Leading With Integrity
Integrity beats charisma when it comes to sustainable humane leadership. Especially for the difficult task of finding an adequate balance between stability and disruption.
Integrity Over Charisma
Peter Drucker was born on November 19, 1909, and grew up in Vienna as the son of an upper-middle-class Jewish family. In the 1920s, he first studied in Hamburg and later in Frankfurt. After the Nazi regime placed one of his works on the list of books that were publicly burned on May 10, 1933, Drucker first emigrated to London and then moved to the USA in 1937.
Against this background of his personal history, it is hardly surprising that Peter Drucker is hesitant to address the concept of leadership in his work. In the few places where he writes about it, he rarely fails to refer to Hitler, Stalin, and Mao as cautionary examples of how dangerous charisma without character and integrity is. He, therefore, explicitly emphasizes the importance of character:1
The final proof of the sincerity and seriousness of an organization's management is uncompromising emphasis on character. (…) For it is through character that leadership is exercised; it is character that sets the example and is imitated.
For Peter Drucker, charisma is not at all decisive leadership quality; on the contrary, it is often the root of all evil because charisma tends to lead to complacency and arrogance. Egomaniacs, in particular, can be very charismatic. Accordingly, Drucker attributes real leaders such as Dwight Eisenhower, George Marshall, or Harry Truman with the charisma of a “dead mackerel.”2
What matters more is integrity. Personal integrity, a postulation of philosophical humanism, means the greatest possible congruence of a consistent framework of one's values, convictions, and ideals with one's life practice in words and acts. In particular, this framework must be universally applicable, i.e., neither individuals (oneself) nor groups of persons (others) can be excluded. Integrity, therefore, requires compliance with Immanuel Kant's categorical imperative:3
Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.
Those who lead with integrity are not afraid of strong employees but rather build on those individual strengths, promote them, and employ them for the greater good and vision. Those who keep others down out of fear or, like many autocrats, carry out outright purges only appear to be strong and are, in fact, acting from a position of weakness. The result is mediocrity on the one hand and wasteful political warfare in corporate trenches.
In this sense, integrity is precisely the value behind the fifth thesis of the Manifesto for Human Leadership: Growing leaders over leading followers (see Section “Encounter at Eye Level”). Leadership is only legitimate if it is aimed at the self-leadership of the employees entrusted to it. It is not about superiority or subordination but about working together as adults at eye level. Leadership is a service, not a privilege. And the service consists of offering people the opportunity to develop, or in the words of Peter Drucker:4
Leadership is lifting a person's vision to higher sights, the raising of a person's performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations.
Leadership through integrity creates a climate of psychological safety and trust in which people can outperform.
Disturbing the Comfort Zone
Leadership sets things in motion and often involves change. But change means disturbance, and change requires disturbance. The new is always a challenge for and an imposition on the established. Leadership is more than just managing the status quo. It focuses not only on today but likewise on tomorrow and the day after tomorrow (see Section “The Art of Ambidexterity”). Good leadership means finding an adequate balance between stability and disruption.
In computer science, heuristic optimization methods are often used to approximate “very difficult” problems. Many of these methods start with a random solution and then improve it step by step. Several new solutions close to the current one are evaluated, and the best one is selected. The procedure continues until none of the neighboring solutions is better than the selected one.
It's like trying to find the highest peak when mountaineering by always following the path with the highest local incline. In this case, you will undoubtedly reach a peak, namely when all available paths lead down. Yet, this will not be the highest in general, but just any peak, a local optimum. You must go downhill again to climb the even higher peak behind or next to it.
Therefore, such optimization methods occasionally also allow for a deterioration of the target function. The more sophisticated methods allow larger deteriorations at the beginning and reduce the degree of permitted deterioration during the calculation. With that strategy, the algorithm can overcome local optima to a certain extent (it still cannot guarantee finding the global optimum). If you want to aim high, you must go up a lot, but sometimes you also have to go down.
It is similar in the organization. Of course, it is good and essential to improve products and processes continuously. Ultimately, however, you only end up with a local optimum. It requires a certain amount of humility on the part of leadership to recognize this and then to set sights on an even higher goal and not allow yourself to be discouraged despite the inevitable, but also temporary, decline that comes with it.
Consequently, leadership is also the art of repeatedly drawing oneself and others out of the comfort zone and, despite initial resistance, seeking the path to new peaks, even if this path appears rocky at first and initially leads downwards. In this respect, leadership always means disrupting the comfort zone with a long-term vision that provides direction and stability and helps cross canyons. This stability in direction gives the disruption constructive power and purpose.
This results in a broad spectrum of skills for a good leader. On the one hand, they should run today's business efficiently. On the other hand, they should develop and communicate an attractive and meaningful vision for the future, question the status quo, and occasionally rock the boat. Depending on personal inclination, these two poles will vary in intensity. Everyone has specific preferences and capabilities.
This calls for strengthening strengths and making weaknesses irrelevant, as Peter Drucker aptly called it (see Section “Strengthen Strengths”). To a certain extent, leaders will be able to develop the dimensions of stability and disruption themselves, but in the end, there will always be a tendency towards one dimension. Making this weakness irrelevant in the other dimension can also mean combining complementary strengths in a leadership team. Those who enjoy stable processes and regulated procedures and are not so inclined to constantly challenge and disrupt the status quo are welcome to add some corporate jesters and other more rebellious minds to the mix.
In Scrum, for example, this disruptive aspect of leadership is even explicitly required of the Scrum Master. The Scrum Guide describes that the Scrum Master helps not only the team and the Product Owner but also examines the organization.5 Unfortunately, this task of looking at the organization with a systemic lens and challenging the status quo so the team can work better is often forgotten.
Leaders must not just manage and maintain the status quo but must constantly challenge themselves and the organization. Leadership is always a balancing act between stability and disruption. Without disturbing the comfort zone, the organization becomes sluggish and complacent. The cozy picnic on the seemingly safe and high peak ends abruptly when the competitor suddenly raises his flag on the much higher peak next to it. However, this external disturbance comes too late and hits an organization that, in its inertia, is unable to deal with it.
Table of Contents
All links lead to the parts that are already published here on Substack.
The 14 Principles Behind the Manifesto
Integrity Over Charisma
Disturbing the Comfort Zone
Get to Work!
Leading by Example
Incitement to Rebellion
Set Priorities
Enduring Dissonance
Doing Your Best
The next chapter will follow next Friday. In case you want to read on as soon as possible, the book is available on Amazon in many countries as hardcover, paperback, and for your Kindle. (also on Leanpub). And all my German readers can get the German edition in every book store.
Peter F. Drucker and Joseph A. Maciariello, Management, Rev. ed (New York, NY: Collins, 2008), 286.
Drucker and Maciariello, 289.
Immanuel Kant, Kant's Gesammelte Schriften. Bd. 4: Abt. 1, Werke ; Bd. 4: Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1. Aufl.) Prolegomena. Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten. Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft, Photomechan. Nachdr, vol. 4 (Berlin: Reimer, 1973), 421.
Drucker and Maciariello, Management, 288.
Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland, Der Scrum Guide, 2020.