Leaders Are Made, Not Born
That’s my personal conclusion, after six decades of experience. I recently realized it was also Vince Lombardi’s judgment. So, I guess I’m in good company.
What I have seen most often: leaders choose (sometimes reluctantly at first) to become part of the change they want to see—in their business, their nonprofit, their church, their school, in their community.
Inherent in the choice to lead
is the choice to learn how to lead.
From the early days as brand manager to becoming the CEO of Procter & Gamble. Progress happens over time.
Yet, in my experience, the vast majority of leaders who take on the responsibility do not receive nor seek out any education or formal training in leadership or management, either prior to or during the time they take on their leadership responsibilities.
How can we expect outcomes to be good when there is no formal training or learning in preparation for the leadership job?
Management education and training, of course, is available at colleges and universities, and increasingly online. But most management training does not address the capabilities and skills of leadership, which are different. As Peter Drucker and others have pointed out, leadership is about doing the right thing; management is about doing things the right way.
Leadership is about effectiveness. Management is about efficiency.
I believe good leaders must be “good enough” managers to be effective. But I’ve also learned that many efficient managers never become effective leaders.
So, if leadership isn’t taught in school, how does one learn about leadership capabilities and skills?
Do the reading.
I have read literally hundreds of books on leadership and strategy. There are hundreds of thousands available on these topics on Amazon alone. There are a few stand-outs on strategy.
I would modestly mention that Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works, which I co-wrote with Roger Martin, consistently shows up on lists of top-rated strategy books and has been a strong seller since it was published in 2013. Harvard Business Review also makes available the Playing to Win Strategy Toolkit, with videos, case studies, facilitator and meeting guides, to learn how to do strategy at your small business or nonprofit. While most strategy books are written by academics, Playing to Win is one of the very few written by a leader who actually practiced strategic choice-making, made the hard calls, executed the plans, and lived with the business and financial results.
A few other leadership and business strategy books I recommend include:
Blue Ocean Strategy, by Renee Mauborgne and W. Chan Kim
Competitive Strategy, by Michael Porter
The Innovator’s Dilemma, by Clayton Christensen
Good to Great, by Jim Collins
Business Model Generation, by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur
The Art of War, by Sun Tzu
On War, by Carl von Clausewitz
Finding a good book on leadership is even more challenging.
Business strategy has a basis in military strategy, a well-established, much-practiced, and long-studied discipline. Leadership books can be more anecdotal. Some of the best are biographical, describing what certain individual leaders actually did in certain situations, including crises— how and why. Others try to deduce leadership principles, strategies, and best practices from real-world cases. Warren Bennis, Jim Collins, Stephen Covey, John C. Maxwell, and John Wooden, among others, have written books of practical use to small business and nonprofit leaders.
At Procter & Gamble, we came across a simple, practical approach to the work of leaders. Three simple but powerful leadership tasks:
Envision. Empower. Enable.
Envision. What is winning? What must be accomplished to win? What must we change or do differently? Where are we going next? How and why? What is our goal, our objective?
Empower. How do we enroll, energize, and empower—motivate the team and the organization to go for the goal? To sign up for the journey and the challenging transformation ahead.
Enable. After we accept the goal, and personally commit to do our part to achieve it, we have to step back and ask what specific abilities, capabilities, and skills we’ll need—individually, as a team, and as an organization—to increase our chances of accomplishing the goal.
A.G.’s perspective: Leading with E’s
At P&G, three of us created a leadership-training course to teach these capabilities and skills to middle-level managers. Most of the organization worked for and with mid-level directors and associate directors, so they were the leaders who mattered most. The course was three days. One day per concept/capability/skill. Through a simple, “three-person learning” approach:
Teach the meaning of the concept to the group.
Break into smaller groups and ask each member to teach the rest of the group what she had learned from prior personal and professional experience about the relevance, importance, and re-application of the concept.
Still in small groups, practice the concept by role-playing case studies taken from actual P&G business unit work experiences.
At P&G, three E’s since turned into five E’s.
We added Engage and Execute. (We’ll explore the 5 E’s in an upcoming article.) This hands-on, practical course is now part of nearly all middle-manager training, and refresher classes are included in general management college, executive leadership, and the highest level leadership and strategy training.
Strong 5E leadership has contributed to many successes at P&G. And when we fell short and missed our goals, we almost always found one or more E missing. The goal envisioned was not clearly understood and fully bought into. Not every member of the team felt empowered. We didn’t enable one or more critical capabilities or skills we needed to enter or create a new business or transform an existing one.
Leadership capabilities must turn into leadership behaviors to deliver leadership or winning results.
About the author
A.G. Lafley is the former CEO of Procter and Gamble, who worked for decades in and with large public companies. Over the last 15 years, he has turned more of his attention, energy, and time to small businesses and nonprofit organizations. He currently serves on the boards of Omeza, Snapchat, Tulco, Hamilton College, and as the founding CEO of the Sarasota Bay Park Conservancy. A.G. is the author of two best-selling books, The Game Changer about innovation and Playing to Win about strategy, as well as numerous articles on leadership, management, and business strategy for Harvard Business Review.