Warren Bennis: Q & A on Today's Leadership. (Leadership).

Following October's joint virtual chapter meeting of FEI and the Institute of Management Accountants (IMA), FE caught up with Warren Bennis to ask some of the questions that didn't get asked.

Dr. Bennis is internationally known as a guru on leadership. In what he calls his 25-year "lifelong odyssey," he's interviewed in depth 150 of the world's greatest leaders. From the research, he's developed insights that he shares in publications (articles and more than 25 books), with students (as Distinguished Professor of Business Administration at the University of Southern California) and as a consultant to multinational clients in all industries.

Q: Talk about leadership for different times. How different is leadership -- leading our country in the new war, or leading the growth of business organizations through the stages they go through?

Bennis: It's like playing chords on a piano. There are certain contextual or cultural things, or things about the arc of an organization that would pull from a good leader a different set of chords or keys that [in] another time wouldn't be played. During a time of crisis, for example, New York City's Mayor Rudy Giuliani is a good example of someone who rose to the occasion -- while at other times during his course as mayor he wouldn't have been that way.

Besides that, there are five traits I believe all leaders have -- under all conditions. [Like] the basic chords or basic notes, these factors have to be there at all times:

1. Leaders must provide direction and meaning to their staff.

2. Leaders have to convey some sense of optimism and hope.

3. Leaders have to generate and sustain trust.

4. Leaders have to engage followers in shared meaning.

5. Leaders have to show results.

Those five things -- regardless of context, or the arc of where the organization is at any given time -- are the "givens." Certain things are quite different when leading a team; a group of creative or research types; a major league football, basketball or baseball team. And, while the five points above are essential, they're not [the only] sufficient requirements, characteristics and qualities of terrific leadership.

Q: What, then, would you say it takes to sustain leadership to make it last though the environment changes?

Bennis: The main thing is to develop terrific leaders. In other words, leaders have to be leaders of leaders. You primarily sustain this by developing leaders within the organization who can carry on. Every organization leader must create embedded, enabling systems where leadership development is part of the work of the organization and every leader.

There is always change [and always will be]. There are three pressing factors affecting today's leaders moving from the analog to the digital society: globalization, technology and the Internet, and human capital or brainpower.

Q: What specifically inhibits great performance?

Bennis: The quick answer is just to reverse my answers to the first and second questions about qualities and leadership development. Then acid to that: 1) Stifle dissent. 2) Provide mixed signals. Be unclear, fuzzy and ambiguous. 3) Don't reward leadership characteristics that are important; ignore or punish them. 4) Don't provide any budget for developing any leaders. 5) Don't make leadership an important part of an organization's agenda. 6) Just be mindless about it. Most organizations don't do a very good job developing leaders.

Q: Lets turn that around. What "positive" moves encourage investing in leadership?

Bennis: In every organization, there are certain people who are terrific mentors. Every organization knows [those] people under whom terrific exemplary leaders have emerged. Why not make a roster of those people? Why not provide some additional rewards to those people?

Another area is budget. What percentage of the budget is going into leadership development? Most firms that I know of that are doing a good job of leadership development provide at least 2-1/2 to 3 percent of the payroll for leadership development. Andersen Worldwide puts 6 percent of its revenues into leadership development and requires 130 hours each year of management development education for every person in the professional practice. Intel spends annually about $5,000 per person on leadership education.

Look at the budget and the reward system, and look to the consciousness and mindfulness that companies put into really developing leaders. One essential aspect of great leadership today is to develop leaders at every single level of the organization.

Q: How do we start that chain by identifying future leaders? Is there a rating tool, or a systematic approach for selecting those with the capability for the future?

Bennis: One thing is to seek out those individuals who have the adaptive capacity and ability to seize opportunities to continually learn and who make it a part of their everyday agenda. Given the complexity, ambiguity and uncertainty of the age we're living in, people have to exercise judgment to get ready for anything -- not just get ready for nothing.

Other traits include having a track record and business literacy. Do they really "get" what it is that the business is doing? Also, you can observe future leaders by how willing they are to understand and look at their mistakes and errors, and to embrace and learn from those errors. Finally, look at past results to see how they match up.

Q: To be judged a good leader, must a leader be liked?

Bennis: I don't think so. It's nice to be liked, but that isn't the goal of leadership. You'll notice I didn't include "being liked" as one of the five criteria for terrific leadership. There are plenty of good leaders who are/were not liked. To be hated is something else. I think most leaders -- regardless of what they say -- want to be liked. So, I'm not saying it's not a good thing to be liked, but if that's your only goal, you're not on a good path.

Q: How important is demonstrating respect or mutual respect for the leaders and those whom they lead?

Bennis: It's essential. If I were to boil down exemplary leadership into two phrases, they would be: 1) "Tell the truth," and 2) "Treat people with respect and dignity."

Q: Talk about being at the right place at the right time. That goes to the question of leaders being born or made.

Bennis: When referring to leaders being born or made, both Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt are good examples because each of these men went through incredible crucibles before they really emerged as leaders. That confirms the point that leaders are made, not born.

Churchill sort of jaywalked his way through life until he was 66 years old. That doesn't mean that the war made him a leader; it does mean that he learned a lot in World War I; [prior to] the war he made mistake after mistake. Churchill and FDR each learned through experience and experienced crucibles.

In FDR's case, he'd experienced polio, was defeated for public office on at least one occasion, and grew and learned through these experiences.

It gets back to what was said about learning. [Both Churchill and FDRI were people who kept learning. It wasn't that a situation appeared suddenly and then each emerged as leaders [or] warriors; they had each gone through experiences that really tested them.

So, too, for Washington, Lincoln or other great leaders who did not come out of the womb [a leader]. Nor was it necessary that their fathers or mothers were leaders. There was no genetic or sequential continuity. They each learned the hard way through crucibles, from which and out of which they became bigger and stronger people.

Q: Jack Welch, General Electric Co.'s former CEO, is touted as a model for great leadership, and yet, it's widely known that GE had some difficulties during his years at the helm. From his top spot, he was responsible for GE'S decisions, and yet as the individual leader he somehow managed to largely escape criticism. Can you comment on that?

Bennis: It's a very good question. There are two parts to that question. First is how the press/media dealt with Welch; he has terrific press, and he's certainly been "iconocized." He deserves a great deal of the praise he's been given, because, if you look at the company's results, it's probably the most profitable corporation in the world over the last two decades.

On his leadership: In the course of two decades you're bound to make a number of mistakes - how could he not? So do you evaluate a person on the mistakes he or she made or on the terrific things they've done? Now, that's really an innocent question, and I don't know the answer to it. I do think Welch's triumphs have outweighed the negatives.

There are pieces of GE that probably don't reflect Welch's philosophy of leadership, because as a company with over 400,000 employees, not everybody at every level can control behaviors. There've been problems with this global company that he couldn't have stopped.

Now, Welch is a very demanding, competitive and edgy person, and lots of people don't like working at GE because of its culture, which won't work for everybody. But he's explicit about what the culture is. There's a lot of good self-selection going on there. They want people who are self-confident, confrontational, edgy, highly competitive, active and energized.

Welch has repeatedly said there are four types of people at GE: 1) those who make the numbers and share the values, and they make up the top 20 percent; 2) those who don't do either, and they're out of there; 3) those who don't make the numbers and share the values; those people are going to have to be worked on, and if they don't make the numbers, they're out; and 4) those who don't share the values, but do make the numbers, are also out.

There are people who may not want to work there, or people where the culture doesn't suit them -- they wouldn't thrive in GE. You don't like that, don't work there.

Q: Looking beyond Welch, would you name names of people you see as the up-and-coming leaders?

Bennis: I don't like naming names, partly because those people could be in a business that tomorrow could be either acquired or out of business. There are several underplayed executives and I'd rather talk about it more generally.

I think the good leaders who are going to be great are those who really feel comfortable with mystery, doubt, ambiguity and chaos and who thrive in messiness. Leaders in the future are going to have to live in the world of speed and be comfortable with advanced technology. They'll have a bias towards action and the courage to take risks.

Also, future leaders who are going to succeed are those with a high degree of emotional intelligence, as we've seen in this latest terrorist crisis, the capacity to put caring and empathy [in the mix] are things that will be increasingly important. It's that sense of knowing "who you are," that's so marvelous about Mayor Giuliani, who'd been a very controversial mayor. It's clear that Giuliani has a sense of his own identity, and he showed an enormous amount of emotional intelligence in the New York City-national-world-global crisis.

Finally, to some degree, a moral compass -- some sense of integrity -- can never be overestimated. And, learning, learning. These are what should work for the future.