An interview with Jean Lipman-Blumen, PhD

Citation

(2013), "An interview with Jean Lipman-Blumen, PhD", Cross Cultural Management: An International Journal, Vol. 20 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/ccm.2013.13620baa.007

An interview with Jean Lipman-Blumen, PhD

Article Type: Leadership From: Cross Cultural Management, Volume 20, Issue 2

Interviewers: Kristine Marin Kawamura, PhD; Lead Editor and Interviewer; Professor of Management; Director of MBA Programs; St. Georges University; Grenada, West Indies; e-mail: kristinekawamura@yahoo.com; Phone: (1) 310 567 7603.

Interview Date: 13 December 2012.

Background

Jean Lipman-Blumen is the Thornton F. Bradshaw Professor of Public Policy and Professor of Organizational Behavior at Claremont Graduate University’s Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management. Lipman-Blumen is Director and co-founder of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Leadership at the Drucker/Ito Graduate School of Management. She is President of the Connective Leadership Institute, a leadership development, management consulting, and public policy research firm in Pasadena, CA. Dr Lipman-Blumen has published seven books, three monographs, and more than 200 articles on leadership, crisis management, organizational behavior, gender, and public policy issues. Her book, The Connective Edge: Leading in an Interdependent World (Jossey-Bass, 1996) – paperback Connective Leadership: Managing in a Changing World (Oxford University Press, 2000) – was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. She wrote Hot Groups: Seeding Them, Feeding Them, and Using Them to Ignite Your Organization (Oxford University Press, 1999) with Harold J. Leavitt, Walter Kenneth Kilpatrick, Professor of Organizational Behavior and Psychology, Emeritus, Stanford Graduate School of Business, which was the American Publishers’ Association “Business Book of the Year” in the Scholarly and Professional Division. Other groundbreaking books include: The Allure of Toxic Leaders: Why We Follow Destructive Bosses and Corrupt Politicians – and How We Can Survive Them (Oxford University Press, 2005) and The Art of Followership: How Great Followers Create Great Leaders and Organizations (Jossey-Bass, 2008), which was co-edited with Ronald Riggio and Ira Chaleff. Dr Lipman-Blumen served as Assistant Director of the National Institute of Education, Special Advisor to the Domestic Policy Staff under President Jimmy Carter, and serves on several boards, including the De Pree Leadership Center, the National Women’s Museum, and the Ernest Becker Foundation. She is Board Member Emerita, International Leadership Association, and received many honors and awards, including an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from the University of La Verne and the International Leadership Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

Summary

Dr Jean Lipman-Blumen has researched and presented a new model for leadership called Connective Leadership that describes the connective and inclusive qualities needed for leaders to perform optimally and effectively in the Connective Era. In this era, people across the globe realize that they are leading in a time pulled apart by two contradictory forces, interdependence and diversity. Connective leaders use direct, instrumental, and relational sets of achieving styles when leading others – all of which may be practiced and improved. Connective leaders may also be called ennobling leaders when they identify and orchestrate noble enterprises in which others can participate so their lives and work have meaning. Dr Lipman-Blumen presents an ennobling vision for global and local peace, and she asks for individual, sectoral, and national commitments to make this happen.

Interview

You have proposed the need for a new model of leadership called Connective Leadership that is based on inclusion and connection. You state that this leadership model helps leaders to lead in a new Connective Era – when the contradictory forces of interdependence and diversity are altering the conditions under which leaders must lead. Could you describe these forces and the changes leaders are facing?

When I began to write about Connective Leadership – the first article was published in 1992 – I was looking at a new kind of leadership that would address the changes we were seeing in the world. The term globalization hadn’t been coined yet. I talked about interdependence, which is essentially globalization. The internet was still in its infancy. People realized that we were connected, but I don’t think they understood the depth and complexity of the new connections. There really wasn’t much talk about globalization in the ‘90s or before that time.

With world politics, if you looked at the way that countries were relating to one another, the world was changing. When the Soviet Union came apart, many countries spilled out of it. There were some countries that had been independent and others that hadn’t been before the Soviet Union amalgamated them. Now, they all wanted to be recognized as independent entities. They all wanted their own distinct identity. They yearned to be different and unique, to follow their own path. Diversity, therefore, talks about your own, special identity. It talks about your exceptionalism – your uniqueness – and “doing your own thing”.

Interdependence, on the other hand, talks about mutuality – how you overlap with others and where you connect to others. It asks, “How can we work together in some way?” It means not just doing things in your distinctive way, but finding something that works for all involved. That mode of thinking sends you in a very different direction.

As you can see, you end up with two very contradictory tensions, and they’re difficult to pull together. This is where connective leaders come in, because they can detect the areas of mutuality between parties who believe they have different agendas. A good connective leader can look at two groups that think they are in conflict and identify mutual goals.

For example, pro-choice and pro-life people would say that they really are at opposite ends of the political-religious spectrum. But a connective leader would bring them together by focusing on something they both care about – for example, pornography. The prolife group feels that pornography is sinful, whereas the prochoice group abhors pornography because it degrades women. Both groups see pornography as a negative and could probably begin to work together on that issue. Once we begin to work with people or groups about whom we hold negative views, these stereotypical beliefs cannot sustain themselves against daily reality. So, connective leaders can take groups that are at odds – and the more we want to be unique, the more at odds we are, by definition – and work to bring those groups together in ways that don’t involve compromise but, instead, focus on integration.

In my own work, it never seemed appropriate to think about connective leaders compromising between interdependence and diversity. Instead, I’ve used the term integration. Recently, Mary Parker Follet’s work has been called to my attention (As you know, Peter Drucker was greatly influenced by her work.). She had a brilliant insight. She explained that when you ask people to compromise, you are asking them to give up something that’s really important to them. When they acquiesce, they experience a terrible sense of loss. It is only natural to feel sorrow or grief about giving up something that has been central to our beliefs and values.

I would add something to what Follett said because I think it goes even deeper. If I have to compromise my dearly-held beliefs in order to work with you, if I have to give up my concern about women [for example], then I’m forced to question whether I am a hypocrite. All these years, I thought I was someone who cared about women’s issues. But now – in order to work with you – I’m agreeing to say, “OK, I no longer care what happens to women!” This leaves me not only with a sense of loss, but also a deep, gnawing disappointment in myself, because I feel like a hypocrite. So, the distinction between compromise and integration is really critical. How do we integrate our diverse needs – rather than compromise on issues that are important to us?

There’s another thing, too. When we force a party to give up something that’s important to them, in order to compromise, they become resentful.

And that builds and builds

That’s right. And Follett said something else. She said that just because someone is willing to give in this time, in this compromise, doesn’t mean the matter is forgotten. It will come up in every future time that person is asked to negotiate on related issues. Consequently, I think this leads to increased resentment and frustration between the negotiating parties.

Compromise is such a part of leadership and organizational cultures, if you think of the win/lose mindset which has been a foundation of, at least, American business

I know. Winning is largely about competition. For 25 years, I’ve been trying to find a student to do a dissertation on women and competition. We have close to 30,000 managerial profiles, at least half of which are female cases. If you look at the differences between male and female managers in terms of how they accomplish their tasks – what we call “achieving styles” – there are clear differences between males and females. We’ve identified one style (out of nine total styles) that, over time, shows a robust, statistical difference between the sexes. It’s competition.

I don’t know if you remember Jill Robinson? She was a student at CGU [Claremont Graduate University] in SBOS [School of Behavioral and Organizational Sciences] and Drucker [School of Management]. She and I did a paper on the gap between men and women with regard to the competitive style of achieving. We predicted the gap would close over time; but it hasn’t really done so yet. We used data from 1984 through 2002. The gap had narrowed, but not for the reasons that we thought. The women’s competitive scores remained low, and, let’s remember, these are self-reports. I believe this is important because women don’t like to think of themselves as competitive, but the world of business is always talking about competition.

Yesterday, one of my student groups reported on their analysis of annual letters to shareholders from CEOs in terms of achieving styles, and more specifically, the competitive style. “We’re better than any other organization”. “We’re the largest and the best”. “We have more, we’ve done more”. It’s a strong motif. When you want to connect with somebody, particularly in a globalized environment, it’s very hard to connect when it’s clear that person wants to compete with and outdo you. This doesn’t seem like the most positive strategy for working with someone as a partner.

You said that the gap in scores for the competitive style narrowed between men and women, over time. Was that because the men became more cooperative?

Yes, it’s clear that men are becoming more collaborative [another achieving style] than they used to be, and they are also somewhat more contributory [still another achieving style]. I think it’s clear why things are changing for men. Remember, the majority of our sample consists of people in management who have been to business school. Business schools have been talking about teamwork for the last 30 years. I think that the belief in teamwork has caught on. People are also more aware of the impact of globalization now than they were in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Both teams and globalization require more collaborative and contributory styles, more helping people and working together.

Working with people who are very different, and looking for the commonalities you’ve talked about?

Yes.

How does a Connective Leader bring people together without manipulating them?

Connective leaders identify mutual goals. To make it easier to talk about this, let’s look at two parties who are in conflict. A connective leader finds the areas they agree upon, just as the pro-choice and pro-life groups we spoke about previously. Connective leaders begin someplace where people are not in conflict, where they have an overlap in interests or goals. In the process of working together and seeing that they can do it successfully, the former antagonists begin to feel they could do other things together, as well. They begin to expand their areas of mutual concern.

When you have Connective Leadership as part of an organization’s culture, what kind of organization does this create?

There are, what I call, two imperatives of Connective Leadership. The first imperative is accountability, the willingness to explain how you made your decisions. That kind of leadership is key in organizations. I guess today you would call it “transparency”. Accountability comes to the fore when we don’t like the decisions a leader makes – when the decision has created a negative result. I think we want leaders who tell us the truth, do not sugarcoat bad results, but, instead, look at how they occurred and learn from their mistakes.

So they reflect? There’s a reflective quality with accountability?

Yes, there is a willingness at every point to be open and to let people see what they’re doing. There is nothing surreptitious or classified. The second imperative of connective leadership is what I call “authenticity”. I use this term in a slightly different way than it is commonly used. It still means authentic in the traditional sense, but authenticity in leadership has another component to it. It also demands that leaders put the good of the group above their personal wellbeing. That means leaders are there to help the group, not to advance their own agenda. That does not mean the leader has to suffer while the organization prospers. If the organization prospers, the leader should partake in that. But whenever the leader has to make a choice about what path to take, the path should lead to one goal: the wellbeing of the group. The leader should not put a desire for personal power or wealth above the group’s goals.

The connective leader asks, “What ethical and/or legal goal is that group trying to obtain?” Ethics is part of accountability. But authenticity also demands that you be ethical. If I put your wellbeing above my own, that says that I am an ethical person.

Do you have examples of leaders that you admire for their authenticity and accountability?

Yes, but most of them don’t come from the business world. I think that Václav Havel was a leader who understood diversity and interdependence. He was willing to put his life on the line, literally, to accomplish the goals of the group. He took the goals of the group as his own, but for him, the goals of the group were also his own.

Do you always see connective leaders at the top of the organization? Or are they everywhere throughout the organization?

Everywhere. I believe that organizations need leaders at every level. The larger the organization grows, the harder it is for the person at the top to know everybody. There are many people in organizations that are global, with thousands of employees, who never get to see the person at the top. They may see a video of the CEO on the company’s web page, but they don’t know him/her personally.

Even if you are the CEO of an organization, in the course of a day, you go back and forth between being a leader and a follower, [or, in other words,] a constituent. You’re not the one who’s calling all the shots. Maybe you call in your HR personand follow that person’s lead. I think someone who is a good leader articulates the goals of the organization and then entrusts the task to the HR person – then, the CEO becomes the follower.

You said in your book that we have a human need for leadership. Do we also have a human need for followership?

I think in the course of any person’s life that individual oscillates between being a follower and a leader. I think you have to learn how to do both things well.

Going back to that 1988 HBR [Harvard Business Review] article by Robert Kelley, “In Praise of Followers”, he talks about being a follower who is active and willing to speak out. There’s a lot of work on followership by researchers in more recent years that had a different take on it. I was trying to explore this in The Allure of Toxic Leaders: Why We Follow Destructive Bosses and Corrupt Politicians – and How We Can Survive Them (Oxford University Press, 2005). I first defined what I meant by toxic leaders before I asked the question, “Why do people follow them?” My main interest was in the followers, or what John Gardner called the “constituents” or supporters.

Could you briefly define toxic leaders and what you found? Why do people follow them?

The answer to why people follow toxic leaders is very complex. Toxic leaders meet many different kinds of needs and certain situations, like crises, bring those needs to the forefront.

A toxic leader is someone with a dysfunctional personality and a set of destructive behaviors, who has a negative impact on the organization and the people in it. The quick way of saying it is, “They leave you worse off than they found you”. This doesn’t have to be deliberate or malevolent. It can be through incompetence. For example, Charlie may be a charming leader, with whom you can “sit down and have a beer”, but whose incompetence drives the organization into bankruptcy. Despite his charm, he is still a toxic leader.

I think this issue of toxic leaders and followers really goes back to the existential dilemma we all face and the angst that comes from it. That is, the awareness that we’re going to die, in many ways, drives the human condition. I came to that realization a long time ago in a book I wrote called Gender Roles and Power (Prentice-Hall, 1984). I was asking, “Why would anyone enter into a power relationship and take the powerless role?”

The major reason for power relationships is that people are looking for someone who will keep them safe and promise them that they will not die. People know that they will die, but they want physical safety, nonetheless. For those of us who are willing to acknowledge that we’re going to die physically, we want to live on symbolically – or at least want to be mollified by the promise of living on symbolically. One major way we live on symbolically is to participate meaningfully in the world – to do something that changes the world in a positive way. This can be something small, like creating a neighborhood park in a poor community, or something huge, like finding the cure for cancer or outlawing nuclear weapons. It can be introducing care as an important lens through which to analyze organizations, societies, and human behavior.

So you’re giving examples of people finding a source of meaning for their lives, for their work, for their time, for their period of time here on earth?

Yes. People look to leaders to identify those noble enterprises in which they can participate so their lives do have meaning – so they can leave a legacy. They may die physically, but their words live on. The words of Martin Luther King, Jr, for example, live on through technology. We understand and recognize these words. We know what [Martin Luther King] has done, and it has meaning. The people who participated with him also feel their lives had meaning. I think identifying noble enterprises and inviting others to participate is the most fundamental contribution of leaders.

Do ennobling leaders have an ability to help others find meaning? Or is it the particular focus of their passion, the issue they focus on, that gives meaning to others? Which is more fundamental?

What’s fundamental is that you offer people a way to meet their need to live on in some way – symbolically, metaphorically, or sometimes physically. In certain religious cults, leaders have told their followers that if they do what they’re told, like drink the Kool-Aid, they’re going to live on together in some other wonderful place.

So they are manipulating that need, which is what toxic leaders do?

Yes, that can happen.

Still, the allure of toxic leaders goes beyond these existential needs. There are also psychological needs we have that begin early in life. As children, most of us are brought up by care-givers who keep us safe. That is a major responsibility of care-givers or parents – but there’s a tradeoff. We have to obey in order to be kept safe, and we know that the bargain for safety is obedience.

When we get to the teenage years, we think we are throwing this off, but it’s deeply imprinted in our subconscious. So, when a would-be leader tells us that he’ll keep us safe, we resonate to that. It’s like hearing familiar music and tapping our toes to it.

It’s in your cells

Yes, and then we’re swaying in our seats. Soon, we’re up and dancing around the room, because it speaks to a need. It’s getting in touch with a need that’s deep within us. That’s only one of many psychological needs, but a very powerful one.

We also have sociological needs – to be part of the group. To be part of the human group is terribly important to all of us. To be thrown out of the group is social death. We understand what social death is in a way that’s very different from how we understand physical death. We know the body dies and each of us has our own ideas about what happens after that. We can paint our own picture or accept any glowing picture that we want.

In social death, we can’t paint our own pictures. We see many examples. Social death is isolation. Solitary confinement in prison is the worst punishment you can give someone. Exile – saying that you are no longer part of this group – is the worst punishment that a country can impose on a citizen, other than physical death. The desire to be part of a human group is part of the decision-making that affects our lives.

It’s a way to feel safe?

Yes. But it’s also a way to assure ourselves that something positive will happen. The closer we get to the leader, the more clout we [think we] have. We feel we’re part of “the Chosen”.

I think that there are many reasons why people want leaders. And, yes, toxic leaders understand these needs and manipulate them.

You asked, “What’s the difference between toxic leaders using us and non-toxic leaders using us?” Well, most leaders need our help to accomplish their goals. If they didn’t, they’d go off and do it themselves. They need us to help share the burdens. I think the important difference between toxic and Connective Leaders is that connective leaders are always overt and ethical. They tell you why they need your help, instead of quietly manipulating you into helping them achieve goals. They try to articulate their goals in a way you can understand, appreciate, and support. They feel free to call upon you to ask for help, and they do it overtly.

So you used a term in your book, “De-natured Machiavellianism”. Does this fit in the conversation here?

Yes, indeed. We read The Prince, by Machiavelli, because there’s a lot of political wisdom in that book. We also feel uncomfortable with it because we realize that Machiavelli is showing the prince the ways he can manipulate people covertly so he can become wealthy and retain his power.

Connective leaders understand the wisdom, the political savvy, that Machiavelli had, but they are trying to capture that savvy in overt, ethical ways. They use relationships, but they engage the person whose help they need by openly asking them, “Will you join me in this? I need your help with this”. They ask with the understanding that you both have a common goal. Or they offer a reason why the other person should be willing to help the leader reach that goal. Connective leaders, through their authenticity and accountability, are always ethical. People can trust that they’re not getting drawn into actions that they later will find embarrassing or that may be ethically inappropriate.

In Connective Leadership, you’ve identified nine achieving styles. Could you briefly discuss what that these are, and why they are so important to the model? Could you please highlight the different styles in the model? For example, when you are talking about “instrumentalism”, when leaders ask people to participate towards a goal, that’s only one example of an achieving style, right?

Right. Connective Leadership is the overarching model of how leaders want to integrate interdependence and diversity in the Connective Era in order to be successful. Let me step back for just a moment. Leaders used to operate differently in what I call “the Geopolitical Era”, where we were bound by and brought together by geopolitical boundaries and ideologies. Although geopolitical leaders needed to cooperate with their allies, the person with the greatest economic and military power usually dominated. Leaders were authoritarian.

Today, we’re in the Connective Era – a time when the old geopolitical boundaries are breaking up and connections and networks link all kinds of groups, nations, and organizations. Connective Leadership is the overarching model of how leaders should behave – how they need to behave – to address effectively the new challenges in today’s world. I’m not trying to say that connective leaders are saints. They’re human beings who make mistakes, like the rest of us. But connective leaders admit their mistakes and learn from them.

It’s also not satisfying to talk about leadership in global terms without giving people a concrete way to be a connective leader.

To actually do it, right?

Yes. Leadership is about behavior. What kinds of strategies do you use to accomplish your goals? In the Connective Leadership Model, there are nine “achieving styles” that describe the strategies that people use to accomplish their goals.

My own research into this began with Harold J. Leavitt, way back in the ‘70’s, at Stanford, when the Feminist Movement was blossoming. There was great interest in the differences between how men and women behaved. We wanted to document the differences between how men and women went about achieving their goals. We called this behavior “achieving styles”, After Hal moved on to other interests, I began to see how these behaviors, taken together, constituted a certain kind of leadership repertoire. I called it “Connective Leadership”.

The way people go about accomplishing their goals, or achieving them, is behavior. Behavior is something that you can put your arms around. Behavior is learned, by and large. With insight and training, we can change behavior or moderate it, if we choose to do so.

People want to change their achieving behaviors, but how do they do it?

Well, at the Connective Leadership Institute, we regularly conduct training seminars to help people understand and strengthen their leadership behaviors. We help individuals – mostly managers and other leaders – gain insight into their own behavior. With that insight, we can help them change their behavior.

That is why we developed several achieving styles inventories or assessment tools. They are the instruments we use to measure how people accomplish their goals. With insight into their current behavior from these assessments and subsequent training, individuals can learn to behave differently and more effectively. They can learn to be stronger and better connective leaders.

We can measure the behaviors people use to achieve their goals. We developed eight previous instruments to draw out the behavioral themes, that is, how people said they behaved – how they went about accomplishing different kinds of tasks.

Over time, we realized there were nine major categories, or behavioral strategies, for accomplishing tasks. Using these nine behavioral themes, we developed what are now the L-BL Achieving Styles Inventories. Within these broad bands of behaviors, there can be thousands of different behaviors. Here is what makes the model interesting and even more complex: the same behavior can be used for different purposes.

It was Hal’s idea, [by the way], to use the gerund of “achieving” – not “achievement” – when we identified the behavioral strategies. He wanted to emphasize the process [of achieving]: how do you go about doing it, not, what you have achieved? When you have a goal, when you have a task, how do you accomplish it? Are you turned on by the intrinsic challenge of that task? Well, then you prefer to be an intrinsic [achiever]. We don’t say you are an intrinsic achiever; we say you prefer this style. You may prefer some of the other styles just as much. Only for purposes of explaining the model and trying to keep the nine major categories clear, do we sometimes talk “as if” someone were a “pure” Intrinsic type, or whatever (Figure 1).

Picture a large circle [see Figure A]. We’ll start at twelve o’clock and move around the circle with the nine styles. There are three sets of styles: a Direct Set, an Instrumental Set, and a Relational Set. We use the language of “sets” just so it’s easier for people to remember all nine styles, or clusters. It’s hard to remember nine individual styles, so we group them in sets, but there are no strong barriers between the sets.

Figure 1 The connective leadership model

There are three styles within the “Direct Set”: intrinsic, competitive, and power. We call the first set “direct” because people who prefer the direct styles like to work directly on their own tasks. Intrinsic [achievers] like autonomy to do the task their own way, to reach perfection. If you are an intrinsic achiever, you love doing something yourself. You’re seeking perfection using an internalized standard of perfection. Your standard is: What did I do last time, and how can I do better? You want to do it perfectly without regard to how anybody else is doing it. These people like doing it themselves so they can do it perfectly, without interference. They want to be in control of themselves. They don’t care about controlling other people.

The second member of the Direct Set, intrinsic’s “kissing cousin”, is called the “competitive” style. Competitive people have an external standard of excellence. They want to do better than everybody else – at least, everybody else who is relevant to that particular concern. If I’m a violinist, I want to be better than Jascha Heifetz. I don’t want to be better than my next door neighbor who plays for fun.

The third member of the Direct Set is the “power” style. If you are a power achiever, it means that you like to be in control of resources, of people, of money, of situations, of everything. You name it – they want to be in control of it.

Now, we move into the “Instrumental Set” which also has three styles: personal, social, and entrusting. These instrumental styles are the “Denatured Machiavellianism” styles.

The personal style comes from the concept of one’s persona, where the person uses everything about his or her persona to accomplish the task: charm, intelligence, beauty, talent, attire, family history, where they went to school, everything about themselves. If you look at speeches by President John F. Kennedy, you’ll see he did just that. He talked about his family all the time – how wonderful they were, his father the Ambassador, his own Harvard education, etc. He drew upon everything about himself that made him attractive. The personal style is the home of charisma. People who prefer this style know how to draw others into their task. They accomplish their task by acting as a magnet and using their persona to draw people into help them. Gandhi behaved this way. So did Martin Luther King, Jr Mandela uses this achieving style, too (But let’s remember that we all use various combinations of styles in different situations, not just one limited achieving style).

The second style in the Instrumental Set is the social style. Social achievers are networkers, to use today’s language. They see relationships as avenues for accomplishing their tasks, but again, they’re overt about it. They know everybody and carry a mental contact list in their head. They know whose father is mayor, what town they live in, etc. When you’re talking about somebody you need to meet, they whip out their cell phone, or I-phone, and they immediately provide that person’s contact information. They call upon people with the appropriate skills, knowledge, experience, and/ or contacts to help them accomplish their goals.

The third style in the Instrumental Set is the entrusting style. As you move around the circle and get to this style, this is where entrusting individuals will let go of their need to control the means the other person uses to achieve the task. If you are an entrusting achiever, you will hand over a task that is central to what you are doing to somebody else without caring about whether they have the experience or the right contacts or the relevant education. Entrusting achievers assume everyone around them is capable and will rise to the occasion. They also tend to surround themselves with people who are very competent.

It’s very interesting to see how the entrusting style works. When I’ve interviewed people who have supervisors or leaders who use this style, they all talk about how nervous they were at the beginning, when that person gave them a task they had never done before, and just assumed that they could and would do it. When I ask, “Well, did you do it?” I am almost always told, “Oh, yes, it was the best thing I ever did! I was the most creative, etc.”

It’s a gift that the leader gives that other person – a gift of trust. When I say to you – “Kristine, will you do this? I know you’ll do a fabulous job. I don’t care how you do it, as long as it’s legal and ethical. Do it any way you want! I don’t care if you haven’t done this before. I know you’ll figure it out!” In that way, I stimulate you to unleash your creativity. And you do it. This is different from using the power style, where the leader tells you how to do it and micro-manages you.

From this, you get self-esteem and you get self-confidence!

Oh, it’s just amazing to hear people say what they learned and what impact it had on their lives. It’s extremely powerful. But you have to have a lot of self-confidence to use the entrusting style, particularly in work organizations where you may be judged by the people who supervise you. Inexperienced leaders or managers are afraid to use entrusting behavior.

It really does work and works well with very large projects, as you can imagine. I had one PhD student who did a study of the aerospace industry. The leaders who were most successful with multi-million dollar contracts were the ones who used entrusting. That makes sense, because if you have a huge contract, you cannot micro-manage the whole thing. You need to evoke the intelligence, expertise, and dedication of all of your people.

The last three styles are part of the Relational Set: collaborative, contributory, and vicarious. Here again, you see that there’s still a focus on the goal, but the means are different. As you move [around the circle] from the collaborative style to the contributory style and on to the vicarious style, you see that the leader is giving up control over the means and, eventually, the goal.

If you are a collaborative achiever, you have a common goal, and you may even be playing by established rules, like a football game. You’re not making up the rules about how to get to the goal; you know what the rules are and agree to participate. You share responsibility for success, as well as failure. Collaborative achievers like to play on teams.

Contributory achievers are behind-the-scenes people. They are the “assistants-to”. They are the people who contribute to the actual work of the leader. For example, a speechwriter writes the speech and knows that the other person will give the speech. But when the speech is a success, the speechwriter feels a sense of achievement. So, he or she has achieved success by contributing to somebody else’s actual task, what the sociologist would call the “role task”.

The final relational style in the Instrumental Set is the vicarious style. Here, vicarious achievers give up control over shaping the means and the ends. They do not actively participate in the achievement. Yet, vicarious achievers identify so strongly with the people who are achieving that they feel as if they have achieved, too. When my students have a class project and do something fantastic, I feel a real sense of accomplishment, pride, and happiness because of their achievement, although I wasn’t directly involved in the doing. Mentors, who give advice and support, rely upon the vicarious achieving style.

So Connective Leadership provides a menu of behavioral strategies that a leader can choose from, depending on the situation?

That’s right.

And you can develop these over time?

Right, absolutely. You can be trained and continue to train yourself to develop these leadership behaviors. As I mentioned previously, at the Connective Leadership Institute, we conduct seminars to train people to strengthen their achieving styles with the goal of becoming more effective connective leaders. What I particularly like about these seminars is that they reflect the very tenets of Connective Leadership. What I mean is we bring people together from all over the world, people representing great diversity, but who value working together to become better leaders, to make a difference.

We know that people, all kinds of people, from diverse cultures, can strengthen each of these styles. We can measure differences – real improvements – over time. We are all strong on some achieving styles – some people are strong on all nine. That’s great! But most people don’t have a balanced profile. It’s important to understand what your strengths are and what behaviors you need to strengthen.

You’ve written an amazing treatise on peace, called “A Connective Leadership Strategy for Global, Enduring, and Sustainable Peace”. What motivated this paper? What is your message?

Well, those are two big questions.

What motivated me was, after having been in the field of leadership for some years, I began to have my qualms about the kind of people, particularly students, who were drawn to leadership courses. So, I began to ask myself, “Leadership for what?”

Many of these students come to graduate school after having been selected into leadership development programs when they were undergraduates. Some are interested in leadership and want to study it. Some simply want to mature as leaders in a conceptual way. But many of them come in feeling they have been anointed through this process – that somehow, they are the select few who are supposed to be the leaders. Metaphorically, they’re looking around the room saying, “Where’s the group I’m supposed to lead?”

My question then, is, “Leadership for what?” Do you want to be a leader because you’re passionate about something that you want to accomplish in the world? Or, is it because you want to elbow your way to the front of the line, and, for narcissistic reasons, want everyone to follow you?

As you can imagine, my predilection is toward people who want to become leaders to make the world a better place. So, I raised this question a number of times at the International Leadership Association. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that the overarching goal that the world has to accomplish is peace. Without peace, we are wasting resources to accomplish everything else. We are wasting human, material, economic, climatic, and artistic resources, all kinds of resources – everything – by not focusing on peace.

I began to think about it, slowly, over a period of time, and got the opportunity and impetus to write it down. I was invited to speak at a multinational business conference at Nanjing University Graduate School of Business on the topic, “What could business do to address the 2008 financial meltdown?” I said, “That’s the wrong question. Business can do a lot, but it can’t do everything”. So I began to think: What could every sector of society do that could make a difference? So, I started to work on a peace plan.

Peace is more than the absence of war. If you look at the defense industry, it’s the second largest industry worldwide. We spend an immense amount of money: half of the US budget is military, and much of it is purely political. One person from the Joint Chiefs of Staff came to see me. He said, “I couldn’t agree with you more. We are being given material, armaments that we would never use – they are so outdated, but some politician votes for it, and he gets his buddies to vote for it, because that means jobs in his home state or region”. It really has more to do with money and power than the desire for war.

There are many parts to the peace plan. There is a part for each sector of society. The implementation strategy is quite simple. We need to spread the word through social media, particularly to the younger generation. The Arab Spring made me hopeful that you could do this.

I also want the Nobel Peace Committee to take the Plan and invite every nation to come together, amend the Plan, and create benchmarks for themselves. Then, every other year, they’ll come back to report how far they’ve gone in each country. In the intervening years, the separate sectors will come from every country to talk about what benchmarks they have met: the business sector, K-12, higher education, the media, entertainment, health, religion, etc.

Let me give you a feel of what’s in the peace plan, just the part relating to the government and business sectors. What if we were to declare, worldwide, that the defense industry was nonprofit rather than for-profit? After all, if you have this industry to defend your country, then shouldn’t it be a patriotic thing that you are doing, rather than something you do to make money? Like Costa Rica, we should have a Department of Peace, which should offer for-profit contracts and grants. We could have: peace entrepreneurship, peace innovation, peace R&D, peace sustainability. I assure you, if you announced at 4:00 GMT on Friday that we would be opening an Office of Peace on Monday, all the people who used to line up at the Defense Department would be lining up at the Office of Peace early Monday morning!

This would be fine! I am not opposed to businesses making a fair amount of profit. If they do good things for the world, why shouldn’t they do well? I’m not trying to say, “Oh, you should live in poverty or not try to make money”. Make money, but make it doing things that we can be proud of – things that are going to make the world a better place.

This plan, in a way, is analogous to President Kennedy’s idea of going to the moon. People thought he was a little bit crazy when he said that, because they asked, “What are we going to get if we go to the moon?” But, [going to the moon] started all kinds of scientific research – new knowledge development – that we are still benefiting from today. If we think about turning the economy around by doing things that haven’t been done yet – things that all need to be developed, created, manufactured, and sold – we can help the whole world prosper.

It’s not just the defense industry. There are many things that have to be done differently in politics and other sectors, too. In the political arena, we need to enact term limits, [for example], so that politicians will do what’s good for the country, not what’s good for their political careers. Political campaigns should take no more than four weeks and should be publicly funded. That would certainly change things, don’t you think?

That’s back to Connective Leadership

Right. I think that connective leaders can see how these things come together. They can help groups come together [so that they] can to do something that’s really useful. They can [orchestrate] ennobling enterprises that can make us feel proud that we have contributed even the tiniest piece to a cause that is greater than ourselves.

Recently, I went to the Cleopatra exhibit at the Science Museum. One of the last pieces – the only piece on which they actually had her signature – was a letter from Cleopatra to a bureaucrat asking him to let some man import wine without tax. Right above the signature, she [wrote], “Make it happen”.

That’s how I feel about peace. “Make it happen!” There are many things that every one of us can do – from little kids to grown-ups. I think we really need to do it. [Peace] is an ennobling enterprise. Those of us who participate in it will have a sense of having done something that’s important, that’s meaningful.

I think it’s here that you get to the stage that Mike Csikszentmihalyi calls something like “self-reflective consciousness”.

Is that his model that shows stages of development, where you move back and forth from the individual to the Other?

Yes, that’s right. You start out, in your earliest years, being focused on the self and then you focus on the Other – and it goes back and forth as you develop through the life cycle. By the time you get to “self-reflective consciousness”, most people – not all people – are in midlife. And, of course, some people never get there. At this point, the focus is not on the self or on what you can do. You’ve come to terms with what you’ve done regarding your personal aspirations, etc. Now, you want to do something that benefits the “Other” writ large – people you don’t even know. The question of the “Other” is an important issue I want to focus on next [with my research].

Meaning, Who is the Other?

Yes. This is issue of: Who is the Other? Why do we hate the Other? These [questions] bring us back to the issue of care. Can we commit ourselves to do something to enhance the Other – when we might not know anybody who constitutes a part of that group?

It really relates to the work of Abraham Maslow who revised his hierarchy of needs to add transcendence as the level above the previous peak of self-actualization. I always thought self-actualization sounded self-focused. Maslow gave thirty-something synonyms for transcendence in a footnote. The one I remember the most – because it struck my fancy – is self-forgetfulness. You transcend yourself and your personal ego, your needs, vanity, and aspirations and try to do something that’s more important than you personally. I went out to dinner with a former student not too long ago who started to build a business. I was telling her about the peace plan. And she said, “Oh, you could really monetize it”. I don’t want to monetize it. I simply want to make it happen.

I want to use “Make it Happen” as the subtitle of the peace proposal. Right now, it says, “A work in progress”. My vision is that this is a communal project, where people take the plan and treat it as a “work-in-progress”. I want it to be crowd sourced. A young man in the Netherlands objected to the plan because he said it was “too American”. I said, “Well, it would be presumptuous of me to tell you what your government needs to do. So, maybe we need to have regional peace plans that will work in different regions of the world”.

Which goes back to the twin forces of interdependence and diversity, right? This is very powerful, Jean. Is there anything else that you want to share with the readers of CCM?

I could go on all day and talk about the peace plan.

What do you hope to do with it next?

Well, here’s the very next thing. Turn around and look out the window (pointing). See that tree? That tree is dying, I regret to say. I’ve come to grips with that over the year. But, now, I want to turn it into a peace sculpture – one that also has to do with sustainability and the role that art plays in [communicating ideas and meaning].

Picture [that tree] sculpted into four figures holding up the globe of peace – this very delicate thing. It can’t just be one person holding it – it has to be several.

It’s a beautiful idea

Here’s the dilemma, Kristine. I’ve called two artists to come look at it. One of them wrote me an email saying exactly what I thought was bothering him – he doesn’t want to collaborate. As an artist, he wants to do his own thing. You see, that’s the dilemma of the world. As individuals, we want to do our own thing. But to live in this world together, we are going to have to learn how to do things with other people. If we could get artists to collaborate, that would be so symbolic! They don’t have to go on collaborating forever, but if they could collaborate on putting together sculptures all over the world – and one of those sculptures should be in front of the Nobel Peace Committee building.

You have a cycle with the trees. You have life to death to life again

Yes. Think about Picasso’s Guernica. Think about the impact that painting has had. It makes me cry to think about it. But people looking at it understood what war was. I think we really need to use art to know what peace is.

I believe what Margaret Mead said: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has”. I believe we can make it happen, if we choose to make it happen.

I think universities should have “Centers of Reconciliation for Intractable Problems”, where you bring together people who aren’t getting along – like the antagonists in Northern Ireland, who fought for years, and the Palestinians and the Israelis. You bring them together without the media – without photographers, without press – and they are committed to meeting every day with mediators and negotiators until they break through to a plan. If they come to an impasse, they can go away for 48 hours, but they have to come back. Once the problem is solved, the people who were most involved in the process come back and help to refine the process for the next group.

I’d love to have a million lives and be a part of every aspect of this. I’d like to go all over the world and ask artists to take trees that are dead and do something with them. The sculptures [hold] both life and death. Even if someone were sculpting that tree right now, something alive would be growing up around it.

This interview has been edited and condensed.