Challenging Leadership the Skolkovo Approach

By Pierre Casse

Leadership in todays world is a subject of much debate and quite rightly so. Since our world is one which is constantly evolving, so must our thinking on leadership and the behaviour to which it gives rise.
Drawing on the authors experience and collaborations while teaching at Skolkovo, Moscow School of Management over the past 5 years, this book is a gathering together of reflections on a wide range of diverse topics within the subject of leadership i.e. emotions, energy, ethics, corruption...The intention is to simulate thinking, encourage debate and provide a platform for new ideas for the future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris UK
• Release date: May 31, 2012
• ISBN: 9781477104002

Pierre Casse

Sergey Ryazanskiy is a motivation speaker. His lectures focus on leadership, motivation, team building and working in stressful conditions and draw on his wide range of unique experiences which include being selected and trained as an astronaut, living and working in multi-cultural teams on the International Space Station, performing spacewalks and dealing with crises. Sergey graduated from the Moscow State University in 1996 with a major in “Biochemistry”. In 2003, as a result of his research, he was enlisted as a candidate in the Astronauts Corps of Russia. In 2013 during his first space mission he took the Olympic torch of the Sochi Winter Olympics into outer space. In the same year he performed one of the longest outer space missions in the history of the Soviet and Russian astronautics that lasted 8 hours 7 minutes. Sergey is also a public figure and since 2016 he has been Chairman of the Russian movement of schoolchildren. In 2017 during his second mission Sergey became the first scientist in history to be assigned as spaceship commander. He spent a total of 306 days in space and made a total of 4 Space walks. Sergey has already published 2 books in Russian: “Amazing Earth” which compiles best pictures of our planet made from the International Space Station and “How to hammer a nail in space” which answers most of the popular questions about astronautics. Sergey is a frequent lecturer at the Moscow School of Management Skolkovo Pierre Casse is Professor of Leadership at the Moscow School of Management Skolkovo and holds the leadership chair at the Business School (IEDC) of Bled (Slovenia). He was a visiting Professor at the Kellogg School of Management (Chicago) and the IAE of Aix en Provence (France). Former Dean at the Berlin School of Creative Leadership (Germany) as well as Professor at the International Institute of Management (IMD) in Lausanne, Switzerland. He is a consultant to several multinationals and has published more than 15 books on leadership and negotiation. Andrey Shapenko is Associate Professor and Academic Director of MBA Programme at the Moscow School of Management Skolkovo. His teaching and research is focused on leadership development and organisational behaviour in the context of Russian management culture. Andrey is the certified executive coach and is the author of award-winning teaching cases that are taught at many Russian and international business schools. He is the winner of the prestigious EFMD Case Writing Competition 2016 and a finalist of CEEMAN Case Writing Competition 2017. Andrey’s opinion articles have been published by leading Russian business media (Harvard Business Review, Forbes, RBC, Republic, Inc. and other); and he has been a keynote speaker at multiple conferences in Russia and abroad, including TEDx. Andrey holds an MBA from IMD business school (Switzerland) and a PhD in Economics from Gubkin Russian State University of Oil and Gas (Russia).

Book preview

Theme 1

Leadership Attitudes and Mindsets

1. Emotions: The Leadership Dimension that Makes the Difference¹

"Business is smell, feel and touch as much as or

more than numbers".

Jack Welch, former CEO of GE

"Show that you have emotions that you laugh, cry,

can be frustrated and even fail".

Narayana Murthy, Founder of Infosys

Why should top executives pay attention to emotions? A case in point: The CEO of a European Multinational made a great speech in front of 200 key leaders in the company. He clarified some of the strategic issues facing the company at the time and concluded his presentation by inviting questions from the audience. At first there was a moment’s silence so he added that he would be rather surprised and upset if there were no questions from the floor. Then a hand went up from one of those seated in the room. When told to do so, the executive asked his question. In response the CEO put his hand to his brow and sighed heavily into the microphone, In my entire life, he replied, I have never heard such a stupid question! Next question? Well there was no next question.

It is a fact that many senior executives do not feel comfortable with emotions. They do not see, understand nor acknowledge them properly. They offend people without even realizing it. What a waste! This article is aimed at clarifying what emotions are and helping senior leaders to manage them more effectively. Emotions are an important leadership key success factor.

Revisiting emotions

Emotions have traditionally been downplayed, not to say looked down on or even repressed in the business world. How many times have we heard serious, no-nonsense managers make the snappy comment: Don’t be emotional please, in the midst of a conversation or a meeting. Expressing emotions has been considered as a sign of weakness; an inability to remain in control, the failure to keep in mind that reality is objective and based on the hard facts rather than a reality based on the subjective, uncertain, fluctuating movements of our personal feelings. Indeed there are still a lot of people who agree with Bertrand Russell that the degree of one’s emotions varies inversely with one’s knowledge of the facts as well as with Ayn Rand who claimed that Emotions were like lanterns strong along the dark unknown of another personality, marking vulnerable points. Even more dramatically, many managers still claim that one must control one’s emotions lest one should become controlled by them. We don’t agree with such a view.

We believe that our understanding of emotions is happily changing! It seems that ever more organizations and their managers are learning that emotions are a crucial dimension of our life as human beings, and that missing out on the meaning and power of emotions is missing out on a critical leadership ability. Today’s good leaders are the ones who have rehabilitated emotions in the work place, have developed their emotional intelligence and use emotions as a way to understand and motivate people for superior performance.

In this article, we would like to examine the very nature and importance of emotions within the context of an organization. We intend to go upriver of the current research on emotions and the so called emotional intelligence² and focus on the very meaning and purpose of the human ability to express and listen to emotions. Our views are based on three key premises:

1. Emotions are as important in human life as logic and rational thinking;

2. Emotions are the source and expression of our values;

3. Emotional Quotient (EQ) is the measure of the state of our life at a certain point in time.

In order to recognise emotions as a vital dimension of our being, we will explore the following topics:

• Redefining emotions and their ‘raison d’être’

• Reading our (and others’) emotions

• Measuring our emotional quotient (EQ)

• Managing emotions

Redefining emotions and their ‘raison d’être’

What are emotions and why do we feel what we feel? Our claim is that the human organism is built like a system in which each part plays its role in contributing to the whole, i.e. to our survival as a living being. If that claim is true, then we will accept that everything that goes on within us, everything that we do or feel has its purpose in keeping us alive. This is true for all the actions that we undertake and it also has to be true with regards to our emotions. In other words, our emotions serve our will-to-live; they are the second critical dimension of our existence, our actions being the first. But how do they thus contribute to keeping us alive. The great Charles Darwin once wrote: Emotions ensure survival by energizing required behaviours and signalling valued information. What he meant is that our emotions are like a fantastic feedback function that keep us constantly informed of the state of our existence. Roughly speaking, positive emotions are telling us: This is good. Keep it up! and negative emotions mean: Watch out! Something bad has happened to you. Take corrective action. So it’s clear that without our emotions, we would be left in the dark, not knowing if what is happening to us and impacting our organism is favouring or jeopardizing our existence. We wouldn’t know whether to act or not, and in what way. One could say that without our emotions we could not survive for very long.

So our emotions are the very signals that our organism is sending to us about the state of our life. They are telling us where we stand regarding the following three major life priorities:

• Am I living according to my own aspirations and values or not?

• Is it my life or somebody else’s life that I am experiencing right now?

• What should I do to live a better life?

These questions are absolutely vital for managers who want to perform and enjoy their role as leaders. Leading yourself is the first prerequisite for effective leadership. Therefore leaders should learn to listen first to their own emotions, decipher them properly and act accordingly.

Reading emotions

Our emotions fall into two great families: Impressions and Desires. Impressions are, as we said above, the signals that our organism sends back to itself about the state of accomplishment of its own existence. Positive impressions signal favourable happenings, whereas negative impressions come as warnings that we should do something to get back on the right path.

Our impressions in turn come under two categories: Sensations and Feelings. Sensations are impressions that signal events that have actually already affected our organism: we can be hot or cold, bored or excited, frightened or comfortable, disgusted or delighted. All theses sensations are in the range of pleasure or displeasure, with the former telling us something good has happened to us in our desire to live, and the latter warning us that something damaging has hit us that could put us in jeopardy.

Leaders are impacted by the sensations they get from the interactions with their managers and team members. Such sensations determine, in many circumstances without much awareness, the positive or negative biases these leaders have about people. Leaders must better understand these sensations and manage them in such a way that they are used as opportunities for performance and development rather than lead to communication breakdown and destruction. To learn how to listen to one’s own sensations, (emotions), is a leadership must.

Feelings are none other than anticipated impressions. We have a feeling towards something, an event, a person, an object, according to how we expect that something will affect our existence and therefore bring us positive or negative sensations. We feel positively towards something that we anticipate will favour our being and we feel negatively for something that we fear will cause us harm. Our feelings are all in the range of love and hate. In short, we love what we understand is good for us, in our desire to survive, and hate everything that puts our life in danger. Love and hate are thus nothing other than an evaluation we make of the world around us according to how we believe it will favour or jeopardize our chances to perpetuate our existence. We understand the world and all that it comprises in emotional terms. Until we can measure how a thing will affect us in our desire to live, it is not knowledge to us, but just data. Turning data into knowledge is adding an emotional value to its perception, i.e. understanding ‘what it means for us’. Our understanding of the world is essentially emotional.

So many leaders are conditioned by their pre-conceived idea regarding other human beings. It starts with the recruitment of new employees and goes on with their management of people including the crucial act of assessing others’ performance. They like and favour people who, they believe, will support them in their careers and their lives. They anticipate what other men and women can do to help them be more successful. It leads sometimes to cloning and creating teams that are more able to support the leaders’ ambition than to contribute to the success of the organization. They sometimes reject extremely good people on the basis of negative feelings which are often unjustified from an organizational viewpoint. They are then missing great opportunities to set up powerful teams in which people complement each other. Leaders must be able to pay attention to their feelings so that they are able to reconcile personal and organizational expectations when managing people. This is a major challenge for all in leadership positions. Beware of unfounded prejudices!

On the other hand, it is also obvious that to project the right image, to trigger good feelings in executives can be vital for one’s own survival and career in any organization. One of the key success factors in organizational negotiation is to package our messages in such a way that the other party sees clearly what’s good in it for him or her, in other words to trigger some positive feelings in the interlocutor.

Our desires constitute the second family of our emotions, after our impressions. In fact, all our impressions necessarily and always lead to a subsequent desire. We cannot have an impression without this impression being followed by a desire. Why is that? Our impressions tell us how something has affected our life. As a result, we will always want to react to that impression by responding to whatever caused it. If our impression is positive, we will want to protect, acquire, bring closer and retain its cause, since it is favourable to us. Conversely if we have a negative impression, we will tend to reject, destroy and flee from that which has provoked it. And of course, a desire is always the desire to do something, to take action. Therefore we can say that our life as it unravels takes the form of a circle.

Our observation is that many executives are not even conscious of their desires or the rationale behind their actions. They act without being aware of the desires that support most of their deeds. They are blind to their own underlying motivations. We strongly advise leaders to create and use what we call a Personal Emotional Map focusing on:

• Feelings: What are my key emotional anticipations regarding my collaborators? Why those feelings? Should I preserve them? Change them? How?

• Sensations: What are my after the fact emotions of people and events? Why those? Am I fair and effective by having them? Should I change? How?

• Desires: What are the basic desires behind my actions? What are my actions telling me about my desires? Are they acceptable for others and for the organization to which I belong? Should I change and improve?

As we have said we receive impressions all day long, as things affect us in our life. These impressions lead to desires to address their causes. And our desires are to act on those causes in one way or the other, depending on whether they favor our existence or not. When we act, we change something in the world, be it in our organism or in our environment. Any such changes will necessarily again affect us in our life, positively or negatively. Which will in turn lead to a new impression, followed by a subsequent desire to do something, followed by a new action, and over and over again we go around this continuously repeated circle which is nothing else than the form of our life. We can therefore conclude that half of our life is made of emotions, i.e. all the signals we receive about where we stand and the desires that they induce, and the other half is made of actions, i.e. all that we do as a consequence of our emotions to ensure the best accomplishment of our existence. So it is easy to see how absurd it is to disparage emotions: it is like asking people to mutilate themselves, to cut away half of what contributes to their existence!

Measuring our emotions: The Emotional Quotient (EQ)

As we said above, our emotions give us the measure of how we feel about carrying on with our existence. They inform us of how confident we are that we can stay alive, given the circumstances that affect us in all ways and means. At every given moment of our life, we are subject to a mass of positive emotions, resulting from all that is affecting us favorably, and negative emotions, from all the threats to our existence. If we could mix all these emotions in one big bag and measure the resulting emotional charge, this is what we would call our Emotional Quotient (EQ). Our EQ, as we define it here, is our general mood at a given moment in our life, the overall impression that we have as to whether we can make it or not. It measures our self-esteem or confidence about ourselves and our ability to survive. The higher our EQ, the stronger and happier we feel; the lower the EQ, the weaker and worried we feel. At the end of this article we will provide a self-assessment exercise, which will allow the reader to evaluate his or her EQ at this point in their life. Let us examine meanwhile what determines our EQ through our lifetime:

• Our innate personality: to some degree some people are born happier, or more optimistic than others. Some people tend to react positively to whatever circumstances affect them, even when they are objectively damaging. They see the glass half full rather than half empty; they see the opportunities more than the problems. Others react to the contrary, always seizing upon the darker side of things and blaming the world for what happens to them.

• Our upbringing: the way we have been raised, how our parents or teachers have considered and treated us in our youth, can have a strong influence on how we feel about ourselves. Jack Welch, former CEO of GE, for instance has repeatedly explained how the fact that his mother had all through his younger years treated him as if he was ‘the greatest’ and could only end up being a success, and had thus built in him an everlasting sense of confidence.

• Life events: when things happen to us, they increase or reduce our EQ, as they impact us more or less favourably. If we go through a chain of good happenstances, we will tend to feel more self confident and conversely bad experiences will have the opposite effect. Sometimes a succession of events can result in emotions that cumulate in an upward or downward spiral leading to either a hyper positive mood of elation or a state of anxiety or even depression.

There is no question that effective leaders are very sensitive to the impact of their EQs on people as well as the influence of the team members’ EQs on their performance and on the quality of their lives. Just reflect on the following three questions and measure your own sensitivity to the existence and importance of the EQ:

• Have you ever worked with a manager with a very low EQ i.e. depressed? How was it?

• Have you ever experienced a manager with such a high EQ that the entire environment was loaded with passion? Was it exciting? Maybe also exhausting and scary?

• Have you ever seen some team members unhappy with their lives and refusing to talk about it? Did you try to help? Was it easy? Challenging?

Let’s examine now how leaders can use emotions to create a healthier and better performing environment.

Managing our emotions

It is clear that leaders cannot afford to ignore or downplay emotions as in the past. Leaders must be ‘tuned in’ not only to their own emotions but also to those of their collaborators. Let’s keep in mind that our emotions are talking about how we feel regarding accomplishment of our existence. What can be more important? By showing emotions we are telling others about what counts the most for us: the chances we see of succeeding or not with our life. By listening to other people’s emotions we get access to their basic motivation and aspirations. So here are some practices that we need to carry out in our roles as leaders:

• Self-awareness: we need to learn to read our own emotions and understand what messages they are conveying to us. Some people sometimes feel strong emotions and can’t interpret why they are affected that way. They often turn to friends to ask for help in deciphering their feelings. To understand our own emotions and make the best value of them, we need to know ourselves and what our priorities and values are. Or conversely, if we listen carefully to our emotions, this will help us to discover what it is that really counts for us: the stronger the emotions, the better the chances that they have emerged from an event that has hit us where it counts most (in some of our key values).

• Self-management: while understanding our emotions is a key priority, it is just as important that we manage the desires and actions that they will lead to. We believe that this is essentially what people mean when they say: don’t be emotional! They don’t mean: stop having emotions, but rather: manage the sequence following your emotions in such a way that the final result is favourable to your basic intent, which is the quality of your life and ultimately your survival. When you go around your ‘circle of life’, make sure that you use your intelligence (IQ) in such a way that the circle becomes virtuous and not vicious. We must also observe that sometimes, and more often than not, we are dealing with contrary emotions, or what is commonly called ‘mixed feelings’. What happens then is that we encounter, regarding the same event, both positive and negative emotions, depending on whether we consider the short term or the longer term effects of that event, or possibly its effect on one aspect of our life vs. another. For example, if I light a cigarette, this can induce an immediate positive sensation, i.e. pleasure, and at the same time a negative sensation of fear that I may be jeopardizing my later chances of survival, i.e. displeasure. Or, another example, if I indulge in buying for myself an expensive watch that I really desire, this is giving me a thrill, i.e. pleasure, but at the same time it is making me feel guilty because of the cost endured, i.e. displeasure. It is up to each one of us to manage such contradictory interests as we feel best for the overall accomplishment of our existence.

• Social-Intelligence: Let’s listen to and understand the messages conveyed to us as a leader by our collaborators. These people are telling us something about their lives and how they feel within the working environment that we have to a large extent set up for them and for which we are responsible. We need to be attentive to those signals and take action accordingly as explained below.

• Relationship management: We will only obtain top performance when our collaborators themselves feel satisfied that they are secure in their existence and enhancing their chances of having a good life. It’s up to us as leaders to contribute to such a favourable situation by designing their assignments and arranging their working environment so that they can blossom and expand, making the best use of their talents. Of course it is always a challenge to match the business requirements with peoples’ life aspirations, and it can never be done to perfection. But the leader’s role is to strive towards the best match possible afforded by the given circumstances. Good leaders are able to adjust the tasks they assign to the ‘mood’ of their collaborators: they watch their self-esteem and self-confidence, and are attentive to the variations of their EQ, which can be indicative of things happening to their life that they should perhaps become informed about. As leaders we should also play on emotions to motivate and stimulate our team members. As Lou Gerstner, former CEO of IBM once said: make an effective use of recognition, fear, anger or pride. Also play on peoples’ desires by offering them possibilities to grow, make more money or learn.

Assessing you EQ

Instructions: Please select one item per line, the one that you feel most accurately describes you at this moment. Circle the number that corresponds to the item you have selected

Scoring

Debriefing

The Emotional Quotient (E.Q.) reflects your own overall evaluation, at a given moment in time, of the state of your will to live and of its chances of accomplishment. Your E.Q., as such, will directly affect the judgment you pass on and the value you give to any person, object or event that you then encounter in the course of your existence.

For a score between 10 and 25: You feel in trouble. Something is not right. Your vital functions are strangled. You feel stymied. You are struggling to find a way out. You feel vulnerable and lost. Better to do something to re-align your existence with your priorities. Have a good look at your private and professional lives. Maybe you need help. Make a diagnosis of what’s wrong. Find a way to change and stop shrinking!

For a score between 25 and 40: You are OK. Your life is on the right track which is not to say you are totally comfortable or carefree. There is a good chance that you feel you could do better or more. Perhaps you are over-prudent. It’s perhaps time to build on some of your talents (check your priorities), to take risks, to activate new vital functions. Maybe you need to wake up