I’ve been reading Bill George’s book, True North, his follow-up to Authentic Leadership. George is the ex-CEO of Medtronic, inventor of the pacemaker, which he grew in ten years from a $1.1 billion to a $40 billion company.
We tend to have an archetype in our head of leaders as infallible, certain of where they are going, moving from success to success. Even George’s phrase ‘True North’ reinforces that image. But, great leaders – authentic leaders – often don’t feel that way when they are in the middle of achieving great things.
Anne Mulcahy, the CEO credited with rescuing Xerox from its downward spiral, is a case in point. The emotional roller coaster of trying to keep people at Xerox motivated and pull the company back from the brink was so draining that, at one point, Mulcahy described to George, she was on the way home, drained, and had to pull over to the side of the road. She sat there, temporarily unable to move, and said to herself, “I don’t know where to go. I don’t want to go home. There’s just no place to go.”
The boxer Jack Dempsey once supposedly said champions get up when they can’t. Dempsey would have said Mulcahey ‘got up when she couldn’t’. And she is now widely praised as the woman who saved Xerox (a claim she would herself deny, as she credits a lot of people at Xerox with saving the company). That’s the test of an authentic leader, says George.
It occurs to me, then, that great leadership doesn’t always feel like that when you are in the middle of it. Mulcahey knew Xerox could go either way - off the edge of the cliff to bankruptcy or be pulled up out of its long dive just in time. You don’t know if you are going to win when you are in the middle of it. And you often doubt yourself. It’s only in retrospect you realize that whatever you did was the right thing to do and the best you could do. When it works, you become a hero. When it doesn’t, if you can get up and learn from it and go again, you’re still a great leader. Worse, when it works, but you are ousted or not given the credit anyway (think Carly Fiorina) you have to realize that doing the right thing doesn’t always mean career advancement.
Both Bill George and Carly Fiorina are coming to Leaders in London 2008 to share their recipes for great leadership, and for leading through and after adversity. George is now an academic at Harvard, running the MBA he created in ‘Authentic Leadership’. Fiorina, famously ousted from the HP CEO position by a boardroom coup, has since watched HP follow her strategy to become the world’s first $100 billion tech company, passing IBM to the number 1 slot in the process. She’ll be talking about sticking to the vision and taking the long view…and the tough decisions that get you there.
Posted on behalf of
Leaders in London
by
Phil Dourado of
The Leadership Hub
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