Warren Bennis: leadership guru.

Warren Bennis's career has been extremely wide-ranging and has covered various areas. He worked as an educator, writer, administrator and consultant, and authored or co-authored many books on different topics. He has carried out highly respected work in the areas of small group dynamics, change in social systems, T-groups and sensitivity training, and during the 1960s became a recognised futurologist. Bennis wrote his first article on leadership in 1959, and he has become a widely accepted authority on the subject since 1985, when Leaders was published.

Life and career

Bennis was born in New York in 1925 and educated at Antioch College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). During World War II he served in the army, and was the youngest infantry officer to be involved in European operations. Later, he studied group dynamics, and during the 1950s was involved in the US National Training Laboratories teamworking experiments. His early field of work was organisational development.

Bennis, like Abraham Maslow and Charles Handy, both of whom he knew, was a great admirer of Douglas McGregor and his `Theory Y' approach to motivation. In fact, Bennis became very close to McGregor and was strongly influenced by him. His career path even followed McGregor's to some extent. Firstly, he was an undergraduate student at Antioch College while McGregor was President there, and later, in 1959, he was recruited by McGregor to set up a new department for organisation studies at MIT.

From the late 1960s, Bennis's career moved from academic research and teaching to administration for a time. He became Provost at the State University of New York (SUNY), Buffalo, in 1967, staying there until 1971, when he moved to take on the post of President of the University of Cincinnati.

As an administrative leader from 1967 to 1978, Bennis attempted to put McGregor's motivation theories into practice, and found the theory unworkable without some adaptation in the form of strengthened structure and direction. In his autobiographical An Invented Life: Reflections on Leadership and Change (1993), Bennis said that he felt a great sense of powerlessness as an administrative leader, despite the supposed power of his official status.

During the 1960s, Bennis became known as a student of the future, and predicted (with co-author Philip Slater in a March 1964 article for the Harvard Business Review called Democracy Is Inevitable) the downfall of communism in the face of inevitable democracy. By the mid-60s, he was predicting the demise of bureaucratic organisation. His 1968 book The Temporary Society explored new forms of organisation, advocating an `adhocracy' of free-moving project teams as a necessity for future organisations. This idea has since been taken up by other writers, such as Alvin Toffler and Henry Mintzberg.

In an adhocracy, responsibility and leadership are distributed to groups or task forces on the basis of the relevance of members' qualifications or abilities for the specific task or purpose of the group. For Bennis, adhocracy was an important concept as a counter to hierarchy, centralised control and bureaucratic organisation.

In Bennis's early book on leadership, The Unconscious Conspiracy (1976), he highlights how leaders can positively influence others to bring about change. His most distinctive ideas on the subject, however, partly grew out the broad, general response to a landmark Harvard Business Review article of 1977 by Abraham Zaleznik (then Professor of the Social Psychology of Management at Harvard).

The Zaleznik article was entitled Managers and Leaders--Are They Different? Bennis's research and writing were extreme in emphasising a complete, qualitative difference between management and leadership, and he drew up a listing of sharp distinctions that ended with the now familiar aphorism: "Managers do things right, leaders do the right thing".

While Bennis considers that managers can become leaders through learning and development, he is firm about the functional differences between the roles and the approaches involved, and the distinctions he draws echo throughout most of his writings on leadership.

The Leaders study

In 1979, on his return to research and teaching as Professor of Management at the University of South California, Bennis sought to unravel the lessons of his practical experience of leadership. He explored the subject through a 1985 serial study that was published as a book co-authored with Burt Nanus, called Leaders: the Strategies for Taking Charge (1985). While Bennis has written or co-written many other books relating to leadership, these largely expand upon the ideas developed in Leaders.

Leaders aimed to identify common characteristics among 90 successful American leaders who had all, the authors considered, demonstrated "mastery over present confusion" in their careers. The leaders ranged from an orchestra conductor to Don Croc, the founder of McDonalds, and included a baseball player and a tightrope walker, as well as the astronaut, Neil Armstrong. 60 were Chief Executive Officers in business, 30 were from the public sector, and all were white males apart from six black men and six women, who had to be sought out with some determination. The research was based on unstructured interviews of three to four hours, and some observation. It was Bennis's second book on leadership, selling over 300,000 copies, and is still considered an important text on the subject.

In Leaders, Bennis and Nanus identify four common areas amongst the participants, and these form the core of their ideas about leadership:

* Attention through vision--all had an agenda, an intense vision and commitment which drew others in. <N>The leaders also gave much attention to other people.

* Meaning through communication--all had an ability to communicate their vision and bring it to life for others, sometimes using drawings or models as well as metaphor and analogy.

* Trust through positioning--through establishing the position with a set of actions to implement the vision, and staying the course, the leaders established trust.

* The deployment of self through positive self-regard--the creative deployment of self is essential to leadership, involving an honest appreciation of oneself and one's own worth, and instilling confidence in others. Three components of self-regard are knowledge of own strengths, capacity to nurture and develop strengths, and ability to discern the fit between strengths, weaknesses and organisation needs.

Positive self-regard is related to `emotional wisdom', and five key skills in emotional wisdom are given as the abilities to:

1. Accept others as they are

2. Approach things in terms of only the present

3. Treat others, even familiar contacts, with courteous attention

4. Trust others, even where the risk seems high

5. Do without constant approval and recognition.

One quality of these leaders that Bennis and Nanus particularly distinguished was their way of responding to failure as a learning experience. Karl Wallenda, the great tightrope aerialist, was taken as a main example. The authors illustrate his manner of putting his energies completely into his task, thinking of failure as a mistake from which he could learn, and viewing this experience (of learning based on failure) as a new beginning, rather than the end, for a project or idea.

The style of leadership discussed by Bennis and Nanus is termed Transformative, in that it is said to have an empowering effect on others, enabling them to translate intentions into reality. A Transformative leadership style is described as one that motivates through identification with the leader's vision, pulling rather than pushing others on.

Four elements of empowerment are distinguished as:

* Significance--a feeling of making a difference

* Competence--development and learning `on the job'

* Community--a sense of inter-reliance and involvement in a common cause

* Enjoyment--capacity to have fun at work because it is enjoyable and involving.

The four major characteristics of transformative leaders identified earlier are linked to strategic approaches through which a leader

1. The creation of a compelling vision: a leader must develop and communicate an image, or vision, of a credible and attractive future for the organisation.

2. The translation of meaning into social architecture: social architecture is the intangible variable that translates the buzz and confusion of organisational life into meaning. While similar to culture, social architecture is more precise in meaning, in that it can be defined, assessed and, to some extent, managed. Three styles of social architecture are distinguished as formalistic, collegial and personalistic. A leader must understand social architecture, and be able to manage or change it to mobilise the organisation to accept and support the vision.

3. The position of the organisation in the outside world: positioning of an organisation is described as the process by which an organisation establishes a viable niche in its environment. It encompasses all that must be done to align the internal and external environments of the organisation. Trust, integrity and positioning are, it is suggested, all different faces of the ability to integrate those who act with that which must be done, so that the organisation comes together as a harmonious whole within its environment.

4. The development of organisational learning: good leaders are experts at learning within an organizational context, and their behaviour can help to direct and energise innovative learning within the organisation as a whole.

The end result of Transformative leadership is, Bennis and Nanus consider, an empowering environment and accompanying culture, enabling employees to generate a sense of meaning in their work. Higher profits and wages, the authors suggest, inevitably accompany this sort of culture, if it is genuinely established.

At the end of the book, five myths about leadership are identified and contradicted:

* That leadership is a rare skill--it is not

* That leaders are born--they are not

* That leaders are charismatic--most are ordinary

* That leadership can exist only at the `top'--it is relevant at all levels

* That leaders control, direct and manipulate--they do not. Transformative leaders align the energies of others behind an attractive goal.

A later, prominent book by Bennis, called On Becoming a Leader (1989), looks at learning to lead, developing leadership qualities and how leadership can be taught. It uses 29 well-known Americans as case studies to illustrate leadership qualities. Its main message suggests that becoming a leader involves continual learning, development and the re-invention of the self.

Bennis has since written or co-written many books and articles which expand upon and develop his ideas on leadership. His more recent works focus on the important roles of followers and groups, as well as on leadership. In Organizing Genius (1997), a collaborative work with Patricia Ward Biederman, Bennis almost returns to his roots in group work. The book looks at the history of seven well-known groups in action, including Walt Disney's animation studios, President Clinton's 1992 election campaign, and Lockheed's `skunk works'. Common features of these successful groups are highlighted, and the mutually interdependent relationship between great leaders and great groups is stressed.

In perspective

The importance of Bennis's work in the field of leadership is indisputable. Forbes magazine, for example, has called him the dean of leadership gurus. At the same time, his informal and easy-mannered style of writing and use of practical illustrations have made his books very approachable, and introduced his ideas to a broad, popular audience.

The management writer Stuart Crainer emphasises Bennis's high hopes for humanity, and the consequently very humane approach to leadership that accompanies these hopes. Firmly in the `made' rather than `born' school of leadership theory, Bennis views leadership as a skill that can be developed by ordinary people, at all levels, and that centres on enabling and empowering others rather than on control and direction. He is sometimes criticised as a romantic in his approach and has himself affirmed (in The Director of October 1988), that he is indeed a romantic, if that term accurately describes someone who believes in possibilities, and is optimistic.

Key texts

Bennis has written or co-written more books and articles than can be listed here, but some of his most important texts relating to leadership are given below.

The unconscious conspiracy: why leaders can't lead
New York: Amacom Press, 1976

Leaders: the strategies for taking charge, with Burt Nanus
New York, Harper & Row, 1985

On becoming a leader
Reading: Addison-Wesley, 1989

Why leaders can't lead: the unconcscious conspiracy continues
San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 1989

An invented life: reflections on leadership and change
Reading: Addison-Wesley, 1993

Organizing genius: the secrets of creative collaboration,
with Patricia Beiderman
Reading, Mass: Addison-Wesley, 1997

Managing people is like herding cats
London: Kogan Page, 1998

See also
The Management Thinkers: Abraham Maslow, Charles Handy,
Douglas McGregor and Henry Mintzberg.