Harvard Business School Professor Anthony Mayo joins host Chris Linnane to explore what distinguishes good leaders from great ones, emphasizing how emotional intelligence enables leaders to excel in dynamic environments.
Anthony Mayo, Thomas S. Murphy Senior Lecturer of Business Administration and C. Roland Christensen Distinguished Management Educator in the Organizational Behavior Unit of Harvard Business School.
HBS Online’s Organizational Leadership course (https://hbs.me/2p8t69bv)
HBS Online’s Leadership Principles course (https://hbs.me/2p8t69bv)
Mayo’s latest book, Race, Work, and Leadership: New Perspectives on the Black Experience (https://hbs.me/mrz4pah2)
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Editor's Note: The following was prepared by a machine algorithm and may not perfectly reflect the interview's audio file.
Chris Linnane:
The Parlor Room is an official podcast of Harvard Business School online.
Anthony Mayo:
Leaders who are successful over a long period of time have built these interpersonal skills, have built emotional intelligence, have created the conditions for other people to be successful. We take this baseline competency as a given, but then what sets good leaders from great leaders is this notion of emotional intelligence. And so we see that play out in a number of different scenarios across a number of different industries.
Chris Linnane:
Welcome to The Parlor Room, where business concepts come to life. I'm Chris Laane, creative director at Harvard Business School online. Today, we have a timely discussion on the critical topic of leadership. I'm delighted to be joined by HBS Professor Tony Mayo, an expert on developing leadership skills and driving organizational change. Professor Mayo's research examines how both individual leaders and companies can adapt and thrive in dynamic environments. Through his teaching and case studies, he helps demystify what it takes to lead effectively. He teaches two HBS Online courses, leadership Essentials and Organizational Leadership, with his colleague HBS Professor Joshua Margolis. In our conversation, Professor Mayo will share frameworks and real-world examples to illustrate the challenges and opportunities leaders face today. I know you'll find the perspective shared to be highly valuable, whether you aspire to be in a leadership role or you're already leading others. So without further delay, let's get started. So what do you see as the most important skills and qualities of an effective leader?
Anthony Mayo:
So, I think we have to define effective leadership. And so if we think about effective leadership as creating the context in which you bring out the best in everyone, which is the way I think about it, I try to think about leadership is about that context that enables everybody to excel. And so it's a combination of two things which can be difficult to balance. One is this sense of setting high standards. So, as a leader, you need to set high standards and be rigorous, but you also have to provide support and trust. You've got to provide the scaffolding to enable people to reach that high potential. And one of the things we often think about in terms of leadership is that, oh, you need to set the bar. Maybe not super high, but what we know is that you want the bar as high as possible, but you want to create the support and scaffolding that enables people to be successful.
So that's one thing is finding the right balance between rigor and compassion or high standards and support and trust. The other two aspects are that I think about when I think about effective leadership is this notion of empathy. Being able to understand different contexts, different environments, being able to sense what might be bothering somebody. If we think about what's important in terms of leadership, it's addressing conflict head-on, it's creating a sense of comradery. Empathy is a big part of that. And then the third big element for me is this notion of resilience or to have, as one of my colleagues calls it a high adversity quotient that you can face a lot of different adversities, you can face hardship. And when I think about adversity and hardships that I've experienced, it's what can I learn from that as opposed to being debilitated by that. So how do I pick myself up, say, yes, this has been a setback, but what can I learn from it, and how can I move forward? I think to me that's another big aspect of effective leadership,
Chris Linnane:
A lot of pressure in being a leader. What are the most common mistakes you see people make?
Anthony Mayo:
There's a lot of mistakes that people make. One of the first mistakes that they make is often their first transition from individual contributor to manager. And it's deciding when is good, good enough, not my version of what's good. So particularly people who've been promoted into new positions or into management positions, they got there because they've been successful and they produce results. And so one big mistake is how do you let go? And how do you give advice and coach others to be successful in their own way? Not necessarily a carbon copy of you or a Xerox of you in any particular way. That's often what we want. We want them just to do it the way that I did it because I know that that's successful. And so I think one of the mistakes people make is that they forget that there are a number of different ways to address a particular problem and a challenge and not expecting people to do a carbon copy of them.
A second mistake that we see a lot of people make is wanting to do the work themselves, not willing to delegate, not willing to let go. This goes along with the first one feeling like, oh, I don't necessarily trust that particular individual to be successful, and so I'm going to do too much myself. And then, eventually you hit a breaking point, and it actually impedes your progress in your development. A third mistake that people make, and this often happens when people are super successful, is they lack empathy or they lack self-awareness. They don't actually put a mirror up to themselves. They don't create the conditions where people are feel comfortable giving advice and giving feedback. And so not taking feedback, not opening it up. And I think this is sort of the paradox of success. If you've been successful for a long period of time, you often know the right thing to do.
You do it well, and that can lead to a false sense of confidence. And it can also lead to an inability to see the diversity of a situation and say, oh, maybe this approach that I've taken in the past is not going to, this is a different context, it's a different environment, it's a different world. I need to adapt and modify my style to fit this particular context or situation. And I'm not doing that. I'm sort of going to my playbook. I'm thinking this has always worked. And so we often see a lot of leaders who go to that playbook, and it works a couple of times, but eventually it's not going to work, and you're going to be put back on your heels. And this is where the resilience and adaptability come into play because you have to be able to say, oh, okay, how can I adapt? How can I address this particular challenge and modify my behavior going on.
Chris Linnane:
Yes, you're learning from that.
Anthony Mayo:
Well. Yes, that's right.
Chris Linnane:
How do you create a culture that's more performance driven?
Anthony Mayo:
So, I think that there's two dimensions we can look at. When we think about a high performance context or a high performance culture, there's support and trust, and there's performance management. So if you're driving very hard on performance management and not giving enough support and trust to the team, you're actually creating a burnout context because it's high on performance, it's driving for results, it's driving for achievement. And that creates this burnout context. If you're all about support and trust and everybody feels great and we're all holding hands and we're singing kumbaya, that creates this country club context where we all feel great, but there's no results. And so I think the real nugget is how do I balance the performance management focus with a focus on support and trust so that it creates this high performance context? And so each of us have this tendency either we're very results driven, and we charge for results, or maybe we have a tendency to be much more supportive and adaptive and willing to sort of go with the flow.
And what you need to do is to try to balance both of those two elements. This goes back to the first element that I talked about in terms of successful leadership. When I think about high performance and I think about driving for results, that's the rigor, that's setting high standards, that's being rigorous. And when I think about support and trust and creating the scaffolding to enable people to be successful, that is the compassion. And so you want to be able to balance both of those too. And sometimes we have that balance in ourselves and sometimes we don't. And this is when we need to recognize that, oh, I need to compliment myself with somebody else on my team. And so sometimes it's a combination of people that are part of a senior management team that bring together these skills of support and trust and results orientation that enables us to be successful.
Chris Linnane:
Yeah, that's interesting. It's kind of the sum of the parts rather than, yeah, I didn't think of it that way.
Anthony Mayo:
Alright, what I want to do is to talk to you about a case that I wrote recently about an executive who was taking on a new role and had to figure out, how do I take on this new role? How do I build my credibility? How do I enact my sense of authority in that role? And so this is a story about Rosalind Fox. Rosalind Fox is the first woman and the first person of color, she's a Black woman to take on a factory manager role at John Deere. So this is an organization that's been around for 150 years, never had a woman run their Des Moines works operation. And Des Moines works is a huge factory in, actually not in Des Moines, which is one of the things, oh wow. Even though it's called Des Moines, it's in Ankeny, Iowa, and it was actually established as a munitions factory during World War ii.
So it has 17 different buildings. It's a huge complex, and when I went out there to visit it and to write this case about Rosalind Fox, we had to take this golf cart to drive around the different buildings. And so they produce four main products. They produce sprayers and carbon cotton harvesters and, etcetera. And so her role was coming in; she was running a smaller factory in North Carolina and was recruited to come into Des Moines to take on this particular factory. And as she was coming in, she had a bit of trepidation about, okay, this is a much bigger factory, it's a union factory. They've had some challenges with the union in the past, but she's had success in North Carolina. And so they've tapped her to take on this particular role. And if you put yourself in Rosalind Fox's shoes and you're stepping into this new job, you've just come from North Carolina where you have been running their, they produce lawnmowers and tractors and things like that, and now you're going to the agricultural side of the business. So it may not seem like a big deal, but in John Deere, that's a big deal. Going from lawn care to agricultural implements is a huge deal. So if you're Roslyn Fox and you're taking over this role and it's about 1600 employees, a thousand union workers, five or 600 office workers, how do you take charge? What are the first couple of things that you do?
Chris Linnane:
This is where I really sink John Deere, unfortunately. Well, I'll try. Okay. So I think that's overwhelming. That's a huge number of people too. So what you always hear people do is they go in on their listening tour, and they hear about everything they can hear about from the organization. If I'm going into that environment, I'm probably going to do something similar to that. Then I'm probably going to see what the challenges really are and see maybe what the internal versus external challenges are as well. But beyond that, I don't have a huge plan, Tony, I'm not sure what to do next.
Anthony Mayo:
Well, you hit on the thing that she did, which is this listening tour. So one of the things that she did and was to actually bring the entire factory together over three shifts. It's a three shift factory. Talk to the employees about her vision and her coming in and what she's doing and to hear their issues or their questions. And so she goes to these meetings, and she gets a lot of pushback and she gets a lot of questions about, Hey, what do you know about this particular line? And what do you know about this particular part? And she doesn't know that. So then, what do you do?
Chris Linnane:
Oh boy, it's tough because it might not be important for her to know those specifics. And you don't want to make people feel like you're being a know-it-all by saying, I don't actually need to know that. You need to know that. I need to help you figure out how to manage that area. So I think I would try to find the nicest way to say, well, tell me about that so that if that's a problem for you, I can learn more about it. But overall, I want to support you, not tell you specifically what to do with that part.
Anthony Mayo:
That's actually a great way to handle it. Okay, good. That's good to hear. That's not necessarily what she did upfront. So I think partly her reaction to that was to actually withdraw a little bit and say, oh, they've hired me for this particular role and I'm supposed to know this stuff because at my smaller factory, I knew all of that, but here I don't know anything. And so her first action or her first thought was, I need to go into the weeds and know everything about everything, and you have four products and over a thousand employees. And partly, she did that because she was an outsider. So if you're a woman, if you're a person of color and you're coming into an organization, why do you think you would be less likely to ask for help or to put yourself forward in that
Chris Linnane:
Way? Yeah, it's hard for me to answer her based on the position that she was in with that job transfer or job position switch. But I think she doesn't want to be perceived as not knowing what she's doing. So she's anxious to show anyone that she has questions, she wants to go into the room and know the answers. And then the people that are maybe frustrated by, well, she's coming from a different area and doesn't know how to do this stuff. You don't want to give them fuel, I guess.
Anthony Mayo:
Yeah, that's absolutely right. So if you think about the burdens that underrepresented individuals face when they're going in the bar is super high for you to prove yourself. Because when we're evaluating leaders, we're looking at the prototypical profile of who a leader is. And for many people, that prototypical profile is a middle aged or older white man. And if you're not that, then we need more evidence to suggest to us that you are capable. And so if I actually admit that I don't know this or I admit that I am uncomfortable in a particular area, it gives fuel to the fire that you were talking about.
And so she held back and she didn't do that. The downside of that, though, is then you're putting all of this pressure on yourself, and you're actually putting more work on yourself, and you're actually putting this additional challenge to be able to step up into the role that people in the majority don't necessarily face. In addition, the other things that she did is she decided to dress a particular way that she thought was appropriate in the sort of management model. And she chose to wear her hair a certain way. She straightened her hair, she thought, I have to fit this particular prototype. What she ended up finding out, and it took her a little while, and it actually was one of her mentors, one of her mentors who was an older white guy, helped her to lean into who she is as an individual. And so eventually over time, she decided to do a couple of things.
One, she decided to wear her hair naturally. She decided to wear the clothing that she wanted to wear, which was much more brighter colors and much more vibrancy this spring out of her personality. And she decided to ask for help. And what she found is when I asked for help, when I said, Hey, look, I don't know all of this aspect of this particular factory, but you run this particular line this, well, can I just spend a couple of days on the line with you? Can you just teach me? And people were super willing to help. Most people are 95% of the time people are willing to help. But you've got to be vulnerable. You've got to put yourself out there. And particularly when you're an outsider, taking that leap of faith and saying, if I put myself out there, if I'm my true authentic self, will people accept me?
So people like me, an older white guy, I don't actually think about authenticity. I can step into any room and I can just sort of be myself and not have to worry about it. But if I am an underrepresented individual in that context, I'm always doing this calculus in my head, how much of myself can I lean into and how much of myself do I need to hold back? And so if we think about taking charge and building credibility, there are three things you need to do to be able to do that. You need to produce results, you need to build relationships, and you need to learn. And so if you think about building relationships, producing results, and learning, what do you think most people gravitate toward?
Chris Linnane:
I think the results.
Anthony Mayo:
Yeah.
Chris Linnane:
Yeah.
Anthony Mayo:
Yeah, and particularly if you're an underrepresented individual, you're going to go, Hey, they can't hold anything against me if I produce my results.
Anthony Mayo:
And particularly if you're an underrepresented individual, you're going to go, Hey, they can't hold anything against me if I produce my results.
Chris Linnane:
Yeah.
Anthony Mayo:
But the results will only take you so far. So if you're actually not building relationships in the organization, you're not building connections, then you are stifling your potential growth. And if you're not learning new things, if you're not building your capacity to learn and grow, then that's a particular challenge. So as you think about new roles that you're stepping into new opportunities, you need to be thinking, yes, I need to produce the results. I've got to do that. That's a given. But I also have to build relationships, and I also have to be a little bit vulnerable and learn. And I think a lot of new leaders feel like I need to know everything they put in this job because they thought I knew things. And if I start asking questions, then that shows a little bit of a weakness on my part, and that actually is a fatal flaw.
Chris Linnane:
You ready to move to some questions?
Anthony Mayo:
Sure.
Chris Linnane:
Alright. This first question. How do you structure self-assessment and feedback opportunities to maximize?
Anthony Mayo:
So I think we need to think about feedback in an ongoing basis. A lot of times, we think about feedback as being once a year or twice a year in a performance review. I'm going to give you feedback, but the most effective leaders actually are doing feedback on an ongoing basis. Sometimes we call it critical incident coaching that you're actually using a particular moment. Maybe it's a presentation in a meeting, and you want to pull somebody aside and say, Hey, I want to give you some feedback about what I thought you did really well in this particular meeting. That's a great way, in a quick moment to reinforce behaviors that you want to reinforce in that particular individual. It also enhances their self-awareness by you giving their feedback. So partly what we want to do is create a culture of feedback where you're using these micro-moments during the course of a work week to focus on either positive things that people are doing that you want to reinforce or some constructive feedback that you want to address right in the moment to the extent that you can give that feedback right in the moment based on concrete behavior, not based on some notion of somebody's personality, but when you did this, it had this particular effect that is super effective.
Chris Linnane:
Great. Perfect. This one is from Ina, what challenges and obstacles do women leaders face in a male dominated business environment and how can they be overcome?
Anthony Mayo:
So there are a couple of challenges that women face in male-dominated industries and in any industry in some ways. So one of the things that we know from the research is that women and people of color get less feedback overall than white people in an organization. And partly they're giving less feedback to women because managers don't want to come across as sexist in any particular way or don't want to come across as harsh. So they actually don't give feedback. So one of my colleagues calls it benign sexism. You think you're doing the right thing by not being critical, but what you are doing is you're giving feedback to your white male counterparts. And so it's creating actually two different tournaments that are going on, as David Thomas talks about, where the people who are getting the feedback, who are typically people who look like you, they're getting the advantage of that feedback.
They can course correct, they can do some things, but for women, for people of color, they're not necessarily getting that feedback. So when it comes down to the review time, they're sort of behind. And so that's one of the big challenges that happens there. And sometimes managers are doing this and they're doing it in a well-meaning way. They think they're doing the right thing, they don't want to be overly harsh, but by not actually, we often talk, it's a little cheesy. We talk about feedback is a gift and it's a gift that you should want. And it is, I mean, the reason that we often say that it is a gift because if we think about the purpose of feedback, it's to enable somebody to be the best version of themselves if we think about the noble purpose of feedback. So that's one of the challenges is how do you actually get that feedback?
And so if you're not getting that feedback, one of the things that you can do is use some of these micro-moments to say, Hey, can you give me feedback right after this meeting? Or can you give me feedback about this report that I've written? Take it upon yourself. Should the burden be on you? Probably not. But this is a way to sort of counteract some surprises that come. The other challenge that women face an organization is they often have to balance warmth and competence. And so, a man in an organization can be viewed as both highly competent and warm. And if they're warm, they're like, oh, he's democratic, he's participatory. We respect him. If he's competent, take charge, command, and control. That's what we expect. But if a woman leans into competence, she's automatically assumed to be less warm. And if she leans into warmth, she's automatically assumed to be less competent.
So it's called a task buying. And so this task, buying that women face is like, how do I thread the needle where I can demonstrate my competence and my likability and my warmth in a way that doesn't penalize me on both ends of the spectrum, where men don't actually necessarily have to think about that? And that's super hard to be able to do that. It turns out that the best thing that people, both men and women can do is to lean into warmth and trust early on, build those relationships and then back into competence. It also helps if you have mentors and sponsors and others in the organization who can attest to your capabilities, who can say, oh, this particular woman is strong and this and this. That actually mitigates against some of these challenges. But that's some of the context and challenges that women face.
Chris Linnane:
Great answer. This one is from Rachel. What strategies have you seen work well for developing the next generation of leaders from within an organization?
Anthony Mayo:
The appropriate thing for developing the next generation of leaders is thinking about what are the appropriate next stretch opportunities for them? Who gets access to those opportunities and why? And so what you want to do, the last thing you want to do is to delegate to somebody before they're ready. So oftentimes, there's this two dimension of leadership that I like to draw upon quite a bit. It is from Hershey and Blanchard, and it's this notion of skill and will. And so you have certain employees that have a lot of skill or low skill, but by will we mean passion, excitement, and drive. And so if you have an employee who has a lot of will, a lot of passion and a lot of skill, you want to delegate, you want to get out of the way they can do the job. And for people who don't have a lot of skill and don't have a lot of will, they're probably new employees, you want to be very directive with them. And so the challenge often is the people who have a lot of will, they're passionate, they're driven, a lot of the new millennials in the workforce, and they want responsibility more before they're ready. And if you do that, if you delegate too quickly, you may be setting them up for failure. So what you need to do is guide them. You need to coach them and support them, enable them to build the skills that they need so that you can feel comfortable delegating to them going forward.
Chris Linnane:
If you'd like to learn more about Professor Mayo or his courses Leadership Essentials and Organizational Leadership, please visit theparlorroompodcast.com. You can also follow HBS Online on Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram, and X. My name is Chris Linnane. Thank you for listening. If you are enjoying The Parlor Room, please share the show with your friends and subscribe, rate, and review it wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you.
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