HERMINIA IBARRA, CONT’D

Last fall, Harvard Business Review put out a list of the top-performing CEOS, touting ‘the rise of the engineer CEO’: 24 out of the 100 CEOS were engineers — praised for their ability to bring a kind of ‘nuts and bolts’ thinking to organizations. The article cited headhunter James Citrin as saying, “Engineers excel at architectural thinking and logical problem-solving.”

The idea of ‘architectural thinking’ for leaders is very interesting — of leaders designing environments and cultures to enable innovation and success. The problem is, we don’t really teach these skills, and we don’t help leaders think about how to do the hard work of changing the antiquated systems in their organizations.

My INSEAD colleague Jean-françois Manzoni polled the senior managers he teaches, asking them to estimate how much time they spend in four areas: ‘doing’ things, mobilizing people, strategizing, and architecting systems. He found that they spend most of their time doing, and they do a good bit of mobilizing interpersonally and through inspirational speaking. But he found that they don’t do enough strategizing — and they’re aware of that; and they do even less architecting, but they’re not aware that they should be doing this. It’s not even on their radar. As I describe in my book, in order to ‘act like a leader’, you have to devote much of your time to four activities: bridging across diverse people and groups; envisioning new possibilities; engaging people in the change process; and embodying that change.