Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter (19 page)

H
ow leaders make decisions is profoundly influenced by how they engage and leverage the resources around them. Our research has shown that Diminishers tend to make decisions solo or with a small inner circle. As a result, they not only underutilize the intelligence around them, but they also leave the organization spinning instead of executing. Multipliers make decisions by first engaging people in debate—not only to achieve sound decisions, but also to develop collective intelligence and to ready their organizations to execute. Jonathan Akers illustrated the difference between these two approaches when he drove a high-stakes decision at a multinational software company.

Jonathan Akers had recently landed a global role as vice president in corporate planning and was eager to make an impact on the business. The company was entangled in a competitive contest over ownership of the mid-market space. Their largest competitor dominated the small business market, while they owned the enterprise data space. In search of market control and revenue growth, this company began moving down market while their competitor was moving up. Winning the mid market was symbolically important, but it would take
an entirely new business model to get there. Jonathan had been asked to lead the development of a new pricing model to enable them to penetrate the market. It was just the opportunity he needed to deliver a tangible success.

Eager to get it right on an issue of such strategic import, Jonathan assembled a team with all the right players, including a broad coalition of leaders from product, marketing, services, and business practices, many of whom had a deep understanding of the mid-market space. The group came together in a large conference room on the top floor of their sleek headquarters in Silicon Valley. Jonathan sat at the head of a narrow table.

He began the conversation by laying out the challenge to the group, teeing up the issues and turning on the heat for the work of the task force. He made it clear that the CEO and the other top lieutenants of the company were expecting significant progress in the mid market. Driven by a high-stakes mandate, people began compiling data and analysis and submitting it to Jonathan over the course of several weeks.

The task force had just been set in motion, but already it was beginning to spin with confusion. Jonathan had left unclear the role the task force members would play and how the recommendations and decisions would actually get made. Instead of using the brainpower inherent in the task force, Jonathan used the task force as an audience for his own ideas. He consumed most of the time of the task force meetings overarticulating his own biases or dropping names. Although he gathered data from each task force member quite tenaciously, none of this information was shared or discussed in the task force meetings. There was plenty of data gathered, but there was simply no debate. The meetings atrophied into opinion-based conversation—mostly Jonathan’s. One task force member shared his frustration: “I came to these meetings hoping to hear from this brain trust we assembled, but all I heard was Jonathan’s point of view.”

Although people were led to believe they would be a critical part of the decision, they quickly realized that the task force wasn’t where the decision would be made (or even recommended) nor was it a forum
for debate where their individual or collective thinking would be challenged. It appeared that the decision would be made by a select few behind closed doors. The suspicions turned out to be true. Nothing much came of their work, but they did eventually receive a sudden e-mail from Jonathan with the subject line: “Announcement of New Pricing Model” and knew the decision had been made without them.

Instead of generating collective understanding and optimism about the mid market, Jonathan generated disillusionment about the company’s prospects for winning in this market, and he personally earned a reputation as a time waster. The immediate impact was apparent the next time Jonathan called a task force meeting: every other chair around the huge conference room table was empty. But the more far-reaching result was that the company continued to stall in the mid market while their competitors gained traction and market share.

This is a story played out far beyond this top floor conference room. It is repeated because, while many leaders like Jonathan attempt the management practice of inclusion and discussion, they are still operating with an elitist view of intelligence, believing the brainpower for the organization sits with a select few. They lack a rich view of intelligence in which there are many sources of insight waiting to be more fully utilized and where intelligence actually develops through engagement and challenge.

A leader’s ability to garner the full intelligence of the organization depends on some of his or her most deeply held assumptions.

THE DECISION MAKER VERSUS THE DEBATE MAKER

Mind of the Multiplier

Diminishers like Jonathan Akers seem to hold an assumption that
there are only a few people worth listening to.
Sometimes they state that thought out loud, like the executive who admitted to listening to only
one or two people from his 4,000-person organization. But typically such executives manifest their assumption in more subtle ways. They ask their direct reports to interview candidates for an open position but they end up hiring the person their “star employee” favors. They say they have an open-door policy, but seem to spend a lot of time in closed-door meetings with one or two highly influential advisors. They might patronize people by asking for their opinion, but when it comes down to the high-stakes decisions, they make them privately and announce them to the organization.

Multipliers hold a very different view. They don’t focus on what they know but on how to know what others know. They seem to assume that
with enough minds we can figure it out
. They are interested in every relevant insight people can offer. Like the executive who even late at night, after a twelve-hour debate, insisted the team listen to one more comment from a junior member of the group. The comment turned out to be the crucial insight necessary for solving the question at hand. It’s no surprise that Multipliers approach decisions by bringing people together, discovering what they know, and encouraging people to challenge and stretch each other’s thinking through collective dialogue and debate.

These core assumptions lie at the heart of the differences in how Diminishers and Multipliers make decisions. By assuming there are only a few people worth listening to, Diminishers operate as Decision Makers: when the stakes are at their highest, they rely on their own knowledge or an inner circle of people to make the decision.

When Multipliers are faced with a high-stakes decision, they have a different gravity pull toward the full brainpower of their organization. In harnessing this knowledge, they play the role of the Debate Maker. They realize that not all decisions need collective input and debate, but on decisions of consequence, they lead rigorous debate that prosecutes the issues with hard facts and depersonalizes decisions. Through debate, they challenge and stretch what people know, thus making the organization smarter over time and creating the organizational will to execute the decisions made.

The Decider vs. a Team of Rivals

Examining the core decision-making approach of President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama reveals key differences in their stated approach to making high-stakes decisions.

Mr. Bush has characterized himself as “the decider.”
¹
And
Time
magazine
²
described him as leading “The Blink Presidency,” after Malcolm Gladwell’s book
Blink
about the phenomenon of making instantaneous decisions.

In an interview with
Washington Post
writer Bob Woodward, Mr. Bush said, “I’m a gut player. I play by instincts. I don’t play by the book.” After writing a four-book series on the President, which included eleven hours of personal interviews with Mr. Bush, Woodward concluded, “I think [Bush] is impatient. I think, my summation: He doesn’t like homework. And homework means reading or getting briefed or having a debate
.
And part of the presidency, part of governing, particularly in this area, is homework, homework, homework.”

We saw the consequences of rapid, centralized decision making, which led the United States into war with Iraq in 2003. Regarding the 2007 surge in Iraq, Mr. Bush asked tougher questions of his security team than he had with the original invasion because “Different times call for different kinds of questions.”
³
But as a matter of record, he kept himself away from some of the meetings where key decisions about the surge were made, telling Woodward, “I’m not in these meetings, you’ll be happy to hear, because I got other things to do.”

In contrast, Mr. Obama has stated an intent to follow Abraham Lincoln’s approach to decision making. An approach that can be summarized by the title of a book by Doris Kearns Goodwin on Lincoln called
A Team of Rivals
. After introducing members of his national security team at a press conference in December 2008, which included his fierce rival in the election primaries, Hillary Clinton, as secretary of state, Mr. Obama was asked how he would ensure the group worked as a team of rivals rather than a clash of rivals. He responded with clarity:

According to a
New York Times
article on March 28, 2009, Mr. Obama’s stated approach to foreign policy decisions has been carried out in practice. The article outlines the debate that took place in the White House over the plan to widen the efforts being made in the Afghanistan war. “The debate over the past few weeks,” wrote Helene Cooper, “offered a glimpse into how Mr. Obama makes decisions.” In the end, a compromise was reached that “reflected all the strains of the discussion among his advisers.”

David Brooks wrote about Obama’s approach to foreign policy decision making this way:

These two approaches capture the essence of the difference between Decision Makers and Debate Makers. History will show the long-term
impact of these two approaches, but even in matters of high politics, the approach a leader takes in making a decision matters.

THE DEBATE MAKER

Lutz Ziob, the executive at Microsoft highlighted earlier, approaches decision making in his organization with both the mind and the practices of a Debate Maker. When Lutz took over the education business at Microsoft in 2003, it was a traditional education business that delivered five-day instructor-led classes through corporate training partners. But it was falling short of its goals for revenue and reach.

Lutz faced a double whammy: the organization urgently needed to return to positive and profitable revenue growth, and at the same time, it needed to greatly extend its reach to ensure as many customers and potential customers as possible had a command of Microsoft’s technology. As general manager of the Microsoft Learning Business, Lutz needed to decide if they should look for this revenue and reach within the current base of corporate training partners or if they should pursue a bold—and potentially risky—new approach in the academic sector.

Lutz, who speaks with a softened German accent, has that rare combination of passion and reserve. He is a veteran of the technology education business, with a masterful command of both the strategy and the details of running his business. His team is diverse, precisely because he has recruited them to be. Several are longtime Microsoft staffers. Others have deep experience with education at other global technology firms. Several are new to their current role, because they are in stretch assignments outside their usual domain and functional expertise.

After fifteen minutes with Lutz, you can tell he is quite capable of making these decisions himself, given his vast knowledge. And given the stakes, many executives would have felt the pull to do so. But Lutz has a bias for debate and a conviction that the more vital the decision,
the more rigorous and inclusive the decision-making process should be. So he set out to engage his leadership team with the challenge at hand.

He gathered his team and teed up the issue with a big question: Should they refocus their entire business on the academic market, distributing education through the schools instead of through corporate training providers? Should they risk their current business model to potentially achieve significantly higher reach? He gave the team their assignments. They would meet in a couple of weeks on Rocas Island near Microsoft’s HQ in Redmond, Washington. They were to bring all the information they could gather and come with views about the academic market space.

Gathered on Rocas Island, the team had the usual offsite environment—a great physical location, pens and flip charts, a big, open, light conference room—but more important, they had been given permission to think! Because everyone was prepared, Lutz could quickly frame the issue and launch right into the challenge: “As you know, the entire $300 million education business we are in has been based on a potentially outdated model. The decision we face is whether to cling to this business model or introduce a totally new model that would push the education out of the corporate classroom space and into academics where we would reach students much earlier in their careers.”