Why good leaders can't use good advice.

Executive Summary

There is an abundance of good advice on what leaders and organizations need, but there are fundamental reasons why they can not implement the advice. Knowing what to do and what structural features are desirable may be necessary, but are not sufficient for leaders to use the advice successfully. Leaders need to develop new internal programming to replace the innate, pervasive programming that prohibits even good leaders from implementing good advice. Their double-bind is that the internal programming shared by all not only keeps them from successfully using good advice, but it also keeps them from examining or questioning their own thinking. This unawareness seals them off from making the necessary, internal changes. This paper describes a process by which leaders can develop an improved internal framework and use it in practice, despite the self-sealing features of their old programming.

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The best advice available to leaders, managers, and executives makes good sense, for example: build trust, empower people, be tough and participatory, face reality, care for others. These are examples of what could be called behavioral advice. There is a second set of good advice prevalent today, which could be called structural advice, although the two sets overlap; for example: design the organization around customer needs and expectations, flatten the structure, increase use of virtual organizations. Table 1 gives representative examples of advice offered to leaders-grouped into behavioral, including advice by Bennis (1997), Blanchard (1999), Covey (1989, 1994), Drucker (1999), Kanter (1997), Kouzes & Posner (1995, 1999), Lawler & colleagues (1995, 2000), O'Reilly & Tushman (1997), Peters (1997), Senge (1999), Tichy (1997), and Vaill (1998), and structural, drawn from various sources including Galbraith (1995), Hammer & Champy (1995), Lawler (2000), Mintzberg (1997, 1998), and Nadler & Tushman (1998, 1999).

All of this advice makes good sense to us, as well as to our clients. The behavioral advice makes sense intuitively, in ways few of us question. It is consistent with our deepest and most cherished social values, which we have inherited from the time we could walk, if not before. Both sets of advice, behavioral and structural, make use of the collective experience of leaders and organizations and are responsive to the turbulent environments they face. Our economic environment is growing and fragmenting at an increasing rate. We must innovate and implement faster. This requires developing high performance teams faster and reforming teams more frequently. We must learn faster, and deeper, to keep up. This requires learning from conflict and mistakes. We must achieve ever finer tolerances in our communication and coordination. Most of the advice, given to respond to such challenges, is good.

Dilemmas Inherent in the Best Advice Offered to Leaders

Unfortunately, there are fundamental problems in implementing both kinds of advice. Some of the best givers of this advice implicitly assume that if leaders know what to do they will be able to do it. Others assume that their advice will be implemented successfully if certain specified organizational structures or practices are created. Such assumptions are not valid, based on our experience involving several hundred consulting projects in many organizations from Fortune 100 companies to government organizations and smaller companies, plus 20 years of experience in management/executive positions in four companies. In preparing this paper, we reviewed and re-analyzed extensive data from these projects, especially comprising audio tapes and detailed notes of key verbatim statements made by participants during meetings and confidential interviews.