In Search of Leadership

Robertson is part of the current consultancy consensus that leaders can be made if they have some predisposition to the role and a driven desire to fulfill it. Dan Holland, leader of Towers Perrin's leadership development practice and a licensed psychologist, says, "You can learn leadership, but you can't teach it. If someone has the quality of genuine curiosity, about themselves and others, and is highly motivated to become a leader, then that behavior can be reinforced and built on."

In terms of its own consultants, Towers Perrin both hires and develops leaders, making a huge commitment to mentoring and 360-degree feedback. "I would put resources into identifying good raw talent and helping it to develop, rather than putting people in a classroom. One of the greatest learning experiences is when a consultant faces a significant challenge in his or her career. At this point, putting a lot of thought into how to develop further can be very beneficial," says Holland, who leads a team of about 30 psychologists and behavioral scientists working across the firm's global organization. "The downside is that the best leaders often get the toughest jobs," he quips.

When it comes to clients, Holland encourages consultants to apply many of the techniques that are used in the firm to identify and develop leaders. "By definition, leadership is behavioral, dynamic, and interactive, so leaders need good and regular feedback. The first thing we do with a CEO is find ways of collecting rich data about his leadership behavior and provide it to him," he explains.

This is all very well if the CEO takes the bait, but a common problem, despite having called in consultancy help, is to find that senior executives don't want to hear the bad news if it is about themselves. This is where a consultant must muster all of his or her leadership skills. Says Holland: "There are multiple pressures on the consultant, including the fact that the client is paying the bill. The fundamental challenge to the consultant trying to lead in such a situation is to stay centered on core values and continue to deliver honest, sound advice, using himself as an instrument of change."

"I school consultants in not being heroes," says Murray Dalziel, global managing director of organizational effectiveness and management development services at Hay Group. "Consultants like to be heroes, but the client CEO may not want heroic efforts. There's also danger in making the CEO the hero and getting into the Messiah syndrome, where the board, the staff, the press, and everybody else is waiting for the Messiah to solve every problem, and then the CEO becomes the Messiah and very soon falls from grace. Instead, treat the CEO as a whole person. Leaders aren't genetically coded and they can be changed, although I don't like the 'teaching' idea. This is not a didactic exercise, and those who claim to 'teach' leadership are fooling their clients — it's more about developing strategies."

Hay emphasizes two strategies, both to develop its own consultants and to encourage leadership within client organizations. First, coaching, in which Dalziel includes all aspects of people relations such as change and the reframing of how they work. Second, Hay promotes reference groups, with peers working together to create better leadership skills. "Rather than putting people in a classroom, getting people together gives them access to many things they haven't already found out," he says.

Dalziel believes that the job of a leader is to produce results through influencing the environment. This, he suggests, is achieved by a combination of finding the right leadership style depending on the situation; a philosophy of emotional intelligence that understands and encourages longer-term development; and a deep-seated cognizance of where energy, passion, and drive come from.
"Leaders must reach into themselves to consider these issues, then they must look out to build and work with a team, rather than stand alone on a podium. Then they must intervene across the organization to align people with where leadership wants it to go. CEOs like to start at this stage, but I put it last. The path to successful leadership should be self, team, organization."

With USA Today recently reporting that three CEOs a day have left their jobs across the U.S. over the past six months, there is certainly evidence of a crisis of leadership in the executive suite. Says Andersen's Robertson, "The CEOs I see in U.S. organizations were put there by the board because it wanted a safe pair of hands to ride out a bull market. But that market is coming to an end, and there is an excess of CEOs whose leadership is not fit for the next 10 years — hence the exodus."

Robertson claims that his phone is ringing off the hook, not because poor leaders realize they need help — they don't — but because good leaders who want their business to be great need help to adapt. "This is no longer about an individual in a Superman outfit, but about knowing what talent a person brings to leadership and finding collaborative partners. This implies 'strong and different' rather than consensus rule with everybody being nice to each other, no processes for conflict resolution, and no way of getting different opinions onto the table. I see a lot of turf protection and 'show and tell,' very little planning for the next six months — virtually nothing on leadership — and no team thinking with functional hats parked at the door. The reason clients call us in is because they want to run a better business and deliver to all their stakeholders."

Andersen's approach to clients asks the leading individual what he is trying to do for the business and where he wants it to be in two or three years' time. Then the issues that must be addressed and the leadership that will be needed can be evaluated. It also looks at the connection between leadership and business performance, turning a previously soft subject into a hard-edged measurement.
"The main reason that companies which are changing fail or underperform has everything to do with the behavior of the top executive. All too often I hear the CEO say, 'If only those people out there would get it, everything would be OK,'" says Robertson. "I'm not in the therapy business seeking to make people better. I have to play the bad guy and tell the CEO that the answer to his problem is not looking through a window onto the organization, but looking into a mirror and considering his impact on company performance in terms of how people relate to him."

Obviously, there is no guaranteed recipe for creating strong leadership, but Andersen follows a method similar to that of Hay Group, moving along the chain from the current situation to deduce appropriate leadership for where the business wants to go and then focusing on what that leadership should actually be doing and the processes that it should employ. For example, are the strengths of each individual board member creating tension, and is that tension being used productively or to fence off no-go areas?
Having peeled the business from strategy to individual performance, Andersen then reverses along the chain, reconstructing how individuals can build a leadership team that works effectively. Its impact on the business can then be measured.

Says Robertson, "I base my thinking on four premises: effective leadership is not just about rational thinking, but also emotional intelligence; difference is a key strength to leverage; leadership processes must be developed strategically rather than maintained; and leaders are made, not born."
As the electronic economy makes mincemeat of old-school leadership models, it is too early to say which consultancy will be most successful in developing and deploying tomorrow's leaders. But, like their clients, they all know that success is the only option.

Sidebar: PowerPoints:

• In light of the need to lead in the e-business economy, leadership often means the capability to change the
mindset of another person or group.
• A current consultancy consensus says that leaders can be made if they have some predisposition to the role and a driven desire to fulfill it.
• It's never too early to develop leadership skills. The downside is that those who demonstrate leadership skills early may get the toughest jobs.

Sidebar: How Leaders Are Made

We asked some of the profession's top leadership gurus to dismiss some of the myths surrounding leadership and discuss the different approaches their firms use to develop new leaders.

Grady Means
Managing partner and global leader in strategy consulting at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC)

"At PwC, we appraise market conditions and then create a strong team of second-line leadership that will give us a good choice of leaders later on. I would be very uneasy about a fast track to leadership — it would make the process bureaucratic and people would be predesignated, which is chancy in today's environment. We have tremendous intellectual capacity, and people come from all over the firm with interesting proposals. I don't want to prevent that. I prefer an options approach, giving people a dynamic environment in which to develop and shine. Then we will see who the leaders are."

Alastair Robertson
Partner and head of the leadership development practice at Andersen Consulting

 "We are a small group of about 10 people worldwide. Our focus is to stay at the cutting edge of leadership through close relationships with experts such as Warren Bennett, a foremost authority on leadership and emeritus professor at the University of Southern California. Around us are market units; they have two or three people like us, but dedicated to their industry specialism.
"We use on ourselves the same approach to leadership that we do with clients. For example, as the firm thought through the situation with its new CEO, Joe Forehand, we re-examined where we are going, our value propositions, what it says about being a partner, and the persona of a partner. Then we look at how to create partnerships with clients and, below that, the necessary capabilities of our partners, and the processes and behaviors needed to lead. My group is in the early days of introducing the concept to partners, not just as training, but as a way to develop in terms of developing the business."

Murray Dalziel
Global managing director of organizational effectiveness and management development services at Hay Group

"About two-thirds of my time is spent dealing with whether consultants feel they lead their clients. I ask them a basic question: 'When are you at your best?' The answer is that when they are at their best, they feel they are making a difference. It's tremendously exciting to see and hear the impact consultants feel they are having because they work globally and gain experience from different cultural perspectives.
"As a business consultancy with people and organizational issues as our key focus, we are more attractive to clients than big generalists when it comes to leadership issues. The Big Five now do IT service jobs, and I don't see them as competitors. The competition here comes from business schools and private boutiques, but they don't have our capacity or scale. We're uniquely positioned. I say to applicants, 'If you want to be in change management, join Andersen Consulting and change code for the next five years. But if you want to work in leadership, join us, because we have a single community of interest that gives us headway.'"

Dan Holland
Head of Towers Perrin's leadership development practice

"Good leadership has a huge impact on the firm. I've been here five years, and I have great personal regard for our leaders and the exposure we get to them. The firm does a good job of elevating those who have raw ability to be leaders. It's natural selection, not who generates the most revenue as it is in some other consultancies.
"Being a human resources consultancy definitely gives us a better understanding of people issues and, if I were a client, I'd be very thoughtful about the key need — IT, strategy, people issues, or whatever — and select consultants accordingly."