Followers Don’t See Their Leaders as Real People

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Great leaders, especially in large organizations, aren’t really people. They’re mental images.

They may be flesh and blood to the senior team and the assistants in the C-suite, but to people in outer orbits, from operational departments to business units, they are imaginary constructs. Employees create pictures of what leaders seem to be, based on the bosses’ accumulated emails, tweets, speeches, and videos, plus whatever tidbits are picked up here and there.

Companies assume, or merely hope, that people will somehow derive inspiration from these mental images of the leader. But employees are judgy; a perceived shortcoming in a leader can easily undermine the image. But the mental process of building an imaginary picture is complicated, and certain weaknesses can be interpreted as strengths, lending the image an aura of authenticity. Understanding this process can be advantageous for leaders who hope to motivate and inspire.

Our extensive research suggests there are four rules governing how people create and respond to the imaginary leaders that live in their minds.

Rule 1: Employees tend to judge a book by its cover. In saying this, we are not being disparaging toward employees; everyone does it. People are content to base their assessments of a leader’s ability and appeal on very little information. In fact, they prefer to have skimpy information, since it’s easier to digest.

Rule 2: Employees look for answers to a few specific questions: Does the leader care about me personally? Have high standards? Offer an appealing vision of the future? Seem human in a way I can relate to?

Rule 3: People prefer to get answers to these questions in the form of stories, which are then used to create the mental image. The image helps people decide whether to believe in and follow the leader. 

Rule 4: In assessing stories, people pay attention to those they perceive to be trustworthy, and disregard the rest. In assessing trustworthiness, people look for unexpected moments of candor and unbiased third-party accounts, communicated through unscripted and informal channels. Formal, planned interactions don’t provide these moments. As trustworthy stories are retold, they take on a life of their own, affecting people throughout the organization.

In our interviews with employees we found numerous examples of these rules. An employee of Haier, the Chinese manufacturer, told us that CEO Zhang Ruimin once shut down production after he found minor dents and scratches on appliances that were coming off a manufacturing line. He instructed employees to take hammers in hand — not to fix the flaws but to destroy the imperfect products. The employees were astonished and quickly shared the story with their colleagues.

The anecdote was short, answered the question about high standards, and was dramatic, and its word-of-mouth transmission gave it credibility.

Another example: After a Microsoft employee’s young son had reached his lifetime medical coverage for leukemia, the employee sent an email to Bill Gates, who was CEO at the time. After being summoned to Gates’s office, the employee watched as Gates phoned the insurer’s chief executive — calling him out of a meeting — and “ripped the CEO apart,” as a Microsoft manager told us. When the employee left Gates’s office, his son had insurance coverage. Again, the story was short, informative about the leader’s feelings for employees, dramatic, and credible.

Leaders who are presented with our analysis of how employees form their mental pictures often ask us if there’s anything they can do to influence this process. They want to ensure that the CEO avatars embedded in employees’ minds are benevolent and inspiring, rather than negative and demotivating.

Certain aspects of the process are inherently uncontrollable; once you start trying to stage-manage incidents for employees’ benefit, you’re drifting into tricky, manipulative territory. But leaders do have choices about how they answer the four questions floating around in employees’ heads, the questions about whether the leader cares about them, has high standards, offers an appealing vision, and seems human. Let’s look at each of these.

Caring. As a leader, an important part of your job is to know who in your organization is going through difficult times and to find ways to help those employees. A personal note to someone who is out on sick leave, or an in-person thank you to an employee who worked extended hours during a particularly crucial period, will help to convey your concern.

Look for opportunities to learn about and show concern for employees. Show your interest quietly — don’t focus on how such an action might ultimately benefit you.

Standards. True, employees want independence and autonomy, but most of them want to exercise their independence in service of high standards. Those standards come from the leader. Low standards lead to low commitment, even for the most self-motivated employees; high standards are energizing. To make effective use of high standards, choose your arenas carefully. Standards must be consistent, but slavish consistency is counterproductive: If you demand perfection in every aspect of performance, you’ll come across as a tyrannical nitpicker. In our interviews we found that the most effective story-generating leaders were known for one or two things, such as always being prepared for meetings, insisting on product quality, or supporting excellent customer service. Whatever the standard was, the leader consistently upheld it and demanded it of others.

When you are enforcing your standards, bear in mind that it is a best practice to praise in public and coach or admonish in private. Public reprimands often backfire, either because employees sympathize with the target or because the leader turns out to have spoken too soon, without a full awareness of the circumstances. That’s not the kind of story you want circulating in your company. If you do reprimand in public, avoid making it seem personal. One CEO, after sensing that an executive team was unprepared for a quarterly product meeting, stood up and calmly left the room. No one was singled out, but the message was powerful nonetheless.

Vision. Generating stories that suggest you are a visionary can be challenging. What we found is that it is usually stories about the past that make others believe you will be visionary in the future. A compelling story about how a company got started can serve this purpose. Starbucks employees we interviewed told us about founder Howard Schultz’s well-known “Aha!” moment at an espresso bar in Italy. A Netflix employee recounted Reed Hastings’s story of being annoyed by late charges on his video rental. Sometimes an origin story can take the form of a CEO’s journey to the company. YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki has talked about her experiments with entrepreneurship as a child; later renting her garage to Google’s founders; becoming one of the early Google employees; and pushing Google to make strategic decisions that have paid off (such as purchasing YouTube).

Remember, however, that for maximum effect stories like these need to be shared and emerge through informal channels. Your “My Vision, and I Do Have One” video isn’t the best way to create a positive mental image.

Humanness. This is what makes you seem accessible — what makes it possible for others to identify with you and bond with you. If you are one of the corporate world’s relentlessly success-oriented leaders, remember that failures, setbacks, and even weaknesses are at the heart of stories that communicate your humanness.

In our research, we heard stories about executives with physical disabilities, illness, and repeated rejections or failures; these challenges allowed employees to see them as human. One employee told us that his firm’s managing partner had an odd habit of laughing nervously at inopportune moments. In one instance the partner had started laughing in a meeting with an important client and finally had to excuse himself. It was clear from the way the employee told the story that this “problem” was something that endeared the partner to his employees.

Another aspect of humanness is to communicate that you are no better than anyone else. Yvon Chouinard, founder and owner of Patagonia, makes it a point to eat lunch with his employees when he is at headquarters, and he always pays for his meals in the company cafeteria. These lunch stories have circulated in the company. The simple acts send a clear message that he is human and accountable to the rules, just like the rest of the employees.

As we’ve pointed out before, the best way to get your story out there is through surrogates, employees who have had inspiring interactions with you and spread the stories throughout the organization. These individuals amplify your concern, standards, vision, and humanity.

But even if you lack surrogates, rest assured that if you keep doing the right things, people will eventually notice and spread positive stories about you. And those stories will form themselves into an army of mental images that will mobilize people to achieve your goals. 


Source: HBR