Leadership continues to be one of the most heavily studied subjects in business education today, yet it's an elusive topic. Companies have found that the innovation and continual development needed for competitive advantage aren’t produced by the old command and control management. As a result, companies recognize that people who have persuasive skills, and the ability to gain the buy-in and commitment for projects have a great deal of organizational value. Since research has shown that leaders are made and not born, companies have set out to solve some of their management problems by investing in leadership development.
If you’re a Gen-Yer, the sooner you start learning some of those skills, the better your future will be. Furthermore, many of you will be expected to take leadership opportunities shortly after you’re hired. Leadership is not a subject that you can ignore and hope will go away. It’s here to stay in the 21st century.
What do leaders do?
Leaders have to be able to work with today’s massive accumulation of data, opinions and conflict, make decisions in quick time, and gain the support of relevant people—all under extraordinary pressure. Although leadership is viewed from a number of perspectives, three major skills are common to nearly all settings:
- The ability to manage the organizational culture and system.
- The ability to engage in productive dialog—what I call conversational leadership.
- The ability to tolerate and handle ambiguity.
Although they are all complex skills, execs tell me that finding people who can handle ambiguity is tough. By business ambiguity, I refer to the ill-defined and lack of clarity and explicitness in projects, roles, issues or strategies. In a conversation with a senior technology executive from a major European insurance company, the issue of ambiguity came up. Lance Wilson, formerly CIO of Alliant, mused over his difficulty and asked what percentage of people I thought could do ambiguity successfully. I suggested four or five percent. He thought that was high: maybe one or two percent was more accurate. Yet the volatile, highly competitive environment requires the ability to deal with the “dark hole of ambiguity.”
My Gen-Y protégé recently interviewed for a still undefined position in his firm—one of the nation’s largest finance companies. The company recruiter asked about his project management skills—he had little experience in project management—and then turned the conversation to his ability to manage ambiguity. Liam, my protégé, is exceptionally comfortable with ambiguity and has resolved a number of individual projects that others had resisted because of the “lack of project definition.” With an extensive background in English and literature from UVA, he has a near perfect ear for ambiguity. But he was completely unaware of the organizational value of his competency. I suggested that the recruiter could find a number of people with project management skills, but that he’d meet a dead-end when it came to ambiguity.
Think about it. Execs may be comfortable with you stumbling about to learn the organizational system, learning project skills and trying on new and needed conversational skills, but ambiguity is another animal. Execs meet intense frustration around organizational ambiguity, and often turn a person down for projects and promotion because he/she can’t handle lack of role or project definition.
Ambiguity feels like an all-or-nothing skill. Either you can handle it, or you can’t. That’s an overstatement, but it’s closer to reality than you might think.
FYI: Research from Wellesley College suggests that graduate school is required for people to successfully handle ambiguity. Inferential thinking is normally taught in grad school especially in fields like statistics and physics. The successful management of ambiguity requires a great deal of inferential skill. Inferential thinking requires an in-depth knowledge of a given field, thus universities locate programs in inferential thinking at the graduate level. In addition to a collegiate knowledge base, the ability to deal with ambiguity in the work setting requires a degree of expertise in a given function.
So, where do you start learning to deal with ambiguity?
The best place to get exposed to ambiguity is to find professionals who have a track record of successfully handling difficult projects. Get to know them. Get them to walk you through their project thinking. And get on their team. Ambiguity is one of those complex skills that you learn by mimicking an expert. So, find your expert, and learn to mimic, and build on to that. You’ll get way ahead in the career game.