Thought Leaders: David Dotlich on Leadership Passages: The Personal and Professional Transitions That Make or Break A Leader

The following interview with David Dotlich is a condensed version of HR.com's live, one-hour online learning seminar. Access this archive here.

To view a schedule of upcoming Thought Leader interviews, please click here.

David Dotlich is president of Mercer Delta Executive Learning Center, formerly called CDR International. He consults with senior leadership teams in the areas of leadership, business strategy and executive coaching. He is a certified psychologist in career development, life planning and numerous psychological inventories. He has authored five books including, Why CEO´s Fail, Action Learning, Action Coaching and Unnatural Leadership. David has just co-authored a new book on leadership passages.

Prior to founding the Mercer Delta Executive Learning Center, he was executive VP of Groupe Bull, a global computer manufacturer headquartered in Paris with 45,000 employees worldwide. He was also corporate VP of HR for Honeywell International. David regularly teaches in the executive development programs at Penn State, Michigan and Minnesota.

KE: Let´s begin by having you describe your ´big picture´ perspective on how leaders develop.

DD: Leadership is a huge issue for a lot of companies because they have seen how changing the leader of a business can change the performance of that organization. When companies want to transform themselves, very often the first thing the Board of Directors does is try to find a new leader. For many CEO´s and Boards of Directors, I think leadership is at the top of the agenda. They want to know how to define and develop and grow great leaders, which naturally leads to the question, what makes great leaders and how do you produce them?

We often forget that leaders are a combination of experiences and strengths and weaknesses, of skills and impulses - all of the things that go into making a human being a human being. The fact is that everyone, leaders included, is shaped by personal events, public events and private events.  

When we think of leadership we often tend to focus on the positive public side of leadership. During the presidential election there was a lot of debate about what makes a great leader. Is a good leader consistent or adaptable? Is a leader confident or humble? Is a leader focused on the big picture or on execution? It contributed to a very intense debate about what makes great leadership.

In the book we talk about Rudy Giuliani and his experiences as a leader. Before 9/11 he was a politician in New York on his way out and in many cases he was not admired or respected by a lot of people. As a result of 9/11 he became a true leader who could be trusted, who was heroic and who had great personal qualities. Some of that had to do with the fact that we saw his character in a time of trial. We felt we were able to trust him as a person because we could see that he had suffered and we could identify with him.

If you look at your own life, you realize that it isn´t always the great successes that produce who you are. In many cases the adversity in your life has made you who you are. The events that shape us are not necessarily positive, but they are the passages that we go through as a person and as a leader.

KE: Where do those unsuccessful events fit into a leader´s portfolio?

DD: In business we assume that leaders should develop through one positive experience after another and rise to the top based on one success after another. I have been in many succession planning meetings and the focus is almost always on what the leader has accomplished and what they have succeeded at.  In many cases a significant failure is seen as a reason for taking somebody out of the running for advancement. But in talking to great leaders we found that successful careers are not always continually successful and that there are often periods of ups and downs. For example, there are times when you may have to deal with a new boss or times when you have to move to a new division where you may not be as appreciated as you were before. Even the most acclaimed and successful leaders have gone through periods of uncertainty. For example, Apple fired Steve Jobs before he came back to the company and made it a success. 

KE: How do you define the term leadership passages? What are the qualities of such a passage?

DD: We use the term leadership passages as a way of thinking differently about how people develop as leaders. In the process of writing our book, we talked to about 75 senior executives worldwide and asked them to describe their development. Most of the people we spoke to talked about going through a number of passages in their career. These passages are predictable in the sense that we have to go through them, but while predictable they are also random in that we don´t know when they are going to happen or how they are going to happen. Most significantly, we found that they described their passages as a mix of personal, as well as professional experiences.

Leadership passages are intense transitions where people describe going from one state of being to another. For example, if you think about being fired from a job you know that in the middle of that passage you are having an emotionally intense experience. The intensity then pushes you into new learnings and new behaviors and pushes you out of your comfort zone. We know that growth and change happens when you move out of your comfort zone. It is the intensity that is the catalyst for change and growth.

The word "passage" expresses transition and change - a movement away from one way of identifying yourself to another. The outcomes through these passages are not necessarily guaranteed. You might succeed and go on to greater things, or you might fail. If you lost your job, you might not find a job as important as the one you lost. But success or failure, as you have defined it previously, may not be possible. Anything is possible at that point and the outcomes are not guaranteed.

KE: I´m wondering what prompted you and your colleagues to write this book.

DD: Our original focus was to try and characterize the diversity and adversity of experiences that led people to become more effective leaders. When interviewing and coaching senior leaders we would ask them to describe a significant development in their lives and they would often talk about the failures that challenged them. 

People talked to us a lot about their experiences as a person. They said that life, their relationships, had a profound impact on their development and maturity as a leader. This is not necessarily a breakthrough idea, but what is interesting is how little we integrate this information when we think about leadership in a business context. We found that these passages could be grouped into four different areas:

-Diversity in your Career/Work

-Diversity in your Life/Family/Relationships

-Adversity in your Career/Work

-Adversity in your Life/Family/Relationships

 This became our framework for looking at passages.

KE: You talk in the book about 13 specific passages. Each one falls into one of the four categories you´ve described above. Please review these passages for us briefly.

DD: The passages that we describe in the book are not meant to be exhaustive. What we have done is list those passages that the leaders described as being the most important to their own development.

In a career, the diversity of experiences were: the impact of joining a company, moving into a leadership role for the first time, the stretch assignment and assuming responsibility for a business.

In the diversity of life category, the experiences most people mentioned were: finding a meaningful balance of life and family, living or working in a different country, and letting go of ambition.

On the adversity side of career, people talked about: coping with a bad boss, losing their job or being passed over for a promotion, being responsible for a significant failure and being part of an acquisition or a merger.

When we talked to people about the adversity of life experiences, the most commonly mentioned were: facing personal upheaval, dealing with the death or illness of a loved one, losing faith in the system and moving through a divorce.

KE: One of the things that I appreciated about your book was that it took a holistic view of leadership development and human development. Can you tell us about some the key learnings that are available to leaders and organizations in those four categories?

DD: When talking to people we found that becoming a general manager and taking responsibility for a business was a very significant passage. It is the first time that many people have responsibility for all the controls and can make an impact on the business. They are now responsible for making trade-off decisions and looking broadly across the entire organization. The people that we talked to said that this passage was one of the most significant in a hierarchical career. Your identity begins to change; instead of just being a functional head you now have a general management self-identity and are responsible for the enterprise. A lot of leadership development encourages individuals to take responsibility for the enterprise, but it is hard to do theoretically until you have had that particular experience. It is also a time of risk. There is a tendency to do what you have done before. There is a tendency to focus on the things you know as opposed to learning the new things of a business. There is a tendency to emphasize the people that you´ve historically trusted instead of learning to trust new people. Of people that we interviewed, this passage was identified as being extremely important to helping them develop a sense of identity. In many ways, becoming a general manager is really a positive event.

KE: Let´s talk a bit about adversity in career and work.

DD: Although failure is difficult to talk about, there are some lessons in it that all of us can learn from. It is interesting, as a researcher, to see how senior executives respond when asked what they learned from their failure. One thing that many people said was that from failure they learned to go on with their lives. Sometimes when I work with senior executives that have had one success after another my reaction to them is that they lack depth or character. What failure teaches is resilience. Can you pick up your boots and move on to the next thing?

Failure, if you reflect on it, requires you to sort out your contribution to it. What do you not want to do again? What factors were contextual? How did other people influence the failure? The reflection allows you to take on a sense of personal responsibility, which is important both personally and professionally.

People also talked a lot about the adversity they faced in developing a work life balance.

We have the idea that we should have balance in our lives, but in fact there are times in our lives when we invest more heavily in one side of the equation than the other. People´s expectation of balance is what creates frustration more often than anything else. Those who focus on their careers have to work it out with their families one way or another. Leading a global company today requires a significant sacrifice on the part of your family. That paradox between career and family is often never resolved. Successful leaders are aware of it as a dilemma to be managed as opposed to a state to be achieved. Everyone that we spoke to said that managing this paradox is what made them a much better leader overall.

Personal upheaval was another developmental experience that many leaders went through. It is not easy for a senior leader to talk about their divorce and how their divorce contributed to their leadership. We all know that this is a defining moment that creates your humanity. It helps you to accept fate, acknowledge loss and contributes to moving on. In the book we talk about the passage of personal loss or upheaval as a significant turning point in life. Many people said they did not have any emotional intelligence as a leader until they went through one of these experiences. Understanding their vulnerability and accepting it made them stronger as a leader.

KE: Can you talk to us a little bit about what is needed from a leader to gain as much as possible from these passages?

DD: We are all going to have experiences in our lives because life is experience. Are you able to step back, reflect and make sense of them? Reflection is a big part of action learning. The idea of reflection is to build a theory, an idea or a concept about what has happened to you and why.

I worked with a company that worked really hard to become a learning organization. They invested a lot of money in seminars on how to be a learning company and sent a lot of people to learning programs. They hired a new COO who came in and implemented a really unusual tactic. He would stop every meeting 10 minutes early and would ask people to rate the meeting on a specific scale. The last ten minutes of the meeting would consist of discussing those numbers and reflecting upon what happened during the meeting. That did more to create a learning company than almost all of the seminars combined. What the leader had done was introduce reflection into the company on a daily basis.

KE: How do organizations get involved in supporting and facilitating the learning available in these passages? These passages are predictable yet random, so what can we do in the way of development programs to harvest the learning available through passages?

DD: Most of this is common sense. I think there is a genuine desire on the part of senior leaders in large companies to gain an in-depth understanding of a person´s development. This understanding and insight can come from conversation more than it can by defining an individual based entirely upon their successes. 

I´ve written a lot about action learning and I am a huge proponent of building in the experiences where people have the opportunity to think, act and reflect in a different way. Many times action learning creates an environment where people can live in a very different system than the company.

Coaches are also a huge trend and good coaches can really have an impact in this area. One of the reasons coaching is so important is that a good coach has the ability to stand outside the system and create reflection. That objectivity and ability to challenge people´s self-concept is what can help people move through their passages.

It is also important to recognize the importance of these passages for people. I´m not suggesting that companies prescribe failure, but there are ranges of experiences that people can have that constitute genuine passages. Companies should recognize that what people might be going through in their lives might be a passage. In writing this book, we learned that a lot of current work values, policies and practices are out-dated and almost draconian in how they fail to address the diversity that people are facing in their lives. In the effort to have equity across a company we have lost track of individual differences completely.

To purchase David Dotlich´s new book, click here. To learn more about Mercer Delta Executive Learning Center, visit www.mercerdelta.com.