Managers and Leaders • HBR CLASSIC pectations are aroused and mobilized, with all the dangers of frustration inherent in heightened desire, new thinking and new choice can never come to light.
Leaders work from high-risk positions; indeed, they are often temperamentally disposed to seek out risk and danger, especially where the chance of opportunity and reward appears promising. From my observations, the reason one individual seeks risks while another approaches problems conservatively depends more on his or her personality and less on conscious choice. For those who become managers, a survival instinct dominates the need for risk, and with that instinct comes an ability to tolerate mundane, practical work. Leaders sometimes react to mundane work as to an affliction.
Relations with Others
Managers prefer to work with people; they avoid solitary activity because it makes them anxious. Several years ago, I directed studies on the psychological aspects of careers. The need to seek out others with whom to work and collaborate seemed to stand out as an important characteristic of managers. When asked, for example, to write imaginative stories in response to a picture showing a single figure( a boy contemplating a violin or a man silhouetted in a state of reflection), managers populated their stories with people. The following is an example of a manager’ s imaginative story about the young boy contemplating a violin:
“ Mom and Dad insisted that their son take music lessons so that someday he can become a concert musician. His instrument was ordered and had just arrived. The boy is weighing the alternatives of playing football with the other kids or playing with the squeak box. He can’ t understand how his parents could placed business policy as the conceptual handle for establishing a corporation’ s directives.
In relying on strategy, organizations have largely overlooked results. Strategy is an offspring of the branch of economics called industrial organization; it builds models of competition and attempts to position products in competitive markets through analytic techniques. The aggregation of these product positions establishes mission statements and direction for businesses. With the ascendancy of industrial organization in the 1980s, management consultants prospered and faith in the managerial mystique was strengthened, despite the poor performance in the U. S. economy.
To me, the most influential development in management in the last 10 or 15 years has been Lotus 1-2-3. This popular software program makes it possible to create spreadsheets rapidly and repetitively, and that has given form and language to strategic planning. With this methodology, technicians can play with the question,“ What if?” Best of all, everyone with access to a computer and the appropriate software can join in the“ what if” game.
Alas, while everyone can become a strategist, few can become, and sustain, the position of creator. Vision, the hallmark of leadership, is less a derivative of spreadsheets and more a product of the mind called imagination.
And vision is needed at least as much as strategy to succeed. Business leaders bring to bear a variety of imaginations on the growth of corporations. These imaginations— the marketing imagination, the manufacturing imagination, and others— originate in perceptual capacities we recognize as talent. Talented leaders grasp the significance of anomalies, such as unfulfilled customer needs, manufacturing operations that can be improved significantly, and the potential of technological applications in product development.
Business imaginations are substantive. A leader’ s imagination impels others to act in ways that are truly, to use James MacGregor Burns’ s felicitous term,“ transformational.” But leaders often experience their talent as restlessness, as a desire to upset other people’ s applecarts, an impelling need to“ do things better.” As a consequence, a leader may not create a stable working environment; rather, he or she may create a chaotic workplace, with highly charged emotional peaks and valleys.
In“ Managers and Leaders: Are They Different?”, I argued that a crucial difference between managers and leaders lies in the conceptions they hold, deep in their psyches, of chaos and order. Leaders tolerate chaos and lack of structure and are thus prepared to keep answers in suspense, avoiding premature closure on important issues. Managers seek order and control and are almost compulsively addicted to disposing of problems even before they understand their potential significance. In my experience, seldom do the uncertainties of potential chaos cause problems. Instead, it is the instinctive move to impose order on potential chaos that makes trouble for organizations.
It seems to me that business leaders have much more in common with artists, scientists, and other creative thinkers than they do with managers. For business schools to exploit this commonality of dispositions and interests, the curriculum should worry less about the logics of strategy and imposing the constraints of computer exercises and more about thought experiments in the play of creativity and imagination. If they are successful, they would then do a better job of preparing exceptional men and women for positions of leadership.
— Abraham Zaleznik
harvard business review • march – april 1992 page 6