Today, let’s contrast the consummate "noisy leader" of recent months—Carly Fiorina, late of Hewlett Packard—with the archetypal "quiet leader" as portrayed by Prof. Joseph Badaracco of Harvard Business School.
The question: What type of leader are you?
Let’s take Carly first, since she’s (invited herself to be) under the klieg lights. Her first confession to the Wharton interviewer about her book, Tough Choices, is that she first thought about writing a book (presumably a different one) five years ago. If you’re like many high-achieving types, the thought of writing a book may have crossed your mind as well: But I wouldn’t put much stock in a vague and nebulous desire to write a book (any book?) any more than I’d put stock in someone’s notion, utterly unaided by practice or disposition, to be a starting wide receiver in the NFL or to debut in concert at Carnegie Hall.
What comes through in Carly’s interview is a certain definitive insistence on vindication, presumably responding to a perceived sense of victimization. At the same time, articulate and expertly coached as she is, she expresses it, at least if you take her phrases literally, as selfless. Consider this exchange:
Knowledge@Wharton: If you had to boil it down, what is the most important quality for a leader?
Fiorina: The role of a leader is to see possibilities in people and in circumstances and to see both danger and opportunity before others do. This, to me, is all about helping people see things that they maybe can’t quite see yet and then helping them deal with it.
So it’s both all about people, but it’s also all about Carly.
Now, I would be the last to suggest that one can accomplish what she’s accomplished without an ego. Or without, by and large, sound judgment. So in fairness I offer this observation of hers, with which I concur 100%:
Knowledge@Wharton: What do you mean when you write that you haven’t lost your soul?
Fiorina: What I mean is hanging on to those things that I knew were important when I was a little girl. I watched my mother and father stay genuine, authentic people of character and integrity. […]
I worry that in business, when a scandal hits, we spend perhaps too much time talking about what new rule should be written and not enough time talking about personal ethics and character.
She just put her finger on something critical, and too often overlooked in our political discourse (Exhibit A being Sarbanes-Oxley): We worry more "about what new rule should be written" rather than how to encourage the right behavior to begin with.
But back to Carly. Surely the most controversial episode of her tenure at HP was the Compaq merger, which she championed and which the Hewlett and the Packard families, among other large stockholders, opposed. The Wharton interviewer credits her with "bring[ing] a lot of emotional intelligence to your management roles," yet if that’s true Carly seems strikingly tone-deaf on this seminal issue:
Knowledge@Wharton: On the issue of the Compaq deal: When members of the [Hewlett and Packard] families made their decision to oppose that merger, what made you decide to carry on, no matter what?
Fiorina: We had undertaken a very deliberative, thorough decision making process. We had reviewed every alternative; we had looked at every risk. It was the right move for the company. Once you’ve made a decision that you are confident in through a decision making process that is sound, you can’t change your mind just because people disagree with you. You have to carry on for the good of the company.
Now, I may not be as "emotionally intelligent" as the celebrated Carly, but it strikes me that if major shareholders with a long history of ownership of and commitment to the firm oppose a transformative event, it might be worth re-examining your premises, at least for a moment; it strikes me, in the vernacular, as "new news," or in securities-law speak as a "material development." Bulling one’s way ahead, and ignoring "just" the fact that "people disagee with you" seems a strident leadership stance.
Which brings us to the "quiet" leaders, almost by hypothesis more difficult to characterize, because they come in different stripes and tend to cruise under the radar, but let’s explore the breed. Harvard Prof. Badaracco began his research by recognizing that for the vast majority of professionals the vast part of their careers do not involve go/no-go decisions of the magnitude of the HP/Compaq merger. As he puts it,
"For some [I would say most] people they come along very, very infrequently. Does this mean these people are on vacation the rest of the time?" And, to elaborate:
"You also end up defining quiet leaders almost through a series of negatives. They’re not making high-stakes decisions. They’re often not at the top of organizations. They don’t have the spotlight and publicity on them. They think of themselves modestly; they often don’t even think of themselves as leaders. But they are acting quietly, effectively, with political astuteness, to basically make things somewhat better, sometimes much better than they would otherwise be."
Badaracco addresses quiet leadership as a study in lifetime preparation: To be outstanding at something, you have to do it so often that it becomes second nature and your instincts can kick in to lay the groundwork, so that your higher mental faculties—your intentions and your inspiration—can focus on transforming what you’re doing from competent to superb.
Without the years of experience, your highest mental faculties are consumed in making what you do merely competent, which is the land of trainees.
Badaracco’s world of "quiet leaders" may not be the glamorous, Carly Fiorna or Jack Welch world where every meeting Welch attended became the Jack Welch Show, and where the fate of HP was laid single-handedly at the feet of one individual, but I would wager it’s closer to your world and to mine.
We can still learn from the stories of the Carly’s and the Jack’s of the world, even if their tales these days seem more cautionary than inspiring; but we could also do well to pay more attention to recognizing, singling out, and rewarding, the "quiet leaders" in our own firms, who may not have a multi-million dollar book contract any time soon but who make a world of difference.
