Book Excerpt December 18, 2009, 1:18PM EST

Book Excerpt: High Commitment High Performance

Harvard Business School's Mike Beer says forget the "heroic leader" model—and most other theories about what makes for an effective CEO

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In the new book High Commitment High Performance: How to Build A Resilient Organization for Sustained Advantage (Jossey-Bass, 2009), Harvard Business School professor Michael Beer redefines C-suite leadership. Excerpts of the work follow.

High Commitment High Performance (HCHP) leadership is not about exercising influence through the formal authority vested in one's position, nor is it about influence through superior knowledge and intelligence. Smart CEOs with a strong will to merely impose their ideas do not succeed in building an HCHP company. The distinctive HCHP outcomes of psychological alignment and capacity for learning not only require leaders with an emotional commitment to a well-thought-out vision but also a deep involvement in an action learning process that surfaces the truth about how the organizational system is currently functioning and provides as many people as possible the opportunity to contribute. This HCHP approach to leadership is grounded, operational, puts a premium on collective learning, and, as I show below, is much less dangerous than the mythical heroic view of leadership.

"There are no great men. There are only great challenges that ordinary men like you and me are forced by circumstance to meet," observed Admiral William F. "Bull" Halsey, a man who saw leaders tested by challenges far greater than those faced by business leaders. Yet the Great Man theory of leadership is still alive and well. Heroic, decisive, and charismatic leaders who impose their strategic vision and solutions are widely celebrated in the business press.

When companies outperform, success is attributed to the CEO's leadership. When companies fail, the CEO is blamed and usually fired. Quite often the same CEO is celebrated and later fired. Jeff Skilling, Enron's leader in the 1990s, was widely hailed for several years as the leader who had created a new business and organizational mode—and was later blamed for the company's demise and convicted of management misdeeds.

Attributing success to personal qualities—the CEO's brilliance, vision, and style of management—is not only dangerous but also dead wrong. A company's behavior and performance tend to be path-dependent, research shows. As Warren Buffett has observed, when you bring good management into a bad business, it is the reputation of the business that quite often survives.

Much academic research supports this view. In Built to Last (HarperBusiness, 2004), Jim Collins and Jerry Porras concluded that the key to sustained success is not visionary leadership (which was their proposition at the beginning of the research) but visionary organizations. For these reasons, quick fixes and inspirational speeches do not transform organizations. Transformation requires leaders committed to the long-term development of the organization. These leaders draw on knowledge about the business and the organization extant in the company, and they commit people to change.

For several years now, my Harvard Business School colleagues Michael Porter, Jay Lorsch, and Nitin Nohria have been running a workshop for CEOs who have recently taken charge of their companies. Seven lessons about leadership emerge from discussions with these CEOs. All point to the fallacy of top-down, single-handed, and single-minded leadership, and the importance of collaboration with all stakeholders.

1. You can't run the company.
2. Giving orders erodes other managers' confidence.
3. It's hard to know what is going on in your organization.
4. You are always sending a message, but not necessarily the one you intend.
5. You're not the boss—the board is.
6. Pleasing shareholders is not your goal.
7. You're still human.

Why is the heroic CEO exactly the wrong leader? Ron Heifetz reminds us that "in a crisis…we call for someone with answers, decisions, strengths, and a map of the future, someone who knows where we ought to be going—n short, someone who can make hard problems simple.