Vigilant vs. Operational Leaders
Published: September 20, 2006 in Knowledge@Wharton
As Wharton marketing professors George Day and Paul Schoemaker see it, the recent and well-publicized travails of the Ford Motor Co. offer a clear example of the distinction between vigilant leadership and operational management.
To explain that distinction, Day and Schoemaker -- building on research from their recently published book, Peripheral Vision: Detecting the Weak Signals That Will Make or Break Your Company -- have identified four leadership traits: external focus, conceptual ability, organizational role and time horizon.
Vigilant leaders are more externally oriented: They are open to new ideas, seek diverse perspectives, listen to a wide array of sources and foster broad social and professional networks. Richard Branson, says Day, is an example: The inveterate inventor and promoter -- with 200 start-ups under his belt -- is now developing alternative fuels. Operational leaders are more narrowly focused, have less interest in outside opinions and confine their networking to familiar settings.
Under conceptual ability, or strategic foresight, vigilant leaders are more imaginative and "probe deeply for second order effects," Day notes, citing as an example a CEO who looked at China's victorious bid to host the 2008 Olympics in Beijing and immediately began to consider what impact that would have on steel and cement orders. Vigilant leaders also embrace uncertainty and learn from well-intentioned failures. Operational leaders are more predictable, stay focused mainly on the task at hand, rely on past experience and try to avoid mistakes at any cost.
In their organizational role, vigilant leaders are both enablers and visionaries who create slack that allows the company to explore areas outside their main focus; operational leaders are more controlling, focus on efficiency and cost cutting and don't explore outside potential. Finally, a vigilant leader's time horizon is longer while an operational leader's is shorter.