The Seven Ages of the Leader

The Seven Ages of the Leader by Warren Bennis on the HBR Site

When coming into an existing organization where emotions are high, relationships have to be established, and the members of the organization harbor expectations that you are not yet fully aware of. Followers were watching.

Every new leader faces the misgivings, misperceptions, and personal needs and agendas of those to be led. To underestimate the importance of your first moves is to invite disaster. The critical entry is one of several passages—each of which has an element of personal crisis—that every leader must go through at some point in the course of a career.
Shakespeare spoke of the seven ages of man. A leader’s life has seven ages as well, and, in many ways, they parallel what Shakespeare describes in As You Like It. To paraphrase, these stages can be described as an infant, schoolboy, lover, soldier, general, statesman, and sage. One way to learn about leadership is to look at each of these developmental stages and consider the issues and crises that are typical of each.
Major changes in the first six months will inevitably be perceived as arbitrary, autocratic, and unfair, as much for their timing as for their content.

Knowing what to expect can help the leader survive and, with luck, become stronger and more confident. And so first to the leader on the verge—Shakespeare’s infant.

First: The Infant Executive.

On the brink of becoming a leader, the world that lies ahead is a mysterious, even frightening place. The fortunate neophyte leader has a mentor, a concept originating in Greek mythology. When Odysseus was about to go to war, the goddess Athena created Mentor to watch over the hero’s beloved son, Telemachus.
The fact that the Mentor had the attributes of both man and a woman hints at the richness and complexity of the relationship, suggesting a deeper bond than that of teacher and student. In the real world, unfortunately, goddesses don’t intervene, and mentors seldom materialize on their own.
While the popular view of mentors is that they seek out younger people to encourage and champion, the reverse is more often true. The best mentors are usually recruited, and one mark of a future leader is the ability to identify, woo, and win the mentors who will change his or her life.
It may feel strange to seek a mentor even before you have the job, but it’s a good habit to develop early on. The message for the “infant executive”? Recruit a team to back you up; you may feel lonely in your first top job, but you won’t be unsupported.

Second: The Schoolboy, with Shining Face.

The first leadership experience is an agonizing education. It’s like parenting in that nothing else in life fully prepares you to be responsible, to a greater or lesser degree, for other people’s well-being.
Worse, you have to learn how to do the job in public, subjected to unsettling scrutiny of your every word and act, a situation that’s profoundly unnerving for all but that minority of people who truly crave the spotlight. Like it or not, as a new leader, you are always onstage, and everything about you is fair game for comment, criticism, and interpretation (or misinterpretation).
Your dress, your spouse, your table manners, your diction, your wit, your friends, your children, and your children’s table manners—all will be inspected, dissected, and judged.
And nothing is more intense than the attention paid to your initial words and deeds, as any first-time presidential candidate can tell you.
Social psychologists have found that we base our judgments of people on extremely thin slices of behavior. We decide whether we are in sync or out of tune with another person in as little as two seconds.
So it is with leaders and organizations. Your first acts will win people over, or they will turn people against you, sometimes permanently. And those initial acts may have a long-lasting effect on how the group performs.
It is, therefore, almost always best for the novice to make a low-key entry. This buys you time to gather information and develop relationships wisely. It allows you to learn the organization’s culture and to benefit from the wisdom of those who are already there.
A quiet entry allows the group members to demonstrate what they know. And it allows you to establish that you are open to the contributions of others. It shows them that you are a leader, not a dictator.
It is worth noting that, no matter what your first actions are, you can influence other people’s image of you only to a limited extent.
The people under your leadership will have formed an opinion about you by the time you walk into the office, even if they have never met you. They may love you, they may hate you, they may trust you or distrust you, but they’ve probably taken a stand, and their position may have very little to do with who you are.
The leader often becomes a screen onto which followers project their fantasies about power and relationships.
To some degree, all leaders are created out of the needs, wants, fears, and longings of those who follow them.
Events that predate your arrival will also shape followers’ views of you. Some people are liable to assume you’re there to clean house again and may respond with either open hostility or flattery in the hopes of keeping their jobs.
Others may see you as their savior because of the bad leadership of your predecessor. Your first challenge is not to take your new followers’ assessments too personally. The second—and far trickier—the challenge is to embrace that certain elements of their assessments may be accurate, even if they put you in an unflattering light.

Third: The Lover, with a Woeful Ballad

Shakespeare described the man in his third age as “sighing like a furnace,” something many leaders find themselves doing as they struggle with the tsunami of problems every organization presents.
For the leader who has come up through the ranks, one of the toughest is how to relate to former peers who now report to you.
Today’s leaders would instantly recognize the young king’s predicament. It isn’t easy to set boundaries and fine-tune your working relationships with former cronies.
Most organizations, except for the military, maintain the fiction that they are at least semi-democracies, however autocratic they are. As a leader, you don’t have the option of telling the person with whom you once shared a pod and lunchtime confidences that you know her not.
But relationships inevitably change when a person is promoted from within the ranks. You may no longer be able to speak openly as you once did, and your friends may feel awkward around you or resent you. They may perceive you as lording your position over them when you’re just behaving as a leader should.
One mark of a future leader is the ability to identify, woo, and win the mentors who will change his or her life.
The challenge for the newcomer is knowing whom to listen to and whom to trust. Leaders new to an organization are swamped with claims on their time and attention. Often, the person who makes the most noise is the neediest person in the group and the one you have to be most wary of.
Focusing your attention on the most clamorous of your followers will not only anger and alienate the healthier among them. It will distract you from working with the entire group on what matters, accomplishing a common mission.
Knowing what to pay attention to is just as important—and just as difficult. In their efforts to effect change, leaders coming into new organizations are often thwarted by an unconscious conspiracy to preserve the status quo.
Problem after problem will be dumped in your lap—plenty of new ones and a bulging archive of issues left unresolved by previous administrations—and responding to them ensures you will never have time to pursue your agenda.
The cumulative effect of handling each of these items matters because it keeps you from addressing what was truly important: articulating a vision and persuading the rest of the community to embrace it as their own. It is at this stage that an inability to delegate effectively can be disastrous.
Newcomers or not, almost all leaders find themselves at some point having to ask others to leave the organization—firing them, to put it bluntly. This is always a painful task, if only because it usually devastates the person being let go, and the timing is never opportune. There’s little available to guide leaders on how to do this awful business humanely; only remember that you have people’s emotional lives in your hands in such circumstances as surely as any surgeon or lover does.

Fourth: The Bearded Soldier

Over time, leaders grow comfortable with the role. This comfort brings confidence and conviction, but it also can snap the connection between leader and followers.
Two things can happen as a result: Leaders may forget the true impact of their words and actions, and they may assume that what they are hearing from followers is what needs to be heard.
While the first words and actions of leaders are the most closely attended to, the scrutiny never really ends. Followers continue to pay close attention to even the most offhand remark. The more effective the leader is, the more careful he or she must be because followers may implement an idea that is little more than a passing thought.
Followers don’t tell leaders everything.
A second challenge for leaders in their ascendancy is to nurture those people whose stars may shine as brightly as—or even brighter than—the leaders’ own. In many ways, this is the real test of character for a leader.
Many people cannot resist using a leadership position to thwart competition. When confronted, they seemed genuinely surprised and protested that they were doing no such thing. Perhaps, unconsciously trying to sabotage those under them to prop himself up.
In contrast, authentic leaders are generous. They’re human and may experience the occasional pang at watching someone accomplish something they cannot. But they are always willing—even anxious—to hire people who are better than them, partly because they know that highly talented underlings can help them shine.
Many of the greatest leaders of our times have healthy enough egos to surround themselves with people who have the potential to steal their jobs.

Fifth: The General, Full of Wise Saws

One of the greatest challenges a leader faces at the height of his or her career is not simply allowing people to speak the truth but being able to hear it.
Some leaders are notorious for their unwillingness to hear unpleasant truths. He was said to bark, “Don’t say yes until I finish talking!” which no doubt stifled many a difference of opinion.
Among the many ways to block the flow of information upward was to limit the pool of people and, thus, the number of people he listened to.
Arrogance keeps those from building the alliances and coalitions that every leader needs. Their egos are not so fragile that they cannot bear the truth, however harsh—not because they are saints but because it is the surest way to succeed and survive.
The real test of character for a leader is to nurture those people whose stars may shine as brightly as—or even brighter than—the leader’s own.
There is wisdom in avoiding major change in the early months of a new position. At this stage, the challenge is different because leaders further along in their careers are frequently brought in with a specific mandate to bring about change, and their actions have a direct and immediate impact on an organization’s long-term fortunes.
Hesitation can be disastrous. However, you still need to understand the mood and motivations of the people already in the company before you take action.
The world is filled with stories of leaders who failed to achieve greatness because they failed to understand the context they were working in or get the support of their underlings.

Sixth: The Statesman, with Spectacles on Nose

Shakespeare’s sixth age covers the years in which a leader’s power begins to wane. But far from being the buffoon suggests the leader in this stage is often hard at work preparing to pass on his or her wisdom in the organization’s interest.
The leader may also be called upon to play important interim roles, bolstered by the knowledge and perception that come with age and experience and without the sometimes distracting ambition that characterizes an early career.
One of the gratifying roles that people in a late career can play is the leadership equivalent of a pinch hitter. One who was immediately able to apply a career’s worth of experience to the newspaper’s crisis and whose tenure was unsullied by any desire to keep the job for the long term.
Consider, too, because they accomplished all their goals and were tired of the politics associated with his job. The ability to perform an even better job than a younger person might have, not only because he brought a lifetime’s worth of knowledge and experience but also because they didn’t have to waste time engaging in the political machinations often needed to advance a career.

The Sage, Second Childishness

Mentoring has tremendous value to a young executive. The value accrues to the mentor as well. Mentoring is one of the great joys of a mature career, the professional equivalent of having grandchildren.
It is at this time that the drive to prepare the next generation for leadership becomes a palpable ache.
The true nature of mentoring, its inevitable reciprocity, and finding and cementing a relationship with a mentor is not a form of fawning but the initiation of a valuable relationship for both individuals.
When you mentor, you know that what you have achieved will not be lost and that you are leaving a professional legacy for future generations. J
The reciprocal benefits of such bonds are profound, amounting to much more than warm feelings on both sides. Mentoring isn’t a simple exchange of information.
The elder partner stays plugged into an ever-changing world, while the younger partner can observe what does and doesn’t work as the elder partner negotiates the tricky terrain of aging.
When comparing older and younger leaders for Geeks and Geezers, we found that the ruling quality of leaders, adaptive capacity, allows true leaders to make the nimble decisions that bring success.
Adaptive capacity also allows some people to transcend the setbacks and losses that come with age and to reinvent themselves again and again.
Shakespeare called the final age of man “second childishness.” But for those fortunate enough to keep their health, and even those not as fortunate, age today is neither end nor oblivion.
Rather, it is the joyous rediscovery of childhood at its best. It is waking up each morning ready to devour the world, full of hope and promise. It lacks nothing but the tawdrier forms of ambition that make less sense as each day passes.

Horace Mann League of the USA