LEADERSHIP
Knowledge@Wharton: How important is corporate culture?
Williams: There’s an expression that “culture eats strategy.” What that means is that you can have the strategy, but you must have a culture that supports the strategy. Most importantly, you must have a human capital strategy, meaning the right people in the right jobs. Culture is not what the leadership says it is; culture is what people actually experience every day. The objective of the leader is to align what they believe the culture should be with what employees on the front line say the culture actually is.
Knowledge@Wharton: But shouldn’t the culture fi lter down from the C-suite to the mid-level managers to the employees so there’s no ambiguity?
Williams: That comes to the communication issue, because you’re absolutely right. Many of the messages that start at the top don’t make it through the middle layer of the organization, so there has to be very structured and disciplined communication, and the organization has to work very hard. One of the things I say is that when the senior leadership team has described the culture and the values and the messages so much they could scream, they probably have reached about a third of the people.
Knowledge@Wharton: One of your really strong beliefs is being able to lead yourself. What did you learn about yourself as you were coming up through your career that helped you become better?
Williams: It’s extremely important to being a good leader that you be self-aware. In being self-aware, you have to solicit feedback from others. People have to be comfortable giving you feedback. One of the things I would always do with my
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direct reports is to end every one- on-one session with the question: “What can I do better? What can I do better to help you? What can I do better to help the organization?” It required people to have a meaningful discussion about that. Sooner or later, people fi gure out that it’s a real opportunity for input. You have to be prepared to have that kind of input and be self-aware about not just your intent in interacting with people, but also your impact in interacting with people.
Knowledge@Wharton: How has the digital era changed leadership?
Williams: One way is response time. In the digital era, you have to be prepared to respond instantly to multi- stakeholder issues that come up. Half of the responses want you to go left, the other half want you to go right. You have to fi gure out, as the leader and the spokesperson of the company, what you need to do in order to speak to the issue. It doesn’t mean always doing what everyone wants you to do, but it means articulating what you believe you should do and why the other point of view is not what you believe the organization should do. Communication is just absolutely essential.
“Culture is not what the leadership says it is; culture is what people actually experience every day.”
Knowledge@Wharton: Let’s talk about the mid-level manager who has to respond to the diff erent executives above him or her. That manager may be getting mixed messages on which direction to go.
Williams: It’s quite common today in the matrix environment where a person reports to one boss for part
of a project and for another boss for another aspect of what they do. You end up with two managers who may have diff erent points of view, and that’s where the values and the culture of the organization become really critical. Because you want to be certain that if there are two or more executives involved, that all decisions, all actions, are consistent with the values of the company as they’ve been articulated.
Knowledge@Wharton: In education now, there is greater emphasis on science, technology, engineering and math (STEM), and learning to be problem-solvers. We’re not grounded in philosophy. Do you think it’s important to learn philosophy and the social sciences as underpinnings to leadership?
Williams: It is extremely important to have a broad perspective, to have a functional technical discipline but also to understand history, philosophy and human interaction. Because no matter what domain you’re in, you’re going to work with teams of people. One of the fundamental points I always stress is that your consideration for the individuals involved has to be higher than your focus on the task to be done. People often think that means
lowering consideration for the task. That’s the wrong answer. You have to be task focused. You have to be driven to produce the software, solve the engineering problem, get the details done. You solve that by raising your consideration for the people involved so that it is higher than that task focus. And that kind of broad background is helpful. You don’t have to get it through formal education in college or university. It’s through reading; it can be through self-study, or it can be through interaction with other people and mentors.
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