Tomes have been written about leaders and leadership. A search for the two terms on Google serves up 137 and 120 million results, respectively! Till not so long ago, leaders were merely those we read about in history books or the living politicians we admired. Somewhere along the way, leadership became associated with business and management.
As business success becomes more and more unpredictable, there is an even greater belief that leadership is the key ingredient for high-performance. Hence, the tremendous interest in leadership and what makes a leader. We are constantly seized by the question: what makes a leader and how do we groom more leaders in our organisations?
For some years now, I have tried to understand the answer to this question —reading, observing and asking others. The answers have been as various as the books and articles I read and the people I spoke to. For a while, it all seemed more confusing than clarifying. Then, I came across the “Managerial Grid” (
www.gridinternational.com/gridtheory.html).
In the 1960s, two behavioural scientists, Drs Robert Blake and Jane Mouton, created a framework to measure managerial styles in an organisational context. They proposed two fundamental drivers of managerial behaviour—a concern for results and a concern for people. Their thesis was that some managers are very result-focused—they simply want to get things done. Other managers are very people-oriented—they want people working under them to be happy. Still others are a combination of the two.
Blake and Mouton went on to create a grid that actually plots a manager’s degree of concern for results versus the degree of concern for people. So on one axis (concern for people), they plotted the degree to which a manager was concerned about the needs of team members, their interests, and areas of personal development when deciding how to accomplish a task. On the other (concern for results), they measured the degree to which a manager emphasised concrete targets, goals and efficiency in accomplishing a task. To actually come up with a measure for managerial style along both dimensions, they defined nine degrees of concern along each axis and used them to define five managerial styles.
Courtesy: www.gridinternational.com
There are 1,9 (high people/low results) managers who are most concerned about the needs and feelings of their team members. Their belief is that as long as they can keep employees happy, results will follow. They show little concern for results and impact. Therefore, in this kind of “country club” environment, results usually go for a toss.
In contrast, there are 9,1 (high results/low people) managers who are constantly driving for results in an autocratic manner. They are seen as controlling and dominating with very little concern for people. These are the ones we often call the “people-eaters”.
Then, there are the 1,1 (low results/low people) managers and the 5,5 (middle of the road) managers. The former are disorganised and their teams are dissatisfied as well, creating little or no impact on performance. The latter are constantly making compromises and end up being average performers who are neither here nor there. Worse, they start believing this is the best they can do.
According to Blake and Mouton, it is the 9,9 managers who exemplify the best management style – something that all managers should aspire to. They balance tremendous concern for people with an unwavering concern for results. They build employee commitment, even as they align the team to the organizational needs and purpose. They achieve results for the organization, while ensuring the growth and satisfaction of people who work with them.
To my mind, 9,9 managers are really the leaders whose definition I was searching for. As I reflect on all of the leadership literature and wisdom that I have encountered, the idea that concern for results and people define leaders has tremendous resonance. Without results, you cannot have leaders. To illustrate this through some exaggerated examples, if India had not won freedom from the British, would we consider Gandhi a Mahatma? If Britain had not won World War II, would Churchill have been considered the greatest Briton of all time? A leader is someone who not only achieves results, but does so with extraordinary performance and success. Think of the leaders you admire — all of them will have delivered impact beyond the ordinary. This is the essence of leadership.
But managers who achieve results at any and all cost tend not to gain followers. They are the 9,1 managers, climbing over people to get to where they want. Moreover, followership is generally required to achieve extraordinary results for any leader. My Google search resulted in the Wikipedia definition of leadership at the top of the table. Here is what it says: “Leadership is the process of social influence in which one person can enlist the aid and support of others in the accomplishment of a common task. It is usually impossible to achieve extraordinary impact without the support and commitment of others. Thus, developing followership is the other essence of leadership. Without followers, you cannot have leaders.”
I believe it is this ability to create followership that Blake and Mouton were referring to in their concern for people. Way back in the 1960s, they elegantly defined what management thinkers and gurus have tried to recycle and redefine through the tomes created in subsequent years. But even today, Blake and Mouton’s simple definition of the 9,9 manager remains the most intuitive and enduring model of a leader.
As I think about building leadership skills personally, and in others, this somewhat simple definition indeed makes leadership development less complicated. Measurement is easier — is this person having impact, delivering extraordinary results, and showing real ownership for performance? Am I doing all of this and building a followership at the same time, do I demonstrate real concern for people? You can ask these questions — about your own performance and that of others —by way of feedback. Obviously, this leads to a quick assessment, and eventually ways to address the gaps.
So is the rest of leadership thinking all nonsense? Of course, not. To me, all of what I have read or heard is really about the qualities of the leader and the “how” of leadership. So Jim Collins writes about Level 5 leadership qualities in Good to Great while leadership academics such as Stanford’s James March illustrate leadership traits with historical and mythological examples. Others, such as McKinsey’s legendary Marvin Bower, talk about the Will to Lead and how leaders act and behave. All of these are extremely useful and valuable inputs in the leadership journey.
But, through all of these, the ultimate objective is really to achieve extraordinary results and impact, while building a growing band of loyal followers — that’s what all leaders do and that’s what a 9,9 leader is about!
The author is the founder and managing director of 9dot9 Media. He can be reached at pramath.sinha@9dot9.in 
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After spending years researching what defines a true leader,