Test Drive test drive | Page 27

Managers and Leaders • HBR C LASSIC Gifted people need oneto-one relationships. Eisenhower had General Connor, Carnegie had Thomas Scott. tolerance for emotional interchange. This interchange, inevitable in close working arrangements, probably accounts for the reluctance of many executives to become involved in such relationships. Fortune carried an interesting story on the departure of a key executive, John W. Hanley, from the top management of Procter & Gamble to the chief executive officer position at Monsanto.8 According to this account, the chief executive and chairman of P&G passed over Hanley for appointment to the presidency, instead naming another executive vice president to this post. The chairman evidently felt he could not work well with Hanley who, by his own acknowledgment, was aggressive, eager to experiment and change practices, and constantly challenged his superior. A chief executive officer naturally has the right to select people with whom he feels congenial. But I wonder whether a greater capacity on the part of senior officers to tolerate the competitive impulses and behavior of their subordinates might not be healthy for corporations. At least a greater tolerance for interchange would not favor the managerial team player at the expense of the individual who might become a leader. I am constantly surprised at the frequency with which chief executives feel threatened by open challenges to their ideas, as though the source of their authority, rather than their specific ideas, was at issue. In one case, a chief executive officer, who was troubled by the aggressiveness and sometimes outright rudeness of one of his talented vice presidents, used various indirect methods such as group meetings harvard business review • march–april 1992 and hints from outside directors to avoid dealing with his subordinate. I advised the executive to deal head-on with what irritated him. I suggested that by direct, face-to-face confrontation, both he and his subordinate would learn to validate the distinction between the authority to be preserved and the issues to be debated. The ability to confront is also the ability to tolerate aggressive interchange. And that skill not only has the net effect of stripping away the veils of ambiguity and signaling so characteristic of managerial cultures, but also it encourages the emotional relationships leaders need if they are to survive. 1. New York: Harper-Row, 1973, p. 72. 2. Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., My Years with General Motors (New York: Doubleday, 1964), p. 440. 3. Ibid, p. 91. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid, p. 93. 6. Dwight D. Eisenhower, At Ease: Stories I Tell To Friends (New York: Doubleday, 1967), p. 136. 7. Ibid, p. 187. 8. “Jack Hanley Got There by Selling Harder,” Fortune, November 1976. Reprint 92211; Harvard Business Review OnPoint 8334 To order, see the next page or call 800-988-0886 or 617-783-7500 or go to www.hbr.org page 11