A new corporate leadership option appears to be emerging from the pack.

Some of the best leadership lessons, a new book suggests, can be found in the heart of the animal kingdom in a pack of wild African dogs - scraggly creatures with oversized bat ears, spindly legs and blotchy coats.

"Wild dogs are methodical hunters that go after their prey doggedly, patiently, hunting it down for hours and wearing it out," says Marvin Washington, an organizational sociologist at Edmonton's University of Alberta.

"There are no stars in the pack - just everyone in the pack working together with the common goal of hunting and killing the prey."

Photo courtesy of Marvin Washington
University of Alberta Authors Marvin Washington, right, and Steve Hacker examined the hunting habits of African wild dogs, and discuss how they apply to business leadership in their new book.

Washington, along with co-author Stephen Hacker, has written Leading Peak Performance: Lessons from the Wild Dogs of Africa - How to Create Pack Leadership and Produce Transformative Results, published by ASQ Quality Press.

Looking at untamed packs of dogs running wild - in countries such as Botswana - hardly seems to be where CEOs or struggling companies would turn to for answers to today's business problems.

But Washington and Hacker argue that positive leadership examples often come in unexpected packages or from unexpected places.

With a kill rate of 80 per cent, dog packs in Africa succeed because of their pack mentality. Each dog works together to ensure that their ultimate objective is met.

That, says Washington, is just the beginning of what these dogs can teach us about leadership. Other traits the wild dogs exhibited are:

* A shared vision - with a focus on one prey and a hunt for the same prey.

* Shared leadership - there is opportunistic leadership; whichever animal is closest to the prey becomes the leader of the pack.

* A high degree of individual skill. There's no 'I' in the team, rather lots of 'I's in these teams. Great teams are made up of many great performers, but it's the shared leadership part that makes them work well together.

* Tenacity - continuing the hunt for hours rather than giving up after a short while.

Washington says during a game-viewing safari in Botswana's vast park reserves, the wild dog emerged as the perfect animal to exemplify a style of leadership that is strong and focused, yet empathic and democratic.

Photo courtesy of Marvin Washington
African wild dogs.

All these characteristics, notes Washington, have the ability to be easily transferred to the workplace to create a more productive leader with a more effective leadership team.

Both Washington and Hacker believe their concept will pass muster despite the cuteness of the analogy.

"We're not telling people to become a pack of wild dogs, we're telling people that these are the traits to being successful," says Washington.

"The traits that we mention are traits that create a good organization."

The authors say companies in today's dog-eat-dog economy will go farther and adapt better to change if they follow this course of action: Focusing their team on a goal (the shared vision) and attacking the problem until it is solved (tenacity), while closely bonding and letting individual strengths take the lead (shared leadership and individual skill) in order to reach the objective.

The combination does work, agrees Doug Beigel, CEO of COLA, a physician-directed organization based in Columbia, Md., that educates, consults and accredits clinical laboratories throughout the world.

"About six years ago, we had to transform the way we do business or we would have gone out of business," says Beigel, who was no stranger to the executive halls having been COLA's chief operating officer for 12 years before taking on the chief executive role.

This meant rethinking assumptions, but Beigel notes that leadership books on store shelves only reinforced what he already knew and were of no help.

Given an advance copy of the book - he has since written the book's forward - Beigel found the construct he was looking for. I had very bright people around, who knew what they were doing - I knew we needed to change and it gave me a model we needed to communicate to the organization," says Beigel.

"The issue for me was everybody talks about transformation or change management - it's almost too homogenized, it's almost become a programmed approach. For me, using the metaphors in the book and the way that they are proposed requires people to get out of their comfort zone and think differently than they did before."

While he says using an analogy of wild untamed dogs may seem a little radical, he adds the proof is in the results.

"We have actually grown to be larger than we have ever been in our 18-year history. We are looking at sustained growth of 25 per cent for the next three to five years - and that's per year," says Beigel.

Jim Clemmer, an Ontario-based author and management team developer on leadership, change, customer focus, culture and personal growth, says some of Washington's and Hacker's assessments such as shared vision and shared leadership make sense.

"It's certainly hard to disagree with those (concepts) - they are some of the key elements of teamwork," says Clemmer. "There's certainly more need for interdependence or teamwork because of how much more complex we are becoming in many of the organizations - technology is connecting more organizations and people than ever before."

While Clemmer says he can understand the wild-dog analogy, like any metaphor it can only go so far. "There have been a lot of things written and studied on the dynamics of groups and animals," he says. "There is something to be learned from successful self-organizing groups in nature or society but there are limits. The goal isn't always quite as clear as the dog pack that has just got to get the next meal."

The teamwork aspect also rings well with Howard Jackson, an associate with Western Management Consultants in Vancouver, who specializes in change management, process re-engineering, and compensation and benefits reviews.

"What I see is that there is a real lack of strong leadership in business in Canada right now and people are desperately trying to find easy ways to become leaders," Jackson says.

"There is a lot of time and energy put onto processes and policies and not a lot of time put on the art of getting people engaged in their business - and that's a skill. When I'm consulting, I can get people excited to come to work if they can see that they can make a difference. In (the authors') analogy, they make a difference when they work as a team.

"If you can create that environment, I think it's great. But I don't see that team environment," Jackson adds. "Our reward-and-recognition system is not based on that - we don't train our leaders to think that way.

"The value of this book is that it gets you to think about how to engage your people in a different way, even though I don't agree with all the analogies. Having said that, it did inspire me to engage my people in contributing to the success of the organization."

(Laura Severs can be reached at laura@businessedge.ca)