Leaders in business, government and other societal institutions sometimes fail to achieve their goals because they don’t understand themselves.
This can play itself out in two ways. A leader fails to appoint an aide who is a perfect foil to his or her character, whose task may include translating for the organisation what the leader has in mind. A leader may also not understand what his or her colleagues are feeding back to him or her.
Neither has anything to do with a leader's education or intelligence (though some of the most intelligent people score poorly on communicating clearly). The second problem has to do with a leader’s failure to understand whether he or she is a reader or listener. As the late management guru Peter Drucker once illustrated, this can have a huge effect on whether one succeeds as a leader.
A reader thrives on memos and other briefing documents; a listener on verbal briefings. Sending memos to a listener or talking to a reader may leave a leader not “understanding” what he is being told, as Drucker’s case studies have shown. Drucker used the example of Dwight Eisenhower, the supreme commander of the Allied forces in Europe during World War 2 and two-time US president. As supreme commander, Eisenhower was “the darling of the press”.
“His press conferences were famous for their style — Gen Eisenhower showed total command of whatever question he was asked, and he was able to describe a situation and explain a policy in two or three beautifully polished and elegant sentences,” explained Drucker in an article for the Harvard Business Review.
Eisenhower didn’t know that he was a reader, not a listener. He had been a success in the army because his team asked journalists to submit their questions in advance. It’s not clear whether the army did this because they understood Eisenhower to be a reader or that this was just standard military practice. It suited Eisenhower, creating an impression of a man who was on top of his subject.
Then he moved into the White House, succeeding two listeners, Franklin D Roosevelt and Harry Truman, who enjoyed free-flowing media briefings. Eisenhower never even heard the questions journalists asked. He never addressed the questions, rambling on endlessly about something else, according to Drucker.
Another US president, Lyndon Johnson, a listener, destroyed his presidency because he continued with the machinery of his predecessor, John Kennedy. A reader, Kennedy had put together a brilliant team of writers who submitted memos to him before they met to discuss them.
“Johnson kept these people on his staff — and they kept on writing. He never, apparently, understood one word of what they wrote. Yet as a senator Johnson had been superb; for parliamentarians have to be, above all, listeners,” wrote Drucker.
Interestingly, one of the reasons for Eisenhower’s success as the head of World War 2 Allied forces was because of his chief of staff, Bedell Smith. A “cantankerous but highly efficient military manager” who was described as “bulldog-smart, intense, yet political”, he was a perfect foil to Eisenhower’s generally calm, logical and diplomatic approach.
Nicknamed “Beetle”, Smith was one of the most archetypal chiefs of staff and became the glue that held together the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF), Eisenhower’s military headquarters. This freed Eisenhower to concentrate on strategy and operations, according to one study.
Smith — “an angrily confident, take-charge figure” — moulded SHAEF, which had vast staff and countless problems, into an efficient administrative machine. “He dealt with or otherwise diverted many of the difficulties and pesterings that might have increased the load the supreme commander was carrying at a time when virtually all of Britain was an armed camp manned by some 3-million troops under his command,” wrote Norman Gelb in Ike & Monty: Generals at War, an account of the difficult relationship between Eisenhower and British general Monty Montgomery.
Roosevelt’s World War 2 strategy succeeded, largely because of the role of Harry Hopkins, a man who was close to the US president but held no official government post. Hopkins has been described as a linear thinker who could translate and convert Roosevelt’s vision into concrete action. Winston Churchill would also grow fond of Hopkins, nicknaming him Lord Root of the Matter because he “always went to the root of the matter”.
So, it’s not just one’s technical expertise. Knowing oneself — specifically whether one’s a reader or listener and hiring a perfect foil to one’s character — could determine whether one succeeds or fails as a leader.
• Sikhakhane, a former spokesperson for the finance minister, National Treasury and SA Reserve Bank, is editor of The Conversation Africa. He writes in his personal capacity.