Building Leadership Capacity
by Liz O’Donnell (Boston)
Annie McKee believes we are witnessing one of the greatest changes in human history. The rapid growth of new forms of communication — Facebook, Twitter, texting — all offer an incredible opportunity for women to make a powerful impact on the world.
“We have to admit that things have gone fundamentally wrong,” says McKee. “We can pretend this is a blip or we can craft a new change.”
McKee knows something about creating change. She has taught leadership at Wharton and helped the University of Pennsylvania’s senior team bring about a large scale organizational change at the school. She is also the founder of the Teleos Leadership Institute, an international consulting firm. Clients include Merrill Lynch, Reuters, UniCredit Group, United Nations, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Unilever, and Schering-Plough.
McKee recently spoke at the Simmons School of Management Leadership Conference in Boston. “If ever there was a time, it’s now to craft new change,” she says. “My firm belief is that women will take us out of it.”
There are other reasons women could be the catalyst to positive changes for the economy and the ways we do business. The impact of the recession has hit traditionally male-dominated industries hard and, as a result, more women than men may be reporting to work by year end. And, while progress is still slow, women are gathering some critical mass in leadership positions. Women hold 15 percent of board seats in the Fortune 500 and approximately 17 percent of the seats in Congress. Couple these facts with the “special resilience” McKee says can be found in women and we are looking at a huge opportunity for women to make a difference on a national level. “We can stay creative when things get tough,” she says.
So how can these female leaders build their leadership capacity? “Great leaders,” says McKee, “are emotionally intelligent, are complete human beings, and show up as full, whole humans. They are not uni-dimensional. We pretend the mind is the most important but that’s not true.” In fact McKee says we operate with many false assumptions about what it takes to be a leader and that those assumptions need to be unlearned.
- Smart is good enough. Not true, says McKee. “Smart is the price of entry but it doesn’t distinguish you in leadership.”
- Emotional intelligence makes the difference. It’s only part of the solution. It is the behavior backed up by the intelligence that makes the difference. McKee says strong leaders have access to a full array of emotions and know how those emotions affect them.
- Mood doesn’t matter. It absolutely does according to McKee. Too much stress and negative input inhibits our ability to think. “The kind of climate you create around you is your choice.” While these false assumptions need to be unlearned, the good news is McKee says emotional intelligence can be learned – if you want to learn it. “The key to adult learning is to tie it to something personally meaningful,” says McKee. All the MBOs and other corporate incentives are “absolutely, categorically a waste of time unless they are tied to something personally meaningful.”
Empathy, she says, is being able to read another human being and tie into that which motivates them. And women, she says are trained to be tuned in. “Pay attention to your intuition about other people and expand your hypothesis about why people do what they do.” Self awareness, social awareness and self management are key elements to building leadership capacity.
Finally, McKee offered some advice on how to deal with negativity in the workplace. Start by remembering that you are the person with control over your destiny. Negative people, she says are dangerous. In defense you should build psychological boundaries and, most importantly, don’t stay around them too long. And until you leave? “Defend yourself. Find joy in small wins. Choose kindness and look out for others.”
