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Harvard Business Review

LEADERSHIP

Avoid Mistakes That Plague New Leaders: An Interview with Warren Bennis by Christina Bielaszka-DuVernay

APRIL 13,2009

A noted authority on leadership with more than 25 books to his name~ Warren G. Bennis

is University Professor and Distinguished Professor ofBusiness Administration at the

University ofSouthern California~s Marshall School ofBusiness~ and founding chairman

ofthe school~s Leadership Institute. His most recent book is Judgment: How Winning

Leaders Make Great Calls~ coauthored with Noel M.Tichy (Penguin Group~ 2007).

Bennis began examining the nature ofleadership more than 50 years ago when he was

one ofthe youngest U.S. infantry commanders fighting in Germany~ service for which he

was decorated with the Bronze Star and Purple Heart.

He and I spoke in 2006 about the mistakes and missteps that plague newly appointed

leaders and how to avoid them. Here is an edited record ofour conversation. - Christina

Bielaszka-DuVernay~ Editor

https://hbr.org/2009/04/avoid-mistakes-that-plague-new 12/3/2015


CBD: I once heard a fascinating keynote address delivered by a young executive at a

world-famous medical products company. He spoke frankly about how close he

came to failing in his first high-profile leadership role some seven years earlier, and

how he turned his performance around. In your experience, what distinguishes

leaders who can pull away from disaster from those who plunge right over the edge?

WB: The understanding that they can't lead alone. The myth about leadership is that

it's a solitary act, that "it's lonely at the top." But effective leaders know the truth of

this passage from Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451: "We need not to be let alone. We

need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really

bothered? About something important, about something real?"

Leaders, like the rest of us, have all sorts of ways of not looking at themselves, of

overlooking shortcomings. For that reason, leaders need not to be alone. They need to

be "bothered" by people who will give them what I call reflective back talk.

How can a leader make sure that the right people are giving him or her "reflective

back talk"? How can leaders encourage those with less power to feel comfortable

doing this?

I'll answer your second question first. To get people to bother you, you have to bother

them. Otherwise, people won't take you seriously. Putting out a suggestion box,

advertising an open-door policy, even walking the floors and asking, "What can we do

to improve?" - they're all well-intentioned actions, but, unless there's a deep culture

of trust and openness, people won't tell you what they really think.

It's analogous to the heart: for it to do its job and keep the body healthy, the right

amount of oxygenated blood needs to get to the right part of the heart at the right

time. Likewise, it's critical that enough true, honest opinion and information make it



to leaders for them to be effective and keep their organization fit and healthy. A

leader, at whatever level, has to make a real effort to create a culture in which people

feel free to commit candor.

As for making sure the right people are bothering you, you have to keep widening and

widening your sources - you need to practice "open source management." You need

to get your information from everywhere. This serves three purposes:

1. It increases the chances that you'll learn something important. The more sources

you use, the more certain you can be that you're being bothered about the right

things.

2. It will loosen up your own people. If someone in your closest circle is tempted to

withhold information from you, they'll think twice about this when they realize

that someone else might reveal it.

3. People learn from dialogue - it stretches them. I know that I don't know all that I

know until I'm in conversation. Engaging in dialogue with a wide selection of

people both inside and outside the organization uncovers knowledge and

awareness the leader didn't even know she had.

Let's go back to your story for a moment: Can you tell me what made the leader aware

that he was failing - what it was that "bothered" him?

It was an official letter from HR putting him on notice that his performance was

unsatisfactory. It was, in his words, a "2 X 4 moment" - he'd thought he'd been

doing great! When he started probing, he was told that the biggest problem was that

his failure to delegate had caused morale among his top team to plummet. They

thought he didn't trust or respect them.

https:llhbr.org/2009/04/avoid-mistakes-that-plague-new 12/3/2015

Learning to delegate is difficult. It's tempting for all of us, especially ambitious

business professionals, to believe that unless we do something ourselves, it won't be

done right.

What new leaders need to understand is that by not delegating, they're disrespecting

not only others but themselves. They're not using themselves to their best advantage,

and they're demonstrating that they haven't learned one of the key truths about

leadership, which is that the only way to make your weaknesses irrelevant is to

respect others' strengths and use them.

What steps can new leaders take to become better at delegating?

In my experience, most leaders and aspiring leaders are, with very few exceptions,

driven type As. They're perfectionists. But delegation requires letting go of perfection

and relinquishing control. It's very difficult for some people to let go, but being an

effective leader absolutely requires it.

For one, if you're not delegating, you're not doing your job. As someone moves up in

an organization, their job becomes less about their facility at the functional tasks that,

earlier in their career, defined their performance and more about their skill at making

the best use of all the capabilities and talents that surround them.

By definition, an organization is a system of collaboration and interdependence. The

work of leading an organization - whether a team, a business unit, a regional division,

or an entire corporation - is to fit together the organization's independent pieces so

they create the most value. It's to increase the sum of the parts. If you can't delegate,

you shouldn't be in this business.



For another, as the leader in your story learned, a failure to delegate appropriately

drives down motivation and morale. Competent, creative, hardworking people want

their talents and effort recognized. I was reminded of this rather poignantly in a

conversation with a friend of mine. An extraordinarily gifted person, she chose to take

early retirement from an organization where she'd worked 30 years because she said

she never felt that her full talents were utilized.

What else is crucial to making the leap to leadership - and succeeding at it?

I'll single out two things. One is attentiveness - keeping your eyebrows raised all the

time. You know, even if a leader has surrounded herself with trusted advisers who

give her straight talk, she still needs to cultivate attentiveness. That means whenever

an issue or crisis arises, asking herself, What have I done to create this situation? What

did I contribute to this mess?

The goal is not to blame but to understand. Accepting failure is pretty easy; to

understand it is the hard part.

In the case of a crisis, the dangerous response is to look for someone to blame. But

always pointing the finger at yourself isn't good, either; there are some people whose

self-esteem is so low that their default response is to blame themselves. Brooding

about one's failings, obsessing about them, is not productive.

What leaders want is a certain detachment. They should aim to be observing

participants. But they don't want to be so detached that they're always in the bakony

observing things; they have to spend time in the fray.



The other is contextual intelligence. Get the business literacy down pat. Just as a

musician has to master the scales before he can become a master, so a leader has to

gain a command of the basics to break free of the grid of technique and become an

eminence.

It also means knowing the whole industry: what it's about, what makes one an expert

in that particular space.

Finally, it requires knowing your company inside and out: the products, how

customers see you, the culture - and what employees particularly value about it. This

is where [former Hewlett- Packard CEO] Carly Fiorina really stumbled. She said she

wanted to preserve the best of the HP culture, but she never really got the culture in

the first place. While she paid lip service to [William] Hewlett and [David] Packard,

and the company's early days, she never truly saw the company from the employees'

perspective.

If you want to lead people, you have to enter their world.

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LEADERSHIP Avoid Mistakes That Plague New Leaders…homepages.se.edu/cvonbergen/files/2015/12/Avoid-Mistakes-That... · Avoid Mistakes That Plague New Leaders: An Interview with Warren