• Examples. Brief descriptions of the principles in action. We will contrast examples that destroy vitality with those that create it.
• Practices. Personal and team activities to test the principles and cultivate your personal and organizational effectiveness.
Second, we promise immediate, positive impact in your life if you read with a specific challenge in mind—your personal vitality imperative—that shares these characteristics:
• The challenge is important to you and the organization in which you lead.
• It requires resilient, self-supervising performance from people you lead.
• It requires collaboration across organizational boundaries.
• Success or failure is measurable.
• You are not already confident that it will turn out well.
At the end of each chapter, we’ll invite you to stop and ask yourself, “What do I now see about my vitality imperative, and what action will I take?”
Finally, we promise more days when your leadership feels like an energizing privilege and fewer days it feels like a burden. This promise applies wherever you feel responsible for the success of others: at work, with your family, and in your community.
Of course, our promises only matter if they are relevant to you. So, let’s contrast two forms of leadership so that you can decide if The Vitality Imperative is worth your time and attention.
Vitality or Not: Different choices for leaders, different experiences for employees
In her foreword, Anne Murray Allen makes the case for vitality. Anne’s research fits with our experience over the last thirty years. Energized, committed employees—those who would describe their workplace as exhibiting vitality—create superb, enduring performance. However, creating a Vitality culture is not for the faint of heart and begins with an important choice.
Leaders and philosophers have differed for ages on how to best produce results through others. These can be summed up in two models:
1. The Superior Leader: Put superior people in charge and follow their instructions.
2. The Connected Leader: Put the most connected people in charge and count on them to understand challenges, inspire commitment, and coordinate contribution.
The Superior Leader Model
The Superior Leader approach is, at best, benevolent domination. Many leaders have produced significant value doing exactly this. The results, however, are rarely sustainable after the organization grows enough to require self-supervising work. There are exceptions, but they tend to feature unusual competitive advantages like a unique technology, market opportunity, or a creatively disruptive business model—and even those eventually deteriorate.
Riccardo Muti, a world-renowned musician and conductor, serves as a good example. Muti is said to have musical perception so refined that his hearing is insured for millions of dollars. Currently, he is the music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and has held important posts in Florence, Philadelphia, Salzburg, London, and Milan. “Muti is brilliant,” says a fellow musician. “Not only his instructions are clear, but also the sanction: what will happen if you don’t do what he tells you to do. It works to a certain point.”
Despite Muti’s brilliance, his tenure at Milan’s famed Teatro alla Scala, known internationally as La Scala, ended badly. In 2005, nearly all of the seven hundred employees of La Scala signed a letter of no confidence to Muti. The letter said, among other things, “You are using us as instruments, not as partners.”
Muti resigned, citing “staff hostility.” He contributed to La Scala with years of musical excellence, and yet, he reached the limits of his way of leading. La Scala was ready to move on without him.
The Connected Leader Model
By contrast, the Connected Leader approach largely depends on leaders with unique gifts in the art of connection. These are women and men who intuitively grasp how to connect people to each other and reality in a way that reveals opportunity and inspires high performance. They tend to spearhead times of surprising achievement that leave people feeling proud and deeply satisfied.
Greg Merten, an influential leader at Hewlett-Packard from 1972–2003, is a great example of a Connected Leader. For much of his time at HP, Greg was a senior vice president responsible for Inkjet supplies. He oversaw operations in the United States, Europe, Asia, and Latin America. Greg felt strongly that a large multinational group of employees and supply-chain partners could operate as a community held together by shared purpose, values, and learning. During his tenure, the business results were extraordinary and turnover of high-performing employees was very low. When he retired, the employees of the HP site in Aguadilla, Puerto Rico engraved the following words on a parting gift:
Thanks, Greg:
For caring more than others thought was wise,
For dreaming more than others thought was practical,
For risking more than others thought was safe,
And for expecting more than others thought was possible.
Those are the words of a community of people who felt connected, cared for, and challenged to do great things.
As HP has since shown, you can damage and lose such vitality. Historically, the problem with the Connected Leader model is that it is dependent upon the presence of unusually gifted people. When those people depart, the deterioration of vitality often begins.
With The Vitality Imperative, we make connected leadership learnable. The principles and practices serve those who choose the Connected Leader approach to organizational success. It is an important choice between two very different methods of control: the personal brilliance of a few or the connected contribution of many—a choice that can literally change the entire course of an organization.
As one executive told us, “I got to a place in the growth of this company where I needed to change. We had succeeded because a few of us were smart, vigilant, and demanding. That was our era of ‘hands-on control.’ However, as we got bigger there was a lot of unsupervised work going on and hands-on control was not enough. We’ve spent the last few years changing how we lead so the company continues to grow. These Vitality principles have helped us enter the era of ‘remote control.’ It has been uncomfortable, sometimes difficult, and well worth it. We are getting more done with less time, money, and stress.”
The Damaging Impact of the Superior Leader Model
We have analyzed thousands of employee surveys across the world and conducted live interviews with employees on six continents. We have discovered that when the Superior Leader approach has outlived its value, the employee experience includes three damaging impacts: fear, mechanics, and manipulation.
1. Fear of embarrassment, fear of failure, fear of retribution, and general fear of disappointing someone in a position of power. When people experience fear, they tend to avoid conflict and suppress open dialogue. That lack of candor, as we will discuss later, is a major cause of waste, stress, and mistrust. Criticism and threat feel normal.
2. Mechanics are the rule. Rather than feeling supported by processes that make the right thing easy, people report how bureaucratic rules and habits keep them from getting work done. They feel dominated by out-of-date processes and measures that impede contribution. Those processes seem to lack a living spirit because they make employees feel like inanimate objects rather than human beings who want to help.
3. Manipulation results in widespread mistrust in the communication coming from leadership. Authenticity feels like the exception, not the norm. Leaders are falsely positive instead of open and honest