Long-time chairman and CEO of Herman Miller -- one of the most innovative and admired companies in America -- Max De Pree has won the praise of business and community leaders. His writings and leadership practices have inspired millions of people to think differently about work and life. Recently De Pree was honored by President Clinton and the Business Enterprise Trust with a Lifetime Achievement Award. Just a few weeks later the De Pree Leadership Institute was established at Fuller Theological Seminary. Afterward, De Pree spoke with Editor-in-Chief Frances Hesselbein about the many roles and responsibilities of leaders.
Frances Hesselbein: Max, you have spoken eloquently about the obligations of leadership and the need for leaders to leave a legacy for their colleagues, customers, and communities. Too few people are helping us see the significance of this philosophy. What do you mean by leaving a legacy, and why is it important?
Max De Pree: One should think first of all about the difference between strategic planning and the concept of a legacy. A strategic plan -- understanding the value you provide to customers, your competitive strengths -- is necessary but insufficient to the full task of leadership. Leaving a legacy -- articulating and bringing to life the kind of organization or community that you want to be a part of -- is very different. And it is every bit as important.
At Herman Miller, for instance, leaving a legacy meant, first of all, that there was a common good that we were all connected to and had a right to. And second, that we did not have categories of people based upon either performance or natural gifts. Rather, we had a community of people who got to be as good as they could be because we were able to sort out their gifts and assign tasks according to those gifts. The dream was that we would then create results that were quite rich. It wasn't an effort to create results that could be measured only in terms of the conventional wisdom of accountants. Those measurements are important but they're never enough if you're thinking about a community. One has to think about what kind of place we work in, what kind of relationships we have within the workplace, what effect work has on the families we go home to, and what effect the family has on the work we do.
On one hand, as a leader you always seek a certain level of simplicity, on the other hand, you want to be aware that the workplace is a very complex setting and that there is a range of achievements you'd like to shoot for. We as leaders don't do a good enough job of explaining to people that the quality of the community cannot be seen in terms of the best-off part of the community; it's measured in terms of how the most vulnerable people are doing.
FH: Yes. That has great significance for so many of us who are concerned about what is going to happen to those least able to compete. So what you have to say about building community is extremely helpful. You alluded to the new contexts for work and for leaders. What do you see as these contexts for the leaders of the future?
MD: The Knowledge and Information Era, as we call it, is clearly changing work tremendously. For instance, the physical dispersal of work, our relationships to the organization and one another, and the demands that we place on certain jobs are all changing. A part of the new context that we're in today is a result of the downsizing that has gone on. We have gone from a corporate society in which we used to say, "Yes, there is a place for you here," to now saying, "No, there may not be a place for you, at least not in the long term."
Corporate leadership for a variety of reasons is withdrawing what used to be a meaningful commitment. One of the results of that is that we have stopped trusting each other; we don't find meaning in work the way we used to. These are real losses, which we are not yet facing up to. We're also losing our corporate poise. Even 20 years ago, you could sense a certain poise in which people in corporations trusted each other, cared about each other. They had self-confidence, and you could always count on people to be able to work on their own when necessary. But when you lose your corporate poise, people no longer feel able to do that. That's a part of a new context.
We're seeing a movement among leaders in American corporate life toward more individualism, and, to me at least, that signifies less concern for the common good. You see this when leaders place their own interests above those of all other stakeholders -- for instance, with extravagant severance packages even for executives who have performed poorly. Leaders also have to be concerned about the fragmentation of society in general. Instead of seeing a coming together of community and family and educational systems, with the corporation playing a role, we're seeing those groups driving each other apart. We're seeing young people coming up who are actually quite dangerous. I'm not at all sure the corporations are as well equipped to handle that kind of problem. That is yet another new context we must face.
FH: This new corporate context is so different from the call in your earlier writing for a covenant between management and the workforce. We seem to be going the other direction, with every man, woman, and child for him- or herself. But when you talk about the need to build community, you talk about the need to first get your own house in order. We use that phrase at the Drucker Foundation as well, but in what sense do you mean it?
MD: Getting one's house in order, in a family or a really good school or a great corporation, has to begin with one's beliefs about people. In my case, it stems from the belief that each of us is made in the image of God, but there are many who have a high view of people that doesn't stem from a religious source. The important thing is that we need to understand that each person is authentic -- is an individual with a legitimate place in the world -- regardless of whether we hire that person. So long as a person is in your work community, is a legitimate part of that community, she's indispensable to the group. Then you have to work in such a way that your relationships reflect that belief.
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If you want to build trust, it always
has to start with respect. |
If you want to build trust and if you want to have covenantal relationships, it always has to start with respect. Another way leaders can get their own house in order is to describe to themselves what I call an ethical space within which they're going to operate. If that's rooted in good values, then they can build trust and build covenantal relationships that are enormously productive, both in terms of the bottom line and in terms of the kind of communities we want to live and work in.
FH: Even the language motivates and inspires people when you talk about covenantal relationships. You're saying that before we can look at strategy and structure in terms of getting the institutional house in order, we have to look within, and put our personal houses in order.
MD: Yes. Another way to say that is we have to know who we are. It's very difficult. Most of us have also been followers; we didn't come out of the nursery as leaders. And we have learned along the way a great deal about people who wanted to lead us but had no idea who they were. It's tough to follow somebody who doesn't have that sense of himself.
FH: Max, in talking about knowing who we are, you have done some provocative thinking on the importance of personal restraint. Tell me why you think personal restraint in today's world has significance?
MD: I think about personal restraint in terms of the moral tone that has to be applied to the way we use our environment. We share the world with a lot of people who have the same rights that we do. We have to understand that there is a relatively small but significant segment of the world who have been given a larger share of all its riches. Philosophically, we need to learn how to ask, "Was all this favored stuff given to me for me?"
Another side to that question is, "OK, I've got everything I need in life and there's a large world out there." Not everybody has that. So then the question one asks is not "How much do I give away?" but "What may I keep?" I'm here for 70, 75, 80 years if things go well.
I have a certain purview as a leader. The question of what I may keep is to me quite an important one, especially for leaders to ask. When leaders indulge themselves with lavish perks and the trappings of power, they're not showing appropriate restraint, and they're damaging their standing as leaders.
FH: We hear a lot about shared leadership responsibility and the new role of leaders. But from your experience, what are the few things that a leader may not delegate?
MD: That's an important question. First of all, from the perspective of the people within most organizations, the only one who is able to hold the organization accountable is the leader. So the leader may not delegate that role. There are some other elements of good corporate life that have to be seen as core elements of leadership. When I was very young, I was an operating room scrub nurse in World War II in France and Germany. While the relatively untrained scrub nurses could do a lot under severe stress, there were certain things the surgeons could never delegate. It's the same in business. Really good restaurants, for instance, seem to have an owner looking over everything; the great restaurant owner doesn't delegate that oversight. That means providing the kind of visibility and personal engagement that cannot be delegated. I say that one of the functions of a leader is to stop: Just as you can't have a conversation with somebody riding by in a car, if you're going to interact with a leader, she has to understand she needs to stop -- and listen.
Nor can a leader delegate the final decision on what it is we're going to measure. In a good organization we measure outputs but in a better organization we also measure inputs. The buck has to stop with somebody on what it is we're going to measure, because that's going to have an enormous influence on the health of the community down the road. But there is one more thing. The leader has to set the tone for the quality of relationships. If he doesn't care about the quality of relationships, everybody catches on quickly. But if he cares deeply about those, everybody catches on to that quickly. It's almost impossible to think about an organization in which people down the line can set that particular tone.
FH: If you are my leader and I am your follower, what do you owe me?
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In organizations that work, hope
is a very functional force. |
MD: As a leader, to start with, I owe you a respect and an understanding that you're legitimate in that relationship, that I cannot do very much without you. I also owe you a perceivable level of fairness. I'm going to make promises over time. You as a follower have to see those promises kept. The leader owes the follower productive conversations about the gifts that the follower brings to the organization and the kinds of contributions the follower wishes to make -- so that tasks can be designed that give that person hope. In organizations that work, hope is a very functional force, and understanding the function of hope in an organization is essential.
We're talking about two things. One is choice, and choice is always directly connected to hope. The other thing in a productive organization is the design of the task. It's very hard for workers to succeed if they never see how their task is designed. If they can't succeed they can't have hope. And if they can't have hope, it's going to be, at best, a very ordinary organization.
A leader owes a follower one more thing: to point the direction in which our personal and our group potential lies. As a leader, you've got to understand and explain the environment in which your organization and people are operating. You provide an agenda of things to be working on that are going to have an effect on your future. You should be able to say to people, the company is moving in such and such a direction and will require new skills and knowledge. So we're developing educational programs to help those of you who want to fit in to do this.
FH: One of the things that raises anxiety in an organization is risk taking: what is risk, who should be taking it, and how much? What does risk taking mean to you, and can we lead without taking risks?
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Nobody gives the CEO a perfect
setting in which to make a decision. |
MD: We cannot either lead or learn without taking risks. As you gain more and more responsibility in organized life, you become more and more of an amateur, because you're less and less specialized. Because of the complexity of work, you have to count more on others. But that also means you're more exposed to risk. When you get to be the CEO, nobody gives you a perfect setting in which to make a decision. They only give you gray areas. All the black and white decisions are made elsewhere. So as the black and white choices merge into gray choices, the level of risk rises. You're also more at risk because you don't have as much time as you used to. But that's part of the job -- and the risk -- of leadership.
FH: You have talked about another kind of risk taking in your books, and one that makes some people uneasy: moving toward greater openness. The notion of being open and vulnerable to the talents of others is very uplifting as we look at the uncertainty of the future. How did you develop this view?
MD: Dr. Carl Frost, who is an industrial psychologist and was a consultant at Herman Miller for many years, taught us a lot about participative management. He helped me understand the need to be abandoned to the strengths that others bring. It's similar to what happens when you raise children. When your child turns, say, 16, you suddenly discover that you've lost your influence. You've done everything you could do, and now you're at the mercy of the child. It's a little frightening, but when the children turn out well, it's terribly rewarding. You learn that being abandoned to the strengths this child has developed is a really wonderful way to live together as parent and child.
Another mentor in my life was David Hubbard, who for many years was president of Fuller Theological Seminary. He used to talk about two things in particular that taught me a lot. He said leaders don't inflict pain, they bear pain. And, he said, the primary purpose of power is not to use it but to share it. A special kind of power develops when it's shared, as compared to when it's used.
FH: That makes enormous sense. So much of what you talk about has to do with relationships, and I think all of us have learned so much by a simple thing that you did at Herman Miller -- you did not have a vice president for human resources; you had a vice president for people. And you've said that if you had been there longer it would be vice president for people and families.
MD: You're a great one, Frances, for pointing out to all of us the importance of language and how it influences our behavior in an organization. What we were simply searching for was a way to assign significant responsibility to somebody who is not an overseer of people but an advocate of people. That comes back to the whole idea that what we're working on here is potential, not simply achieving today's goals. For most people in good organizations, achieving their goals is not so difficult. For years we have underestimated people.
We never had a senior officer for human resources before Michele Hunt became vice president for people. We consciously avoided putting that into our structure until we understood that it had to be a senior position of advocacy. It's interesting, Frances, that once you understand the language you're searching for, then you can really describe what you want to achieve.
FH: Max, as a CEO, how did you help people throughout the enterprise understand your mission? How did you communicate that sense of purpose -- why you did what you did, not just the what of the business.
MD: At Herman Miller, that came out of the convictions that we shared. My dad was founder of the company, and then my brother was the CEO for 17 years. The company grew nicely and in about 1970 became a public company, which changed things a lot. Through all of that, there was a red thread running through what we were trying to do. It was a thread of moral purpose. In addition to establishing and nurturing good relationships, we tried to do the right thing in the way we researched and developed products. This meant, for instance, that if we were going to perform a leadership role in the design of new products, we had to have connections with the very best people. One of the great gifts of my father and brother is that they were so good at identifying people like Charles Eames and George Nelson and Bob Propst and Bill Stumpf. These are really talented people who gave product leadership to the company over a long period. But we always tried to determine our potential as a group, and we always had a clear sense of mission. We always talked about a more complex set of results that we wanted, including results in our community.
There were other manifestations of this red thread. When it came time for us to establish a major manufacturing operation in Georgia, we sent Michele Hunt, an African American woman, to get that started. We went through a period with the all-white male city council, when they would send Michele out of the meeting and say go call the home office and get a decision. And she'd go out, wait a few minutes, and walk back in and give them the decisions. After a while they caught on, and we ended up with a wonderful relationship with the city of Roswell.
FH: Max, I have one more question. If you could have just one wish for today's and tomorrow's leaders, what would you wish for them?
MD: I'd wish that at a younger stage of life these leaders would know in their hearts that what they're figuratively ready to die for is going to change. If they could live in light of that knowledge, they would think differently about their jobs and the world. When we're 52 and we've just been made the CEO or chief financial officer in a good-sized company, we honestly believe we'd be ready to die for earnings per share or return on investment. But in about 10 years that's going to change. We'd be better leaders if we understood that what we were ready to die for is going to change.
FH: Max, it's fascinating. We began this conversation talking about change, and we are ending it talking about change. I'd like to express enormous gratitude for this dialogue and for all you bring to all of us who try to make a difference.
Copyright © 1997 by Max De Pree. Reprinted with permission from Leader to Leader, a publication of the Leader to Leader Institute and Jossey-Bass.
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De Pree, Max "The Leader's Legacy" Leader to Leader. 6 (Fall 1997): 18-23.
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