Understated Leadership

In every organization, there are a few people who act outside the mainstream and modestly, yet persistently, change the culture.

By DEBRA E. MEYERSON, PhD '89

Illustration by Sarah Wilkins

FROM 7 A.M., when Martha Wiley walked into her 10th-floor office, she has sprinted from one meeting to the next, stopping only for a one-hour workout. Before she rushes home to relieve her nanny, she has one final meeting at 5:30 with one of her most valued employees, who requested time to talk about “the future.” The employee, fidgeting nervously, explains that since returning from maternity leave with her second child, she has found it increasingly difficult to be in the office five long days each week. She needs to find an alternative way to continue performing her job.

In just 30 minutes, the two women agree to a plan: The employee will work two days from home and three days in the office, and every other week she will take one day off. Martha’s only request is that the employee remain flexible and be willing to come into the office when it is absolutely necessary for her work.

At 44, Martha has spent the past 10 years working her way up to her position as senior vice president and highest-ranking woman in the real estate division of a Seattle financial institution that I will call by a pseudonym, Western Financial. (Except for scholars named in this article, all the names of people and organizations have been changed to protect their privacy.) Martha has actively looked for opportunities to initiate changes that accommodate working parents and that make her department more hospitable to women and people of color. A full 30 percent of her staff work an alternative schedule despite a lack of formal policy to guide these arrangements. Martha has little doubt that her experiments in flexible work, even though she has kept them quiet, have been slowly paving the way for broader changes at Western.

This quiet and persistent approach to organizational change is typical of how Martha and countless others lead change in their workplaces. Martha’s agenda is bold—she wants nothing less than to make the workplace just and humane—yet her method of change is modest and incremental. She balances the need to fit into the established culture against her commitment to act on personal values that often set her apart. As a result, she continues to rock the boat, but not so hard that she falls out of it.

All types of organizations—from global corporations to neighborhood schools—have Marthas. They occupy all sorts of jobs and stand up for a variety of ideals. They engage in small, local battles rather than wage dramatic wars. But these men and women of all colors and creeds are slowly and steadily pushing back on conventions, creating new understandings, and inspiring change within their organizations.

Sometimes people like Martha pave alternative roads by quietly standing up for their personal values or by refusing to silence aspects of themselves that make them different from the majority. Other times they act more deliberately to change the way the organization does things. They are not heroic leaders of revolutionary change; rather, they are cautious and committed catalysts who keep trying and who slowly make a difference. They are “tempered radicals.”

BEGINNINGS AT THE GSB

IN THE EARLY 1980s, when I was a doctoral student at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Maureen Scully, another student, and I found ourselves feeling like “poor fits” in our chosen profession. We did not have to look far to find others who shared our sense of misalignment. We were advisees of Professor Joanne Martin, the first tenured woman at Stanford’s Business School. Behind the closed doors of her office, she shared with us some of the dilemmas she faced in balancing the demands of the male-dominated culture of the Business School with her own progressive ideals and the needs of her family. We watched her navigate between her commitment to maintain her credibility within the mainstream of the profession and at the same time advance a social agenda that involved opening opportunities for women and minorities and breaking down boundaries within the profession. Her career entailed an ongoing “swim against the tide,” as she has called a chapter about her experience in a forthcoming book.

When Maureen and I proposed researching challenges faced by women executives, we were strongly advised by faculty against taking up such a heated topic at the formative stage of our careers. We were told we needed to build our credibility first. Eventually we returned to our interest in women executives and expanded our focus to include others who feel at odds with their institutions and want to effect change. We coined the term “tempered radical” to capture the competing pulls faced by these individuals and the delicate balance between conformity and rebellion they must sustain.

Since our published article on tempered radicals in 1995, I have heard from hundreds of people—many of whom would never consider themselves “radical”—who recognized their own experiences in our descriptions of tempered radicals. Based on these responses, I expanded our original portrait and conducted additional interviews, first with 182 people in three quite different companies and then with 56 additional individuals who self-identified as change agents. This research allowed me to write a book for many different types of people who might be tempered radicals, even if they don’t realize it.

Though the profile of a tempered radical should apply to anyone who feels at odds with his or her organization in some fundamental way and wants to use his or her difference as the impetus for change, I restricted my research to tempered radicals whose values are more progressive than the majority—environmentalists in for-profit companies, parents who want to create family-friendly workplaces, women and people of color who want to remove obstacles, gay employees who want to be treated equitably, and innovators who advance progressive ideals, to name just a few cases. I did not study people who advance values that are more conservative than the majority, though I think many of the same principles that emerged from my research would apply.

TEMPERED RADICALS AS "EVERYDAY LEADERS"

WHEN I ASKED PEOPLE at Martha Wiley’s company who they thought had made a real difference in the organization, many people, and particularly people of color, pointed to Peter Grant, an African American executive who spent 30 years working his way up the corporate ladder and bringing hundreds of others up with him. His colleagues described Peter as an inspiration, coach, mentor, and catalyst of a quiet and slow cultural transformation. One middle manager described how Peter had kept him going by showing him how his struggle to succeed was not just about his personal success. “He didn’t let up on me, but it was the most caring exchange I can ever remember having at work,” the manager said. Another executive told how Peter had helped her land a plum job in another area of the bank, which turned out to be a platform for a brilliant career. Since then, she has followed his lead, actively recruiting and mentoring other minorities.

Despite this legacy, I doubt that Peter will be written into the company’s history books as one of its more influential leaders. He never visibly took the helm of a dramatic transformation or organization-threatening crisis. He never formally led from the very top of the organization. Yet people throughout the organization viewed him as one of the most important people in their professional lives. They were mentored, taught, and inspired by him. Many others recognized the cumulative cultural impact of Peter’s persistent yet quiet efforts to effect positive change within the organization.

Like Peter, other tempered radicals act as “everyday leaders” who make a difference in the course of their daily actions and interactions. By opening the boundaries of inclusion, pushing back against prevailing norms, and creating new conversations and learning, they lay the groundwork for slow yet crucial organizational adaptation. This surely represents an important and underappreciated sort of leadership in organizations and society.

We can find traces of this humble form of leadership operating behind the scenes of most significant social or organizational transformations. If we look, for example, at the U.S. civil rights movement, we find countless individuals leading tirelessly outside the spotlight. While history records the names of a few of the more visible heroes—Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks, to name two—it leaves out all the others who played crucial backstage roles in generating the momentum of social change.

The same is true of many of the people I studied. They don’t flash brightly on the cultural radar as rebels or change agents. Yet the footprints of their efforts are everywhere, and their leadership takes many different forms.

Some tempered radicals leave their mark as leaders of people. Martha Wiley’s employees looked to her as one of the best managers because she allowed them to be themselves, created conditions that enabled them to shine, and championed their successes. Other tempered radicals make a difference by leading change, drawing on a spectrum of strategies from the most quiet personal approaches to more public collective ones.

On the most quiet end, some tempered radicals inspire change simply by behaving in a way that is consistent with their personal values, but in so doing they disrupt established norms. For example, John Ziwak, an ambitious manager in a business development department of a fast-growing, high-technology company, wants to continue to advance in his career but is unwilling to shirk his duties as parent and partner to do so. But it isn’t that easy. John, like his wife, faces pressure from his organization to work all the time and to choose between his commitments to his work and to his family. He resists pressure to make such choices and, in so doing, he challenges prevailing expectations.

For example, John consistently leaves work by 6 P.M., rarely schedules meetings that run later than this, and generally refuses to take calls at home between 6:30 and 9 P.M. so he can spend time with his family. Though he often works late at night from home to meet performance expectations, his schedule initially caused his boss to doubt his commitment. But people respected his performance, and his boss did not want to lose him. Eventually, people in John’s group adjusted to his schedule, and conference calls and meetings that involved him stopped being scheduled after 5 P.M. This evolved into an unstated rule within his group that all meetings should be scheduled to end by 5:30, and soon a strong norm emerged against calling people at home during dinner hour.

Productivity did not suffer, and virtually everyone appreciated these changes. What started as John’s simple adherence to his personal values and priorities created some significant shifts in cultural expectations about time and ultimately worked to the benefit of many people besides himself.

Sometimes tempered radicals lead change in a more public and deliberate manner by forming or joining a group or task force to advance more sweeping organizational changes. Other times they start small and provoke change by initiating what Karl Weick, a professor at the University of Michigan, terms “small wins,” which are “controllable opportunities that produce visible results.” For example, a person who wants to make a corporation more environmentally sustainable places a green bin under everyone’s desk so people don’t have to get up and walk to the nearest recycling receptacle and makes sure that the cleaning staff are paid to collect the recyclable waste.

Though small wins are relatively simple to initiate, they need not stay small. Tempered radicals broaden the impact of their small initiatives by adding people to their efforts and creating learning from them. Peter Grant, the African American executive described earlier, was brilliant at scaling out the impact of his small wins. For instance, most of the jobs he held entailed hiring new talent, so when he could, he hired women and minorities. But he didn’t stop there. He asked the people he hired to commit to doing the same. Over his career this effort resulted in the hiring of more than 3,500 minority and female candidates, many of whom became successful executives.

Martha Wiley recognized and acted on doable opportunities when she experimented with flexible work arrangements, but she did more than initiate these experiments—she created learning from them. After several experiments had proven successful, she created conversations about them, strategically framing them as a significant change from normal practice. She called attention to the fact that “normal” arrangements did not work for all employees, many of whom could be productive contributors if minor adjustments were made to their schedules. By developing conversations around her own actions, she helped her colleagues develop new understandings about what needed to change and why.

QUALITIES OF TEMPERED RADICALS

IN THE COURSE OF MY RESEARCH, I have found that the most effective tempered radicals move back and forth between approaches to change that are more and less tempered, adjusting their approach to circumstance. Whatever their approach, however, tempered radicals must continually navigate between the competing pulls of their personal values and the surrounding culture. For this reason, many tempered radicals are characterized by a set of dualistic, even paradoxical, qualities.

Perhaps the most important quality of effective tempered radicals is that they know who they are and what is most important to them, and they stay firmly committed to these ideals and values. Yet even as they stay anchored to these core commitments, they are flexible about how and when they act on them. This flexibility allows them to improvise, ultimately making them more effective in achieving desired ends.

Tempered radicals also are inclined to favor action, yet at the same time they are marked by their patience. The most effective tempered radicals are the ones who have the patience to wait for the right opportunity to act but who act on that opportunity—regardless of how small it may be—without hesitation. Tempered radicals who seek long-term cultural change also have the patience to endure setbacks and the persistence to keep acting in the face of them.

Tempered radicals act as individuals to make a difference, but they also know that they cannot do it alone. They build connections to people who share their identities and change agendas and those who don’t. These relationships are essential to keep tempered radicals going, to help them affirm their sense of self, to aid them in their efforts to broaden their impact, and to forge collectives when necessary to drive larger institutional change. Most important, relationships prevent isolation and loneliness—a fate that can easily sap the energy and effectiveness of tempered radicals.

I am not suggesting it is easy to be a tempered radical—but neither is it impossible. The people portrayed in my book are ordinary people. Most have advanced steadily in their careers while balancing competing pulls. They face ongoing setbacks that continually test their commitment and patience. Some tempered radicals ultimately give up. But many others persist, working in a wide variety of ways to advance their ideals and make a difference.

In the process, tempered radicals inspire people, and they inspire change. They inspire by having the courage to tell their truths when it is difficult to do so. They inspire by demonstrating the commitment to stay focused on their larger ideals even when they suffer personal setbacks and receive little recognition for their efforts. Their leadership does not rely on inspiring through heroism and headlines. Their leadership inspires—and matters—in big and small ways every day.

Adapted with the permission of Harvard Business School Press from the book Tempered Radicals: How People Use Difference to Inspire Change at Work by Debra E. Meyerson, a 1989 PhD graduate of the Stanford Business School and visiting professor of organizational behavior. ©2001, Debra E. Meyerson. All rights reserved.