Executives wondering if they have what it takes to become a business leader don’t have to go far to find out. Just step into the business section of the nearest bookshop – and brace yourself.
There, amongst many, many titles, you’ll be able to discover 100 Best Ways To Be A Great Leader, the Top 10 Leadership Secrets, the 33 Lessons on How to Become A Proactive Leader and Successfully Build A Phenomenal Team, along with the 25 Leadership Skills Used by Team Leaders, and for the good of your soul don’t leave the shop without picking up the 60 Biblical Principles for Business, Leadership & Power.
Would-be leaders are pummelled with different recipes for success. Be disruptive! Be truthful! Be a visionary! Be innovative! Be confident! Be inspirational! Be bold! Be authentic! Be charismatic!
In practice, be thoroughly confused… Small wonder that a recent book written by Jeffrey Pfeffer, the celebrated Stanford University management thinker, is simply and brutally entitled Leadership BS.
The general impression arising from this avalanche of advice is that business leaders must be impulsive and fearless visionaries who constantly innovate, disrupt, and generally turn their businesses upside down on a regular basis. Challenge everything!
Or, perhaps, don’t.
A recent article in the Harvard Business Review does its bit for restoring some business sanity by stating that:
‘The best managers are boring managers’.
This refreshingly down-to-earth message is delivered by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, a professor of business psychology at University College London. He explains that in psychological terms ‘boring’ means ‘mature’ – and in a business leadership context that means an emotionally stable manager who is agreeable and conscientious, and who never engages in drama. These individuals understand that their role is not to come up with a new disruptive idea every day, but to manage well the people who report to them.
Most employees are normal people of average ability, who thrive on certainty and fret about change. Managing them effectively means using emotional intelligence to ensure that you remain calm and composed when those around you are upset, fearful or over-excited, and that you restore their emotional and mental equilibrium. For the staff, a manager’s key trait is integrity, which means that they are reliable, fair, and behave well when dealing with their people.
Professor Chamorro-Premuzic’s prescription would find favour at Google, where employees rate their managers twice a year using anonymous ‘upward feedback surveys’, and where the HR teams use stacks of ‘people analytics’ to measure how effective each leader is.
Laszlo Bock, senior vice-president of people operations at Google, said in a New York Times interview that the surveys work because they confront managers with their own shortcomings as perceived by the people whom they manage:
“We’ve significantly improved the quality of people management at Google, measured by how happy people are with their managers… for most [managers], just knowing that information causes them to change their conduct.”
Bock explains that Google believes it has cracked the key traits for effective leadership – predictability and consistency, which together allow the employees to do their jobs well without unnecessary top-down interference or drama:
“If a leader is consistent, people on their teams experience tremendous freedom, because then they know that within certain parameters, they can do whatever they want.”
Of course, Google remains one of the most innovative businesses in the world. Which suggests that having emotionally mature leaders allows the people at the front line of the business the freedom to come up with the improvements and fresh ideas that every business needs. These grounded managers are open to ideas generated by others, without feeling that their authority is being challenged or their position undermined.
So, where does that leave the notion of charismatic, visionary leaders? They too have their place, but – as usual in business – the important factor is balance. Professor Chamorro-Premuzic points readers to another great Harvard Business Review article, penned by Michael Maccoby, which describes how narcissistic and charismatic leaders can be very productive for businesses – and also very destructive, if they are allowed to run away with their ideas. Not everybody has the genius-level mind that lets egotistical visionaries like Steve Jobs get away with it.
A good business will balance brilliant with boring; putting all your faith in constant disruption will just turn your business into a nursery food fight.