The Big Question: How Can You Become a Better Leader?

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Hal Weitzman: There’s no shortage of material claiming to be able to help you become a better leader. Yet while some people seem to be born leaders, many struggle with authority, and some ultimately fail. So how can leaders work on their leadership skills? Do you need formal training, or is it best to learn from experience?

Welcome to The Big Question, the monthly video series from Chicago Booth Review. I’m Hal Weitzman and with me to discuss the issue is an expert panel.

Harry Davis is the Roger and Rachel Goetz Distinguished Service Professor of Creative Management at Chicago Booth. He’s a pioneer of leadership education and creator of Booth’s Management Lab. George Wu is the John and Lillian Gould Professor of Behavioral Science and the faculty director of the Harry Davis Center for Leadership at Chicago Booth. He is an expert on decision-making and negotiation. And Nancy Tennant teaches and works with companies on innovation. She’s the former corporate vice president for leadership and strategic competencies at Whirlpool Corporation and the author of several books, including Unleashing Innovation: How Whirlpool Transformed an Industry.

Panel, welcome to The Big Question.

Harry Davis, let me start with you. Can you learn to be a leader, or is it best to learn from experience?

Harry L. Davis: I think it’s both. I think we learn from experience, but I think there are some preparations, possibilities, knowledge, perspectives, self-awareness. But a lot of leadership is learned through experience and day-to-day engagements in the workplace.

Hal Weitzman: How do you separate the theory, then, from the practice part?

Harry L. Davis: Well, the theory has to be translated into action, with and through other people, something I call “action skills.” But it’s really important that one has the foundation of knowledge to apply in various situations.

Hal Weitzman: Nancy Tennant, from your perspective, what about learning on the job as opposed to learning in the classroom?

Nancy Tennant: I think they’re both important. I mean, learning on the job is how most of us learn in the workplace, but learning in the classroom is really important as well because it gives you the theory and allows you to reflect on some things, and learning on the job allows you to practice and do things day to day.

Hal Weitzman: OK. George Wu, in practical terms, what are the things you can learn as a leader in the classroom?

George Wu: Yeah, well, first of all, in my mind, or the way I think that we’re all talking about leadership is in terms of the interpersonal skills that are necessary to effectively mobilize people in an organization, so there’s clearly lots of parts of leadership—strategic vision and decision-making and all those kinds of things—that are very very different than interpersonal skills. But I think that oftentimes—

Hal Weitzman: So you mean those things can be learned in the classroom, and the interpersonal skills—

George Wu: I think all those kinds of things both require classroom kinds of experiences and theories and frameworks and things of that sort, as well as practice through action.

Hal Weitzman: So Harry Davis, when you’re on the job, how can you actually learn from that experience? Tell us some techniques. How do you help people use their experience to learn?

Harry L. Davis: Well, actually, I think interestingly here at Chicago, we’re trying to bring a more scientific approach to learning on the job, and, for example, we talk about learning to pay attention, observing. A lot of us don’t pay as much attention to what’s going on as we might.

Secondly, I think it’s important to experiment, try things, be more assertive, listen with greater capabilities, collect data from these interactions, reflect on the data as we do in research, and then share what you’ve learned with other people to get feedback. So we’re trying to embed an ongoing learning process using, in a sense, what is very much in the tradition of science to help people to develop better skills.

Hal Weitzman: And when you say collect data, you’re not referring there to numerical data.

Harry L. Davis: It could be, but generally it’s really just impressions. It could be more qualitative data. We’ve actually begun to develop a mobile app where people basically report on a sliding scale how successful an interaction might have been, you know, on a scale from 1 to 7 or whatever it might be. But it tends to be much more impressionistic than it would be in the laboratory.

Hal Weitzman: Nancy Tennant, how hard is it, though, to conduct those experiments, to try out different things when you’re actually in a working environment. You presumably have got to a certain point because what you’re doing works. How hard is it to change what you’re doing, to try different ways of doing things?

Nancy Tennant: Well, I think it is hard to change, but listening to Harry talk about using science to change, I mean, thinking about one or two things, one of the things I coach leaders about is, don’t think about 10 things you want to change, pick one or two. Think about, as Harry said, the experiment, what you’re trying to do, what’s the hypothesis. And then I think it’s really important in the feedback loop to get people to help you.

For example, I’m going in a meeting. I’m really trying to involve everyone in the meeting. So George, at the end of the meeting, would you mind staying over for five minutes and just give me some feedback on how I did.

George Wu: Yeah, no, that’s right. And I love the idea of breaking complex tasks, like mobilizing people or influencing an organization, into smaller tasks that they can take on at any given time. I spend a lot of time teaching negotiation and I teach an advanced negotiation class. And one of the things I ask them on the last day is: How are you gonna continue to learn once this classroom experience is done?

And oftentimes they aren’t terribly imaginative in terms of what they can do, and one of the things they say is, well, you know, I’m gonna go into an organization. I’m not gonna have a chance to negotiate very often, or not for a while, and my skills will get stale. And I ask, well, are you going to talk to people? Are you going to listen? Are you gonna go home and talk to your wife? And they say, yes. Well, you’re practicing negotiation, and you’re not practicing negotiation on the whole but you’re practicing listening, and that’s a pretty important part of negotiation.

So I think part of it is decomposing the big difficult hairy thing of doing all of those things at once into a bunch of smaller tasks that you can do all the time.

Harry L. Davis: I think one of the things that makes it more complicated in the real world is that we’re doing these things in very different contexts.

So it’s not like a repeated experiment over and over again, because I may be in a meeting in the morning to increase top-line revenue and in the afternoon I’m trying to reduce costs by 35 percent. So the same skill may come out quite differently in different contexts. And that’s why I think it’s so important to collect data working on one thing, because one thing across context may give one insight that you wouldn’t typically get.

Hal Weitzman: What do you think specifically about learning—I was just gonna ask Harry, is it one problem that we think of learning as a discreet activity, and doing as something different, and we don’t think about learning from doing?

Harry L. Davis: I think a lot about learning from doing. I mean, I think sometimes we spend too much time thinking about doing something and not enough time just doing it and saying, OK, what did I learn from it?

And I think this iterative process of doing and collecting data and then reflecting on it and, I think as Nancy said, getting some feedback from others. Or, my saying to George, when I did this, I basically concluded X, and he said, well you could conclude Y, and I would say, gee, I never thought about that. So on we go. I go back and I may try something again. So I think it is this iterative process that’s very, very valuable.

Nancy Tennant: I think the last part of that is really hard in an organization, which is after you do something to sit back and reflect on what did I learn. Either at the organization level or the individual. And I think companies are always trying to figure out how to do that, how to add that last loop, because it’s so important to share best practices. It’s so important for the next team that’s coming after you. But in the day-to-day, it’s hard. You kind of do it and move on. And so I think companies are really trying to get people to sit down and think about: What did I learn and what would the next step be as a result of the learning?

Hal Weitzman: Is it harder there to get people to analyze their successes rather than their failures?

Nancy Tennant: It depends on the company, I think, but a lot of companies like to beat themselves up. I know at Whirlpool we like to think a lot about what went wrong with the failures, but it’s important to do both. It’s important to learn from both, and to make sure that you generalize those understandings and share them across the organization.

Harry L. Davis: Now this is an important point, I mean, sometimes people say to me, well, what if the experiment doesn’t work out? And then I say, well then you’re not experimenting, because of a lot of experiments don’t work out, and that’s how you learn.

George Wu: Yeah, I think one idea and I think one thing that we’re trying to teach people to do is to think about small-scale, low-cost experiments that they can do.

And I think if they think about trying a new skill in a really important situation with a billion-dollar deal, that’s not exactly the right place to try something new. But in a conversation in which you have some—I have that conversation with Nancy all the time, and why not try something new there? Or maybe even telegraph to her that I’m trying to do something.

Nancy Tennant: I—. I’m sorry, George. I also like to compress the time. I like for people when they’re experimenting with behaviors or innovation to think about 30-day, 60-day, 90-day, because when it gets beyond that it’s so far out.

So what can you really accomplish in 90 days? And so pick one or two things, as each of you have said, and then just compress the time and just see what changes you can make.

Hal Weitzman: George, you talked earlier about sort of technical skills and interpersonal skills as being distinct things. What are the, which are kind of the ones that people have more problems with, and what are the basic skills that you’re talking about?

George Wu: I mean, I think the technical skills, in some sense, those are ones where we think of the classroom as being the place in which we learn those kinds of things, so doing the models and learning economics and operations and those kinds of things. And of course that’s true, but I also think we learn the interpersonal skills also in the classroom in a different way.

And one of the things that we do in our behavioral-science classes is we teach people theories about psychology, and the idea is that when you try to learn, maybe one of the things that’s inhibiting your ability to learn is that there are all these kinds of biases out there. So I mean Nancy talked earlier about getting feedback, and I think that’s very very important, and one of the reasons it’s important is that you simply cannot see things that others can see very easily. And by asking others for that kind of data—you can try to collect data on yourself, but sometimes you’re just gonna miss things that are very glaring to other people. And those are the kinds of things that I think we try to make an impression about to our students in the classroom.

Hal Weitzman: So is it just that people are unaware of how their actions are coming across?

George Wu: I think they’re unaware of them, but they’re also, I think there’s an extent to which a lot of things are just simply hard. So my colleague Nick Epley, among other things, has done studies about people’s ability to tell whether people lie. And many, many years of studies say that people are very very bad at that. And it’s one of these things that’s extremely hard to learn whether you’re good at doing this, and so really what I have to do is I have to tell you and ask you in a situation, well, what did you really, I got this, what did you really mean?

And that’s not something that you’re typically gonna learn in the real world. And in the laboratory you can learn those kinds of things, but not in the real world. So I think that one of the things is that, given the fact that there are all these biases and reasons why we channel and take the information that we see and distort it, I think people have to know about those things. They have to collect the data but they also have to be very wary about how they interpret it and look for other ways of getting data that are kind of outside of their own vision.

Nancy Tennant: And I’ll just add to that. I think it’s particularly important when you’re working with very diverse people and environments and different cultures, because you really don’t always know how you’re coming across, so that feedback loop is really important.

And I think to your question, Hal, that one of the things people really struggle with is getting feedback is hard, you know. Sometimes you don’t want to hear it. Sometimes, especially if you’re in something that’s a spiral down, you kinda want to go in your bunker and not think about it.

And I always ask people to think about themselves maybe as an avatar, kind of remove themselves from that persona and think about that feedback and how that might improve that avatar, if you will, because getting feedback is really hard. It’s tough. It’s tough, especially when it’s negative, and you’re trying as hard as you can, and it’s just not coming across.

Harry L. Davis: And I think to some extent a lot of the feedback that is given is too aggregate, too removed from the context, too general.

I think we learn a lot from, actually, from the performance areas of the arts, and I watch theater directors working with actors, and they give very specific feedback in very small parts of the script that’s being brought to life. They don’t at the end of a scene say, OK, now sit down, let me give you 30 minutes of feedback.

So I think to some extent our feedback mechanisms in organizations are not very helpful to get me to improve my performance. I think that it raises some interesting issues about feedback as a way of really improving day-to-day performance and learning rather than some sort of more bureaucratic evaluation.

Nancy Tennant: And I’ll just add onto that the anonymous feedback you get. I mean, there’s certainly a reason why organizations request anonymity, but I kind of grew up in a world where, when you were gonna give someone feedback, you owned it. And even on a 360 feedback, even if it doesn’t ask me, I put my name on it so that person can come and talk to me.

But this whole notion of anonymity, I think it makes getting feedback really hard. It’s general. It’s sometimes more biting than it maybe needs to be.

Harry L. Davis: I think sometimes, for example, people get feedback in these sort of aggregate notions. Like, you’re too impatient. Well, it may be that I should have been impatient because we’ve been talking about some strategy for a month and just ready to make a decision. And it could have more to do with the person giving me the feedback than it had to do with what was actually taking place.

George Wu: Can I ask Nancy a question which is, I think one additional challenge to getting feedback is that when you ask me for what I thought about the meeting, it’s not exactly clear what you want. And we know that in a lot of situations people are looking for accolades and reinforcement and not the truth, so to speak.

So I’m curious how you deal with that, and to the extent that you want honest feedback, how do you telegraph that you’re in this world rather than this world?

Nancy Tennant: Sometimes I stay at the behavioral level. Like in the example earlier. In this example, I’m having trouble bringing everyone into the meeting. So George, what I’m gonna try to do is, I’m gonna call on everybody and I’m gonna try to have eye contact with them. Those are the two things I’m trying to work on, so could you give me some feedback?

So at the behavioral level, it tends to be a lot easier, but it’s not all about behavioral. Sometimes it’s just the general nature of how you come across. Do you seem honest? Do you seem transparent? Those things are harder to get feedback on, I agree.

Hal Weitzman: I was gonna ask on feedback, isn’t one of the problems that people who are asked often don’t have any incentive to be honest and rigorous about the feedback. It’s easier just to say, you’re doing great.

Nancy Tennant: I think the old adage is, you give feedback to the people you care about. So I think it’s really important to find someone that you have a relationship with and that you know will be honest with you. And how you ask for it is really important. If you’re already defensive: I’m trying to work on this. I’ve gotta get this done for my performance appraisal. If I don’t, I’m gonna get fired, could you give me some . . . Well, you know.

But if you’re really open about it and honest and you find someone that you have a relationship with and you feel really wants to help you.

Harry L. Davis: And I would add to that, is the person giving feedback close enough to the behavior that they were actually seeing it? And it wasn’t too long ago, so there wasn’t sort of some kind of forgetting bias, and so forth. And that’s another issue that’s often difficult.

Hal Weitzman: Harry Davis, both you and George have spoken about experimentation. What advice do you give people? What kind of these low-level, non-high-stake experiments should executives start with?

Harry L. Davis: Good question. I think, as some of you know, I spend a lot of time looking at a lot of areas that seem removed from business leadership, because I think many of us here view leadership as a performance, and I would even say a performance art.

I was just reading a book about a very-well-known opera singer who said that you can tell what’s necessary to know about singing in about 10 minutes. It takes about 10 years to accomplish it. So how does a singer accomplish it? You sing. You audition. You try out. You practice every single day.

And so, the first recommendation I would make is that, like exercise or healthy eating, you have to do something every day. You have to keep working at it. You can’t say, well, I’m gonna give up, in maybe another six months I’ll go back to it. I think it has to be a daily regimen.

Hal Weitzman: OK, but what would be an example of something you would encourage somebody to look at?

Harry L. Davis: Well, if I tend to talk a lot and maybe I don’t listen all that well, I may go to a meeting and say, Nancy, why don’t you facilitate the meeting today? Change the roles, switch things around a bit.

Or I may say, hey, before I give my opinion, I’m just gonna sit and listen to what Nancy and George think about this, and I may ask some questions. I’ll just try something very different.

Now they may say, what are you doing? You’re always telling us what to do. But I think when we’re working together, we may learn to have that agility and be able to be more fluid in the way we play our roles, which I think is the way of learning.

Hal Weitzman: Nancy Tennant, what are some examples at Whirlpool of how you experimented?

Nancy Tennant: How I personally or how . . . ?

Hal Weitzman: Yeah, well, when you were doing your innovation gig at Whirlpool, yeah.

Nancy Tennant: It was kind of interesting for the innovation gig at Whirlpool. The first time we sent people out to do an experiment, they were so excited. They went out in the marketplace and they came back and we said, OK now, tell us what you learned. And they basically said, in this first wave, well, we’re not sure. Because they really didn’t have that rigor, that design of experimentation to really say, these are the hypotheses, this is how I’m gonna . . . So we did try, to Harry’s point, bring some science into it and help people really understand how to do experimentation: quick, low cost, one or two things, but around a design of experimentation.

One example is a group of innovators went out into the field and decided they were gonna set up a kiosk in a retail store and allow customers to come in and customize their refrigerator, and so they went through and got all the SKUs that were available and built the website and etc., etc. And when they finished, they really weren’t sure what they had learned. Did it mean they would actually pay for this customization? Did it mean that we could actually fulfill it?

So coming back and setting a hypothesis to say, OK, Hypothesis 1 is gonna be about whether or not at the end of it they would be willing to pay for the change. Hypothesis 2 . . . So getting really specific about it and then collecting the data and sitting back and reflecting and deciding what we had learned.

Hal Weitzman: What was the leadership lesson there? Is it that the people themselves learned leadership, or did the leaders learn by letting them go and do their thing?

Nancy Tennant: I think the leadership lesson is to set some kind of a frame. To not go in and actually do it for them and show them, but say, here’s the frame, in this case experimentation, here’s some ideas or here’s a place you might go learn about it.

Or in this case, there’s a group of people at Whirlpool that are experts in this. They’re Six Sigma Black Belt. And then letting them do that and then come back, and then I think the leadership role is asking questions. What did you learn? How do you know? What’s your next experiment? Etc.

Hal Weitzman: George, were you gonna?

George Wu: Yeah, I agree with everything that’s been said. I guess I would add a couple of things.

In my mind, I think of the scientific method, and I think the scientific method—getting to what Nancy said—is having a hypothesis. And I think one thing that’s difficult about a lot of interpersonal skills is maybe the hypothesis is that, I am unable to do that, or, I will feel really uncomfortable doing that, or whatever. And that’s a hypothesis about capabilities.

Another hypothesis is one about effectiveness. If I do this, then it will be effective, ineffective, relative to something else. And I think to be clear minded about what you’re trying to get out of any kind of activity that you’re doing. I think the issue about capabilities is very different than the issue about consequence and so on.

And then to try something different, as Harry was saying, and one of the things is that sometimes there are just things that you can do that are a little different, and I think one of the things that I know that Harry believes in a lot is that you have to behave differently in different situations because a situation in which you’re in front of the room, people are expecting you to take command, is very different than a situation where we’re in a group of peers or something in which we have somebody new or whatever. And so you have to develop the capabilities of being in lots of situations but you also have to develop the capabilities of figuring out what’s right to do in that particular situation.

Harry L. Davis: One of the things that gets in the way of experimentation is the sense that people tend to seek confirming evidence, which means if, for example, I think George doesn’t like me, in a group situation I’m not going to do anything that would disconfirm that. I will probably not say very much because my belief is he’s not gonna listen to me. It’s important that people seek disconfirming evidence, and that’s the way science evolves.

And in the laboratory courses that I’ve run in the last two or three years, where we were collecting data, I’ve always been really amazed at how many people are surprised when they seek disconfirming evidence that, in fact, the hypothesis and the belief sets they had were wrong.

For example, if somebody said, if I express my opinion, people are going to distance themselves from me, and so they start to do that and people say, gee, that’s a really smart thing, Nancy, say more. And so, I think that’s a habit that often needs to be broken.

George Wu: That’s right, and I think a lot of kinds of things . . . people talk themselves out of doing certain kinds of things in lots of different ways because they think they’re not gonna work or they think that they’re not going to be able to do these things, and sometimes they’re right, and of course sometimes they’re wrong. And you’re never gonna learn that you’re wrong, that you can’t do something, unless you try it, probably in a low-stake situation. But you gotta try it and see if it works or not.

Hal Weitzman: Harry Davis, what about mentorship? How important is it to have a mentor if you want to become a better leader?

Harry L. Davis: Well, I’m sitting here with two mentors so I have to say it’s important, and I believe it. I think mentors are, they’re part of the feedback process. And Nancy said it well, they’re people that typically care and they have time to spend.

Hal Weitzman: Does that mean people in the same company or the same industry?

Harry L. Davis: I think in some ways sometimes people in the same company are extraordinarily helpful when it comes to tacit knowledge and domain knowledge. If somebody says, by the way, let me tell you something that happened 10 years ago that is still a part of the culture, you better pay attention to it. That’s very relevant. But sometimes it’s very refreshing to talk to somebody in a completely different field.

So I think opening oneself up to asking for help, and I think sometimes leaders get into difficulty ’cause they say, well, I’m a leader, I shouldn’t ask for help because that means I’m weak. And I think that’s really not the case at all. At the same time, I would just say as sort of underneath that,

I think that teachers and mentors can be helpful to a point, but I think when all is said and done, leadership is a personal commitment to one’s self and one’s uniqueness, and a mentor can sometimes say, you should do this. You should do that. You should do this, because those are the characteristics of the leaders I know. But sometimes you have to say, well, that may be a characteristic of those people, but that’s not my leadership style. So I think one has to . . . you’ve probably had a lot of experience with that, Nancy.

Nancy Tennant: Well, I was just thinking, that’s very well said, because I think mentors and teachers can take you to a point, and then as you said, you have to, it’s a performance art. You have to perform. You have to try things. And so I think both are really important, but I think it was really well said.

Hal Weitzman: OK, Nancy Tennant, what about leading in a period of great disruption and uncertainty? Are there specific kinds of skills that work well in those situations?

Nancy Tennant: Well, it’s an interesting question because in some sense I’m not sure when we’re not leading in that environment, you know what I mean? I just can’t remember a time when everything was calm and peaceful.

But I think there are important skills, and I think one of the things leaders need to do is think about patterns to get up on the balcony and to kind of understand that there is a pattern to things. There is kind of, there are cycles and seasons to things. And being able to have that confidence—not ego—but that confidence to help other people understand we’re gonna get through this. There is light at the end of the tunnel.

So I think having that leading-from-the-balcony view in times when things are really difficult, when it’s really hard, is really an important trait.

Hal Weitzman: How do you balance that with the sort of getting down into the details that Harry talked about?

Nancy Tennant: I actually think you have to do both. I think . . . you have to be able to get down on the playing field but not do the work. You have to understand it enough and then you have to lead from the balcony. And I think where a lot of leaders fail is the balcony because a lot of us are promoted because of the way we are on the playing field, if you will, and so getting up above and understanding that there’s a system behind things and there are connections that you need to understand, I think that’s where leaders really struggle.

Hal Weitzman: OK. George Wu, you talked about—again, to come back to this idea of technical skills and interpersonal skills: we all can think of examples of companies that were not meritocracies, that were not lead necessarily by the smartest, most able people, but there was something about the leaders of those companies that got them to that position. Does that mean that interpersonal skills are more highly regarded at a certain point?

George Wu: I don’t know, I mean, I think business is always going to be a combination of these . . . I mean, if you don’t understand your business and strategy and all those kinds of things, you’re unlikely to be successful.

On the other hand, if you can’t get people in an organization mobilized behind what you’re trying to do, whether or not it makes sense, that’s not going to be effective either. So I think, of course, the hard part is those things are oftentimes seen as two different ways of thinking, two different kinds of skills, and you gotta do both of those things.

And you have to . . . I think what makes it even harder is that good leaders have to make the assessment: Is this mostly a vision thing, where what I have to do is understand what’s going on? Or is it mostly a people thing? Or is it something where it’s people at the beginning and then vision or vice versa. And being able to perform on both of those kinds of dimensions is what’s necessary.

Harry L. Davis: In some ways, things get done not just because of the leader but because the leader has created a culture and a sense of empowerment and a sense of responsibility that lots of people in the organization take responsibility, and that’s so critical. The leader may get all the attention and the credit, but it’s to some extent the result of having inspired people, and often not just intellectually but emotionally.

Hal Weitzman: OK, well it seems like a leader should basically be able to do everything extremely well. It sounds like the summary of the conversation we’ve had, but we’ll talk more about this. For the moment, our time, unfortunately, is up. My thanks to our panel: Harry Davis, George Wu, and Nancy Tennant.

For more research, analysis, and commentary, visit us online at review.chicagobooth.edu and join us again next time for another The Big Question.

Goodbye.

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