Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter (6 page)

Empire Builders hoard resources and underutilize talent. Talent Magnets attract talented people and use them at their highest point of contribution. Let’s explore the world of the Talent Magnet, these Multipliers who create a cycle of attraction and grow intelligence around them.

THE TALENT MAGNET

The Talent Magnet creates a cycle of attraction that accelerates performance and grows genius. But does this only work for top talent and for the
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players in the market? Or can a true Talent Magnet find and grow genius everywhere and with everyone?

Hexal AG, a maker of generic drugs, is located in a small village close to Munich, Germany. Hexal was founded in 1986 by twin brothers and self-made entrepreneurs, Thomas and Andreas Strüengmann. Andreas, a doctor, is the medical authority and Thomas is the international marketing genius behind Hexal. These brothers teamed their expertise to build a successful generic drug company, growing primarily from the local talent pool in the village. What makes the company unique is that its approach to talent is anything but generic. It is an approach that gets extraordinary results from very ordinary people. It starts with how these leaders hire people into their company.

Anyone who has been in the hiring manager’s seat knows the process can be painful. To find the right candidate, you know you will waste a lot of time interviewing the wrong candidates. This is particularly frustrating because you typically know they are the wrong candidate in the first three minutes of a job interview. But regardless, you feel compelled to proceed with the obligatory sixty-minute interview and the pleasantries of “We’ll get back to you.”

The Strüengmann brothers cut right to the chase. When they were looking for a general manager for Hexal in the Netherlands, they began with the normal actions—they engaged an external recruiter, gave her the job requirements, and then waited for a list of candidates. The
recruiter brought forward nine candidates. But then they did something quite unusual. They made arrangements to conduct the interviews in a single day in a rented conference room at Schiphol Airport, just outside Amsterdam. The recruiter reviewed their planned interview schedule and was shocked—they had allowed just ten minutes per interview. She called to inform them that it was impossible to interview so quickly! The Strüengmann brothers disagreed. They met with each candidate for just three minutes—every candidate except their final candidate, with whom they spent three hours. They explained their unusual approach: “When we consider each person, we ask one or two questions. If they don’t fit, we simply don’t continue the conversation. If the person is individualistic, we know that he or she won’t fit in our culture. When we find someone who will fit with our company, then we spend a lot of time with this person to make sure we understand their capability and what they would bring to our organization.” The Strüengmann brothers knew how to spot and attract the right talent.

Once people joined Hexal, they discovered another one of the Strüengmanns’ unconventional practices. Hexal doesn’t have jobs per se, and they don’t have an org chart. This isn’t like some elite organizations that choose not to publish their org chart for fear that some other company will snatch up their talent. Hexal didn’t have an org chart because the Strüengmanns didn’t believe in them. Jobs were loosely created around people’s interests and unique capabilities. They called their approach the “ameba model.” Here’s how it works.

Ursula’s responsibility was to assist the customer services manager. In her role, she saw a large number of repetitive requests for the same action and was continually updating people on the status of these requests. She had an idea to use the Internet to create a workflow tracking system. She wrote up a little proposal and sent the idea around to her colleagues in an e-mail asking, “What do you think about it?” Some people replied on e-mail and others stopped by her
desk to discuss it in person, but everyone agreed that it was a good idea and wanted to see it happen. She gathered the people she needed, secured some budget, and got the system built through this makeshift team. The team then presented the system to the Strüengmann brothers, who applauded their efforts and Ursula’s leadership and initiative. These twin brothers simply believed that if an idea got support from a lot of people, it was a good idea. At Hexal, you could work wherever there was energy.

Through encouraging their employees to use this heat-seeking approach, they were able to utilize people at their highest point of contribution. They didn’t box people into jobs and limit their contribution. They let people work where they had ideas and energy and where they could best contribute. They let talent flow, like an ameba, to the right opportunities.

There are clearly multiple reasons for their success, but it is interesting to note that the Strüengmann brothers sold Hexal (along with holdings in another company) to Novartis in 2005 for $7.6 billion; at age fifty-five, they were each worth $3.8 billion. As they lead Hexal, the Strüengmann brothers got extraordinary results from very ordinary people. Why? Because these twin Talent Magnets knew how to unleash people’s genius into their organization.

How does a Talent Magnet find and unleash genius? In the four practices of the Talent Magnet, we find some of the answers.

THE FOUR PRACTICES OF THE TALENT MAGNET

Among the Multipliers we studied in our research, we found four active practices that together catalyze and sustain this cycle of attraction. These Talent Magnets: 1) look for talent everywhere; 2) find people’s native genius; 3) utilize people at their fullest; and 4) remove the blockers. Let’s look at each to understand exactly what a Talent Magnet does to create genius in others.

I. Look for Talent Everywhere

Talent Magnets are always looking for new talent, and they look far beyond their own backyard. Multipliers cast a wide net and find talent in many settings and diverse forms, knowing that intelligence has many facets.

Appreciate All Types of Genius

In 1904, a test of intelligence that later evolved into the IQ test was developed by French researcher Alfred Binet as a tool for assessing the learning progress of French schoolchildren. His assumption was that lower intelligence signaled a need for more and different teaching, not an inability to learn.
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This tool quickly became ubiquitous as a unilateral determinant of intellectual horsepower. Much work has been done over the last two decades by cognitive psychologists around the world, offering additional methods for identifying and developing intelligence. Whether it is Harvard professor Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences, Daniel Goleman’s work on emotional intelligence, or Stanford professor Carol Dweck’s work on the effect of mindsets on capability, the message is clear: IQ is a practical but limited measure of the true intelligence of our species. We are simply smarter in more ways than can be measured through an IQ test.

A Talent Magnet knows that genius comes in many forms. Some minds excel at quantitative analysis or verbal reasoning—capabilities measured through IQ, SAT, and other tests of traditional cognitive intelligence. Other minds offer creative genius, innovating through fresh thinking and bold ideas. Some minds are critical, spotting every problem or landmine lurking within a plan; the genius of some others is to find a way to tunnel around these landmines.

Bill Campbell, former CEO of Intuit, is one such leader who appreciates the diversity of talent requisite to build a successful company. This economics major and football coach at Columbia University is renowned for his ability to lead and guide Silicon Valley’s elite technologists. Bill reflects, “Their minds can do something that mine can’t.
They have a genius that I don’t.” He communicates this respect for the intelligence of others through his actions. He readily admits that he doesn’t think like they do and that he appreciates what they bring to the table. He listens intently to the ideas and advice of those who offer this perspective he doesn’t have. And he asks people to teach him what he doesn’t know. This rich appreciation for the genius of others is how this former football coach has become a personal advisor to the CEOs at Apple, Google, and many more.

Ignore Boundaries

In their quest to assemble the finest talent, Talent Magnets are blind to organizational boundaries. They see the multiple forms of intelligence that exist everywhere. Talent Magnets live in a world without walls and without hierarchical or lateral restrictions. Instead, they see talent networks.

You can often spot Talent Magnets inside organizations because they are the ones who ignore org charts. Org charts are handy for finding out who works for whom and who’s in charge if something goes wrong, but these issues are of relative unimportance when you are searching for genius. As far as Talent Magnets are concerned, org charts are irrelevant. Why? Because
, everyone
works for them—or at least every person whose genius they can uncover. The mind of the Multiplier works like this:
If I can find someone’s genius
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I can put them to work.

The idea is simple. Multipliers understand that people love to contribute their genius. If they put in the effort to figure out someone’s genius, they have opened a pathway for that person to contribute. They can utilize them. Multipliers aren’t deterred if someone doesn’t officially report to them on an org chart. These leaders see an unlimited talent pool that they can draw from. Everyone works for a Multiplier.

For this reason, you can often spot Multipliers leading cross-functional projects and intercompany ventures. They may be in key staff roles, or they may also be at the top of the org chart. The common denominator is that they look beyond boundaries for talent.

Zvi Schreiber, CEO of G.ho.st, is one such Talent Magnet. Zvi, the company’s British-born Israeli chief executive, started G.ho.st with the ambition of providing users with a free Web-based virtual computer that lets them access their desktop and files from any computer with an Internet connection. His business strategy was to break down walls in the computing world. He called the company G.ho.st for Global Hosted Operating System, because ghosts can go through walls.

Zvi took a similar approach to finding the talent he needed to build his company. Headquartered in Modiin, Israel, Zvi could have easily built the company with the abundant supply of technical and business talent in Israel. But he could see a rich supply of technically savvy talent in Palestine that became isolated by failed peace agreements. Zvi convinced his venture partner, Benchmark Capital, to make a risky move and support him in building a company that spanned the Israeli-Palestinian divide.

The Palestinian office in Ramallah, West Bank, houses about thirty-five software developers and is responsible for most of the research and programming. The Israeli team is smaller and works about thirteen miles away in the Israeli town of Modiin. The team works through video conferencing. When face-to-face meetings are necessary, colleagues gather at a run-down coffee shop on a desert road near Jericho, frequented by camels and Bedouin shepherds.
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This Talent Magnet not only looked beyond the fabricated borders of organizational structure to find the best talent to staff his company. The boundaries he broke through, borders steeped in cultural, political and physical conflict, were patrolled by armed guards.

Talent Magnets look for talent everywhere and then study that talent to uncover and unlock the real genius that lies within.

II. Find People’s Native Genius

As the head of a global function inside a multinational corporation, I spent a lot of time in cross-functional meetings and on task forces. It
was almost inevitable that at some point in these meetings, when things would become murky, someone would hand me the whiteboard pen, point to the front of the room, and say, “Liz, lead us through this.” I’d readily jump in and do my thing, and hand back the pen at some point. After a while, I started to wonder why I almost never got to be a regular meeting attendee and sit in the back of the room and check e-mail. I thought,
Why do I always get asked to lead these difficult meetings? Why am I always getting put in charge when it isn’t even my job?
After seeing this pattern repeated over many years at work and in other group settings, I realized that I wasn’t being asked to be in charge per se—it was a very particular type of “in charge.” I would find myself in charge when a group needed more of a facilitative leader and less of a boss. I vividly remember one of my colleagues trying to explain to me why I was always getting asked to lead these types of meetings. Ben explained, “It is because you can so easily frame the issue, synthesize what people are saying, and lay out a course of action.” What? I stared at him blankly, trying to decipher what he was saying. It sounded like he was telling me that I was good at breathing. It didn’t strike me as a particularly big deal or something someone might find difficult. It
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as easy as breathing; at least it was for me. What my colleagues were teaching me was that I had a native ability—something that I did both easily and freely.

Look for What Is Native

Talent Magnets know how to uncover and access the native genius of others. By “native genius” I mean something even more specific than a strength or a skill that might be highly rated on a 360 degree leadership assessment. A native genius is something that people do, not only exceptionally well, but absolutely naturally. They do it easily (without extra effort) and freely (without condition).

What people do easily, they do without conscious effort. They do it better than anything else they do, but they don’t need to apply extraordinary effort to the task. They get results that are head-and-shoulders above others but they do it without breaking a sweat.

What people do freely, they do without condition. They don’t need to be paid or rewarded, and they often don’t even need to be asked. It is something that gives them inherent satisfaction, and they offer their capability voluntarily, even ardently. It is effortless, and they stand ready and willing to contribute, whether it is a formal job requirement or not.