Strategic Assessments (6)
Master Sun: “Leadership is a matter of intelligence, trustworthiness, humaneness, courage, and sternness.”
Du Mu: “The way of the ancient kings was to consider humaneness foremost, while the martial artists considered intelligence foremost. This is because intelligence involves ability to plan and to know when to change effectively. Trustworthiness means to make people sure of punishment or reward. Humaneness means love and compassion for people, being aware of their toils. Courage means to seize opportunities to make certain of victory, without vacillation. Sternness means to establish discipline in the ranks by strict punishments.”
Jia Lin: “Reliance on intelligence alone results in rebelliousness. Exercise of humaneness alone results in weakness. Fixation on trust results in folly. Dependence on the strength of courage results in violence. Excessive sternness of command results in cruelty. When one has all five virtues together, each according to its function, then one can be a military leader.”
Adaptation: Here we are offered the classical description of the personal qualities embodied by genuine leaders according Sun Tzu and his commentators over the last 100 generations or so. While the message may appear self-evident its adaptation may not be.
Some questions naturally arise as we try to adapt these ideas about leadership to the era of the modern corporation. From an organizational perspective one might ask:
- Is our approach to recruiting and managing our people smart?
- Do we sacrifice long term values like corporate cultural evolution and human resource development for short-term financial gains?
- Does senior management exercise sound judgment while giving employees insight into the decision-making process, or does it view itself as being beyond accountability to subordinates?
- Does the executive team deliver on their avowed and implicit commitments to candidates and staff?
- Does the organization have defined privacy policies for dealing with applicant, candidate, and employee data?
- If so, how is adherence to the specified procedures for compliance with the policy enforced?
- Does the company have a culture that extends loving kindness and compassion to employees or are the people used without consideration for their basic human needs such as a living wage and health care benefits while we tell them and our investors that our people are our most important asset?
- Do the line managers know the real difficulties the people who work for them overcome through their work, or are they out of touch?
- Is our organization’s leadership decisive or indecisive?
- Do employees regard senior management as hesitant to act and fearful of change?
- Do we take our work seriously or is our workplace a decadent adult playground and daycare facility that somehow makes money (high school with money)?
- Is the organization’s culture coercive?
- Is profit more important than people in our culture?
Application: In the modern corporation even posing such questions openly may well be regarded as a form of heresy. The highest value in commerce is supposed to be the profit motive.
Indeed, from a short-term investment perspective opportunism and greed are apparently good. Senior management is primarily responsible for maximizing the value of the shareholders equity. Unfortunately this is done all too often at the expense of other stakeholders in the enterprise (employees, alliance partners, vendors and perhaps even the national interests of the organization’s country of origin).
By contrast, Talent Strategists understand that their role is to deliver sustainable competitive advantage through the recruitment and selection process. This cannot be done in an environment in which management is so arrogant as to openly marginalize employees. So, whether such analysis is heresy or not, it is necessary for Talent Warriors to take these assessments into consideration.
The leadership may in fact be corrupt but still appear to be intelligent (no one would seriously consider Andrew Fastow or Jeffrey Skillings unintelligent but in retrospect it is clear that they were in fact untrustworthy). Hence the assessment of intelligence is to be counterbalanced by the assessment of trustworthiness.
If the leadership is trustworthy only in that it can be relied upon to maximally exploit people and situations for profit without consideration of the human rights and needs of the corporate ecosystem in which it operates, it cannot be said to be humane. So the leadership may be regarded as intelligent (cunning) and trustworthy (predictable) without being humane (compassionate).
This is where the question of courage enters into the assessment equation. Courage can be defined as a quality of the heart and a brave heart at that. Placing people over profit (or at least on par with profit) and balancing the conflicting needs of the disparate elements of a corporate ecosystem cannot be done without compassion.
In an era when profit is often regarded as the highest good, it requires courage to forego profit in the face of the larger interests of the community one operates within. It takes a brave CEO to face the board of directors and let them know that although it might be somewhat more profitable to outsource certain operations it would be a betrayal of the loyalty of the current employees who have helped to build the enterprise to do so.
Can such leaders succeed and survive in the era of NAFTA, CAFTA, and Sarbanes-Oxley?
There is an inherent tension in the business lives of today’s genuine leaders. The tension they face is between competing social values and business principles. The tension is that of the conflict of values versus value. Those that resolve this tension within themselves have the capacity to lead high potential people to the achievement of meaningful business and social objectives that yield substantial profit.
Those who fail to effectively resolve this inner tension may well appear to be productive leaders but they often run dysfunctional organizations that produce short-term returns but are doomed to fail over the long term because they succeed at the expense of the people who sustain the enterprise. Those who live by the sword… you know the rest.
As to sternness, it is not to be understood as mere authoritarian behavior. One may indeed be stern without being domineering. Sternness is the proper outlook for one who has been entrusted with the hopes and aspirations of others.
What it means is always keeping one’s eye on the possibility that laxness may infect the body politic of the enterprise. It means constantly examining one’s own heart and one’s own mind for departure from what duty requires of one in the moment and over the longer term.
If the leader becomes adept at self-criticism and transcends the limitations of self-interest and ambition, she can stabilize her mind in a state of constructive discontent that yields valuable strategic insight. By relentlessly looking for areas of potential weakness in her own strategy, tactics and operations the skillful Talent Strategist discovers the gaps in her formation before others can exploit them and closes the gaps before danger threatens.
Having applied this first to herself secretly and privately, she then applies it to her immediate circle individually. When the team begins to spontaneously apply the qualities of dispassion and impersonality to the discharge of duty and the administration of operations, the purpose of sternness will have been achieved.
Sternness is thus based on self-mastery. If the leader tries to get others to uphold a value that she does not personally exemplify through bullying people, they will become discontent and recalcitrant.
If on the other hand she only expects from her team what they themselves have seen her give them, then the value of self-criticism and mutual criticism will be openly embraced. Thus by her sternness with herself and her subordinates she will naturally infuse the entire organization with these values.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 15th, 2007 at 11:53 am and is filed under The Art of War for Talent. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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