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