Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter (24 page)

I
t is after midnight at the McKinsey office in Seoul, South Korea. The lights are out, except in one conference room occupied by a project team that is two days away from a critical presentation to one of the firm’s biggest clients in Asia. The team is led by Hyunjee, a sharp, highly regarded project leader. Joining them this night is Jae Choi, one of McKinsey’s Seoul-based partners. Jae knows the team has a critical deadline and, as is typical, is meeting with the team to guide, challenge, and shape the thinking as they build the first major presentation of their findings to the client.

The project leader, Hyunjee, is at the whiteboard. She and the team are retesting the story line with some new facts that surfaced during the past week. The team is struggling to integrate the findings into the overarching message about the client’s business transformation. Jae listens carefully and asks a lot of questions, as he is known to do.

It becomes clear that the team is stuck. The team leader is systematically working this tough problem, but looks at Jae with that desperate look that signals, “I could use a little help here!” Jae has been
on countless numbers of these projects and has stood in the project leader’s shoes many times. He can see a story line that the team, who has been buried in the details, has not yet considered.

Jae offers a few thoughts for the team to discuss, standing up to take the whiteboard marker from the team leader. Heading to the board, he begins to list several emerging themes, encouraging the team to view the facts from a different angle. The group is thrilled to have this fresh perspective, and excited voices are now engaged in testing, pushing, and building on the ideas despite the late hour. With the new insights coming from the renewed discussions, Jae can now visualize the new presentation flow in his mind. He feels a familiar comfort up at the whiteboard. The desire to drive the team toward completion is alluring. He is tempted to lay it all out for the team so they can all go home and get some rest. The consultant in Jae tells him to go on and finish the job and complete the story line himself. But the leader in Jae signals restraint. He stops sketching and turns to the project leader, checking to see if she is comfortable with the new direction. Seeing the smile on her face, Jae says, “Okay…looks like we’ve got a new line of thinking to run with. Let’s see what you can do with this.” He then hands the pen back to Hyunjee, who resumes command of the process and leads the team to build an outstanding presentation for the client.

Surely it was tempting for Jae to jump in, rescue the struggling team, and drive the presentation to completion himself. He would have felt like a hero (and probably a few years younger, too). And it was appealing for the team to let him do it, given the late hour. But Jae’s proclivity to invest in people and their development won out. Jae reflected on the leader’s role: “You can jump in and teach and coach, but then you have to give the pen back. When you give that pen back, your people know they are still in charge.”

When something is off the rails, do you take over or do you invest? When you take the pen to add your ideas, do you give it back? Or does it stay in your pocket?

Multipliers invest in the success of others. They may jump in to teach and share their ideas, but they always return to accountability.

When leaders fail to return ownership, they create dependent organizations. This is the way of the Diminisher. They jump in, save the day, and drive results through their personal involvement. When leaders return the pen, they cement the accountability for action where it should be. This creates organizations that are free from the nagging need of the leader’s rescue.

Multipliers enable others to operate independently by giving other people ownership for results and investing in their success. Multipliers can’t always be present to perform emergency rescues, so they ensure people on their teams are self-sufficient and can operate without their direct presence.

Thus far the book has explored why Multipliers make people smarter and more capable in their presence. But now I ask you to consider a different question: What happens when the Multiplier isn’t there? What happens to people when the sunlight of the Multiplier isn’t shining in their part of the world? This chapter addresses this most curious question: Can Multipliers create an organization that can act intelligently and deliver results without their direct involvement?

THE MICROMANAGER VERSUS THE INVESTOR

Multipliers operate as Investors. They invest by infusing others with the resources and ownership they need to produce results independent of the leader. It isn’t just benevolence. They invest, and they expect results.

Forever Strong

Larry Gelwix stood on the side of the rugby pitch, watching his high school team practice. He thought back to the first team he had coached to the
national championships. He remembered them being up before dawn, training together. Larry said under his breath, “Well, that was then.”

The team in front of him was good, to be sure. They were learning the game, but he noticed they didn’t have the physical stamina of previous teams. Larry felt stuck. It wasn’t like he hadn’t tried. He reminded them at practice all the time. They would nod their heads, but then they didn’t do it.

He could cancel practices and hold fitness training in its place, but that risked the skill level of the team. He could yell at them, but that would only work for a day or two. Larry leaned over to an associate coach and said, “We need to turn this over to the captains!”

The next day, Larry stood up, walked quickly to the chalkboard, and drew a line from one side of the board to the other. He said, “We have six weeks left until the finals, and it takes a pretty good athlete six or seven weeks to build the endurance he needs.” The coaches and captains were listening to every word. He continued, “If we figure this out now, we can win the Nationals. If we can’t, we’ll be running on empty.”

Larry said, “There are two options: the coaches can keep trying to figure something out or you as the captains can take ownership for finding a solution. What should we do?”

There was a pause. Then the captain of the backs said, “We’ll take it on.”

Larry said, “Right now I own this challenge. Once you take it on, you’ll own it completely. We’ll expect an update from you two weeks from today, but we won’t bug the team at all.”

There was a silent agreement as the captains looked at each other, and the captain of the forwards stood up and went to the board. He turned to Larry who had sat down with the other coaches and said, “Okay, we have a few questions.” Larry and the coaches stayed and answered questions about what types of fitness training produced speed, agility, and endurance until, eventually, the coaches were excused and the four captains, all in their teens, stood in a semicircle around the chalkboard figuring it out.

The solution they implemented was to divide the team into small groups of four to six people, each with its own leader. The captains would keep the subgroup leaders accountable, and the leaders would keep the players accountable. The smaller groups met before or after school for fitness training for weeks, and the team soon became one of the fittest in the thirty-four years Larry has coached the team. They went undefeated all season and won the national championship.

How would a micromanaging coach have approached the same problem? We don’t need to wonder.

Calling Every Play

Marcus Dolan shouted across the school at John Kimball, “Get over here!” Marcus was a muscle-head coach who wanted to micromanage every aspect of his team. He yelled at one of his team captains, “Don’t ever hold a practice without me or you’ll be off this team. You’ve probably already messed everyone up.”

Not surprisingly, John didn’t try again. He and the other players slowly stopped taking initiative entirely. Playing for Marcus meant you did what he said without question. The endless laps at practice just had to be done. Even in the games, he called every play for every player. The team was so focused and dependent on Marcus, they couldn’t think intelligently or adapt rapidly to the changes on the field. They lost every game. Marcus took a group of players that had begun with a sense of ownership for the team and micromanaged it out of them. Interestingly, Marcus Dolan was later elected the most losing coach in high school sports history by
Sports Illustrated
.

More interesting still, eight of his players eventually left the team and went to play for Larry Gelwix. In fact, they were on the team described earlier that woke before dawn to practice. They were the team that led Highland to its first national championship.

Running onto the Field

Why is it that when the stakes are high, so many managers jump in and take over? I’ve watched hundreds of youth soccer games, and I have to admit that I find myself watching the coaches more than the players (this is one of the curses of genius watching). I’ve seen a lot of very frustrated coaches during those games when the team is down and playing horribly. I’ve seen crazy arm waving, copious shouting, and an occasional tantrum on the sideline. But I’ve never once seen a coach run out onto the field, steal the ball away from a player, drive down the field, and score. It has just never happened. Yet each one of these coaches had the skills required to score the game-winning goal. And I’m sure a few have been tempted to.

So why didn’t they? Beyond the obvious reason that it is against the rules, it simply isn’t their role. Their job is to coach, and their players’ job is to play. What perhaps isn’t so obvious is why, when the stakes are high, so many managers in organizations don’t hesitate to run onto the playing field, steal away the ball, and score the winning goal. Managers jump in because it isn’t illegal, and many can’t resist the lure to do so.

• A sales manager who doesn’t see fast-enough progress in an important prospective client jumps into the sales process trying to win the deal himself.
  
• A marketing vice president watches one of her people stumble as he presents the new product go-to-market plan to the CEO, who begins firing tough questions at him. The marketing VP, fearing the CEO will lose confidence in her staff, jumps in and not only answers the tough questions but finishes the presentation.
  

You might ask yourself: How would I coach if I could never step out on the playing field? How would I lead if I couldn’t jump in and
take over? How would I respond to a performance gap if I were a Multiplier?

Multipliers understand that their role is to invest, to teach, and to coach, and they keep the accountability for the play with the players. By doing so, they create organizations that can win without them on the field.

Let’s now explore the discipline of the Investor and how Multipliers create organizations that can perform and win, not only without them on the field, but long after their direct influence is felt.

THE INVESTOR

Ela Bhatt (or Elaben) is a slight seventy-eight-year-old Indian woman who is soft-spoken to the point of seeming almost fragile. She lives in the simplest two-bedroom bungalow where her bed doubles as a desk chair. She grew up listening to her teachers speak of India’s struggle for independence and her parents tell stories of her grandfather joining the twenty-four-day Salt March from Mohandas K. Gandhi’s ashram in Ahmedabad to the Arabian Sea to make salt in symbolic defiance of British law.

In order to gain firsthand experience with rural poverty, Elaben went to live in the villages of India and saw for herself that the political independence gained from British rule was not enough. Economic independence would be the next victory. In the villages she saw both the vibrancy and the struggle of the self-employed seamstresses, street vendors, and construction workers and, in response, founded the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) in 1972, which gradually became a significant union in this region.

It would have been easy for Elaben to be elected general secretary of SEWA every three years, as dictated by law, forever. In this way she could have owned the organization’s agenda indefinitely and just assigned tasks to everyone else. SEWA, after all, was her creation. It had
evolved slowly in her mind and it would have been understandable, if not expected, for her to remain its formal leader in perpetuity.