Like so many others in our field, I devoured the Isaacson biography of Steve Jobs this year the moment it hit the shelves. I was struck by just how far Jobs was from our current managerial ideal, being as he was notoriously difficult and exacting in his vision.
Many thousands of hours of managerial training have been developed and delivered extolling the virtues of participative and soft side management, individual dignity entitlement and releasing performance through collaboration. Yet here we are, faced with an incredibly gifted and hard-edged individual that has had enormous impact, and who would have not made it through 15-minutes of the training just described.
So which leadership style — supportive or demanding, stable or mercurial — is the right one?
The answer is: it depends on whether the path is charted or not.
The analogy here is: do you need a tour guide or an expedition leader? The operational leader is a tour guide — he uses the same paths, tools and research to take the team along a well-charted path. The supportive, collaborative tools have their place, and allow solid outcomes when the growth path is linear. A skillful operational leader provides stability and brilliance in execution on a defined field of play. When you hear words like SWOT, optimization, segmentation, and product line management you are in the zone of the skillful, stable leader.
When the terrain is completely new, when there is not a lot of precedent, then the situation demands more intensity and clarity of vision. An expedition leader has the end firmly in mind, but can take many paths, and deal with tremendous adversity in getting there. The skillful mercurial leader draws his team along with vision and drives them with high expectation and immediate feedback. He is taking us to place that only they can see clearly, and it is so compelling that we must go along. Consensus does us no favors on such a journey, we must come under the vision of the leader, learn it expand it, and be changed by it.
Quadrant 4 Leadership
In my ebook, The Growth Zone, (see the sidebar at right) I talk about the four quadrants for potential growth. I call the area of breakthrough innovation — the one where you both develop a new product and new customer segment — Quadrant 4. This is the territory of the expedition leader.
Steve Jobs routinely sought out growth in Quadrant 4. For example, he completely restructured the way music was purchased and consumed with iTunes. He brought both a new product and new customer base into the portfolio. His intuition, persistence and the iron will to wait until the pain of piracy was met by the promise of secure technology revolutionized the music industry.
Over my career, I have been on and led teams in an organization that has built several new industries. Just about every one of the breakthroughs was led by someone who had an intensity that made them hard to get along with sometimes, but this was offset by their white-hot clarity and ability to drive their point of view. I immediately recognized in the Jobs biography those traits among those who take business and technology to new places — the expedition leader or Quadrant 4 leaders.
Qualities of a Quadrant 4 Leader
- Brutal honesty – Does not hesitate to say exactly what they are thinking, and willing to “break some glass” if it’s the fastest path to getting to the truth.
- Polarity – not allowing any middle ground, things are either very good or very bad.
- Duality of view – able to hold and articulate the big picture and drill down to very intimate detail, and jump back up at will.
- Unstoppable – once locked on a course of action, unable to allow anything to get in the way.
- Enormous expectations – set high personal and organizational objectives, and will not back down.
- Inspirational – Able to craft a future vision that is so compelling, you just have to go there. Able to redirect your concerns back into their vision, and create a “force field.”
- Decisive – roots all ambiguity out of the organization, comes at problems directly and unflinchingly.
Developing the Quadrant 4 Leaders
You won’t find these in the core MBA curriculum because they are difficult to teach, and these qualities can mistakenly be seen as anti-team. You can identify the emerging Quadrant 4 leaders and cultivate them, as well as make sure that it’s OK to be a Quadrant 4 leader when the situation calls for it.
- Don’t mistake strong opinions for vision. Review your key programs and make sure that you have the right leaders in place. If it’s a push into Quadrant 4 (new product + new customer) and its not being led by a person with the attributes I listed above, you will have trouble on your hands.
- Challenge emerging visionaries. These white-hot leaders display their skills early in the their careers. One of my favorite HR directors used to say, look for momentum and direction, and find where it came from. It may not be the org chart leader, but it is still a true leader. It is important to find them quickly and challenge them with projects that will hone their skills.
- Tweak the usual career path. If you are lucky enough to have people that are tough enough to change the world because the world will not change them, put them into a position where that gift can be built on and employed. Left to a standard corporate development track, these people will be weeded out.
- When the project goes into operation, switch up the leadership. Business history is littered with breakthrough projects that have been extremely successful in the early years, only to be driven into decline by holding on to the successful strategy beyond its apex. Harvard professor Clayton Christensen has documented this as the “innovator’s dilemma.” How do you know when to switch up leaders? When the signs of category maturity start to show up, i.e industry analysts, competitors with similar offerings, profit margins under pressure, and most importantly when what you are providing routinely exceeds what the customer really needs.
It can be thrilling and terrifying to hand the reins to someone with an uncompromising vision. It feels like a terrific gamble, but it can pay huge rewards.
The next time you’re looking at moving into uncharted territory, it’s important to know who has the vision — no matter how difficult they may be on a personal level — that can pull you through the chaos and resistance.
Have you worked with a mercurial leader? What have you learned from them?
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I found this post interesting and I will be thinking about it for a few days in comparison to the book Multipliers… as well as my own experiences with leadership styles.
Thanks for stopping by jami, looking forward to your thoughts
The mercurial leader gets it done again and again, I think society has gone too soft and the consequences are devastating for companies. From my experience, too many companies are mired in analysis paralysis, touchy feely team building, and consensus building that leaves them competitively disadvantaged.
Mediocrity is the disease and “Quadrant 4 Leaders” are the cure.
Excellent, spot on post, Scott.
Chris, Appreciate your observation, and would add that good aligned actions are key – if we are going somewhere new, we need strong inspiring leaders with a firm grip on the vision.
when i think of mercurial leaders, i think of words like changeable, erratic……..sounds like so many of todays politicians doesn’t it?
Herm, I resonate with that, being a good engineer at heart, i like to imagine I have thought though all the contingencies, and have come to the best conclusions for the forward looking actions…then you go talk to a mercurial leader and pop, a new insight emerges and we all change direction. In the book they talk about how Ron Johnson confronted Jobs about how the apple store layout was all wrong, and then less than 10 minutes later after first blowing up, proceeded to change up the whole layout. Classic mercurial style.
Another example I saw recently is Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. Amazon also clearly revolutionized an industry and marched through new territory. This post by Steve Yegge (now with Google) is mostly about technical things, but it also gives a rare inside look at Amazon management under Bezos, and it sounds like he too is a mercurial leader. And, he was absolutely right about turning Amazon.com into a platform based on SOA. And, Amazon Web Services is arguably now the #1 Internet “cloud computing” infrastructure provider, which is a second revolution in itself that has nothing to do with books and music. At the time the Bezos “Big Mandate” probably sounded to a lot of people like a foolish detour from their core purpose.
http://www.businessinsider.com/steve-yegge-google-platform-rant-2011-10
https://plus.google.com/112678702228711889851/posts/eVeouesvaVX
“At this point they don’t even do it out of fear of being fired. I mean, they’re still afraid of that; it’s pretty much part of daily life there, working for the Dread Pirate Bezos and all. But they do services because they’ve come to understand that it’s the Right Thing. [...]
“That’s what Bezos was up to with his edict, of course. He didn’t (and doesn’t) care even a tiny bit about the well-being of the teams, nor about what technologies they use, nor in fact any detail whatsoever about how they go about their business unless they happen to be screwing up.”
Yegge also posted a great story about how he gave a presentation to Bezos and lived to tell about it:
https://plus.google.com/110981030061712822816/posts/AaygmbzVeRq
“Over the years I watched people give presentations to Jeff Bezos and come back bruised: emotionally, intellectually, often career-ily. If you came back with a nod or a signoff, you were jumping for joy. Presenting to Jeff is a gauntlet that tends to send people back to the cave to lick their wounds and stay out of the sunlight for a while.”
Brent, Thanks for stopping by, great addition.
From the links you attached, we get a great insight into the back room at Amazon, and it has all the drama associated with the mercurial leaders style. I love this section from your Yegge link:
But how do you prepare a presentation for a giant-brained alien? Well, here’s my second realization: He will outsmart you. Knowing everything about your subject is only a first-line defense for you. It’s like armor that he’ll eat through in the first few minutes. He is going to have at least one deep insight about the subject, right there on the spot, and it’s going to make you look like a complete buffoon
Interesting post on leadership and innovation by Scott Propp.