How to Improve Your Career Life

Workplace Buzz on June 19, 2007 7:48 AM

New York Time’s segment What’s Offline reports “How Great Leaders Juggle Ideas.”

WHEN we look for ways to improve our life at work, how we can make better decisions, for example, or try to figure out the next step in our career, invariably one thing we do is look at what great leaders have done. This is why books like “Straight From the Gut,” by John F. Welch Jr., and those by Lee A. Iacocca sell so well.

But focusing on what a successful leader does is a mistake, according to Roger Martin, dean of the University of Toronto Business School.

“That’s because moves that work in one context often make little sense in the same company or within the experience of a single leader,” he writes in The Harvard Business Review.

Mr. Martin contends that the more beneficial thing to do is study how great leaders think.

He has, and he has concluded that they process information differently than the rest of us do.

“They have the predisposition and the capacity to hold in their head two opposing ideas at once,” he writes. “And then, without panicking or simply settling for one alternative or the other, they’re able to creatively resolve the tension between those two ideas by generating a new one that contains elements of the others but is superior to both.”

Mr. Martin calls this process of consideration and synthesis “integrative thinking,” and contends that it is this ability and not a “superior strategy or faultless execution that is the defining characteristic of most exceptional businesses and the people who run them.”

Intriguingly, Mr. Martin, who interviewed 50 exemplary leaders in doing his research, says many successful executives aren’t aware that this is the way they go about processing information.

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