Leadership OS

The Operating System You Need to Succeed

Nik Kinley, Shlomo Ben-Hur

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783030272937
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

Based on years of original research, this book controversially counters almost every existing leadership model and approach.

It shows how as leaders rise to senior levels, their roles become less about doing things that directly drive results and more about directing and supporting others to achieve objectives. Using case studies and research insights the authors reveal how leadership success is thus not so much about having the right core capabilities, but about creating the right environment.

Using the analogy of a smartphone operating system (OS), the book presents a new way of thinking about leadership. The authors provide a clear and practical framework to follow and show how your leadership OS becomes the impact you have, the imprint you make and the foundation of your legacy as a leader.

After reading it, you will learn:

· How to diagnose the impact you have as a leader and understand the OS you create

· How famous business and societal leaders have created effective – and sometimes ineffective – OSs

· How to optimise your OS to produce the best results

· How to get people working together effectively, and be a high-performing leader

Providing you with practical and easy to follow advice, this book will show you how leadership success is not about having the core capabilities, but about creating the right operating systems for your organisation.

© The Author(s) 2020

N. Kinley, S. Ben-HurLeadership OShttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27293-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. How Leadership Works

Nik Kinley¹ and Shlomo Ben-Hur²

(1)

Woking, UK

(2)

Lausanne, Vaud, Switzerland

Nik Kinley (Corresponding author)

Shlomo Ben-Hur

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

When our children were just two years old, they could use an iPhone. Not because they were especially smart (although as loving parents, we obviously believed they were). Nor because the phone was well built from quality components. It was because the operating system (OS) software on the phone was so well designed. It created an interface and environment that was so easy to navigate that our kids intuitively knew how to open apps and play games, without ever being shown how.

It was similar when the first personal computers came out, too. What enabled them to take off as mass products was the introduction of the Mac OS and Windows OS, which made them easy for even those new to computing to use. The hardware—the processors and drives—was important, but it was the operating systems that really made these products work well. And it is the same with leadership.

As a leader, having the necessary core components—the skills, characteristics and capabilities—is essential. Things like decisiveness, strategic thinking and influencing skills are critical, required ingredients. But they are also just foundations. Because as leaders rise to more senior levels, their jobs become less about doing things themselves that directly drive results, and more about directing and supporting other people to do so.

They do this by affecting things like what their team focus on, how motivated people are, what the levels of cooperation are, how decisions get made, and how empowered people are to speak up, challenge thinking and contribute new ideas. In other words, leaders create an operating environment, or system, for their people. And just as with the operating system on a phone or computer, it is this Leadership OS that is the difference between failure and success. Leaders can have all the core components and capabilities in the world, but if they do not create the right OS for their team or business, they will not succeed.

None of this should sound controversial or surprising. Yet amazingly, for the past 50 years, the leadership industry has more or less ignored these operating systems and has instead just focused on leaders’ core components. There is an endless array of models describing the skills, qualities and behaviours that leaders need, and whole libraries of research into which of these components are most able to drive performance. This has undoubtedly been helpful. Today, we have a solid understanding of the skills that leaders need. But in focusing solely on these inner qualities, only half of the leadership story has been told, and leaders have been given only half the information they need to succeed. And the bit that has been missed is the most critical part.

This book is about that missing part of the story. It is not about the core capabilities you need to have, but about the operating systems you need to create. Based on over five years of research with thousands of leaders around the world, it describes what these systems are made of, explains why they are so important and reveals how they drive and enable performance. And it shows you how to identify the type of system you tend to create, and then optimise it to produce the best results.

Why Core Components Are Not Enough

For many years, the leadership industry has followed a kind of ‘build-it-and-the-results-will-come’ approach. It has developed leadership models that say, ‘Be like this, do that’: universal rules that leaders can follow in every situation, anytime and anywhere. The belief has been that if you get the behaviours, values and internal qualities right, then the performance will come.

But this approach is failing. Because the rules do not always work, and performance does not always come. In fact, every single major leadership model has been found not only to not help in some situations, but to actually make things worse and decrease performance.

Take what is probably the most famous model—transformational leadership. It describes four things leaders should do [1]:

• Act as a role model and walk the talk
• Motivate people with an inspiring goal
• Show genuine concern for people
• Push people to be creative and challenge accepted thinking.

As a model, it’s a good one. Research has shown that if leaders follow these four rules, it can in many cases help them to improve their team’s performance. Yet it is massively overhyped. Thousands of articles have been written about it, almost all describing it as the best way for leaders to deliver results, without any cautions or caveats. Indeed, reading these articles, you could be forgiven for thinking that transformational leadership is a kind of wonder drug that imbues leaders with amazing powers. Which would be fine, if it did. Except it doesn’t.

In fact, there is a growing list of situations in which transformational leadership does not work so well. If a leader’s team members are very goal-oriented, if they have a traditional view of organisational hierarchy or if they do not view the leader as ‘one of them’, then transformational leadership tends not to work so well [2]. There are also question marks over whether it can work in smaller organisations [3] and certain cultures [4]. And it can even lower creativity and performance in some types of followers [5].

So, far from being universally helpful, transformational leadership can in fact be unhelpful in some situations. For all its benefits, in multiple scenarios, slavishly following its rules will sooner or later result in failure. And to make matters worse, there are no clear guidelines on when it is okay to use the model and when it is not. We know some things, but most of what we know is buried in arcane academic journals and hardly mentioned in mainstream articles.

This is not just a problem with transformational leadership, either. It is the same for models like charismatic leadership, empowering leadership, and even authentic and benevolent leadership [6]. And this is why this type of core component model of leadership is not enough if you, as a leader, want to fully understand what you need to do to succeed. For all these models can undoubtedly help in some scenarios, none of them will always work, and they can all have a negative impact in some situations. They are all limited, all unreliable.

The Power to Transform Taken Too Far: The Case of Elon Musk

Elon Musk is one of the most brilliant transformational visionaries of his time. His companies—PayPal, Solar City, Boring Company, SpaceX and Tesla—have not only disrupted industries but also redefined society. At the end of 2018, Tesla was worth $50 billion and had more than 40,000 employees. The company’s mission—‘to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy’—was arguably achieved years ago. The company changed how automakers think about strategy and design, how regulators think about the future of the industry, and how consumers think about their role in society. The world is a better place with Elon Musk trying to change it. Any list of the world’s most transformational leaders would have to feature him near the top (Fig. 1.1).

Fig. 1.1

Elon Musk

However, that is not all that Musk does. He is also massively engaged in social media. Here are some highlights of his 2018–2019 Twitter activity:

• He called a rescuer of a boys’ soccer team trapped in a cave in Thailand a paedophile. Then he wondered why the man was taking so long to sue him.
• He posted a picture of himself smoking marijuana during a podcast.
• In August, he said that he was considering taking Tesla private at $420 a share, when the stock was trading at $340.
• That tweet prompted an investigation from the US Securities and Exchange Commission. In late September, Musk settled with the SEC, agreeing to pay a fine and to step down as the chairman of Tesla’s board, among other terms.
• One week after the settlement, he referred to the SEC as the ‘Shortseller’s Enrichment Commission’.
• The SEC settlement required Tesla to set up a board-level committee to review all executive-level public disclosures, including Musk’s tweets. In February 2019, he falsely tweeted that Tesla would produce 500,000 cars in 2019. The SEC viewed this as a violation of the settlement and considered holding him in contempt. To this, Musk commented, ‘Something is broken with SEC oversight.’

Much of what makes Musk such a brilliant visionary is his disregard for the status quo and the established way of doing anything. He views everything as a personal challenge and is both defiant and consistent in his rebelliousness. But he is not a teenager being told not to smoke. He is the CEO of a $50 billion company with more than 40,000 employees. And none of these employees has a clue what Musk will tweet tomorrow, or how the company will be performing in a year. Nobody ever knows what he is going to do next.

Thanks to this attitude, he has created several companies that most people did not even know the world needed. But ask yourself: Would you really want to work for him? Would you really want to work in the unpredictable environment he creates? Because given the reports that 41 senior executives left Tesla in 2018, it seems that at least some of Musk’s employees did not want to. Having a provocati...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. How Leadership Works
• Part I. Building Trust
• Part II. Creating Clarity
• Part III. Generating Momentum
• Part IV. Your Leadership OS
• Back Matter