Chicago Booth Review Podcast Is Leadership a Choice?

Hal Weitzman: We tend to think of leaders in terms of personality types or set ways of behaving, but can you learn to be a better leader and can you choose when to act like a leader? Welcome to the Chicago Booth Review Podcast, where we bring you groundbreaking academic research in a clear and straightforward way. I'm Hal Weitzman. Chicago Booth's Linda Ginzel thinks that we can become better leaders by being diligent about how we learn from our experiences. In the first half of today's episode, Ginzel digs into a foundational piece of research that has informed the Chicago approach to leadership education. It's a paper by former Booth professors Harry Davis and Robin Hogarth. Ginzel discussed the significance of the paper in a 2013 essay for CBR. It appeared under the title Lessons from Life, Learning to Make Experience Count. And it's read for us by the author.

Linda E. Ginzel: For me, Rethinking Management Education: A View from Chicago, is very much like its authors. It is inspiring, challenging, and upon acquaintance becomes a presence in one's life that forever facilitates personal growth. I first read this paper the month it was published as I was settling in as a new Booth faculty member in the summer of 1992. It showed me something I'd never seen in my prior MBA teaching experience at Stanford and Kellogg, with an approach that is still unique to Booth. Two faculty members, Harry Davis and Robin Hogarth created a framework for what they were trying to accomplish in the classroom to help students become self-sufficient learners in order to achieve higher levels of personal performance. In a description of traditional MBA education, Davis and Hogarth explained that students arrive with domain knowledge, which is real-world knowledge, such as knowing industry standards or a company's specific operating procedures, things a person acquires on the job.

Faculty provided formal instruction to transmit what they call conceptual knowledge, such as discipline-based theories. Those two different knowledge types meshed in the classroom. And graduates went on to use their combined knowledge to manage firms big and small. However, the authors argued that business schools needed to challenge themselves in order to remain relevant for an ever-changing business community. And the paper contained a revelation. While MBA graduates were well-armed with domain and conceptual knowledge, they needed certain skills in order to make the most of what they'd gained in the classroom. Meeting this need would be the core of a new approach that augmented Booth's traditional strengths by focusing on two new types of skills, skills that Davis and Hogarth called action and insight. By the paper's description, action skills are similar to those of negotiation and interpersonal influence. The authors explained them as skills that enable individuals to set goals, to sell others on the value of those goals and to work with and through others in their implementation.

There's no reason why the acquisition of action skills should be left to chance. Hard science can still be used to impact soft action skills. They wrote, "Insight skills," they explained, "Are reasoning skills, skills you need in order to learn from experience." The authors asked readers to consider two scientists, Herbert Spencer, an early proponent of evolution, and Charles Darwin. Darwin used insight skills to learn from experiences and he exercised those skills when he took note of data points that seemed to contradict his theories. Spencer, however, was unable to learn as much from his experience without the skills that would help him to gain insights he selectively accumulated data that supported his theories. "Darwin's insights have endured. But how many have heard of Spencer?" the authors asked. The authors suggested that business schools could arm students with an understanding and appreciation for those skills. And they believed this could be done in part by providing opportunities to acquire and practice those skills in the classroom.

The genesis of the paper can actually be seen as an example of its own framework and operation. To start, it represents a synthesis of its authors considerable conceptual and domain knowledge, both as academics and stewards of education. In filtering, shaping, and communicating these insights, the authors also relied on lessons learned from their own experiences. At the time, Davis and Hogarth were working with colleagues including Joshua Klayman to develop what they called laboratory education, which includes leadership, exploration and development, or LEAD, the new product laboratory and management laboratory where students work in teams tackle real world assignments for companies and are coached by faculty and alumni. Davis and Hogarth continued to develop and promote their ideas beyond the selected paper series, which was distributed to an audience they hoped to empower. For Hogarth, many of the ideas in the paper formed the basis for his book, Educating Intuition.

In addition, his early experience with laboratory education laid the foundation for his future development as an internationally renowned management educator. For Davis, the concept of students as active learners who take charge of their own personal development has always been central to his teaching. He has spent the last six decades helping boost students become lifelong learners. He's done so with the very framework this paper described. And today, laboratory education continues to provide real benefits to both companies and students. I read this paper at a critical time in my career development and it continues to inspire and inform my approach to teaching. I ask all my students to read the paper, incorporating it into the first class assignment in each of the three MBA courses I teach. It serves as an introduction to the importance of action and insight skills and I rely on it to present a useful framework for how to learn the right lessons from experience both inside and outside the classroom.

Hal Weitzman: Have you ever wondered what goes on inside a black hole or why time only moves in one direction? Or what is really so weird about quantum mechanics? You should listen to Why This Universe? On this podcast, you'll hear about the strangest and most interesting ideas in physics broken down by physicists, Dan Hooper and Shalma Wegsman. If you want to learn about our universe from the quantum to the cosmic, you won't want to miss Why This Universe? Part of the University of Chicago Podcast Network.

We encourage children to criticize the action, not the person. That wasn't a kind thing to do, not you are unkind. But when it comes to leadership, we tend to talk about leaders more than leading. Linda Ginzel wants us to rethink leadership and management to think of them as verbs rather than nouns. We'll do both leading and managing through our careers, and the question to ask is not who you are, but what skills to exercise and when. She explained her approach in a 2015 essay for CBR entitled Leadership Is a Choice. And again, it's read for us by the author.

Linda E. Ginzel: What comes to mind when you think of a leader? Probably a person who is bold, self-assured and charismatic. Or has some of the other characteristics commonly associated with high-profile successful leaders. Many of these are listed in Being A Leader, which is an article on the Small Business Administration website. An article attempts to teach aspiring leaders about the work of the late personality psychologist Raymond Cattell. In 1954, Cattell developed a model to determine the traits which characterize an effective leader. Traits listed in the article include emotional stability, dominance, enthusiasm, conscientiousness, social boldness, self-assurance, compulsiveness, intuitiveness, empathy, and charisma. This summation of leadership has proven enduring. People remain fully committed to the idea that there exists a leader personality type that has qualities such as those laid out by Cattell. Businesses routinely measure innate dispositions using personality tests to select and develop employees. The billion-dollar pre-hire testing industry sells a broad range of assessments which are of questionable validity and reliability, but they're sold to determine whether a candidate has these innate traits.

The small business administration article advises aspiring leaders to work on developing those areas of your personality that you feel are not up to par. While self-understanding and personal development are important goals, there's a big problem with this approach. No one has ever figured out how people might go about acquiring a new trait. Or whether attempts to develop such traits actually lead to more successful outcomes for individuals or for their organizations. In my classroom, I'm working to reframe the conversation about leadership. Over the years that I've been teaching leadership at Booth, I've been developing a new framework, which is what I call leadership capital. My goal is to refocus the discussion from innate traits to behaviors, from the noun leader to the verb to lead, from manager to manage. In leadership capital, leadership is a choice. When I teach, I ask my students to list words they associate with leaders.

Inevitably and predictably, they produce a list of traits similar to the one on the Small Business Administration website. My students' lists collectively tell the story of a mythic person, a change agent who has a vision for the future, who breaks the mold innovates passionately and is volatile, courageous, and intoxicating. I suspect your list tells a similar story. Manager, of course, is the companion stereotype to leader. When I ask students to describe managers, they produce another oversimplification. This of a relatively boring person who meets targets and stays busy with the tasks at hand. The manager has no grand visions or ideas. This manager will not disrupt the status quo. These stereotypical views incorrectly imply that leaders and managers are born, not made. For this we can thank Cattell. His theories became the basis of the idea that personality traits can be used to predict and explain people's behavior.

He laid the groundwork for those personality assessments and the mistaken belief that personality can be used to predict organizational success. In reality, there's nothing innate and fixed about the qualities that make someone good at leading. That behaviors involved can be learned, honed and encouraged through practice. When we use the word leader as a label, we do ourselves and others a disservice. There's substantial evidence that categorizing people creates biases in how they're perceived and distorts the evaluation of their performance. Say you decide a woman in your department isn't excellent manager. She's capable, good with colleagues and very reliable. She likes consensus and is a team builder, but she's not an extrovert and doesn't seem to exhibit those personality traits you associate with leaders. Out of an oversimplified and limited view, you might miss that she also has the capacity to engage in leadership-type behaviors. And you may limit her opportunity to demonstrate leadership because she is labeled a manager.

Similarly, you may consider yourself a leader because you have big ambitions and grand ideas. You're unhappy with status quo and you're determined to do something about it. Once you label yourself a leader, you may discount the importance of making this quarter's numbers or neglect your important relationships. And if you do that, you may soon find you lack the capacity you need to engage in those leadership-type behaviors that create a different future. To move past the limitations of our stereotypes, I suggest we start by adopting a more appropriate term, executive. As the late management professor and consultant Peter Drucker argued, an executive is anyone who is responsible for actions and decisions that contribute to the performance capacity of his organization. This term is more inclusive because it doesn't apply only to people at the top of an organization. In fact, a person doesn't even need to manage people in order to be considered an executive.

Substituting this label, executive, for manager or leader might help us internalize the understanding that everyone across an organization has the choice to engage in both types of behavior, managing and leading. Doing so helps you to understand that leadership is a behavior and involves a choice. You'll achieve much more success if you embrace a more contemporary understanding of management and leadership as behavioral choices, not personality traits. Recognize that what matters is not whether you fit into some leadership suit of clothes or match up to some template of a leader personality. What matters is how you choose to behave. And unlike traits, our behaviors form the basis for skills and skills benefit from practice. A leader-type behavior is focused on the future. It is concerned with a vision that will help change the present to create a better future. A management-type behavior is focused on the present, concerned with stability in the here and now.

Making the choice of which behavior to practice at any given point becomes a central challenge. And my goal is to help executives make this choice by developing their courage, capacity, and wisdom. Kurt Lewin, the founding father of social psychology, offered a version of an equation in his 1936 book, Principles of Topological Psychology. The equation states that behavior is a function of the person and their situation. I introduced this equation in my classes to help students understand the usefulness of situation-based explanations based on social psychology and understanding behavior versus using immutable personality-based approaches. I always tell my students if they want to change someone's behavior, they should try to change the person's situation, not the person. Executives have less control over other people's personality attributes than they do over various factors outside, such as rewards, peers, physical space, and so on. The challenge for modern executives is to keep Lewin's equation in mind.

Your choice to lead or manage should be based both on the person and the situation, and the person doesn't represent personality alone, but it includes your values and goals. Some situations may call for having grand visions and creating new realities. Those situations may require behavior often associated with leadership, such as making difficult choices, taking risks, and tuning out naysayers. Other situations, however, may call for behaviors that maintain the status quo or execute a long-term plan, behavior that will earn you the credibility, trust, and support of people whose trust and support you may need. When you decide to make a different choice at a more critical juncture. To know which behavior to practice, you must first ask the question, should I manage or lead? Ask it often and build your leadership capital. That's how to be successful in this era, and the next one. Over the past two decades in teaching leadership at Booth, I've been developing a new framework of leadership.

Its leadership as a choice. It references the University of Chicago's intellectual contribution that intangible assets can be invested in and managed, similarly to more familiar types of capital such as physical or financial assets. The late Gary Becker's contributions to human capital theory were developed both theoretically and empirically in his 1964 book, Human Capital. In the book he writes, "Economists regard expenditures on education, training, medical care, and so on as investments in human capital. They're called human capital because people cannot be separated from their knowledge, skills, health, or values in the way they can be separated from their financial and physical assets." It is largely for this insight that Becker won the 1992 Nobel Memorial Prize in economic sciences. Now, what I call leadership capital is the wisdom to decide when to manage and when to lead together with the courage and capacity to act on those choices.

For 70 plus years, we have been engaged in a futile search for the leader personality. This search, along with various laundry lists of innate traits, has led many people to the mistaken conclusion that leaders are born, not made. Consequently, some people are thought to be leaders and others to be managers. In contrast, according to leadership capital principles, both the behaviors of managing and the behaviors of leading are to be practiced by the same individual. As a result, every executive is faced with a choice at any given decision point, to lead or to manage. Therefore, an organization that invests in the practice of leadership capital has a greater likelihood of producing value and achieving success than one that invests in identifying and building the leader personality.

Hal Weitzman: That's it for this episode of the Chicago Booth Review Podcast, part of the University of Chicago Podcast Network. To learn more about Linda Ginzel's approach to leadership and to apply it to your own career, find her masterclass on leadership capital at chicagobooth.edu/review. There's seven lessons that will help you lead more effectively. This episode was produced by Josh Stunkel. If you enjoyed it, please subscribe and please do leave us a five-star review. Until next time, I'm Hal Weitzman. Thanks for listening.