Читать книгу The Return on Leadership - D. L. Brouwer - Страница 5

Reunion

One of the unintended consequences of the commercialization of the Internet is that it has democratized access to information that has always been locked away, for reasons of both practicality and security. While that’s interesting in a broad social sense, one of the very personal things that it makes possible is for each of us to look up people from our respective pasts. There’s no need to wait for the Class of ’74 to host a get-together when a quick search of Google, FaceBook and LinkedIn makes it comically easy to get back in touch with pretty much anybody.

Like many people, I’ve looked up old college roommates and business colleagues, or in this case, a guy I used to fly with in the Navy. His name is JP Kelly, and for a few years in the early 1980s he was my crew pilot, meaning I flew with him and two other guys, a lot. At the height of the Cold War, our job was to launch from the flight decks of US aircraft carriers in search of the bad guys – Soviet cruise missile-equipped attack submarines in the western Pacific and Indian Ocean.

On a whim, I decide to look up my old Navy crew. My search rapidly turns up a JP Kelly in an online phone directory. He lives in southern Maryland, about an hour south of DC. Since I live in northern Virginia, about an hour west of DC, and considering the fact that we haven’t spoken in decades, this is an incredible stroke of luck. From what I remember of JP, I doubt that he is a leading adopter of social media, but I decide that Facebook and LinkedIn are worth a look. There’s nothing on Facebook, but when I search LinkedIn in December of 2012, I get a possible hit. But no, that can’t be him…a heavyset guy with close-cropped, thinning gray hair. No way.

I remember JP as he was in 1984, a young Navy carrier pilot with a “yeah, I’m that good” swagger and black, albeit gently receding, hair. Before clicking away to another page, I scroll down through his job history, and oh my god, there’s a naval aviation career, and it dawns on me. If he looks at my photo, he will also see, comparatively speaking, a heavyset guy with close-cropped, thinning gray hair where once a lean, dark-haired warrior stood. So it IS him, after all.

With some further digging, I ferret out JP’s current contact information and reach out to him. Yup, it’s definitely JP; he sounds the same over the phone as he did decades ago. A few weeks later, we meet at a local quarterly get-together of former aviators, many of whom work for defense contractors in the DC area. The LinkedIn photo has it about right, in that he’s older and the hair is definitely thinner, but JP is as jovial as always and still has that jet pilot/Corvette swagger. We hit it off immediately – really just pick up where we left off 27 years earlier. We are JP and DB, one half of the original Crew 11.

In my time in naval air, I flew with a lot of pilots, some good and some not so good. I flew with JP more than anyone else, and he was always on top of his game…one of the best, every day. As we talk, I learn that he stayed in the Navy for 26 years compared to my eight, and I’m sure he’s got some great, character-revealing sea stories to tell. I can’t wait to catch up.

Parallels

Over the next few months JP and I get together several times and begin to compare notes. We are reminded that we share a small-town upbringing in the Midwest, and all of the participation in sports and family and community that often comes with that. It’s interesting that even as kids we were on similar paths. We each found our way into directly parallel roles in naval aviation, JP as a pilot and me as a naval flight officer, a role that is equal parts tactician and navigator. When we first met in 1981, we were both new to the Navy and the fleet, eagerly stepping into our roles as junior officers for our first assignment to a front-line squadron. When our squadron tour ended, we parted ways and quickly lost touch, a commonplace outcome in the highly mobile military community before social media.

As we trade stories of how we’ve spent the past quarter century, an intriguing pattern begins to emerge. It turns out that after leaving the squadron in 1984, we’ve essentially lived parallel lives.

After we went our separate ways in 1984, JP continued in the Navy, building a lengthy career that included three command tours and an unusually fast climb through the highly competitive officer ranks. He finished his career as a captain, the Navy’s O-6 grade that is equivalent to an army or air force colonel. Along the way, he earned a reputation as a gifted leader by completing a “worst to first” turnaround as skipper of VS-37, a squadron that flew the S-3 Viking and specialized in anti-submarine warfare. He followed that tour with a “bonus” assignment as commanding officer of VS-41, where he led another successful turnaround in naval aviator training that was heralded as a model for the Navy. After that, while serving as commodore, Sea Control Wing, US Pacific Fleet, JP led the unprecedented deployment of all assigned squadrons following the attacks of 9/11.

I chose a different path, earning an MBA during my Navy shore duty at Texas A&M, leaving the military in 1987 to join IBM as a sales representative, and building a career in high-tech sales, marketing and product management. My parallels to JP’s career include involvement in three successful business turnarounds, and the eventual promotion to an executive position at CenturyLink, a Fortune 500 company with $18 billion in annual revenue.

As we trade stories, we eventually realize that in our parallel careers, JP in the Navy and me in high-tech services, we have encountered nearly identical leadership and organizational challenges. As we discuss those challenges, we find that we have taken strikingly similar approaches to developing leaders and turning organizations into dynamic, resilient winners. The similarities are downright eerie.

But here’s the deal. The more we talk about what we’ve done, the less certain we are about why we’ve seen the successes and failures that we have. We have lots of entertaining anecdotes, but as we’re talking it through, it’s tough to discern a central, consistent theme. We struggle to isolate our basic premise of what works and what doesn’t, in a way that is repeatable, much less teachable.

Whereas most business leaders seem to have the problem of not being able to pinpoint exactly why their organizations are not successful, we have the opposite problem. We are struggling to figure out exactly why some of the organizations we’ve led are successful.

But then it dawns on us. If we were to design a test to isolate and quantify leadership behaviors and their impacts, we couldn’t have done anything more ideal than to live the lives we’ve led for the past 30 years. We’ve been unknowing lab rats in the perfect leadership experiment. And now, in order for us to make our success both teachable and repeatable, it looks as though we’ll have to work together again, this time as researchers, using our lives as the source for our experimental data.

Double Blind

Here’s the premise.

What if we could design a thirty-year, double blind experiment that examined the effectiveness of fundamental leadership behaviors? Our double-blind methodology would require us to begin by choosing two random individuals with identical backgrounds, oblivious to the fact that they are participants in a sociological experiment. We would establish a baseline of leadership behaviors by immersing our subjects in identical environments with a focus on teamwork, decision making and motivation, with no control over the mission, compensation or team composition.

After five years in this intensive leadership lab, making decisions that ranged from the mundane to life and death, phase two of our experiment would require that our subjects be separated and released into the world for the field portion of our study. Finally, after spending a significant part of their careers on completely separate, parallel tracks, our leaders would be interviewed, their results and methods studied, and the insights published.

In theory, this could be done with almost anyone. In practice, however, it would be nearly impossible to find a patient, deep-pocketed organization to fund the research, not to mention two people with virtually identical backgrounds who shared intense leadership environments at a formative age, followed by wildly diverse work settings with no contact between the participants. As luck would have it, two people who fit that job description, JP Kelly and I, ended up in the same cockpit in 1981, and through the relentless connectedness of social media, ultimately crossed paths again at the tail end of our careers.

Since our backgrounds are so similar, we had unknowingly cancelled out a broad range of socio-economic and environmental variables. It’s a happy and material coincidence that we grew up in towns in the Midwest, pursued liberal arts educations at large state universities (Kansas and Minnesota), chose a non-Naval Academy path into the Navy (the Reserve Officer Training Corps and Aviation Officer Candidate School), and ended up working and flying together in the same type of airplane, the same squadron, and eventually the same crew.

In contrast, since our subsequent workplaces were so different (carrier aviation vs. corporate America), we were able to test our methods in dramatically dissimilar settings. And since we had no contact for the decades between our military service and eventual reunion, there was no cross-contamination of methods. Under extremely trying conditions, we simply did what we believed was right and what we thought would work, based on our training, experience, and the challenges we faced.

So if this is more than simple coincidence, we should be able to measure it, right? Conventional wisdom says that’s not possible. Based on our personal experiences as leaders and advisors, the most common belief about leadership development in organizations is that it fails the fundamental litmus tests of both science and business.

From a scientific perspective, leadership best practices are viewed as immeasurable, non-repeatable, and unquantifiable. From a business perspective, leadership development, despite countless books and TED talks, is often viewed as a perpetual exercise in meeting the emotional needs of employees. It is seen as a touchy-feely endeavor that cannot produce quantifiable business benefits and, in that most damning of business critiques, simply isn't worth the effort.

JP and I know in our guts that those assumptions have to be fundamentally wrong, but we need to prove it.

Data

So, we have our doubts, and we’re not even sure where to start. When it comes to cold hard data, we really have nothing more than our admittedly subjective memories to fall back on. We’re convinced that we’re onto something, but where’s the cold, hard, objective truth?

What we need is a quick, cheap way to quantify and compare our parallel approaches and results. After thinking this through, I can’t believe that I’ve overlooked the obvious solution. Following my recent graduation from the Georgetown Leadership Coaching program, I had completed an in-depth certification for the Leadership Circle Profile™ (LCP), a rigorously researched and statistically validated assessment of 29 leadership “competencies” in eight related areas. It dawns on me that if JP were to complete the exact same assessment, we might just have our basis for comparison. Time for a little impromptu science.

In a matter of months, JP completes the certification training and as part of the class, completes his assessment as well. In each of our respective cases, we are assessed by the individuals who had been our direct reports, peers and bosses as we led challenging turnarounds. For me, it was during my time at a company called Savvis, where I spent three years leading the turnaround of a failed network business. For JP, it was the two years he spent as skipper of VS-41, a failed Navy training squadron.

Again, luck is on our side. We have stumbled on the perfect double-blind test of our methods and the associated results. We will use the same ironclad assessment to measure our individual impact on groups so diverse and distinct that, to this day, neither group is even aware of the other’s existence.

As for the assessment itself, the output is produced in several formats that we’ll cover in greater depth at a later point. For now, it will suffice to say that the most vivid format, shown on the facing page, is the Leadership Circle Profile™ (LCP) itself. In our case, our respective LCPs graphically illustrate the fact that our leadership competencies are similar – but there’s more to it than that.

Our profiles aren’t just similar – they are virtually “brothers from a different mother” identical, and on closer inspection, they are overwhelmingly positive. At the highest level, a profile showing higher percentiles in the top half of the circle is consistently correlated with positive outcomes across all organizations and leaders, and we’ve got a lot of high numbers in all the right places. When compared to a database of hundreds of thousands of leaders on a range of measures statistically correlated with positive outcomes, our scores are consistently in the 90th percentile or better. The profiles are visible evidence that in challenging real-life turnarounds, our system of leadership places us in the upper echelons of effective, authentic leadership.

How significant is that? Who better to comment than Bob Anderson, Chairman and Chief Development Officer at The Leadership Circle, not to mention the creator of the Leadership Circle Profile™ itself.