Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter (14 page)

By doing so, you can create space for others to comfortably disagree with your “soft opinion” thinking and establish their own views. Reserve the right to have “hard opinions” for when it really matters.

3.
MAKE YOUR MISTAKES KNOWN
.
There is no easier way to invite experimentation and learning than to share stories about your own mistakes. As a leader, your acknowledgment of your personal mistakes will give others permission to experience failure and go on to learn and recover with dignity and increased capability.

Great parents do this with their children. They understand that their children are liberated when they know their parents are human and make mistakes just as they do. They especially appreciate knowing that their parents learned from their blunders and recovered. When we help people see a path to recovery, we spawn a learning cycle.

As you share your mistakes, try these two approaches:

Each of the above is a simple starting point. But if done consistently over time, these practices can allow a leader to become a powerful force for liberating the intelligence from within an organization.

A LIBERATING FORCE

On January 1, 1831, William Lloyd Garrison, an antislavery activist, began a paper called
The Liberator
, of which he published 1,820 issues over thirty-five years. In
The Liberator
, Garrison spoke out eloquently and passionately against slavery and for the rights of America’s black inhabitants. He wrote in the first edition: “I do not wish to think, or
speak, or write, with moderation…I am in earnest—I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—and I will be heard.”

Garrison’s fervor captures the essence of Multipliers. They aren’t necessarily social activists like Garrison, but they do activate intelligence. They aren’t Tyrants, but they can be a bit despotic in their liberation. Multipliers liberate people from the intimidation of hierarchical organizations and the domination of tyrannical leaders. They see intelligence around them, and they release it into the organization so it can be freely utilized at its highest point of contribution. They create an environment where ideas can be heard and where intelligence can be given, grown, and stretched through challenge.

THE MULTIPLIER FORMULA

I
n 2005, Shai Agassi sat in a large auditorium in Davos, Switzerland, at the World Economic Forum. He was there as one of 200 Young Global Leaders, an elite group of up-and-coming world leaders, all under forty years of age. At the time, he was a top executive and board member at SAP and was assumed to be next in line for CEO. As he sat in the forum, he was asked a simple question, “What could you do to make the world a better place?” The question and the challenge stuck with him. He left SAP in 2007 and founded Better Place in Palo Alto, California.
¹

Shai started with a simple question: How do you run a country without oil? But initially the answers were far from simple. He first posed the questions and tested the ideas with his colleagues at Young Global Leaders and with a white paper to the WEF. He looked at alternative forms of transportation and worked on the question for six months in small groups. After several iterations, he could see the opportunity. After a year, he knew pursuing this opportunity was the right thing to do. He began building the team that would make it happen.

AN IDEA FOR A BETTER PLACE
To build his team, he simply explained the opportunity as he saw it. This was nothing short of a chance to make the world a better place, which inspired the name for the company: Better Place.
²
He then explained the possibility. Known for his sharp intellect and ability to see around corners, Shai began to assemble the pieces of the story. He explained the logic supporting electricity as the most viable energy source for cars and took others through this same logic. Barak Hershkovitz, CTO for Better Place, said, “After a five minute conversation about the opportunity, I decided to leave my job and join him.”

A CHALLENGE
Not only did Shai explain the opportunity he saw, but he began to lay out the challenge. To make electric cars a viable option, someone would need to build the infrastructure for recharging or switching batteries. Someone would need to be the AT&T and build the network across a vast geography. After months of analysis, the team realized that battery charging could not be the most viable solution; they would have to build an infrastructure for rapid battery switching at stations much like gas stations. Shai issued the challenge to the team and began asking the difficult questions: “How can we change a battery in five minutes?…and how can we make it user-friendly?…and location-independent?…and car-independent?…and cheap so it can be scalable?” He turned the problem over to the team and gave them two months. The team then broke the challenge down into pieces and constructed a solution. Within three months, they had a working prototype—not for a battery switch in five minutes, but rather a solution to switch a battery in 1.5 minutes. It was beyond his outrageous expectations.

A POSSIBILITY
“Shai is an expert in making the impossible possible,” says one senior member of his team. “He breaks down the challenge in a way that makes you believe it can happen.”

Barak recounts a pivotal moment for Better Place: “I was preparing for a critical meeting with one of the car makers. I knew they were skeptical about the solution we had developed, so I had developed a Plan B, which was a compromise that might be easier for them to adopt. Right before the critical meeting I told Shai that I had created, reluctantly, a Plan B. Shai asked me, ‘Do you believe in what you are doing?’ He paused. ‘Is it the right solution?’ He sensed my hesitation, and asked, ‘Is there a better solution?’ I told him that there wasn’t a better solution, but that Plan B represented a compromise that would not work as well. Shai told me, ‘Believe in what you do and stick with the truth. I’ll back you up.’ I stood up at the meeting with the car maker and gave the speech for the original solution, not the Plan B compromise. It must have been in the way I said it and in my conviction. But all of a sudden, the impossible became possible. The whole room was now in support for the original solution.”

Shai is a master at defining opportunities that dare people to stretch beyond what they know how to do. This is one reason why Shai was listed in
Time
magazine’s 100 Most Influential People list, published in a May 2009 issue. His team describes what it is like to work with such a Challenger:

Shai gets more out of people than they knew they had to give—and they love it. It appears the man who seeks to charge the world’s electric cars has found a way to charge the people in his own organization.

Consider another company founder.

The Expert

Richard Palmer founded SMT Systems in the mid-1990s in the United Kingdom to build systems and tools for business process reengineering. Started as Richard’s brainchild, the company’s intellectual foundation was built from his expertise as a business process analyst and in expert systems. The process reengineering work appealed to Richard’s sense of methodology and superior strategy, both developed through years of playing chess as a youth.

Not only was Richard one of England’s youngest chess champions (holding a Master rating), but it was common knowledge throughout the company that he was a chess champion. It was typically the first thing people said about Richard. Chess champion and Oxford University graduate. He was clearly a genius and the chief genius in the company. While he gave the title of CEO to someone else, everyone knew Richard, who remained the chairman of the board, was still the one who called the shots on budget, pricing, products, compensation, and company strategy.

AN ARMY OF PAWNS
The energy changes in a room when Richard enters. It is as if the headmaster has entered the school assembly. People begin to shrink. People react the way they might when the calculus teacher gives a surprise oral quiz, getting smaller—hoping he or she won’t call on them and find them lacking. Despite the fact that everyone fears the attention will turn to them, the attention often just stays with Richard, who works to make sure he is seen as the expert and smartest person in the room.

In one executive management meeting, Richard put the company general counsel in the hot seat with a pop quiz about a technical distinction on a very specific legal code regarding corporate governance. Richard had become concerned that his general counsel didn’t fully
understand the nuances of this particular code that had to be reported to “the city,” so he began launching questions. One by one, the general counsel answered them until the questions became more precise and delved into nuances and obscure scenarios. The general counsel looked puzzled, but answered the questions to the best of his knowledge. But, this didn’t satisfy Richard. Richard left work just in time to stop by a WHSmith bookshop before it closed. He didn’t buy just any governance book, he bought the 600-page manual on the most recently announced corporate governance codes. And, he didn’t just look up the answer to the question he asked, he stayed up through the night reading the entire book. The following day, he called a meeting of the executive team. The topic for this emergency management meeting was, of course, this particular code. Richard professed his newfound knowledge and quite publicly let everyone know everything the general counsel got wrong.

BAD BISHOP
Richard is a master of “The Gotcha” question. Richard only asks questions that he knows the answer to. He asks questions to test other people’s knowledge and to make sure other people understand his point of view. One of his vice presidents said, “I can’t think of a single time that he has asked a question when he didn’t know the answer.”

He is also a master of “The Stall” question, which he uses when he doesn’t have the answer himself. He is known for asking frivolous questions during teleconferences to stall the conversation while he googles the answers to get ahead in the conversation. One such “stall” was during a meeting with an account team that was planning their sales proposal for a deal with British Telecom. The sales team was reviewing the proposed contract. Richard, who appeared to not yet know exactly how the contract should be worded, jumped in with, “How many of you have read British Telecom’s field operations manual?” The document was 500 pages long and not your typical reading for a sales representative. Wondering if this was a trick
question, the team tentatively confessed that they hadn’t read it. Richard replied with, “How can you even understand this contract and sell to a BT if you haven’t read the field operations manual?” The sales process came to a complete standstill while the entire account team, and Richard the founder and chairman of the board, read the manual. One team member said, “He wasn’t the kind of leader who would say, ‘I have an idea. Why don’t we look in the manual to better understand the business and the terms of the contract?’ Instead, he made us look ridiculous for not doing it.”

FOOL’S MATE
It is no surprise that really smart, talented people don’t stay long in this organization. Some are asked to leave when the founder finds out they aren’t as smart as he’d like. Others “quit and stay,” giving up on the idea of making a meaningful contribution. The sharpest people leave because they see the wasted time and talent and know the organization can’t grow beyond its founder. Although the company has been able to grow sales under Richard’s leadership, most believe that the organization is inherently limited. They remark, “We’ll never become a serious company.”

One of these two founders operated as a Challenger. The other founder operated as a Know-It-All. This chapter is about the difference.

THE KNOW-IT-ALL VERSUS THE CHALLENGER

The approach of these two founders captures the essential difference between how Know-It-Alls and Challengers provide direction and pursue opportunities for their organization.

Diminishers operate as Know-It-Alls, assuming that their job is to know the most and to tell their organization what to do. The organization often revolves around what they know, with people wasting cycles trying to deduce what the boss thinks and how to—at least—look like they are executing accordingly. In the end, Diminishers place
an artificial limit on what their organizations can accomplish. Because they are overly focused on what they know, they limit what their organization can achieve to what they themselves know how to do.

In setting direction for their organizations, Multipliers have a fundamentally different approach. Instead of knowing the answer, they play the role of the Challenger. They use their smarts to find the right opportunities for their organizations and challenge and stretch their organizations to get there. They aren’t limited by what they themselves know. They push their teams beyond their own knowledge and that of the organization. As a result, they create organizations that deeply understand a challenge and have the focus and energy to confront it.

The Mind of a Multiplier

What are the assumptions that lie at the heart of these different approaches? Consider our two founders. What caused Shai to challenge his organization in a way that allowed others to do their very best thinking and best work? And why did other people’s intelligence and capability stagnate around Richard? We know that both founders are highly intelligent, with a clear vision for their organizations and a passion for their work. But if we examine their approach to setting direction, we can distinguish two different logics at work.

Deeply embedded in Richard’s logic is the assumption:
I need to have all the answers
. He sees this as the essence of his job as the leader. And if he doesn’t know the answers, he needs to either find them himself or appear to know the answers. What does he do when he doesn’t have the answer? He stalls until he can find it. He buys a book on corporate governance. He reads the operations manual. He googles the answer. He assumes his role is to know and to be the expert. It is an assumption that may have become entrenched in the years he studied expert systems.

If a leader holds the assumption that it is a leader’s role to provide
the answers and if the employees resign themselves to this mode of business, a downward Know-It-All spiral naturally follows. First, the leader provides all the answers. Second, subordinates wait for the directives they’ve come to expect. Third, the subordinates act on the leader’s answers. Finally, the leader concludes
they would never have figured this out without me
. He or she sees evidence to support this belief and concludes:
it is obvious I need to tell others what to do
.

Shai’s leadership at Better Place follows a different logic. He uses his intellect and energy on two things: first, asking the big questions and second, showing that a solution is possible. He understands the challenge at a deep enough level to believe a solution is possible. His assumption seems to be that
people get smarter by being challenged
. As people embrace the challenge, both their insights and the belief grows. Soon, the belief becomes infectious and the unsolvable problems become solvable. Antiquated arguments give way to new thinking and what once appeared to be roadblocks become interesting puzzles, which teams solve one by one.

If leaders have to spread their intelligence across asking the questions
and
finding all the answers, they will tend to ask questions they already know the answers to. Once a leader accepts that he or she doesn’t have to have all the answers, he or she is free to ask much bigger, more provocative and, frankly, more interesting questions. They can pursue things they don’t know how to do.