Read Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter Online
Authors: Liz Wiseman,Greg McKeown
Tags: #Business & Economics, #Management
Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter (33 page)
Which will you be: A genius? Or a genius maker? Perhaps, you stand with one foot on the building and the other on the wire. The choice matters.
BECOMING A MULTIPLIER
THE LAZY WAY STRATEGY
Use the right principles and tools and attain maximum results with just the right amount of effort.
The Accelerators
1.
Work the Extremes:
Assess your leadership practices and then focus your development on the two extremes: 1) bring up your lowest low and 2) take your highest high to the next level.
2.
Start with the Assumptions:
Adopt the assumptions of a Multiplier and allow the behavior and practices to naturally follow.
If I can find someone’s genius, I can put them to work.- People’s best thinking must be given, not taken.
- People get smarter by being challenged.
- With enough minds, we can figure it out.
- People are smart and will figure things out.
3.
Take a 30-Day Multiplier Challenge:
Pick one practice within one discipline, and work it for thirty days.
Sustaining Momentum
1.
Build it layer by layer.
2.
Stay with it for a year.
3.
Build a community.
THE RESEARCH PROCESS
I
n this appendix you will find a detailed account of the research Greg and I conducted to study the differences between Diminishers and Multipliers. We will outline the research process in three phases: 1) the foundation work for the research; 2) the research itself; and 3) the development of the Multiplier model.
PHASE 1: THE FOUNDATION
RESEARCH TEAM
While Greg and I were the primary members of the research team, C.K. Prahalad served as an important, informal research advisor. While many people contributed to the research in the book, our core was as follows:
Liz Wiseman, Master of Organizational Behavior, Marriott School of Management, Brigham Young University
Greg McKeown, Master of Business Administration, Stanford Graduate School of Business
C.K. Prahalad, Paul and Ruth McCracken Distinguished University Professor of Corporate Strategy at the Ross School of Business of the University of Michigan
RESEARCH QUESTION
Through an iterative process we refined our research questions as: “What are the vital few differences between intelligence Diminishers and intelligence Multipliers, and what impact do they have on organizations?”
Inherent in this question was the idea of contrast. We reasoned that it wasn’t enough to study Multipliers. As Jim Collins has explained, if you only studied gold medalists at the Olympics, you might erroneously conclude that they won because they all had coaches. It is only by contrasting winners with the people who lost that you realize that everyone has a coach, so having a coach cannot be the active ingredient in winning.
1
We were looking for the active ingredients or differentiating factors.
DEFINITION OF KEY TERMS
To be able to answer our research question we defined our three key terms: Diminisher, Multiplier, and intelligence.
DIMINISHER:
a person who led an organization or management team that operated in silos, found it hard to get things done, and despite having smart people, seemed to not be able to do what it needed to do to reach its goals.
MULTIPLIER:
a person who led an organization or management team that was able to understand and solve hard problems rapidly, achieve its goals, and adapt and increase its capacity over time.
INTELLIGENCE:
In our literature review we found a paper that identified more than seventy definitions of intelligence.
2
One paper that was important to us throughout the research process was
signed by fifty-two researchers in 1994. They agreed that intelligence was “the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly and learn from experience. It is not…narrow…. [I]t is a broader and deeper capability for comprehending our surroundings—‘catching on,’ ‘making sense’ of things, or ‘figuring out’ what to do.”
3
Beyond this, we included the ability to adapt to new environments, learn new skills, and accomplish difficult tasks.
INDUSTRY SELECTION
Having first observed the Diminisher/Multiplier phenomenon at Oracle, a software company, we opted to research the phenomenon in other companies within the broader technology industry. These companies included:
Technology Industry
: Biotech
Company
: Affymetrix
Technology Industry
: Online Retailing
Company
: Amazon
Technology Industry
: Consumer Electronics
Company
: Apple
Technology Industry
: Networking and Communications
Company
: Cisco
Technology Industry
: Internet Search
Company
: Google
Technology Industry
: Microprocessors
Company
: Intel
Technology Industry
: Computer Software
Company
: Microsoft
Technology Industry
: Enterprise Software Applications
Company
: SAP
PHASE 2: THE RESEARCH
NOMINATORS
Instead of trying to identify Diminishers and Multipliers ourselves, we found people who would nominate these leaders for us. We used two criteria in the selection of our nominators. The first was that they should be successful professionals. It was important that these individuals had positive career experiences to draw from. We reasoned that interviewing people who had “an axe to grind” could skew the data.
The second criteria was that these nominators have approximately ten years’ management experience themselves. We wanted practical insight from people who had grappled with challenges of leading others. It is worth noting that nominators at many of the above companies pointed us to both Multipliers and Diminishers they had worked with at entirely different companies and often industries.
RESEARCHER-ADMINISTERED SURVEY
We asked the nominators to rate the Multipliers and Diminishers they had identified on a five-point scale against forty-eight leadership practices. We designed the list to be comprehensive, drawing upon standard competency models, popular leadership frameworks, and practices we hypothesized would differentiate Diminishers from Multipliers.
The survey included
skills
(e.g., “Focuses on the customer” “Demonstrates intellectual curiosity” “Develops the talent of the team” and “Business acumen”) and
mindsets
(e.g., “See their role as a primary thought leader” and “See intelligence as continually developing”). We collected the results of this survey and analyzed the data in several ways. We looked for the largest deltas between Multipliers and Diminishers, the top skills and mindsets of Multipliers, and the skills most correlated with the top mindsets of Multipliers and Diminishers.
STRUCTURED INTERVIEWS
In the original interviews with the nominators, we followed a structured format. We used the same questions in the same order to minimize context effects, or at least hold them constant, so we could ensure reliable aggregation and comparison of the answers we received across different interviews and timeframes.
All the interviews were conducted between October 2007 and October 2009, with the first round of interviews transpiring in 2007. The interviews averaged between sixty and ninety minutes and were conducted in-person or by telephone. We kept written transcripts of all the conversations so we would have a permanent record of quotations and examples. While we followed a structured format, we allowed ourselves some latitude in determining how much time to devote to each question. Our typical format for an interview kept to the following narrative structure:
THE RESEARCH PROCESS
- 1.
Identification of two leaders: one who stifled intelligence and the other who amplified it - 2.
Identification of an experience or story working with each leader - 3.
Context for working with Diminisher: experience, setting - 4.
Impact on nominator: percentage of nominator’s capability used - 5.
Impact on group: role played in group process, perception in broader organization - 6.
Leader’s actions: what was done or not done to impact others - 7.
Result of actions: outcomes, deliverables accomplished - 8.
Repeat questions 3 through 7 for the nominated Multiplier
STRUCTURED INTERVIEWS: FOLLOW-UP
We conducted a second round of interviews to gather more information about the strongest Multipliers. This included: a) interviews with the Multipliers themselves; b) second interviews with the nominators to gather greater detail and understanding; and c) an in-depth 360 process interviewing both former and current members of the Multiplier’s management team.
INDUSTRY EXPANSION
As we extended our research to eventually include 144 different leaders, we found more examples within our original target companies, added more companies within the technology and biotech industries, and went beyond these industries entirely to include others in the for-profit sector as well as nonprofits and government agencies. Our research journey took us across four continents and introduced us to a rich and diverse set of leaders (see Appendix C). The following is a list of organizations where we studied Multipliers. In order to provide confidentiality, we are not publishing the list of companies where we studied Diminishers.
Industry
: Biotech
Example Companies
: Hexal, Affymetrix
Industry
: Green Tech
Example Companies
: Bloom Energy, Better Place
Industry
: Education
Example Companies
: Stanford University, VitalSmarts
Industry
: Entertainment
Example Companies
: DreamWorks Studios
Industry
: Government
Example Companies
: White House, Israeli Army
Industry
: Manufacturing
Example Companies
: GM Daewoo, Flextronics
Industry
: Nonprofit
Example Companies
: Boys and Girls Club of the Peninsular, Green Belt Movement, Bennion Center, Unitus
Industry
: Private Equity and Venture Capitalists
Example Companies
: Advent International, Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers
Industry
: Professional Services
Example Companies
: Bain & Company, McKinsey & Company
Industry
: Retailing
Example Companies
: Gap, Lands End, Gymboree
Industry
: Sports
Example Companies
: Highland High School Rugby, North Carolina State University women’s basketball program
Industry
: Technology Industry
Example Companies
: Amazon, Apple, Cisco, Infosys Technologies, Hewlett Packard, Intel, Intuit, Microsoft, SAP, Salesforce.com
Industry
: Workers’ Union
Example Companies
: Self-Employed Women’s Association
PHASE 3: THE MODEL
We gathered approximately 400 pages of interview transcripts, read them multiple times, and collated them for cross-interview analysis. We then took this theme analysis and calibrated it against the quantitative data we had gathered from the leadership survey. Finally, we adhered to a disciplined and rigorous debate methodology for crafting each of the disciplines that eventually became chapters for the book.
Both Greg and I claim to have been severely beaten up by each other during this debate process. We hope the research is stronger for it.