Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter (32 page)

Or simply…

• How can I multiply the intelligence of others?
  

Asking these questions once or twice is interesting. Continuing to ask them again and again during the course of a year (or longer) creates deep learning and builds the hours of practice necessary to achieve mastery.

3. BUILD A COMMUNITY.
When three friends decided they all wanted to earn a black belt in judo, they enthusiastically signed up for the challenge together and agreed to rotate driving each other to the gym. But as the week-in and week-out training relentlessly continued, their motivation waned. Despite the pull to quit, all three continued with their training, reaching black belt status together. Their explanation was simple: Each week at least one person didn’t feel like going, but no one wanted to let the others down.

Positive peer pressure is a powerful way to sustain momentum in any endeavor. It is, in its own right, a lazy way idea for becoming a Multiplier. The most successful participants of the 30-Day Challenge have worked collectively or have had a partner who served as both a sounding board and accountability point.

Experiment with the power of community in your own organization as a way to spark and sustain momentum. You might start small by finding a couple of colleagues or friends who read this book and want to take the challenge. You might then create an online learning community. Or you may choose to join a community of leaders around the world who aspire to lead like a Multiplier. I have often wondered what type of online community a team of Multipliers would create. How
would they make it safe for people to share their best thinking and their boldest ideas? How would challenges get established and how would debate happen? How would this community attract and develop talent and share ownership? By joining forces with a community, you need not have all the answers, or even all the questions. You can look to the genius of the group to guide you.

THE MULTIPLIER EFFECT REVISITED

When Greg and I teach the Multiplier ideas to teams and organizations, we often ask the question, “Does any of this matter?” How does leading like a Multiplier matter to you, to your organization, or even to the world at large? Let us consider each in turn.

First, it matters to you because people will give you more. The research showed consistently that even high-performing people gave Multipliers 2X more than they gave their Diminisher counterparts.

People don’t give a little more—they give a lot more. They give all of their discretionary effort and mental energy. They dig deep and access reserves of brainpower that they alone know exist. They apply the full measure of their intelligence. They reason more clearly, comprehend more completely, and learn more quickly. In the process they get smarter and more capable.

Your people will give you more, and in return they get a richly satisfying experience. “Exhausting but exhilarating” captures what people continually told us it was like to work for a Multiplier. One woman said, “It was exhausting but I was always ready to do it again. It is not a burnout experience—it is a build-up experience.” As you become more of a Multiplier, people will flock to you because you will be “the boss to work for.” You will become a Talent Magnet, drawing in and developing talent while providing extraordinary returns to the company as well as to the individuals who work for you.

Second, it matters to the organization you work for. Many
organizations face the double whammy of new challenges and insufficient resources. Perhaps you can relate to one start-up that experienced years of extraordinary growth. Their strategy had been to “throw people at the problem.” But as their growth declined, they had to try to outperform their market without adding headcount. Suddenly resource leverage was as strategically important as resource allocation. A leader in a Fortune 500 company recently shared with us that in one particular division, one in three of his people was utilized below the 20 percent level! Organizations led by Multipliers can more than double the capability of their people and hence their organizations.

This is a particularly timely message. In down markets and times of scarcity, managers must find ways to get more capability and productivity from their current resources. Corporations and organizations need managers who can migrate from the logic of addition, where more resources are required to handle the increased demands, to a logic of multiplication, where leaders can more fully extract the capability of their current resources. Resource leverage has the power of relevancy. It is timely. But it is also timeless.

It is timeless because even in times of abundance and growth, companies need leaders who can multiply the intelligence and capability of their colleagues and increase the brainpower of the organization to meet its growth demands. In down markets or growth markets, leading like a Multiplier matters to the organization you work for.

Third, leading like a Multiplier matters to the world at large. Albert Einstein is credited with saying, “The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.” But what if we could access twice as much of the available intelligence and channel it to the perennial problems we face? What solutions could we generate if we could access the underutilized brainpower in the world? Surely we need leaders who can extract and utilize all available intelligence to solve our most complex and vital challenges. Leading like a Multiplier matters to the world at large.

GENIUS OR GENIUS MAKER?

When Philippe Petit illegally connected a tightrope wire between the 1,368-foot Twin Towers in New York City, he still had the chance to change his mind. The moment of truth came later, when he stood with one foot still on the building and another on the wire in front of him. The wire was bouncing up and down from the airflow between the buildings. His weight was still on his back leg. Recall once more how Petit described that critical moment as he stood on the edge overlooking the chasm. He reflected, “I had to make a decision of shifting my weight from one foot anchored to the building to the foot anchored on the wire. Something I could not resist called me [out] on that cable.” He shifted his weight and took the first step.

At the conclusion of this book, you may feel like Petit, with one foot anchored to the building of the status quo and the other anchored to the wire of change. You can remove your foot from the wire, lean back, and continue to lead the way you have in the past. Or you can shift your weight onto the wire and lead more like a Multiplier. Inertia will keep you on the building where it is comfortable and safe. But for many of us there is also a force pulling us out onto the wire and to a more impactful and fulfilling way of leading others. Will you shift your weight?

Consider some of the Multipliers who have made it across:

• Entrepreneurs Thomas and Andreas Strüengmann, who built billions of dollars of value in their company on their ability to find and develop the natural genius in others
  
• History teacher Patrick Kelly, who creates an environment that draws out his students’ very best thinking and work, and whose 98 percent of students score at the proficient or advanced levels on state tests
  
• Activist Ela Bhatt, SEWA founder (and now member of the esteemed group, The Elders, established by Nelson Mandela), who built up leaders to fully own and guide organizations she began
  

Leading like a Multiplier is a choice we encounter daily or perhaps in every moment. What choices are you making? And how will these choices affect what the people around you become? Is it possible that the choice you make about how you lead can impact not just your team, or even your immediate sphere of influence, but generations to come? A single Accidental Diminisher turned Multiplier could have a profound and far-reaching impact in a world where the challenges are so great and our full intelligence underutilized.

It seems possible that there are Diminisher assumptions holding whole businesses back. What could happen if one aspiring Multiplier introduced people around them to these ideas? What would happen if an organization currently operating on 50 percent of its intelligence moved to the 100 percent level? When Accidental Diminishers become Multipliers, they are like Sir Galahad, whose “strength was as the strength of ten.” This is because Multipliers are the key to everyone else’s intelligence. A Multiplier is the key to unlocking capability. A single Multiplier matters.

It is plausible that Diminisher assumptions are underlying failing schools. What would transpire at a school if one principal learned to lead like a Multiplier and found a way to give teachers, parents, and students greater ownership for the success of the school? What if these students and teachers learned these principles together? What would happen to families if parents led like Multipliers in their homes?

Many governments are suffocating, even collapsing. Is it possible for our civic leaders to seed challenges and then turn to the community for answers? Could answers to our most vexing challenges be found through rigorous debate and the extraction of the full intelligence of the community? Could Diminishing leaders be replaced by those who serve as true Multipliers, inspiring collective intelligence and capability on a mass scale?

I believe that the Diminishing cultures we see in organizations, schools, and even families are not inevitable. Indeed, in the last analysis, Diminishing cultures may simply be unsustainable. To the extent that these cultures are based on incorrect assumptions, they will violate the truth about how people work and thrive. Like many historical empires, they will eventually collapse. It may be that the only institutions that will be left standing in turbulent times are those that harvest the abundance of intelligence available to them and operate on correct assumptions.

We began this inquiry with an intriguing observation about two political leaders paraphrased by Bono, the rock star and global activist. He said, “It has been said that after meeting with the great British Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone, you left feeling he was the smartest person in the world, but after meeting with his rival Benjamin Disraeli, you left thinking you were the smartest person.”
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The observation captures the essence and the power of a Multiplier.