Dead Men and Headmen
Leading a team of competers
Copyright (c) 1998 by Harvey Robbins & Michael Finley
from TRANSCOMPETITION (McGraw-Hill/Business Week Books, 1998)
We've talked about problems within teams and problems between teams. We need to talk a bit about the problems of leading teams beyond competition.
Leading a team of strong competers often calls for a collaborative style of leadership. Collaborative leadership means being a coach, a cheerleader, a counselor, a taskmaster, a constant reminder of the goal, and a nag about best practices and good habits. More than anything it means constant attention and hard work. It is seldom glamorous and never glorious.
Anthropologist Marvin Harris describes the workday of a tribal taskmaster, or headman, of a group living way up on the Amazon:
Headmanship can be a frustrating and irksome job. Among Brazilian Indian groups such as the Mehinacu of Brazil's Xingu National Park, headmen remind one of zealous scoutmasters on overnight cookouts.
The first one up in the morning, the headman tries to rouse his companions by standing in the middle of the village plaza and shouting at them. If something needs to be done, it is the headman who starts doing it, and it is the headman who works harder at it than anyone else. He sets an example not only for hard work but for generosity. After a fishing or hunting expedition, he gives away more of the catch than anyone else; and in trading with other groups, he is careful not to keep the best items for himself.
In the evening he stands in the center of the plaza and exhorts his people to be good. He calls upon them to control their sexual appetites, work hard in their gardens, and take frequent baths in the river. He tells them not to sleep during the day or bear grudges against each other. All the while he carefully avoids making accusations of wrongdoing against a specific individual.
Only team members imagine that team leadership is an honor. Teams leaders -- effective ones, anyway -- know different.
The story of digit
Leaders of native groups are lucky in one way -- their culture defines the role they must play. In our more freewheeling society, where anything goes, leaders are left to their own devices.
When Dian Fossey worked with the highland Gorillas of Rwanda in the 1970s, she discovered each individual had a distinct personality, but each was committed to the happiness of the group. One young silverback, Digit, was so sociable he appeared on tourism posters, until he came to a grisly end at the hands of poachers.
It was Ian who found Digit's mutilated corpse in the corner of a blood-soaked area of flattened vegetation. Digit's head and hands had been hacked off; his body bore multiple spear wounds.
There are times when one cannot accept facts for fear of shattering one's being. As I listened to Ian's news all of Digit's life, since my first meeting with him as a playful little ball of fluff ten years earlier, passed through my mind.
Digit, long vital to his group as a sentry, was killed in this service by poachers on December 31, 1977. That day Digit took five mortal spear wounds into his body, held off six poachers and their dogs in order to allow his family members, including his mate Simba and their unborn infant, to flee to safety. Digit's last battle had been a lonely and courageous one. During his valiant struggle he managed to kill one of the poacher's dogs before dying. I have tried not to allow myself to think of Digit's anguish, pain, and the total comprehension he must have suffered in knowing what humans were doing to him.
The lesson of Digit's leadership is that one does not always lead from the front. Digit was the derriere garde of an extremely peaceable, collaborative group, whose existence was threatened by the encroachments of highly competitive poachers. Collaborative by nature, Digit gave the last full measure of devotion to buy time for his team.
Silverbacks and Graybeards
But it was not enough. Ron Heifetz, author of Leadership Without Easy Answers, describes the shortcomings of leadership that operates, like Digit's, in a closed system.
Heifetz described the communal lifestyle of the same highland gorillas Fossey lived with. The gorillas live in bands of 15 or 20 individuals, always with a dominant male called a silverback because of the color of his hair. The silverback is silver because he's older, and he's more experienced than the others in the band. The silverback is a living example of traditional leadership -- in charge because he's been around and knows the score.
He knows, for openers, where the berries are, and berries are the business highland gorillas are in. In the morning when the gorillas wake up, they all turn to the silverback for direction. Eventually he too wakes up, thumps his chest, and they all follow him to the desired berry-picking site.
The silverback performs five basic tasks of leadership:
The moment a new situation presents itself -- new market conditions, new technologies, changes in customer tastes, nuclear winter -- the team must adapt. A silverback response will seldom be adequate. Think how much more of a hero Digit would be, and less of a tragic figure, had he been able to galvanize a new and effective response to the poachers, like hiding. But gorillas don't hide.
Presidential Vomit
Heifetz compares President Bush to the murdered gorilla when Bush, a lifelong free marketer and believer in competition, was manipulated by the Big three automakers to perform the ultimate collaborative service to them.
In 1969 the balance of trade deficit was accelerating out of control, and carmakers here were frustrated that Japanese consumers were not snapping up Chevys and Fords. Big Republican donors that they were, they manipulated Bush into traveling with them to Japan, not to lay down the competitive gauntlet ("Open your markets to our cars and we'll drop our barriers to yours") but to beg their number one trade rival to please, please sell more U.S. cars in Japan.
It was a complete disconnect for Bush, advocating something he had opposed his entire career. The Japanese were puzzled by the new face Bush was showing them. The men from Detroit were puzzled that Bush was not a better salesman for them. Perhaps it was this ideological contradiction that led to a fevered Bush vomiting in the arms of Japan's prime minister at a state function. In the struggle to lead people who would not be led, to a mission he did not believe in, something had to give.
Broken lance
Excessive competition is poison to teams because it erodes their sense of pride. Taken to its extreme, teams members become not eaters of meat but the meat itself, too demoralized to function as they are trained and rewarded to do. When that happens, teams and the company they comprise go into a freefall together, the teams desperately needing a victory to sustain its sense of self, and the company blaming the teams for not being competitive enough. Recriminations, dismissals, and exhortations to extinguish the fires that are popping up everywhere only make matters worse.
Here is an example involving a friend of ours, whom we will name Lance. Lance is a divisional head for a Minnesota communications company. We know from our dealings of many years with Lance that he is a super-motivated, highly competent, very intelligent manager, with considerable personal charm.
But he is also an all-out workaholic Brute, desiring victory over his market competition so fervently that very often it is the most important thing to him. In the past 20 years he has headed a half dozen teams. Each time he has begun with a bright vision, and tremendous personal commitment. Seventy-hour work weeks are nothing to him, and he naturally expects, as we all tend to, that the people he surrounds himself with will share his rabid appetite to win.
Lance has worn out and depressed every talented group he has assembled. Everyone starts out as teammates and friends, high-fiving and pledging up-against-the-wall competitiveness. But no one can match Lance's foaming-mouth intensity for long, and the products he competes against are not much different from his own. So there is really no opportunity for "victory." Instead, blaming sets in, and it quickly becomes personal. Soon an important teammate loses his or her status as "go-to" guy or gal and from then on is seen as an impediment; or worse, someone consorting with the enemy. Something that began healthily is now quite sick.
Our own friendship with Lance has been downgraded over the years, because he has seen us, ultimately, as cut from a less sturdy bolt of cloth as himself. In a pointless war of self-destructive competitiveness, we were not go-to guys.
The future for Lance, for all his competence and industry, is uncertain. He lives in a wonderful big home, but he can't relax in it. He is on his umpty-umpth team now. They keep getting younger, and easier to inspire/program/dominate in the early going. But his reputation as an eventual cannibal precedes him into relationships even with these neophytes. None plan to be with him long, just long enough to pick up the credential and search for greener pastures -- among Lance's sworn enemies.
The secret to Lance's competitiveness may be buried in his past. He grew up in an alcoholic home, and his zeal to prove himself in the business world seems rooted in the misery he experienced as a boy.
But that story does not make him any more lovable to the teams he tyrannizes. Nor does it bolster the muscle tissues of a heart that has been diagnosed as overworked from the stress and tension Lance visits upon it.
Our hope for Lance is that he find his path to a more transcompetitive, less compulsive way of working. We suspect he will always be a supercompeter -- it is in his blood. But he must know somehow that a longer-term success, and life, are possible if he can master his need to be master.
Vertical Competition
People on teams engage in destructive competition. Whole teams do battle with one another, to no positive outcome. Worst of all may be the competition between lord and laborer that has deepened in the winner-take-all economy.
We call the competition for profits between managers and workers vertical competition. Executives negotiating huge salaries and bonuses argue that their leadership is the key to company profitability, and thus, job creation. Workers who have seen their salaries and job descriptions frozen, or worse, scaled back, wonder whose side of the game the CEOs are on.
In 1996 the average pay raise for top executives was 54 percent, compared to a typical 3 percent boost factory workers got, according to a Business Week survey. That means the average CEO paycheck, stock options, incentives and bonuses included, was 209 times that of the average worker. The average salary at 365 companies was $5.8 million.
At the top of the pack is a relative unknown, Lawrence Coss, chairman and chief executive officer of Green Tree Financial Corp. of St. Paul, Minn., who brought home $102.4 million last year based on 2.5 percent of Green Tree's pretax income.
Andrew Grove of Intel was second with nearly $97.6 million, followed by Sanford Weill of the Travelers Group, nearly $94.2 million; Theodore Waitt of Gateway 2000, $81.3 million; and Anthony O'Reilly of H.J. Heinz, $64.2 million.
The switch to more stock options was supposed to make CEOs seem tethered to their companies, assuaging stockholders about where the chief executives' priorities lay.
"It's a soothing lullaby, but shareholders are starting to wake up to some sour notes," the magazine wrote. "The CEO's gains often exceed the company's own strong year proportionally ... options have hidden costs and are diluting those gains to the tune of tens of millions of dollars."
CEO pay is a structural problem. In current business fashion, companies build themselves around superstar managers, and so feel compelled to pay superstar salaries. In a world where basketball players and rock stars make even more, it is not hard to justify.
But think of the morale problems such salaries inevitably cause. Even Disney, putatively the "happiest place on earth," is groaning under the weight of Michael Eisner's $200 million compensation package. Even the Wall Street Journal, no enemy to executive aspirations, wondered aloud about where the salary component of the Brute Cycle would end:
With even weak CEOs pocketing gigantic gains last year from the long bull market, boards -- and some chiefs -- have begin to ask the once unthinkable question: How rich is too rich?
Robert K. Cooper, Ph.D., advisor to organizational leaders and best-selling author of "The Performance Edge" and "Executive EQ"
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