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Keys to implementation
This edition of “Organization Matters” was written for HMI World by Miles Shore, MD, Bullard Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, Visiting Scholar at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and Senior Consultant and Director at Harvard Medical International; and Bruce Solomon, MBA, MPH, HMI Senior Consultant.
The literature on leadership tends to focus on heroic leaders. How did Winston Churchill, Abraham Lincoln, and Mahatma Gandhi excel at what the literature calls “transformative” leadership? The literature says relatively little about leadership in ordinary circumstances that focuses on doing the world’s work, the kind of leadership experienced by most leaders in most circumstances, so-called “transactional” leadership.
“Transformative” and “transactional” are terms used by James MacGregor Burns,a political science professor who wrote the first big book on leadership. Because Burns was a political scientist he used examples from politics to illustrate his ideas.
He said that transactional leaders trade favors for political support. “If you vote for me, I will get the street in front of your house repaired.” In contrast, transformative leaders try to understand what motivates followers—their aspirations, higher needs, and values. The transformative leaders use this deeper understanding to solve higher level problems, to convert followers into leaders, and in doing so address social problems at a more fundamental level, transforming society. Outside the political arena, the concepts of transformative and transactional leadership have taken on a life of their own.But wherever they are applied, transformative leadership tends to be much more highly valued than transactional leadership. Transformative leadership aims at decisive change of values, of ways of working, of the spirit and vision of the organization. Transactional leadership results in preservation and enhancement of the status quo, not fundamental change or improvement. The result is that ordinary people get very little help from students of leadership in solving the ordinary problems that, contrary to expectation, pose a great many challenges without leading to world-shaking transformations.
In recent years, the popular press has abetted the leadership literature in focusing attention on glamorous, transformative leaders, many of them the CEOs of great corporations. The exploits of Jack Welch at General Electric, Lee Iacocca at Chrysler, “Hank” Greenberg at American International Group, and Carly Fiorina at Hewlett Packard, have been the stuff of legend. In fact, some have suggested that a style and substance lending itself to glamorization in the press had even become a prerequisite for leading a great company. These leaders were lauded for having a transformative vision for the company.
Recently, celebrity CEOs have encountered a variety of difficulties. Companies have not always thrived under a CEO famous for his or her managerial prowess. Widely touted visionary plans have failed, and bottom lines have suffered. Some of the outsized personalities in the corner office took on imperial trappings and precipitated shareholder rebellion. The use of company resources for personal gain on a gigantic scale has landed a few of them in criminal courts. As a result, the rock star glow around CEO expectations has begun to fade. The business press is now abuzz about a new wave of CEOs whose task is to run the company well, pay attention to the details of the business and focus on the bottom line—not togenerate feature stories about leadership miracles.
There are two fundamental problems with the heroic approach to leadership. The first is that transformative moments occur rarely in the life of most organizations. Much of the time, the substance of organizational life consists of routine activities: ordinary problems to be solved. Threats to financial stability must be dealt with, competitive challenges must be met, and strategic opportunities must be seized. Good people have to be hired, they have to be oriented, their performance appraised, and their complaints resolved. Most of all, what is planned must be implemented to improve the bottom line.
The second problem is that the leadership required to take care of such routine events and implement a successful strategy is not necessarily routine or commonplace. Organizing effective responses to ordinary challenges requires shrewd diagnosis, and a repertoire of skills assembled through training and experience. It involves keeping a talented group of associates working together, focused on the tasks at hand. Far from being routine, dull, or easy, keeping the show on the road is a demanding leadership challenge for which the experience of the world’s heroic, transformative leaders is of little relevance. It is unlikely that Winston Churchill could have run an ordinary company whose success depended on regularly meeting the demands of the bottom line. Loyal associates of Gandhi have said that it was extremely expensive to keep their visionary leader in his highly publicized simple life, spinning thread and living in ostentatious poverty.
Vision and the capacity to conceptualize great transformative schemes have been superseded by the ability to implement the details of decisions that underlie success. Talk of leadership miracles has been replaced by a concern with implementation of organizational plans. It has been recognized increasingly that some of the most dramatic moves of inspired leadership never come to pass because of failures of implementation. A new crop of leaders has been selected because they could make things happen through skillful implementation, rather than prowess at dazzling, visionary schemes.
Successful implementation demands two kinds of skills. The first set rests with individual capabilities; the second reflects the nature of the organization (see Sidebar). Here we'll focus on personal implementation skills and characteristics.
Leaders must become managerial
Leaders are supposed to provide a vision about the direction the organization should go. Managers are supposed to be more inward-looking, focused on the way in which things are done. The quick version of this distinction is: “Leaders know the right thing to do, managers know how to do things right.” To be successful at implementation, leaders must become, temporarily, more managerial. They must understand the details of how things happen in the business, and constantly track progress to ensure that what is supposed to happen actually does. This concern with the process of implementation can be turned into formal procedures, such as meetings of task groups, formal assigning of responsibilities, regular reporting on progress, and a host of other technical aids. But the involvement of the leader and his regular surveillance are essentials. This is in marked contrast to the idea that to get things done, you hire the right people and leave them alone. “Leaving them alone” is a fatal avoidance mechanism that leads to failure of implementation
More interest in outcome than in process
Implementation is typically in the service of a new or different way of doing things. As a component of the management of change, it involves abandoning what has been and substituting something new in order to achieve a better result. Doing that is much more difficult if there is a stronger attachment to how things are done than to the end result. The classic example is the “Gunfire at Sea” case described by Elting E. Morrison in Men, Machines, and Modern Times. In the days of sail, naval guns were mounted on carriages with a small wheel attached to gears to change their elevation. Since both the gunship and the target were moving up and down with the waves, changing the elevation of the gun rapidly enough was impossible. Further, the sighting mechanism was attached to the gun, which meant that the gunner had to step away before firing or lose an eye as the gun recoiled. As a result the accuracy of naval gunnery was abysmal, dependent as it was on the individual artistry of the gunner. In the 1890s, two officers, one in the British Navy, another in the American Navy, adapted already-available technology to develop “continuous-aim firing” that improved the accuracy of naval gunnery by 3,000% in six years. Both faced bitter opposition from higher-ups who were determined to stick to the traditional methods because they were wedded to the process of traditional firing rather than to the sizable improvement in outcome that was promised by the technical innovation. The American officer finally had to write to President Theodore Roosevelt to plead his case. He was eventually given the task of spreading the innovation throughout the American Navy.
Sharing the credit
Implementation is a group matter; typically a team of people working together is necessary for successful implementation of programs. A key to group effectiveness, particularly for leaders pushing implementation, is to be generous in sharing the credit for what is done. Success with both the process and the outcome must be distributed among all the participants. Being stingy with praise, and more particularly, withholding credit for the ideas and the work, is essential for wholehearted participation in the project. A good test of successful implementation is the extent to which leaders publicly acknowledge the team that did most of the work.
Relentlessness
Thomas A. Edison was regarded as an iconic genius in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Holding more than 1000 patents at his death, Edison is credited with inventing the incandescent light bulb, the phonograph, talking pictures, and a host of other technological breakthroughs. But he was no theoretician and his discoveries, although grandly transformative, were based on relentless implementation. They were the product of intensive, repetitive trial and error. He is said to have tried for months to find the right material for the filament of the light bulb. The work involved his relentless, repetitive testing of possible materials to find a filament that would work. In general, Edison experienced few bolts from the blue; instead his success was a testimony to the most dogged implementation efforts.
Resilience
Henry Ford’s first two auto manufacturing companies failed due to disagreements with investors and inability to make a car that would sell. Although his first working automobile, the Quadricycle, was finished in 1896, Ford failed to establish a viable automobile manufacturing company until he incorporated the Ford Motor Company in 1903. Guided by the radical notion of creating a car for the masses, it took him five more years to develop the model T, which propelled the company into international prominence. By 1918 half of all cars in the U.S. were Model Ts, and by 1927 when production of that model was halted, there were 15,000,000 Model Ts on the road. More than an efficient means of transportation, the Model T sparked a social and cultural transformation that is a distinguishing characteristic of U.S. culture and U.S. manufacturing prowess until today.
The success was a product not only of Ford’s transformative vision; it was equally the result of his being an inveterate implementer who was constantly and deeply engaged in his business. His involvement ranged from design, manufacturing methods, and marketing, to the housing and the behavior of his employees. Frustrated by repeated failures in his early days, Ford could easily have given up his ambitions; it was only his resilience in constantly tinkering with the implementation of his ideas that led eventually to vast success.
Willingness to fail
Underlying both relentlessness and resilience is a willingness to fail, or perhaps better put, a lack of fear of failure. Relentless and resilient implementers are confident that they will ultimately be successful. They may worry about failing but they are not paralyzed by it and therefore they persevere. It is impossible to implement anything complicated or innovative without the possibility of failure. Willingness to risk failing is thus essential for implementation to take place. The technology of implementation, the benchmarks, task assignments, monitoring, and supervision function to reduce worry about failure as well as being important in the actual process of implementation.
Further Reading
For more, see Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done, written by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan, and published by Crown Business, 2002.
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