The Vision Nobody Asked For

Leading Beyond Transformational — Part 1: Developing the Vision
Personal narrative and career details below are Mats Kallmyr’s own account. Leadership research references are drawn from the peer-reviewed and published sources listed at the end.

Stockholm, 2006. Ericsson’s internal Contact Centre, the unit that answers every employee’s question about the business systems they rely on to do their jobs, has a customer satisfaction score of 3.1 out of 5. Thirteen agents. One of eight Ericsson contact centres worldwide, and by common agreement, not one of the good ones.

Nobody in that building thought a call centre could be something to be proud of. Least of all the people answering the phones.

I didn’t walk in with a turnaround plan. I walked in with a question: What would it feel like if this were the best one? Not “acceptable.” Not “meets SLA.” The best of the eight.

That question is closer to what leadership researchers actually mean by “vision” than most executives assume. James MacGregor Burns, the political historian whose 1978 book Leadership effectively founded the modern academic field of leadership studies, drew a sharp line between two ways leaders relate to the people who follow them (Burns, 1978). Transactional leadership, in Burns’s account, is an exchange: effort for pay, compliance for approval, votes for promises. It’s the currency most workplaces run on, and there is nothing wrong with it — it is simply limited. Transforming leadership, as he called it, is different in kind, not just degree. It does not trade on existing wants; it surfaces motives people did not know they had and appeals to something higher than the transaction at hand (Burns, 1978).

A customer satisfaction score of 3.1 is a transactional problem. You could throw incentives at it, bonuses for faster call resolution, penalties for missed targets, and probably move the number a little. What you cannot buy with incentives is thirteen demoralised agents deciding, on their own, that they want to build the best contact centre in the company. That has to come from somewhere else.

Bernard Bass, the industrial psychologist who spent much of the 1980s translating Burns’s largely political framework into something organisations could actually use, identified four behavioural components of transformational leadership. One of them, he called inspirational motivation, the ability to communicate an appealing vision in a way that gives people’s everyday work meaning and challenge (Bass, 1985). Crucially, Bass’s research suggested that transformational leaders do not simply extract competent effort from people; under the right conditions, they get people to exceed even the leader’s expectations (Bass, 1985). That is the gap between what a transactional manager gets and what a transformational one does.

James Kouzes and Barry Posner reached a similar conclusion from a completely different angle. Starting in the early 1980s, they collected thousands of “personal best” leadership stories from ordinary people across industries and found the same handful of behaviours recurring, regardless of seniority or personality type (Kouzes and Posner, 2017). One of the five practices they identified, Inspire a Shared Vision, is not, in their data, primarily about the leader’s charisma. It is about a leader who can see a future others cannot yet see and who invites people to build it with them rather than announce it to them (Kouzes and Posner, 2017).

That is the part people misunderstand about vision. It is not a slide. It is a claim you make before you have earned the right to make it, and then you watch who leans in when they hear it, and who looks at their shoes. The ones who lean in are your first team.

At Ericsson, some of them leaned in almost immediately. Not because I had shown them a plan, I did not have one yet, but because, for the first time, someone had suggested their work could be something other than a cost centre to be minimised. We started small: better handling of the toughest calls, visible recognition when someone solved something difficult, and agents given real input into how the floor was run rather than just told the metrics they would be judged on.

Within a year, the customer survey score moved from 3.1 to 4.3 out of 5, from the bottom of Ericsson’s eight global contact centres toward the top. The number of supported business areas grew from three to eight. The number of countries served grew from one to twelve. Thirteen agents became thirty-two.

None of that happened because I was inspiring in the entertainer’s sense of the word. It happened because thirteen people who had been told, implicitly, “this is just a call centre,” were finally asked to help build something they could be proud of, and enough of them said yes before I had fully worked out how we would get there.

That is the uncomfortable part of vision that does not make it into the leadership textbooks often enough: you frequently have to make the claim before you have validated it. Burns’s transforming leader “recognises and exploits an existing need or demand” in followers, then goes further, seeking to satisfy needs the follower may not have consciously registered yet (Burns, 1978). At Ericsson, the unspoken need was not for a better bonus scheme. It was for the thirteen people on that floor to stop being embarrassed about where they worked. Instead, they were proud to work in Ericsson’s first (and best) Contact Centre.

Bass’s research is careful to note that inspirational motivation on its own is not enough, it works in combination with three other components of transformational leadership: idealised influence (being someone people want to emulate), intellectual stimulation (inviting people to question and improve how things are done), and individualised consideration (treating each follower as a person with distinct needs, not an interchangeable unit) (Bass, 1985). Vision was the opening move. It was not the whole game.

But it was the necessary one. Nothing that followed, the process changes, the new supporting areas, the shift from Sweden’s least-loved internal contact centre to one of its best, would have happened if thirteen people had not first decided, together, that “the best of the eight” was worth trying for.

I think about that distinction often now, thirty years into this work: the difference between leaders who perform confidence for an audience, and leaders who make a quiet, specific, falsifiable claim about what a team could become, and then stay in the room long enough to find out if they were right. The first kind photographs well. The second kind is the one people still talk about a decade later.

That is the part I want to write about next: what happens in the gap between the moment people say yes to a vision, and the much longer, much less glamorous process of actually knowing how to get there.

References
Bass, B.M. (1985) Leadership and Performance Beyond Expectations. New York: Free Press.
Burns, J.M. (1978) Leadership. New York: Harper & Row.
Kouzes, J.M. and Posner, B.Z. (2017) The Leadership Challenge: How to Make Extraordinary Things Happen in Organizations. 6th edn. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.