Page 278 - The extraordinary leader

The Organization’s Role in Developing Leaders • 255

tell me that I had performance problems?” To which the manager replies, “I
did not want to hurt your feelings.”
The healthiest feedback in organizations comes when people can freely
exchange views with each other. Max de Pree, the retired CEO of Herman
Miller, stated, “I now work with about ten people, all of whom see me as one
of their mentors. In order for a mentorship to work, it has to be a co-mentor-
ing arrangement. You can’t have a teacher and a student. You both have to be
a teacher and a student. That keeps me alive. I keep learning.” 19

Transform Complexity into Simplicity

We live in a time in which during the day, a typical manager receives 34
phone calls, hundreds of e-mails, 6 faxes, and spends 2 to 3 hours in meet-
ings. It is a time of data overload. We have access to seeming warehouses of
information on everything imaginable, including most business issues. Rather
than being forced to choose between one good alternative and one bad one,
most leaders find themselves in the situation of having to choose among at
least a handful of good alternatives.
It is no longer the choice between right or wrong tactics or strategy. The
choice is among multiple avenues and trying to figure out which is best. The
former Fortune magazine editor Thomas Stewart has written of those conflicts
in an article about the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce. After inter-
viewing all of the senior management, the people in charge of a new leader-
ship development center identified nine dilemmas leaders face:

1. Acting in a “get out with the troops” approach, versus a strong,
charismatic, highly visible manner.
2. Having an independent, entrepreneurial culture versus being a good
team player and acting interdependently with others.
3. Managing for the short term versus the long term.
4. Having a culture of high creativity versus one of discipline.
5. Trust versus change. The argument here is that every time you
institute major change, you risk damaging the feelings of trust that
people have for you.
6. Bureaucracy busting versus working toward economies of scale.
7. Emphasis on people versus high productivity.