadership performance over the sweep of history. Sitting Bull performed his leadership role better than did George Custer. Queen Victoria must have performed her leadership role better than did Queen Boudica. Alfred P. Sloan Jr. may have performed his role better than his contemporaries.

Richard Branson seems to have raised the bar. Jack Welch will not be remembered as a virtuoso leader, but merely as a celebrity. Robert E. Lee lost in the U.S. Civil War, but is widely thought to be the better general. As emperors go, Napoleon may have established the records to be broken. Bill Clinton will likely not be remembered as a virtuoso in his leadership role. But he will be remembered for other things. Even Tony Soprano may be remembered as a model for leadership virtuosity.

In ancient worlds, the superior candidate for a power and/or leadership role was often decided on the battlefield, sometimes just the two, face to face.

The methods for who should be selected for a leadership role have varied from culture to culture. In ancient Greece, it was decided by who could out-perform the others in oratory. We still do that, but we don’t know how to discriminate, so we just vote.

Or, in the case of corporations, power usually begets power. People get chosen for the role by the people who have the power to decide. People get elected or appointed to leadership roles for reasons other than their qualifications. Most of the incumbents of those leadership roles are not there to pursue virtuosity—or even mastery. They are there for other reasons.

That is why we measure success and not virtuosity in those roles. It is relatively easy to measure success in business. There is growth, there are profits, there are shareholder returns, there is publicity, there is customer feedback, etc. We might like to think that higher CEO pay is a measure of real performance in that role. But it is not.

Tiger Woods is not a great golfer because he makes a lot of money. He makes a lot of money because he is a great golfer and can draw a big audience. Any time you use money as an incentive for performance you lose.

Those who are in pursuit of virtuosity in their role are not in it for the money. Their criteria are different. They have long ago realized that status and power are distractions.

Virtuosity is more like a metaphor when applied to leadership performance. But it is a powerful metaphor, one that can be of immense practical utility.

And, indeed, virtuosity may not be objectively measurable. I believe it was the artist Georges Braque who once said, What makes great art great is the part you can’t explain. So it is with virtuosity in every field of human endeavor. What makes great leaders great is the part you can’t reduce to steps or to secrets. It is the part that cannot be replicated.

So be it. In the film of the same name, the wizard Merlin (King Arthur’s time) is given to say: Explaining everything settles nothing. We could certainly explain simply superior performance. But this would not allow us to reproduce it, to understand it, or to predict it. Virtuosity remains finally inexplicable. We can’t measure it with our crude tools—even though we might recognize it if we observed it.

Virtuosos are recognized by those who are masterful, but have not achieved at the same level of virtuosity. The court composer Saleri’s frustrations at being readily bested by Mozart in the film Amadeus might be a good example. Being anointed by people who are not masterful at anything does not make one a virtuoso. There are many examples in modern entertainment. It takes one to know one.

What I like about this angle on our elusive subject is that virtuosos raise the bar for everyone else. And yet, the only way the virtuoso can sustain that status is to raise the bar for herself, consistently and perpetually. A virtuoso never arrives. The journey is endless. It requires staying the course to the end.

Virtuosity, thus understood, is not something to be achieved, but a way of life. One develops the habits that fuel and enable a de-centered, ongoing critique of the pursuit of virtuosity, and those habits take over. Once on that path, there can be no deviation. A fine exemplar is Stevens, played by Anthony Hopkins in the film The Remains of the Day. This is one key to the making of a virtuoso organization.

Virtuosity cannot be objectively measured, like a jar of pickles. That’s in part because it is a relative thing—relative to the performance of all others who might be seeking virtuosity. It is an emergent property—something ineffable that emerges from time to time out of the cauldron of those competing for survival or mastery.

But we can measure leadership performance in unconventional, non-psychological ways. And that’s good enough for our purposes in this book. We will follow the complex thinking and doing of the best exemplars. You won’t find recipes here. We want to get next to the full richness of the process in action. We simply want to be far enough along the path to virtuosity ourselves that we can recognize and appreciate those who are further along the path than we are.

The second reason for enlisting virtuosity as the assessment criterion in this book is quite different.

The term derives from its root in Latin, virtus, meaning behavior that exhibits extreme valor, merit, and moral perfection. We can agree that the virtuoso is the best of the best. But we don’t often think of moral perfection as a component of virtuosity.

It is a small m morality, not connoting something religious or institutional. What we will want to mean by it is simply that leadership virtuosity implies that the person who is exercising the role of leader is good—good for himself, good for all others he influences, good for the organization or institution or community in the long term, good for the larger society, good for the economy, and good for his or her contributions to our individual and collective destinies.

That’s a tall order. But we’re talking about those roles in our civilization that will inevitably affect our present and our future—our destiny. Even though it is usually discounted in our world of stuff, of celebrity-worship, and of short-term infotainment, we pay dearly for discounting it.

In the short term, our leaders have no role beyond that of satisfying our multifarious and self-centered appetites. To call these people leaders or, worse, to follow them, is to sacrifice the future for the present. We want our leaders to attend to our present interests and concerns—which we get largely from other people and the media. We don’t know what our best self-interests are. And we don’t seem to care.

Our so-called leaders compete for the spoils of this indifference. Our leaders are there because they are popular, not because they intend to be virtuosos in their leadership roles.

It’s a problem also for every person who assumes a position considered to be a leadership position. Why? Because for the most part, those who support a leader these days are not looking for virtuosity in that role. They are not lusting after moral perfection in their leaders. They are far more likely to be looking for what they intend to get as a result of supporting that leader.

People may loathe their bosses at work. But they still know how to suck-up to get what they want. It may be easy to pursue moral perfection in a world where that is the rule, not the exception. But you won’t get hired as the leader in our world if you insist upon telling people the truth about why you want the job. And that’s the problem. Your constituents put you in place for their own purposes. If you don’t serve them as expected, they know how to make you fail.

Perhaps the exemplar here (apart from Machiavelli, who argued that his prince should serve the state and not himself!) was the British politician Edmund Burke. Burke said, in a speech to his constituents in 1774,

"Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgement; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion."

He considered sacrificing his own judgment to popular opinion to be a betrayal. Who was being betrayed? The people who elected him. Many of our present-day politicians talk a good story. But they seem to have neither the conviction nor the courage to play well or masterfully the role into which they want to be cast.

Politics is even more duplicitous than everyday life. And so is life in organizations. [Deceitful, double-dealing, for those of you who wondered about the word duplicitous.] Such matters will be explored more fully in one or more of the short essays that follow.

My point here is that the moral perfection originally required of those who purported to be our leaders continues to recede in our thinking, to be irrelevant to our critical judgment. It has always been extremely difficult to fulfill in any masterful way a leadership role. It is today even more difficult.

We have cast our lot with duplicity. But that has made that component of leadership virtuosity even more crucial to our lives and our collective destiny.

One more observation—almost trivial by comparison—may be useful before we delve into the challenges to our thinking that follow.

We have trivialized and continue to further trivialize the concept of leadership. The most common way we do this today is by carelessly referring to anyone who has any kind of supervisory or high-visibility position as a leader. Leader and leadership are very fashionable terms. So, in a lemming-like way, we use the term without discrimination.

It has largely lost its special meaning as a term by which to refer to someone who has accomplished much of value to all of the stakeholders in her role as the most accountable person in some human enterprise.

A parent perhaps ought to be aiming for leadership virtuosity. Where could it be more important? But we rarely think of parents as leaders. We think of CEOs and elected officials as leaders. But it’s misplaced. As noted previously, most of them are not in that role in order to learn how to become virtuosos in that role. They are there for other reasons.

We trivialize the concept by applying it where there is little real evidence of it, and by failing to apply it where there is the greatest need. And where there is the greatest need to know well what we should mean by it.

Perhaps unconsciously, we are inclined to refer to anyone who has a higher status than we do as a leader. It may therefore be in part wishful thinking. We desperately hope for someone who will lead us out of servitude and to the promised land. We need someone who will save us from ourselves. We are willing to hand over to someone else our responsibilities for ourselves. It’s easy to call these our leaders.

We love our metaphors, especially those that permit us to stumble on in our own mediocrity. So it has also become fashionable to belong to teams, and to refer to the person who is supposed to make our teams