http://kuleed.googlpages.

com
This paper analyzes the leadership style of Google CEO; Eric Schmidt based on the
of leadership concepts outlined by David Messick in his essay "On the
Psychological Exchange Between Leaders and Followers". Eric Schmidt measures up
very well on all the dimensions except Protection-Security.
In his paper, Messick analyzes leadership by focusing on the relationship
between leaders and followers. Messick postulates that followers chose to be led
because doing so provides them certain benefits. In choosing to be led, the
followers act in ways beneficial to the leader. Thus leaders and followers are
linked together in a symbiotic psychological relationship by exchanging benefits.
Messick identifies five dimensions along which this exchange of benefits takes
place.
Benefits Leaders offer Followers Benefits Followers offer Leaders
i Vision-Direction Focus-Self Direction
ii Protection-Security Gratitude-Loyalty
iii Achievement-Effectiveness Commitment-Effort
iv Inclusion-Belongingness Cooperation-sacrifice
v Pride-self respect Respect-Obedience

The first benefit of a Vision-Direction provides focus to the efforts of

followers. It helps followers visualize a future state that is better than the
current and motivates them to work towards it. Leaders provide answers to the
questions "Why are we here", "What is our purpose", "Where are we going" and "How
are we going to get there". If the followers identify with the leaders vision,
they are more likely to take ownership of the vision and work towards the goal
with minimal oversight. As the followers work towards the goal they expect leaders
to provide them security, stability, continuity and a sense of purpose especially
during times of uncertainty. In return, the followers feel an obligation towards
the leader and his cause thus strengthening the bonds between them. On the next
dimension of "Achievement and Effectiveness", Leaders convince their followers
that audacious and difficult goals are achievable. The followers work hard
sacrifice their own self-interest and are committed to the leader's goals. This
common goal bonds the members of the group together increasing cooperation and
chances of success. Leaders also foster the human need for belonging in the next
dimension of "Inclusion and Belongingness". By being part of group the followers
can enjoy the successes of team members as if it were their own. Followers with a
sense of belonging are more likely to make sacrifices for the members of the
group. This leads us to the next dimension of "Pride and self-respect", where
followers feel valued for their contribution to the group and take pride in the
group's achievements. Thus followers feel a sense of ownership in the outcomes of
the group and are self-motivated. Even though the five dimensions are listed
separately they are entwined. Leaders will find it hard to make a change on one
dimension without affecting the other. However under certain conditions (e.g. war)
one dimension may be more important than another.
Eric Schmidt
Eric Schmidt has a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Princeton and a
Masters and PhD in Computer Science from University of California, Berkley. He
spent 14 years at Sun Microsystems progressing through various technical jobs,
eventually leading the development of the Java language and becoming the Chief
Technical Officer. In 1997 he took over as CEO of Novell with the goal of turning
the beleaguered company around. After Schmidt's arrival the profitability at
Novell increased. However the internet bust of 2000 greatly slowed demand, leading
to Novell's acquisition of consulting firm Cambridge Technology Partners (CTP).
Mr. Schmidt relinquished Novell's CEO position and assumed the role of chief
strategist. In 2001, he joined the Google's board of directors and later became
the CEO. Even though Eric is the legal CEO of Google he shares power with the
founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin in a triumvirate .
The leadership style of Eric Schmidt can be summarized in the following key
points
1. Get to know your followers.
2. Create new ways to promote your followers.
3. Let your followers own the problems you want them to solve
4. Allow people to function outside the company hierarchy
5. Review your team's results by someone they respect.
How Eric Schmidt measures on the Messick's five dimensions
I. Get to know your followers
Erics success at Sun, Novell and now Google can largely be attributed to his
efforts at energizing the workforce of software engineers (technologists, geeks).
He is intimately aware of their strengths and weaknesses. e.g. An engineer's
obsession with being truthful and precise. When asked a question, they are more
likely to answer only that specific question and nothing else. They are so
particular about being truthful, that someone not familiar with this behavior may
interpret the engineer to be concealing facts or even lying. However, when asked
the right question, they provide highly effective information. Society stereotypes
engineers and technologists as having poor social skills. While true in general,
engineers are very social within their community. They communicate effectively
amongst themselves and are organized into different sub-communities (mainframe-era
graybeards, Unix people, pc-web generation, Linux aficionados etc.). They enjoy
publicity, are deeply interested in having an impact, and making the world a
better place.
This leadership style primarily provides benefits on the "Vision-Direction"
dimension. It helps Eric formulate a vision, his followers are more likely to
accept and be motivated by.
When Eric joined Novell, the company's future was very much in doubt. He correctly
recognized a culture of fear that pervaded the organization. Bright engineers with
revolutionary ideas were reluctant to voice them for fear of being fired. The
engineers however, complained vociferously amongst themselves leading to a culture
of corporate cynicism. Recognizing this pervasive bellyaching, Eric asked two
engineers he met on the company shuttle, to give him the names of the smartest
people they knew in the company. Eric met with each of them, and asked them in
turn to identify the 10 smartest people they knew. In a few weeks, Eric had a list
of 100 engineers he considered critical to Novell's future. He met with each of
them personally, encouraging them to take chances and follow their instincts. He
removed the possibility of reprisals by their managers for voicing their opinions.
This inspired the engineers and focused their efforts, resulting in innovative and
improved products. These changes helped Novell transform itself from a loss of $78
million to a gain of $102 million.
II. Create new ways to promote your followers
Eric's opinion is that most of the engineers in a corporation do not aspire
to be executives or managers. The traditional approach of promoting people by
turning them into managers is not attractive to many engineers. He suggests
creation of a technical career ladder that runs parallel to the executive ladder.
To recognize outstanding achievements, other incentives like corporate awards,
stock option grants need be handed out to the top performing engineers.
This management technique primarily benefits in the "Achievement
-Effectiveness" dimension in Messick's theory.
During Eric's tenure at Novell, 20 of the top employees and spouses were
invited to the Presidents award program dinner each year. They were recognized
with plaques and stock option grants. Even though the executive effort for such a
recognition is small, it serves as a great morale booster to the people being
recognized, enhancing their self-esteem and commitment to the organization.
Another example of promoting engineers is to let them present their products
at sales meetings. It allows the engineers to see, first hand, the positive impact
their efforts have on customers realizing their dreams of making the world a
better place. At a sales meeting for ZENWorks, Eric persuaded an engineer from
Utah to recount his experiences of how a few engineers from Utah had pulled
together as a team, with no support from management in California to build this
amazing product. The message resonated with the audience and helped suppress the
culture of fear that existed in Novell at that point in time.
At Google, Eric organizes a 5+ hour video presentation called "The Factory Tour",
where different teams present their work. This event is broadcast over the web and
archived for anyone else that would like to see it at a later date. On the video
Eric comes on stage with a light saber from Star Wars, sending out the signal that
Google celebrates the eccentricities of its engineers.

III. Let your followers own the problem you want them to solve.
This management technique is a consequence of getting to know your
followers. Engineers like to solve difficult problems. They are invigorated by the
challenge posed by intractable problems. But they only solve problems that
interest them. A leader with a good understanding of his follower's interests can
transform the problem into one that the engineer is interested in. The leader
needs to articulate a challenging and significant end result, but leave out the
specific steps the followers should take. This allows the followers to interpret
and internalize the objective utilizing their creative talents in meeting the
leader's goals.
"Vision-Direction" is the primary Messick dimension that benefits from this
technique.
At Google, Eric has stated the company's goal as "...Organizing the worlds
information making it universally accessible and useful". An engineer working to
index billions of web pages can easily identify with this laudable goal. As a
practical matter the goal of making information universally accessible is a more
meaningful goal for the engineer, interested in making his mark on society, rather
than a mundane goal of increasing Google's revenues by $300 million dollars.
Eric considers this transfer of ownership to be so important that while at Novell
he created a quarterly in-house radio show modeled after NPR's "Car Talk". He even
made tapes available for in-car listening.
IV. Allow people to function outside the company hierarchy
Companies make the mistake of promoting their most productive and creative
engineers into research, strategy or management positions. In strategy they
produce brilliant documents that never get used. In research, they get ghettoized.
In management positions they end up devoting most of their time making sure
everyone else is following corporate policies. A similar problem is caused by
managers who are not as smart as the people reporting to them. These managers
inhibit innovative ideas coming from their bright subordinates.
Eric suggests the best way to manage engineers, is to let them self-organize
outside the company hierarchy. Engineers seek out like-minded people with
complementary skills and organize themselves into a team. As teams organize, a
natural leader emerges from their midst. Team members report to a manager in the
traditional company hierarchy but are not forced to spend all their time on the
manager's priorities.
On Messick's dimensions, this technique provides benefits in the "Inclusion-
Belonging" and the "Achievement-Effectiveness" dimension. By allowing engineers to
chose their own groups, it fulfills the engineers desire to belong. Since the
members of the team join by choice rather than management decree, they have a high
probability of reaching their peak performance. The engineer also has the latitude
to work on a problem that interests him the most.
At Google engineers are given the latitude of spending 20% of their time
experimenting in areas they consider interesting. This lets loose their creative
spirits, giving Google a distinctive competitive advantage over its competitors.
The history of software is replete with cases, where few people come up with a
brilliant piece of software. A couple years later a few hundred people struggle to
follow-up on their idea e.g. the Mozilla browser, Unix, Linux, Java etc.
This novel method of organizing teams has helped Google come up with
innovative products like Google Earth and Orkut.
V. Review your team's results by someone they all respect.
Even though the previous management techniques increase the probability of
team success, it is not infallible. Teams of brilliant engineers fail when they
are following the wrong idea, are on the track or have poor execution. Checkpoints
and reviews are used to identify problem teams. The challenge then, is how to pass
on this unpleasant message to the team members.
Eric management style is to let the team's progress be reviewed by
individuals the team respects. In most companies there exist a few individuals
that are universally respected or at least more respected than everyone else.
These individuals have a way of articulating principles and have very good
memories. Since they are considered impartial, teams are more open to receive
feedback or decisions even if the decision goes against them.
This technique mainly provides benefits in the Pride-Self-respect dimension.
Conclusion
The preceding discussion on Eric's management style mentions only engineers
since they are the people he is most involved with. However, the techniques can be
extrapolated to non-engineering professions as well.
In summary, Eric Schmidt provides benefits on Messick's entire dimension list
except ‘Protection-Security". The lack of benefit along "Protection-Security"
dimension is not as serious as it may first seem since this dimension has more
relevance in times of war and crisis. Software engineers consider themselves to be
living in a golden era with rising salaries and stock options.
Vision-Direction is the dimension that benefits most from Eric's management style,
followed by Achievement-Effectiveness, Inclusion-Belongingness and lastly Pride-
Self respect.
Effectively articulating audacious (organizing the worlds information) and
meaningful (making it universally accessible) goals allows the employees at Google
to be motivated and highly committed. They have internalized Eric's vision, and
expanded their own thinking releasing a sequence of innovative products. While
others businesses have focused on serving the Fortune 500 or Fortune 1000, Google
has expanded its horizons to serve the Fortune 1 million, all the while ensuring
the end-user gets the fastest and most relevant search results. Thus Eric Schmidt
in his role as a leader has set forth the right conditions enabling his follower's
success and consequently the company's success.

Ref:

David M. Messick, "On The Psychological Exchange Between Leaders and Followers,"
in David M. Messick and Roderick M. Kramer, The Psychology of Leadership: New
Perspectives and Research. 2005. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, pp.81-96

The term triumvirate is commonly used to describe an alliance between three

equally powerful political or military leaders. These alliances seldom hold very
long. The term can also be used to describe a state with three different military
leaders who all declare to be the sole leader of the state. Wikipedia search on
Eric Schmidt. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Schmidt

Russ Mitchell: How to Manager Geeks: Eric Schmidt, CEO of Novell, Fast Company
Issue 25 1 June 1999

iv Harvard Business Review: Leading through Rough times: An interview with Eric
Schmidt 1 May 2001