BMA eBook - Manual / Resource - Page 49
Managing Authenticity
Leaders may be
profoundly self-aware
and essentially authentic
but not because of
contemplation or
analysis; they are not
characters in some
Woody Allen film.
forthright for the rather polite culture in
which he worked. We urged his managers to
give him a chance to grow, though, feeling that
his high-energy leadership style could help
bring about some much-needed change in the
organization.
Graham moved from sales to marketing,
then briefly into a production role at a factory,
and then back into a senior marketing role. We
were amazed and disappointed at the transformation in him when we saw him again. He
spoke in nuanced phrases, and he carefully
weighed his opinions before expressing them.
He defended the status quo, remarking that
our proposed change agenda for the organization was “a little simplistic.” He even told us
that he preferred the quiet corridors of headquarters to the hurly-burly of the marketplace.
Graham had attempted to fit in to the dominant culture. Instead, he had merely conformed—and lost the chance to be an effective
change leader.
At the other end of the spectrum, Disney’s
former president, Michael Ovitz, provides a
cautionary tale about not conforming enough.
As his boss, Michael Eisner, told Britain’s Telegraph newspaper: “He started to rub people
the wrong way. He was controversial, and it
got worse as things went on....We’d all take a
bus [at the corporate retreat] and he had a limousine; a special driver. Everyone had a walkietalkie, and you heard [people] saying, ‘Who
was this guy, and why was he demanding this?’
It was a bad vibe, let’s put it that way.” Ovitz
lasted 14 months at Disney.
Authentic leaders know how to strike a balance between their distinctiveness and the cultures in which they operate. They do not immediately seek out head-on confrontations
because they recognize that their survival as
leaders (and, by extension, the survival of their
initiatives) requires a measured introduction
to, and adaptation of, the organization’s established business networks and social relationships. To influence others, authentic leaders
must first gain at least minimal acceptance as
members of their organizations.
Perhaps the best example we’ve seen of this
was the case of an executive we’ll call Miyako,
one of the first female finance directors in a
Japanese company. Miyako was an outstanding
leader. She helped the company modernize its
accounting practices, brought in new talent,
and succeeded in breaking up the cozy male
harvard business review • december 2005
cabal at the top. But even as she broke new
ground, Miyako was careful to play the role expected of a Japanese woman in social settings.
Her situation highlights the universal challenge that women face in establishing themselves as authentic leaders: Unless female leaders acknowledge and validate some of the
prevailing organizational norms surrounding
gender roles, they will find it hard to obtain acceptance from male followers.
In complex organizations, leaders can select
the specific norms and elements they want to
be identified with and those they need to reject. Greg Dyke, former director general of the
BBC, one of the world’s largest media organizations, understands very well how to play different organizational norms against one another. When he took over at the BBC in
January 2000, employees across the organization were unhappy. Shortly after coming into
the job, Dyke began poking his nose into offices and studios to understand the staffers’ situation better. The more visits he made, the
more he came to see that he could win broad
acceptance for the major changes he needed to
introduce by appealing to the organization’s
rank and file.
To that end, Dyke began phasing out the
cars and chauffeurs that had been assigned to
each member of his executive board. The program producers and support staffers were
pleased by this move: In an organization with a
strong egalitarian aspiration, the long line of
expensive black cars parked outside headquarters had been a source of irritation—even
alienation—for many staffers. Dyke also cut
the large budget spent on outside consultants—in one year, it went from £22 million to
£3 million—symbolizing the faith the director
general had in the people already inside the organization. He was implicitly saying, “I know
we have the talent here.”
But it wasn’t enough to identify with people
near the bottom of the hierarchy. Unlike a typical CEO, Dyke needed the approval of the
BBC’s very powerful board of governors as
well as its chairman at the time, the patrician
Sir Christopher Bland. To win their acceptance, Dyke had to show respect for their established mores even while he was appealing
to the antiestablishment instincts of most of
his employees. For a while, he proved quite
adept at managing this relationship. In public,
at least, he always addressed Sir Christopher
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