Creating Better Business Leaders By Honing Interpersonal Skills
By Deborah Steinborn

From The Wall Street Journal Online


Founded in 1970 with financial support from the Smith Richardson Foundation Inc., the Center for Creative Leadership today is recognized as one of the largest institutions in the world focusing solely on the study of leadership. The nonprofit educational institution has campuses in five cities: Brussels, Singapore, Greensboro, N.C., Colorado Springs, Colo., and San Diego.

CCL annually serves leaders from more than 2,000 organizations across the public, private, nonprofit and education sectors world-wide. CCL's clients include such organizations as the Economic Development Board of Singapore, DaimlerChrysler AG and the U.S. Air Force.

The Wall Street Journal recently spoke about leadership education with John Alexander, CCL's president. Here are excerpts.

* * *

What differentiates a manager from a leader?

We see leadership and management as tasks or activities rather than traits of an individual.

We like to say there are three leadership tasks. The first is setting direction or creating a vision for the future, followed by creating alignment in the organization. The third thing is gaining commitment from a team, group or organization to support the alignment or movement in a certain direction. Those are the basic tasks of leadership.

Management tasks are more tactical and day to day but also important. They include activities like creating a budget, setting goals, creating metrics to achieve those goals, and fielding new technology into a workgroup.

Looking at the two categories as tasks rather than traits can free you up from the false distinction between the two. That said, I do think some individuals in organizations are better at one than the other. Some organizations come to us and say they have good managers but want them to be better leaders. Our philosophy is that more people in an organization should participate in the leadership process. It's not just for people at the top. It has to be shared across the organization. We have clients coming to us saying that they want more people actively participating in the leadership process.

CCL maintains that leaders in business and politics need hard, knowledge-based skills as well as emotional-based skills. Why is possession of both important? And can leaders or managers really be taught emotional skills?

We've done a lot of research on executive derailment, looking at executives whose careers plateau or who just don't reach the potential everyone saw in them. We've done this research in North America and replicated it in Europe; we are now doing so in Asia as well. The No. 1 factor for derailment is poor interpersonal skills--our inability to get along with other people.

Those are exactly the soft skills that we have taught for many years. It's all about emotional intelligence--the ability to communicate, get along with others, team build, and get in the direction you want to go as a group. So in a sense, these soft skills are really the hard ones. And yes, these skills can be taught. Some people are obviously better than others at interpersonal relations, but everyone can learn and improve in this department.

How do you teach emotional intelligence?

We offer 360-degree feedback and other psychological assessments on how individuals are viewed by others. We can all speculate about how good we are at interpersonal skills. What really matters, though, is our behavior on a daily basis, our day-to-day interactions with others. We help them in a very confidential, customized setting to learn about themselves, their values, and how their behaviors come across to other people. We help people receive this feedback in a way that allows them to learn from it. And then we help them set goals to improve.

Of course, it's tough to be assessed so personally, but it's also empowering. For instance, it's liberating to learn that you are seen as an excellent listener and you really hadn't ever known this before. At the same time, you may learn that you aren't very good at managing a meeting, so you could focus on improving those skills during your coursework. We set very practical goals that the participant can implement when he or she goes back to the workplace as well. We also appoint learning partners, such as an executive coach to help reinforce good behavior once back in the workplace.

What do your executive coaches do?

They're like adjunct faculty. They may have their own consulting practices or work as professors, but they work with CCL on a contractual basis. A coach works one-on-one with an individual in sessions lasting up to three hours. The two look for patterns and themes in the participant's behavior. The coach helps draw out those themes and the individual decides what he or she wants to accomplish during the coursework. The coach and participant can stay in touch by telephone or email after the course.

In Europe, our coaches speak the local language, so an individual can request a feedback session in his native tongue even though classes are taught almost exclusively in English. We are moving to this model in Asia now, too. In Asia we have 30 coaches in Singapore who are bilingual in English and Mandarin Chinese. And we are exploring the same in India. So the trend towards executive coaching is not an American trend, but rather a global trend.

You work a great deal with executives from public and private sectors alike. How do the skills and approaches of leaders differ from sector to sector?

They are more different in degrees rather than in absolute kind. In the U.S. nonprofit sector, for example, you have to be good at working with a very large and diverse board. That's different from the country's corporate sector, where you have a very small board and the CEO also serves as chairman or chairwoman. Both have boards, but the nonprofit executive has to be more tuned in to how to deal with his board, because it's larger and has more power and works more independently.

Another thing that's different between the various sectors is vocabulary. There are different words used to describe the same thing in the military, the nonprofit, the educational and the corporate world.

But more interesting than sector difference is all the other factors that can enter the equation. If you are a global corporation, for instance, the issues related to that global context could trump whether you are in aerospace versus financial services. It's sort of four-dimensional. The size of the organization, the location can matter a lot as well. There are various contexts to which you must be sensitive. In the government sector you run into the political arena, and there you need other skills once again.

Since we work with leaders in so many different sectors we can bring them together and have them learn from one another. We have access to leadership in military, nonprofit and other sectors and learn how similar some of their problems actually are. We have tried to address that for our clients through Leadership at the Peak, a course for senior executives from different organizations, sectors and countries that we offer in Colorado Springs as well as in Europe several times a year.

How different are the kinds of skills possessed--or needed--by American, Asian and European executives? Are there certain global similarities among all executives, regardless of their origin or professional upbringing?

We don't have the final answer on this. We have a big research project under way called Leading Across Differences. We are studying leadership in more than 20 countries around the world, looking at both similarities and differences.

We do believe there are important differences, but it's all about context. One thing: Showing respect for others seems to be a consistent theme of leaders who do well, regardless of country. But how this respect is defined can be very different from country to country. How it plays out behaviorally, the nuances from culture to culture, differs.

The complexity of this research is rather daunting. For one, it's a misnomer to refer to Asian or European executives, because those in South Korea versus Malaysia are very, very different. We're trying to steer away from the idea of an Asian approach to leadership versus a European one.

And we are finding that there are many nuances. If we want to say that respect is one thing shared by all leaders, we want to be able to say here's how it looks in this cultural setting versus that one. Because when we go somewhere, we're asked. "What does that mean for us in our country?" In the Middle East, for example, hierarchy is still very important. If you are an American executive posted there, you need to understand that to be a good leader you must operate through a hierarchy; if you're not aware of that you'll get into trouble very quickly. In the U.S., this style would be viewed as passé.

How do CCL's executive-education offerings differ from programs at other schools? What is your unique selling point?

We focus on leadership and leader development and we think that's our unique advantage. We don't teach the things that leading business schools teach, such as marketing and finance. We don't teach or consult in the area of strategy. We are in the leadership arena, and that is our strength.

Individual leadership development is our forte, but we also are working increasingly with groups, teams and even whole organizations. So our ability to scale over a group of hundreds of executives and sometimes over a period of several years is another unique selling point. We worked with the Canadian civil service on an executive-education program for more than 1,000 senior civil servants, for instance. They now offer the course in-house, after we worked with them for five years. That's an example of the success we've had over time.

CCL has a diverse list of clients. How does one center serve the needs of so many?

We see the diversity of our client base as one of our strengths. Our mission is to serve society, and we would not be serving society broadly if we were just working in the corporate sector.

It is a big task, though. It means that the way in which we work is complex. In order to serve such a broad client base, we have staff from a variety of different sectors and backgrounds. For instance, when we work with the U.S. military, some of our staff will be retired military officials. We can't do it perfectly, but most of our clients want to work with a staff member who understands their context. We spend a lot of time interviewing a potential client, learning their organization's vocabulary and building it into the coursework. We spend time up front understanding the context of what leaders in this organization are doing.

We have close to 100 full-time faculty members but we have a cadre of adjunct faculty too; some teach in the classroom but many act as executive coaches. We have about 350 to 400 adjuncts, and that gives us a lot of reach.

Where do you see the greatest opportunities in executive education in the next five years?

We are seeing rapid growth in Europe. We've had a presence there for more than 15 years but it's growing rapidly. We are taking a pan-European approach since leaders in Europe have to take that same approach. That said, the former Eastern Europe, particularly Poland, is booming.

Asia is, of course, huge. Since 2003 we have had an office in Singapore, which serves the entire Asia-Pacific region. And like everyone else, we are trying to figure out how to best work in India and China in the coming years. We are working in India right now with domestic companies there and are exploring opportunities in China. The language is a challenge, but we are bringing on board adjunct faculty and staff for this. We are also in the process of translating our feedback assessments and other course and coaching materials into about 10 different languages.

We see a growing demand for leadership research in coming years. We just put together our new budget and are increasing by 40% our investment in research and innovation this year; a lot of that will go to Europe and Asia. As of this year, we will have research based in Europe. We are also launching a new virtual research center in Singapore, which we are doing in conjunction with the Singapore government to fund research about leadership in various Asian countries.

How does your status as a nonprofit organization affect its approach to executive education programming?

We see it as an advantage because it allows us to take a long-term view. Daily or weekly numbers don't drive us. We can invest heavily in research, take a long-term view, and try not to get wrapped up in educational fads of the moment. We try to do the research and find out what the long-term trends are.

CCL's mission is to advance the understanding, practice and development of leadership for the benefit of society world-wide. That's a tall order. How does an educational program aimed at executives and politicians benefit society at large?

It's a very lofty, broad mission but it's inspiring. We think that by helping leaders to become better at what they do, we can improve the quality of leadership in different organizations and even in a sector such that they are operating at a higher level of importance and thus working to solve the complex challenges of broader society.

Look in the corporate sector at the growing emphasis on corporate social responsibility. I don't think any one organization is exempt from making a better world. We honestly think that if we help people to improve within their context, they will improve the practice of leadership and thereby help the world. That can be at the top level, but it can also be lower down within an organization. After all, when the baby boomers age out of the work force, younger people will move up through the ranks.

Email your comments to cjeditor@dowjones.com.