What makes a leader great?
A dose of luck, for sure. But specific leadership traits mark extraordinary individuals time and time again and help elevate the standouts from the vast middle.
That’s the overarching takeaway from an extensive and growing collection of biographical case studies by Robert Simons, Baker Foundation Professor and Charles M. Williams Professor of Business Administration, Emeritus, at Harvard Business School.
“People are attracted to optimism and hope in leaders.”
On the surface, Steve Jobs and Sarah Breedlove don’t appear to have much in common. One, a child of the 1960s Bay Area counterculture, and the other, a daughter of former enslaved people born after the Civil War, both built iconic companies by passionately championing their ideas and pushing for growth. They’re two of the 23 profiles that Simons wrote for his MBA course, “Changing the World,” whose life stories contain pearls of management wisdom for today’s executives looking to lead with excellence.
“Without exception, all these people are opportunity seekers,” says Simons of the leaders profiled, which include former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and baseball and Civil Rights legend Jackie Robinson. “They wake up every morning and see the glass as half-full not half-empty. People are attracted to optimism and hope in leaders.”
Here, Simons discusses five leaders and what made them management legends.
Mary Kay Ash: Praise is powerful
Growing up in 1920s Texas, future cosmetic industry pioneer Mary Kay Ash learned about hard work, strict priorities, and the power of positive reinforcement firsthand. When she was seven, her father contracted tuberculosis, becoming housebound and requiring constant medical care. Always stretched for time, Ash recalled, “Throughout my childhood, I knew that in order to get something, I had to give up something else.”
Her mother worked at a restaurant to support them, and Ash would call her for instructions on cooking and other household tasks. Her mother patiently motivated her young daughter with praise and reinforcement, saying over the phone, “You can do it, Mary Kay, you can do it.”
When she launched her own firm, Beauty by Mary Kay, she leaned on the early lesson her mother taught her about motivation to inspire her salespeople. “Especially in the beginning, the consultant needs praise for everything she did right… I find that if you must criticize, it’s best to sandwich it between two thick layers of praise,” Ash said.
Leadership Lesson 1: “Mary Kay was a master of harnessing the power of recognition,” Simons observes. “We talk about compensation, but at every level, she gave prizes and they had to be given onstage. She believed you could praise people to success.”
Bill Wilson: Eliminate ego
Bill Wilson isn’t a household name in business circles—and that’s intentional. The founder of Alcoholics Anonymous was adamant that successful organizations need a decentralized leadership that keeps big egos at bay.
Born in the backroom of a Vermont saloon in 1898, Wilson was drawn to drinking after his parents divorced, leaving him with grandparents and a deep insecurity that he didn’t belong. Driven and charismatic, but falling down drunk much of the time, the case describes how Wilson built and lost fortunes during the Roaring 20s and Great Depression. A stable and supportive marriage was a rock, as was a friend who helped him see and spread the idea that alcoholism wasn’t a moral failing, but a disease. Once sober, Wilson started support groups that later became A.A. built on an idea that “there could be leaders but no bosses.”
As Wilson expanded the organization nationwide, he instilled strong boundaries and a rigid sense of ethics. He insisted that all major decisions be made by local chapters. Wilson turned down Time’s Man of the Year profile and wouldn’t claim authorship of the Alcoholics Anonymous “Big Book” he wrote and that eventually sold 35 million copies, “to keep our fool ego from running hog wild at A.A.’s expense,” Wilson reflected.
Leadership Lesson 2: “There is always this danger as people succeed and rise up the hierarchy that they start to think that they’re infallible, that their egos start to dictate how the organization is run, that everyone’s kind of afraid to say anything until the boss clears what he or she is going to say,” Simons says. “Wilson didn’t want ego and hierarchy to overcome the power of individual initiative.”
Sarah Breedlove: Networks matter
The child of formerly enslaved people born in Louisiana in 1867, Sarah Breedlove was an orphan by seven and a widowed single mother by 19. She was determined to escape the poverty and violence of her childhood, and moved to St. Louis with her young daughter to build a better life.
There, the stress of a doomed relationship caused her hair to thin. Breedlove found a product that revitalized it, and started selling the tonic, leaning hard on family and friends for labor and customers. “I was convinced it would be a success,” she said of the hair-care business she founded that went on to achieve great success, the Madam C. J. Walker Manufacturing company.
Breedlove chased growth, picking up and moving first to Denver, then to Pittsburgh, then to Indianapolis. Her strategy: Look for locations where she could tap into vibrant African-American networks, and where shipping hubs could accelerate distribution to meet her aggressive growth targets.
Leadership Lesson 3: “As an individual manager, it’s so important to build these networks both inside your own organization and externally, with customers, suppliers, and stakeholders,” Simons says. “Sarah was always adaptable and willing to move to where the opportunities were. Every one of those moves were driven by looking around the corner and seeing an opportunity or way to grow or a new angle. Willingness to uproot yourself is even more important today as opportunities expand.”
P.T. Barnum: Know your audience
P.T. Barnum, renowned for his famous circus, was in fact the father of modern advertising, Simons’ case shows. As a child working in his father’s general store, Barnum learned to hustle, promote, and barter. He didn’t care if his tactics earned him jail time as long as they drew a crowd or earned press coverage.
For the launch of his museum of curiosities, Barnum painted the five-story building with pictures of exotic animals, draped flags from the roof, hired a brass band to play, and shone beams of light from the roof. His exhibits included a “Fejee Mermaid” stitched together from an orangutan and fish, advertised with posters of bare-breasted blond women. Barnum bought a rival museum but concealed his ownership to drum up competition between the sites.
Leadership Lesson 4: “We know a lot of the stuff we read in the news or on the internet is biased, inflated, or untrue, but we still all read it. And Barnum was the one who said, ‘we can turn this into a business,’ and he did this with enormous success,” says Simons. “He had an absolute eye on the customer. He knew what the customer wanted, and he gave it to them.”
Steve Jobs: Be demanding
Today’s tech world considers Steve Jobs, Apple’s founder, a wildly successful icon. But what got him to the top was an unconventional attitude built on persistence and passion.
In high school, enamored of electronics, Jobs set out to build a frequency counter—but realized it wouldn’t work without parts from Hewlett Packard. He looked up the phone number of Bill Hewlett, then the company’s CEO, and called him at home. Caught off guard but intrigued, Hewlett chatted with Jobs for 20 minutes and gave him a summer position.
Several years later, a similar tactic worked at video-game company Atari, when a shaggy-haired Jobs camped out in the lobby until HR called the head of engineering and said, “We’ve got a hippie kid in the lobby. He says he’s not going to leave until we hire him.”
Leadership Lesson 5: Steve Jobs was a demanding and unrelenting boss. “There’s a danger of complacency as we try to be everything to everyone, everywhere. We forget at our peril to the extent we are operating in competitive markets where someone is trying to leapfrog us or steal our customers,” Simons says.
“The more there’s risk of disruption in your industry, the more there’s a danger that someone who is an outlier in terms of management style or approaches might actually turn your entire business upside down. We all want to work in places that are happy and polite, but there are expectations for performance, so if you cannot find ways of motivating people to bring their very, very best, your business sooner or later will be overtaken by someone who can.”
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Feedback or ideas to share? Email the Working Knowledge team at hbswk@hbs.edu.
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