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|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

If you were to rank the skills needed by CIOs (or anyone else in a leadership role, for that matter), put the ability to recruit and retain excellent managers at the top of the list. You aren’t leading unless others follow; the caliber of those who follow you determines how well you’ll achieve your goals.

Yet when it comes to voting — arguably a more significant hiring decision — most of what I hear has to do with just two questions, policy and demeanor. I don’t know — maybe hiring the President of the United States is less important than hiring a data center manager. Or maybe a lot of people just aren’t very good at choosing excellent managers.

The challenge is, in many respects, the same. Whether president or manager, our goal isn’t to hire the nicest guy, the person we’d most like to have a beer with, or whichever candidate we think is the best looking.

We want whoever will build the strongest organization and make sure the work is done right, on time, and within budget as our manager. The parallel when voting: We want the candidate who, after four years, will leave our country and the world in the best shape as our president.

How can you tell?

As a starting point, we need an effective leader. According to Leading IT: The Toughest Job in the World, that requires competence at eight tasks. For many voters, vision — just one of the eight, expressed by a bumper-sticker phrase and a few high-level statements of policy — is where the analysis stops. If that’s where you stop when hiring a manager, shame on you. You need someone who is skilled at the other seven tasks, too. Vision is the one percent part of the Edison ratio — the inspiration part. Your new hire had better be good at the 99 percent that’s perspiration as well. Likewise for whoever leads the country for the next four years.

The 99 percent includes management skills, too. Your managers must know how to run an efficient operation and take care of the administrative tasks that might be irritating, but which are more irritating if left undone. While a president generally leaves that to others, any leader who doesn’t appreciate the importance of efficient operations and administration will lead a flabby organization characterized by internal political maneuvering and excessive cost. Not that the political punditocracy has given us much to work with on this front.

When you hire an IT manager, you look for domain knowledge. Managers must understand the area they manage well enough to understand what it means to manage it well, which sounds tautological but isn’t. Presidents need domain knowledge too — in their case, foreign policy, economics, environmental issues, and whatever other topics you think are of more than passing significance. Ignorance may be bliss, but it rarely results in good policy or competent execution.

And, whether you’re hiring a manager or choosing a president, you want someone you won’t be embarrassed to introduce to just about anyone in your company, the companies with which you do business, or visiting foreign dignitaries. Image really does matter. When you’re hiring, it’s just one among many criteria. When you’re voting, some of the political talking heads focus on this above all other factors.

Another reason voting is harder is that the United States hasn’t implemented “instant run-off.” Many voters think their decision should be swayed by who has a chance of getting elected. That’s reasonable, too, because if you vote for someone who doesn’t, it counts as a half vote against your second-choice, who does.

Nor can we interview the candidates, and the pseudo-information that’s thrown our way is mostly worthless. The candidates have trapped themselves and each other into a pattern that would cause us to reject any job applicant who tried it on us, talking more about how badly the other guy would run the place than how well they’d do it themselves.

So listen to Bush on Bush, Kerry on Kerry, and Nader on Nader, but ignore Bush on Kerry, Kerry on Bush, and Nader on Kerry and Bush. Ignore the Swift Boat Veterans, Ann Coulter (especially Ann Coulter) and Michael Moore. If you want an objective source, go to www.factcheck.org.

When you’re hiring, sometimes the best choice is to reject everyone and try again. The pain of a bad hire lasts long after the relief of filling an open position. When it comes to voting for president, Bush or Kerry will get the job. You choosing to abstain November 2nd won’t change that. It’s another place the parallel between hiring and voting breaks down.

But if you don’t think the decision of who to vote for warrants as much care as hiring your next manager, please stay away from the polls.

Especially if you live in Minnesota, because everyone who does makes my vote count more.

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|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

The technology life cycle, first described by this author in May of 1996 and later discovered (ahem) independently by Gartner as the “technology adoption curve,” has three stages: Hype, disillusionment, and application.

Management trends follow a similar trajectory: Technique, panacea, yesterday’s fad. Which just goes to show that technologists have more sense than management theorists. Technologists finish by finding the useful balance point; management theorists start at the useful balance point and lose it.

Take the notion of “servant leadership.” Introduced by Robert Greenleaf back in 1970 in his book, Servant as Leader, it offered a useful and distinct perspective on how leaders should view their role. Rediscovered by Ken Blanchard and Phil Hodges last year in their book Servant Leader, the concept is rapidly approaching the peak of the panacea phase, a sure sign it’s about to be discarded as last year’s fad.

It’s too bad, too. If you ignore Blanchard and Hodges’ theological spin, there’s value in the idea that leaders are supposed to help, support and develop those they lead.

It isn’t, however, the answer to good leadership. There is no “the” answer. Everything is situational: Sometimes leaders should be servants, providing resources and removing obstacles, just as sometimes they should be posterior-kickers, inspiring visionaries, or politicians adept at herding cats.

The question goes even deeper than the form-follows-function issue of matching style to circumstance. It gets to the heart of why someone chooses to become a leader in the first place.

Some people become leaders because they want to be leaders, which is to say they want power. Everything else is pretext. These are the people most likely to end up in leadership roles, for the simple reason that those who aim at a target are more likely to hit it than those who don’t.

Then there are those described by Greenleaf: They start with the desire to serve, and expand their circle of servitude, as it were. They’re wonderful people, with deep integrity, who tend to get shot at a lot by those who want power for its own sake. The best servant leaders shed their naivete early in their careers, so as to avoid becoming former servant leaders.

A third type of leader — the visionary leader — is, to my way of thinking, the most deserving of the title. These are the people who become leaders because they’re trying to accomplish something. They see a future different from the present, inspire others to see the same possibility, and have the courage, energy, and ability to see both broad strokes and great detail to drive the hard, complex work of making that future a reality. They deserve to be called leaders because others are following them to a destination.

They also deserve to be called dangerous, because a future that’s different from the present is an unknown. That means the risk of unintended consequences. It’s one reason visionary leadership requires courage. It’s also the reason visionary leaders better be good thinkers and better listeners: Most unintended consequences can be avoided through the not-so-simple act of thinking things through. Vision is the focal point for deep thought and hard work and not, as too many self-styled visionaries assert, a substitute for them.

Power-driven leadership, servant leadership and visionary leadership aren’t mutually exclusive alternatives. They’re different dimensions of the character of anyone in a leadership role. To be an effective leader, you need a healthy dose of all three, and others besides.

If you don’t, to some extent, see yourself as the servant of those you lead, they’ll find themselves having to overcome you to achieve the tasks you set out for them. Servant leaders take care of those they lead, help them grow, and clear obstacles out of their paths. Even if you don’t think this is an ethical necessity it’s a good idea if you want those you lead to be as effective as possible.

If you don’t have something important you’re trying to achieve — a vision, for want of a better term — then you’re in the ludicrous position of having no answer when those who follow you ask the question, “Where are we going?” It’s hard, not to mention irritating, to follow someone to nowhere in particular.

And if you don’t, at some level, want authority, that also leads to problems — in particular, to an unwillingness to exert it.

Which is to say that if you don’t want the job, chances are you won’t do it very well.

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