Seeing Yourself as a Leader

HANNAH BATES: Welcome to HBR on Leadership, case studies and conversations with the world’s top business and management experts, hand-selected to help you unlock the best in those around you. Are leaders born or made? University of Michigan Ross School of Business professor Sue Ashford has studied leadership for decades. And she says that leadership does come more easily to some people than others. But she points out that leadership is only as real as a group decides.  In this episode, you’ll learn how to cultivate leadership within yourself and those you manage. You’ll also learn about alternative models, like shared leadership, that can benefit any team. This episode originally aired on HBR IdeaCast in August 2017. Here it is.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Sarah Green Carmichael. He’s a natural leader. She was born to lead. Those are big compliments to hear in the working world. But they make it sound like leadership is something you have – or something you don’t. Our guest today says, sure—leadership comes more easily to some than others. But it’s really more fluid than that. And, actually, everybody can be a leader with a little practice. Sue Ashford has been studying for decades what makes people see themselves as leaders. And how a group chooses the leader—or leaders—among them. She’s a professor at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business. And she’s here with me now. Sue, thanks for talking with the HBR IdeaCast.

SUE ASHFORD: It’s my pleasure. Happy to talk about leadership.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So how does someone usually start to identify themselves as a leader?

SUE ASHFORD: There is no particular scientific answer to that question. Other people see it in us, or we want to develop it, and we go out and we make little attempts at it. We, we try to claim it. We try to lead, and we see what happens. Last week I watched a new group of MBA students come into our program here at the Ross School, and you could see claiming and granting or claiming and not being granted back, et cetera, as they were, sort of, exploring who’s going to lead this effort, and who’s going to sit back?

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Do we even call them followers? How did they decide to sort of say, That person’s our leader?

SUE ASHFORD: Even that sentence is dangerous. Who is our leader? That person is our leader. That carries an assumption with it that there’s only one. And we ended up starting to study as a variable people’s normative beliefs about what we called “leadership structure in teams.” And it really is your belief about, should there be one leader, or should there be many leaders? And you can think about that. If you believe there’s only one, and somebody else tries to lead, and you want to lead, you’re likely to feel a very competitive response, feel anxious, feel like you need to take quick action. If you had a belief that there are multiple leaders on most teams, or most teams performed better with multiple leaders, and someone else starts to lead, you’re likely to feel excited. Oh, this, this is going to go well; there’s going to be lots of leaders here today. And there’s a lot of writing today about how the world needs more leadership from more places: multiple leaders, more people to step up and lead. And so, we need to be watchful about our beliefs about leadership.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Well, I’m interested to know more about the sort of granting, because it seems like one thing is being willing to, sort of, claim the label or do the actions, even if you’re not ready to, maybe, claim the label. Then the other part of it is, sort of, granting. What’s that all about?

SUE ASHFORD: People grant a leader identity by their willingness to follow someone. So, if you take the chalk and go to the board and start writing things, am I starting a side conversation with someone else and paying you no attention, or am I following along, adding to your structure, your list? And by doing that, I’m reinforcing that I’m willing to go with you for this bit of time. We also think leadership is dynamic. Just because I go with you for this bit of time doesn’t mean you might not follow me and grant me a leader identity at some later point in time in the group’s life.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Is there any reason to think that that claiming and granting behavior works differently in classroom setting than in the workplace?

SUE ASHFORD: Most likely there’s some differences. We argued that claiming and granting goes on whether you’re in a position of formally appointed supervisor or not. You know, we start from the premise that not everyone in a formally appointed supervisory role is actually a leader. Some of them never lead. If you go into a group of executives and ask them, Have you ever had a boss who didn’t lead? most hands go up. So, most people have seen this phenomenon. That person holds the role of boss, but they’re not actually leading. And what we argue in the paper is that holding that role makes it easier—more likely that you’ll claim a leader identity—and more likely you’ll be granted one because that’s what people are waiting for, ready for, and expect from people who hold those roles. So, when you have a person in a formally appointed supervisory role in an organizational group, I think, you might find more people in the other roles hold back.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: If, sort of, having a formal role of leadership makes you more likely to claim and also more likely to be granted, should you claim leadership, what are some of the other kind of aspects or characteristics of people who are more likely to be recognized as leaders?

SUE ASHFORD: We studied for years, what are the personalities of people in leader roles, and we called them “leader personalities.” We don’t know if those people actually led or not. We just know they were in those roles. And then we started studying the behaviors of people in those roles and calling that “leader behavior.” And then someone had the idea—his name is Bob Lord—and he had the idea of studying the mindsets of the people who think someone else is a leader. And so what they came out with is a set of qualities that they’ve demonstrated as being qualities that people associate with “leader”: “sensitive,” “intelligent,” “dedicated,” and “dynamic.”

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Those four qualities. Is that something where someone might have all those qualities but just not see themselves as a leader?

SUE ASHFORD: Quite possibly. Sure. Sometimes people need someone else to see it in them. If I’m a subordinate, and I have those qualities, but I think there’s only one leader in a group, and I have a boss, my boss is the leader. What she says is what is leadership. I’m not even thinking about that as part of my identity. When we poll MBA students, only 16 percent put down “leader” when asked to write descriptions of who they are.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Is there—do you see a difference in that between male and female MBAs?

SUE ASHFORD: I haven’t looked at that directly. But we have found that there’s a difference in men and women in terms of their comfort with thinking about themselves as a leader. And in this study, we just asked people how comfortable are you with the following words as descriptions of you. And we had filler words, and we had the four characteristics: “sensitive,” “dedicated,” “intelligent,” and “dynamic.” And we had the word “leader” in there, and they just rated on a scale their level of comfort of regarding that word as a description of them—not that they would say it to anyone—but just that they felt comfortable with it. And we found across men and women that there was more comfort with the four prototype words than there was with the word “leader.” All respondents were more comfortable with that. But we found that that gap was bigger for women than it was for men.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: If you are that person who wants to be seen more as a leader, do you start with, sort of, inward things and kind of developing yourself, or do you—is it, sort of, an outward performance, you know, what do you do?

SUE ASHFORD: Well, I think it is both. You know, identity gets, you know, instantiated. We come to see ourselves a certain way based on our own thoughts but also based on the messages the world gives us. So, it takes both. But I do think helping people to see that “leader” is a good identity to have, a valued identity in this setting, is important because it makes people think, Hmm, maybe, maybe I want that identity. How—am I that? Could I be that? How might I get that? We’ve also found that the more you have a leader identity, the less risk you see in leading; and the less risk you see in leading, the more you develop a leader identity.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: One of the places I think we see a kind of gap between senior management, maybe, and frontline employees is that senior management may be waiting for employees to put their hands up and say, I want to lead. Whereas employees might be waiting for that tap on the shoulder from their boss to say, Hey I think you’re ready for this project. And then people, sort of, stay in their camp, and people wonder why more isn’t getting done. How can we, sort of, get past this strange status?

SUE ASHFORD: Yeah, it’s tough, in the sense that employees have a lot of fears. Our comfort zone is our comfort zone. It feels safe there, so we like to stay there. And this is an invitation to wander outside the comfort zone, where, I think, the magic happens. And probably the more workable lever for change is the managers: getting the managers to look for and reinforce this in others, in those who report to him or her.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So, if you are a manager who has an employee—or managing or mentoring—who you think has great leadership potential, but they are worried about claiming that label or even engaging in leadership behaviors, is there a way that you could help them overcome some of those fears and really step up and give it a try?

SUE ASHFORD: Yeah, I think there are. I think that’s one of the most important things you can do, and I think that in organizations, we often—we know that organizations want more leaders; we often relegate that task to HR or to top levels of managers to find those. Whereas I think every manager could be growing the leaders around her. So, one strategy for a boss is to grant the identity in a public setting where others are viewing that. It also might make that something that others want to achieve from their boss. I’d like to be seen as a leader by my boss. And so you might stimulate more leadership that way as well.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: In terms of either becoming a better leader oneself or helping someone else develop as a leader. You have talked before about the mindful engagement cycle. I just wanted to ask you to sort of walk us through that. I think people would find it really helpful.

SUE ASHFORD: So, mindful engagement is an approach to leadership development that really empowers the person to grow their own leadership. So, let’s say you are running an important committee. So, two things to do as you approach: one is, you’re going to run this committee anyway. You’re going to get that done. That’s the task. But think about, what could I be working on about myself since I’m doing that task anyway? So, for example, it could be, I want to be more influential. Or it could be, I want to be more approachable. And you adopt what psychologists call a “learning orientation,” a “learning mindset”

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So, you go into the experience. You’re sort of successfully able to adopt this learning mindset. Then what happens?

SUE ASHFORD: And then the third thing is to design some experiments: things you can try in that experience to help you achieve your goal of being more influential or being more approachable. So, an experiment might be if you wanted to be more influential, you might say, I’m going to experiment with speaking last in a discussion of a particular topic or speaking first, or I’m going to experiment with speaking in a louder voice tone or a more a voice that doesn’t go up at the end of every sentence, but I’m going to try to be more declarative. If you’re trying to be more approachable, you might say, I’m going to get to the meetings early so that I can greet everyone as they walk in. Instead of sitting at the head of the table, I’m going to sit halfway down the side of the table. You also need to seek feedback in some way. And that can be done either by being very attentive to people’s reactions to you as you are trying to be more influential or trying to be more approachable or having someone in the group you might ask after a meeting of the committee. And then the final stage is, after the experience, or if the experience has many events, after an event in the experience—and that is taking some time to reflect on what occurred. And this has been shown to both be something people don’t like doing and has enormous payoff when good.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Why do people hate reflection? And how can they get better at it even if they find it unpleasant?

SUE ASHFORD: Yeah. So, there is a study, a published study, where they gave people the option—would you like to spend 15 minutes alone with your thoughts and feelings or shock yourself with a 9-volt battery. People far preferred to shock themselves with a 9-volt battery than be alone with their thoughts and feelings. I think the average number of shocks during that period was like five or six. And one man shocked himself 190 times. This is a person who does not like his own thoughts and feelings. So, one of the reasons we don’t reflect more is, a lot of us don’t like our inner world.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So, if you want to, sort of, build more reflection into your life and leadership and, you know, a student came to you and said, You know, I really want to do this, or an executive came to you and said, You know, help me do this. Is there, like, some just quick advice or tip you would give them in terms of, like, yeah, here’s, like, a way that you could just build this in and make it more of a habit?

SUE ASHFORD: Right. OK. So I’ve got three things I would say. One is, we’re building an app for that, where you can get on this app and say, Hey I’ve just been charged with running this retreat for the top levels of the company. I want to do mindful engagement with this. And then the app prompts you as you go through the preparation and the retreat to set a goal, seek feedback, reflect. The other two quick tips I’d give people is, one is journaling, writing something down; or in this day and age, the way I would do it is talking into my phone and having it write it down—my phone keep a record. And the other is, find a friend. So, Marshall Goldsmith, who’s the executive coach to very prominent people, he says he has a friend, and they talk every night, and they just talk for five minutes every night, and they just say, What was your goal for the day? Did you make your goal? What prevented you from making it? And he’s been doing that for years, and he often gives that as a tip. And I would as well. So, you set up the structure—maybe not every night; maybe once a week, for a longer conversation—but that person is then going to hold you accountable.SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: When you see leadership as something that lots of people can do instead of like a Darwinian race to see who, who comes out in front, it kind of makes it easier and less risky to engage in these kinds of behaviors. Just, like, give me all the benefits of shared leadership.

SUE ASHFORD: So, shared leadership has a lot of benefits but primarily under certain conditions. If we’re in a world where things are moving much faster than they did before, things are more complex, things are more ambiguous, and more—work is more interdependent where coordination and cooperation is required, then shared leadership can have a lot of payoff. We don’t have time to wait for everything to go up the chain of command, back down the chain of command; we need people taking leader-like actions in more places so that they can react more quickly, react in a way that allows more voices to be heard to handle some of that complexity and ambiguity.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: A skeptic could say, right, when leadership is shared, or when we think of it that way, there could be, sort of, an anxiety about, how will we keep this organized? Is it kind of being, like, you know, herding cats or something. Will everyone be, kind of, confused about who’s doing what?

SUE ASHFORD: Well, the skeptic would be right to worry because those are real concerns, and we don’t have a lot of data on this yet. We do have one finding that might give the skeptic a bit of pause. Research by a group of social psychologists have shown that most of our interpersonal perceptions boil down to two factors: whether someone is competent and whether they are warm, and they’re perceiving that about you as well. They claim that it’s evolutionarily important: I need to know if you’re warm to know you won’t hurt me. And I need to know that you’re competent to know that you can follow through on your intention of not hurting me. And so, one of the things we found is that if competence in a group is centralized—perceived to be centralized—leadership tends to be centralized around those same individuals. We see those individuals as competent. We then grant them a leader identity we reinforce them for leading and they emerge we have a more centralized pattern over time. The thing that might give the skeptics pause, though, is those groups were the poorest performing groups. The groups that had a centralized structure around a few competent people—and I’m putting that in air quotes—tended to do worse than the groups that had a more shared structure. And what led to a shared structure was the individual’s perception that everybody else was high in warmth. So, it’s kind of a psychological safety: it felt safe to try and lead, so I did. But we also showed the mechanism of, I identified more with the group, and so I did more leadership.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: When you talk about the teams being most effective and productive when they were high and warmth and when they had a shared structure, I would love to know, sort of, what does that really look like?

SUE ASHFORD: Right. So, you know, again the question that comes out of that research, which is kind of your question, is, how often do we focus on creating warmth in a group that we, that we charged with doing some task? I would say very rarely or never. I mean, if we work to set them up, we often work to set them up around the task: what the task involves, what the deliverables are. But when do we ever say, You know, what’s really important here is that you all feel like you have something to offer and that the group culture you create around warmth acceptance, et cetera., is really going to matter and help people work down a path of creating that. So, I’m a big fan of, you know, cheesy things like group bonding and doing things that help us to feel more like we’re all part of a collective that’s working toward something, and I’m part of that.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: In terms of, like, who might be responsible for building that kind of feeling, is that the kind of thing where you need a leader to do that? Or is that the kind of thing that anyone on the team could decide, I’m going to be a leader by trying to build this kind of culture?

SUE ASHFORD: It’s an anyone-on-the-team thing. But when a person is not in a formal position of authority, what we’ve found is that social behaviors don’t get coded as much as leadership, which I think is a bit of a bind. If we need to be more warm, and yet social, you know, doing things that used to be called consideration, et cetera, don’t get coded as leadership, then you’re not gaining much by doing them if you want to be seen more as a leader. And I also think those are the things that women pay more attention to than do men. I call it the bringing-the-pizza phenomenon. So, if you’re formally appointed supervisor, your boss, brings a pizza, you think, how considerate she is; it’s wonderful that, you know, she thinks about our, our social needs and, and our biological needs, as well as us getting this task done. But if you’re just a member of the group, and you bring a pizza, I think it doesn’t even get coded as leadership at all. And yet it is creating that warmth that I think the group could benefit from.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Are there other kinds of psychological benefits to convincing yourself, like, Hey, it’s good if everyone sees themselves as a leader?

SUE ASHFORD: It puts you into a proactive stance with respect to the world around you. And then by extension in your own life. And I think a proactive stance, a stance where you feel you have some agency, some ability to, to craft the world around you, to make change, to change your life, is really good. I think that is the way that people go through life much more happily than if they see themselves as passively waiting around for others to lead and others to shape and others to drive.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Sue, thanks again for talking with us today.

SUE ASHFORD: I enjoyed it.

HANNAH BATES: That was Dr. Sue Ashford, a professor at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business. We’ll be back next Wednesday with another hand-picked conversation about leadership from the Harvard Business Review. If you found this episode helpful, share it with your friends and colleagues, and follow our show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. While you’re there, be sure to leave us a review. We’re a production of the Harvard Business Review – if you want more articles, case studies, books, and videos like this, find it all at HBR.org. This episode was produced by Anne Saini [“Sanny”] and me, Hannah Bates. Ian Fox is our editor. Music by Coma Media. Special thanks to Maureen Hoch, Adi Ignatius, Karen Player, Ramsey Khabbaz, Nicole Smith, Anne Bartholomew, and you – our listener. See you next week.