enjoy reading!
available as upload in German/English on www.bertelsmann-stiftung.de/leadership
The End of Patriarchal Leadership
By Axel Gloger
Edgar H. Schein doesn’t sit on his laurels. At a time when many of his colleagues are drawing their pensions, the grand old man of organization culture is as active as ever - travelling the globe, explaining the world to managers – and showing himself as a force for renewal. At the age of 83, the professor and famous American management guru has now come up with a new idea about the way leaders should lead. What he says is that leadership means helping: employees need only a little support, the rest they can manage by themselves.
“We’ve still got the leadership as dictatorship model,” says the emeritus Professor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), “only it’s no longer in tune with the times.” The all-knowing boss - the boss who lights the way forward, lays down the law, keeps tight control and is blessed with permanent foresight – is an anachronism, claims the academic.
You can see this happening in politics as the chairs of dictators start to shake across the Arab world. And in the enterprise sector too the role of the patriarchal leader has had its day. “The idea that one person alone tells all the others what to do doesn’t work anymore.” Schein has had his own direct experience of what dictatorships mean. He was born in Zurich in 1928 where his parents settled after emigrating from the Soviet Union. Part of his childhood was spent in Czechoslovakia before his family emigrated to Chicago.
His constant drive to provide a better explanation of the way companies work than management experts are capable of has made him the founder of modern organizational psychology. And this role has brought him countless honours and distinctions and made him the star guest at the world’s top conferences. He fits into a picture of the world considered by many to be highly problematic, precisely because he delivers clear explanations of how it functions.
Cultures of Experts on the March
If Edgar Schein didn’t exist, we’d have to invent him. He’s the type of east coast intellectual dressed as though he’s just left the mahogany and leather armchair interior of the Harvard Club and sporting of course the inevitable beard. He embodies a vision of good old America, of a time when academics didn’t have to be as brash and pushy as General Electric salesmen. Schein is distinguished by what he has to say, he has no need of a manner of presentation overblown with hype and “wow” effects.
He can capitalize on the benefits of a long lifetime. “Certain things are clearer to someone who’s lived as long as I have, and seen as much as I have.” And what he says carries immediate conviction. Clever thoughts couched in short sentences and simple language. The same way as he presents a clear idea that now needs to be adapted: “Companies nowadays are cultures of experts” he says, talking to the Handelszeitung newspaper about the modern world of work during an event organized by the Bertelsmann Stiftung. Employees know infinitely more about their own area of speciality than the rest of their colleagues – and certainly more than any CEO. “Everywhere we look nowadays we see higher levels of technical complexity. Managers are dependent on specialists who know their stuff.” To illustrate this, Schein gives the example of a doctor and a technician operating an X-ray device. “The doctor might be higher up the hierarchy, but it’s the technician who explains to him just what can be seen on the patient’s X-rays.” The real task of leadership is to ask and inquire – and to take jigsaw bits of information and build up the big picture that first enables the right kind of decisions to be made.
Ed Schein has spent his whole life on such inquiries which have enabled him to map out new areas of scientific study. In his usual tireless manner, he now seeks to bring such a spirit of inquiry to senior management, a mission he finds so important because most senior managers are by no means adept at inquiry. “They only ask what they already know”, he admonishes. If you stay on the “Well, Smith everything shipshape today?” level, you will never find out the true state of affairs. Managers caught in this mindset can never get the true facts - which is why their picture of reality is so hazy.
All this Schein explains with the authority of a professor intimately acquainted with the world of workaday practice, of a man who has spent many decades advising companies all around the world how best they can improve their organization. His roll-call of clients includes such names as Ciba-Geigny, one of the two predecessor companies of Novartis, as well as Apple, Shell, Saab, and Procter & Gamble. It is from insights gained in the ways companies actual function that he has derived his ideas on how senior management should formulate their questions if they really want to know what’s going on.
Personal Authenticity
Schein gives the impression of a man in the know. His mind is a vast library of intellectual resources and when you listen to him talking you have the feeling that he is selecting first this thought then the next from different shelves in the library of his mind. Each of his pronouncements is carefully considered, well rounded and meticulously crafted.
Peter Drucker, the doyen of all management thinkers who died in 2005, had a similar way of speaking. Schein follows but does not copy him. And in doing so he reveals glimpses of a personality no longer concerned with winning. Lauded and loaded with honours by his peers, Professor Schein is already a winner.
The proposals he puts forward carry the weight of this easily worn authority. “Focussed dialogue” is how he terms one of the techniques which has proven its worth in management. To achieve this, he says that management needs to create a truly open climate for dialogue in which everybody can freely speak their minds without fear of reprisals. “Imagine a situation like the one you get around a camp fire where people come and sit together at the end of a long day. Whoever speaks out there is speaking more to the fire than to any one particular person” is how the management guru describes the open environment for dialogue. “Everyone should say something for the round of people in general and not for or against one particular person.”
This is the kind of environment bosses must have to get the information they need to fill management objectives with life and where employees can be non-partisan and say where they stand, where the hitches lie, what has been achieved and what is still needed to make things run even better. “And this is where the boss can step in with support and help for his colleagues” says Schein. He calls his idea of leadership “servant leadership” and sees the coach or trainer standing on the sidelines and urging on his team on to score goals.
Edgar Schein is impatient with dirigisme as befits a psychologist who has spent many long years pondering why some organizations succeed – and why others fail. Ultimately Schein has come up with a startlingly simple formula – “Help is important” this research scientist says, “Every leader should know the best way to offer help, to give help but also to receive it.” Among other skills, this means knowing how to clear the way of obstacles and how to judge the right moment to give encouragement as well as knowing what it takes to create a single productive entity out of the work of many individual knowledge workers.
This means that excellent leadership works mainly from the background – which as Schein proclaims, spells out the demise of alpha male assertiveness in the leadership role. “The role of the eternal front man and mentor doesn’t work anymore,” says the organizational psychologist because the realities of corporate life have changed too drastically as management levels are thinned out, spans of control steadily widened and hierarchies flattened.
This gives superiors – particularly those in the upper echelons – more people under their direct control while at the same time it limits their direct sphere of influence. “This is why the point is to accept the expertise of individual team members. A good boss will set the general direction but won’t attempt to take control of the work of the people under him.”
In such a complex world the ability to delegate becomes a means of ensuring your own survival because it’s the only way management has of ensuring that it won’t stifle in a mass of operational details. Schein does not accept the lament so frequently heard from leaders that they don’t have enough time to do their job properly. “You do have enough time if you stick to the essentials and use your time wisely” is the advice this management guru urges managers to chew on.
More people, less influence
On a practical level he thinks that bosses shouldn’t let themselves be constantly distracted by calls from their cell phones. “Time for reflection, for seeing things as they are, for recognizing emerging trends and thinking them through to their last consequence – all this is much more important than immediately responding to each and every email or phone call,” he says setting out the priorities.
Many leaders would find it difficult to replace the hustle and bustle of operative business with quiet periods of reflection on strategy. “But it can be learnt,” replies Schein and says that the next train journey is a good point to start. “Stop messing about with your blackberry and notebook and take the time to think something through to the end.”
AN EVENTFUL LIFE
From Zurich to Chicago via Odessa
The son of emigrants, Edgar Schein first saw the light of day in Zurich in 1928 where his father completed his Ph.D. in physics. When his father was later forced to give up his post at the university, the family moved to Soviet Odessa where Schein senior had accepted a post as professor of mathematics. In 1936 the family then fled to Czechoslovakia to escape Stalin’s reign of terror. Yet the ever growing threat of Hitler’s expansionism made them flee once more – this time to Chicago via Zurich.
Learning for life. This eventful childhood was formative for Schein who says that it was mainly in children’s playgrounds that he first learnt to observe and analyse, not to jump to foregone conclusions about strange cultures and to rapidly assimilate.
Academic career. Schein studied psychology at the universities of Chicago, Stanford and Harvard after which he joined the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he was made a professor in 1964.
Famous author. Schein has written dozens of books, one of the most famous of which is “The Corporate Culture Survival Guide”. His latest book is “Helping: How to Offer, Give and Receive Help”.
Photo Caption. Management guru Ed Schein is a venerable visionary who now proclaims the demise of the alpha male leader.
