Leadership as example, and where example runs out
Kamprad put his idea of leadership into a staff document in 1976. It works best when the leader's habits are visible and the rule being taught is simple.
If there is such a thing as good leadership, it is to give a good example.
In 1976 the founder of IKEA wrote a short document for his staff, The Testament of a Furniture Dealer, nine points on how the company should think about its customers, its costs and itself. The sentence on leadership sits among them, and Kamprad follows it at once by saying that the duty applies to him, in front of every IKEA employee.
The idea is older than IKEA, but Kamprad lived it in a way that made it memorable. Stories about him had become part of the company’s culture long before 2010: the economy seats, the modest hotels, the old Volvo he kept driving while his company became the largest furniture retailer in the world. A memo telling managers to watch travel costs would have been ignored. A founder visibly counting his own costs made the memo unnecessary.
That is where the line holds. Example is the cheapest way to set a norm that is easy to see and easy to copy. How much a company spends on itself, whether meetings start on time, how people talk to customers, whether the boss answers the phone: staff learn these by watching, and they learn them faster from behavior than from any handbook. When what a leader does contradicts what a leader says, people follow the behavior every time.
It holds less well for everything that cannot be seen. A founder cannot show by example how to price a new product range, negotiate with a supplier in another country or decide which market to enter next. Those need explicit reasoning, written down and argued over, and a company that relies only on imitation ends up with a staff that copies the founder’s habits without understanding his decisions.
Example can also teach the wrong thing. A founder who answers email at two in the morning is setting an example too, and in a small company the team will copy it whether or not anyone asked them to. Frugality can turn into a habit of underpaying people, and a founder’s visible presence everywhere can train a team to wait for him before acting. Kamprad himself worried about this, which is partly why the Testament exists: he wanted the values to survive without him in the room.
Example is the necessary part of leadership, the part without which nothing else is believed. It is not the whole of it. The rest is judgment, explained well enough that people can exercise it when the founder is somewhere else.