In Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter, ($26.99, HarperBusiness), leadership expert Liz Wiseman explains how some leaders are able to amplify the best in those around them. She talked to Healthcare Finance News in advance of her keynote address on June 25 at this year’s Healthcare Financial Management Association ANI conference.
Q. Please give us a brief description of your book, Multipliers, and share with us what you think is its most important takeaway for readers.
A. Multipliers reveals a way to access the most valuable resource of all: intelligence. This novel approach has the potential to do for today’s knowledge economy what the invention of the assembly line did for our previous manufacturing economy. It all comes down to the kind of leader you are.
Most companies are adept at bringing in smart, talented people but few companies put as much discipline into understanding how fully they are using the talent they’ve acquired. Many managers are so focused on their own ideas and capability that they shut down intelligence around them. I call these leaders “diminishers.” Yet other leaders seem to amplify the intelligence around them. These leaders are “multipliers.”
To determine the impact of these two types of leaders, my colleagues and I studied 150 leaders across four continents, asking their subordinates to quantify how much of their intelligence the leader was getting access to. We found that, on average, these diminishing leaders used only 48 percent of people’s intellectual capability. Multipliers used 95 percent, or twice that of the diminishing leaders. In other words, the managers were paying a dollar for their resources but only extracting 48 cents in capability – a 52 percent waste.
However, the costs of under-utilized employees are far deeper than just the waste of payroll dollars. People who are underutilized by their managers described their experience as “frustrating” and “exhausting.” Inevitably, the most talented employees quit, leaving you with an expensive turnover problem. The less confident staff often “quit-and-stay,” leaving you with a more destructive morale problem as disillusioned employees infect the culture.
Smart executives understand that the cheapest way to fuel growth is to first tap deeply into the resources they already have. Stretching and engaging your existing talent is also the highest-octane fuel source. When you're expected to get more done with less, what if you could get 2X more from your team?
Q. You say that multipliers are “genius makers.” Many people may think of geniuses in relation to IQ. Please explain what you mean by the term.
A. When “genius makers” walk into a room, light bulbs go off over people’s heads; ideas flow and problems get solved. They inspire employees to stretch themselves and get more from other people. They are leaders who use their intelligence to amplify the smarts and capabilities of the people around them.
Q. Healthcare CFOs are increasingly being looked to as leaders in their organizations instead of just numbers crunchers. I understand that you will have a new book published in October called Rookie Smarts, about recapturing the rookie mindset even if you've been in the professional workforce for a long time. What advice would you give CFOs to help them recharge as their roles expand?
A. In a rapidly changing world, experience can be a curse. Being new, naïve, and even clueless can be an asset. Rookies are unencumbered, with no baggage to weigh them down, no resources to burden them, and no track record to limit their thinking or aspirations. For today’s knowledge workers, constant learning is more valuable than mastery.
In Rookie Smarts, I argue that the most successful rookies are hunter-gatherers – alert and seeking, cautious but quick like firewalkers, and hungry and relentless like pioneers. Most importantly, I identify a breed of leaders that are “perpetual rookies”. Despite years of experience, they retain their rookie smarts, thinking and operating with the mindsets and practices of these high-performing rookies.
Rookie Smarts addresses the questions every experienced professional faces: “Will my knowledge and skills become obsolete and irrelevant? Will a young, inexperienced newcomer upend my company or me? How can I keep up?” The answer is to stay fresh, keep learning, and know when to think like a rookie.
Q. Is there something about your books about leadership and work that I haven't asked that you would like to add that you think is important for readers to know?
A. These books can help leaders take on the world's toughest challenges. We have all this latent, unused intelligence inside of our organizations. Rather than hiring more people, why don’t we start by fully utilizing the people we already have? This not only makes sense for economic reasons, but because when you fully utilize talent, you create a vibrant, exhilarating place to work.