The 7 Secrets of Responsive Leadership

Drive Change, Manage Transitions, and Help Any Organization Turn Around

Jackie Jenkins-Scott

• Publisher: Career Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781632657732
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

Leadership and turnaround expert Jackie Jenkins-Scott shows you how to spot and take advantage of opportunities in any environment.

Being a responsive leader means playing to win. Responsive leadership can thrive anywhere, unlike systematic leadership. The latter imposes methods and laws; principles govern action. In contrast, responsive leadership is a living, changing set of traits and skills that adapts to new people and environments. You may have an impressive grasp of how to influence, inspire, and build teams, but you must know how to adapt your abilities to each new organization, or to changes within the organization—new board members, new staff members, new shareholders.

The 7 Secrets of Responsive Leadership spotlights how to build the skills to be a leader in any environment. Richly illustrated with stories from the author’s decades of experience as a CEO, the book explores how to:

• Take advantage of opportunity
• Turn around an organization
• Compete well by leading with heart
• Keep your bags packed
• Echo one message at a time
• Look for opposition
• Value the interconnectedness of people
• Recover quickly

At its core, this book is about the intimate relationship between leadership and opportunity. The author lived that relationship in transforming a major urban health care center and a college from struggling and failing organizations to thriving, international leaders in their field.

1 Secret 1—Take Advantage of Opportunity

During a conference of corporate directors, a few of us discussed the attributes of leadership over dinner. The conversation became a collection of bits we had read, heard from speakers, and lived. Ultimately, we agreed that the strongest leaders have these characteristics, which we dubbed the Big 4:

Curiosity: A desire to continuously learn, discover, and grow intellectually

Humility: A sincere regard for the reality that we cannot go it alone

Empathy: The ability to feel and appreciate other human beings

Resilience: The capacity to recover, to keep going forward in the face of adversity

Note that we agreed these were qualities of the strongest leaders—not necessarily the most famous, richest, or most powerful. Throughout this book, I will try to channel the wisdom of these women and men so you can be reminded of how critical the Big 4 are in making the 7 Secrets of responsive leadership come alive for you.

I rediscovered the Big 4 in my journal after I had already drafted descriptions of the 7 Secrets. As I went through the how-to information and stories for my proposed book, I realized that each of the four surfaced in each of the secrets! It was like finding the magic ingredients in soil that allowed amazing flowers, vegetables, and trees to grow. I think we can all easily agree that curiosity plays a central role in discovering opportunity, for example. At the same time, considering the other three—who, other than you, is integral to the opportunity (humility), who these people are in terms of their values and priorities (empathy), and how well you are likely to adapt within that opportunity (resilience)—is vitally important in deciding whether an opportunity is a good one for you.

Do a Google search on the discrete phrase “characteristics of leadership,” and the result is roughly nine million entries that offer the top five, top ten, and so on, traits of a leader. Many appear to be results-oriented such as innovation. I'm not sure how important it is for a leader to be innovative if she is curious and humble enough to hire innovative people. Other lists talk about passion. To me, passion is a personal driver. I have passion for what I do, but I think it varies from day to day as to how much that internal fire contributes to my ability to lead. As I probed and read entries on the internet, I felt reinforced that the short list our dinner group composed might be the best of all.

The Institute of Leadership and Management lists the following Five Dimensions of Leadership: achievement, authenticity, collaboration, ownership, and vision. You could make the case that the Big 4 make it more likely that a person could capture the Institute's Five Dimensions. It all depends on how each of the dimensions is interpreted; that is, whether the emphasis is on quantitative criteria or qualitative. To differentiate, if you evaluate a leader based on quarterly returns and name-recognition, that's a quantitative analysis of achievement. If you evaluate based on processes installed and people hired to support the organization's success, that is more of a qualitative focus.

Quantitative measures address results of leadership that come and go. In fact, we might say that they relate more to management—the technical aspects of leadership—rather than leadership traits. They do not describe the sustained attributes that make a person's leadership strong in both triumph and crisis as well as transportable and transferrable to different environments.

EXPLORING THE BIG 4 IN LEADERS

With a laser focus on the Big 4, let's look at how they have surfaced, or failed to surface, in several leaders. Not all are household names, but you'll find the work they've done familiar.

Patricia Moore

Patricia Moore (author of Disguised) was originally drawn to art but later migrated into a career in industrial design. Sister Mary Ellen Twist, president of Mt. Mercy Academy and one of her early teachers, described her as

. . . inquisitive, [driven] to ask a lot of questions . . . I think it is true that Patty's early education had something to do with her attitude and her values, and especially her respect for all people.¹

In 1974 when she began her foray into her chosen field, Moore was the only female in a design group of 350 people working with Raymond Loewy, considered the Father of Industrial Design. As such, she described her voice as uncommon among the others in the room. Her constant “What about . . . ?” questions related to people with mobility issues such as paraplegics and people with severe arthritis would elicit the response, “Patty, we don't design for those people.”

A few years later—at the age of twenty-six—Moore embarked on what is known as experiential empathy. She worked with others to develop the protheses and makeup she needed to age her appearance to around eighty and added glasses with clouded lenses so she could experience the diminished vision of many elderly people. She also blunted her hearing, strapped splints to her legs to impose movement restrictions, and wore gloves to reduce her dexterity. After all this effort, she could no longer function as a young person. As she traveled throughout the United States and Canada over the next three years, she became dependent on the assistance of total strangers she met on the streets.

In 1980, Moore founded her first company to develop new products and services for the cradle-to-grave needs of people of all abilities. It evolved into her current company, MooreDesign Associates, where she serves as president. Her clients include some of the biggest companies in the world.

Whether you describe what Moore did as recognizing an opportunity or creating one, she launched her business by defining a need that she had the ability to meet. It's analogous to Henry Ford realizing that average people, not just rich people, could and should benefit from having automobiles; he then mass-produced the Model T. He and Moore both revolutionized economic and social possibilities for significant populations.

R. Roger Remington, Massimo and Lella Vignelli Distinguished Professor of Design, honored what we would see as the vision behind Patricia Moore's leadership, noting:

She identified early in her career a need and a problem and she structured a definite response to that need and I think we're all very proud of that accomplishment and I think it's something that really sticks out as a recognizable benchmark in her career.²

Moore's persistent goal, then, was to design “with equity.” She addressed myriad basic problems of dexterity and comfort, such as the thick-handled, rubber-grip kitchen appliances that became OXO Good Grips. She successfully challenged people who refused to finance her mammography project—a quick-release mechanism that would immediately stop exerting pressure on a breast after the image was taken. Essentially, her style of leadership brought others toward empathy and away from their natural tendency to be insensitive and obsessed with the bottom line.

Moore's philosophy is that design should empower people and not disable them: “Each of us has some level of capacity, some level of ability. Design is intended to meet that level and exceed it. . . . Whenever there's a roadblock in our lives, it's because somebody didn't do their job right.”³

Moore captures all four attributes of leadership, with curiosity and empathy abundantly obvious. She also exhibits humility with her respect for the knowledge that people with mobility difficulties have about their own needs. She has stepped back to listen and observe repeatedly to complement her own experience, rather than simply having it dominate her choices. Moore's resilience is apparent in her struggles against powerful voices who didn't see the economic sense in her desire to serve all people through design, not just fully functioning ones.

Howard Schultz

Well known as the former Starbucks Corporation Chairman, in 2018 Howard Schultz (Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life without Losing Its Soul) reminded the world that the management of his company had a moral compass. After two black men were arrested at a Philadelphia store because they used the restroom before they purchased anything, Schultz stepped into the spotlight and condemned the action the Starbucks manager had taken. He pledged to address an obvious problem of unconscious bias. He did not back off from the bitter words racial profiling in saying that the company would make racial bias training mandatory for every one of its 175,000 employees.

Schultz did not have a sudden flash of conscience or empathy: what he did was consistent with how he had lead the company for many years. It seemed as though he never forgot his roots—the Bay View Houses housing project in southeastern Brooklyn—and wanted to create opportunities and rewards for others who worked hard to get an education and succeed. He wanted to shape an organization that practiced empathy for staff (who he called partners) and customers alike. One of his groundbreaking initiatives that gave fuel to that empathy was the Starbucks College Achievement Plan, developed in alliance with Arizona State University (ASU) President Michael Crow. Through it, partners could pursue their college education tuition-free using ASU's online resources.

Schultz's curiosity score was high in that he relentlessly sought ways to build the company, ultimately helping it deliver approximately 18,000 percent in shareholder returns since its initial public offering in 1992.⁴ Humility shone through in the way he put the team's input upfront when he was deciding how to grow the company and determining what the mechanisms were for turning a profit. Without question, the way he treated people—and not just when the company's reputation was under threat—indicated a consistent desire to honor their dignity. Resilience was threaded through his entire career with the company—from coming on as director of retail operation for a company selling coffee beans (not coffee), to taking an eight-year hiatus as senior leader, to returning in 2008 to restore the company's reputation and profits after they faltered.

Colin Powell

The former US Secretary of State called his 2003 speech justifying the war in Iraq a blot on his record.⁵ Without a doubt, Colin Powell's (My American Journey) leadership embodied the Big 4, yet the “blot” is a valuable lesson that even great leaders can make great mistakes when one or two of the Big 4 get submerged by powerful influences.

Powell grew up in Harlem, the son of Jamaican immigrants, and he attended New York City public schools. At City College of New York (CCNY), he found his calling and joined the Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC), and thus his military career was launched. The Big 4 shone through time and again, with Powell earning eleven military decorations in his career—he was curious about solutions, resilient during the stresses of war, team-oriented, and focused on the needs of fellow soldiers. He earned one award for rescuing comrades from a burning helicopter after he, too, was injured in the crash. And in September 2006, he joined like-minded Senate Republicans in supporting more rights and better treatment for detainees at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility in Cuba.⁶

Where Colin Powell failed—how he got his blot—suggests that he did not remain curious or humble enough to counter the force of a US president directing him to go the United Nations and make the case for war against Iraq. Asking more questions about evidence of weapons of mass destruction, relying more on people in the field who were trusted sources—these are just two of the measures Powell might have taken to display great leadership in that situation. He later explained that language and “facts” had not even come from President Bush, who sent him to the UN, but rather from Vice President Dick Cheney:

I'm secretary of state. Who else would you send? You can't send the secretary of defense to the U.N. The U.N. ambassador—this is a little above that pay grade. So he selected me, and I think he thought I had credibility to deliver a speech, and it would be believable.

The speech supposedly had been prepared in the...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• Introduction: The Nature of Responsive Leadership
• 1 Secret 1—Take Advantage of Opportunity
• 2 Secret 2—Compete Well by Leading with Heart
• 3 Secret 3—Keep Your Bags Packed
• 4 Secret 4—Stay on Point in the Midst of Risk
• 5 Secret 5—Move Your Opposition
• 6 Secret 6—Value the Interconnectedness of People
• 7 Secret 7—Recover Quickly
• 8 Making Transitions
• Conclusion: The “I” in Leadership
• A Exercises in Seeking Opportunities
• B Communication Tools and Techniques
• C Organizing Information
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author