There are bird watchers, and there are whale watchers, but I’m a genius watcher. I am fascinated by the intelligence of others. I notice it, study it, and have learned to identify a variety of aptitudes—even without my binoculars.
Oracle Corporation, the $22 billion software giant, was a great place to observe genius. As a vice president at Oracle for seventeen years, responsible for the company’s global talent development and its corporate university, I worked closely with senior executives and had a front-row seat to study their leadership.
From this vantage, I observed how leaders used their brainpower in different ways, and I became intrigued by the effect they had on people in their organizations. Some were driven by resolve to be the smartest person in the room. I noticed the diminishing effect these managers had on the people around them. Others used their intelligence in a fundamentally different way: they applied their knowledge to amplify the smarts and capabilities of their co-workers.
Multiplying vs. Diminishing
These repeated observations led to the curiosity that drove me and my colleague Greg McKeown to research the effects of leadership on collective intelligence. We began by selecting companies and industries in which individual and organizational acumen provides a competitive advantage. We studied 150 leaders in thirty-five companies across four continents using both quantitative assessments and intensive 360-degree interviews of former and current members of their management teams.
We were astonished to find that these leaders we call “diminishers” got less than half the capability out of others, while the leaders we call “multipliers” got virtually all.
Why? Diminishers are idea killers and energy destroyers. When they walk into a room, the shared IQ drops and the length of a meeting doubles. These diminishing managers myopically focus on their own ideas, shoot down other employees’ ideas, and make all the decisions themselves. Some are tyrants, but other diminishers are more subtle. Their protective instincts cause them to make the hard decisions for their staff, finish their work, or jump in and rescue them at the first sign of struggle. Whether it’s arrogance or overprotection, the result is the same: a loss of intelligence as employees revert to using only a fraction of their capabilities.
Good leaders use their skills and insights to spark a multiplying effect. People get smarter and better in their presence. When these people walk into a room, light bulbs go on, ideas flow, and hard problems get solved. These are the leaders who inspire employees to stretch themselves and get more from other people. They use people to their fullest, while diminishers waste talent and intellect that sits right in front of them.
The High Cost of a Diminisher
Consider the effect of one corporate executive: Jasper, a strategist and an idea man. Jasper’s mind worked incredibly fast, but he produced more ideas than his organization could execute. Every week or so, he would launch a new initiative. His director of operations recalled, “He’d tell us on Monday, we needed to catch up with ‘competitor X,’ and we needed to get it done this week.” The organization would scurry, throw a Hail Mary pass, make a few ephemeral product improvements, and then eventually lose traction when they were given a new goal to chase the following week. Jasper’s need to micromanage the details created a bottleneck, causing his organization to move slowly while he worked extremely hard.
Jasper thought big, especially when it came to hiring, but it appeared his overriding goal was to outsize the other divisions in his company. He hired people at a breakneck pace and built his own internal staff, all of which was redundant with infrastructure that existed at the corporate level. Most of the staff in his division appeared overworked, but they confessed they were actually grossly underutilized. They were paradoxically overworked and underutilized.
Things eventually caught up with Jasper when the real ROI calculation was made on his products and the investments he had indiscriminately made, which had wasted millions of dollars. He was removed from the company; the duplicate staff he built was drastically reduced.
Diminishing leaders come at a high cost. The most obvious cost is the devaluing of resources that produce the output of half a head for the price of a full head. Surely most organizations can’t afford this waste, especially at a time when they are forced to do more with less and when economic realities necessitate top-line growth without a commensurate, linear increase in expense.
This gross misuse of intellectual resources is a shame, but it is perhaps the hidden costs that are the most damaging to organizations. In our research, people told us that working for a diminisher was exhausting, but working with a multiplier was exhilarating. One person described it like a vigorous workout—you feel tired but fully energized. Ironically, being used at 50 percent is exhausting, yet being used at 100 percent is exhilarating. The malaise and disengagement that characterizes so many organizations might be a result of diminishing leaders.
New Reservoirs of Intelligence
In sharp contrast to these diminishers are the leaders who serve as multipliers. They get 100 percent and then some, as employees are stretched and become smarter and more capable. Multipliers get more from their people because they tap into the latent capability inside their organizations and extract unused brainpower and discretionary effort. They know most people have more intelligence, capability, and energy than they are being asked—or even allowed—to use in their current roles.
Our research revealed that while multipliers and diminishers do many things alike, multipliers differ sharply in the following five leadership roles and disciplines. Multipliers are:
1. Talent magnets who attract talented people and use them at their highest point of contribution
2. Liberators who create an intense environment that requires people’s best thinking and work
3. Challengers who define an opportunity that causes people to stretch
4. Debate makers who drive sound decisions through rigorous debate
5. Investors who give other people the ownership for results and invest in their success
Multipliers are leaders like Matt McCauley, who challenged his organization and made it safe to attempt the impossible. Matt was a pole-vaulter at BYU with a proclivity for setting the bar high. After graduating from BYU, Matt spent his early career in inventory management at Payless ShoeSource, Gap Inc., and Gymboree.
When Matt was appointed CEO of Gymboree, he quickly spotted an opportunity to improve earnings per share (EPS). He told the board he believed the business could grow from its EPS of $.69 to $1 within the current fiscal year. The board laughed. Undeterred, Matt assembled his management team and walked them through the calculations. His team caught the enthusiasm of his approach and asked the entire organization to do the same. Soon everyone inside this 9,500-person organization had this goal—a crazy aspiration.
At the end of the fiscal year, Matt announced to Wall Street and every employee that they not only had achieved the goal of $1 per share but had delivered an EPS of $1.19. The celebration was electric. But Matt and the organization didn’t stop there. Matt set the next year’s goal at $2 a share. The board thought it was outrageous. At the end of the fiscal year they delivered $2.15 per share. Another celebration ensued, followed by a $3 per share goal. Two years later, the organization had achieved $3.21 per share, a fivefold increase in four years.
In achieving this unprecedented growth, Matt and his management team tapped the intelligence of employees and accessed new reservoirs of capability within the organization. Matt was a challenger and used his knowledge of the business to frame an opportunity and dare his team to rethink the business and stretch in new ways. By acknowledging the impossible nature of the mission, he gave people permission to think and act big without fear of failure.
A Shift in Thinking
How do leaders become multipliers who use and develop the full brainpower of their organizations?
In the case of Elay Cohen, an energetic and passionate senior vice president of product marketing at salesforce.com, it meant learning to ask questions instead of firing off instant answers. Elay was known for his rapid email responses, where he gave detailed answers to every question. As he learned the distinction between diminishers and multipliers, he could see how jumping in so quickly sent an unintentional message that he didn’t think his people could figure things out without him. The next time he received an email, he paused. Instead of responding with answers, he asked a question. This small change did not go unnoticed.
Elay continued to ask the hard questions and gave his team space to answer them. He gave full ownership to his direct reports for their work. He said, “My team members know they are in charge. They like it. And they are a bit scared too.” Elay had successfully shifted the burden of thinking to his staff. His team members reported a doubling of their utilization in a matter of weeks—from being utilized at the 30–40 percent level to the 80–90 percent level.
Great leaders have a multiplying effect. They cultivate the skills that magnify the intelligence and capability of the people around them. Multipliers tap into new reservoirs of intelligence invisible to others. They maximize the intelligence of the organization, wasting little of this vital resource. This allows companies to think beyond the loss-prevention programs that preserve tangible assets or store merchandise and instead institute loss-prevention leadership, where leaders capture the intelligence and capability around them.
The waste of intelligence may be as imperceptible as a gas leak—quietly and slowly draining off energy and resources. But imagine the boost to productivity and satisfaction when leaders become multipliers, enabling employees to become smarter and more capable. What intractable problems could we solve? What opportunities could we pursue with access to all the intelligence inside our organizations? The seemingly impossible becomes possible when leaders serve as multipliers.
_
Article written by Liz Wiseman
Illustrated by Francesco Bongiorni
About the Author
Liz Wiseman is president of the Wiseman Group, a leadership research and development center headquartered in Silicon Valley, and a former vice president at Oracle Corporation. She is the author of The Wall Street Journal bestseller Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter.
