Free Market in Its Twenties: Modern Business Decision Making in Central and Eastern Europe

3.5. Breaking with the Leadership Fantasy: Adopting a More Realistic Model of Drive and Motivation

– 215 – CHAPTER IN BRIEF:   CEE’s businesses are often led by fast trackers—top executives who rapidly advanced in the early 1990s.   Today’s middle managers need to learn how to manage their fast-tracker bosses, with all their failings.   The Absorption-based Model of Leadership is a flexible tool to optimize one’s managerial competencies at every level. T he preceding three chapters have all outlined the nature of a gap that seems to run right across Europe, dividing the 2004 big bang EU expansion states from the Western part. This is a gap created through differences in thinking about competitiveness and innovation, differences in thinking about laws and regulations appropriate for the real needs of individuals, business and society, and differences in the type of the public discourse the every democratic society must carry to make collective choices. Parallel to these three, a similar discrepancy can also be found in the context of thinking about busiBREAKING WITH THE LEADERSHIP FANTASY: ADOPTING A MORE REALISTIC MODEL OF DRIVE AND MOTIVATION Zoltan Buzady C h a p t e r 3 . 5 . i6 FM.indb 215 2014.06.05. 12:20 – 216 – ness leadership.This chapter outlines the relevant historical context and provides more evidence about this leadership gap. It then explores in greater detail my own leadership model that may be helpful to develop more insightful, flexible, and sophisticated managers and leaders of the future. Despite its common historic roots, the division of Europe during the Cold War induced divergent developments not only in the economic and political systems, but also through the proliferation of rather different leadership styles in East and West. In oversimplified terms that means that the Western management systems are characterized by the objective of optimizing performance, as well as safe-guarding and building on positive effects of groups and teams. By contrast, the success of managers in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) fundamentally depends on their ability to access and influence the “central power” that distributes scarce resources as a mechanism for survival (i.e., politicking ). In the context of managing people at work, the traditional commandand -control, top-down, management-by-telling style became paramount, and the word leadership per se became a politically contaminated, negative concept. After the political, social, and economic changes in our region, the most successful new managers were the most agile, often not older than twenty, or those in their mid-careers capitalizing on the emerging management buyout opportunities in the privatization bonanza. Retrospectively, we can see that both groups were able to ride the wave of the old style subordinate environment by redirecting their managerial actions toward the performance expectations of new startups and Western investors. They worked extremely hard and long hours, and by successfully pushing through the new ways of doing business they were able to deliver sensational results to their new but geographically distant CEOs and company owners.They made an excellent “external” career, a questionable “internal ” career, and often paid high cost in their private lives. Starting in 2000, many of these fast trackers of the 1990s established themselves as top managers, bosses, or company owners. But I have noticed an interesting trend when discussing real leadership challenges with my MBA students who are often from the “next” generation that entered high-end corporate jobs after the fast trackers. My MBAs look for ways to best influence their own bosses and CEOs who, in my students’ judgment, have become ineffective and inaccessible.These fast trackers are stuck with outdated business techniques that limit company growth by ignoring new possibilities and with old favoritisms and preferences for old comrades. Very little has been published on the topic of managing one’s boss in this specific CEE context. I believe there are two reasons for that. First, Western management has been understood to be directed downward or laterally, but not upward. Second, over the decades, organizations in market economies have CEE’s managers depend on access to centralized power— or “politicking.” i6 FM.indb 216 2014.06.05. 12:20 – 217 – developed systems to select the most competent individuals to become their leaders. These Western leaders, unlike many CEE fast trackers, are capable of sustaining business performance and nurturing effective teams. Based on experiences gained from teaching leadership and general management for more than a decade in CEE, I have found that many of my MBAs intuitively believe that they have to replicate...