Soft Leadership
Are you playing it soft?
By Mike Farish, a specialist journalist, who has written
for numerous publications, including Saab magazine
How the most successful leaders ‘play it soft and cool’
Dwight D. Eisenhower was a man who knew a lot about leadership. As Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in 1944, it was he who had the responsibility of giving the go-ahead for the Normandy invasion. As President of the United States from 1952-60, he held the single most powerful executive position in the world at a time when the Cold War threatened to go ‘hot’ at any moment.
You might, therefore, expect him to have viewed leadership as synonymous with command and control—a matter of giving orders and being obeyed. But you would be wrong. Eisenhower was a conciliator, who saw his job as one of mediating between different individuals and interests. As Eisenhower himself observed, the essence of leadership is “to get people to work together, not only because you tell them to do so, but because they instinctively want to do it for you.” Indeed, even more pithily, he said: “You don’t lead by hitting people over the head; that’s assault, not leadership.”
Unwittingly, therefore, Eisenhower gave a near-perfect description of the concept now known as ‘soft power’—leadership by persuasion and motivation rather than by force and compulsion. His words are cited in a recently published book by American author, Joseph S. Nye Jr*. As such, they are more than appropriate because Nye—a professor at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, who has also worked at a high level within the US Government in Washington—is the man who coined the term in the first place. Even more pertinently, Nye uses the book to explain just why ‘soft power’ is now increasingly relevant to leadership not just in the military and politics, but also in business.
Inspiring Action
Nye’s definition of leadership is highly illuminating. A leader, he argues, is not simply someone who makes other people follow their wishes. Instead, a leader is “someone who helps a group create and achieve shared goals”. Hence there is an implied value judgment in Nye’s argument. In effect, leadership is only worthy of the name if it leads to something worthwhile. As he mordantly observes, the Pied Piper who led the children of Hamelin off into oblivion—thankfully only in a fairy tale—was “not a leader”.
Moreover, that example—even if based in a fantasy—illustrates what Nye seeks to highlight: that leadership is about followers as much as leaders. This is true in all contexts, even those with an apparently strict hierarchy such as the military. But it is particularly true of much of the modern business world with its increasing emphasis on teamworking and cooperation. Indeed, says Nye, the measure of a leader lies in their followers’ actions, not their own: “The test of a leader is whether a group is more effective in both defining and achieving its goals because of that person’s participation.”
All about timing
But there is a third element in the leadership paradigm besides leaders and followers—contexts. Quite simply, particular ways of leading may be more or less appropriate in particular circumstances, and actions or attitudes that may bring success at one time may guarantee failure at another.
The world of politics provides plenty of examples. Most British people, for instance, would regard Winston Churchill as a great leader; but that estimation is based almost entirely on his actions in the crisis year of 1940 when his mix of forcefulness, obstinacy and eloquence was vital in maintaining national morale. In contrast, during the 1930s, Churchill was widely regarded as a maverick who was out of touch with the popular mood.
The business world is much the same. Nye cites, for instance, the case of Lee Iacocca; a highly successful and high-profile executive with US multinational car maker Ford, widely regarded as the company’s ‘leader’, who was fired from his post of president in the late 1970s. What had occurred, observes Nye, is that Iacocca had generated such a high profile for himself that it soured his relations with the chairman of the board, Henry Ford. He had forgotten that leaders in large complex organizations have to “attract and persuade in all directions”. Significantly, Iacocca’s successor, Philip Caldwell, introduced a much more collegiate style that “stressed the importance of everyone’s contribution” and that proved very effective in business terms, even though he personally received much less recognition as ‘leader’ than his predecessor.
Keeping the balance
Defining the ‘soft power’ skills that Iacocca perhaps underutilized, along with identifying how they should be employed, is the main aim of Nye’s book. He says that these skills include not only persuasion, but also enticement, attraction and an appeal to values rather than just self-interest. Of course the ‘hard’ counterparts—most obviously in the business world, setting reward levels and hiring and firing—remain legitimate elements of effective leadership, but they are only part of the equation. In the end, the two types of approach have to be fused together and used, as appropriate, in a manner that Nye dubs ‘smart power’.
Someone who endorses this point of view is Jeff Immelt, CEO of US industrial giant General Electric. He says of his job: “When you run General Electric there are seven to 12 times a year when you have to say, ‘you’re doing it my way’. If you do it 18 times then people will leave. If you do it three times, the company falls apart.”
But the world never stands still, and Nye argues that various trends are currently tilting the emphasis towards soft power. These include, at a social level, increasing informality of interpersonal relations and, at a technological level, the now pervasive nature of inexpensive communication technologies—in other words, the ‘information revolution’.
These come together with particular force in the companies that interact with their customers over the internet and, again, there is confirmation of this from someone who deals with this reality at a high level every day—Samuel J. Palmisano, CEO of IBM. Under these conditions, he observes, “hierarchical, command-and-control approaches simply do not work any more. They impede information flows inside companies, hampering the fluid and collaborative nature of work today.”
Virtual world leaders
At a real grass-roots level, the leadership style of the future may be forming itself in millions of adolescent bedrooms all over the world, where teenagers are communicating with each other in cyberspace via their computers. Nye says that there are already indications that, in this virtual environment, leaders are emerging based on their “linguistic skills and quantity of talk”. How that will translate into the business world, as those individuals grow up and get themselves jobs, remains to be seen. But it does appear that the future will see companies enjoying the most success when its workforce actively wants to do their job.
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*) The Powers to Lead, Joseph S. Nye Jr, Oxford University Press.