Great business communicators want to create change and they are not afraid to say so.

Why are some leaders considered so charismatic, inspirational, persuasive and just downright magnetic?  Powerful communication is key.

The most successful leaders manage to find that sweet spot between engaging others and creating shared meaning and understanding. They embody highly developed verbal and non-verbal skills, from body language to tone of voice. They also prepare very diligently for every major meeting, interview, presentation and speech.

Consider former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, a master communicator, orator and expert of the written word. His World War II speeches inspired his country and the free world. This was by no means happenstance; it was due to meticulous preparation. Churchill worked diligently at crafting strategic messages, rehearsing them repeatedly for maximum impact.

He also was a very visible leader. By regularly visiting factories and bomb-damaged streets, he boosted the public’s morale and leveraged the press to extend his message, further communicating his inspirational leadership.

Civil Rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. influenced the entire way we view freedom and equality. King was an incredible leader and activist, but why was he so effective? He wasn’t the only African-American leader of the day or the only one to suffer prejudice and racial discrimination in a pre-civil rights America.

The answer is, in part, his ability to communicate. He captured people’s imagination and painted a picture of how things could be. He inspired and influenced audiences when he spoke, making them want to take action.

Steve Jobs, the late founder of Apple Computer, radiated charisma, capturing the hearts — and wallets — of thousands of “Mac faithful” customers and employees. A key to his success was his zeal to change the world.  People found it intoxicating.

Great business communicators want to create change and they are not afraid to say so. When interviewing then-Pepsi President John Sculley for the role of Apple chief executive, Jobs asked him, “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world?”

Perhaps the most known primer on effective communication is Dale Carnegie’s bestselling book, How to Win Friends and Influence People. Financial success, Carnegie believed, is 15 percent due to professional knowledge and 85 percent due to “the ability to express ideas, to assume leadership and to arouse enthusiasm among people.” 

Carnegie’s approach was to teach people how to relate to other people and make them feel important and appreciated, not criticized or manipulated. He emphasized fundamental techniques for winning people over including seeing others’ point of view, admitting mistakes, saying “thank you” and remembering peoples’ names.

Great business communicators also respond to employee concerns by answering emails, holding lunchtime chats and communicating regularly and consistently companywide.

Cisco Systems, Inc., the $40 billion technology company based in San Jose, Calif., has created a culture of open communication with its more than 63,000 employees. John Chambers, the company’s chairman and chief executive officer, employs several tactics to ensure his organization stays connected.

Six times a year, he hosts “birthday chats” when Cisco employees celebrating birthdays are invited to meet him face-to-face.  He’ll listen and respond to the most hard-driving questions and later post the recorded chats on Cisco’s intranet for all employees to hear.

The company also communicates with employees through blogs, takes regular “pulse” surveys and uses videoconferencing to bring staff from around the globe together in one virtual room.

While Cisco can apply its own technology to foster two-way communication, even the modestly tech-savvy have access to a myriad of communication channels: emails, voicemails, memos, newsletters, blogs, podcasts, chat rooms, TV, video conferencing, instant messaging systems, employee meetings, focus groups, brown bag lunches, social events and social media.

Although communication can be a complex and overwhelming process, it is critical to organizational success. It is pivotal in socialization, decision-making, problem-solving and change management. The benefits are many,including well-informed employees who are aligned with the company’s mission, higher productivity and ultimately, a stronger bottom line.

In my upcoming posts, I’ll explore the changing landscape of communication, the proliferation of social media as well as crisis communication for reputation management.

“The way we communicate with others and with ourselves ultimately determines the quality of our lives.” — Tony Robbins

Many of us learned a valuable lesson about communication as kids when we played the “telephone game:” We told a simple story to a friend, who repeated it to another.  By the time the story reached the last person, it bore little resemblance to the original.

Isn’t that lesson just common sense, that people are capable of interpreting things quite differently from one another?

Perhaps, but consider the assumptions we make in business when we communicate to our clients, employees, suppliers and other key audiences.  Don’t we simply expect everyone to understand what we mean?  Don’t we expect our intentions to be abundantly self-evident?

Consider how long it must have taken this manager to construct such a complex thought and how few people ever will understand what it means:

“The core team is different than a steering committee in that its vision is more based on self-managing teams and alignment within the core contributors from each of the stakeholder teams, but without the need for senior leaders to be present for some potential approval.”

Great business communicators speak in clear and simple terms. This may be precisely why Jack Welch, corporate icon and former chairman and chief executive officer of General Electric, was legendary for demanding simplicity in written and verbal communications.

Welch was passionate about crafting and articulating his vision in direct terms to achieve concurrence. There was no place for clutter and jargon in a Welch business meeting. He would ask his managers to pretend they were talking to high school students, to focus on the basics.

Business Dictionary defines communication as a two-way process in which participants not only exchange information, but also create “shared meaning and understanding.” Yet, most people seem to define communication as “getting your point across.”

Gail Fairhurst, management consultant and professor of communication at the University of Cincinnati, believes too many leaders today “take communication for granted, dismissing it as something they do automatically.”

In her book, “The Power of Framing: Creating the Language of Leadership,” Fairhurst contends such leaders assume their messages always are received and understood when, in fact, they are not.

To be an effective manager and create a “shared reality,” she writes, there is nothing more critical than understanding how to frame an issue so that you are effectively communicating and motivating in a culturally sensitive manner.

Edward Bailey’s The Plain English Approach to Business Writing is peppered with examples of what he calls “businessese, bureaucratese and legalese” including this brainteaser:

“Each application shall be supported by a comprehensive letter of explanation in duplicate.  This letter shall set forth all the facts required to present to this office a complete disclosure of the transaction.”

Bailey decodes this enigma, rewriting it to say:

“You must send us the following:

• One copy of your application
• Two copies of a letter explaining the complete details of your transaction”

Effective communication represents a critically important way for businesses to increase customer satisfaction, engender trust and ensure employees get their jobs done properly.

Motivational speaker Tony Robbins goes as far as saying, “The way we communicate with others and with ourselves ultimately determines the quality of our lives.”

In my next post, I’ll look at some of the masters of communication and how they leveraged their powerful communication skills to command attention and connect to their audiences.

Southwest is widely recognized not only for delivering unique customer experiences, but also for creating a motivational culture.

In 1971, Herb Kelleher reinvented air travel when he founded Southwest Airlines as a low-cost airline with a sense of humor that encourages employees to have fun on the job and customers to have fun while traveling.

Now, 40 years later, Dallas-based Southwest Airlines is the largest airline in the United States based upon domestic passengers carried.  It’s also one of the safest airlines in the world and receives some of the highest marks in the industry for service, on-time performance and lowest employee turnover rate.

Just as with The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, Southwest is widely recognized not only for delivering unique customer experiences, but also for creating a motivational culture.

Kelleher, the founder and former president and chief executive officer, gained a reputation for hijinks, including singing rap tunes to his staff and poking fun at airline culture.

But he primarily is remembered for his management philosophy on service.  “You have to treat your employees like customers,” he said.  “When you treat them right, then they will treat your outside customers right.”

Southwest remains loyal to that philosophy. As current President and CEO Gary Kelly said, “Our people are our single greatest strength and most enduring long-term competitive advantage.”  And he promotes this philosophy right on the home page of his company website.

With more than 37,000 employees, Southwest Airlines “gets it” when it comes to teaching employees to deliver positive emotional experiences.

Kelleher’s tradition of encouraging fun on the job remains a priority.  The company realizes that if its people have fun on the job, they are more likely to come to work with a positive attitude and deliver superior customer service.

Southwest’s leadership also engages employees regarding the company’s finances and emphasizes their importance to the bottom line. The airline has an open culture of inclusion at all levels and employees are trained to understand their roles in providing great service and keeping costs in check.

Certainly there are other factors that contribute to Southwest’s success.  Among others, the airline maintains a solid business strategy with low fares and travel perks (your first two bags fly free).  The airline also awards stock options to employees to encourage a sense of ownership.

Colleen Barrett, president emeritus of Southwest Airlines, partnered with best-selling business author Ken Blanchard to write a new book on the airline’s best practices, Lead with LUV: A Different Way to Create Real Success (the LUV comes from Southwest’s stock symbol, LUV).

When asked if she worried competitors would steal her management ideas, Barrett demurred, saying, “the real magic isn’t in knowing the concepts, it is in doing the work.” For Barrett, “doing the work” is the underpinning of Southwest’s model of good management.

Seven key elements serve as the backbone for Southwest Airline’s employee motivation philosophy:

1)    A strong set of values: The top three are employees, customers and stakeholders.

2)    Employees come first: All employees are highly valued and respected as individuals, which in turn, engenders strong feelings of mutual belief, trust, and motivation to perform.

3)    Rewards and recognition: By profusely rewarding its employees for excellent performance, Southwest maintains loyalty, job satisfaction and high levels of personal motivation.

4)    Mission: “The mission of Southwest Airlines is dedication to the highest quality of customer service delivered with a sense of warmth, friendliness, individual pride, and company spirit.”

5)    Hiring:  The airline has a very stringent hiring process and goes to great lengths to ensure that they hire the best of the right candidates, often acquiring talent from outside the industry. Southwest qualifies a customer service candidate for employment based on attitude, not experience. The company believes that it can teach a person how to deliver quality service, but attitude must be brought to the job.

6)    Distributed Leadership: The company follows a broad-base leadership model, insisting on diverse and senior leadership at the top and throughout the management hierarchy.

7)    Performance Management: Three dimensions of performance are measured with rigorous tracking: Employee well-being, customer satisfaction and shareholder gain. Individual performance is rewarded and clear, immediate feedback is provided for performance improvement.

It is remarkable how training and a positive culture can contribute to a company’s bottom line.

Execution in business is all about linking strategy, people and processes to achieve results. The degree to which that is done efficiently and consistently can be attributed, in part, to how well employees relate to their organization.

The key to attaining engagement is to share your organization’s business strategy with all employees and align their performance objectives with it.  Those two steps will help ensure that the business strategy is known by everyone in the organization.

Employees who understand how their individual goals relate to the larger goals of the company are more likely to become engaged with their work and more likely to go the extra mile when circumstances dictate. The result: improved execution.

The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company and Southwest Airlines are organizations that excel because of their corporate cultures.  Both manage, track and communicate goals and link reward systems with individual and team performance.

Ritz-Carlton is one of the most widely known and admired names in lodging and an acknowledged leader in the upper-upscale and luxury segments. (The word “ritzy” even was coined after the brand to mean anything posh.)

While Ritz-Carlton connotes elegance and luxury, it also is synonymous with a high level of service. The company calls it “legendary service.”

Ritz-Carlton’s ability to consistently deliver outstanding service is based on the principle that emotionally engaged employees foster emotionally engaged guests and, ultimately, greater brand loyalty and repeat business.

Its orientation program stresses two points: New employees are told they now belong to an elite, best-in-class organization.  Second, company managers return the sentiment by telling their new charges, “We are lucky to have you.”

In another example of Ritz-Carlton’s devotion to delivering excellent service, the company established the following employee motto: “We are Ladies and Gentlemen serving Ladies and Gentlemen.”

The organization’s goal is to deliver “anticipatory service,” meaning employees are expected to anticipate guest needs and serve them before being requested to do so. At the same time, it strives to make employees feel empowered and engaged, not servile.

This culture is paramount. All Ritz-Carlton employees learn the brand’s gold standards and credo, which are read aloud each morning in staff meetings across the company and displayed on pocket-sized cards carried by each employee.

Ritz Carlton views its employees as critical to its image and ability to perform. There is a clear understanding that the corporate philosophy, commitment to service excellence and employee empowerment each drive customer engagement and loyalty.

Bloomberg Businessweek chronicles how Ritz-Carlton employees share true stories with guests around the world that illustrate how they go above and beyond to deliver outstanding service and create memorable experiences.

(For example, after learning that a guest suffered food allergies, a Ritz-Carlton chef in Bali located special produce in another country and arranged for it to be shipped by air to his hotel. Now that’s a wow factor!)

My next post will examine how Southwest Airlines developed one of the most successful employee cultures in American business.

“Strategies most often fail because they aren’t well executed.” — Larry Bossidy

From now through November 2012, there will be no escape from the daily churn of news stories and analyses about the presidential campaign. Will the highest post in the land be won by brilliant strategies or deftly executed campaigns?

The same question can be applied to other areas, including organized sports.  For example, what enabled the Dallas Mavericks to clinch a victory over the Miami Heat in the 2011 NBA finals? Was it great game plans or fantastic player performance?

Whether it be politics, sports or business, the question is compelling: Does strategy or execution drive results?

Of course, these are not necessarily mutually exclusive options. Strategy and execution, in fact, are intended to be integrated and balanced in a business plan.  Yet history shows one or the other tend to dominate, depending on leadership prejudices.

For decades, best-sellers extolling strategy and strategic planning crowded bookstore shelves and business school curricula. The pendulum swung back in recent years on the heels of high-profile business failures that prompted renewed interest in execution.

In 2002, Larry Bossidy, the retired chairman of Honeywell Corporation, coauthored the best-selling book. Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done, which declared, “Strategies most often fail because they aren’t well executed.”

Another execution acolyte, David P. Norton, author of The Execution Premium: Linking Strategy to Operations for Competitive Advantage, claims that fewer than 10 percent of all business strategies are effectively implemented.

Strategy, according to Norton, is a top-down process, and translating strategy to operational terms is the core of effective strategy formulation.

Yet for many CEOs, strategy is the hallmark of executive leadership. CEOs, after all, are visionaries, not implementers.  They readily confess that they view the world from 30,000 feet, not ground level, where the work gets done.

Strategy determines the direction their business will pursue, and CEOs are the captains of their ships.  But every sailor knows that it takes muscle, discipline and know-how to keep a vessel on course and, in the event of a storm, prevent it from sinking.

Execution determines whether the good intentions and promises of a strategy can be translated to results and profits. The key is to mesh strategy and operations to attain goals using targeted initiatives.

Uniting strategy and operations requires strong senior leadership.  Consider Isadore Sharp, founder and chairman of Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts, a luxury chain known for delivering exceptional personal service. 

“There was no vision, there was no grand dream,” he said, reflecting on the nearly 50 years since the first Four Seasons – a modest motor hotel – opened in downtown Toronto. “But there has always been a consistent thread and it propels us forward today, as we continue to grow globally, and that’s service.”

Defining and enforcing a company culture was one of four key strategic decisions made in the company’s formative years.  The Four Seasons culture is based on the Golden Rule: Treat others as you wish to be treated.

“A lot of companies talk about having a culture, but we knew we had to walk the talk if we expected it to thrive in our hotels,” Sharp said.

Sharp walked the talk himself, treating his employees as he would want to be treated and as he ultimately wanted his guests to be treated.  He did this, according to an interview in Business Week magazine, by creating “a reputation for service so clear in people’s minds that Four Seasons’ name will become an asset of far greater value than bricks and mortar.”

The Golden Rule proved to be an immensely powerful tool for aligning the work of individual Four Seasons employees with the company’s strategy.  For example, every employee is empowered to resolve complaints by treating guests with the same care they would expect to receive.

Four Seasons distinguished itself, he said, “by hiring more for attitude than experience, by establishing career paths and promotion from within, by paying as much attention to employee complaints as guest complaints.”

Execution arguably is one of the biggest challenges facing organizations today. Without effective execution, no business strategy can succeed. CEOs need to own responsibility for execution just as they own responsibility for strategy.

I am beginning a new series on execution: How strategy and decisions move from concept to implementation

My Leadership Series highlighted the importance of leadership, core traits of effective leaders and some of the masters, from iconic billionaire businessman Warren Buffet – “the oracle of Omaha” — to the late Steve Jobs, cofounder of Apple Computer and its spiritual and visionary leader.

What makes these leaders and their organizations so successful is not just vision but the ability to execute.  That’s why I am beginning a new series on execution: How strategy and decisions move from concept to implementation.

“We’ve got a plan; now let’s get it done.” We’ve all heard this missive, which sounds simple enough in theory. In reality, even the good companies with smart CEOs sometimes stumble when they attempt to link people, strategy and operations.

Ten years ago, business author Jim Collins asked, “Can a good company become a great company and if so, how?” His best-selling book, Good to Great, attempted to answer the question, listing the following seven steps:

1. Appoint humble leaders who are driven to do what’s best for the company.  A perfect example is Costco CEO Jim Sinegal, who has achieved enormous profitability without losing touch with reality.  His nametag simply says “Jim,” he answers his own phone, and his office doesn’t have walls. Even more impressive, he reportedly earns an annual salary of $350,000 compared with millions paid to other large-company CEOs.
2. Reward great employees. In their best-selling management book, Execution: the Disciple of Getting Things Done, Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan urge companies to “reward the doers:” Shower employees who are effective with praise, rewards and recognition and make them examples for everyone else.
3. Confront hard truths without losing hope. Leaders must have faith that their organizations will prevail, regardless of the difficulties, while honestly confronting the most brutal facts at hand.
4. Decide “what makes you money, what could you be best in the world at and what lights your fire?” Then find a product or service that leads the organization to outshine all worldwide competitors.
5. Nurture a culture of discipline. Great companies build a culture of disciplined people who engage in disciplined thought and who take disciplined actions, operating with freedom within a framework of responsibilities. In a culture of discipline, employees do not have “jobs,” they have responsibilities.
6. Use technology to accelerate greatness.  Technology is an accelerator of greatness “already in place, never the principal cause of greatness or decline.”
7. Keep the “flywheel” spinning: This refers to the cumulative effect of many small initiatives. In building greatness, there is “no single defining action, no grand program, no one killer innovation, no solitary lucky break, no miracle moment.” Rather, the process resembles relentlessly pushing a giant flywheel in one direction, turn upon turn, building momentum from consistent efforts until there’s a point of breakthrough.

When he embarked on his book, Collins and his team studied 1,435 companies, searching for those that made significant performance improvements during a sustained period.

They selected Walgreens, Phillip Morris, Pitney Bowes, Abbott Laboratories and the former Gillette Company (which merged into Procter & Gamble in 2005), among others, and in the process discovered common themes that challenged many traditional notions associated with corporate success.

They found that great companies do not necessarily require a superstar CEO, the latest and greatest technology, innovative change management or even a well-oiled business strategy.

Instead, the success of Collins’ great companies was built on a corporate culture that “rigorously found and promoted disciplined people to think and act in a disciplined manner.”  In other words, great companies need to execute well.

Ironically, some of Collins’ 11 great companies subsequently failed, including Circuit City Stores, the retail appliance and technology giant that declared bankruptcy during the 2008-2009 recession and subsequently closed its 567 U.S. stores.

George Whalin, president and CEO of Retail Management Consultants, said management mistakes over the previous few years combined with the recession brought down Circuit City.

“This company made massive mistakes,” he said, citing the decision to get rid of veteran sales people.  Without an effective sales team, Circuit City could not execute on his primary mission: to sell more goods and provide excellent service.

Another has-been is Fannie Mae, formerly a publicly traded enterprise that was supposed to keep money flowing to mortgage providers.

An investigation in 2004 found that Fannie Mae misapplied account standards, suffered from poor internal controls and incentivized executives to manipulate earnings to achieve profit goals.  Four years later, it was placed in federal receivership by the U.S. Treasury to avoid insolvency.

In the midst of the 2008 banking crisis, Wells Fargo was forced to accept $25 billion in federal Troubled Asset Relief Program, a.k.a. TARP fund, which caused the company’s stock price to plunge 80 percent.   Wells Fargo repaid the government one year later.

The company’s then-chairman, Richard Kovacevich, rejects all claims that his bank failed to execute its responsibilities, insists his bank did not need federal assistance and claims that TARP needlessly terrified investors and shareholders.

When companies fail, their strategies often are blamed as being all wrong. But strategy by itself is not often the cause. Strategies most often fail because they aren’t executed well.

Failed execution means things that are supposed to happen don’t happen. Either the organizations aren’t capable of making them happen or their business leaders misjudge the challenges.

Execution is equal in importance to strategy and goals. It is the critical link between aspirations and results.  For that reason, execution must be the overarching priority of every CEO and business leader.

“Before Adolf Hitler’s reign, people yearned for strong leadership. After Hitler, they dreaded it.”

Modern social psychologists are challenging the long-established conventional wisdom that charisma, intelligence and other personality traits are the key to effective leadership.

The concept of “charismatic leadership” is attributed to Karl “Max” Weber, a German sociologist and political economist who introduced it 100 years ago. His advocacy of “strong leaders as saviors” alternatively has been embraced during chaotic times and rejected in revulsion to the horrors imposed by dictators.

Social psychologists Stephen Reicher, S. Alexander Haslam and Michael Platow explore this dichotomy in their paper, The New Psychology of Leadership, published by Scientific American Mind magazine in 2007.  “Before Adolf Hitler’s reign, people yearned for strong leadership,” they observed.  “After Hitler, they dreaded it.”

They point to a new “psychology of leadership” that is based on the premise that leaders are most effective when they can induce followers to see the group’s interest as their own interest.  According to this theory, “no fixed set of personality traits can assure good leadership because the most desirable traits depend on the nature of the group being led.”

Fred Fiedler is credited with formalizing this approach, which he termed the contingency modeling theory of leadership in 1967 when he was a business and management psychologist at the University of Washington in Seattle.  According to this school of thought, there is no “best way” to lead or make decisions. Instead, the optimal course of action depends upon the internal and external situation.

Fiedler says leaders gain influence by maintaining good relationships with group members who like, respect and trust them. How this plays out depends on the circumstances and people involved and may require leaders to act unilaterally when faced with chaos and collaboratively when dealing with friendly peers.

While true contingency modeling involves complex analysis, some best-selling authors and executive search firms have simplified the theory to mean, “For every leadership challenge, there is a perfect candidate.”  Reicher, Haslam and Platow warn this interpretation delivers “mixed results” and supports charismatic models of leadership.

As an example, they point to the work of  James MacGregor Burns, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and political scientist who wrote Transforming Leadership and Leadership.  His work on “transformational leadership” in the 1970s “rekindled the view that only a figure with a specific and rare set of attributes is able to bring about necessary transformations in the structure of organizations and society,” they said.

As an alternative, Reicher, Haslam and Platow advocate this theory of leadership: “Strong leadership arises out of a symbiotic relationship between leaders and followers within a given social group and hence requires an intimate understanding of group psychology.”

The foundation of this theory is the concept of “social identity,” defined by British social psychologists Henri Tajfel and John Turner in the 1970s as “the part of a person’s sense of self that is defined by a group.”  In other words, groups give us a sense of social identity, a sense of belonging to the social world.

“When a shared identity exists, individuals who can best represent that identity will have the most influence over the group’s members and be the most effective leaders,” Reicher, Haslam and Platow said.  “The best leaders … not only seem to belong to (the group) but also exemplify what makes the group distinct from and superior to rival groups.”

Conversely, leaders who set themselves apart from the followers compromise their own effectiveness.  For example, Peter Drucker, “the man who invented management,” railed against the corrosive effects of excessive executive compensation.

“Very high salaries at the top … disrupt the team,” he said.  “They make people in the company see their own top management as adversaries rather than as colleagues.  And that quenches any willingness to say ‘we’ and to exert oneself except in one’s own immediate self-interest.”

Among other necessary attributes for leadership, Reicher, Haslam and Platow observed that “followers generally respect fairness in leaders, although what fairness means can depend on the followers.”  Conversely, even the appearance of favoritism can lead to “civil war in organizations, political parties and countries.”

Reicher, Haslam and Platow round out their “psychological of leadership” theory by stressing the need for leaders to “shape and define” their group’s norms, not just conform to existing norms:

“The most effective leaders define the group’s social identity to fit with the policies they plan to promote, enabling them to position those policies as expressions of what their constituents already believe.”

For example, Garry Wills in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Lincoln at Gettysburg, describes how President Abraham Lincoln “elevated the concept of human equality to a position of supreme importance and made it the touchstone of American identity,” they said. “The reshaping of American identity as centered on equality allowed Lincoln to unite and mobilize Americans around freeing the slaves – a previously divisive issue.”

The take away for business and other leaders?

First: “Leaders and followers must be bound by a shared identity and by the quest to use that identity as a blueprint for action.”

Second: “The development of a shared social identity is the basis of influential and creative leadership.  If you can control the definition of identity, you can change the world.”

In my next post, I will begin a series on the importance of execution.

“A leader is an earthly star.  He is the one human being in a hundred who shines out through the insufficient luminosity of human mediocrity and lights up the dark places of social obscurity.”  — Henry Edward Tralle, Psychology of Leadership, 1925

Do leaders harbor some mystical ability to command the loyalty of millions of people who become their acolytes or, at least, willing enablers?  Or can those skills be taught in business school? The answers may lie in the psychology of leadership.

The late management guru Peter Drucker famously is quoted as saying, “Leadership is all hype. We’ve had three great leaders in this century – Hitler, Stalin, and Mao.”  He also said dismissively, “The only definition of a leader is someone who has followers.”

The implication clearly is that leadership certainly is not an inherent force for good, that evildoers have proven time and time again that they are just as adept at harnessing the power of persuasion as are the forces for good in this world.

Moreover, none of the three ruthless dictators cited by Drucker are known to have received any formal leadership training.  Stalin received his last formal of education at a seminary, which expelled him as a teen-ager. Hitler dropped out of secondary school, never to return. Mao received an education in Chinese classical literature.

Yet no historian would challenge the notion that these three tyrants succeeded in attracting millions of adoring followers, many of whom laid down their lives at their leaders’ direction.  Despite a bloody legacy of slaughtering millions who opposed or offended them, diehard loyalists still sing the praises of Stalin, Hitler and Mao today.

Jim Stroup, author of the book, Managing Leadership, and the popular blog of the same name believes Peter Drucker was right about his assessment.  “Those guys had it all: vision, oratorical ability, relationship-building skills, charisma, relentless focus, outside-the-box thinking and follower-attracting magnetism.”

So what gave these devils such godly powers, black magic?

Stanley Milgram, a Yale professor, conducted an experiment during the 1960s to test the theory that most people, no matter their nationality or ethnic background, will obey authority figures even when they know the consequence will harm innocent people.

In his experiment, an authority figure dressed in a lab coat was able to convince test subjects to push a button that they thought delivered an electric shock to an innocent person in the next room. Two-thirds continued to give shocks at higher and higher voltage even when they could hear the screams from the other room.

No one actually was shocked during the experiment, which the test subjects who were directed to push the button did not know. Milgram concluded that a majority of people will follow instructions from authority figures even if the consequence is to inflict pain and suffering on others.

In their seminal paper, The New Psychology of Leadership, published by Scientific American Mind magazine in 2007, authors Stephen Reicher, S. Alexander Haslam and Michael Platow argue that “neither the enlightened nor dark rulers of this autocratic genre are true leaders.”

Dictators, like early monarchs, “can shape the behavior of even the most disparate collection of people using repression or rewards to secure assent or encourage compliance.”  However, such “leaders” can succeed only by forcing their followers to comply.  This isn’t leadership, the authors contend; it’s actually coercion.

“When we refer to leadership, we mean the ability to motivate people to act in concert: something that requires an internalized social identity,” said Reicher, Haslam and Platow. “This type of leadership is effective even when followers are not being watched; that is, they do the boss’s bidding even when the boss is away.”

I will explore this and other modern interpretations of the psychology of leadership in my next post.

When reflecting back on the top leaders of Sept. 11, 2001, the first names that come to mind are President George W. Bush and New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. But I would like to examine several lesser-known individuals who demonstrated leadership in response to the terrorist attacks.

Joseph Pfeifer, then a New York Fire Department battalion chief, was responding to a routine call when he saw American Airlines Flight 11, a Boeing 767 airliner, slam into the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 8:46 a.m. He rushed to the scene and became the first city fire chief to take command.

Pfeifer was interviewed earlier this year by Michael Useem, a management professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, for his book, The Leaders Checklist.  Asked about lessons learned from 9/11 and subsequent crises, Pfeifer rejects the conventional wisdom that leadership should be centralized during a crisis:

“We want one person to run the whole thing. And I think what we have learned since 9/11 and looking at those major events, that is not what leaders do. Leaders during a catastrophic event do more than just manage the event. They do three other things: They connect, collaborate and coordinate.”

Robert Scott, then president and chief operator officer of Morgan Stanley Dean Whittier, told a Harvard Business School audience in late 2001 that one leadership lesson is particularly clear: “If you wait for a crisis to begin to lead, it’s too late.  We had 2,500 people in Tower 2 but lost only six because of the evacuation plan we put in place.”

In a 2004 speech at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he received his MBA in 1970, Scott reflected on leadership, decision-making and values: “Start by knowing yourself and what you believe in. Learn to listen, to connect to people, and if you get lost, reflect back on your values. They will help you stay the course.

“Leadership is a journey. I’m both the same and different than I was 10 or 20 years ago. I’m the same in the decisions I made that were faithful to my personal standards. I’m different and I’d say better because of things I learned from people I work with and decisions that tested me.”

ReginaWilson, one of very few black female New York City firefighters, arrived at Ground Zero just as the towers were collapsing.  Seven members from her firehouse, Engine 219, died at the scene.  She climbed onto the rubble pile with so many others, painstakingly searching for survivors amid the suffocating smoke and debris.

Since 9/11, Wilson has emerged as a leading advocate of attracting more women into the N.Y.F.D., where only 29 of 11,000 firefighters are female.  She has talked to elementary schoolchildren, been interviewed on television and now serves as member of the department’s Recruitment and Diversity Unit.

“I think one of the biggest things that I hope for is not even so much as an African-American woman, but as a woman, period, is that people will be able to see our own personal sacrifices, and that history will show that men were not the only protectors of the city, but there were women there, too,” she said.

John Baldoni, author of Lead With Purpose, cites the example of Joseph Kearns Goodwin, who was born into a life of privilege in Concord, Mass., the son of Doris Kearns Goodwin, a Pulitizer Prize-winning biographer and historian, and Richard N. Goodwin, a writer who served as an advisor in the Johnson and Kennedy administrations.

Having graduated from Harvard in 2001, Joe Goodwin was about to begin a political job when the terrorists struck. The following day, he enlisted in the U.S. Army, a decision that eventually took
him to Iraq and later Afghanistan, where he served as a captain and was awarded a bronze star.

Writing in the Harvard Business Review Blog Network, Baldoni said: “Events do not define the leader; events create the context for the leader’s response.  When events unfolded, Goodwin responded by deciding to serve.”  The same is true of the other 2.3 million volunteers who put service ahead of themselves and fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, Baldoni said.

Interviewed on PRI’s The World on the eve of the 9/11 tenth anniversary, Goodwin reflected on his decision: “I felt that here I was, I had been afforded basically every opportunity that a free society can give you. I went to a great public school system. I went to great university. I had great parents. I grew up in a great town.

“I just felt that here I was, young, able, in relatively good shape; so it just seemed incumbent upon me to give something back to this great country that has given me so much. Especially
because it was evident then, after 9/11, the need was really there for that kind of service.”

Kenneth Chenault, who became chief executive officer of American Express Company in 2001 and continues to hold that position to this day, reflected on 9/11’s challenges during a meeting of the American Express Leadership Academy earlier this year in New York.

“The key is to balance decisiveness with compassion,” he said. “You cannot be afraid to make the tough choices, but you have to do it in a compassionate way.” The destruction of the World Trade
Center damaged the nearby American Express headquarters and killed 11 of its employees.

In the weeks that followed the terrorist attacks, Chenault made what he characterized as “difficult decisions” to protect American Express in the weakened economic environment. He shared the following four strategies that he said helped guide him:

1. Be visible: “The people you lead must see how you’re doing and how you’re reacting.”
2. Communicate: The second key is to communicate clearly and to give constant assurance to the people you lead. “You need to communicate on a consistent basis. Part of your job is to connect the dots.”
3. Stay calm: Another job of a leader in turbulent times is to stay calm. Leaders can be energetic and passionate, but they must not panic. “Maintain your composure. That gives people a level of comfort.”
4. Take action: Evidence of action gives comfort to crisis victims. “You cannot freeze up. You can’t allow the circumstances to stop you from acting.”

U.S. Navy Captain G. Mark Handy, the first military commander to reach Ground Zero in Manhattan, offers eight lessons on how to manage a crisis, all inspired by his experiences on 9/11 and its aftermath:

1. Assess the situation: “Figure out what’s happening.  The first report is almost always wrong.  You never get 100 percent of the facts, but a good leader knows how to make a good decision with most of the facts.”
2. Control your fear: “You’re going to be afraid.  It’s going to scare the daylights out of
   you.  If you focus on the mission and determine what needs to get done, that gives you the courage to overcome your fear.”
3. Take charge: “You’ll find yourself in a crisis situation where
   nobody will be in command.  People are looking for direction. By taking charge, you put control into the circumstances.”
4. Do what’s right, not just what’s legal: “You’ll find out that oftentimes what’s legal was developed in a vacuum of the circumstances you’re encountering.
5. Know your goal: “My goal was to account for all of our people and get them to support the fire department, the police department and the FEMA folks in whatever roles they assigned to them.”
6. Delegate: “You can’t do it all. You need to build trust among your people.  Put them in charge, and let them run with it.”
7. Be flexible: “The situation is going to change. You need to adapt. If you stay with the same game plan and make decisions based on outdated information, you can put your people and your mission in jeopardy.”
8. Know when you’re done. “At some point, the crisis is going to end and your role is going to be finished. Our time to disengage was when the Army National Guard came in and took over.”

I’ll conclude this blog by sharing three 9/11 “take-away leadership lessons” from Doug Dickerson, a leadership consultant and motivational speaker.

Dickerson’s first lesson is, “Ordinary people answer the call during extraordinary times.”  Thousands of first responders, including numerous off-duty firefighters, police officers and emergency medical technicians who made their way to Ground Zero, toiled around the clock for weeks searching first for survivors, then for victims.

The second lesson is, “Ordinary people make great sacrifices.” Volunteers from across America showed up week after week following the attacks to assist in the World Trade Center clean-up and
recovery effort.  Many who could not work in person helped by conducting bake sales to raise money for the victims, donating blood and making cash contributions.

Dickerson’s third and final lesson is, “Ordinary people give hope for a better tomorrow,” which he illustrates by saying, “Who are the leaders that make America great? Look around you. They do
not relish fancy titles or status symbols. They are ordinary people like you.”

Failing that, we must go through a process of elimination to identify the best leaders, discounting candidates who fall short on the key personality traits we believe they need to do the job. What are those traits?

Warren Buffett, the chief executive officer of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. who has become a legend in his own lifetime – “the Oracle of Omaha” — for his investment acumen, often is put on a pedestal as a business leader.

“Buffett may be the most trusted leader in the corporate world today,” said Todd Thomas, in an article for The Street entitled Why We Trust Warren Buffett: Leadership Matters. Thomas singles out three of Buffett’s traits: transparency, consistency and integrity.

“When asked why he invests the way he does, Buffett is not shy in explaining his thinking, even if it is contrary to the public view,” Thomas said, speaking of the Oracle’s commitment to transparency. “When he screws up, he says so.”

On consistency, Thomas notes: “Buffett doesn’t chase after the latest and greatest but uses a consistent formula for making his decisions.”  About Buffett’s integrity, Thomas simply says, “He does what he says he is going to do.”

The news media is not shy about assessing the leadership characteristics of politicians or business executives.  For example, the Phoenix Business Journal this summer published a roster of 25
Most Admired CEOs at local companies and ascribed seven traits it said are common to each: longevity, loyalty, work ethic, corporate citizenship, vision, humility, risk-taking.

College professors also get into the act.  In The Leadership Challenge, authors James Kouzes and Barry Posner of the the Leavey School of Business and Administration at Santa Clara University
in California, compiled a “top 20” list of characteristics that followers most admire in leaders (ranked in order of importance):

Honest, competent, forward-looking, inspiring, intelligent, fair-minded, broad-minded, straightforward, imaginative, dependable, supportive, courageous, caring, cooperative, mature, ambitious, determined, self-controlled, loyal and independent.

(You would be forgiven if you confused these characteristics with the Boy Scout Law. And you might wonder whether successful CEOs like John D. Rockefeller, Steve Jobs and Al “Chainsaw” Dunlap would make the grade, especially those known for uncontrollable tempers, obsessive micromanagement and psychopathic tendencies.)

Even the U.S. Army Field Manual sets forth personal attributes and core competencies in its Leadership Requirements Model.  Attributes include empathy, warrior ethos, military bearing and innovation.

Clearly there is a desire on the part of business, news media and the military to distill the essence of leadership.  Business wants criteria upon which to identify and hire senior leaders. The news media wants objective criteria in order to make judgments. The military wants to imbue leadership qualities in its prospective officers.

Just when a formula for success seems within reach, leave it to the late Peter Drucker, the “father of modern management,” to throw a monkey wrench into the process. He contended there is no such thing as “leadership qualities” or a “leadership personality.”

“Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, George Marshall, Dwight Eisenhower, Bernard Montgomery and Douglas MacArthur, were all highly effective — and highly visible — leaders during World War II,” Drucker said in a 1988 article in the Wall Street Journal.  “No two of them shared any ‘personality traits’ or any ‘qualities.’”

First, he said, leaders are people who work hard and can define and establish an organizational mission clearly and visibly. Second, good leaders consider their positions as a responsibility and never blame others when things go wrong. The final requirement of effective leadership is to earn the trust of people in the organization.

Shelley Kirkpatrick and Edwin Locke of the University of Maryland strike a compromise between Drucker’s school of thought and those who invest heavily in leadership traits.  In their 1991 article, Leadership: Do Traits Matter?, the professors conclude that while traits alone do not guarantee the ability to lead, certain characteristics help leaders acquire the necessary skills.

“Leaders do not have to be great men or women by being intellectual geniuses or omniscient prophets to succeed, but they do need to have the right stuff, and this stuff is not equally present in all people.

“Key leader traits include: drive (a broad term that includes achievement, motivation, ambition, energy, tenacity, and initiative); leadership motivation (the desire to lead but not to seek power as an end in itself); honesty and integrity; self-confidence (which is associated with emotional stability); cognitive ability; and knowledge of the business.”

Their contention is supported by Ronald Riggio in a Psychology Today article entitled Leaders: Born or Made?  Research, he said, shows that leadership is “one-third born and two-thirds made.”

“To expect that a person would be born with all of the tools needed to lead just doesn’t make sense based on what we know about the complexity of social groups and processes,” Riggio said,  adding that research suggests the following personal traits are advantageous for leaders: extraversion, assertiveness, risk-taking, empathy and an understanding of social situations and processes.

A University of Cincinnati ROTC primer entitled Leadership Traits and Behaviors, mirrors my conclusion on the subject:  “While sociologists, psychologists, strategists, historians, and business analysts have made significant progress in learning about leadership, there remains no single universally accepted formula for creating a great leader.”

All the more reason to explore the topic at greater length in upcoming blogs!