Notes for a speech
by Jacques Duchesneau, President and CEO
Canadian Air Transport Security Authority (CATSA)

Leaders are also psychologists and creators

Symposium of the Société québécoise de psychologie du travail et des organisations

December 3, 2004
Montréal

Leaders are also psychologists and creators

Ms Beaudoin,
Mr Ishak,
Ladies and Gentlemen,

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak to you. I'm delighted to be here. When Alain Ishak approached me and asked me to talk to you about leadership, I was reading something by the French philosopher Michel Foucault, who was saying that a society makes the madmen it deserves. This led me to the thought that businesses are likewise mirrored in their leaders, whether mad or not! So welcome to my hall of mirrors! It's time for some reflection!

Let me start with a little confession: I'm a big consumer of industrial psychologists. Every day as I carry out my duties as leader of the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority, I have to do more than just lead. I have to understand the environment in which I am operating. As a result, I find that I have to be a psychologist of enterprise culture, of terrorism, and of a wide variety of human behaviours. In this, industrial psychologists are of great value to me. I appreciate your efforts enormously.

So when Alain Ishak asked me to talk about leadership, I wondered what angle I should take. It occurred to me that almost everything has already been said about this topic. The bookstores are packed with books that dissect the problem of leadership. Then I thought of trying to look at who leaders really are and what it takes to call yourself a leader. But I found that I was quickly reduced to something evident yet discomforting: leadership is simply managing as the person you are. It's as simple as that. In managing, you use your gifts but also your defects, your skills and know-how but also your weaknesses and deficiencies, your strengths but also your obsessions, your egoism and your dependencies.

What this means is that all leaders need to draw on self-knowledge if they want to stay on course. Since leadership involves using a psychology of power, a leader has to be enough of a psychologist to engage in self-examination.

In preparing for my talk today, I visited Internet sites that provide tools for leaders and managers. Do you know how one such site defined leadership? As identifying your personal powers, working on your emotions and the resulting needs, on your self-esteem, and on your social and spiritual conscience. So once again, we come back to a close study of self.

You're probably thinking that there's more to it: models of good leadership, principles of leadership, theories of leadership.

You're also thinking that a good leader is someone who knows how to keep in touch with the latest trends: competitiveness, just-in-time production, ISO compliance, excellence, value chains, learning organizations, convergence.

In fact, all these precepts are false.

Duchesneau can only manage as the man he is

Management models, principles and dogmas have always moved in and then out of fashion. At your meeting last year, Claude Béland, the former president of the Mouvement Desjardins, said that before the 1950s, little was said about leadership in business. Instead management philosophy was based on the dominant values of the era: hierarchy, command and control. But then things changed. In the early 50s, some researchers took an interest in the concept of leadership based on charisma. Later it was leadership based on the values of fairness, integrity and human values. More recently, said Béland, enterprise management has turned to a more democratic, participatory model.

Béland and I are saying the same thing: models may seem modern but they are all short-lived. However relevant they may be, they cannot last because they always fall short of the new models which inevitably appear on the scene.

If it sounds like I'm affirming a long-held belief, I'm not. I only just made this discovery recently, since I became a sort of guinea pig. Every three months for the past year, I've taken my place on the couch, so to speak, of Laurent Lapierre, who is the incumbent of the Pierre Péladeau Chair in Leadership at the Hautes Etudes Commerciales business school. You'd be surprised at what I do. I speak, I explain what I am, how I go about taking action at work every day, how I manage my work, how I react to certain situations, on what basis I make my decisions. It's an exercise in what's called the case study method.

What I've discovered in this way over the past year is that I manage like Jacques Duchesneau. What do I mean? Well, I have a master's degree from the École nationale d'administration publique, which also trained such well known government officials as André Dicaire, the highest placed public servant in Quebec, Louise Pagé of the Treasury Board Secretariat, who is responsible for reengineering the Quebec government apparatus, and Monique Bégin, President and CEO of the corporation that oversees Quebec's parks and wildlife. We all took more or less the same courses and we were all trained in the same methods of management. Yet we each have our own management signature, our own style of management.

How is this possible? The answer is clear: we are each the product of different experiences, different pasts, different acts, emotions and cultures. No one is a clone of anyone else. Everyone reacts on the basis of who they intrinsically are. Let me give you an example. In 1998, as chief of police, I had to deal with the ice storm. I'm sure you remember the general state of alert. On January 13, as the situation was gradually coming back to normal on Montreal Island, I contacted Premier Lucien Bouchard to suggest that the Montreal police provide support to the police on the South Shore, where disaster conditions continued to prevail. Police forces had never operated outside their territories before but this time we did. We set up a command post at Canadian Forces Base Saint-Hubert and we assisted the people of the Montérégie area, with very pleasing results. But when I made the decision to go to the South Shore, doubts and eyebrows were raised; people said it was a foolhardy, crackpot idea. But I went ahead anyway. Why? Because that's me. I took the risk of being myself, of daring to act on my convictions.

Freeing ourselves from models

This is probably the key message which you as industrial psychologists need to get out. Managing is not about comfort. As my 'confessor' Laurent Lapierre puts it, managing means saying goodbye to models and recipes. It means being yourself in relationships with others. It's knowing that you can displease certain people and even be a target of attack without falling apart. It's giving yourself permission to think differently and to be wrong. It's about recognizing your duty to consult, to listen, to admit your mistakes, to learn from your mistakes, to start over and to move on.

Laurent Lapierre also says, based on over 10 years of research, that being who you are as a manager means accepting that you can't know everything in advance. It means being able to surround yourself with people who are better at certain things than you are. It means picking skilled colleagues and then paying attention to their suggestions and criticisms. It means knowing yourself better, developing a realistic picture of yourself and of others. Once again we come back to that key notion, self-knowledge.

If I had to sum up what I've said so far in a single phrase, I would say that a leader must not hesitate to break the rules. I don't mean breaking your own rules, but rather the rules of those who would keep us on well-worn paths. Leaders must be daring. They must dare to lead opinion, dare to get away from the latest fashionable theory, dare to be imaginative. Every time a new model comes out, it's already out of date with respect to the realities of tomorrow.

From neighbourhood policeman to Kosovo

Coming back now to our question: what does leadership mean? First, this word has no equivalent in French. We Francophones are very humble. We don't have leadership. We have chiefs, power and hierarchy, but leadership is different from these things. Under my definition, a leader is someone who gives direction to people. Leaders are defined by those who follow them (not those who obey them). Sometimes the concept of leader is associated with the concept of manager. Often there is some truth in that. But what leaders have in common, what defines them, is two things: vision and a determination to bring that vision about.

While leadership is very easily defined, explaining it is a bit more complicated. To do so, I'd like to speak to you about someone I admire a great deal, Bernard Kouchner, the founder of MSF (doctors without borders). When the special representative of UN Secretary General Kofi Annan asked Kouchner to go to Kosovo and reconstruct a country starting from nothing, he agreed. He had full authority, but he did not lead by demanding obedience. It was clear to him that the work of peacemaking had to be done collectively, along with the Serbian and Albanian Kosovars, along with the governments, along with the people who were there. As he explained, when you on a UN mission, you are not at home. You may be speaking on behalf of the international community as represented by the UN, but you are in someone else's house.

His experience as a leader was fascinating. He quickly noticed that the Albanians considered him and his partners as occupiers rather than liberators. From this he drew the lesson that you can't always decide for others. That's true in political life in democracies and in companies. You can't always make decisions from the top. Or at any rate in a vacuum. It's just not possible.

Before coming here today, I was thinking of all the months that we in the Montreal police force worked on developing neighbourhood policing. That was in 1996. I can tell you that it involved a lot of discussion and required a lot of tact. Pointed questions were asked. Fears were expressed. There was resistance and an upsurge of opposition. After all, we were going against over 50 years of established police practice. Do you know what made it possible to achieve our goals and bring in neighbourhood policing? We included the people who were affected by the project. All front-line workers were approached in a sort of democratic forum: unions, the various levels of government, police officers and civilian employees, citizen groups.

I could have acted more quickly. I had the authority and the means to do so. But it seemed to me that it would be ridiculous to not listen to the people whose daily lives would be affected.

We met with police officers and civilian employees over a period of 31 days, sometimes at night, sometimes during the day. All in all there were 45 meetings. What did we say? We explained that the model was not perfect, that it had weaknesses, but also strengths, irritants but also a great many benefits. We avoided bafflegab and we told them that we would work with them to put the finishing touches on the model. They would put their own imprint on it and make it fit their experience.

So the officers were not being required to simply apply decisions. I wanted them to participate. I remember telling employees: neighbourhood policing isn't MY model, it's YOUR model. After that, neighbourhood policing wasn't a model any more because it was now owned by employees. This illustrates the truth that people implement what they helped to create.

That was the lesson of neighbourhood policing, and it was also the lesson of Kosovo. Dr Kouchner had to work with Kosovars to make decisions. He had to forge a single government out of the four governments. Since some of the Albanians were pacifist while others were warlike, he had to get them to talk to each other. He had to bring the Kosovars and Serbs together. There were killers and the families and friends of those they had killed. He had to bring them all together. In the case of the neighbourhood policing project, I had to find methods of conciliation; I had to find common ground; I had to persuade; I had to keep pointing out the value of the project.

During that whole period I would question myself every day about the way in which I was exercising leadership. Was I making the wisest possible decisions? Was I making space for people to have ideas and act on them? In other words, were my leadership skills in the best possible shape? I looked at community policing in Japan, the Netherlands, Great Britain and the United States and I asked myself whether I was applying the model properly.

Managing means creating every day

If I may be a bit immodest, I knew I had not made a mistake once I realized that we had adapted the model, not just mechanically copied it. We had put our stamp on it. We had initiated a kind of policing that had not previously existed. We had created something. I want to emphasize that word CREATE.

This is another important truth: managing and giving direction to people means first and foremost creating, producing results as a team. It's using your imagination to increase employees' skills and thereby their effectiveness. Most of you work in companies and you already know that when it comes to leadership, perfect ready-made answers and miracle solutions don't exist. Outstanding and esteemed leaders are those who have the intelligence to build their own theories and do not hesitate to adjust their theories when practice so requires. One thing that pleases me is to see that the leaders who last longest are those who do not hesitate to let go of safety nets and move ahead on the basis of their own understandings.

As my friend Laurent Lapierre says, when you have to remake the world, it's best to avoid received ideas and start with a blank slate.

I read somewhere that the sculptor Auguste Rodin, who was a leader in his field, was rejected three times when he applied to study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Until age 40, he worked for others as a craftsman. Do you know what kept him going? It was his single-minded attachment to his work, his passion for it. Little is said about that sort of thing in management books. As I see it, there can be no success without failures and without upsetting the applecart. There can be no success without the clash of ideas. Directing people means being excited about dealing with new little details every day; it means trusting the power of your imagination.

Surgeons operate; leaders live life

What is the difference between a surgeon and a leader? Surgeons can take training in their occupation; they learn and perfect their art over many years. When you are on the operating table, you can't say "please cut below the knee instead of above". You have to trust the surgeon. You assume he knows more about it than you do. But what about leaders? They are just people who learn from life's experiences. You can challenge them or follow them, admire them or detest them.

Leadership can't be taught. Many of you are probably familiar with Henry Mintzberg. I've always found it a pleasure to talk things over with him and he says that you cannot teach management to someone who has never managed and has never experienced the difficult situations that arise in a company, just as you can't teach psychology to someone who has never taken an interest in human beings. I agree with that. I also agree with him when he says that management is an integral part of everyday life and as a result there is a strong element of the unforeseen, the unforeseeable and the unexpected, and there is a lot of learning on the job. What do leaders do? They do not personally carry out the various tasks that pile up; that's taken care of by specialists. Instead they deal with the thorny issues that arise, the insoluble problems, the crises, the complicated situations. It's very different from the experience of a surgeon, who will never be confronted with a muscle or bone where there should not be one. Leaders have to be ready to handle anything, even the impossible. Because life is like that.

A leader is basically someone who deals with the human side of things. A leader has to have big reserves of experience, intuition, wisdom and judgment. Successful leaders are not so much decision-makers as people who help others succeed.

CATSA: looking at everything anew

Being psychologists, I'm sure you'll be indulgent if I go on and on a bit. When I took up my post at the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority two years ago, I thought I was "well armed". I had led thousands of men and women, managed large budgets, gotten through a great many crises. I thought I was all set. What I discovered, however, was a completely different universe, one that was under construction and where the mission was somewhat fluid, where the employees were acting like a reconstituted family whose members who were having trouble adapting, where my landmarks no longer worked. I could have put my foot down and announced that it was my way or the doorway. But I adapted. I made a thorough study of my organization to grasp all its complexities. I gave myself new guidelines.

The most crucial challenge I've had to meet as a leader is that of grasping a situation in order to be able to situate myself in it and be able to act. That's the only way to bear up under fire. You have to understand that management models, dogmas and precepts, even simple ones, quite commonly fail the test of reality.

Management schools: a necessary evil?

I now come to the question of management schools, one of my hobbyhorses. To be an effective leader, is it absolutely necessary to have taken courses at a management school? Does an actor need to have been to drama school? That's a question I've discussed at length with my friend the actor Paul Hébert. Now ask yourselves, as industrial psychologists who specialize in human resources, do you have more respect for the managers you work with if you find out that they have degrees from a management school? These are questions which in my view simply cannot be ignored.

Laurent Lapierre and I have spent a lot of time debating the usefulness of management schools. Finally we concluded to conclude that management schools have their place. They help train people to think critically; they enable people to acquire knowledge, to see society changing, to measure the impact of decisions, and to confront their own ideas with those of others. Schools are essential if only because they do these things. But I would add a caveat: academic learning provides no guarantee. I wasn't more intelligent after I got my master's degree than I was before. I won't deny that my credibility leaped up ten points after I got my degree, though I'm not sure why. Was I any different? Of course not. Before I obtained my degree, I managed people by being me. And afterwards, I continued to manage by being me, though I had a few more arrows in my quiver.

It's important to see that knowledge and skills have very different sources. You may be loaded with diplomas and you may have passed every available management course, and still, in practice, be a dreadful manager. Then again, your academic record may be very average but you may be extremely good at managing. All a diploma proves is that you possess knowledge. But that does not mean you will be able to apply this knowledge in particular situations. I have known many senior police officers who left school at age 17 and nevertheless excelled at their work, simply because they had good judgment and saw things clearly.

I often give the example of a pilot, who has to follow a flight plan. That's what management schools provide-flight plans. But once in the sky, the pilot can't just rely on the principles he was taught at school. He has to be able to adjust to air pockets, to wind velocity, to unexpected events. In the same way, a hockey coach may teach his players everything he knows, but once they are on the ice, they have to tailor their skating to the state of play at a given moment.

Basically, management schools show leaders how to chew up knowledge and then spit it out in their own way, in their own unique style. Management schools let you learn to think before you learn to manage.

Conclusion

Recently I discovered that Hautes Etudes Commerciales in Montreal had established a chair in management ethics, currently held by Thierry Pauchant. He asks his students to identify what the most admired leaders have in common. Rather than talk about Bill Gates, he is more interested in having them talk about Martin Luther King, the Dalai Lama or Mother Teresa. Why these emblematic figures? To show current and future leaders that it is not enough to be skilful and innovative; they must also have integrity in the sense of wholeness. Which brings me back to my point of departure. Being a leader means managing as the whole person who you are. It means examining your deepest motivations, your dreams, the way you behave with colleagues, the values and attitudes you encourage. We're back to psychology and the scrutiny of oneself.

With that I'll conclude. I could talk to you about leadership for hours, which I hope you will take as evidence of my high regard for the work you do. I'm sure it will be an interesting day, with all the wonderful speakers you have on the program. It's an ambitious program, but as someone at NASA once said, "Always shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you will fall among the stars."

Thank you.