Leadership

Why do motivated managers often fail to follow through? Because motivation is not enough. Superficial and dependent on incentives, motivation gives up in the face of serious obstacles. For purposeful action taking at work, managers must engage a more powerful attribute, their willpower. The best already do, crossing a personal Rubicon to deep commitment. How that happens is the subject of studies by professors from the London Business School and the University of St. Gallen. The researchers find that managers commit for highly individual reasons but that five strategies can help enterprises create the right environment. The companies studied included large ones such as ConocoPhillips and Lufthansa and small ones such as Micro Mobility Systems of Switzerland. The managers who achieved their apparently impossible goals had in common an intense inner struggle to commit. Once their willpower was engaged, they were able to deal with setbacks and persevere. The best way to build persistent organizational commitment is bottom-up, on the foundation of personal ownership of and commitment to specific initiatives and goals. In the world of mobile employees, frontline entrepreneurship and constant, unavoidable organizational restructuring, corporate leaders must develop that kind of commitment if they want to see action and follow-through in their companies.

Companies have much to gain by actively touting their human resources successes. So why don't they?

Long-term focus, not cosmetic ethics initiatives, will regain the public trust.

Leadership has become the hottest topic in business. Companies see this hard-to-pin-down ability as essential to organizational success, and they want their executives to learn how to exercise it. As a result, they are investing heavily in leadership-development programs and honing eloquent statements about the importance of developing next-generation leaders at every organizational level. And yet these speeches and investments have often failed the companies seeking to create a pipeline of leaders. The authors have identified three pathologies at the root of many leadership-development failures. They cite outdated thinking about ownership of the efforts, a product-focused, quick-fix mentality, and make-believe metrics that measure activity rather than capability. The danger is that these pathologies will sour companies on leadership development, leading them to cut investment and go back to waiting passively for leaders to emerge. But that approach has failed in the past and will continue to do so. Companies that make leadership development a core business process can overcome the pathologies and prepare the individuals and teams they will need to take their organizations to greater heights.

In an article written well before Enron became a euphemism for corporate irresponsibility, the authors make the case that such misdeeds, so prevalent in recent months, are symptoms of a syndrome of selfishness that has taken hold of our business institutions, our societies and our minds. Drawing on history, literature, philosophy and management thinking, they argue that the syndrome is built on a series of half-truths & #8212; or fabrications & #8212; each of which has driven a debilitating wedge into society. Our narrow view of ourselves as “economic man” has driven a wedge of distrust between our individual wants and our social needs. A distorted view of shareholder value has driven a wedge of disengagement between those who create economic performance and those who harvest it. Our obsession with heroic leadership has created a wedge of disconnection between leaders and everyone else. The glorification of the “lean and mean” organization has driven a wedge of discontinuity between short-term and long-term goals. And the convenient, widely held notion that “a rising tide lifts all boats” has ratified a wedge of disparity between the prime beneficiaries of stock-price increases and the large numbers of people disadvantaged by the corresponding actions. The authors challenge and deconstruct each of these flawed premises and offer an alternative. Real prosperity, they say, combines economic development with social generosity & #8212; and that requires a new philosophy of social and managerial engagement.

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