The arrest of Maximilien Robespierre at Paris City Hall on 9 Thermidor, year II (July 27, 1794).
My email overflowed last week with responses to my Jan. 31 newsletter about what a succession of failed leaders have done to Boeing, some from people who’d worked for the company. I was especially struck by a note from my friend, leadership coach Frank Wagner.
Frank reminded me that our 100 Coaches mentor and colleague Alan Mulally had been passed over for the top position at Boeing in 2006. This was just after the second CEO in a row had been fired for ethics violations. When it became clear to Alan that the board was not going to name him as successor, he decided to accept Bill Ford’s invitation to become CEO of Ford Motor Company, which he then led to one of the most successful turnarounds in this century.
What made Alan’s tenure at Ford remarkable was that, as a self-proclaimed “airplane guy,” who had joined Boeing straight out of college in 1969, he freely admitted he had little expertise when it came to cars. Instead, he viewed his role as helping build a culture that would free Ford’s highly experienced engineers, designers, operations people, production workers, and staff to work together to restore the company to profitability and greatness.
Frank said that Alan had seen the writing on the wall at Boeing when he was told that the way the company had historically done things– it’s famous working together approach– had obviously been completely wrong, requiring nothing short of radical change.
I found Frank’s comments fascinating because I’ve long been obsessed with the whole-new-day approach to leadership that helped bring Boeing to grief. I call it Thermidor leadership, after the name given to the month of July during the French revolution, which began with the July 14 the storming of the Bastille.
Those who led the revolution decided to rename every month of the year in order to send a message that the past would play no role in shaping the country’s future. Thermidor thus serves as a convenient shorthand for the belief that whatever people were doing before a new regime came to power must be tossed aside as retrograde and suspect.
Yet as history teaches, this “everything must change” attitude usually requires chopping off a lot of heads. Either literally, as in revolutionary France, or metaphorically, as in the case of corporate leaders who see themselves as bold agents of total transformation.
Tip to the world: this rarely works out.
The reason? Displaying contempt for the culture one proposes to lead— corporate, national, military, educational, scientific, religious— shows disdain for those whose experience has both shaped that culture and been shaped by it. It also marginalizes the embedded expertise and knowledge that people at every level of the organization carry in their heads, their hands, and their hearts.
Thermador leaders, by contrast, rely entirely on their own allegedly audacious ideas about what the future needs to look like. Anyone who questions the new direction, or the assumed brilliance of the new regime’s leadership, is viewed as a threat to the organization’s success.
This is what happened at Boeing. It’s what has happened at Twitter. It’s what could have happened at General Motors if the board hadn’t, after much travail, chosen a leader who understood and valued the company’s historic strengths. And drew upon them to make the company fit for the future.
I’m using corporate examples here, staying away from politics and religion. But please feel free to add your own examples in the comments.
Thermidor leaders often sell themselves as visionaries. Because they’re skilled at dazzling the media, their followers, and their boards, they galvanize people eager to buy into their unbounded self-belief. But while the Thermidor approach is indeed bold (or in today’s jargon, “disruptive”), over time it generally crashes to earth, taking a lot of people and embedded knowledge down with it.
It’s worth remembering that the revolutionary calendar in France was itself tossed aside after just 12 years. Historians refer to this as “the Thermidor reaction.” It’s how cultures try to rebalance themselves.
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