The guff of greatness

In the management of IT, is leadership all about charisma? Bill Gates might, perhaps, suggest not. But at Microsoft’s Redmond, Washington campus, the Gates dream of changing the world, it is said, made him charismatic.

I have not yet read the two latest books on leadership to come out of Gates’s homeland. They are too long and too expensive, and there are 2,000 other new management books to read this year. But I have renewed my bemused love for the Harvard Business Review of late, and caught the lengthy clues to leadership that have been given by the books’ five authors there.

University of California professor Warren G Bennis and Accenture’s Robert J Thomas have just published Geeks and Geezers. They went looking for, and found, the influence of different formative eras on today’s young and old generations of leaders. But they also found “crucibles of leadership”.

You’re nobody if you haven’t had a crucible. For crucibles are “intense, often traumatic, always unplanned” experiences that transform people and become the sources of their distinctive abilities as leaders. So leadership comes from being an American woman working in male-dominated Japan and facing estrangement and sexism. Or it comes from facing anti-Semitism and racism at work. In sum, the most crucial skill leaders have is “adaptive capacity”. That is the kind of “applied creativity” that confers on its bearer “an almost magical ability to transcend adversity”.

Confronted with today’s IT systems, most IT workers will think they’ve got this adaptive capacity, or Oprah Winfrey-esque marks of victimhood on their back. But they also may well have “neoteny” to boost their chances of leadership.

Neoteny? It’s the retention, we’re told, of juvenile characteristics in the adults of a species. For IT workers as for corporate leaders, it amounts to a delight in lifelong learning, regardless of age.

As for Richard Boyatzis, Annie McKee and Daniel Goleman, authors of the dodgy-sounding Primal Leadership: Realizing the Power of Emotional Intelligence, they observe that after 11 September Americans have a desire to take stock. Do they feel trapped by their jobs? If so, they should reawaken their passion for work by having a sabbatical, going to a leadership development seminar, finding an executive coach, finding a meaningful cause, and keeping sacred a few hours a week for, er, self-examination.

These things, it is written, help leaders keep their passion alive. In turn, good leaders are people who support staff doing these things.

What a load of tosh. Leadership does not come out of charismatic visions, the suffering of abuse, a constant resort to the infantile, or from regular self-indulgent introspection either. For IT workers as for anyone else, it more often comes from getting out of one’s own hole through hard work, discussion, reading, writing and generosity.

Leadership is about rising above one’s own experience and reaching for the higher collective goal. A leader is someone with the strength both to embody the times and transcend them.

How much our authors embody, and how little they transcend.