Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter (3 page)

Business school professors and strategy gurus Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad have written, “The resource allocation task of top management has received too much attention when compared to the task of resource leverage…. If top management devotes more effort to assessing the strategic feasibility of projects in its allocation role than it does to the task of multiplying resource effectiveness, its value-added will be modest indeed.”
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Picture a child at a buffet line. They load up on food, but a lot of it is left on the plate uneaten. The food gets picked at and pushed around, but it is left to go to waste. Like these children, Diminishers are eager to load up on resources, and they might even get the job done, but many people are left unused; their capability wasted. Consider the costs of one high-flying product development executive at a technology firm.

THE HIGH-COST DIMINISHER
Jasper Wallis
⁹
talked a good game. He was smart and could articulate a compelling vision for his products and their transformational benefits for customers. Jasper was also politically savvy and knew how to play politics. The problem was that Jasper’s organization could not execute and realize the promise of his vision because they were in a perpetual spin cycle, spinning around him.

Jasper was a strategist and an idea man. However, his brain worked faster and produced more ideas than his organization could execute. Every week or so, he would launch a new focus or a new initiative. His director of operations recalled, “He’d tell us on Monday, we needed to catch up with ‘competitor X,’ and we needed to get it done this week.” The organization would scurry, throw a “Hail Mary” pass, and make progress for a few days, and then eventually lose traction when they were given a new goal to chase the following week.

This leader was so heavily involved in the details that he became a bottleneck in the organization. He worked extremely hard, but his
organization moved slowly. His need to micromanage limited what the rest of the organization could contribute. His need to put his personal stamp on everything wasted resources and meant his division of 1,000 was only operating at about 500 strong.

Jasper’s modus operandi was to compete for resources with a larger division in the company that produced similar technology. Jasper’s overriding goal was to outsize the other division. He hired people at a breakneck pace and built his own internal infrastructure and staff—all of which was redundant with infrastructure that existed in the other division. He even convinced the company to build a dedicated office tower for his division.

Things eventually caught up with Jasper. It became clear that his products were hype and the company was losing market share. When the real return on investment (ROI) calculation was made, he was removed from the company and his division was folded into the other product group. The duplicate infrastructure he built was eventually removed, but only after many millions of dollars had been wasted and opportunities lost in the market.

Diminishers come at a high cost.

The Logic of Multiplication

We have examined the logic of addition and the resource inefficiencies that follow. Better leverage and utilization of resources at the organizational level require adopting a new corporate logic. This new logic is one of multiplication. Instead of achieving linear growth by adding new resources, you can more efficiently extract the capability of your people and watch growth skyrocket.

Leaders rooted in the logic of multiplication believe:

• 1.
  Most people in organizations are underutilized.
  
• 2.
  All capability can be leveraged with the right kind of leadership.
  
• 3.
  Therefore, intelligence and capability can be multiplied without requiring a bigger investment.
  

For example, when Apple Inc. needed to achieve rapid growth with flat resources in one division, they didn’t expand their sales force. Instead, they gathered the key players across the various job functions, took a week to study the problem, and collaboratively developed a solution. They changed the sales model to utilize competency centers and better leverage their best salespeople and deep industry experts in the sales cycle. They achieved year-over-year growth in the double digits with virtually flat resources.

Salesforce.com, a $1 billion software firm that has pioneered software as a service, has been making the shift from the logic of addition to the logic of multiplication. They enjoyed a decade of outstanding growth using the old idea of “throwing resources at a problem.” They addressed new customers and new demands by hiring the best technical and business talent available and deploying them on the challenges. However, a strained market environment created a new imperative for the company’s leadership: get more productivity from their currently available resources. They could no longer operate on outdated notions of resource utilization. They started developing leaders who could multiply the intelligence and capability of the people around them and increase the brainpower of the organization to meet their growth demands.

Resource leverage is a far richer concept than just “accomplish more with less.” Multipliers don’t necessarily get more with less. They get more by using more—more of people’s intelligence and capability. As one CEO put it, “Eighty people can either operate with the productivity of fifty or they can operate as though they were five hundred.” And because these Multipliers achieve better resource efficiency, they enjoy a strengthened competitive position against companies entrenched in the logic of addition.

This book strikes at the root of this outdated logic. To begin to see how, we will turn to the question of how Multipliers access intelligence
and get so much from people. The answer, we found, is in the mindset and the five disciplines of the Multiplier.

THE MIND OF THE MULTIPLIER

As we studied both Diminishers and Multipliers, we consistently found that they hold radically different assumptions about the intelligence of the people they work with. These assumptions appear to explain much of the difference in how Diminishers and Multipliers operate.

THE MIND OF THE DIMINISHER
The Diminisher’s view of intelligence is based on elitism and scarcity. Diminishers appear to believe that
really intelligent people are a rare breed
and
I am one of the few really smart people
. They then conclude,
other people will never figure things out without me
.

I recall a leader I worked with whom I can only describe as an “intellectual supremacist.” This senior executive ran a technology organization of over 4,000 highly educated knowledge workers. Most of these employees were graduates of top universities from around the world. I joined one of his management meetings in which twenty members of his senior management team were troubleshooting an important go-to-market problem for one of their products. As we walked out of the meeting, we were reflecting on the conversation and the decisions made. He stopped, turned to me, and calmly said, “In meetings, I typically only listen to a couple of people. No one else really has anything to offer.” I think he saw the alarm on my face because after his words came out, he added the awkward postscript, “Well, of course you are one of these people.” I doubted it. Out of the top twenty managers representing a division of 4,000 people, he believed only a couple had anything to offer. As we walked down the hallway, we passed by rows and rows of cubicles and offices occupied by his staff. Seen through new eyes, this expanse now suddenly looked like a massive brainpower wasteland. I wanted to make a public announcement and tell them all
that they could go home since their senior executive didn’t think they had much to offer.

In addition to assuming intelligence is a scarce commodity, Diminishers see intelligence as static, meaning it doesn’t change over time or circumstance. Our research showed that Diminishers see intelligence as something basic about a person that can’t change much. This is consistent with what Dr. Carol Dweck, noted psychologist and author, calls a “fixed mindset,” which is a belief that one’s intelligence and qualities are carved in stone.
¹⁰
Diminishers’ two-step logic appears to be
people who don’t “get it” now
,
never will
; therefore,
I’ll need to keep doing the thinking for everyone
. In the Diminisher world, there is no vacation for the smart people!

You can probably predict how the executive described above actually operated on a day-to-day basis. You might ask yourself how
you
would operate if, deep down, you held these beliefs. You would probably tell people what to do, make all the important decisions, and jump in and take over when someone appeared to be failing. And in the end, you would almost always be right, because your assumptions would cause you to manage in a way that produced subordination and dependency.

THE MIND OF THE MULTIPLIER
Multipliers hold very different assumptions. Multipliers have a rich view of the intelligence of the people around them. If Diminishers see the world of intelligence in black and white, Multipliers see it in Technicolor. They don’t see a world where just a few people deserve to do the thinking; Multipliers see intelligence as continually developing. This observation is consistent with what Dweck calls a “growth mindset,” which is a belief that basic qualities like intelligence and ability can be cultivated through effort.
¹¹
They assume:
people are smart and will figure it out.
They see their organization as full of talented people who are capable of contributing at much higher levels. They think like one manager we interviewed who takes stock of her team members by asking herself,
In what way is this
person smart?
In answering this question, she finds colorful capabilities often hidden just below the surface. Instead of writing people off as not worth her time, she is able to ask, What could be done to develop and grow these capabilities? She then finds an assignment that both stretches the individual and furthers the interests of the organization.

Such Multipliers look at the complex opportunities and challenges swirling around them and assume:
there are smart people everywhere who will figure this out and get even smarter in the process
. Therefore, they conclude that their job is to bring the right people together in an environment that liberates people’s best thinking and then to get out of their way.

How would you operate if you held these assumptions? In the most trying times, you would trust your people; you would extend hard challenges to them and allow them space to fulfill their responsibilities. You would access their intelligence in a way that would actually make them smarter.

The chart below summarizes how these very different sets of assumptions have a powerful effect on the way Diminishers and Multipliers lead others:

How would you:
: Manage talent?

Diminisher “They will never figure this out without me.”
: Use

Multiplier “People are smart and will figure this out.”
: Develop

How would you:
: Approach mistakes?

Diminisher “They will never figure this out without me.”
: Blame

Multiplier “People are smart and will figure this out.”
: Explore

How would you:
: Set direction?

Diminisher “They will never figure this out without me.”
: Tell

Multiplier “People are smart and will figure this out.”
: Challenge

How would you:
: Make decisions?

Diminisher “They will never figure this out without me.”
: Decide

Multiplier “People are smart and will figure this out.”
: Consult

How would you:
: Get things done?

Diminisher “They will never figure this out without me.”
: Control

Multiplier “People are smart and will figure this out.”
: Support

These core assumptions are essential to unearth and understand because, quite simply, behavior follows assumptions. If someone wants to lead like a Multiplier, he or she can’t simply mimic the practices of the Multiplier. An aspiring Multiplier must start by thinking like a Multiplier. In twenty years of watching and coaching executives,
I have observed how leaders’ assumptions affect their management. When someone begins by examining and potentially upgrading their core assumptions, they will more easily adopt the five disciplines of the Multiplier with authenticity and impact.

THE FIVE DISCIPLINES OF THE MULTIPLIER

So what are the practices that distinguish the Multiplier? In analyzing data on over 150 leaders, we found a number of areas in which Multipliers and Diminishers do the same thing. They both are customer driven. Both have strong business acumen and market insight. Both surround themselves with smart people, and both consider themselves thought leaders. However, as we searched the data for the active ingredients unique to Multipliers, we found five disciplines in which Multipliers differentiate themselves from Diminishers.

1. ATTRACT AND OPTIMIZE TALENT.
Multipliers lead people by operating as
Talent Magnets
, whereby they attract and deploy talent to its fullest regardless of who owns the resource. People flock to work with them directly or otherwise because they know they will grow and be successful. In contrast, Diminishers operate as
Empire Builders
, insisting that they must own and control resources to be more productive. They tend to divide resources into those they own and those they don’t, allowing these artificial separations to hamstring effective use of all resources.

People may initially be attracted to work with a Diminisher, but it is often the place where people’s careers die.