Leadership in Organizations: Current Issues and Key Trends, Second Edition

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Leadership in Organizations

Leadership has proved a tricky beast to pin down and the subject has been approached from a variety of perspectives over the years. The beauty of this textbook lies in its role as an illustrative guide to the wilds of an elusive discipline. This second edition of Leadership in Organizations: Current Issues and Key Trends offers a balanced combination of theory and practice to provide an up-to-date account of this multifaceted topic. Looking at the international and comparative aspects of leadership, Storey also discusses new modes of leadership that will be required to steer organizations to success in a recessive environment. Topics include: • • • • • •

Changing theories of leadership Strategy and leadership Ethics and leadership Leadership development in public sector organizations Followership and distributed leadership Leadership development in multinational firms

With improved pedagogical features, this new edition is the ideal text for students of leadership studies, as well as practitioners looking to enhance their leadership skills. John Storey is Professor of Management at The Open University Business School, UK, and consultant to a number of leading organizations in both the private and public sectors. He has authored and edited more than twenty books on business, management and organizations.

Praise for the previous edition: ‘Thoughtful managers and academics frustrated by the confusion surrounding the concept of leadership and how to develop it, should read this book. Storey and his associates have done an excellent job of dispelling the leadership myth that has emerged in the last two decades and laid bare false claims about how to develop it. They have replaced myths with a more complex organizationally and contextually embedded view of leadership and how to develop it.’ Michael Beer, Harvard Business School and Center for Organizational Fitness, USA ‘A valuable and timely collection that includes something for everyone interested in leadership and leadership development, with several very important gems.’ Keith Grint, Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, UK ‘Leadership in Organizations goes beyond other mainstream leadership texts by providing both creativity and insight in its approach to leadership development. A focus on key issues and critical themes highlights the importance of the context within which any interpretation of leadership takes place and within which efforts for leadership development must be designed and evaluated.’ Jeanie Forray, School of Business, Western New England College, USA ‘A fascinating set of papers dealing with many current problematic issues in leadership development. John Storey has assembled a sparkling set of leading edge contributors whose contributions are highly thought-provoking and challenging. A “must” for any researcher in this area.’ Karen Legge, Warwick Business School, UK

Leadership in Organizations Current issues and key trends Second edition

Edited by John Storey

First published 2003 Second edition published 2011 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2010. To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk. © 2003, 2011 John Storey, selection and editorial matter; individual contributors, their contributions The right of John Storey to be identified as editor of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data Leadership in organizations : current issues and key trends / edited by John Storey. – 2nd ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Leadership. 2. Executives–Training of. 3. Leadership–Study and teaching. I. Storey, John, HD57.7.L43 2010 658.4’092–dc22 2010007167

ISBN 0-203-84539-0 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN: 978–0–415–55705–4 (hbk) ISBN: 978–0–415–55706–1 (pbk) ISBN: 978–0–203–84539–4 (ebk)

Contents

List of illustrations Notes on contributors Preface

vii ix xi

PART I

Introduction 1 Signs of change: ‘damned rascals’ and beyond

1 3

JOHN STOREY

2 Changing theories of leadership and leadership development

14

JOHN STOREY

PART II

The changing elements of leadership 3 Leadership, ethics and integrity

39 41

IAIN MANGHAM

4 Understanding the crises of leadership

56

GRAEME SALAMAN

PART III

The processes of leadership training and development 5 ‘Learning leadership’ in practice

69 71

ELENA ANTONACOPOULOU AND REGINA BENTO

6 Designing and delivering leadership education and development: the role of corporate universities

93

ROB PATON, SCOTT TAYLOR, JOHN STOREY AND GEOFF PETERS

7 Can leadership be taught? GRAHAM MOLE

114

vi Contents PART IV

Leadership and career development

127

8 Positive career development for leaders

129

WENDY HIRSH

9 The individualization of the career and its implications for leadership and management development

150

JANE STURGES

PART V

How does leadership fit with business strategy in the private sector?

165

10 Strategically aligned leadership development

167

CATHERINE BAILEY, MARTIN CLARKE AND DAVID BUTCHER

11 Linking development with business

185

WILLIAM TATE

12 Leadership development in multinational firms

207

PAUL EVANS, ADAM SMALE, INGMAR BJö RKMAN AND VLADIMIR PUCIK

PART VI

Leadership and its development in the public sector

223

13 Leadership in public and third sector organizations

225

BEVERLY ALIMO-METCALFE AND JULIETTE ALBAN-METCALFE

14 Leadership and leadership development in education

249

NIGEL BENNETT

Index

272

Illustrations

Figures 2.1 2.2 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 8.5 8.6 10.1 10.2 11.1 11.2 11.3 13.1 13.2 13.3

The leadership constellation Meta-capabilities and behavioural requirements of leaders The career development continuum The PwC talent model Supporting individual career development Aligning business and individual career development needs in Nestlé Some career development processes Corporate talent pools in Rolls-Royce A virtuous development cycle BLD strategy framework Converting individual leadership ability into organization action Managing leadership along the employment spectrum False–real learning material continuum The relationship between leadership, culture and engagement, and the inputs and outputs of performance The model of engaging leadership as assessed by the TLQ Relationship between ‘leadership competencies’ and ‘engaging’ leadership behaviour

20 26 136 137 139 141 144 146 170 171 190 196 201 230 233 236

Tables 1.1 2.1 6.1 13.1

A summary dichotomy: managers versus leaders Summary of the main theories of leadership Six corporate university cases and their primary dynamics Multiple regression analyses for all subjects in relation to the ‘attitudes to work’ and ‘well-being at work’ items

8 17 97 239

Contributors

Juliette Alban-Metcalfe, Managing Director, Real World Group. Beverly Alimo-Metcalfe, Professor of Leadership, University of Bradford School of Management and Real World Group, UK. Elena P. Antonacopoulou, Professor of Organizational Behaviour, University of Liverpool, UK. Catherine Bailey, Senior Lecturer in Executive Development, Cranfield School of Management, UK. Nigel Bennett, Professor of Leadership and Management in Education, Department of Education, The Open University, UK. Regina F. Bento, Hatfield-Merrick Distinguished Professor, Merrick School of Business, University of Baltimore, USA. Ingmar Björkman, Professor of Management and Organization, Hanken School of Economics, Helsinki, Finland. David Butcher, Senior Lecturer in Executive Development, Cranfield School of Management, UK. Martin Clarke, Senior Lecturer in Executive Development, Cranfield School of Management, UK. Paul Evans, Shell Chaired Professor of Human Resources and Organizational Development, and Professor of Organizational Behaviour, INSEAD, European campus in Fontainebleau, France. Wendy Hirsh, Principal Associate, Institute for Employment Studies, UK. Iain Mangham (died 2004), Professor Emeritus, University of Bath School of Management, and Visiting Senior Research Fellow, Management Centre, King’s College, London, UK. Graham Mole, retired Group Training and Development Director, Willis Group, now a freelance trainer and writer. Rob Paton, Professor of Social Enterprise, The Open University Business School, UK. Geoff Peters, Professor of Systems Strategy, The Open University, UK. Vladimir Pucik, Professor of International Human Resources and Strategy, IMD, Lausanne, Switzerland.

x Contributors Graeme Salaman, Emeritus Professor of Organization Studies, The Open University Business School, UK. Adam Smale, Assistant Professor, Department of Management, University of Vaasa, Finland. John Storey, Professor of Management, The Open University Business School, UK. Jane Sturges, Senior Lecturer in Organizational Behaviour, Kings College, London, UK. William Tate, Organization strategy consultant and writer, specializing in organization development, change and learning. Head of Prometheus Consulting, UK. Scott Taylor, Senior Lecturer, Centre for Leadership Studies, University of Exeter Business School, UK.

Preface

The Leader I wanna be the leader I wanna be the leader Can I be the leader? Can I? I can? Promise? Promise? Yippee I’m the leader I’m the leader OK what shall we do? (Roger McGough, ‘The Leader’, from the collection Sky in the Pie) Roger McGough’s short poem playfully, but effectively, highlights and pokes fun at the allure of leadership. The years around the turn of the century marked a resurgence of interest in the idea of leadership. As explained in the following chapters, leaders and leadership became celebrated and hawked around as panaceas for numerous organizational and societal ills and ‘challenges’. Yet recently, with the global crisis from around 2008, we have witnessed a dramatic puncturing of some of the more puffed-up versions of the idea. There is now, arguably, a new crisis of leadership. One aspect of this (and one at odds with the thrust of McGough’s ‘wannabe’ sentiment) is that finding suitable recruits for top leadership positions such as headteachers and chief executives of NHS trusts is increasingly problematic. Many top leadership posts remain unfilled. But the alluring idea that somehow ‘a leader’ can resolve almost any set of problems has by no means gone away. The origins of this book stem from a series of discussions with managers from public and private sector organizations of all kinds. While working with them on training, research and consultancy projects concerning strategy, change management, human resource management, innovation, performance management and other related issues, they would frequently ask – often in passing – about ‘leadership’. They were usually perplexed by the subject and were anxious to discuss it. What finally prompted commencement of the book was a series of enquiries from management development directors, most of whom were uncertain how, or whether, to respond to the expectation that they should be doing ‘something more or different on leadership’. These managers were well aware that there is a vast supply of courses readily available on the subject, but they were looking for some independent guidance on how to negotiate their way through the many issues that faced them as corporate customers and suppliers. It subsequently became apparent that their general manager colleagues shared similar concerns.

xii Preface What they were looking for was not simply another course or another book describing the value of leadership or extolling a particular development solution, but a systematic evaluation of the terrain. Further, stemming from and building on this realist assessment they wanted some pointers to more effective ways forward. The book aims to equip readers with the analytical perspectives and tools to make up their own minds about the significance of the huge emphasis on leadership in contemporary discussions concerning business and organizations. Specifically, the book offers new insights into the ways in which understanding of what constitutes leadership has changed over time and it makes a critical assessment of the range of conventional leadership training and development provision. The book is written primarily with the needs of management development specialists in mind, but it has also wider relevance for general managers and for students of business and management, especially those studying for a Master of Business Administration degree (MBA) or specialist Master’s course. The distinctive qualities of the book attracted a dedicated following and in consequence the publishers asked for a second edition. In preparing for this we researched the needs and the wishes of users of the first edition and we have endeavoured to meet their requests and suggestions in this updated volume. I would like to acknowledge the support of colleagues at The Open University Business School, most especially my close working companion Graeme Salaman, with whom I have enjoyed many fruitful discussions and rewarding collaborative assignments. Thanks are also due to Karen McCafferty, who has continued to display excellent secretarial skills. I have learned a good deal from working with some insightful thinkers at other universities. I am especially grateful to Keith Sisson, Emeritus Professor at the University of Warwick, Professor Paul Edwards and Professor Keith Grint, both also at Warwick, Dave Ulrich of the University of Michigan and Patrick Wright of Cornell University, New York. I am indebted to numerous managers with whom I have worked on fascinating assignments in recent years. In particular, I am grateful to Andy Street, Managing Director of John Lewis Department Stores, and Charlie Mayfield, Chairman of the John Lewis Partnership; to Mike Scott, Brigadier Seamus Kerr and General Sir Mike Jackson, formerly of Land Command; Nita Clarke, Director of the IPA; David Yeandle, Deputy Director of Employment Policy at the EEF; Geoff Armstrong, former director general of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD); and executive directors at AstraZeneca, Barclays, British Airways, BT, Deutsche Telekom, Hewlett-Packard, ICI, Lloyds TSB, NatWest, Nortel, Philips, Tesco and Unilever. Finally, I wish to thank all the other contributors to this book. Each, as a specialist in his or her own area, has produced a chapter of distinctive value. Taken together, I believe they have helped to fulfil the purpose which drove the production of this book. John Storey

Part I

Introduction

1

Signs of change ‘Damned rascals’ and beyond John Storey

Chapter outline This chapter: • • •

Highlights the massive extent of interest in leadership in public and private sector organizations. Places the ideas of leaders, leading and leadership in historic context. Locates the leadership phenomenon in its contemporary socio-economic context.

When introducing the first edition of this book, published in 2004, it was noted that ‘There are few, if any, hotter topics in management, business and organization theory at the present time than “leadership”.’ As we enter a new decade, the observation remains valid despite some hefty knocks to and dents in the leadership sheen. In 2010, just as in the year 2000, major bodies have continued to launch strategic leadership initiatives. For example, the NHS has launched a new ‘Leadership Council’ and at lower levels, including the Strategic Health Authorities, new leadership development bodies are being established. ‘Leadership’ is again seen as the answer to increasingly challenging problems – including meeting increasing demands with constraints on resources. Likewise, the Civil Service is looking to improved leadership in order to respond to rather poor results in various departmental staff attitude surveys. The Civil Service is pressing ahead with developing its ‘Centre for Strategic Leadership’ within its National School of Governance. Overall, I continue to be taken aback when visiting, for a range of diverse purposes, numerous corporate training centres and hotel ‘conference suites’ by the sheer number of workshops being held on this subject. Despite much soul-searching in the light of the global economic crisis and the alleged demise of the ‘Anglo-Saxon model’ of capitalism, the fascination with leadership has by no means evaporated and it probably never will. The sceptical note struck by the first edition of this book, when the leadership cult was at a periodic peak, has proved to be more than justified. None the less, the fascination with leadership and leaders continues. Virtually every sector and all levels of staff appear to be represented and engaged in the search for leadership. Everyone, it seems, is being invited to join in. ‘Are you here for the Leadership Workshop?’ receptionists would cheerily and routinely enquire. Leadership in contemporary organizational life has become a pervasive phenomenon. The current leadership climate certainly seems to have changed significantly when compared with traditional approaches; for example, that used by US Navy captains in respect to their crews. Standard form, it is reported, was for captains to address their men as ‘you damned rascals’ (Leiner 2001). Nowadays, public and private sector organizations alike are caught up in a frenzy of

4 John Storey activity as they seek to demonstrate that they are taking responsible steps to populate the ‘leadership pool’ with a set of competences far wider than the navy’s formerly no-nonsense approach. The style of approach is also under exceptional scrutiny (Tamkin et al. 2010). The literature on leadership is enormous and expanding apace. A search of the Amazon.com website in the spring of 2003 using the single word ‘leadership’ netted an overwhelming 11,686 results. In spring 2010, the same search resulted in a list of 379,336 items. This testifies, if nothing else, to the cultural significance of this concept at least in the minds of authors, archivists and editors. Notably, however, a search using ‘leadership and development’ only secured 4.8 per cent of the total results in 2004 and 0.076 per cent in 2010. This suggests that the ways in which leadership qualities might be produced carry considerably less popular appeal than the wider leadership mystique. But perhaps even more telling than absolute numbers is the apparent increase in attention to the theme over recent time. A search of the EBSCO site, which indexes and abstracts published articles on business and management, reveals a phenomenal trend. During the twoyear period of January 1970 to the end of December 1971 there were just 136 published articles, according to a search using the ‘defaults’ field. During the equivalent period ten years later (1980–1981), the number had doubled to 258. But in the two-year period 1990–1991 the number mushroomed to 1,105 articles, and even more remarkable was the result for the equivalent two-year period a decade later (2001–2002), which revealed an astounding 10,062 published articles – an average of 419 per month. A search for this second edition conducted in December 2009 for the two-year period January 2008 to December 2009 using the same database revealed a total of 16,560. This suggests an average output on the leadership theme of 640 articles per month – 172 per week, or 25 articles per day! The growth in interest in leadership during the forty-year period 1970 to 2010 has been exponential. While the interest in ‘How to build great leaders’ (to use one fairly typical article title) continues (Colvin 2009), there has been a noticeable growth of interest in alternative and wider, post-crisis themes such as ethical leadership, followership, servant leadership and the like. But, to reiterate the point, the fascination with leaders and leadership in the more traditional sense has by no means abated. The incredible focus on leadership is an international phenomenon. In the USA, numerous surveys reveal increased attention for and resources allocated to the topic (Conference Board 1999). There is evidence that investment in leadership development has increased significantly (Vicere and Fulmer 1998; Fulmer 1997). All the usual signs are present – there are conferences galore, dedicated journals, courses, workshops and so on. But, perhaps most indicative of all, there are plentiful indications that large numbers of organizations are actively trying to ‘do something’ about leadership development. Leadership and management development is very big business indeed. One estimate of US annual corporate expenditure on the activity put the total at some $45 billion in 1997 – up from $10 billion a decade before (Fulmer 1997). The growth of the corporate university phenomenon in the US and in Europe is one manifestation of this increased attention to leadership development. Having dispensed with their administrative, staff and senior management colleges one or two decades ago, large corporations have spent the past few years launching corporate ‘academies’ and ‘universities’ – and one of the critical foci of activity for these new creations has been ‘leadership’. One assessment of the overall picture in the USA indicates that there are 900 leadership programmes in colleges and universities in that country (which notably represented a doubling of supply over a four-year period), over 100 ‘majors’ (specialist degrees), three dedicated journals churning out regular articles, and many new professorial appointments in this new ‘subject’ (Sorenson 2002). The International University Consortium for Executive Education

Signs of change 5 (UNICON), a body which represents major management schools in a number of countries but mainly in the USA, and which focuses on the non-accredited short-course market, reported in early 2010 that the demand and supply for leadership education was holding steady.1 In the UK and Europe, meanwhile, there has been the notable and successful launch of the journal Leadership, published by Sage. There has also been a veritable welter of ‘leadership initiatives’. The notion of the central importance of leadership has been accepted and institutionalized in so far as it is embedded as the prime ‘enabler’ in the influential Business Excellence Model sponsored by the European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM). This central enabler is elaborated in the EFQM framework with a series of subcriteria such as ‘leaders develop the mission’, ‘mission and values [are] involved with customers, partners and representatives of society’, and so on (EFQM 2000). The prime place of leadership as an enabler is continued in the 2010 version of the EFQM Model (EFQM 2010). The construct is also central to, and embedded in, other variants of the quality movement. For example, it is asserted and accepted as central in influential quality schemes such as the Malcolm Baldridge National Quality Award (MBNQA), and various total quality gurus have emphasised it and sought to identify best practice in leadership style (Deming 1986; Dale and Cooper 1994; Oakland 1999). Leadership is likewise taken as a critical given in modern strategy thinking – especially by figures associated with influential global consultancies (for example, Gattorna 1998). In parallel, activity in the public sector has also been especially intense. There was an initial flurry of activity around 2000 and this has been sustained in varying degrees for over a decade. For example, in 2009 the Department of Health unveiled a new NHS National Leadership Council. This body, with up to forty members drawn from senior levels in health services and from external bodies (including a former director general of the BBC and a former chairman of the John Lewis Partnership), has targeted top leadership, board development and ‘emergent leaders’ as key components of its mission. This came about as a response to the Darzi Report, ‘Next Stage Review: High Quality Care for All’. This stated: We will establish an NHS Leadership Council which will be a system-wide body chaired by the NHS Chief Executive, responsible for overseeing all matters of leadership across healthcare, including the top 250 leaders. It will have a particular focus on standards (including overseeing the new certification, the development of the right curricula, and assurance) and with a dedicated budget, will be able to commission development programmes. (Darzi 2008: 67) The perceived significance of leadership is made clear by a declaration in an earlier report which prepared the way for the new body: ‘The Leadership Council should develop a strong culture of leadership for health’ (Dawson 2009: 11). That phrase, ‘a strong culture of leadership’, sends a message about expected behaviour and also about perceived problem areas in the service. The report goes on to emphasize the importance of leadership and the part it should, and could, play in healthcare reform and system-wide improvement. Additionally, at the next level down, NHS London (one of the ten strategic health authorities in England) launched a new NHS London Leadership body in 2010. It describes Leading for Health as ‘a new organisation that will ensure that leadership in London’s NHS has the capacity and capability to deliver the challenges in Healthcare for London’. In other words, the London-wide strategic body is there to help promote and develop leadership in

6 John Storey London’s health services. Its major functions and activities are to include ‘leadership talent management, programme design, contracting/provider development, programme delivery, quality assurance/impact measurement and healthcare leadership knowledge and advisory services’. For the first twelve to eighteen months, Leading for Health will be an agency hosted by NHS London before making the transition to full independence. Across the civil and public services more generally, since 2006 the Cabinet Office has been promoting ‘customer focused leadership’. This is supported by a learning resources pack and forms part of a wider initiative under the aegis of the Public Services Leadership Consortium (PSLC). One aspect of this is the aspiration to reconnect policymaking with frontline public service provision in a range of government departments. Similar initiatives which seek to promote leadership can be found in numerous departments, including Education, for example, with the revamp of the National College of School Leadership (NCSL) to become the National College for Leadership of Schools and Children’s Services. From 2009 the National Professional Qualification for Headship (NPQH) became a mandatory requirement for new heads of schools. Meanwhile, the Home Office and Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC) have continued to emphasize the role of leadership in the police force. To take one example, HMIC has recently highlighted the importance of ‘leadership at the front-line’ in the form of the sergeant in the police forces of England and Wales (HMIC 2008). The report of the investigation stresses the ‘leadership of people’ aspect of the sergeant’s role. Local Government has its own Leadership Centre, which specializes in leadership development for both full-time local government officers and elected officials. Its premier programme is held at Leeds Castle over a ten-day period. It built a group of alumni consisting of eightyfive leaders between 2007 and 2010. And the Department of Work and Pensions (previously the Department of Social Security) has its own Leadership Excellence Action Programme (LEAP). Much of this recent activity continues the work that was begun in the public sector a decade ago, when ‘leadership’ was identified in policy papers as a key priority. For example, in 2000 the Cabinet Office, on behalf of the Civil Service, announced that it was commencing ‘extensive work on leadership issues in all departments’ (Cabinet Office 2000: 99). A new competency framework designed to promote civil service leadership, and an overall, concerted effort in the form of a ‘public service leadership development forum’ were also announced. For good or for ill, central government is signalling that it is getting serious about leadership. Local government too has its own programme of activity designed to develop leaders for both local authority executives and politicians. In education there has been significant investment in the National College – an institution described as ‘the largest leadership development programme in the world’. And, not to be outdone, the university sector launched a new dedicated MBA specifically to ‘meet the needs of university leaders’. The National Health Service has its own leadership programme and new leadership centre; the police force, not to be left behind, has launched new leadership programmes and so too has the Ministry of Defence. Indeed, following the emphasis on leadership in the ‘Modernising Government’ White Paper (Cabinet Office 1999: 57), virtually all segments of the public services have felt compelled to respond with renewed efforts and initiatives to promote ‘leadership’. At one level, the sheer scale of activity and response is impressive. Less clear is the extent to which all these separate and intertwined initiatives are genuinely tackling a new and worthwhile agenda. The frenzy of activity has been further fuelled by official and semi-official policy-led promotion. For example, the then Department for Trade and Industry, the then Department for Education and Skills, the Institute of Management and the think tank DEMOS also

Signs of change 7 weighed in with major reports (Horne 2001). The ‘project’ was chaired by Sir John Egan, and its report was notably entitled ‘Leadership: The Challenge for All?’ This gathering of the great and the good ‘found agreement’ that what was required from leadership was ‘an ability to inspire’ (described as ‘absolutely key’), along with ‘clarity of thinking, clarity of communications and being able to articulate direction. . .’. The report also noted that the quality of leadership was rated more highly in those organizations where there was an explicit and systematic policy statement about leadership development (Horne 2001: iii). Other officially sponsored reports have simultaneously emanated from the Cabinet Office (Cabinet Office 2000), the Ministry of Defence (Modernising Defence People Group 2000) and the police force (NPLF 2002). The Ministry of Defence in 2009/2010 restated its commitment to the idea of ‘leading a high performance organisation’ and the linkage with working flexibly in project and task-based teams (MOD 2010). When these numerous reports are taken together, the problem is not so much that the analysis is wrong, but rather that precise meanings and connections are usually underspecified. There is a tendency to treat ‘leadership’ as a catch-all and a panacea. It is made to stand for all the qualities that are desirable in a top team or responsible post holder – for example, ‘clarity of vision’, ‘a performance focus’, ‘flexibility’, ‘innovation’, ‘HR capability’ and ‘winning commitment’. In reality, most reports make little detailed examination of the concept of leadership. Its value is simply asserted and its nature assumed. Attention then typically switches to what are commonly seen as training and development ‘needs’ if these desirable ends are to be met. Further, there is an increasing tendency to assume and assert that leadership is the answer to a whole array of intractable problems. For example, the Home Office (2001) ‘Report of the Review of Senior Officer Training and Development’, states in its opening paragraph that The Lancaster House seminar on police reform in October 2000 identified the training and development of senior officers as a pressing issue. Improved leadership is critical to the effective modernisation and improvement of police services and a core factor in the programme to increase the Police Service’s ability to reduce crime and reassure the public. (2001: para 1.1). This is an unambiguous declaration of belief in leadership and leadership development as solutions to the identified problems of contemporary policing. This kind of analysis is given apparent empirical legitimacy by findings – such as those of the HM Inspectorate of Constabulary (2002) report, ‘Getting Down to Basics: Emerging Findings from BCU Inspections’ – suggesting a clear link between performance outcomes and leadership. This report states ‘The first eight months of inspections for real, confirm a finding from the pilot phase in 2000 – that the leadership exercised by the commanding officer and his/her management team is the critical success factor differentiating BCUs’ (2002: 5). Just how this link was demonstrated is not described, but ‘consensus’ of viewpoints seem to play a key part (para. 12). However, the common-sense tendency to suggest that the leader is the source of unit failure or success seems not to have been taken fully into account. So, against this backcloth of intense activity, two key questions arise. First, what are organizations looking for and seeking to achieve when they elevate the subject of leadership up the corporate agenda? Second, why is such an impressive degree of attention being paid to this topic at this time? These questions are very much interrelated.

8 John Storey The argument advanced in this book is that the accumulation of weighty and extensive reports to date tend, in the main, to regurgitate a now familiar thesis – but it is a thesis which remains incomplete, insufficiently tested and inadequately debated or scrutinized. The majority of the reports propound the argument that the environment has changed in such a way that organizations of all kinds are forced to respond to increasing uncertainty, instability, deregulation and competitiveness. In consequence, the argument continues, there is a perceived need to change organizational shape, size, scope and methods of operation. Resources are tight, organizational structures are flatter, power is to this extent more distributed and devolved; staff are in need of motivation, direction and reassurance. This reflects an agenda brought to prominence in the 1980s. ‘Change management’ became the urgent requirement; ‘leadership’ offered a widely appealing response. The case ‘for leadership’ is thus seemingly easily made. The agenda in the reports quickly turns to how to meet the need. The questions of ‘why leadership and why now’ are also intimately related to the idea of what ‘leadership’ constitutes and to the changing context viewed in a rather different light. For example, the obsession with leadership could potentially be explained at least in part by the focus on individualism – the media representation of business and government behaviour as dramas played out among personalities. For example, the initiatives and policies of the massive General Electric (GE) corporation became routinely reported as the personal predilections of Jack Welch, the erstwhile chief executive officer. Thus, the new focus on leadership in the 1980s and 1990s could, in part at least, be interpreted as an expression of the ‘cult of individualism’ (Senge 2000: 64). In the past decade or so, much greater interest has been shown in aspects of ‘followership’ and ‘servant leadership’ (for example, Ago 2009; Riggio et al. 2008; Rosenbach and Taylor 2006; Collinson 2005). In the private sector, the large, orderly corporations and their steady, measured career progress through a clear hierarchy gave way to downsized, de-layered and devolved organizational forms. Corporate planning became discredited. People (leaders) with vision were required. The soft skills associated with leadership – inspiration, vision and creativity were said to be required in place of ‘management’, which became regarded as too operational and system-maintenance focused. The typified contrast between leadership and management invariably encountered in courses, consultants’ presentations and the literature over the past couple of decades is depicted in summary form in Table 1.1. The community of scholars and practitioners expressly interested in leadership remain divided on the importance of making such a distinction. One school of thought remains adamant that it is necessary and useful to make a distinction of this kind; another tends to dismiss such delineations as unnecessary, distracting and unreflective of the reality of practice. A rather neat way to straddle the two is shown by course providers who offer programmes such as ‘Leadership for Senior Managers’ (for example, the King’s Fund in London or the

Table 1.1 A summary dichotomy: managers versus leaders Managers

Leaders

are transactional seek to operate and maintain current systems accept given objectives and meanings control and monitor trade on exchange relationship have short-term focus focus on detail and procedure

are transformative seek to challenge and change systems create new visions and new meanings empower seek to inspire and transcend have long-term focus focus on the strategic big picture

Signs of change 9 Management Centre Europe) or ‘Leadership for Middle Managers’ (for example, the Leeds Leadership Programme for Middle Managers). However expressed, the perceived importance of leadership is now evident, in the public sector especially. The extensive analysis made by the Performance and Innovation Unit of the Cabinet Office envisages ‘leadership’ as the answer to a host of hugely complex, largescale and endemic problems: comparative lower pay than in the private sector, recruitment difficulties, low morale and so on (Cabinet Office 2000). Despite the accumulated onslaught by leadership campaigners, a number of evident gaps and problems remain. First, those occupying top positions in organizations have remained largely unmoved by the widely promulgated case for leadership. For example, recent research by the Work Foundation (2003) confirms what many suspected, namely that chief executives and board directors are still less likely than more junior colleagues to receive leadership coaching and tutoring. Only 25 per cent of top-echelon managers in the sample of 221 organizations had been tutored in leadership compared with nearly 50 per cent of junior managers. As expected, the vast majority of senior managers (78 per cent) espoused the value of leadership as a core organizational priority, but in practice they just do not seem to get round to doing much about it at the highest levels. A second area where gaps and loose ends remain is in relation to serious scrutiny of the issues. As we have indicated in the account so far, the main part of the ‘debate’ about leadership in recent years has been constituted by a fairly simplistic ‘case’. The campaign extolling transformational leadership rests on a series of basic propositions, each of which turns out to be contentious. In this volume it is argued that there are a series of critical issues which deserve much closer analysis. The rationale and purpose of the book is to identify and explore these critical issues. The first of these is the extent of stability in the conventionally dominant model(s). This relative and time-bound issue is explored in Chapter 2. It is argued that the interpretation of what constitutes ‘leadership’, and thus the associated critical issues in leadership, have changed over time. In broad terms, three eras are identified in that chapter. During the first era, prior to the 1980s, ‘leadership and management’ were rarely terms subject to differentiation. They were regarded as either interchangeable or as extensively overlapping activities. When ‘leadership’ was studied or taught it was usually regarded as a small subset of management and the focus was on ‘influencing’ small groups. To a large extent leadership was a first-level management or supervisory concern. Then, in the 1980s, there was a paradigm shift and the mood changed substantially. A new message was propounded in numerous influential books and countless consultants eagerly conveyed it. The message was that ‘transformation’ was required and that this required a new type of senior leader. These leaders were to a considerable extent definable as ‘not managers’. To a large degree some of this thinking is still prevalent. But since the late 1990s, there has been a further shift. This third era harbours much stronger doubts about the transformational thesis and remedy. It is exemplified by a championing of more socially constructive and socially aware modes of leadership (e.g. Boyatzis and McKee 2005; Liden et al. 2008). This new mood is associated with a new set of issues, and these form the purpose of the remaining chapters in the volume. It was detected in the first edition of this book, published in 2004, and that shift of mood has been massively extended since the credit crunch and the global financial crisis that began in 2008. The ethical dimensions of this are explored in Chapter 3. The idea of an exceptional crisis in leadership is examined by Graeme Salaman in Chapter 4. He mounts a trenchant critique of traditional models of leadership. He sees its failure as part of a wider malaise involving weakness of governance, of compensation and

10 John Storey indeed of the business schools who have been part of the problem rather than part of the solution. The uncritical celebration of the transformational leader, he argues, was in effect a form of ‘anti-organizational theory’. He ends on a positive note: clear identification of past mistakes, he contends, offers a unique opportunity to forge a new path. In Chapter 5, Antonacopoulou and Bento develop their analysis of the process of ‘learning leadership’ which they commenced in the first edition of this book. In a thought-provoking new chapter they approach learning leadership as, above all, a practice. This means they suggest engaging in practising, and this may include spontaneous as well as planned behaviour. They illustrate their thesis by drawing upon case examples from outside conventional formal organizations; these examples help us to think afresh about what leadership can mean and how it can indeed be ‘learned’. In Chapter 6, Paton et al. turn to an examination of an important phenomenon in leadership development – the role of the ‘corporate universities’. These institutions represent significant formal investments in the belief that leadership can be developed and that the process is of such strategic importance that top corporate levels should be directly involved. Indeed, CUs are interpreted as helping to foster and sustain a particular meaning of corporate leadership. Graham Mole, in Chapter 7, asks and answers the question: ‘Can leadership be taught?’ As an experienced corporate purchaser of leadership development services in his role as group training and development director, his insights are highly informed. He argues that much of the conventional provision of leadership training is highly problematical. It is, he suggests, often undifferentiated, superficial and lacking in impact. He does not, however, dismiss all attempts at leadership development. Indeed, he takes us through a careful analysis of how leadership is learned in practice and how an understanding of the process can be used to inform more effective and tailored development experiences. The concept of ‘career’ as a mechanism for aiding leadership development is subject to close examination in Chapters 8 and 9. Wendy Hirsh, in Chapter 8, identifies a number of positive career development interventions designed to grow appropriate forms of leadership. Drawing extensively on an array of real-life case examples she reveals how individual and organizational needs can be aligned in multiple ways. In Chapter 9, Jane Sturges also notes that the idea of career has the advantage of attending to both organizational and individual needs. She then focuses on the challenge presented by the ‘new career’. This, she argues, requires novel approaches when compared with traditional career management techniques. In Chapter 10, Catherine Bailey, Martin Clarke and David Butcher address the issue of ‘business leadership development’. Towards this goal they discuss aligning leadership development with business needs. They draw upon results from recent research to reveal how a discriminating approach to leadership development strategy, method and evaluation can be effective. They construct a business leadership strategy framework, which offers a range of options. In contradistinction to some of the other contributors, they also defend the idea of paying close attention to the role of individual leaders. In Chapter 11, William Tate adopts an interesting alternative perspective. He reframes ‘leadership’ and its development as an organizational and business issue. Hence, he adopts a system perspective and this not only attends to a much wider array of interventions but it also results in a much stronger focus on business needs rather than a focus on a few individuals. In Chapter 12 Paul Evans and colleagues examine the problem of how to grow top-level leaders for global enterprises. As they note, the skills required and demonstrated at operational and even business-unit level may not suffice for this corporate strategic role. They trace the obstacles to the development of global leadership and they recommend a number of

Signs of change 11 interventions (which, because they normally work against the grain, they term ‘unnatural acts’) in order to help deal with the challenge. The final two chapters examine the peculiarities of leadership and attempts at its development in the public sector. In Chapter 13, Beverly and Juliette Alimo-Metcalfe attend to the challenge of leadership development in local government, the health services, and other public sector organizations. They explain how securing engagement with the development process is important, and how this links to a need to understand required competences. In essence, they propose an approach which builds simultaneous engagement for individuals, teams and organizations, while also utilizing a diagnostic and measurement-of-progress toolkit. To round out the book as a whole, Nigel Bennett in Chapter 14 reveals key issues in leadership and its development in the context of schools. He focuses in particular on the work of the National College for Leadership of Schools and Children’s Services. The analysis helps reveal the difficulties and dilemmas faced by players in such national development roles (as noted above, such attempts are fairly common in the public services) and he provides a useful and penetrating critique of the initiative. This critique could in large measure be extended to other such attempts to use a ‘national college’ to handle leadership development. In total, this collection reflects the issues and key trends in contemporary debate about leadership in, and of, organizations. In summary, the critical issues and trends identified and examined in detail in the chapters of this volume can be itemized as follows: 1

2

3 4

5

6

7

The temporal shifts in the understanding of what constitutes ‘leadership’. The signs of disenchantment with the recently orthodox transactional and charismatic models of leadership are discussed. One shift is towards an emphasis on aspects of trust, long-term relationships and other dimensions of servant leadership. Another is the emphasis on leadership as an organizational property and phenomenon, rather than focusing on individual leaders. The reappraisal of the charismatic and transformational model in the light of a series of corporate crises, collapses and scandals, and a subsequent concern with the idea of integrity and selflessness as crucial qualities of leadership. A critical reassessment of attempts to identify and catalogue a set of ‘competences’ associated with leadership. An assessment of the raft of ways in which leadership training and development has been attempted. What methods are actually being used to ‘teach’ leadership and what evidence exists of their impact and outcomes? A number of chapters examine the extent to which, and the ways in which, leadership capabilities can effectively be developed. A critical reappraisal of the more serious and significant leadership development initiatives in the public sector. What have they really entailed, what have been their consequences, and what implications do they carry for the future? A reassessment of leadership development initiatives in private sector businesses – most especially in relation to the extent and nature of the alignment or lack of it with business strategy and mission. And, finally but by no means least, the linkage that can be shown between leadership and performance. What evidence is there about whether leadership makes a difference to organizational performance?

When taken together, the exploration of these topics in the various chapters of this book offers significant insight into the current issues and trends in the contemporary practice of leadership, and in its study.

12 John Storey

Questions for discussion 1 2 3

Why has the idea of leadership been the focus of so much attention in recent years? Has the meaning attributed to leadership changed in any significant way over the past decades? In what ways – and why? Has the investment of time and resources in leadership made a difference?

Notes 1

Private communication from the executive director.

References Ago, A. (2009) ‘Perspectives of senior level executives on leadership and followership’, Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies, 16 (2): 159–66. Boyatzis, R. E. and McKee, A. (2005) Resonant Leadership: Renewing Yourself and Connecting with Others through Mindfulness, Hope, and Compassion, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cabinet Office (1999) ‘Modernising Government’, (cm 4310) London: Stationery Office. —— (2000) ‘Strengthening Leadership in the Public Sector: A Research Study by the PIU’, London: Performance and Innovation Unit. Collinson, D. (2005) ‘The dialectics of leadership’, Human Relations, 58 (11): 1419– 42. Colvin, G. (2009) ‘How to Build Great Leaders’, Fortune, 160 (11), 70–71. Conference Board (1999) ‘Developing leaders’, HR Executive Review, 7 (1): 1–19. Dale, B. and Cooper, G. (1994) Total Quality and Human Resources, Oxford: Blackwell. Darzi, A. (2008) ‘High Quality Care for All, NHS Next Stage Review Final Report’, London: Department of Health. Deming, W. E. (1986) Out of Crisis: Quality, Productivity and Competitive Position, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dawson, S., Garside, P., Hudson, R. and Bicknell, C. (2009) The Design and Establishment of the Leadership Council, Cambridge: Judge Institute. European Foundation for Quality Management (2000) ‘Assessing for Excellence: A Practical Guide for Self Assessment’, Brussels: EFQM. —— (2010) ‘The EFQM Excellence Model 2010 Version’, Brussels: EFQM. Fulmer, R. M. (1997) ‘The evolving paradigm of leadership development’, Organizational Dynamics, 25 (4): 59–73. Gattorna, J. L., (ed.) (1998) Strategic Supply Chain Alignment, Aldershot: Gower. Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary (2002) ‘Getting Down to Basics: Emerging Findings from BCU Inspections’, London: HMIC. —— (2008) ‘Leading From the Frontline – Thematic Inspection’, London: Home Office. Home Office (2001) ‘Report of the Review of Senior Officer Training and Development’, London: Home Office. Horne, M. A. S.-J. D. (2001) ‘Leadership: The Challenge for All?’ London: Institute of Management/ DTI/DEMOS. Leiner, F. (2001) ‘Decatur and naval leadership’, Naval History, 15 (5): 30–37. Liden, R. C., Wayne, S. J., Zhao, H. and Henderson, D. (2008) ‘Servant leadership: Development of a multidimensional measure and multi-level assessment’, Leadership Quarterly, 19 (2): 161–77. Modernising Defence People Group (2000) ‘Sustaining the Leading Edge: A Report on Leadership Training and Development’, London: MDPG. MOD (2010) ‘The Defence Vision’. Available at: www.mod.uk/DefenceInternet/AboutDefence/ Organisation/DefenceVision. NPLF (2002) ‘Analysis of Needs of the National Police Leadership Faculty’, Bramshill: NPLF.

Signs of change 13 Oakland, J. (1999) Total Organizational Excellence: Achieving World Class Performance, Oxford: Butterworth Heinemann. Riggio, R., Challeff, I. and Lipman-Blumen, J. (2008) How Great Followers Create Great Leaders and Organizations, San Francisco: Wiley. Rosenbach, W. E. and Taylor, R. L. (2006) Contemporary Issues in Leadership (6th edn), Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Senge, P. (2000) ‘A conversation on leadership’, Reflections, 2 (1): 57–68. Sorenson, G. (2002) ‘An intellectual history of leadership studies in the US’, paper presented at the EIASM Workshop on Leadership Research, Saïd Business School, Oxford, 16–17 December. Tamkin, P., Pearson, G., Hirsh, W. and Constable, S. (2010) Exceeding Expectation: The Principles of Outstanding Leadership, London: The Work Foundation. Vicere, A. and Fulmer, R. (1998) Leadership by Design, Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press. Work Foundation (2003) Developing Leaders, London: Work Foundation.

2

Changing theories of leadership and leadership development John Storey

Chapter outline This chapter: • • •

Explains the multiple and evolving theories of leadership. Presents a conceptual framework to help organize your thinking about leadership issues. Scrutinizes current trends in the practice of leadership and in the thinking about it.

It was suggested at the end of the previous chapter that certain new themes and concerns are emerging in leadership research and practice. These grapple with a number of vital questions, including the kind of leadership behaviours now thought to be required (and, conversely, those which are deemed worthy of discouragement); the allocation of leadership responsibilities across organizational members; and the kind of leadership training and development methods which are deemed to be appropriate in new contexts. In large part, these current issues and concerns in leadership and leadership development reflect key changes in the environment within which organizations have to operate: for example, global economic uncertainty, climate change, massive trade imbalances, shorter product life cycles, debates about re-regulation versus deregulation, globalization of competition, turbulence in markets and technologies, and higher expectations from public services in a context of cuts in funding. They also reflect structural and cultural changes within organizations themselves, such as devolved, delayered and downsized corporations alongside more permeable organizational boundaries, if not outright ‘boundaryless’ enterprises. It has been suggested that it is the increased complexity of society and its faster pace which explains the demand for leadership. Thus, as argued by Fullan, ‘The more complex society gets, the more sophisticated leadership must become’ (2001a: ix). In today’s context, one might add that the challenge is heightened because of the numerous instances of spectacular corporate failures. Consequently, as was pointed out in the previous chapter, a number of interconnected issues and key questions are moving to the forefront of current debate about leadership, echoes of which can be found across the world. It was noted that the list of critical issues centre on recent shifts in understanding of what constitutes appropriate modes of leadership. Doubts about the transactional and charismatic model of leadership are growing and these concerns merit analysis (Mumford et al. 2008). Closely associated with this issue is the increasing interest in the ideas of ‘servant leadership’ and integrity as crucial dimensions of leadership, along with ‘distributed leadership’, ‘followership’ and diversity (Riggio et al. 2008; Sendjava et al. 2008; Liden et al. 2008; Spillane 2006). In addition, on a wider front, the whole set of ‘competences’ associated with leadership require robust critical reassessment. A further identified

Changing theories 15 critical issue was the need to make a dispassionate and frank assessment of the raft of ways in which leadership training and development has been attempted – both in public and private sector organizations – and the outcomes to date of such interventions. Against that agenda, the purpose of this chapter is to locate these emerging elements in the context of the extensive literature on leadership and leadership development. In particular, the chapter will offer a summary guide and, from this, will draw out those elements deserving of the future attention of organizational decision makers and organizational theorists. This chapter will also seek to make sense of the range of alternative ‘theories of leadership’ and to point a way forward. A key part of the argument will be that the corpus of writing which is normally understood to constitute evolving or competing theories of leadership is in fact made up of studies, speculations and hypotheses about a variety of different things. In this chapter we are as much interested in the obsession with leadership as a phenomenon as with the subject of ‘leadership’ as a presumed real social practice or thing. The purpose of the chapter is in fact to theorize the theories of leadership. Why has leadership been defined in different ways at different times? Why have different models of leadership achieved plausibility, acceptance and popularity at different times? To put this point another way, the objective of the chapter is not simply to offer yet another description of the literature to date, but rather to explain its existence and nature. The chapter is organized into three sections. The first section offers an overview of the ways in which theories of leadership are conventionally approached and understood. The second section presents a conceptual framework in order to help interpret current issues and enduring themes in an organized way. The third section examines the proposition that understandings and attitudes to leadership have entered a new phase – one which is increasingly wary and sceptical of the prescriptions for charismatic and transformational leadership which have dominated the subject for the past couple of decades. This third section, therefore, in the main focuses on current trends.

The multiple and evolving theories of leadership The mass of literature and experiments on leadership are illustrated rather well by the periodic surveys by Stogdill and his successors in the Handbook of Leadership (Stogdill 1974; Bass 2008, 4th edn). The original 1974 edition was subtitled ‘A Survey of Theory and Research’, and this is precisely what the volume and its subsequent editions have offered. The Handbooks seek to provide a systematic review of the literature on leadership. Over 5,000 abstracts were prepared for the first edition and only those that were judged to be based on competent research were included – the ‘inspirational and advisory literature was ignored’ (Stogdill 1974: viii). And it is interesting to note that Stogdill also stated that for similar reasons he had purposely excluded ‘charismatic leadership’. This was because the literature at that time was largely based on ‘numerous biographical studies’ which provide ‘comparatively little information that adds to the understanding of leadership’ (1974: viii). Even the first volume noted the ‘bewildering mass of findings’ which had ‘not produced an integrated understanding of leadership’ (1974: vii). To a considerable degree, this observation remains valid today. For many years, the focus of leadership studies derived from a concern in organizational psychology to understand the impact of leader style on small-group behaviour and outcomes. Moreover, the focus was further directed to just two main dimensions – ‘task focus’ versus ‘people orientation’ – and there were various re-workings of this theme; for example, Blake and Moulton 1964, Vroom and Yetton 1988.

16 John Storey In the 1980s, attention shifted dramatically to the elaboration and promotion of the concept of transformational, charismatic, visionary and inspirational leadership. This school was labelled the ‘new leadership’ theories (Bryman 1992), and it has shifted attention to leadership of entire organizations rather than the leadership of small groups. (Though as the work of Alimo-Metcalfe in Chapter 10 of this volume reveals, there are some important current attempts to pull the agenda back to distributed leadership and teams.) On the face of things, much of the debate over the past two decades appears to have been about ‘styles of leadership’, but in reality the subtext was mainly about a propounded dichotomy between ‘leadership’ and ‘management’. This message was extolled graphically and influentially in a Harvard Business Review article by Abraham Zaleznik. This argued that ‘It takes neither genius nor heroism to be a manager, but rather persistence, tough-mindedness, hard work, intelligence, analytical ability and perhaps most important, tolerance and goodwill’ (Zaleznik 1992: 127). Since that time, a huge management consultancy industry has grown around this notion of ‘leaders’ rather than ‘managers’. More recently, the importance of the distinction has been downplayed by the suggestion that organizations need both leaders and managers. However, Zaleznik had anticipated that kind of response and he argued that It is easy enough to dismiss the dilemma . . . by saying that there is a need for people who can be both. But, just as a managerial culture differs from the entrepreneurial culture that develops when leaders appear in organizations, managers and leaders are very different kinds of people. They differ in motivation, personal history and in how they think and act. (1992: 127) Allegedly, leaders ‘think about goals, they are active rather than reactive, shaping ideas about ideas rather than responding to them’. Managers, on the other hand, aim to ‘shift balances of power towards solutions acceptable as compromises, managers act to limit choices, leaders develop fresh approaches’ (Zaleznik 1992: 128). Evidently, the controversy about the essential differences between leadership and management will continue for some time. The essence of the debate, however, has been switching to key task requirements and to the contributions of leaders and managers. This more practice-oriented agenda is itself evolving. For example, one significant development has been the linking of the idea of leadership with that of strategic management (Westley 1989; Tichy and Devanna 1986; Pettigrew et al. 1992). The problematic is clearly very different if one is contemplating the capabilities required to be a ‘team leader’ in contrast to the capabilities required to lead a large-scale organizational transformation. Drawing on his influential work in From Good to Great, Jim Collins (2005) illustrates the idea of a maturation model of leadership in his compelling article ‘The 5 levels of leadership’. The lower levels refer to basic team leader attainment; but levels 4 and 5 reach new peaks of achievement and capability. Thus level 4, the effective leader, ‘catalyses commitment to and organises pursuit of a clear and compelling vision; stimulates the group to high performance standards’. This expresses succinctly what many people have been trying to say about the meaning of leadership. But Collins posits an even higher plane: level 5 executive leadership ‘Builds enduring greatness through a paradoxical combination of personal humility and professional will’. In order to gain broad oversight of this and other main trends in leadership theory it will be useful to view the summary of leadership theories shown in Table 2.1. Much of this

Changing theories 17 Table 2.1 Summary of the main theories of leadership Theory

Texts

Trait theory; innate qualities; ‘great man theories’

Carlyle (1841); Bernard (1926)

Behavioural theories: task related and relationship related; style theory (e.g. autocratic vs democratic)

Ohio State University studies; University of Michigan (Katz and Kahn 1951); Likert (1961); Blake and Moulton (1964) Lewin et al. (1939)

Situational and contingency theory; repertoire of styles; expectancy theory

Fiedler (1967); Vroom and Yetton (1973); Yukl (2009); Hersey and Blanchard (1969); Thompson and Vecchio (2009)

Exchange and path-goal models (relationship between leader and led as a series of trades)

Graen and Uhl-Bien (1995); House (1971); House (1996)

‘New leadership’; charismatic and visionary leadership; transformational leadership

Burns (1978); Bryman (1992); Conger and Kanungo (1988); Bass (1985a); Tichy and Devanna (1986); Kouzes and Posner (1997)

Leadership as performance

Peck et al. (2009); Mangham (1986)

Constitutive, constructivist theory

Grint (1997, 2000, 2005)

Leadership within Learning Organizations: leadership as a creative and collective process; distributed leadership

Senge (1990)

Post-charismatic and post-transformational leadership theory; spiritual leadership; authentic leadership

Khurana (2002a, 2002b); Maccoby (2000); Fullan (2001a, 2001b) Boyatzis and McKee (2005); Tamkin et al. (2010)

chronology will be familiar to many readers of this volume and so there is no attempt to work through the details of the ‘story’ of the journey, from trait theory through style theory and contingency theory and so on, again here. Readers looking for such coverage can find useful summaries elsewhere (for example, Gill 2006; Grint 1997; Yukl 2009), and indeed in most textbooks covering the subject of ‘leadership’. Our purpose here, however, is not to describe each ‘stage’ in this supposedly linear pathway, but rather to note the underlying trends and to identify the echoes and connections with the current key issues discussed throughout this volume. There are some recognizable trends and patterns in the history of leadership research. A great deal of the early theory took a rather ‘essentialist’ perspective – that is, it viewed ‘leadership’ as a concrete phenomenon, a thing that could be measured as if it were a natural physical phenomenon. Also, much of the early research focused on the leadership of small groups – the early experiments with styles of leadership in boys’ groups exemplify this. There was much less research on the leadership of large organizations, though the small-group research was often extrapolated as it if applied more widely. Recent research and theory has paid much more attention to non-essentialist forms of analysis. Thus leadership is now more likely to be seen as a ‘meaning-making’ activity. There are two variants. The first focuses on the meaning-making behaviour of leaders. Here, ‘leaders’ are those who interpret the complexities of the given unit within the environment on behalf of the followers. Leaders thus make sense of the plight of the collective – weighing up threats and opportunities in the environment, and evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of the unit within that environment. The capabilities required are those frequently described in recent transformative literature: clarity of vision; environment scanning and interpretation; the

18 John Storey ability to condense complex data into simple compelling summations; and the ability to communicate clear messages. The training and development implications stem from these required capabilities, and therefore relate to opportunities for plentiful exposure to the ‘big picture’. This might mean, for example, attendance at a corporate ‘academy’ where global issues are discussed. The second variant, the ‘constitutive’ approach, is also concerned with meaning making, but this time with more attention to the part played by the ‘followers’, and with the wider audience being rather more to the fore. Individuals celebrated as leaders under this interpretation are those who enact the behaviours and articulate the messages that are in tune with the preferred and desired requirements of those who can confer the status of leader. To illustrate the point, one can refer to the case of one of the most famous great leaders: Winston Churchill, Prime Minister of Britain during the Second World War. The constitutive approach is able to make better sense of his rise and fall than seems possible from an essentialist perspective. The latter sees leadership as something embodied in individuals; something which simply awaits ‘discovery’ through the appropriate psychometric instrument. While Churchill is now one of the most frequently instanced examples of an indisputably great leader, for much of his career this most cited figure (for example, Bennis 1994; Gardner 1996) was adamantly rejected by his party and his fellow parliamentarians. Far from being accepted as a leader, he was marginalized and even isolated. However, when the previous consensus about the preferred leadership collapsed with the onset of war, the Churchill proposition became acceptable and, increasingly, pre-eminent. The oratorical skills, decisiveness, and other like attributes that have been so frequently cited as quintessential evidence of leadership were exploited to impressive effect. But it needs to be recalled that the ‘followers’ were rather less impressed by these same skills just a short time previously – and indeed these skills and attributes were nullified once again when the war ended. The case helps to illustrate the constructivist interpretation: leadership was ‘recognized’ or constructed within the confines of a specific set of social circumstances; it was not a phenomenon that existed unambiguously, independent of social context. The lesson from the Churchill story carries across into the corporate and work organizational domain. Preferred styles of leadership evidently vary across time and place. In terms of the time dimension, there may even be varying degrees of reaction to previously experienced approaches. Leadership style is thus path dependent. A style may be more relatively acceptable precisely because it appears to correct for the perceived excesses of a previously experienced style. Leadership effectiveness, therefore, depends upon: (a) the extent to which people follow and give legitimacy (this can be termed internal validation), and (b) the extent to which the unit or organization succeeds and survives (this may be termed external validation). There must also be a time dimension to the judgements; this may be short, medium or long term. This further implies that the judgement of the effectiveness of leadership may fluctuate (see Weick 1995). While a review of leadership theory based on the chronological development of the literature can be useful, it also has a number of limitations. The chief problem is that the evolutionary accounts tend to imply that previous theory has been refuted and superseded. In reality, questions concerning leadership qualities and characteristics, appropriate styles, contingent conditions and transactional – as well as transformational – relations continue to perplex and prompt debate. An example is the reworking of the trait theory of leadership by Judge et al. (2009) using an evolutionary psychology perspective. For our purposes in this volume, therefore, it is more appropriate to focus on emerging and continuous themes and issues. In the next section these are identified and a conceptual framework is developed.

Changing theories 19

A conceptual framework for current themes Current debates, as we saw in the first chapter, reveal a series of paradoxes and contradictions within the dominant accounts. For example, one strong narrative strand centres on the idea of current environmental ‘uncertainty and instability’. This, in turn, is seen to require and justify the search for a strong, responsible, organizational leader able to handle difficult and ambiguous conditions through the exceptional use of ‘envisioning and energizing’ capabilities. This strand, therefore, focuses attention on the vital need for exceptional, decisive, and charismatic leadership. Exceptionality is further seen to justify unusual and generous (‘internationally competitive’) reward packages. And yet, another strand of contemporary narrative highlights and emphasizes the need for ‘distributed leadership’ and empowered co-workers and associates. The tensions created by these competing perspectives reoccur in much contemporary discourse – but the potential contradictions are usually insufficiently examined or even unacknowledged. One clear example of a contemporary attempt to come to terms with the tensions between the idea of the exceptional individual on the one hand, and changing values and norms on the other, can be found in the work of Warren Bennis, an established authority on leadership. Bennis argues that leadership can be understood as deriving from a mixture of time, place, predisposition and potential (Bennis and Thomas 2002). Taking a long view by studying today’s leaders (from the allegedly laid-back and informal high-technology world) and comparing and contrasting them with a cluster of interviewees from the immediate post-war world of half a century ago, there is an explicit acknowledgement of the difference that time (captured here in the concept of ‘era’) can make in the meaning of leadership. None the less, Bennis is reluctant to let go of the idea of ‘leaders’ as inherently special people with unique qualities – indeed, this is the underlying assumption of his approach. The research method (interviewing individuals qua leaders and asking how they explain their biographies) seems highly likely to reinforce this bias. Bennis’s most recent work thus reflects a continuing essentialist interpretation of the nature of leadership; its essence, in other words, is to be ‘discovered’ within the attributes – one might say the ‘traits’ – of exceptional individuals found to be occupying leader positions. In this particular instance, the methodological device used to identify and catalogue these attributes of accomplished leaders is to ‘uncover’ the different ways in which people deal with adversity. He claims that one of the most reliable indicators and predictors of ‘true leadership’ is an individual’s ability to find meaning in negative situations and to learn from trying circumstances. Bennis calls these experiences which shape leaders ‘crucibles’. He provides a variety of examples to explore the idea of the crucible in detail. From these examples, he believes it is possible to derive the essential skills possessed by great leaders. The first three of these are familiar restatements of what leadership is frequently understood to be, as well as its apparent prerequisites. These essential skills are: the ability to engage others in shared meaning; a distinctive and compelling voice; and a sense of integrity (including a strong set of values). The fourth is identified as ‘adaptive capacity’. This turns out to be ‘an almost magical ability to transcend adversity, with all its attendant stresses, and to emerge stronger than before’ (Bennis and Thomas 2002: 121). It is of course this final aspect which the narratives of informants were most able and willing to illuminate. The underlying ‘new model’ is that leadership competences are outcomes of these formative experiences. The key competences are said to be: adaptive capacity; an ability to engage others in shared meanings; voice; and integrity. Tellingly, ‘adaptive capacity’ is said to be exemplified through the case of Jack Welch, the famed erstwhile chief executive officer of General Electric. This capacity enabled him to ‘transform himself from staff-slashing Neutron

20 John Storey Jack to Empowerment Jack as the needs of the corporation shifted’ (ibid.: 122). This example is illustrative of the partial nature of much literature and thinking about leadership. In order to progress theory in a more systematic manner it is necessary to stand back and appraise the range of factors which influence our understanding of the leadership phenomenon. In fact, analysis of contemporary organizational discourse and of recent literature reveals a large number of critical factors, which on closer examination reflect a cluster of core enduring themes. There are four in particular, which are essential in any systematic analysis of organizational leadership. As shown in Figure 2.1, these factors are: context; perceived leadership need; behavioural requirements and capabilities; and development methods. Moreover, as also illustrated in the figure, each of these key factors interrelates with all of the others. Together they form the leadership constellation. We will describe and assess each of these in turn, beginning at the top of Figure 2.1 with context and then proceeding clockwise around the figure. Context Despite the seemingly unabated search for the essential attributes of leaders, there is also abundant reference to the importance of context in current leadership research. There are extensive literatures exploring the importance of international cultural differences, industrial sector differences, organizational structural differences and other contextual variables. For example, various researchers have explored the idea that concepts of leadership may differ between different national cultures (Jepson 2009). Sometimes even regional groupings are contrasted. Thus the differences between understandings of leadership using Anglo-Saxon, Arab and Asian traditional cultural values have been studied (Mellahl 2000). This and other studies have challenged the idea of the universality of leadership values and themes. The findings carry implications for content and methods of leadership development and training. Similar findings emerged from an extensive twenty-two-country study across Europe which revealed cultural variation in notions about leadership (Brodbeck 2000). The study suggests

Context: national, cultural, industry, organizational

Development methods

Perceived need

Behavioural requirements/ capabilities

Figure 2.1 The leadership constellation

Changing theories 21 that there are pre-existing leadership ‘prototypes’ or expectations about leaders in the different cultures; these affect the willingness of followers to go along with certain roles and styles of leaders. Brodbeck identifies a set of dimensions which reveal core differences in leadership prototypes. Cultural differences in the understanding of and attitudes to leadership have also been explored in another study by Brodbeck in the even more widely variant comparative contexts of Europe and Africa. These differences, he notes, carry important implications for leadership development methods (Brodbeck et al. 2002). Yet, despite prevailing and persisting cultural differences between certain countries, the still broadly dominant influence of American values may also help to explain the increased attention given to leadership across much of the world. The American Dream and the focus on individualism and the can-do attitude have permeated international teaching and development in relation to how organizational leadership is viewed. The critique of and challenge to ‘Anglo-Saxon’ business values by President Sarkozy and Chancellor Merkel have served to question the dominance of this model but have not yet undermined it. This individualized interpretation is fuelled by the media. Business magazines such as BusinessWeek, Fortune and the Director are especially prone to focusing on the supposed crucial impact of top managers. Even serious financial newspapers such as The Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times tend to ‘profile’ and give huge prominence to individual personalities and attribute special importance to them. News about corporations tends to be translated all too readily into human boardroom dramas. Certain chief executives become lionized and company fortunes are deemed to be closely linked to the actions of these figures. The media, for example, regularly tell the story of great enterprises in terms of the characters at the top. Thus, Marks & Spencer regularly features as a battleground between rival leaders such as Stewart Rose, Paul Myners and Philip Green. Evidently, those in top positions also strongly believe that their leadership is the critical factor which merits paramount attention. Hence, ten years before his retirement the chief executive of General Electric, Jack Welch, declared that ‘From now on [choosing my successor] is the most important decision I’ll make. It occupies a considerable amount of thought almost every day’ (Peston 2008: 109). This statement expresses clearly the deep-seated belief in the importance of leadership as a property of the leader. Other key stakeholders such as shareholders seemingly share the same view: share prices rise and fall simply on the announcement of newly appointed or displaced leaders. For example, when Kodak’s performance came under criticism in the 1990s, Wall Street analysts and the media focused blame on the chief executive, Kay Whitmore. Eventually the board bowed to pressure and Whitmore was replaced with a high profile recruit from Motorola. The share price rose by nearly $5 following the receipt of this news (Khurana 2002a: 5). None the less, Kodak’s lack of competitiveness continued and by the end of the decade the share price had lost two-thirds of its value. There are numerous other examples of this phenomenon (Khurana 2002b). Collectively, these cases illustrate the huge significance of context in shaping the agenda and meaning concerning leadership – and its perceived importance and nature. In addition to national context differences, other studies have pointed up the importance of industry sector as a factor influencing receptivity to different types of leadership. For example, the leading analysts of transformational and charismatic leadership (Bass 1985a; Avolio and Bass 1988) have noted how sector plays a part in the way these roles are performed, how effective they are and how they are perceived. There are numerous other studies which reveal the particularities of leadership in different sectors. These include a growing number of studies of headteachers as leaders – most notably tracking the headteacher leadership programmes in the UK (for example, Blandford and

22 John Storey Squire 2000). There have also been studies drawing comparisons and contrasts between headteachers as leaders in the US and in the UK (Daresh and Male 2000; Brundrett 2001). There are many other sector-specific studies of leadership and leadership development. Overall, they tend to emphasize the critical importance of sector context when it comes to leadership development interventions – a point made emphatically by Graham Mole (in this volume). Beyond the level of industry sector, other studies have drilled down and focused on variations in organizational context as a governing independent variable. Indeed, one major analyst has made the point that ‘the theory of leadership is dependent on the theory of organization’ (Selznick 1957: 23). In similar vein, Charles Perrow observed ‘leadership style is a dependent variable . . . the setting or task is the independent variable’ (Perrow 1970: 6). In other words, each of these theorists emphasizes that leadership behaviour is extensively shaped by organizational characteristics. And yet much leadership discussion and research is conducted as if the organizational context did not matter. One strong attempt to link contextual features with transformational leadership is revealed in the work of Pawar and Eastman (1997). He showed how a combination of four factors – different organizational emphases on efficiency or adaptation; the relative dominance of the technical core versus the boundary-spanning units; the type of organizational structure; and the mode of governance – impact on organizational receptivity to transformational leadership. Likewise, organizational cultures can limit the potential for leadership: ‘adaptive’ organizational cultures, Pawar suggests, give more opportunity to charismatic leaders. Perceived need Early work on context often tended to adopt a rather mechanistic approach. This was characterized by a simplistic notion of ‘fit’ – that is, a proposition that different types of context could be matched with appropriate types of leadership. But contemporary approaches to leadership research are more alert to the interpretist perspective which allows insight into the socially constructed nature of perceived ‘need’. We saw in Chapter 1 that there have been a number of attempts to explain why the topic of ‘leadership’ is so especially salient at the present time. Usually the argument is that the nature of the contemporary competitive environment – with high uncertainty, and a need for agile and speedy response to customer expectations and client demand – necessitates a shift from the orderly, planned and bureaucratic mode to a more adaptive and entrepreneurial mode. The perceived ‘need for leadership’ deriving from this kind of analysis thus reflects a perceived shift in the environment–response equation. There are also, however, other accounts, which lead to different interpretations. For example, a very different form of explanation, both in terms of the focus on leadership as a priority and the kind of leadership solution seen as appropriate, can be found using socalled ‘institutional theory’ (DiMaggio and Powell 1983). From this perspective, the frenetic activity catalogued in Chapter 1 can be viewed as a record of managerial responses to perceived informed action by their competitors or comparative reference-point organizations. There does indeed seem to be more than a little emulation taking place among the impressive array of organizations queuing up to ‘do something’ about the leadership question. This is seen most clearly in the phenomenal growth in ‘corporate universities’ and ‘academies’ (see Paton et al. in this volume), but is replicated more generally in relation to leadership ‘interventions’ and ‘programmes’ of all kinds. Senior executives themselves are not unaware

Changing theories 23 of this element of ‘me-too-ism’ as they often term it. The ones I have interviewed in a range of different countries have often been willing to admit that a key driver upon them has been a sense of anxiety among their colleagues that their organization must be seen to be responding in some way to a general trend. A related perspective is found in the theory of organizational symbolism. Organizational action – such as an emphasis on leadership – can be interpreted as a ‘representation’. These representations reflect a symbolic meaning which organizational actors and their ‘audience’ of stakeholders read and interpret (Pondy et al. 1983). The perceived ‘need for leadership’, and hence for leadership development, can be interpreted in a different way when viewed from a sociological perspective. One major approach is to explain the phenomenon from the angle of interpreting ‘authority’. The classic works of Reinhard Bendix (1956) and of John Child (1969) illuminate the ways in which occupants of elite positions – and their ‘spokespersons’ – seek to legitimize authority, power and privilege. As Bendix and Child both point out, virtually all accounts of the contributions and roles of managers and leaders contain dual aspects; that is, they express ideological as well as technical dimensions (Child 1969). As Bendix observed: Wherever enterprises are set up, a few command and many obey. The few, however, have seldom been satisfied to command without a higher justification even when they have abjured all interest in ideas, and the many have seldom been docile enough not to provoke such justifications. (Bendix 1956: 1) The specific circumstances of commercial and industrial power and authority are addressed in detail by Bendix: Industrialization has been defended in terms of the claim that the few will lead, as well as benefit, the many . . . industrialization has been defended by ideological appeals which justified the exercise of authority in economic enterprises. Qualities of excellence were attributed to employers or managers which made them appear worthy of the positions they occupied. More or less elaborate theories were used in order to explain that excellence . . . (1956: 2) This sociological perspective is taken up by Miller and Form, who describe this ideology of top leaders and management as follows: A highly self-conscious group whose ethnocentrism leads them to believe that they have special gifts and attributes not generally shared by the population. The greatest of these is the ability to manage and organise people . . . Top management is an authorityconscious group. Men at the top of the supervisory structure are consumed with decision making and commanding. Yet they do not like to believe that men obey them because they have power . . . they want to feel they command because they are gifted to lead. (Miller and Form 1964: 186) Bendix echoes this theme: ‘Like all others who enjoy advantages over their fellows, men in power want to see their position as “legitimate” and their advantages as deserved . . . All rulers therefore develop some myth of their natural superiority’ (Bendix 1956: 294).

24 John Storey Drawing on this sociological insight, one can readily explain the tremendous appeal of the idea of charismatic leadership to the burgeoning population of leaders and managers in subsequent decades. Consultants and authors elaborating the charismatic paradigm could be regarded as fulfilling the ideological function as spokespersons for power holders. Likewise, it is hardly surprising that occupants of top roles have been so willing to collaborate with researchers in ‘uncovering’ and cataloguing the array of special attributes, traits, qualities and competences which they uniquely possess – helping to ‘explain’, and thus legitimize, their privileged position. Turning now to a strategic management perspective, another interpretation of the recent emphasis on leadership can be found; though it is one not necessarily in conflict with, but arguably complementary to, the sociological view just described above. From a strategic management perspective, the need for leadership is currently often addressed in terms of the ‘reputational capital’ that a celebrated leader can bring to an organization. This is a very interesting and revealing concept because it highlights the importance of stakeholder perception. In the case of a company, the stakeholder perceptions which would matter most would be those of City analysts, brokers and investment fund managers. As we noted earlier, loss of faith in a chairman or chief executive by these actors can have disastrous consequences on a company’s share price and ability to raise funds. To this extent at least, therefore, the critical importance of ‘leadership’ is hard to overstate. In the case of a voluntary sector organization or non-governmental organization (NGO) such as Oxfam, the significant stakeholders whose perceptions would matter will include the donors, and commentators whose opinions will influence the donors, such as the press. In public sector organizations like a local authority, school or health trust, important stakeholder perceptions will be those held by central government fund allocators and by clients and other sponsors. Each of these can influence the fortunes – for good or ill – of these institutions. Under such circumstances, the importance of leadership again becomes a truism. What is of further interest is that the significance of leadership can spiral, depending on prevailing political, social and economic circumstances. During those periods when government determines, for example, that leadership in the public services is to be treated as of crucial importance, then it indeed becomes so; a self-fulfilling prophecy. Funds and reputation will flow in accord with the contours of this initial determination. Other actors in the system, even those of a more sceptical disposition, are prevailed upon to play by the new rules of the game. Thus, when the Cabinet Office (Cabinet Office 2000; 2001) discussed the crucial importance of leadership in the context of its ‘modernising agenda’, it was not merely reflecting a state of affairs but constructing them. Reputational capital is thus found to have an important bearing on the understanding of leadership. By extension, ‘leadership’, under certain cultural and economic conditions, becomes a vital intangible asset to an organization. It becomes virtually a component of the brand and is potentially just as valuable. It is accordingly easy to appreciate why organizational chiefs feel compelled to play along with the leadership mystique. Being seen to have a competent leader, and indeed being seen to be attending to the task of building a constantly replenishing ‘leadership pool’ is virtually de rigeur for any self-respecting organization. The symbolic presence of these attributes is arguably of even more importance than whether there is any evidence of their impact on organizational outcomes. It is the accomplished performance of leadership, and the accomplished performance of leadership-building, that matters. So far, we have looked at the context of leadership and the different perceived needs for leadership, which emerge at different times and in different places. But the ultimate heartland

Changing theories 25 of leadership comprises a set of behaviours and capabilities. It is to an analysis of these that we now turn. Behavioural requirements and competences Research has continued unabated on the subject of the behaviours and capabilities required of leaders. To be adjudged a competent leader, an individual would usually be expected to possess a range of capabilities. In addition, leaders are expected to make a series of ‘accomplished performances’ – that is, to display requisite behaviours. These latter usually depend on the former. Thus, capability and behavioural requirements are intimately intertwined. Hence, competency frameworks normally express both required skills and required behavioural accomplishments. The capabilities or ‘attributes’ of leaders have proved to be a source of endless fascination. We noted earlier Warren Bennis’s recent description of what he believes are the central hallmarks – the ability to find meaning in negative situations, a compelling voice, integrity and adaptive capacity. But other researchers, practitioners, trainers and consultants have emphasized different attributes. The continuing variation in the competency frameworks thus echoes the problems of the early work on leader traits which also suffered from multiple and non-congruent profiles of leaders. However, some have argued that beneath the variety there are a number of more or less commonly agreed core capabilities. For example, numerous surveys reveal that large numbers of respondents identify leaders as having and displaying vision, strategic sense, an ability to communicate that vision and strategy, and an ability to inspire and motivate (Council for Excellence in Management & Leadership 2001). To what extent respondents to such surveys are truly capturing respondents’ own interpretations of their direct experience of leaders or simply reflecting conventional wisdom about accomplished leadership is very hard to determine. But there does seem to be evidence that the stylized preferred account of the nature of leadership does change over time – and, as we saw earlier, varies also by culture. Of course, leadership may still be important even though, as the literature reveals, it derives from, and varies with, social context. Recent years have witnessed increased usage of targets. But findings from a three-year research project by Tamkin and colleagues from the Work Foundation (Tamkin et al. 2010), suggests that ‘outstanding leadership’ is a subtle process. It is, they conclude, more effective when it is people oriented, in the sense of being able to elicit commitment from people, than when based on cruder forms of target setting and measurement. Current work on behavioural requirements and capabilities is very varied but it can be organized into three main categories – or what might be termed meta-capabilities. These are shown in Figure 2.2. The first meta-capability shown in Figure 2.2 emphasises big-picture sensemaking. This includes the ability to scan and interpret the environment; to differentiate threats to, and opportunities for, the organization; to assess the organization’s strengths and weaknesses; and to construct a sensible vision, mission and strategy. As is constantly emphasized in the literature and in the dominant mode of thinking over the past couple of decades, the result of this big-picture work may entail a transformative agenda for the focal organization. Indeed, the distinct impression is easily gained that in modern perception, leadership work is of this nature almost by definition. Steady-state maintenance, it often appears, is not so much a variant of leadership as one might logically suppose, but rather is a function of that ‘other’, subordinate position; namely, management. What this expresses of course is that leadership is closely identified with change making. The crucial capability here, then, is to correctly discern the direction of change.

26 John Storey

Big-picture sensemaking

Inter-organizational representation

Ability to deliver change

Figure 2.2 Meta-capabilities and behavioural requirements of leaders

This inevitably points next to the second meta-capability – the ability to deliver change. This capability hinges on a cluster of constitutive skills such as: mobilizing support; communicating; energizing and inspiring followers; active listening; adopting a supportive stance; enabling others through investing in their training and development; and empowering them to take decisions. An element within this meta-capability which has received a great deal of attention in recent years is that of ‘emotional intelligence’ (Goleman et al. 2002; Humphrey 2002; Vitello-Cicciu 2002; Wolff et al. 2002). This is a catch-all construct designed to capture a number of interpersonal skills such as self-awareness, self-management and social awareness (for example, empathy). There are two levels to this behavioural attribute, and therefore to this capability. The first level includes team or group leadership – or as it is sometimes termed, ‘near leadership’. At this level, interpersonal skills are at a premium. The second level is termed ‘distant leadership’ and it refers to those situations where the leader is not in direct personal contact with the followers – perhaps because of their large number – and so has to lead through the multiple tiers using means other than interpersonal skills. Different kinds of leadership capabilities are needed for the accomplishment of these different roles. It is also worth noting that there may be misalignment of the perceptions between distant and near-group followers (Waldman 1999). These two levels, distant and near, refer of course to the conventional idea of the hierarchical leader – that is, a leader who occupies some position of authority. Other skills will be required of those exercising lateral leadership. The necessary skills in such circumstances have been identified by Fisher and Sharp (1998), who explain ‘how to lead when you are not in charge’. The third meta-capability concerns inter-organizational representation and the ambassadorial role. While this is a vital capability for a chief executive in a private sector company it is one which has reached special prominence in the public sector as a result of the increasing requirement for inter-agency working. Indeed, the cluster of capabilities required to ‘lead’ in a network context is one of the key current themes in the leadership debate. Skills such as

Changing theories 27 coalition building, understanding others’ perspectives, persuasion and assessing client needs in a holistic rather than a single-agency manner become the premium requirements. The competency perspective has been critiqued by Salaman (2004), Bolden and Gosling (2006) and Carroll et al. (2008). They argue that the formal descriptions of competency frameworks, many of them derived from functional job analysis, tend not to reflect the reality of the practice of leadership. Leadership development methods As will be very evident from the review above, much of the literature on leadership is about the nature and types of leaders, their qualities and the need for them. However, a certain segment of the literature also attends to methods for developing leaders. This agenda, the expressed desire to improve and expand leadership development, lies behind the kind of campaign exemplified by the government’s Leadership and Management Advisory Panel, and before that, the Council for Excellence in Leadership & Management Development (CEML). The general case, as expressed by Robert Fulmer, is: ‘Leaders who keep learning may be the ultimate source of sustainable competitive advantage’ (Fulmer et al. 2000: 49). But, as periodic worries and campaigns suggest, there is a concern that there is an insufficient supply of high-quality development opportunities. From time to time, this concern becomes wrapped up in the even wider agenda, held by some, that business schools are not fully delivering what businesses ‘need’. This criticism is variously expressed: university business schools are ‘too academic’; they do not make enough effort to tailor their products to the needs of their clients; and they pay too little attention to the ‘real-world’ skills of managers. There is often a hidden agenda to such critiques and, not infrequently, also an antiacademic stance. The truth is that outside the business schools, there is already huge provision for ‘training for leadership’. The important question here, therefore, is not so much the alleged ‘neglect’ of leadership, but rather how to evaluate the quality and relevance of the overall provision already available. Most of the training and development interventions that are available both in-house and by external providers can be classified in terms of four main types: 1

2

3

4

Learning ‘about leadership’ and understanding organizations. This includes studying the work of Maslow, McGregor, Hersey and Blanchard, and Kouzes and Posner. This kind of traditional education is made available to a wide range of audiences. It comprises the basic fare for many leadership workshops. Self-analysis, team analysis and exploration of different leadership styles. These interventions are usually based on psychometric questionnaires and instruments. These ‘getting to know yourself’ sessions usually also involve feedback, coaching, and sensitivity training. Experiential learning and simulation. This mode of provision is very popular. It usually takes place in mountainous locales or in close proximity to the sea and small boats. Courses of this type operate on the basis of action learning or learning by doing. The work of John Adair (Adair 1983) often provides the basic underlying framework. The residential courses offering this approach are built around a series of outdoor tasks and challenges. The trainers act as facilitators and feed back information about behaviour patterns, which these participants use to embark on a journey of self-discovery. Top-level strategy courses. For the highest-level managers it is more common practice to send them, either individually or in groups, to prestige business schools for short

28 John Storey ‘executive courses’. These are invariably very expensive, exclusive and much valued by the participants. American business schools such as Harvard and Wharton are especially favoured but certain European schools such as INSEAD are also part of the perceived magic circle. In addition to the four types of courses above, there is a whole array of leadership development activities within companies. These include leadership coaching (Robertson 2009); online learning for leadership (Ladkin et al. 2009; Vicere 2000); 360-degree feedback (AlimoMetcalfe 1998); action learning for leaders (Dotlich and Noel 1998); accelerated development programmes and special project assignments (Giber et al. 2000); seminars and career planning for so-called ‘high potentials’ (or ‘HiPos’); courses to align with critical transition moments (such as first and subsequent leadership-tier promotions); secondments; and various combinations of these approaches (London 2002; Avolio and Bass 2002; McCauley et al. 1998; Conger and Benjamin 1999; Hollenbeck and McCall 1999). There is a fundamental dilemma that haunts many leadership development events. Because leadership is perceived as fundamentally about ‘doing’ rather than ‘knowing’, there is an inherent bias towards activity-focused and indeed brisk-paced encounters. The hours are long and the programme is normally packed. Participants, clients and providers often collude in fulfilling the prior expectation that events must be exciting and fast moving. In consequence, there is little time for reflection or strategic thinking. These characteristics of leadership development events are self-evidently in tension with the kind of clear thinking supposedly required of top leaders. So far in this chapter, we have taken an overview of the different ways in which leadership has been approached and understood, and we have introduced a basic conceptual framework, which helps to locate the relevant key variables. In the following section we turn to an examination of the proposition that there is an overall trend towards a new theory of leadership.

Post-charismatic and post-transformational leadership? To what extent is there evidence that the enthusiasm for heroic, charismatic and transformational leadership is waning? In this final section of the chapter, this is the issue that will be assessed. The terms ‘charismatic’ and ‘transformational’ are used more or less interchangeably in much of the literature. However, it is possible to make a distinction between the two. Distilling a large literature on the ‘charismatic leader’ (Rowold and Laukamp 2009; Bass 1985a; Bryman 1992; Conger and Kanungo 1998 and 1987; Sankowsky 1995), the notion can be broadly captured by reference to six elements: • • • • • •

a heroic figure (usually with previously attributed success stories); a mystic in touch with higher truths; a value-driven individual rather than one who seems purely self-serving; someone who is perceived to ‘know the way’; an individual who has a vision of a more desirable and achievable future; and finally someone thought to be capable of caring for and developing followers.

It is evident from all six points that they reflect attributes of personality and behaviour. The construct of the ‘transformational leader’, on the other hand, although closely related

Changing theories 29 in many ways, is distinct in that it refers to an approach to leading which aspires to significant organizational change through engaged and committed followers. It was John McGregor Burns who emphasized the meaning and significance of transformational leadership by contrasting it with transactional leadership (Burns 1978). This theme was picked up and elaborated by Bass (1985a). According to Bass, transformational leadership has four components: • • • •

individualized consideration (the leader is alert to the needs of followers and also takes care to develop them); intellectual stimulation (the leader encourages followers to think in creative ways and to propose innovative ideas); inspirational motivation (energizing followers to achieve extraordinary things); idealized influence (offers followers a role model).

The component which most centrally captures the idea of transformational leadership is that of ‘inspirational motivation’. This notion is decidedly change-focused. It holds forth the idea of ordinary people achieving extraordinary things through the influence of the leader. This kind of leader reduces complexity, doubt, cynicism and ambiguity by cutting through to the ‘essential’ elements, and these are expressed in simple, readily understandable language. Moreover, these simple truths are expressed with conviction. The goal – or better still the vision – is rendered clear, and it is made to seem both desirable and achievable. Organizational members are asked to forsake mediocrity and routine and aspire instead to reach a future state of such high achievement that it deserves the willing expenditure of extra discretionary effort and commitment (Bass 1985b, 1990). Thus, there are evident overlaps between the notions of the charismatic leader and the transformational leader. In brief, transformational leaders usually require many of the attributes of charisma. But conversely, charisma alone is not enough to enable transformational leadership. However, for the purposes of the present analysis, we are rather less interested in the distinction or the differences between the two than in the way that the general notion of charismatic and transformational leadership captured the imagination of analysts, observers, consultants, trainers and organizational decision makers at the end of the twentieth century. In general, these and other players were mobilized behind the prescribed shift from the old and supposedly discredited transactional approach, to the new supposedly transformational approach. The campaign – urged along by management consultants and trainers – sought to explain and persuade a wide audience of the advantages and the elements of the ‘new’ approach. Especially influential – mainly because they were widely used by consultants – were the works of Tichy and Devanna (1986) and Kouzes and Posner (1997). These, and similar works, emphasize the work and skills of transformational leaders in recognizing the need for change – even when an organization appears to everyone else to be enjoying continued success; creating a new vision – most probably developed and refined with others in the organization; and embedding or institutionalizing changes within the organization. Much of this message is amplified in the influential general works on leadership, management, marketing and business by figures such as Tom Peters, one of the most successful management gurus of all time. For example, a key part of his constantly reiterated message was: You have got to know where you are going, to be able to state it clearly and concisely – and you have to care about it passionately. That all adds up to vision, the concise

30 John Storey statement/picture of where the company and its people are heading, and why they should be proud of it. (Peters and Austin 1985: 284) Given the extraordinary reach that the Tom Peters message achieved among the management populations of the Western world, it is hardly a matter for surprise that surveys of managers find these attributes readily reflected back when questions are asked about the nature and ‘meaning’ of leadership. Similar powerful messages were diffused by management consultants using the works of Bradford and Cohen (1984), Kouzes and Posner (1997), and Kotter (1988; 1990). Transformational leadership was part of the wider message of ‘excellence’ and ‘high performance’ that has been – and to a large extent still is – so pervasive since the 1980s. For example, it has been argued that the inspirational leadership style of Steve Jobs at Apple Computer, Inc. in the 1980s created: a corporate culture that has become widespread. In this new organisation, employees were supposed to work ceaselessly, uncomplainingly, and even for relatively low pay not just to produce and sell a product but to realise the vision of the messianic leader. (Khurana 2002a: 4) This kind of idea took a knock with the events surrounding Northern Rock and RBS. Our argument here is that the profile of ‘transformational leadership’ mirrored and reinforced other, wider themes of the late twentieth century. ‘Change management’ was also very much to the fore for a whole array of reasons – not least because of concern about fierce competition from fast-growing economies in various parts of the world. Large proportions of public and private sector organizations were persuaded that they had to embark on significant restructuring and revitalization. Increased global competition and deregulation of markets led senior executives to feel less secure. Traditional formulas such as large scale, market dominance and mass production seemed to offer far less reliable answers. New technologies and new forms of consumer behaviour made the large industrial and commercial bureaucracies seem slow, out of touch and vulnerable. Many of them embarked on extensive downsizing, delayering and outsourcing. Employees were less likely to be offered long-term careers or jobs for life. Employment contracts became looser as part-time, short-term and fixed-term contracts appeared to proliferate. The challenges were huge and numerous. Who could divine which of the radical paths should be chosen? How were the new and farreaching uncertainties to be confronted? Who could explain to organizational members the imperative to change, and at the same time convince them of the need for new behaviours and the need for a ‘new deal’ in their relations with their employing organization? Under these sorts of conditions, it is no surprise that the idea of the transformational leader became so appealing. The introduction of a deus ex machina figure became almost formulaic. Health trusts were prevailed upon to bring in larger-than-life chair figures from the private sector and ‘interim managers’ as chief executives. The government and health trust nonexecutives wanted ‘leader’ figures – people who would exude confidence, energy, and enthusiasm. These were in effect ‘interim managers’, whose role was seen as temporary; ‘experts’ parachuted in at the top with a mission to bring about significant change before they went native and became embroiled in local culture and assumptions. The same concept was extended to ‘failing schools’ where ‘superheads’ from successful schools were brought in to effect dramatic transformations. (But now the educational world seems to have moved

Changing theories 31 beyond this model. The superheads initiative has encountered a number of harsh realities and the concept appears to have been quietly de-emphasized in favour of a new accent on communities of learning). The overall thrust of the transformational leader proposition was prefigured in the hugely influential management bestseller In Search of Excellence (Peters and Waterman 1982). It is worth recalling that much of the Peters and Waterman case was, in effect, a treatise on the need for transformational and charismatic leadership. As was the case twenty years later in the expressed concerns leading up to the launch of the Council for Excellence in Management and Leadership, there is an incipient critique of the ‘rational model of management’ associated with, though not confined to, the business schools. Peters and Waterman were critical of the overemphasis on central strategic planning, central control systems and complex formal organization structures. Drawing on their assessment of the success factors in a number of ‘excellent companies’ they made a case for correcting all of this with a new formula. It is worth reprising this new formula and the ‘recipe for excellence’ as espoused by Peters and Waterman. It comprised a series of eight attributes. These were: • • • • • • • •

a ‘bias for action’, rather than excessive analysis and committee work; ‘close to the customer’, rather than concern with internal processes; autonomy and entrepreneurship – innovative units rather than bureaucratic procedural hierarchy; ‘values-driven’ [and] ‘strong corporate culture’, rather than rules and procedures; ‘stick to the knitting’ (focus on core business where passion can count and avoid the dissipation of energy implied by conglomerates); loose-tight properties (strong values but mistakes are tolerated and experimentation rewarded); hands-on approach (senior executives engage directly in the core business); success through involved people.

Looked at afresh, it is easy to see that In Search of Excellence, and the subsequent numerous management workshops and presentations that made Tom Peters a multimillionaire, could quite easily have been sold as a treatise on ‘leadership’. Notably, in the sequel, A Passion for Excellence (Peters and Austin 1985), a new explicit emphasis was indeed placed on leadership, but Peters claimed that it was implicit in the original work. In my view this is true. It reinforces the interpretation that the original work could have been recast as an analysis of the importance and impact of leadership. In a trenchant critique of In Search of Excellence, David Guest assesses the work as ‘Right enough to be dangerously wrong’ (Guest 1992). The Guest critique is also pertinent, I suggest, to much of the wider literature on leadership. There are methodological criticisms, and it is relevant to note that a great deal of the transformational leadership literature is similarly superficial in its evidence base; see, for example, Tichy and Devanna’s influential 1986 work which was in fact based on a study of only twelve US chief executives. There are also conceptual and theoretical shortcomings. For example, it is not clear which of the attributes have the greater importance, and there is a neglect of environmental factors, such as changes in market conditions (the subsequent failures and difficulties of the original ‘excellent’ case were indicative of this partial attention to relevant variables). In other words, just as Peters and Waterman were partially right to emphasize the range of skills and issues that had arguably been neglected, so too were the transformational leadership enthusiasts partially

32 John Storey right to point up the limits of the transactional mode. What was dangerously wrong was the naïve and one-sided attention to this new solution. There are now increasing signs of disenchantment with the concept of the assertive, nononsense leader, whether of the charismatic or transformative variety. Some of this discontent and doubt we have already noted. But there is more, and it is increasing. The ‘shadow side of charisma’ has been noted by a number of writers; Conger and Kanungo (1998), Howell and Avolio (1992) and Sankowsky (1995). The dangers of narcissism and the associated misuse, and even abuse, of power were thus known about even at the height of the period when charismatic and transformational leadership were being celebrated. There were even specific case analyses where malign effects had been experienced in corporations such as People’s Express, Polaroid-Kodak and Disney (Garrett 1986; Berg 1976; Sankowsky 1995). But overall, against the cacophony of general applause, they were inconspicuous spectres and ones very much in the background at this time. Sankowsky explored the problem of the exploitation of dependency among the followers of charismatic, narcissistic leaders. And the highly regarded Manfred Kets de Vries has been especially notable for his clinical reflections on some of the dysfunctional aspects of leadership (de Vries 1989; 1994; 2000). But these isolated warning signs have been brought together in a far more developed way in recent times, to such a degree that the charismatic-transformational model itself is now being questioned. The research has also become more systematic and critical. For example, following a study of CEO successions in the US, Khurana (2002a) found that the widespread faith in the power of charismatic leaders had resulted in a number of problems. There was an exaggerated belief in the impact of CEOs on companies because recruiters were pursuing the chimera of a special ‘type’ of individual. There was a further tendency for companies to neglect suitable candidates while entertaining unsuitable ones. Finally, appointed charismatic leaders were problematic because it was found they ‘can destabilise organisations in dangerous ways’ (Khurana 2002a: 4). A common trait in the charismatic leaders studied was their willingness to deliberately fracture their organizations as a means to effect change. The destructive impact of a charismatic leader is exemplified by the case of Enron. Its CEO Jeff Skilling ‘induced blind obedience in his followers’, and while his abilities as a ‘new economy strategist were overrated’ (he instigated the shift to an asset-light position for the company), what he excelled at was ‘motivating subordinates to take risks to think outside the box – in short to do whatever pleased him’ (Khurana 2002a: 7). The case illustrates the dangerous downside of charismatic leadership – the dismissal of normal checks and balances and the impatience with, if not complete disregard of, convention and rule. These are of course the qualities that prompted their appointment and that helped shape their remit in the first place. As Khurana observes, the recent display of ‘extraordinary trust in the power of charismatic CEOs resembles less a mature faith than it does a belief in magic’ (2002a: 8). A similar critique, albeit from a different perspective, is mounted by Michael Maccoby (2000). Writing prior to the burst of the dot.com boom and the corporate scandals which burst onto the scene in 2001 and 2007–2008, Maccoby warned presciently of the risks and downsides of the eager search for, and celebration of, corporate leaders with charismatic qualities. He argues that the 1980s and 1990s provided fertile ground for the rise to prominence of the type of personality which Freud termed ‘narcissistic’. Narcissists were one of Freud’s three main personality types. Unlike the popular stereotype, the term as used in clinical psychology denotes a set of orientations which have positive as well as negative attributes. Among the important positive aspects, such people help disturb the status quo and stimulate change.

Changing theories 33 However, Freud also noted the negative side to narcissism. Narcissists are distrustful, suspicious and even paranoiac. Their achievements feed tendencies to arrogance, and ‘feelings of grandiosity’ (Maccoby 2000: 70). They are poor listeners and tend to have an overblown sense of their own good judgement even in the face of opposition. They thrive on risk and are prepared to destroy current practices and strategies. They seek power, glory and admiration. They present a persona of supreme self-confidence and hubris. They suggest to themselves and others that they can do no wrong. Maccoby’s case is that the last two decades of the twentieth century provided the environment that allowed an unprecedented number of narcissistic personalities to occupy prominent leadership positions: With the dramatic discontinuities going on in the world today, more and more organizations are getting into bed with narcissists. They are finding that there is no substitute for narcissistic leaders in an age of innovation. Companies need leaders who do not try to anticipate the future so much as create it. But narcissistic leaders – even the most productive of them – can self-destruct and lead their organizations terribly astray. For companies whose narcissistic leaders recognize their limitations, these will be the best of times. For other companies, these could turn out to be the worst. (Maccoby 2000: 77) For RBS, Lehman Brothers, Andersen, Marconi and many other companies, these proved to be prophetic words. But have the dramatic events of the past few years been enough to signal the end of the love affair with charismatic and transformational leaders? People are beginning to look for alternatives to the charismatic transformational leader. There is a growing realization that there are no easy answers and that an alternative mode of leadership must be one which promotes learning and is easier to sustain than the concept of the Quixotic hero. Michael Fullan’s work (2001a and 2001b) presents an implicit model of post-charismatic leadership based around embedded learning, devolved leadership in teams and learning as a product of conflict, experimentation and false starts. That incipient leadership model has been refined and developed by many of the contributors to this volume. Looking to the future The campaign for a shift from transactional to transformational leaders that dominated the leadership and management agenda for at least two decades from the late 1970s or early 1980s has evidently run into some choppy waters of late. But has the model of the charismatic and transformational leader truly been abandoned? There is certainly much more caution, suspicion and scepticism of the kind of overblown claims which were relatively unquestioned at the height of the charisma boom. This caution and scepticism carries consequences for modes of leadership development. However, even now, in the period of aftershock following corporate collapse and salutary lessons in stock market fluctuations, it seems unlikely that all of the ideas surrounding the idea of the transformational leader will be abandoned. There will be more caution, certainly, and the apparently unbridled optimism and enthusiasm of the kind of management consultancy works exemplified by Kouzes and Posner (1997) may not find such easy favour. Moreover, there may, for a while, be some greater attraction towards the less bombastic style of charismatic leader. This is the thesis of Birkenshaw’s Leadership: The Sven Goran Erikkson Way. The more modest, thoughtful and quiet approach will always be attractive in some quarters but it seems highly unlikely that it represents an entirely new dominant model. A more balanced

34 John Storey approach is now in evidence. It is increasingly being argued that effective leaders are both transactional and transformational in their leadership styles (Avolio and Bass 2002). They term their leadership development approach as encouraging ‘the full range of leadership styles’. While stakeholders will probably approach staffing decisions in a more judicious way in future, the allure of a leader who promises to point to new appealing directions and also to mobilize and energize followers will continue to be irresistibly appealing. Indeed, as long as organizations require innovation, then this kind of leader will be sought. There may, however, be less naïveté about what a leader can achieve among all the other variables which influence organizational outcomes and success. A notable development is the idea of ‘governance’ as a means of ensuring that leaders act within certain boundaries and that they can be held to account. In the chapters that follow, the broad themes, issues and trends overviewed in these first two chapters are explored in greater detail.

Questions for discussion 1 2 3

To what extent can theories of leadership be classified in a chronological manner? Would you add any significant elements to the conceptual framework shown in Figure 2.1? What other key issues and trends could be identified in addition to those discussed in this chapter?

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Part II

The changing elements of leadership

3

Leadership, ethics and integrity Iain Mangham

Chapter outline This chapter: • • •

Explores concerns about ethics and integrity with specific examples of leadership in action. Describes media reactions to apparent catastrophic lapses in leadership integrity – most especially with reference to Enron – and comments upon these. Considers the idea that newer forms of capitalism are presenting a particular challenge to traditional ideas about leadership integrity.

Foreword by the Editor Professor Iain Mangham died in December 2004. He was formerly Head of School at the Management Centre, University of Bath and before that he had been, among other things, a senior executive with Eli Lilley. He was a tremendously influential individual. The penetrating nature of this chapter, which he wrote for the first edition as he reflected upon the lapses in corporate integrity that led to the collapse of Enron and other companies in 2001, remains just as relevant and insightful for understanding the financial and economic crisis which followed later in that same decade. A reading of this chapter with those recent events in mind is now even more thought-provoking than it was the first time around. Iain begins his analysis of integrity and leadership with the World Economic Forum held each year in Davos, Switzerland. How remarkable and ironic it is that in 2010 the Davos meeting was dominated by debates between leading bankers and regulators about how to reform and restructure following catastrophic failures in integrity. The forum’s own proposals for reform, led by a steering group of senior figures from Barclays, JP Morgan, Allianz and others, were brought together in a report entitled ‘Restoring Trust and Rethinking Business Models Critical to Financial System Resilience’. Whether the proposals in that report really get to the heart of the issue in the way that Mangham does in this chapter is a matter for grave doubt.

Introduction Every year some of the most senior politicians and business leaders attend the World Economic Forum in Davos. It is a gathering of the great and the good, the movers and the shakers, to debate matters of common concern. The main theme of the World Economic Forum held in Davos in January 2003 was trust. According to the commentator Hamish McRae, many of the ‘more thoughtful people’ who run large companies have been shaken by the decline in the reputation of the business community and ‘of course the lapses in the

42 Iain Mangham ethical behaviour of both commercial and the investment banks that have led to this decline’. It was widely expected that the participants would determine ‘that they behave more honourably in the future’ (McCrae 2003). The anxious discussion at the Davos conclave was a response to the near-hysteria generated by the spectacular collapse of some of America’s largest companies, notably Enron and WorldCom. The demise of the former in particular has been called ‘cataclysmic’ and ‘the most egregious example of executive piracy in American corporate history’ (Lambert 2002). Many other companies have been tarred with the same brush. Richard Lambert, for example, in an article in The Times, noted that ‘The grandest companies on Wall Street stand accused of behaviour that would embarrass a Coney Island card sharp’ (ibid.). This chapter is about leadership and integrity and takes the form of a response to the responses. It is neither a review of theories of leadership, nor of the equally vast literature on ethics in business. My concern here is to consider issues of leadership and integrity in contemporary rapidly growing businesses. In this chapter I propose to take Enron as an example. In many respects it can serve to illustrate the issues facing many of the other companies that have been accused of behaving in a morally reprehensible manner. As my starting point I will outline how its collapse has been seen by some commentators, and I will overlay these descriptions with the model of leadership developed by Badaracco and Ellsworth (1989), which promotes integrity as central to high-achieving management. I will go on to comment upon both Enron and the model, and will offer some thoughts on character, ethos, leadership and integrity.

The rise and fall of ‘the world’s leading company’ The description of Enron that follows is based upon a limited number of sources: partly on articles that appeared in the press in the months after the company went into administration, and more substantially upon three books that were published within a year or so of its demise. The first to appear was Pipe Dreams: Greed, Ego and the Death of Enron (2002), written by Robert Bryce, a business journalist; the second was Anatomy of Greed: The Unshredded Truth (2002), by Brian Cruver, a sometime senior manager at Enron; and the third was Enron: The Rise and Fall (2003), by Loren Fox, another business journalist. Their descriptions offer differing versions of Enron’s history, but to a greater or lesser extent they are all concerned with attributing blame for the company’s catastrophic fall. Robert Bryce is probably the most direct: ‘Fish rot at the head. Enron failed because its leadership was morally, ethically, and financially corrupt’ (Bryce 2002: 12). The ‘key miscreants’, from Bryce’s perspective, are the most senior managers in Enron – Kenneth Lay, chairman and founding CEO; Jeffrey Skilling, sometime president and CEO; and Andrew Fastow, chief financial officer – and ‘the Enron board members, the hapless, hoodwinked Greek chorus of fat cats – many of whom had special “consulting” deals with Enron – who stood idly by while Enron was ruined’ (ibid.: 12). Professor Steve Salbu, who offers a foreword to the second book – Cruver’s Anatomy of Greed – provides us with a taste of what is to come. He compares the demise of Enron with the attacks on the World Trade Center and argues that each has had a cataclysmic effect: ‘Bad people can obliterate the world’s most massive skyscrapers; bad people can destroy the world’s most powerful corporations’ (Cruver 2002: xi). As elsewhere, the usual suspects – Lay, Skilling and Fastow – are paraded as having some responsibility for the company’s failings, but Cruver argues that the true villains are those who should have been the company’s real leaders: the so-called independent members of the board, who were required to have an

Leadership, ethics and integrity 43 agenda strictly in line with shareholders. He claims that these people ought to have been challenging the management – arguing with them and closely monitoring their plans, reports and results – instead of ‘just sitting on their hands (sometimes in a blacked out room), agreeing to whatever recommendations were put before them’ (ibid.: 22). Loren Fox is more circumspect in attributing blame than the other two authors. In his introduction he asserts that Enron cooked its books, but argues that the system allowed – possibly even encouraged – rule breaking. He concludes that ‘Nearly everyone is to blame, from Republicans to Democrats, from accountants to lawyers, and from Wall Street to Main Street’ (Fox 2003: vi). However, he considers – like the other writers – that the board is particularly culpable. He asserts that the role of its members is to ask probing questions. He notes that in Enron they routinely ‘rubber-stamped’ the practices of the three most senior managers in the company. In 2001 Enron’s board included one accounting professor, two former energy regulators and four executives of financial and investment firms. ‘Couldn’t one of these directors’, Fox asks, ‘have had the expertise to spot problems in Enron’s accounting practices?’ He cites the Powers Report – by a committee set up to investigate Enron – apparently agreeing with its conclusion that there was ‘a systematic and pervasive attempt by Enron’s Management to misrepresent the Company’s financial condition . . . There was a fundamental default of leadership and management’ (ibid.: 300). He does, however, single out one named person for particular attention and blame. The sometime CEO Jeff Skilling is seen to be at the centre of the company and of its problems: As Skilling’s stock was rising in the company, Enron took on more of the entrepreneurial and extremely competitive personality that he had hoped to fashion. Unfortunately, it could also be a greedy, self-involved, overconfident personality – and those characteristics sowed the seeds of hubris. (Fox 2003: 97) Although the books and articles vary in the extent to which they attribute blame to specific actors within Enron, they appear to agree that – in the final analysis – it is not the culture or the systems but individuals that are responsible for the perceived wrongdoing. Beyond all of the comment and outrage there is a feeling that given better leadership, many of the problems in Enron and other companies would not have occurred. In many respects this is a difficult argument to sustain in the case of Enron. Until shortly before its problems became public Enron was seen to be a very well-managed company. In February 2000, for example, Fortune magazine’s survey of America’s most admired companies named Enron the most innovative US firm for the fifth straight year. In the same survey, Enron also topped ‘the quality of management’ list, coming in ahead of Jack Welch’s General Electric. Later that year the magazine included Enron in its list of ‘10 stocks to last the decade’. Fortune was not alone in its assessments – many newspapers, articles and analysts hailed its management and its stock. Business schools – notably Harvard – fell over themselves to write case studies demonstrating the strength of the company and the skilled leadership of Enron (ibid.: 189). However, to the best of my knowledge none of those cheering Enron on in its good years questioned its integrity or the moral leadership of the company.

A model of leadership So how might a theory of leadership re-describe the spectacular demise of companies such as Enron? Perhaps what is required is a theory that can accommodate the perception that the

44 Iain Mangham company was managed well in what we may call the technical aspects of management and leadership, a framework that also focuses on the moral aspects of managing that so many perceive to be a major reason for Enron’s fall from grace. Joseph L. Badaracco and Richard Ellsworth (1989) offer such a tool. It rests on their experience of working in companies, consulting for them and writing and teaching hundreds of cases at Harvard Business School. It is informed by the literature on leadership and tested and refined through extensive discussions with high-achieving senior executives. The authors hold that integrity is ‘at the very heart of understanding what leadership is’. For them, integrity suggests wholeness and coherence. It also suggests ‘rightness, a sense of moral soundness’ (ibid.: 98). The authors hold that the key to high achievement lies in consistency and coherence among three elements: a leader’s personal values; a leader’s aspirations for his organization; and a leader’s actions. They describe the personal values that lead to outstanding managerial performance under three headings: strong personal ethics; positive belief in others; and a compelling vision for their company. The second, central, element of their model of leadership is that high-achieving leaders have visionary, perhaps even idealistic, aims for their companies. Overlapping somewhat with their description of personal values, Badaracco and Ellsworth maintain that there are five aspects to a leader’s aims for his company: recruiting, developing and promoting people with high intellectual ability and the desire to excel; ensuring that members of the organization have a deeply shared sense of community and of the company’s goals and purpose; seeing that communication is open and candid even to the point of heated emotional debate; structuring the company in such a way that subordinates have substantial autonomy; and determining that a desire for high ethical standards pervades the company (ibid.: 103–5). The third element of the model – action – consists of the link that a leader makes between his or her personal beliefs and the aims he or she has for the organization. It is through action that a leader will ‘move a company toward the ideal organization, one that is consistent with the leader’s personal values’ in a world beset with choices and dilemmas (ibid.: 109). Consistency is the essence of leadership: commitment to high ethical standards and to a vision for a company must remain firm, regardless of situational pressures. Respect for others, demanding standards, and expectations of candor must all remain constant. Preoccupation with substance should not give way to the shifting tides of varying situations. (Badaracco and Ellsworth 1989: 206) Applying these ideas to Ken Lay at Enron, it is possible to argue that he espoused a strong personal ethic. He was instrumental in setting up the company’s code of ethics and he was a ‘prominent speaker on business ethics before his company bit the dust’ (McCrae 2003). Badaracco and Ellsworth argue that the principal standards against which personal ethics should be adjudged are honesty and fairness. These were attributes that Lay was proud to hold dear to himself and his company. They were the attributes that he stressed in his introduction to the company’s code of ethics, which everyone was required to sign: ‘We want to be proud of Enron and to know that it enjoys a reputation for fairness and honesty and that it is respected’ (Cruver 2002: 333). They were the ‘core values’ that were drummed into new starts and were printed at the bottom of every sheet of Enron stationery – RICE: respect (‘We treat others as we would like to be treated ourselves’); integrity (‘We work with others openly, honestly, and sincerely’); communication (‘We have an obligation to communicate’); and excellence (‘We are satisfied with nothing less than the best in everything we do’) (Cruver 2002: 42; Fox 2003: 79).

Leadership, ethics and integrity 45 The second personal value is a strong belief in the ability of other people. Badaracco and Ellsworth believe that good leaders can attract high-calibre individuals to their organizations and can shape and motivate them to act for reasons beyond personal economic self-interest. Lay clearly attracted very high-calibre people to Enron, who – in turn – recruited and trained the brightest and the best. By the year 2000 over half of Enron’s 17,000 employees had college or advanced degrees (Fox 2003: 87). Lay delegated responsibility, and gave many people the opportunity to show what they could do. Many employees appeared to be proud to work for the company. Throughout the 1990s, the company increasingly developed a name as a centre for smart, ambitious young professionals. They saw Enron as the ultimate launching pad for a business career: ‘Highly respected, bitterly admired – if you were craving the fast track, you dreamed of working at Enron’ (Cruver 2002: 1). It is also possible to argue that – together with Jeff Skilling – he was largely responsible for shaping the motivation and behaviour of those he recruited. Although the desire for personal gain appeared to be strong amongst Enron employees, to the point of greed in some of them, there is strong evidence that many were enthusiastic about building a strong and respectable business. To this extent they reflected the fact that Lay and Skilling in particular appeared to have a compelling vision for the company. Badaracco and Ellsworth claim that this vision has its source in ‘personal and imaginative creativity’ that extends beyond analysis and is embodied in actions that reflect ‘initiative, risk taking, and an unswerving commitment to its achievement’ (1989: 101). Few would dispute that Enron was such a company: it aspired to become the world’s leading company and it nearly made it. Furthermore, there appears to be evidence of open communication and of plans being tested through vigorous debate. All three of the authors cited above provide instances where the various levels and divisions of the company challenge and debate ideas, plans and procedures. Fox, for example, speaks of the circumstance where business groups were set to compete against each other as though they were different companies (Fox 2003: 86). Skilling boasted that ‘the whole organization is like a free market of people and ideas’ (ibid.: 89). However, as we have seen, these writers also provide strong evidence that this challenge and testing was not a feature of the board; or, it would seem, of the accountants, bankers and analysts who so faithfully followed Enron into the abyss. For instance, Andersen clearly knew of Enron’s practices and even described aspects of them as ‘intelligent gambling’, but, after having decided to make some suggestions to Enron in order to mitigate their concerns, when asked they said nothing (ibid.: 229). It is clear that the aspect of leadership that Badaracco and Ellsworth hold dear – a desire that high ethical standards pervade the company – is the one that is found wanting in Lay, Skilling, Fastow and the members of the board. For Badaracco and Ellsworth ethical standards are the crucial links between leaders’ aims for their organizations, on the one hand, and their own personal beliefs and actions on the other. The values that Badaracco and Ellsworth hold to be important to the promotion of high ethical standards are ‘honesty, fairness, mutual respect and trust, and compassion and sensitivity in the exercise of power’ (Badaracco and Ellsworth 1989: 104). Lay claimed that fairness and honesty were the watchwords of Enron, but, as others have claimed since Enron’s fall, unfairness and dishonesty may well have been the order of the day within the company (Cruver 2002: 333). Rupert Cornwell writes about an investigation into Enron’s tax avoidance that it apparently included the bribing of tax officials. He reports the words of a Republican senator who claimed that the tax avoidance schemes read like the plot ‘of a conspiracy novel’ (Cornwell 2003: 21). Enron’s treatment of its own employees when bankruptcy loomed – reneging on its pledge to meet the terms of their individual employment contracts and restricting their rights to cash in the

46 Iain Mangham value of their Enron stock until it was worthless – is seen to indicate the senior management’s lack of fairness (Bryce 2002: 2–10). More than one commentator has noted that the senior managers realized much of the value of their own share options shortly before the steep decline in the share price set in. I could go on citing instances, but the story is by now becoming well known. Clearly the leadership of Enron is seen to fall well short of the characteristics that Badaracco and Ellsworth deem to be necessary for a high-achieving company. Were they to take a look at Enron I feel that they would probably concur with Bryce’s judgement that ‘Enron failed because its leadership was morally and ethically corrupt’ (2002: 12).

Comment But are the criteria and the standards promulgated by Badaracco and Ellsworth the ones that should be adopted in considering the behaviour of employees of Enron? Here I will argue that morality and ethical behaviour are usually situated socially within distinct communities and culturally within particular structures of moral reasoning and practice. Badaracco and Ellsworth derived their theories from and tested them with managers and leaders whose heyday – by and large – was in the twenty or thirty years after the Second World War. Enron’s brief time was – effectively – that of the last six years of the century. I will argue that the ethos of these two periods was different; that what was required of Badaracco’s generation of leaders was different from what was required of the generation to which Enron’s leaders belonged and that the ethical foundations of the two periods differ. I will begin with some examples that illustrate the moral reasoning and practice of Enron. All three of the writers with whom I began this chapter make some reference to the circumstances in which Enron employees found themselves. Cruver (or his editor), writing on his book jacket, notes ‘the insidious group-think that made Enron employees unquestioningly accept propaganda’ and attributes this to it having been ‘spoon-fed [to the employees] by Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling’ (Cruver 2002: jacket blurb). Elsewhere Cruver makes a direct reference to the power of the immediate situation that he and the other writers speak of as corporate culture: ‘For those who argue that companies are “controlled” by people, I refer them to Exhibit X: Enron. The people were “controlled” by the company’ (ibid.: 343). In an interesting insider’s view of the company he offers many insights into the culture. It is Fox, however, who writes in a more systematic way about the culture of the company. He notes that by the mid-1990s the trading floors physically dominated the entire organization. He describes a ‘football-field-sized’ office in which, ‘yelling and gesturing with the cockiness most associated with traders of stocks and bonds, the employees were constantly working their phones’ (Fox 2003: 77). He claims that there was a culture of risk taking and greed, and depicts it as a highly competitive environment in which success was richly rewarded and failure meant a quick exit from the company. There was a heavy emphasis upon short-term results. Deal originators and traders looked to maximize their profits on a deal before they moved on to another business unit within the company. He describes the twice-yearly performance reviews, in which colleagues as well as superiors rated each other, as having a ‘harsh Darwinian twist’ – those ranked in the top 5 per cent move onwards and upwards, those in the bottom 20 per cent were marked for dismissal (ibid.: 83). He goes on to quote Skilling’s proud boast that ‘Our culture is a tough culture. It is a very aggressive, very urgent organization’ (ibid.: 86). Enron, it seemed, was always in the throes of fundamental reorganization. Fox sums up the culture as one of putting profit first, a circumstance in which Enron hired smart people, gave them responsibility, set them to work in a highly competitive

Leadership, ethics and integrity 47 environment and rigorously ranked their performance. Those who did not make the numbers were shown the door, a procedure which created a highly stressful workplace where some simply ‘wanted to make their mark’ and move on. This, Fox concludes, simply ‘accentuated Enron’s tendency to focus on the short-term’ (ibid.: 88). Not surprisingly, this ‘trading culture’ often appeared to conflict with RICE – the company’s statement of values – and with its code of ethics. Bryce and Cruver are by turns scathing and cynical about the failure of the company to live up to its espoused ideals, but it is Fox who cites chapter and verse. He notes that Enron employees occasionally sabotaged each other’s work and – more frequently – that competition for bonuses resulted in ‘the compartmentalization of the company into competing fiefdoms’ (ibid.: 85). Elsewhere he asserts that, although Enron managers talked up the core values, in fact these same people often displayed ‘arrogance and ruthlessness’ that went against the ‘respect’ value, and that the way that individuals and units were rewarded led to the ‘communication’ value coming under severe pressure (ibid.: 79). As I have indicated above, integrity, honesty and fairness appear to have been similarly traduced. No one spoke publicly about these departures from the published code until the company came on hard times. I will spell this out with reference to a specific instance of behaviour that – after the demise of the company – was held to be deceitful.

All the world’s a stage Both Cruver and Davies offer a description of what happened at an analysts’ conference to launch Enron Energy Services (EES) in 1998 (Cruver 2002: 273; Davies 2002: 43). The problem for Enron was that the EES was not up and running in time for the conference. The response was to create and show the analysts around a ‘fake dealing room where Enron employees were choreographed to simulate trading months before the room went operational’. An entire floor of the headquarters building was gutted and fitted out with ‘over £350,000 worth of screens and computing equipment to make a “war room” to wow Wall Street’ (Davies 2002: 43). With Skilling, Lay and other members of senior management leading the way, ‘the analysts were brought through the trading floor’, where the people at the machines and manning the phones were ‘urged to look like they were putting deals together’ (Cruver 2002: 273). It is claimed that the performance, which had been rehearsed with the staff by Lay and Skilling the day before the analysts were due, lasted barely ten minutes. It worked. The analysts were impressed and went away happy. The fake conference took place in 1998. Those outside Enron only became aware of it in late 2001/early 2002. Cruver was not part of the company in 1998, but he heard about it from others when he joined Enron and later wrote about it as an example of deceitful behaviour. As I have indicated, Davies considers it a ‘scam’ although he also is writing long after the event. Somewhere between a couple of dozen and a couple of hundred people could well have been involved in the activity. It is not known if any one of those involved in the performance regarded it as deceitful or as a scam when they did what their leaders required of them. However, at the time it occurred, no one appeared to tip off the analysts, no one blew the whistle, and no one – as far as has been made known – refused to take part. Extrapolating from this incident, thousands of employees were party to other aspects of Enron’s behaviour that have now been declared to be ‘deceitful’ and ‘corrupt’, and again – as far as is known – no more than a handful appear to have questioned it, not one of them blew the whistle publicly and only a few walked away from the company. There could be a number of explanations for this: personal ambition, fear of the management, cynicism, etc. I want to suggest that perhaps the reason that no one did speak

48 Iain Mangham out was because they saw no reason to do so. That there was in fact little or no conflict between the thoughts and practices of Enron leaders and employees and the values and ways of interacting approved of by the wider community. It is possible that the trading culture of Enron, with its emphasis upon behaving ruthlessly, and upon risk, aggression, individualism, competitiveness and short-term results overwhelmed the publicly declared values of the company because it was fully in accord with the ethos which dominated (and continues to dominate) the moral reasoning and practice of a large number of companies and a growing number of governments in the last decade of the twentieth century – an ethos given impetus by Margaret Thatcher’s infamous declaration that ‘there is no such thing as society’. I derive the notion of ethos from the work of Adam Morton, who argues that crucial aspects of our understanding of one another work because they are shared (Morton 2003: 175–8). Morton argues persuasively that in order to interact successfully with one another we must have a shared conception of how to understand, and how to act so as to be understood. These factors he sees as closely linked to a shared conception of cooperation. This echoes some of the arguments of the symbolic interactionists, who would use terms such as the ‘definition of the situation’ and ‘presentation of self ‘ (Mangham 1986). In order to work successfully together we need to have a handle on one another’s motives, character and action. A particular ethos will be recognized by a stable combination of explanatory devices, a set of values both acknowledged and implicit, and norms of action. And we should expect these combinations to vary from one time to another, from one place to another and from one social group to another. Thus the Athenians had a particular ethos – a perspective on the world and a consequent set of values and specific ways of behaving towards one another – and the Spartans had quite a different ethos. The managers from whom Badaracco and Ellsworth drew their framework had a way of perceiving, valuing and interacting, and Enron’s generation of managers have quite another way. The next few paragraphs draw extensively upon Khurana’s excellent book on corporate leadership and upon my own work that looks at the financial institutions in the City of London before and after deregulation (Khurana 2002; Mangham 2003). The time in which Badaracco and Ellsworth’s managers achieved their success was the time when the market was regulated, when foreign trade was relatively slight and international competition was in its infancy. A time when, as Khurana puts it: ‘the steady visible hand of the professional trained manager directing the company towards long-term growth was seen to be the natural way to do things’ (Khurana 2002: 53). The actions of these managers were constrained by the government, through regulatory authorities, by the unions and by the employees, with whom they were enmeshed – inter alia – by notions of trust and loyalty (Sennett 1998: 122). During the era of managerial capitalism, business may be seen to have been conducted within a set of generally accepted rules that maintained a relatively ordered, stable business environment, a circumstance in which managers did what was expected of them and were respected for it (Fligstein 1990). In short, an institutional structure obtained which – in theory at least – protected and represented the community, acted on its behalf and promoted public and social interests. As I indicated earlier, for Badaracco and Ellsworth (1989) consistency was the essence of leadership. An effective leader was someone with the character to deny the shifting tides of varying situations. They use the term ‘personality’ interchangeably with ‘character’, but whenever they do so they are referring to persistent traits that are deeply ingrained in the individual. We speak of personality when our concern is how a person presents himself or herself to others (Quinton 1982: 21). Personality in most of its uses has to do with how one establishes oneself as different from other people. One can have a distinctive personality, but

Leadership, ethics and integrity 49 we do not speak of having a bad personality as we speak about people being of good or bad character. ‘Character’ has moral overtones that the word ‘personality’ lacks (Kupperman 1991: 5). This is not to argue that morality is all there is to character, but it is to argue that in any account of character thoughts and actions that are related to moral choice would loom large (ibid.: 7). To have character is to act in such a way ‘that the person one is plays a major role in any explanation of one’s behaviour’. To lack character is ‘to act in such a way that one’s behaviour might be viewed as (at least approximately) the product of forces acting on one’ (ibid.: 7). Character is a notion deriving from another millennium that argues for a bundle of enduring traits which are, generally, dispositions to have thoughts and feelings of a certain sort, and thus to act in certain ways (Aristotle 2000). As relatively permanent features of the individual’s make-up, these dispositions will explain not merely why he or she acted in a certain way, but why the same person can be counted on to act in a similar way in the future. The forces which inculcate character are primarily friends, the family and the community (Sherman 1989). And for Badaracco and Ellsworth’s generation of leaders, character clearly matters. Hunter (2000) outlines the importance of character to generations of Americans, from the early revolutionaries through to the mid-twentieth century. Character was always related to an explicitly moral standard of conduct ‘oriented toward work, building, expanding, achieving and sacrifice on behalf of a larger good’ (ibid.: 7). By the mid-twentieth century the ethical requirements placed upon individuals had begun to change, with more emphasis being placed upon the cultivation of personal preferences. The notion of personality began to replace that of character. Structural changes in the economy led to a greater emphasis upon self-expression, self-fulfilment and personal gratification (ibid.: 7). This emphasis was dramatically reinforced in the last couple of decades of the twentieth century. Shareholder capitalism appears to have taken its toll on the moral life of society. Richard Sennett argues persuasively that what he terms ‘flexible’ or ‘impatient capitalism’ has corroded character. The aspects of character that he sees as under attack are those that ‘bind human beings together and furnish each with a sustainable self’ (Sennett 1998: 17). He argues that the hallmarks of impatient capitalism are instability and uncertainty. Behaviour that earns success in the company offers little to the employee at home or in the community. Frequent job changes and consequent relocation mean that friends and communities no longer serve as witness to one’s character. Families, too, cease to be reliable inculcators of morality. My own contribution to this debate has been to note that the threads of character may well have been further shredded by the wholesale embrace of the cult of individualism derived – directly or indirectly – from the writings of Nietzsche (Mangham 2003). The followers of Nietzsche welcome upheaval and the upsetting of social relations as ‘harbingers of individualism’ (Thiele 1990). The resultant ripping apart of the social straitjacket liberates the individual from the morality of custom and renders him or her sovereign. He or she no longer has to follow the script written by others, but feels free to improvise. Others have gone further and argued that character is dead (Himmelfarb 1995, 1999; Hunter 2000). Like Sennett, Himmelfarb regrets the loss of families, neighbourhoods and communities as moralizing forces. Citing Schumpeter’s argument that the very entrepreneurial spirit that would ensure the triumph of capitalism would undermine the institutions that sustained it, she declares that the creative destruction of rampant capitalism has taken its toll on the moral life of society (Himmelfarb 1995, 1999). Hunter (2000), in his emphatic declaration of the death of character, regrets the loss of stable communities and blames the market economy and the demands of multinational capitalism for the changes that have arisen in the ethical standards of individuals. We are all now subject to an extraordinary diversity of information and communication and are influenced by lifestyles

50 Iain Mangham and ideas from well beyond our own communities, and some of us clearly identify with ethnic, religious, commercial and political groupings well beyond local and national borders. Globalization is ‘hollowing out’ states, eroding their sovereignty and autonomy. As Beck (1999) remarks, state institutions are increasingly like ‘zombies’ following the dictates of the global economy whilst failing to determine any substantive basis for enhancing public good. Enron’s leaders and Enron’s employees, like the rest of us, lack character. In effect, the terms of behaviour are now increasingly set by global markets and corporate enterprise. For Enron’s generation of leaders and managers the world is not one of ‘closed communities with mutually impenetrable ways of thought, self-sufficient economies and ideally sovereign states’ (O’Neill 1991: 282). Ethical discourse – such as it is – has become separated from deliberations in families, communities and nations, but is developing at the intersection of relatively new institutions such as the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund (Soros 2002; Singer 2002). The ethos of managerial or gentlemanly capitalism has been replaced by an emerging individualistic, less community-centred set of explanations and values, and a brasher, harsher, more exploitative variety of interaction. Its essence is perhaps most clearly stated in a treatise published in America in 1994 by James Taggart and others, in which they argue that ‘shareholders are not interested in what the company per se will look like in ten years’. They are only interested in one thing: ‘How much wealth will the company create in the future? And that very simple unadorned question must be the chief executive’s focus as well’ (Taggart et al., quoted in Roberts and Kynaston 2002: 146). These words are echoed in Samuel Brittain’s assertion that ‘Motivation apart, businessmen do not have the knowledge to advance the public interest directly and will serve their fellows best if they concentrate on maximising their shareholders’ equity’ (Brittain, quoted in Roberts and Kynaston 2002: 150). In pursuit of shareholder value, restrictions and laws have been torn up and deregulation – seen as the key to releasing the financial systems and the companies so that they could pursue wealth creation unfettered – has become the order of the day (Kynaston 2001). Quoting the words of Lord Desai – an eminent British economist – to the effect that there was really no choice, Richard Roberts and David Kynaston assert that an infinitely mobile, profit-seeking international capitalism is the only game in town: ‘It is whether to work with the grain of the system based on profitability . . . and follow policies which enhance rather than impede profitability, or go under’ (Roberts and Kynaston 2002: 151). The ethos of shareholder value marked by a determination to see and control what the organization is doing on almost a daily basis theoretically shifts some of the power from the managers and the board of directors to the investors, particularly the institutional investors. According to Roberts and Kynaston, by 2001 the major British companies were under ‘far more intensive day-to-day shareholder scrutiny – scrutiny that was liable to turn to intervention – than had been the case even as recently as ten years earlier’ (ibid.: 158). In turn, the senior management of the companies had to learn to deal with the analysts and the banks in a manner that they were not called upon to do in the era of managerial capitalism. What is more, they are to operate in an international arena that is focused upon wealth creation, where the fortunes of large companies are intimately connected with the prosperity of particular nations. Not surprisingly, politicians and the media show much greater interest in the fluctuations of their respective stock exchanges than they did several years ago. This ethos demands a new type of leadership. In the brave new Darwinian world of shareholder capitalism there is a greater focus on the individual leader. He or she is no longer a professional manager. Instead, the leader’s role is to set the direction for the company, to motivate and energize the employees, but primarily to deal with the analysts, the accountants,

Leadership, ethics and integrity 51 the banks, the government authorities, the media, the public and – above all – to deliver ever richer dividends to the shareholders. Becoming a leader in this day and age is seen to be a matter of ‘communicating an essential optimism, confidence and can-do attitude’ (Khurana 2002: 71). Leaders have become much more visible, subject to much more comment from analysts, the business media and the gossip sheets; some, for example Richard Branson in the UK and Bill Gates in the US, have become celebrities. Some have become important players whose advice is sought by governments, and some pontificate at international economic forums. A specialized market has arisen for such people. They are induced to take on the responsibilities by very large salaries, substantial bonuses and extensive stock options, as well as guaranteed redundancy/pension rights. Personality, image, dynamism and charisma are now the attributes that are seen to be the key criteria in selecting a leader. Khurana notes that as the emphasis on image projection has become so prevalent in the selection of leaders, headhunters and search committees have tended to place less emphasis on factors such as industry experience or technical knowledge in evaluating candidates for the role of CEO (Khurana 2002: 79). The newer form of capitalism demands very different attributes from those sought in the days of managerial capitalism; those who appear truly at home in the new capitalism are ‘those that signal a capacity to let go [their] past, a confidence to accept fragmentation and to dwell in disorder’ (Sennett 1998: 23).

Conclusion The picture of a late twentieth-century business leader that emerges from the foregoing is one of a personality: someone who is paid a great deal of money to advance the interests of a limited number of major shareholders, including himself or herself. He or she operates in a multinational structure and a cultural nexus that emphasizes individualism, aggression, ruthless behaviour, risk taking, competitiveness and the importance of short-term results, whilst paying lip service to the moral dimension of business. Like Enron, many companies publish codes of ethics and offer high-flown descriptions of their purposes in their mission statements. Philip Morris, the cigarette manufacturer, for example, claims to be guided by the values of ‘Integrity, trust, passion, creativity, quality and sharing’. Dupont does not just produce chemicals; instead, it is dedicated to ‘the work of improving life on our planet’ (Khurana 2002: 70). High-flown rhetoric perhaps, leaving some of us in no doubt that passion and creativity will be deployed to ensure that – come what may – the shareholders’ interests will be put before those of the planet. Leaders are not measured by vision, mission statements or codes of ethics, but like the wrapping on Christmas presents these serve as appropriate decoration. They are measured by the growth in shareholder value: ‘everything in Enron is driven . . . by earnings per share’ (Cruver 2002: 79). Not surprisingly, leaders give their full attention to that, proving the power of the adage: show me how someone is measured and I will show you how he or she will behave. None of this is to suggest that leaders of companies such as Enron do not behave with integrity. Badaracco and Ellsworth’s use of the term is one of approbation. Saying that the leaders from whom they took their cue show integrity is – for them – equivalent to saying that they are admirable people. That is certainly one meaning of the word, now well on the way to becoming redundant. Another meaning is ‘the state of being whole and undivided’ (OED). It is possible to argue that the leaders who are now somewhat hypocritically vilified for their actions in Enron and elsewhere were behaving in line with the ethos of the society in which they live; their actions could be seen to be fully in accord with the values which hitherto they

52 Iain Mangham were enthusiastically encouraged to embrace. It is important to remember that many of their actions were applauded by the accountants, the bankers, the analysts, the business academics, the media, the general public and – above all – the shareholders, large and small. Much of their behaviour was a matter of ‘bending the rules’, rather than acting illegally. Some of their behaviours were illegal and some of those who looked on approvingly were complicit with them in these actions. And Enron is not a case of one rotten apple in a barrel of good ones. Other scandals have come to light in the United States and in Europe in which similar characteristics have been observed. By February 2003 as many as 1,200 companies had been forced to restate their accounts. In late February 2003 Ahold – a Dutch company and the third biggest food retailer in the world – announced the resignation of its chief executive and finance director after finding that it had overstated its profits by the equivalent of $500 million. The Economist notes that, rather like Kenneth Lay at Enron, Ahold’s departing boss was until the end lauded for turning a dull company into a growth machine. As with Enron accounting rules were bent to give the impression that double-digit growth was continuing long after the company was actually in financial trouble. Accountants failed to pick up the deception and investors applauded long after they should have been asking hard questions. (Economist 2003: 63) As long as the current ethos prevails, leaders will continue to bend the rules and will be richly rewarded for it. They owe their appointments, their continued employment and their opportunity to make a great deal of personal wealth to their ability to hear and act upon the call for higher and higher returns for the shareholders. In obedience to this strident call it is hardly surprising that some have lied, cheated and manipulated information whilst others have looked on in barely suppressed admiration. There is little point in demanding that they behave more honourably in the future. Honour has little value in today’s market place. Some commentators demand more regulation of the behaviour of all concerned: companies, banks, accountants, analysts, the media and the institutional shareholders. The United States has begun this process by rushing through the Sarbanes–Oxley Act, which provides rules for managers and boards, and they suggest that it be implemented throughout Europe, a proposal from the new world that is being actively resisted by the old one. The United Kingdom is notably dragging its business feet, wanting nothing to do with Sarbanes–Oxley and arguing about the recommendations put forward by the Higgs Report to regulate British boardrooms, with many leaders resisting these reforms in the same manner that they successfully resisted those put forward by the Cadbury Report in 1992 and those offered by the Hampel Report in 1998. On the other hand, statutory independent regulation of auditors is seen to make sense everywhere. There is also growing support for rules promoting the mandatory rotating of auditors and to prevent accounting firms from doing consulting work for audit clients (Economist 2003: 12). The cynic within me argues that there are two problems with more rules and regulations: the first is that they simply offer more opportunities to bend or subvert them; the second is best summed up in the Latin tag quis custodiet ipsos custodies? – who is to control the authorities? Accountants are supposed to oversee company accounts, but driven by the same desire to maximize their own returns as their clients they may choose to sit upon their hands, turn a blind eye and keep their mouths shut. Although it is Andersen that shredded documents and has gone to the wall with Enron, and it is Andersen that has been cited in a number of other scandals, most of the other large accounting firms have also been tarnished in the past year

Leadership, ethics and integrity 53 or so (Economist 2003: 12). Regulations spawn regulators and regulators spawn yet more regulations. Regulators seek to control behaviour; educators seek to change it. In the wake of the Enron scandal some business schools have acknowledged culpability. They have recognized that they may have had some part in promoting the ruthless, aggressive turn that management and leadership took over the last decade of the twentieth century. Dennis Gioia notes that business schools do turn out a very skilled group of people, but acknowledges that some may leave the schools bereft of social responsibility (2002: 2). He believes that the business schools’ contribution to making a change is to make corporate social responsibility and ethical practice a more significant part of the curriculum (ibid.: 5). It is perhaps somewhat ironic that one of the reasons he puts forward for it not being taken seriously is that ethics teaching is not one of the criteria that go into the rankings of business schools. As you are measured, so shall you behave? Others doubt that even well-taught courses will have an effect on the behaviour of would-be managers and leaders. Writing in The Washington Post, Etzioni pointed out that a recent Aspen Institute study covering 2,000 graduates of the top thirteen business schools in the US found that business school education ‘not only fails to improve the moral character of the students, it actually weakens it’. Those believing that the prime responsibility of business is to maximize shareholder value went up from 62 per cent upon entrance to the schools to 82 per cent at the end of their first year (Etzioni 2002: BO4). I will not conclude this chapter on a wholly negative note. Change may come – if change there is to be – from the institutional shareholders. Given the events that have been detailed here and the recent dramatic falls in share values around the world, it is possible that boards of directors will dispense with their high-profile leaders. Two things may contribute to this seemingly unlikely outcome. First, it is a strong possibility that slower growth over the next few years will mean that everyone will have to get used to lower returns. Interest in the longterm growth of companies may become fashionable once more. This will promote very different measurements and hence different behaviours to those that were current until very recently. The market may well push boards of directors and executive search firms into showing much less interest in high-profile charismatic and high-cost leaders and into showing much more interest in less expensive or turbulent managers who have industry track records of quiet achievement (Mintzberg et al. 2002). In short, industry may well fall out of love with the whole notion of leadership, particularly when it comes to realize that what little research there is points to a relatively minor cause-and-effect relationship between leaders and company performance (Khurana 2002: 23). Secondly – and perhaps consequently – there may well be a growing realization of the damage Enron-type failures have done, not just to the companies themselves, to their former employees, their shareholders and their bankers, but also to society as a whole. The future of all companies depends upon those who are prepared to join them, and the young may well turn out to be very careful about whom they choose to work for. Hamish McCrae sums it up well: ‘Just as the 1930s unemployment encouraged young people to seek “safe” jobs, the end of 1990s excess will encourage them to seek “honourable” ones’ (McCrae 2003). Change may also be brought about by the growing demand to regulate the global economy. I do not think that more rules and greater regulation will produce integrity in the terms that Badaracco and Ellsworth would recognize. Like character, it may well be a notion for which the time has passed. Both require anchoring in a particular community at a particular time. When leaders are stripped of moral anchoring there is nothing to which they are bound to submit, nothing engraved within them to keep them in check. What is needed is the development of global ethics for a global community in parallel with and informing

54 Iain Mangham global regulation of the market (Soros 2002; Singer 2002). There is already a demand for closer scrutiny and closer regulation of the relations between companies and their stakeholders: employees, shareholders, suppliers, customers, communities, societies and those representing the environment (Stiglitz 2002). The purpose of such scrutiny and regulation should be to ensure that companies meet their obligations to all concerned. Profit seeking in the interests of shareholders alone need not be the only game in town. At the moment, however, perhaps the best hope lies with the people at Davos, both those inside the compound and those outside it. Post-Enron there may be a surprising consensus emerging. Commentators and regulators, consultants and shareholders, thoughtful business people and academics appear to be united in the view that all those concerned in commerce and business should indeed behave differently in the future. Beyond the wire fences, the demonstrators against capitalism and globalization have been growing in number and sophistication. Who knows? In the next couple of years they may be all inside the wire involved in a more productive dialogue. We may be on the cusp of a new ethos. Only time will tell.

Questions for discussion 1

2 3

To what extent does Mangham’s analysis of the Enron and other scandals that occurred around 2000/2001 apply to subsequent cases such as RBS, which surfaced just seven or eight years later? In what ways are Mangham’s ‘response to the responses’ distinctive? What kinds of approach to ethics and integrity are most suited for our times?

References Aristotle (2000) Nicomachean Ethics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Augur, P. (2000) The Death of Gentlemanly Capitalism, London: Penguin Books. Badaracco, J. L. E. and Ellsworth, R. R. (1989) Leadership and the Quest for Integrity, Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press. Beck, U. (1999) What is Globalization?, Cambridge: Polity. Bryce, R. (2002) Pipe Dreams: Greed, Ego and the Death of Enron, Oxford: Public Affairs Ltd. Cornwell, R. (2003) ‘US threatens post-Enron corporate tax clampdown’, Independent, 14 February. Cruver, B. (2002) The Anatomy of Greed: The Unshredded Truth, London: Hutchinson. Davies, R. (2002) ‘How Enron wowed Wall Street with a fake dealing room’, Evening Standard, 21 February. Economist (2003) ‘Ahold: Europe’s Enron’, 1 March. Etzioni, A. (2002) ‘A few lessons in right thinking’, The Washington Post, 4 August. Fligstein, N. (1990) The Transformations of Corporate Control, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Fox, Loren (2003) Enron: The Rise and Fall, Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. Gioia, D. (2002) ‘Business education’s role in the crisis of corporate confidence,’ Academy of Management Executive, 16(3): 142–94. Himmelfarb, G. (1995) The De-moralization of Society, London: IEA Health and Welfare Unit. —— (1999) One Nation, Two Cultures, New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Hunter, J. Davison (2000) The Death of Character: Moral Education in an Age without Good or Evil, New York: Basic Books. Khurana, R. (2002) Searching for the Corporate Savior, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kupperman, J. (1991) Character, New York: Oxford University Press. Kynaston, D. (2001) The City of London: A Club No More 1945–2000, London: Chatto & Windus. Lambert, R. (2002) ‘Are Wall Street’s ethics dead?’, The Times, 8 October.

Leadership, ethics and integrity 55 McCrae, H. (2003) ‘Trust is a vital part of good business’, Independent, 18 January. Mangham, I. L. (1986) Power and Performance in Organisations, Oxford: Blackwell. —— (2003) ‘Character and virtue in an era of turbulent capitalism’, in H. Tsoukas and C. Knudsen (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Organization Theory: Meta-Theoretical Perspectives, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mintzberg, H., Simons, R. and Basu, K. (2002) ‘Beyond selfishness’, Sloan Management Review 44 (1): 67–74. Morton, A. (2003) The Importance of Being Understood: Folk Psychology as Ethics, London: Routledge. O’Neill, B. (1991) ‘Transnational justice’, in D. Held (ed.) Political Theory Today, Cambridge: Polity. Quinton, A. (1982) Thoughts and Thinkers, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Roberts, R. and Kynaston, D. (2002) City State: A Contemporary History of the City of London and How Money Triumphed, London: Profile Books. Sennett, R. (1998) The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism, New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Sherman, N. (1989) The Fabric of Character: Aristotle’s Theory of Virtue, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Singer, P. (2002) One World: The Ethics of Globalization, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Soros, G. (2002) George Soros on Globalization, Oxford: Public Affairs Ltd. Stiglitz, J. (2002) Globalization and its Discontents, London: Allen Lane. Thiele, L. P. (1990) Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of the Soul, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Usborne, D. (2002) ‘Truth or consequences time for the chiefs of corporate America’, Independent, 8 October.

4

Understanding the crises of leadership Graeme Salaman

Chapter outline This chapter argues: • • •

That there have been repeated crises in the practice of leadership, which have been of a very serious nature and with catastrophic impacts. That the roots of these crises can be traced to the underlying models of leadership. That academics in business schools have typically been complacent and complicit in fostering these models.

Introduction We reel from leadership crisis to leadership crisis. Two major (and related) types of crisis have occurred within the last fifteen years. Neither has succeeded in generating the necessary review of the nature, role and importance of leadership. Neither has caused a reduction in the emphasis on, and perceived value of, leadership as an antidote to organizational ills and failures. Neither has yet caused a significant change in the qualities of leadership seen as necessary. Indeed, leadership continues to be seen as the best and only solution to the problems caused by leadership. But despite this, the biggest crisis could be not that leadership remains defective and unchanged but that we – the business school analysts and commentators, who should be the source of much-needed analysis, evaluation, commentary and even prescription – have failed to rise to the occasion. The crises of leadership have been met by a wall of silence from academia, calling into question not only the role and contribution of business schools (once again) but also and more fundamentally the role of business schools as leaders for the processes of necessary reform and change. Recent years have seen an extraordinary expansion in, and uncritical emphasis on, leadership. In the UK, enthusiasm for ‘leadership’ as an answer has repeatedly been revealed in major initiatives: for example, the Council for Excellence in Management and Leadership; in government, the Public Services Leadership Scheme; in education the Leadership Programme for Head Teachers – possibly the world’s largest leadership development initiative. The UK’s National Health Service (NHS) has its own Leadership for Health programme, which is intended to identify and develop strategic leadership in the new NHS. And in many other public sector areas – including the armed forces and the prison service – major leadership development initiatives are under way. The practical encouragement and emphasis on leadership has been matched by an enormous increase in a largely uncritical focus on leadership at the academic level – both through courses and programmes and through research and writing. And management has

The crises of leadership 57 to a considerable degree been defined as leadership. Gradually, imperceptibly, the word ‘manager’ has been replaced by the word ‘leader’. The notion of leadership lionized in these academic practices and writings and teaching is largely that of the individual narcissistic leader. The recent celebration of leadership is a celebration of a very specific and distinctive (and partial) sense of leadership. It celebrates the extraordinary contributions of specific remarkable individuals to the success of large formal organizations: aggressive, self-confident, macho, uncompromising, enterprising, visionary. No wonder a recent global survey by an international consultancy placed ‘leadership development’ at the top of the list of priority issues for chief executives worldwide – a lead that has been eagerly grasped by many business schools.

Failings in leadership Recent years have also seen stark and dramatic evidence of the failings of this notion of leadership. Ten years ago events at Enron, WorldCom, Marconi, Xerox, Vivendi and others made a very different point, raising questions not only about individual leaders’ behaviour but also about the inflated importance attributed to these individuals as leaders. These events were not simply indicative of failings of corporate governance or of business regulation, or of problems of the independence of auditors (they are all of these), but also and most importantly they reveal problems of corporate leadership. It is not simply that many of yesterday’s heroes have been shown to be less than admirable, and their apparent achievements hollow and illusory, but the very qualities we were exhorted to admire – energy, drive, achievement focus, single-mindedness – are now in many cases apparently transmuted into less admirable features: arrogance, inflexibility, self-centredness, incompetence, greed, dishonesty, excessive and irresponsible risk taking. We are left pondering what sorts of leaders we have and what sort of leaders we need. We should also be left pondering the need not only for alternative models of leadership but for alternative structures of governance. It is not clear how far those leadership failures revealed individual or systemic problems – whether they merely revealed individual aberration or exposed the failings of the prevailing conception of leadership. Were they a result of deviance from the pattern of leadership or of compliance with it? The boss of Imclone, a US biotech success story, was arrested for insider dealing. Bernie Ebbers, the founder of WorldCom where massive corporate greed and false accounting have been revealed, took a £366 million loan from the business to buy more stock. Gary Winnick, chief executive of Global Crossing, a telecoms group now in bankruptcy, had pocketed $735 million. But, in a sense, the 2008–2009 crisis of leadership was more serious because in this later case the irresponsibility and incompetence (rather than the criminality) of the leaders and the model of leadership they personified was revealed. The CEOs of Northern Rock, RBS or Lehman Brothers destroyed their businesses, losing billions in shareholders’ funds, and, through reckless borrowing and reckless disregard of the risks associated with arcane financial ways of packaging debt, induced a catastrophic worldwide recession. It is not too much to say that the world recession was a result of the nature (and implications) of the notion of leadership (and the qualities and behaviours adoringly associated with this conception of leadership) that prevailed over the last twenty years, especially in the US and UK. This was a conception of leadership which, while not originating in the business schools (for I shall argue below that it emerged from the dominance of the logics of enterprise at a social/political level), was certainly unquestioningly accepted, advocated, taught and incorporated by business schools.

58 Graeme Salaman More recent (and more widespread) cases of ‘leadership failure’ reveal a failure not (or not only) of leadership, or of individual leaders’ characters, but, possibly even more seriously, of corporate governance. The failure of leadership is a failure of governance. Under the banner of an almost total focus on the objective of building shareholder value as the aim of the executive (an aspiration duly legitimated and taught by the elite US/UK business schools who take upon themselves the well-rewarded and prestigious responsibility of transmitting and teaching this ideology) leaders have destroyed shareholder value. Corporate leaders whose duty is to safeguard shareholder assets and funds created teams and routines and stoked-up cultures, practices and compensation systems and defined their leadership roles in ways which destroyed their shareholders’ funds. They did this by, in effect if not in rhetoric, defining and practising leadership in a manner (‘value-maximising entrepreneurs’) that was in direct opposition to their responsibilities as stewards of shareholders’ assets. They created a form of leadership which was at odds with governance. The mythology around the nature and contribution of leadership was supported (and reinforced) by the huge salaries that were paid to these leaders ($48m to Stanley O’Neal of Merrill Lynch; £40m to Richard Fauld Jr, CEO of Lehman Bros; $26m to Chuck Prince of Citigroup). Furthermore, these huge salaries were accompanied by share option schemes. Paying executives in shares was a deliberate policy aimed at ensuring the executive identified closely with the interests of shareholder, so the leaders were no longer simply the agents of the owners – they were the owners. But when CEOs are encouraged by their salary schemes to embark on risks which if successful would enrich them personally but if unsuccessful would be carried by the institution, risk taking increases greatly – as indeed happened. So, notions of leadership were allied with principles of compensation policy and remuneration packages to create a mutually self-supporting and self-justifying cycle. The prevailing values and logics of leadership were reinforced by huge compensation packages which were based on, and celebrated precisely those qualities attributed to, the new leader: individualism, charisma, entrepreneurialism, adventurousness, risk-taking. And by rewarding these qualities the packages reinforced them and reinforced the leaders’ sense of certainty. The nature of corporate leadership (as defined through publications, autobiographies, admiring business school case studies, courses and texts) – celebrated, reinforced, admired and publicly rewarded by politicians, commentators and academics, and practised and personified by CEOs of RBS, Lehman Brothers, Northern Rock, etc. – was one which stressed the awesome personal authority of the leader, the ‘vision’ and passion and conviction and certainty of the heroic individual leader; the charisma. Thus, paradoxically, a style of organizational leadership emerged and became dominant and was rewarded which represented the triumph of individualism and individual qualities (passion, charisma, individual vision, energy, iconoclasm, freedom from regulation) over the constraints and limitations of organization (i.e. bureaucracy, governance procedures): thus generating a form of ‘antiorganisational organisational leadership’ (see Storey and Salaman 2009).

Underlying models of leadership A key component of this current logic of leadership is that leaders make up for the deficiencies of organization (by being ‘transformational’ leaders); that they represent an antidote to organization. They do this not only by achieving effects through their personal behaviour and personal traits which would be hard to achieve through organizational systems (inspiring, mobilizing, communicating, energizing, etc.), but also by representing qualities which are the opposite of the qualities traditionally associated with organization – innovation, charisma,

The crises of leadership 59 anti-regulation, passion, emotion, individualism. So leaders, according to this view, make up for the limitations of organization not primarily by changing organizations (though they do tend to change organizations, often as a demonstration of their mastery and ownership of them), but more by representing an alternative, non-organizational, source of direction and control (by generating inspiration, vision, loyalty, energy, drive, etc.) over employees’ behaviour – especially the behaviour of the top team. As a direct result, these leaders, while proclaiming their preoccupation with shareholders, became indifferent to, or somehow managed to sideline and by-pass, their duties of accountability to these shareholders through compliance with established governance frameworks and arrangements. Both recent crises of leadership raise a number of issues for academic commentators – issues which have not been given sufficient emphasis and attention and which may show the need for a new form of less constrained, less acquiescent and more critical business school, and a more sociological approach to current forms and ‘theories’ of leadership. Once again the role of the business school comes under scrutiny. The issue is not that the business school is the servant of power (for how could it be otherwise?), but that the business school’s approach to and definition of power is limited to the power of the executive, and overlooks the power (and the interests) of shareholders and their stakeholders. Perpetuating or understanding current notions of leadership? Central to a more fruitful approach to leadership is a shift of emphasis away from lionizing the qualities of individual leaders (qualities which certainly merit critical analysis, as we will see) and more towards an emphasis on the nature, origins and implications of the values and ways of thinking that are reflected in current notions of leadership. Rather than accept current conceptions of leadership we should show the implications and origins of these notions. We must make the familiar strange. This means not simply encouraging, or even worse celebrating the prevalent definition of leadership, but analysing the assumptions and ideologies underpinning it. It means problematizing and critiquing notions of leadership that are usually seen as normal and unremarkable. The tools for such an analysis are already available and in use in other debates about the nature of modern organizations – but these debates are more likely to take place within social science faculties than in business schools. Much recent work on the values and assumptions underpinning organizational restructuring has emphasized the key role of new conceptions of government, organization and the employee. These ideas spring from the dominance of a critique of anti-bureaucracy and an advocacy of the value of enterprise. And if the contemporary organization is no longer conceptualized as a pyramid or bureaucracy but as a ‘web of enterprise’, then the new leader too must demonstrate the appropriate qualities of entrepreneurial character. Jensen and Meckling in an influential paper argued explicitly that corporate leaders should be defined and treated not as agents of capital (as bureaucrats) but as owners – as ‘principals’. As such, they would want (and would be encouraged by the compensation packages) to behave as value-maximizing entrepreneurs (Jensen and Meckling 1976). Classic exhortatory and influential statements about the nature and contribution of enterprise and how it must be allowed free expression against the malign forces of regulation and bureaucracy are: (in the public sector) Osborne and Gaebler (1992) and Peters and Waterman’s In Search of Excellence (1982). Deeper analyses of the role and implications of this emphasis on enterprise as a necessary dominating logic at the levels of society, organizations and employees have been conducted in: du Gay (1991, 1997); du Gay and Salaman (1992); du Gay et al. (1996); Salaman and

60 Graeme Salaman Storey (2009); Rose (1990a, 1990b, 1996); Rose and Miller (1992); Miller and Rose (1990). These offer fruitful ways of understanding the nature and dominance of the prevailing conception of the modern, anti-bureaucratic, individualistic leader. For many years enterprise has been a major underpinning principle of the reforms of economy, government, corporations and leadership initiated in the UK by Margaret Thatcher, whose advocacy of economic liberalism, with its glorification and sanctification of market structures and relationships, was associated with a focus on the cultural value of enterprise. Enterprise is defined as the principle which underpins the efficiency of markets, the performance of organizations and the deregulation of economies. Enterprising individuals – and most of all enterprising leaders – support ‘. . . the reconstruction of institutions along the lines suggested by the model of “the commercial enterprise”’ (Keat 1990: 3). The paradigmatic status of the enterprise applies to deregulated and ‘reformed’ (i.e. non-bureaucratic) organizations operating competitively to identify, develop and meet the needs of the differentiated, segmented category of consumer, but is also closely associated with current conceptions of leadership which embody ‘. . . “enterprising” qualities or characteristics on the part of those concerned . . . characteristics such as initiative, energy, independence, boldness, self-reliance, a willingness to take risks and accept responsibility for one’s action’ (ibid.: 3). The notion of enterprise operates both as a principle of organizational change and of individual change, and of the links between the two. Enterprise is currently a core and valued quality of both organization and leaders. Developing enterprising individuals or a culture of enterprise within organizations is defined as necessary in order to mount an explicit challenge to those societal and organizational tendencies which are inherently opposed to enterprise: bureaucracy, regulation, the historic educational system and its elite values, the welfare state with its culture of dependence. Enterprise (and markets which enterprise serves) liberates – as enterprising leaders constantly claim, of course. The importance of enterprise as an underlying principle of both organizations and leaders lies not only in the qualities which are regarded (and celebrated) as evidence of enterprise (qualities which have arguably been extremely damaging in the recent crises of leadership), but also in the way in which the pervasiveness and power of the notion of enterprise supports current conceptions of leadership. This pervasiveness rules out alternative approaches and effectively makes natural the notion of the heroic, charismatic, enterprising leader. A proper analysis of leadership would, rather than accepting prevailing notions of the nature and contribution of leaders, regard this takenfor-grantedness as precisely the issue that requires critical attention. Our concern should be not only with the interpretation and operationalization of enterprise as a defining quality of leadership, but with the origin, pervasiveness, power and authority of these ideas – the extent to which, in practice, these ideas have ‘the power of truth, the potency of rationality and the promises of effectivity’ (Miller and Rose 1990: 51). Enterprise offers a way to understand the ways in which ideals of the self (in this case, of leadership) relate to and are bound up with relations between individuals and their identities and structures of political power – so, between the personal and the political. Following Foucault, Rose (1996) deploys a framework for understanding this linkage. The primary level which gives legitimacy is the level of government or the logics or government – the ‘complex of notions, calculations, strategies and tactics through which political authorities have sought to act’. Second is the institutional dimension – the organizational arrangements which seek to orchestrate, maximize and constrain the capacities and actions of individuals. The third dimension consists of the various and changing ‘technologies’ of the self – the ways in which (and the purposes for which) individuals seek to act upon themselves in order to achieve a

The crises of leadership 61 desired state. This is the leadership level where enterprise is used as a basis for individual identity, activity and character. The notion and value of enterprise offer a way of identifying and understanding the connections between these levels – state, organization, individual – and for understanding how prevailing conceptions of the leader gain legitimacy and authority from organizational and societal discourses. Rose, in a prescient comment, locates the notion and identity of the leader firmly within a conception of both organization and society, and identifies some of the ways in which an attractive logic of leadership achieves its appeal by close affinities with prevailing critiques of rejected conceptions of organization and dominant values of social organization: ‘. . . enterprise links up a seductive ethics of the self, a powerful critique of contemporary institutional and political reality, and an apparently coherent design for the radical transformation of contemporary social arrangements’ (Rose 1996: 6). Du Gay et al. note in a discussion of the implications of discourse for the construction of the new manager: ‘A complex series of links has been established through which the economic priorities of politicians and business persons have been articulated in terms of the required personal characteristics of managers’ (du Gay et al. 1996: 265). The same can be said of the characteristics of leaders. Definitions of leadership So the current crisis of leadership inherently raises questions about the ways in which leadership is defined, and behind that, about how business academics as experts support and legitimize such definitions in research, consultancy and teaching. Despite the conviction and certainty of leaders themselves (for both are defining qualities of leadership), the nature of managers and management and of leaders and leadership remains inherently problematic. There can be no agreed view about what managers or leaders should do and how they need to do it because such definitions reflect the shifting ways in which these functions are variously conceptualized over time. Conceptions of leadership, like leaders themselves, are products of the period in which they emerge; products of history not only in the usual sense that leaders emerge and are successful within particular historical periods, but also in the sense that prevailing definitions of leadership succeed because they resonate with dominant contemporary societal values and assumptions. Hence, although in any particular epoch of thinking about organizations and society the necessary qualities and character of leaders may seem obvious and overwhelming – supported by all the weight of airport bookstall analysis, media insistence and business school courses – the obviousness and dominance of such definitions should warn us of their precariousness and should attract our attention and critique. Isn’t that our role? But we are not talking simply about ideas here: dominant definitions of leadership are real in their effects. The character and technical requirements of those who lead businesses are the subject of intense and purposeful ideological – and ultimately managerial and expert – activity. Current definitions of leadership are real, being supported by processes and frameworks of recruitment, measurement, promotion and development: selection, assessment frameworks, compensation schemes and logics. They are promulgated too by expert advisors: recruitment consultants, occupational psychologists, consultants and academics. Leadership can be approached and defined in more than one way – not only in the sense that it can be defined in terms of different types of qualities, but more fundamentally in that it can be seen in terms of different explanatory and analytical approaches: as fixed sets of personality traits, as variable and changing sets of behaviours, as individual or collective

62 Graeme Salaman phenomena, as localized or distributed, and so on. Prevailing conceptions of leadership are revealed in a number of recent developments: the huge increase in courses in leadership; the emphasis of leadership as a solution to organization problems; the explosion of interest in hagiographic biographies (or ghosted autobiographies) of heroic charismatic business leaders. These works celebrate the extraordinary contributions of specific remarkable individuals to the success of large formal organizations and emphasize their defining qualities. But although the current emphasis on leadership argues in effect that there are no longer any doubts about the contribution and nature of leadership, as academics our duty is to do more than simply reflect the prevailing wisdom – especially when this is so dominant and pervasive – and this requires us to raise some simple questions about what leadership is and what it does, how it can be understood, and how it could be different. Over the years, academics have supplied different answers to these questions, but the key positions are still relevant. One approach stresses the importance of core leadership traits; the heroic individual with his or her extraordinary attributes. This is the dominant approach today. It is often associated with the notion of charisma – a quality whereby the charismatic individual is (for a while) capable of inspiring remarkable personal loyalty, admiration, devotion and obedience. From a practical point of view the trait approach is associated with the use of psychometric and other tests to enable HR experts to assess individuals’ possession of the precious relevant qualities (in the armed forces, for example). But the main difficulty with trait theory is not only that there remains little consensus about the underlying traits shared by leaders but also that the trait approach can all too often encourage and legitimize the sort of disastrous egomaniac behaviour we have seen all too frequently recently. Another problem with trait theories and approaches is not only that research suggests a large number of different leadership traits but also that very obviously the rise to prominence of many heroic leaders is not simply a result of their innate qualities but of the situation and context in which they are placed and which they exploit. The Churchill example identified in Chapter 2 of this book illustrates the point. Many organizations reveal the same situational bias. The person who may be a magnificent leader early in the organization’s history – for example, the entrepreneurial founder – is soon found wanting once the organization’s success and size make this sort of buccaneering, tightly controlling leader ‘inappropriate’. It’s not unusual for investors or the board to insist that the early leader is replaced by a more staid, less extrovert, more systems-focused person who will grow the organization and its people: what Weber called the ‘institutionalization of charisma’. A third approach to a definition of leadership stresses the behaviours associated with leaders. This approach argues that defining leadership per se is of limited value; what matters is defining what leaders do. This is appealing. It can be used operationally to measure behaviour and to assess individuals. A famous distinction is between two different types or styles of behaviours: task-focused and people-focused behaviour, and the best balance between these. This approach has recently received attention as researchers and commentators try to identify the key tasks or functions of leaders. Many have argued – with justification – that leaders define or ensure the processes of definition of strategy and environmental analysis (vision). Secondly, leaders ensure that strategy is translated into tasks which are distributed and accomplished (implementation). And finally, leaders operate at the interpersonal level, maintaining enthusiasm, mobilizing energy and focusing activity (mobilization). If leaders do different things it is possible that these functions may be split, and that there are different types of leaders each specializing in one or more of these functions. And if there are different types of leaders then they may be best located at different sites or levels within

The crises of leadership 63 the organization. Some have argued this, suggesting that leadership is not necessarily or even ideally located in one place and one person. Researchers have tried to distinguish different types of leadership operating at different locations or levels – for example, between the ‘transformational’ leaders mentioned above and ‘transactional’ leaders; the former being concerned with inspiration and mobilization, the latter with implementation. Noble has argued for example that senior leadership positions require strategic visionary leadership; whereas lower organizational levels require more transactional forms of leadership that are increasingly operational or customer focused. This raises the obvious problem that management and leadership become hard to differentiate – a situation which is currently the case. These academic debates about the nature, contribution and location of leadership within organizations offer us some possible suggestions for how to rethink and remodel leadership. It is clear that currently the dominant view of leadership remains, in essential terms, the trait approach, which argues the critical importance of the single, charismatic, transformational leader, and that this raises a number of problems. First, it may overstate the importance of a single type or a single location of leadership. It assumes that one type of leadership fits all circumstances. In reality, in every organization it is important to think about the sort of leadership that is required and that is required at different levels (i.e. what is the nature, contribution and location of leadership?). Answers to these questions vary with the nature, size and sector of the organization, and with its stage of development. Young, entrepreneurial organizations in creative, dynamic and innovative sectors may be more likely to require charismatic, egotistical leaders who will brook no resistance, overcome any obstacle, keep driving themselves and their business and staff. Older, larger organizations in relatively sedate sectors with mature markets may have far less need for such leaders. Indeed, such leaders could be a positive danger. In a recent project looking into these issues of leadership within a large UK insurance company, we found that senior and middle managers were extremely wary of charismatic leaders in their sector, pointing out that the only two obvious examples of insurance companies with such ‘larger than life’ leaders had both recently gone catastrophically wrong. In mature organizations in the insurance sector, the role of the leader was far more to develop strategy and to ensure sound and well-implemented systems and actuarial principles than to indulge in extrovert exercises of an exhortatory or rabble-rousing nature. In other words, they were quite happy to have an introverted, intelligent, thoughtful, reflective leader who focused on defining strategy and environmental analysis and ensuring that sound systems existed to translate this strategy into underwriting principles and other processes and structures. But these managers also made another point which highlights a second weakness with the focus on the single charismatic type of leader, one that is familiar to anyone with practical experience of real leadership: that there was a need for the third function of leadership – leadership at the interpersonal level, building the work group, maintaining enthusiasm, mobilizing energy, focusing activity – but that this may well not be located at the top of the organization. In other words, the various functions of leadership could be – indeed, they argued, were and should be – distributed throughout the organization. Research and experience shows that the interpersonal aspects of leadership (as distinct from the more intellectual or knowledge-based aspects) are crucially important at the work-group level. Secondly, the recent preoccupation with the heroic, charismatic individual leader assumes that this sort of leader will always be the dominant, imposing, opinionated type. In fact the notion of charisma per se does not necessarily assume this. History offers some rare examples of quiet, reflective, charismatic leaders (Ghandi, Christ). But the overwhelming tendency with

64 Graeme Salaman leaders of this sort is for them to dominate by their overwhelming, magnificent certainty and self-confidence. And this emphasis on the heroic individual may well be associated with a reduced emphasis on the development and use of the senior team. Hearsay evidence about recent failures at RBS and other cases of massive corporate failure suggests that members of the top team did not find it easy to challenge or question assumptions, values and strategic models valued and used by the CEO, and possibly that they were discouraged from doing so. Awesome in their certainty, such leaders are prey to two serious dangers. First, their strengths can become weaknesses: confidence becomes arrogance; certainty becomes unyielding rigidity; purpose becomes obsession; perseverance becomes intransigence. Second, heroic leaders, despite their publicity and their hagiographic biographers, remain mortals – and mortals make mistakes. People who know they can get things wrong, who know that they don’t always know, try to guard against error and compensate for their own weaknesses and limitations by using advisors and colleagues, and listening to them, not browbeating them. Heroic leaders may be prone not only to overestimating their abilities and their success recipes but may also be prone to discouraging challenges and questions from their top teams. There is research evidence that the way in which the senior team thinks – the openness, thoroughness, degree of questioning, willingness to identify and review mistakes and problems, and most important of all the ability and willingness to think outside of the accepted and ingrained ‘recipes’ within the organization – are crucial to the success of the organization. Salaman and Storey (2009) argue that the way executives respond to and define environmental developments is mediated by the knowledge and assumptions they share. These assumptions ‘ruled in’ certain ways of thinking and talking about issues and ‘ruled out’ alternative approaches. This may go some way towards explaining how organizational success turns to failure as success establishes and legitimates ways of thinking and relating – established routines – which sooner or later begin to fail. The risk then is that leaders are either unwilling to recognize that their recipes are failing (denial) or are unable to think in any other way, or when faced with the need for radical change cannot stop using their established mindsets even when thinking about how to devise new strategies and structures. The very conviction and certainty that are such marked (and celebrated) features of the new leader could carry dangers – dangers which may explain some of the recent disastrous leadership behaviour. And it is not just excessive individual certainty and conviction (and the associated risk of success recipes being applied despite evidence of their declining success) that are the problems of current leadership models; there is also the danger that such leaders whose very raison d’être is founded upon individual brilliance may regard the development of collective leadership as a low priority – even unnecessary, or a threat. Organizations often have to change but more than this they have to recognize that they have to change the way they change. And the leader must be crucial to these complex and sensitive processes of what Argyris has called ‘double-loop learning’, which identify and address deep underlying assumptions. But dominant, egotistical leaders – isolated by their self-confidence and, because of their certainty and drive, unwilling to learn or listen (why should they? They are always right) – may be bad at encouraging learning and review (which could seem like weakness and uncertainty); may be bad at encouraging genuine debate in the team, if only because their sheer power of personality and self-confidence discourages less confident members. There is evidence to support these possibilities: recent experience at RBS, Lehman Brothers, etc., and a recent Institute of Management study of leadership which found a

The crises of leadership 65 surprising level of criticism for leaders from middle managers. While the senior executives tended to define leadership (i.e. in their view, themselves) in terms of the heroic individual leader and their possession of distinctive and valuable individual qualities and strengths, middle managers stressed that desirable leadership qualities were the abilities to communicate, to develop others and to work with teams. Finally, as noted, a prevalent way of describing and defining the new leader is as ‘transformative’– as making up for (‘transforming’) the weaknesses and deficiencies of organization, as anti-organizational in many respects: as emotional rather than rational, as hugely and distinctively personal and subjective rather than formal and procedural, as intuitive rather than systematic, as instinctive and sexual (at least metaphorically, see Guthey and Jackson 2005) rather than cerebral and impersonal, and of course as charismatic rather than organizational. Such leaders are also anti-organizational in that their style and reputation frequently involve claims that they publicly oppose and seek to destroy and overcome sources of conventional internal or external (governmental or regulatory) constraint which seek to protect the interests of parties other than shareholders or CEOs: workers, consumers and citizens. For the new transformational leader nothing must be allowed to restrict his or her right to pursue the only legitimate business goal: profit and increases in shareholder value. Transformational leaders are defined in terms of their ability to overcome or compensate for (transform) organizational and individual limitations. They ‘motivate others to do more than they originally intended and indeed often more than they thought possible . . . Team spirit is aroused. Enthusiasm and optimism are displayed’ (Bass and Avolio 1994: 3). Transformational leaders enable their staff to overcome, to break through, to see beyond the limitations of their organization: they ‘stimulate their followers’ efforts to be innovative and creative by questioning assumptions, re-framing problems, and approaching old situations in new ways’ (ibid.: 3). But they do more than this. In a manner that reflects the new leader’s personification of non-organizational, even anti-organizational, qualities (innovation, passion, iconoclastic, intolerance of regulation, etc.) the new leader transforms organizations by superseding them – by making the solution to organizational deficiencies not organizational adaptation, but leadership. Thus, leadership is seen as the source of organizational success partly because it is a nonorganizational response; it is individual qualities, not organizational ones, which determine organizational success. This implicit opposition between organization and leadership – between regulation, predictability and standardization on the one hand and vision, individualism and passion on the other – establishes the basis for one of the most damaging consequences of prevailing leadership models, discussed below: the failure of governance. The new leader and governance: old tensions, new forms of resolution The current crisis of leadership is also a crisis of organizational governance. The crisis of governance is no accident; or if it is, it is in Charles Perrow’s terms a ‘normal’ accident (Perrow 1984): a predictable and systemic product of the fundamental elements of the situation; an outcome of the design and definition of leadership. Not only was the failure of governance a systemic outcome of the way leadership was defined and implemented, but this very obvious outcome was implicitly accepted and tolerated by the majority of those agencies with an ostensible concern for governance – institutional shareholders whose wealth was at risk. Indeed, the prevailing conception of leadership is inherently associated with a mechanism of accountability (in effect a form of governance). This is the idea that the way to make heroic,

66 Graeme Salaman charismatic entrepreneurial individualistic leaders accountable to shareholders is for them to be shareholders, which guarantees their accountability (as ‘principals’ not ‘agents’); but this idea, when enshrined in compensation logics which encourage executive risk taking (by rewarding successes) while the executives’ liabilities for the costs of unsuccessful risks are borne by the business, actually undermines governance systemically. The modern conception of leadership and associated compensation logics is inherently anti-governance: they deliberately encourage leadership attitudes and actions which are in opposition to shareholders’ interests, even while stressing the key priority of shareholder value. The mantra ‘shareholder value’ was used (and pursued) in a way that systemically threatened shareholder value. Furthermore it is hardly surprising that leaders whose very qualifying qualities were defined in contrast and opposition to the conventional qualities of organization – independence, individualism, lack of respect or tolerance for convention and regulation, personal passion and certainty, intolerance of opposition or resistance – should be intolerant of and fail to respect governance procedures and systems. Indeed it would be expected. Governance, of course, is about accountability. With the separation of ownership and control, there arose the need for owners to be confident that those who used their resources were answerable for how they used them. The solution was a series of governance measures: separation of the roles of chairperson and CEO, non-executive directors, regular accounts, annual meetings open to shareholders and other measures, backed up in extremis by corporate legal infrastructure. All these measures, although recently frequently revised and restated, proved inadequate in the face of the execution of prevailing models of leadership. The checks didn’t check; leadership behaved as leaders (by the prevailing model) are expected to behave: in terms of individual, anti-organizational qualities – certainty, conviction, passion, unpredictability, emotionality, intuition, creativity (‘vision’), iconoclasm, irreverence, personality – in pursuit of organizational success (as defined by prevailing models). And it worked: for a while. ‘It is hard’, remarked the UK’s Chancellor of the Exchequer when ruminating on the UK government’s failure to insist on tighter regulation of UK banks’ risk taking, ‘to question success.’ But if governance means anything this is precisely its role: to question all assumptions, especially those that seem to require no challenge. It is not necessary to create structures to question failure. But ultimately these high-risk strategies failed, and failed catastrophically, wiping out shareholders’ funds – the very funds whose growth was the raison d’être of leadership action and reputation. So the model failed, and governance failed too because the whole point of governance is that it monitors and curtails executive action when this endangers shareholders’ funds. It is not surprising that recent models of leadership would inherently pose a challenge to structures of governance. One could argue that the relationship between governance and executive action involves a fundamental and healthy tension between the innate conservatism and caution of the shareholders on the one hand and on the other the aggressive, confident, potent, iconoclastic, irreverent leader, full of energy and competitive aspirations, driving change within the organization and attacking the forces of conservatism and regulation outside it. This inherent tension between conservatism and risk taking and initiative is managed – in theory – by the checks and balances of governance systems and frameworks. But one of the problems associated with current leadership models is that these leaders began to believe in their own inviolability; they embarked on strategies of enormous riskiness, but managed to suppress, neutralize and undermine the frameworks and systems of governance that should have constrained and challenged them. And the failure of governance raises serious questions for us in business schools, whose role is to do more than simply perpetuate and legitimize prevailing conceptions of leadership and

The crises of leadership 67 organizational action and purpose. Why did governance fail? It is not because the institutions lacked governance arrangements: there were the non-executive directors, the independent chairpersons, the auditors, the reports from risk advisors, the annual reports, the meetings with institutional shareholders, the annual general meetings. Yet none of these worked: the non-executive directors were soon incorporated into prevailing strategies and practices; the independent chairs soon accepted prevailing strategies and practices. As long as success lasted, the institutional shareholders and analysts celebrated the outcomes of prevailing strategies and actions. But clearly a governance system that only starts to work retrospectively when failure is evident – and which even then fails to identify its own culpability in these failings – is no system at all. So what went wrong? Why did the systems and frameworks of governance fail so abjectly? And that, of course, is the question that must be asked but which currently is not being asked. So, this is the third issue raised by the crises of leadership: they expose the inadequacy of governance arrangements whose intention must be, if governance means anything, to monitor, assess and confront risk-taking behaviour that threatens the security of shareholders’ funds. In this they failed, not because these arrangements and processes were not in place, but because they were subverted.

Conclusions Every crisis is, of course, an opportunity. But if we are to move beyond the cliché it is necessary to identify the issues that the recent crisis of leadership raises for organizations, employees and shareholders (and possibly for leaders themselves). This chapter has sought to identify some of the issues that should be raised: •

•

•

To confront and problematize the prevailing conceptions of leadership, which because of their strength seem to be beyond debate or challenge. It is necessary to understand and critique not only the prevailing views of leadership themselves but also the sources of the strength of these views: at a time when alternatives have been ‘ruled out’ by the obvious truth and value of prevailing logics of leadership, it is necessary to insist on ‘ruling in’ critique and challenge, and to understand the sources of the prevailing logics; to make the familiar strange. To identify the consequences of the prevailing logic of leadership. Rather than simply accepting and perpetuating prevailing notions of leadership, it is our responsibility to note the implications of these ideas: how an emphasis on leaders being aggressive, confident, individualistic, iconoclastic, passionate, charismatic, irreverent, transformative, – full of energy and competitive aspirations, driving change within the organization and attacking the forces of conservatism and regulation outside it – may produce serious dysfunctional consequences. Also to register how leadership when defined in opposition to organization can destroy or undermine the organizational forces that should supply balance to executive decision making. To take stock of the consequences of models and logics of leadership for the recent failure of governance. This chapter has argued that opposition between leaders and governance may not be a bad thing, and indeed could be source of potentially healthy tension – but not if the prevailing model of leadership undermines and sidelines governance arrangements; not as an accidental or pathological consequence, but as a predictable and systemic effect of the core values and assumptions of the leadership model.

68 Graeme Salaman But the most important issue raised is none of the above, important as they undoubtedly are. The really fundamental issue is: who is going to raise and address these issues? Where does responsibility for addressing the failure not only of leadership, but of governance, lie? The answer must surely be: the business schools. If not us, whom?

Questions for discussion 1 2 3

Compare Graeme Salaman’s analysis with that put forward by Iain Mangham in the previous chapter. What are the points of similarity and dissimilarity? In your view, is there anything new and particular about recent crises of leadership? Have the very intensive and very public criticisms of major corporate leaders in the past few months and years impacted on the kind of leadership which is now sought?

References Bass, B. M. and B. J. Avolio (eds) (1994) Improving Effectiveness Through Transformational Leadership, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Council for Excellence in Management and Leadership (2001) Leadership Development: Best Practice Guides for Organisations, London: CEMI. Du Gay, P. (1991) ‘Enterprise culture and the ideology of excellence’, New Formations, 13: 45–62. —— (1997) ‘Organising identity; making up people at work’, in du Gay (ed.) Production of Culture/Cultures of Production, London: Sage. Du Gay, P. and Salaman, G. (1992) ‘The cult(ure) of the customer’, Journal of Management Studies, 29 (5): 615–33. Du Gay, P., Salaman, G. and Rees, B. (1996) ‘The conduct of management and the management of conduct: contemporary managerial discourse and the constitution of the “competent” manager’, Journal of Management Studies, 33: 263–82. Guthey, E. and Jackson, B. (2005) ‘CEO portraits and the authenticity paradox’, Journal of Management Studies, 42 (5): 1057–82. Jensen, M. C. and Meckling, W. (1976) ‘Theory of the firm: managerial behavior, agency costs and ownership structure’, Journal of Financial Economics, October, 3 (4): 305–60. Keat, R. (1990) Introduction, in Keat, R. and Abercrombie, N. (eds) Enterprise Culture, London: Routledge. Miller, P. and Rose, N. (1990) ‘Governing economic life’, Economy and Society, 19 (1). Osborne, T. and Gaebler, D. (1992) Re-inventing Government: How The Entrepreneurial Spirit is Transforming The Public Sector, Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Perrow, C. (1984) Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies, New York: Basic Books. Peters, T. and Waterman, R. (1982) In Search of Excellence, New York: Harper and Row. Rose, N. (1990a) ‘Governing the enterprising self’, in P. Heelas and P. Morris (eds) The Values of the Enterprise Culture – The Moral Debate, London: Unwin Hyman. —— (1990b) Governing The Soul, London: Routledge. Rose, N. and Miller, P. (1992) ‘Political power beyond the state: problematics of government’, British Journal of Sociology, 43 (2): 173–205. Rose, N. (1996) ‘Identity, genealogy, history’, in S. Hall, S. and P. du Gay (eds) Questions of Cultural Identity, London: Sage. Salaman, G. and Storey, J. (2008) ‘Understanding enterprise’, Organisation, 15 (3): 315–24. —— (2009) ‘Nature has no outline but imagination has: contrasting executive renditions of the “commitment to innovation”’, European Management Journal, 27 (4 ): 234–42. Storey, J. and Salaman, G. (2009) Managerial Dilemmas: Exploiting Paradox for Strategic Leadership, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

Part III

The processes of leadership training and development

5

‘Learning leadership’ in practice Elena Antonacopoulou and Regina Bento

Chapter summary This chapter: • • • •

Approaches leadership as, above all, a practice. Highlights the important role of leadership practice in everyday life. Notes how leadership capability does not arrive ready-formed but that it is grown through practice. Describes and illustrates a distinctive form of authentic leadership which inherently involves strategic learning and care for a cause.

Introduction In this chapter we seek to extend the idea of ‘learning leadership’, which we introduced in the first edition of this book (Antonacopoulou and Bento 2003). Nearly a decade on from our initial call to take stock of the dominant paradigm that governs the ‘teaching’ and ‘learning’ of leadership we return to the idea, including evidence we are now able to provide illustrating learning leadership in practice. In doing so, our analysis both provides a response to current issues pertaining to the leadership debate and outlines key trends that are likely to define the way we seek to understand and support the development of learning leadership in the future. We approach the interpretation and understanding of leadership in a rather unusual way. The short extract below indicates our mode of thought on the subject: I have three treasures. Guard and keep them: The first is deep love, The second is frugality, And the third is not to dare to be ahead of the world. Because of deep love, one is courageous. Because of frugality, one is generous. Because of not daring to be ahead of the world, one becomes the leader of the world. (Lao-Tzu, The Way of Lao-Tzu – Chinese Philosopher, 604–531 BC) Our basic premise is that if leadership is to be engaged with, it needs to be understood as a practice. A practice orientation highlights the powerful social forces that shape how leadership is performed (Schatzki et al. 2001; Turner 1994). This means that leadership practice cannot simply be understood as a set of activities, actions and modes of knowing,

72 Elena Antonacopoulou and Regina Bento without an appreciation also of how all these aspects interconnect. Together they show the potential of leadership to contribute to collective ways of understanding that inform action (Schatzki 1996; Bourdieu 1990). This reflects one of the most central issues that the current leadership debate has yet to explicate. By engaging with leadership as a practice we are not seeking to adopt a practice lens as a metaphor for describing leadership. We note the tendency to describe a number of organizational phenomena as practice (e.g. strategy, leadership, learning – see Gherardi 2000; Jarzabkowski 2005; Carroll et al. 2008), and we are inclined to make an important distinction in the approach we adopt here. In our view, leadership practice focuses in particular on the ways in which such a practice is performed through practising. Leadership practice as we characterize it is as much about spontaneity as it is about learning (Antonacopoulou 2007, 2008a). This process accounts for the centrality of leader practitioners (individually and in communities) and their unique approaches in defining what leadership may be and what it could become. Moreover, practice orientation provides a basis for illuminating one of the key trends in this field; namely accounting for leadership in everyday life. It invites us to search for leadership where we least expect to find it, for it is here that the possibility for learning leadership may lie. In short, the perspective we bring in advancing learning leadership practice is that we expose the centrality of everyday experiences in learning about leadership and becoming a leader. For us, learning leadership practice is best understood in terms of the phronetic1 (practical) choices made that, in turn, guide the actions taken, which also potentially define leadership in different contexts. By drawing attention to phronetic choices here we highlight the relational mode of learning and knowing, founded on virtues and standards of excellence on the way to perfection. In other words, phronesis is about the knowledge that defines the way we formulate our intentions and the course of action for achieving these intentions. Central to phronesis is practising as we search continuously to exercise practical/prudent judgements. Such practising reflects as a purposeful, albeit not always intentional, approach towards defining and pursuing particular objectives. This means that an integral aspect of phronesis as a mode of learning and knowing is reflexive critique – the capacity to rehearse, recognise, review and renew ways of thinking and acting on the road to becoming a leader (see Antonacopoulou 2010). We illustrate leadership practice by presenting the stories of a man, Jorge Muñoz, and a woman, Mukhtaran Bibi, whose everyday practices drive them – and others around them – to engage in learning leadership. Both are stories of love and learning leadership, and both provide powerful learning (about) leadership practice by illustrating how leadership can emerge as a labour of love. By drawing attention to the centrality of a practice perspective in understanding leadership we seek to expand our earlier theoretical development of ‘learning leadership’. To the two core principles of learning leadership (a window to inner learning and as a relational process) we introduce a third principle; namely, the importance of love in learning leadership. We promote through this principle the need to recognize (see differently) the power of loving what you do and doing what you love. We see this as central to learning leadership because it supports the learning of leadership, as opposed to learning about leadership. We organize the discussion of these issues in three main sections. We begin by reprising the case we made for learning leadership in the previous edition of this book. We review the two core principles as a window to inner learning and as a relational process before we introduce the third principle in relation to learning leadership as a labour of love. The second section presents two stories of love and learning leadership in the practices of Jorge Muñoz and Mukhtaran Bibi. The final section analyses these leadership practices and outlines a

Learning leadership 73 number of implications in relation to how leading and leadership are conceptualized and studied in future leadership research. The implications for leadership development practices are also considered before we also outline some suggestions for how aspiring leaders may engage and encourage others to practise learning leadership, demonstrating their love of leading and learning.

Leadership practice and the case for learning leadership Developments in leadership research have continued to open up new possibilities. The trends that Boal and Hooijberg (2000) identified in their extensive review of leadership research have continued, and the shift in focus from ‘supervisory’ towards ‘strategic’ leadership, and from trait theories to a wider socio-cognitive analysis, have continued to reveal the complexity of leading and leadership (Uhl-bien and Marion 2007; Lichtenstein et al. 2006; Wheatley 1999). The complexity of leading and leadership has been captured in the increasing recognition of the role of interdependencies that form the core of leading. Conceptualizations of leadership as shared (Bradford and Cohen 1998) or distributed (Barry 1991) have been at the core of recognizing such interdependencies at the same time as recognizing the centrality of ‘selfleadership’, which is defined as a ‘process through which people influence themselves to achieve the self-direction and self-motivation needed to perform’ (Houghton et al. 2003: 9). However, the ultimate state is what they call ‘SuperLeadership’. Drawing on the work of Manz and Sims (2001), they define SuperLeadership as ‘an approach that strives to develop followers who are effective self-leaders . . . by helping, encouraging, and supporting followers in the development of personal responsibility, individual initiative, self-confidence, selfgoal setting, self-problem solving, opportunity thinking, self-leadership, and psychological ownership of their work tasks and duties’ (Houghton et al. 2003: 23–4). These avenues for rediscovering leadership have been further developed by the growing attention to authenticity (Avolio and Gardner 2005; Gardner and Schermerhorn 2004; George and Bennis 2003). The authentic view of leadership has extended the attention drawn previously to interpersonal relationships as a vital aspect of leadership by the social constructivist (Smircich and Morgan 1982) and interactionist (House and Aditya 1997; Hunt and Conger 1999) approaches. Previous views accounted for the importance of leadership as a process of creating meaning and constructing reality, jointly negotiated by leaders and their followers, and emphasizing charisma, vision and inspiration. Authentic leaders and leadership bring to the fore the dynamic relationship between a leader’s ethical behaviour and employee outcomes. This introduces an emergent account of the way leadership is enacted as well as embodied. This means that leadership can be conceptualized as an unfolding narrative that captures the expression of leadership in constructing the self in relation to others (Avolio 2007; Sparrowe 2005; Zhu et al. 2004). This attention to the embodied and enacted nature of leadership practice highlights the significance of credibility, soul, reflexivity, emotions, openness to experience and values (Ferris 1998; Bolman and Deal 1995); what McDermott called ‘leadership from within’ (1994). Seen this way, central to leadership practice is the ability to create powerful connections; social conditions and the risks of environmental uncertainties continuously interact. This point reminds us of the strategic significance of leadership. Attaining the qualities of strategic leadership by necessity requires strategic learning. Whatever else leaders do, their primary role is to keep learning, and also to facilitate the learning of those around them. Immersed as they are in what Vaill (1996: 126) calls an environment of permanent white water, constant change requires something beyond managing to

74 Elena Antonacopoulou and Regina Bento stay on a predetermined course. It requires leading: that is, learning whether changing conditions are altering the landscape of needs and opportunities and whether a change in existing plans or goals is required; learning which alternative courses might be possible or desirable; learning which direction to go in; learning what it takes to get there – learning, learning, learning. In this sense, leadership is learning, because leadership and learning are processes of being and becoming. In organizations immersed in continuous change, what matters most is not what a leader knows, but what he or she is capable of learning. This ability to learn, however, requires a leader who is willing to feel the vulnerability implicit in not knowing, an openness to experience that approaches each new situation as a circus artist who flies from one trapeze to the next, rather than clinging to the comforting security of the platform. The vulnerability inherent in the unknown and unknowable is an exhilarating flight between competently holding the trapeze of the past and tentatively grasping for the trapeze of the future, fostering practising and experimentation as part and parcel of performing leadership practice. This approach towards leadership relies on a dynamic capability: the importance of unlearning as a mode of learning (Antonacopoulou 2008b, 2009a, 2009b). This is consistent with our original definition of learning as ‘the liberation of knowledge through self-reflection and questioning’ (Antonacopoulou 2001: 328). This process of liberation in learning emphasizes the importance of spontaneity, improvization and incompleteness that are central to learning and unlearning. Learning, therefore, could be an avenue for rethinking leadership as a practice defined by the lessons one creates as one discovers the inner meanings of leadership, in the way leadership provides and requires personal insight and acts as a window to inner learning (leadership from within). Moreover, learning could be another lens for exploring leadership as a relational and not simply a transactional process. Particular attention here would be placed on the leader/follower relationship; a distinction of roles which, from a learning point of view, in the context of a community of practice, may well prove to be unnecessary. Both sets of issues capture the two principles on which the case for learning leadership has been founded. Below we remind the reader of the key aspects of these principles of learning leadership before introducing the third principle. Leadership as a window to inner learning – leadership from within Lieutenant-General J. F. Deverell (1999: 120) argues that: ‘Leading is more than just doing; it is also about being. It’s about who you are and what values you represent’. This assertion suggests that leadership is integral to the leader as a person; leadership is the leader because it allows that person to demonstrate insight not only about the issues at hand, but also about himself or herself and his or her values. Leadership is, therefore, as much internal – the way one is (in one’s being and becoming identity, character and temperament) – as it is external, in the actions one takes. Pozner (2002: 1) supports this view and argues that the challenge of finding the leader within is about ‘the exploration of the inner territory and the search to know more about the meaning of life and one’s purpose in some grander scheme as the basis for developing leadership’. He emphasizes the importance of leaders knowing what they believe in and what their principles are, and having unwavering commitment towards them. He also explains that taking a journey into inner territory is about finding one’s voice, as deep down as the soul. This is a point echoed by Ferris and Fanelli (1996), who stress the importance of being in touch with the inner self as a condition for personal growth. They see the inner self as constituted by mental, spiritual and intuitive faculties, which at their most basic involve the

Learning leadership 75 ‘reflective discipline of careful planning with a view of maximising available resources’ (Ferris and Fanelli 1996: 69). They also explain that accessing the inner self can best be described as being ‘in the zone’, ‘in flow’, ‘becoming one with the universe’, ‘infused with the excitement of being alive’ (ibid.: 70). One could reach such a state through ‘learned optimism’ and ‘ego energy’ (ibid.: 71). Simply put, in practice this would mean ‘seeing things with beginners’ eyes’, taking a fresh look as a ‘naïve observer’ would, ‘cultivating a responsive awareness of the environment’, and recognizing the ‘dangers of ingrained mindless habits’ and other factors which may inhibit learning (ibid.: 72). Learning leadership, therefore, depends not only on critical self-reflection, so that one is able to be reflexive, but more fundamentally it is about allowing one’s voice of conscience to speak. In short, it is about recognizing individuality2 as a condition of collectivity and connectivity. Leadership as a relational process in a community of practice The love of others is what drives leaders, according to Wakhlu (1999). By being compassionate and loving, leaders act as conduits for growth. This resonates with Ashkanasy and Tse’s (2000) assertion that the power of transformational leaders lies in the ability to exercise control over their emotions, as well as the emotions of their followers. Effective leaders, therefore, care about others. Caring always involves personal risk. Jones explains that: ‘When you show that you really care, you reveal a little bit of your self-identity and you may be rejected . . . it means putting a bit of yourself on the line’ (1999: 107). This is in line with Pozner’s observation that caring is also associated with grief – ‘the suffering of the mind’. He explains that ‘deep within ourselves there is something we hold dear, and if it’s ever violated we’ll weep and wail . . . Leadership begins with something that grabs hold of you and won’t let go’ (2002: 3). Jones also points out, drawing on Goleman (1997), that ‘leaders use their emotions to liberate the energy of others’ (Jones 1999: 107, our emphasis). Leaders have relentless energy and they depend on high energy to keep them going (ibid.: 108). Leaders get people to act in a selfless way (Deverell 1999: 119). Like gardeners who nurture the growth of their plants, leaders nurture the growth of the people around them. They become a channel for nature’s will and, through this flow, life finds expression in the totality of the collective achievement. Learning leaders, therefore, value learning with and from others and create a conducive learning enviroment, where individual and collective growth can take place (Garratt 1990). Also referring to learning leaders, Schein argues that leaders ‘have to set the example by becoming learners themselves and involving others in the learning process’ (1992: 392). This would imply that traditional role distinctions between leaders and followers are unnecessary, particularly if one adopts the Royal Military Academy motto, ‘Serve to lead’. Lieutenant-General J. F. Deverell explains that: ‘those who lead are servants of those whom they lead. In order to lead one has to learn how to serve’ (1999: 128). The question central to learning leadership is, therefore, not what it takes to be a good leader, but ‘what does it take to be a good follower?’ If one takes on board the ideas explored in the preceding paragraphs, it would appear that learning to adopt multiple perspectives (including those of followers), rather than being blinded by one’s own perspective and vision, is an important aspect of learning leadership. It would appear that another important aspect is having the humility to recognize talent and allow it to grow, without setting boundaries or preconditions to self-development (see Antonacopoulou 2000). What this means in practice is that it is critical to accept that there are people with more talent than oneself, as a reflection of one’s commitment to learn so that one can lead others. Learning from others also reflects

76 Elena Antonacopoulou and Regina Bento a commitment to developing others. In other words, learning leadership is a community of practice (Lave and Wenger 1991); a way of exploring collectively the meanings of activities from which knowledge and learning derive and contribute to individual and collective development. Along the same lines, Raelin advances the idea of ‘leaderful practice’ in the way that leaders who allow a team to thrive leaderless is in fact leaderful in the way it maximizes leadership across team members ‘concurrently’, ‘collectively’, ‘collaboratively’ and with ‘compassion’ (2002: 6). The latter characteristic of leaderful practice emphasizes in particular the ‘unadulterated commitment to preserving the dignity of others’. These two principles of learning leadership capture the fundamental tenet of learning leadership, which is not simply about facilitating others’ learning, or indeed being a skilful learner, as previously argued by proponents of the notion of learning leadership (Garratt 1990; Schein 1992). Learning leadership is about acknowledging that leading is learning. This is not to suggest that the two terms are synonymous, but instead to encourage a stance in which learning leadership begins with an appreciation that, because leadership is ambiguous, as is learning, one has to start by exploring equally both the external (explicit) dimensions that constitute leadership and the internal (tacit) dimensions. Just as fundamental is an appreciation of how one participates as a learner in collective leadership, as well as the way one participates as a leader in collective learning. In other words, by encouraging reflection and reconsideration of one’s mode of learning, one develops and is developed by others, and, consistent with the notion of paideia, one becomes a learning conduit (Antonacopoulou 2002, 2008c, 2008d). In doing so, a leader is also learning about the process of leading. The process of leading is a process of peforming leadership practice by revealing the leadership of others and not leading a group of followers per se. Being a great leader, according to Hodgson (1999: 132), is about allowing oneself to be vulnerable, and to have the humility to be willing to learn things that one often doesn’t want to learn. In other words, it is about confronting the dilemmas and challenges (of exploration and exploitation, as per March 1991), and confronting that learning demands experimentation and practice. It calls for unlearning. This process of experimentation in the midst of leadership practice reveals two additional aspects of learning leadership: focus, as well as flexibility; structure, as well as agency. The flexibility and ability to move freely between apparently contradictory polarities requires an open mind; it is necessary to embrace the paradox of what being a leader is about. This is the art of ‘wholesomeness’, according to Wakhlu: ‘Being wholesome as a leader is vital so that leaders can move freely as they discover and adapt their leadership instead of being fixed on any single idea of what a “good” leader should be’ (1999: 208). This process of experimentation and practice, underpinned by the significance of unlearning, also reveals additional qualities that are undeniably central to the engaged nature of leadership practice which learning leadership demands. Such qualities could be captured in leadership virtues such as those of phronesis (practical judgement), perseverence, persistence, patience, care and passion (Antonacopoulou 2008b). For these virtues to underpin the very process of learning there is something more fundamental at play that we would argue forms a third important cornerstone on which learning leadership rests. We capture this principle in a single word, as ‘love’. Love for and from learning, love for and from leading, and loving learning leadership as a practice, all of which demand hard work! This explicates why we propose labour of love as the third principle of learning leadership.

Learning leadership 77 Learning leadership as a labour of love Here we propose that learning leadership is not a goal, but a consequence of approaching work as a labour of love. We see love not as a sentimental concept, but as an ‘almost radical belief in shared humanity’3; a keen awareness of the needs of others as one’s own, an urgency to act to respond to their needs. When we look at learning leadership as the natural product of a labour of love, this encompasses both ‘labour’ as work, the persistent effort of everyday experience, and ‘labour’ as birth, the generative process of growing one’s identity when one fully joins society. This perspective is rooted in the Greek concept of paideia, which combines the idea of individuation and society, the ‘cultivation of each individual’s inborn potential in all areas of social activity,’ addressing the ‘whole person as a free spirit in search of its own self-fulfillment’ (Antonacopoulou 2008d: 286–7). Our exploration of love and learning leadership departs from traditional leadership literature. We examine leadership not in relation to people at the helm of large organizations, but among common people who are so passionate in their compassion that, even when they are working against the odds, they do not stop to think of reasons why they cannot do what they believe has to be done. There is an ‘of course’ nature to their actions; they see what they do as something natural, normal. When they attend to the needs of others, they feel the same urgency, purposefulness, action orientation and ‘phronesis’ (practical judgement) as a mother who responds to her hungry child. It is because they do not see themselves as heroes that they get closer each day to the Olympian ideal of leadership virtues which shape action (Antonacopoulou 2008b). Their focus is on fighting, not just winning; their daily practice is all about trying out, engaging, risking failure – all of which are integral to practising leadership. Practising leadership entails a mode of learning through experiencing and experimenting with aspects of leadership as one gradually gains confidence in one’s ability to lead. Learning leadership embraces a person’s practices as an arena of his or her learning. People do not engage in ‘learning leadership’ so that others will follow them; on the contrary, learning leaders just do what needs to be done, and learning leadership is a by-product. Their leadership is viral: it spreads by contagion, geometrically and in all directions, as their ‘followers’ become infected with their passion and become leaders themselves, new carriers of an ever-burning fire. The ‘followers’ are not inspired by a belief that leaders can do things that others cannot; rather, it comes from the realization that ‘if they can do this, so can I’. They trigger a process of recognition: we see ourselves in them, at the same time that we see ourselves anew. Leadership, therefore, can be learned; and we would argue that learning leadership can be discovered in turn, if one is committed as a learner to love others as oneself, and to find out about oneself through the daily practice of that love. This is what learning leadership is about, the authenticity of leadership in action, interaction and transaction. These are fundamental aspects of the learning process if it were to act as a space in which the multiplicity of possibilities for growth can be identified and developed as part of their everyday living, working and learning (Antonacopoulou 2006). In the section that follows we provide illustrative examples of learning leadership where the three principles of inner learning, relationality and love are demonstrated in practice.

Stories of learning leadership practice Jorge Muñoz One evening in the summer of 2004, Jorge Muñoz, a Colombian school bus driver from Queens, New York, walked by a group of immigrant day labourers gathered under a railway

78 Elena Antonacopoulou and Regina Bento bridge. The scene was familiar, but for some reason, that evening he did not just walk by them: he stopped to talk, and learned that most of them were homeless. They spent their days waiting on that street corner to be hired for a day’s work, and slept under the bridge or in the emergency room of a hospital that kicked them out at daybreak. When work did not materialize during the day, they would go to sleep hungry at night, fearing deportation by the Immigration and Naturalization Service if they attempted to go to a food bank or soup kitchen. For Jorge, the next step was natural, and it felt like a small commitment, easily within his means. He had recently found out that employees at a nearby food factory regularly threw away food that was still good. Jorge put the two facts together. There was food being thrown away, and there were people going hungry: why not bring some of that food to feed some of those people? This simple question started what would soon become Jorge’s life mission. At first, he served eight people three nights a week, using donated food he collected during the day. But then word got around, and soon there were fifteen, twenty, twenty-four people. The donated food was no longer enough, and the next step felt just as natural as the initial one: if he could not collect enough food to meet the growing demand, why not cook some meals at home to supplement the donated ones? Jorge knew just whom to ask. He went to his mother, Doris Zapata, a sixty-eight-year-old retired woman, and said the words that would change his family’s life forever: ‘Mami, I got these people. . .’ Mrs Zapata felt that she could handle cooking for twenty people. After all, hadn’t she been an illegal immigrant herself, when she left her small town in Colombia in 1984 to try life in the United States, working in New York as a live-in nanny? A widow with two children, Jorge and Luz, Mrs Zapata knew what it felt like to struggle to feed a family. Mrs Zapata and her family had become US citizens, but she felt that the day labourers Jorge wanted to help were her people and she could not let them down: ‘we were immigrants and we were illegal’ (Ellick 2007). Osteoporosis and arthritis had affected her hands and back so badly that she had retired in 2000, but her empathy was still bigger than the pain. Sure, she would cook the meals for Jorge to distribute, ‘because going to sleep hungry is just horrible.’4 Step by step, this ordinary family ended up doing extraordinary things. Over time the 24 people being fed had become 60, 90, 140. Soon Jorge found himself delivering hot food, coffee and chocolate every single night. Ever since the food distribution began in 2004, there has been only one night when it has not happened, when a massive snowstorm stopped New York’s subway and buses. Night after night, Jorge or his sister make a point of arriving at the same time (9:30 p.m.), at the same spot (the Roosevelt Avenue subway station, under the subway tracks, in Jackson Heights, New York). Jorge is convinced that this predictability is important to the people he serves, and so, naturally, it is important for him: ‘otherwise, he fears, he will lose them’ (ibid.). On Saturdays, they use the extra time off work to also offer breakfast to more than 200 workers in various locations in Queens (ibid.). On Sundays, they ‘take it easy’ by distributing sandwiches, rather than full meals. Jorge wakes up at 5 a.m. and works the whole day driving a school bus, to earn about US$700 a week; his ‘second job’, distributing meals at night, can be conservatively estimated to cost his family US$450 a week, covering the cost of food, gas, etc. This might have seemed an impossible equation . . . if Jorge and his family had sat down, in the beginning, to work out a plan to finance their mission. So they simply do not stop, and somehow, even if donations are ‘sporadic and unpredictable’ (Ellick 2007), their huge pots and pans are always brimming with hearty Colombian food to serve their extended ‘family’ of hundreds. In a video interview with The New York Times (available at http://www.anangelinqueens.org/), Jorge admits that he avoids thinking about costs: ‘If we start to count how much we spend, we’re going to get scared.’

Learning leadership 79 Like any other household, they have the week’s menu on the door of the refrigerator. Unlike other households, they prepare enormous amounts of food every day in a tiny kitchen that is no bigger than a regular parking space, and pack it carefully into more than a hundred individual styrofoam containers. Every single inch of Jorge’s small home is taken up with storing food. What used to be the porch is packed from floor to ceiling with canned food and supplies. The living room became a pantry. The big freezer does not fit in the kitchen, so it is now crowding what used to be the dining room. Every surface is potential storage space, and so they have not been able to sit at their own dining room table in years. When Jorge’s old home stove finally broke down under the burden of so many meals, they just moved the cooking to his sister’s stove, up six flights of stairs. Just when her stove was almost breaking down as well, in August of 2009, out of nowhere they received the donation of a brand new stove . . . and a microwave! Jorge, who had remained always stoic in the middle of their daily struggle, had tears of gratitude when he received what he called ‘this gift that will keep on giving.’5 With the economic crisis, there could not be a more diverse family than the one that congregates each night around Jorge’s white truck: Latinos, Asians, African Americans, Caucasians. For many, that is the only meal they will have had all day. Their paths may have started in many different places: some were born to poverty, others are discovering it only now. But still they all converge at the same point, at the same time, around the white truck belonging to this man who was himself an illegal immigrant not so long ago. The ‘regulars’ are treated like brothers and greeted by name. For newcomers, no questions are asked: if you are in line by 9:30, you will receive your meal. An observer of the nightly reunion around Jorge’s truck compared it to ‘the smiles of family and old friends just reunited at the airport’ (Lam 2009). To really grasp the magnitude of the miracle that takes place daily on that Roosevelt Avenue street corner, one must go beyond these pages and watch Jorge, Luz and Mrs Zapata in action. We urge the reader to experience this first-hand at: http://video.nytimes.com/ video/2007/11/21/nyregion/1194817108239/an-angel-in-queens.html.6 At first glance, Jorge might seem an unlikely hero. He is a humble, short (5’2”), balding forty-four-year-old man, who speaks a gentle, heavily accented English. Instead of riding a white horse, he drives a white truck to deliver his meals. His pragmatic personality is much more like Sancho Panza than Don Quixote. He never set up to be a leader, or to do anything ‘big’. It all started simply with awareness of food going to waste and the willingness to stop and talk with a group of illegal immigrants at a street corner. He just did what he thought needed to be done, without asking why or trying to foresee and address possible obstacles. From there, small step by small step, love took this ordinary man and his family into what turned out to be an extraordinary journey of learning leadership. The path, once chosen, does not allow U-turns. As Jorge explains: ‘once I started, I can’t go back.’ Jorge is consumed by his dedication to those he serves: he has few friends, no hobbies, hasn’t seen a movie in two years or watched TV in more than a year. His sister says: ‘He got no life’ (Ellick 2007). But one could say just the opposite: his life has found meaning and purpose in the mission he chose for himself. A reader (Kold 8/3/09) who commented on Lam’s 8/1/09 blog posting about Jorge pointed out that the word ‘selfless’ is perhaps inappropriate to describe what Jorge does. By serving others, he grows into the full potential of his own ‘self’. In a sense, it can be argued that ‘he needs them as much as they need him’ (Ellick 2007). In an interview to a Spanish-speaking TV channel (Mega News with Maria Santana, October 29, 2009), Jorge says that serving others makes him feel ‘complete in the inside’ (‘Sentir completo por dentro’)7. It is clear that Jorge identifies with those he serves: ‘when I

80 Elena Antonacopoulou and Regina Bento see these guys on the street . . . it’s like seeing me, twenty-something years ago when I came to this country.’ In Santana’s interview, it becomes obvious that food is only part of the story: more than the meals, Jorge gives the gift of attention to people who have been forgotten by society (‘pessoas olvidadas per la sociedad’). In Santana’s video, one of the people waiting in line for his meal explains the importance of being noticed: ‘para muchos, nos no existimos’ (‘for many people we don’t even exist’). In Lam’s YouTube video of July 30, 2009,8 Jorge is asked why he does what he does, and responds that the inspiration came from ‘God and my mom. Since I was little my mom teach (sic) me to share, and that’s what we are doing here’ (Lam 2009). The daily joint effort to serve others has ‘drawn the family closer together by projecting their love and energies outward’ (Good Samaritan 2009). One of the most striking features of Jorge’s story is that in all of his interviews he never talks about what he does in terms of personal or financial sacrifice. Rather, it is clear that the actions of this man with a $700 weekly paycheck derive from a sense of abundance, and even noblesse oblige. In a 2009 CNN video interview, Jorge tries to explain how grateful he is for what he has, and the obligation he feels to share it with others: ‘I have a stable job, my mom, my family, a house . . . everything I want, I have. And these guys [don’t]. So I just think, “OK, I have the food.” At least for today they’re going to have a meal to eat.’ 9 Having started in 2004 with a decision to collect and distribute a few meals, by now Jorge has alredy served more than 70,000 meals. He is the leader of a non-profit organization, An Angel In Queens,10 and has inspired a rapidly growing network of followers. Even though Jorge doesn’t call for action from anyone else, his own example is like a pebble that falls in the water and creates ever-expanding concentric circles. The ‘contagion’ started with his own family (mother, sister, a young nephew) and immediate circle of friends and acquaintances. As the story started to spread, more and more strangers all across the US and the world have been feeling inspired and compelled to act; either by helping Jorge directly (donating appliances or food, helping set up his non-profit organization and its website, and so on) or by finding their own particular way of helping others. Instead of recoiling in fear of the overwhelming needs of those around them, they suddenly find out that it is no longer so easy to turn away from a fellow human. Toan Lam, who used to ‘utterly dislike homeless and hungry people’, wrote a blog about Jorge’s story that became one of the most cited articles on the Huffington Post website (Lam 2009). Lam is now a passionate champion for GoInspireGo,11 the online non-profit organization he founded to use social networking technology to inspire social change. The producer that Lam recruited to create a video about Jorge was very depressed after being laid off from a TV network, but she became so moved by the ‘cathartic’ experience of meeting Jorge that she reframed the way she was looking at her own life: instead of feeling defeated by the lay-off, she came to realize that being on a ‘laycation’ (a ‘vacation’ caused by a lay-off) meant that she could have more time to do really meaningful things in her community (ibid.). A reader (carolt51) of Lam’s blog entry about Jorge had a similar reaction: ‘I’m on my own “lay-cation”. I’m going to find out what I can do for people in my community, especially now that I have all this time’ (added emphasis). The reframing is so powerful that being laid off – a reason that ordinarily might justify not bothering with the needs of others – becomes instead an especially propitious occasion to help, to share the gift of time. There are countless stories like theirs.12 In spite of all this recent notoriety, Jorge’s life and work are still the same. He seems to be the only one not to take notice of what he is achieving. He dreams of a day when he can have a centre so that people won’t have to eat standing up in the street.

Learning leadership 81 Mukhtaran Bibi (Mukhtar Mai) Mukhtaran Bibi’s journey of love and learning leadership began with an act of submission on Saturday, June 22, 2002. Her family were peasants from the Gujar caste, in the small rural village of Meerwala, in the Punjab area of Pakistan. Earlier that afternoon Mukhtar’s twelveyear-old brother, Shakur, had been kidnapped by members of the powerful and aggressive Mastoi caste. Mukhtar’s family had asked for the intercession of the local mullah (religious leader), but his efforts had been in vain, so they had finally sought help from the nearest police station, three miles away from the village. The police had gone to the Mastois’ home and brought Shakur back to the police station, covered in blood and with his clothes torn from being beaten and raped. The Mastois, enraged that a lower-caste family had had the gumption to summon police to their house, were now alleging that Shakur had committed zina-bil-jabar (illicit sexual relations, potentially punishable by death) against Salma, a twentysomething daughter of their clan. The matter had then been taken to the jirga (village council), to seek some form of reconciliation. There had been long and acrimonious negotiations, where some suggested that Shakur should marry Salma, and Mukhtar should be given in marriage to one of the Mastois. That solution had been repealed, so the jirga had instead told Shakur’s father and uncle to go home and bring a woman from their family to appear before the men of the village and, in all humility, offer a public apology for Shakur’s crime of zina against Salma. So it was that on that fateful Saturday evening Mukhtar’s father and uncle had come to tell her that she was the natural choice to be the emissary for that apology. After all, Mukhtar was a mature woman (almost thirty years old, according to her mother’s fuzzy calculations); she had obtained a legal divorce from her previous arranged marriage; and, even though she was illiterate, she had memorized the Koran and taught it to the children of the village, which had garnered her some measure of respect. They told her: ‘Mukhtaran, get ready, and follow us’ (Mai 2007). Mukhtar was a very shy woman, and the prospect of offering a public apology to the Mastois would scare anyone. But, as she had done all her life, Mukhtar did as she was told. ‘It is the woman’s place to humiliate herself,’ Mukhtar believed, so she went to ‘beg for forgiveness before all the men of the village assembled in a jirga in front of the Mastoi’s farmhouse’, about 300 yards from her own home (Mai 2007). To her horror, she found out that the Mastois were not just looking for a public apology. Abdul Khaliq and other Mastoi kinsmen dragged Mukhtar to a stable, ‘like a goat led to slaughter’, and gang-raped her. I, Mukhtaran Bibi, eldest daughter of my father, Ghulam Farid Jat, lose all consciousness of myself, but I will never forget the faces of those animals. For them, a woman is simply an object of possession, honor, or revenge. They marry or rape them according to their conception of tribal pride. They know that a woman humiliated in that way has no other recourse except suicide. They don’t even need to use their weapons. Rape kills her. Rape is the ultimate weapon: it shames the other clan forever. (ibid.: 10) When they were done, the men shoved Mukhtar outside, half naked, to be shamed before the entire village. In the days that followed, Mukhtar remained hidden inside her home, lying down on a straw pallet, not talking, crying or eating: For several days, I go insane with helplessness. I cannot go on living like this, lying down, shrouded in my shawl! Finally, out of nowhere, a surprising fit of anger saves me from

82 Elena Antonacopoulou and Regina Bento that stupor. Now it’s my turn to seek revenge . . . but I am only a woman, and we have no money. We haven’t the right to have any! Men have the monopoly on vengeance, which passes through violence inflicted upon women. (ibid.: 19) But what could an illiterate woman in a rural area do against men of a powerful clan like the Mastois, protected by their status, their guns, their money, and centuries of tradition? Slowly, improbable things began to happen. Mukhtar heard that during Friday prayers the local mullah had denounced what the Mastois had done to her ‘as a sin, a disgrace for the entire community’, which should be reported to the police. It was rumoured that a local reporter had been present when the mullah said this, and had published the story in the newspaper. One day, the police appeared at Mukhtar’s house and took her, with her father and her uncle, to the police station. To Mukhtar’s surprise, there were reporters at the police station: the story had spread from the local paper to the rest of the country, the capital of Islamabad, and even abroad. Mukhtar realized that a path was opening in front of her, and that maybe she could do the unimaginable: use the judicial system to punish the Mastoi. Like many illiterate women, I knew nothing about the law – and so little about my rights that I didn’t even know I had any! Now, though, I’m beginning to understand that my revenge can take another path besides suicide . . . I have never seen a lawyer or a judge. I know absolutely nothing about the official justice reserved for wealthy and educated people. So I have no idea where my decision to file a complaint will lead me. For the moment, it’s a springboard for my survival, a weapon for my revolt as I seek to avenge my humiliation, a weapon still untested, yet precious to me – because it’s the only one I have. I will have justice, or death. Perhaps both. (ibid.: 28–9) Mukhtar realized that she was ready to rebel: she decided to file an official report. On the one hand, this decision might seem to be at odds with her entire life story of submission, like all the other women she had ever known. On the other hand, it could be argued that the decision was in character, no matter how revolutionary it might sound. In submitting herself to men, her family, her tribe, her religion, Mukhtar had cultivated all her life a commitment to doing what she thought was right. Now, she was still doing what she thought was right; the only difference was that her thoughts about what was right were changing, and so was her behaviour. The road ahead was long and difficult. As Mukhtar’s story began to circulate around the world, the judicial process went ahead, propelled by honest judges and external pressures – otherwise it would have stalled, under the weight of tradition and corruption, or when the government thought she was damaging her country’s reputation abroad. After countless setbacks, Mukhtar was awarded half a million rupees (roughly US$8,000). This monetary award became another crucial fork in the road: on the one hand, the money could do wonders to alleviate the poverty of her family; on the other hand, the judicial struggle had left Mukhtar exasperated with the limitations of her own illiteracy, as she found herself signing important legal papers with a thumbprint, even though she did not know what those documents said. She decided to use the money to build a school for the girls in her village, next to her house, right across from the place where she had been raped. Mukhtar enrolled herself in the school, so that she could learn how to read. But the struggle was not over. There were new legal developments and setbacks, and police were posted around her house twenty-four hours a day; maybe to avoid retaliation, maybe

Learning leadership 83 as a form of subtle intimidation. Journalists like The New York Times’s Nicholas Kristof brought the world’s attention to Mukhtar’s efforts. She became a cause célèbre, a symbol of the lack of legal rights for women in the traditional tribal culture of ‘an eye for an eye’. Human rights groups, feminists, journalists and NGOs rallied to her support. Mukhtar felt confused by the sudden notoriety, but learned to accept it as part of the cost of bringing justice and change to other women. Still, it was not easy: Both the ordeal that destroyed my peaceful life and this resounding victory hailed by the media depress me no end. I’m tired of talking, of having to deal with men and their laws. People say that I’m heroic, when I’m utterly exhausted . . . Thanks to my courage, people say, I’ve turned the spotlight on the condition of women in my country, and other women will follow my lead. How many, I wonder? (ibid.: 74–5) What sustained her in those times of personal pain and self-doubt was the belief that she could make a difference: To me, the answer is simple: knowledge must be given to girls, and as soon as possible, before their mothers bring them up the same way they were raised themselves. . . . But I will make sure girls learn to read, and I’ll learn to read too. Never again will I sign a blank sheet of paper with my thumbprint. (ibid.: 76–7) By the end of 2002, Mukhtar had started her ‘school beneath the trees’. Over time, more contributions arrived in her little village. The school grew, got a roof, more rooms, and more students, including boys. Mukhtar started a high school, so that ‘her’ girls could continue receiving education. People from all over the world started volunteering to teach in Mukhtar’s school. She bought practical things, such as dairy cows, to help supplement the school’s income, and a school van that also works as an ambulance, making it possible for women to go to a hospital to deliver their babies. She started an aid group, the Mukhtar Mai Women’s Welfare Organization, which offers a free legal clinic, a public library, and shelter for battered women.13 When women come from miles around to show up at her door, disfigured by punishments for being ‘bad’, Mukhtar arranges plastic surgery and mobilizes public opinion, judges, lawyers and police to find justice for them (Kristof and WuDunn 2009). The voices of tradition still try to discredit Mukhtar as a ‘money-hungry publicity hound’, or deride her lack of conventional education: ‘Mukhtar means well, but she’s just a peasant’ (ibid.: 76). She still faces enormous challenges and security threats (Kristof 2009). But her impact is felt well beyond the little village of Meerwala: Raping poor girls is no longer always a penalty-free sport, and so rapes appear to have declined considerably in the southern Punjab. There is no data, but inhabitants in village after village say that rapes used to be common and are now rare. Mukhtar has also galvanized other change-makers, creating echoes of herself. (Kristof and WuDunn 2009: 77–8) Just as in the case of Jorge Muñoz, Mukhtar Mai’s work is best seen first-hand, in any of the many video interviews that have documented her journey of love, learning and leadership. We urge the reader to go online and watch her interview with Ann Curry, from NBC News

84 Elena Antonacopoulou and Regina Bento (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/32694579#32694579). Mukhtaran Bibi, the woman who only spoke the dialect of her village, lived in silence. Mukhtar Mai, who now speaks Urdu and is heard around the world, became the voice of girls and women who had none.14

Practising learning leadership practice: implications for future research and practice The idea that we seek to attest by presenting both these stories is the importance of performing learning leadership with love. The stories also reflect our own love and dedication in nurturing the idea of learning leadership; not only through identifying improvizational approaches for its development (Antonacopoulou and Bento 2003), but also through defining unique and individual ways to practise such leadership in the community, like those illustrated by Jorge Muñoz and Mukhtar Mai. Both stories testify to the way learning leadership can be rehearsed, performed and improvized within the process. Our protagonists and those around them learned from their experiences, to the extent that they were able to generate patterns of what works and does not work, bringing those lessons to bear in informing and improving their leadership practice. For them, learning leadership supported inner learning and a relational mode of practice as essential principles, providing social meaning and value to their actions. These social meanings emerge through interactions that allow the emergent leaders the space and time to reflect, reframe and leverage their learning and unlearning through the pursuit of doing what they love while evidently continuing to love what they do – serving others, promoting equality as the telos to which their leadership practice is directed. The two stories of love and learning leadership include the following characteristics embedded in the process of practising: 1 2 3

4

5

Awareness, alertness and attentiveness to one’s own and others’ learning and leadership needs. Shared learning and leadership responsibility, by alternating complementary roles (teacher/learner, leader/follower). Embracing discontinuity as a necessary feature of building a sense of continuity in the actions taken in relation to learning and leadership – one can learn from surprising situations, in the same way that leadership emerges out of situations that are both unknown and familiar. Discontinuity reminds us that surprise is an integral part of learning and leading. Mutual co-operation and agreement to deal with issues being presented in a spontaneous and flexible way; building on what is being offered rather than seeking to judge whether it fits with one’s existing framework. By building on what is happening one lets things grow into what they can become, rather than setting limits based on preconceptions. Tapping into one’s own and others’ cognitive and emotional processes as a way of leading out the practices that define leadership and learning.

These five aspects of practising learning leadership are underpinned by another fundamental quality; namely, reflexive critique (Antonacopoulou 2004, 2008c). Reflexive critique is grounded in empirical praxis because it shifts the focus away from routinization and towards performing leadership with a focus on repetition – rehearsing, reviewing, renewing, recognizing. This suggests that one of the most fundamental implications for leadership research is the need to recast focus, away from presenting leadership as a landscape of ideal practice, towards a

Learning leadership 85 representation in which leadership is the context for learning practice. In other words, leadership is abstracted: it can be conceived of as surreal, a super-reality which defies objectivist representations, but which affords multiple interpretations – that is, if we learn to see beyond what we expect to see or what we assume there is to be seen. Learning leadership, therefore, presents a fluid image beyond attributes and tasks, beyond behaviours and situations. Learning leadership is the coming together of all these features in a complex blend of colour that stimulates our senses to learn to feel the impact of leadership rather than simply insisting on seeing it in order to testify its existence. This said, of course we acknowledge fully that in promoting learning leadership practice we also recognize the importance of observable actions, especially in the context of social interactions where the difference learning leadership practice can make may be more apparent. Although our two examples capture learning leadership practice in conditions that are perhaps untypical of business organizations, they are none the less reflective of the extraordinary human potential for action that makes a difference. It is that process of making a difference that we want to attest to and bring more centrally to focus in leadership practice and in learning practice. Our point is this: irrespective of how we choose to conceive of organizations, we cannot deny that organizing as a process that takes place in a number of contexts demands the engagement of multiple social actors with multiple identities, capabilities, and hence expectations. Organizing however, is also a very personal mode of expressing that which individual actors care about and seek to attend to. Hence, organizations can also be conceived of as arenas of negotiated action where individual initiative can and does have the potential to make a difference. This is exactly what we feel the protagonisits in our two case studies of learning leadership practice reflect: namely the capacity to make a difference to ‘established’ social structures (be that illegal immigrant communities or the cultural, social and political ‘rules’ that define the dynamics between different castes) which they participate in or are compelled to participate in. What is evident through learning leadership practice is that these social structures are reshaped because entirely new organizations are born out of the initiative of the learning leaders. This initiative that both Jorge Muñoz and Mukhtar Mai demonstrate – through their love for others, care for a cause, desire to make a difference and inspiration to others – reveals the practical judgements (phronesis) that have guided their actions. In other words, their phronesis coupled with their reflexive critique towards the issues they were confronted with became a source of energy guiding their intentions. Their intentions fuelled their intensions too and became the source of their entrepreneurialism and creativity in the midst of organizing and copying. As well as new modes of learning, what these emerging organizations create around learning leadership practice is a powerful indication of its impact. The impact of learning leadership practice is evident not least by the ways that others come to recognize and value it. It is important, therefore, to account for the impact of leadership and learning leadership practice specifically beyond economic measures of success and rather in relation to unanticipated social, cultural and political implications.

Conclusions The analysis in this chapter has sought to extend the idea of learning leadership both as an alternative image of leadership, as well as a method of learning to discover leadership. Fundamentally, learning leadership invites us to explore different ways of seeing leadership and learning, and the relationship between the two. Therefore, the notion of learning leadership, and the three principles that underpin it – inner learning, relationality and love –

86 Elena Antonacopoulou and Regina Bento highlight the vast array of possibilities for learning that leadership entails; in the same way, learning is a space for new leads (direction) in being and becoming a leader. The stories of Jorge Muñoz and Mukhtar Mai illustrate several elements in this process of being and becoming. They both start with ordinary human beings, who at a certain point in their lives become aware of ‘something’ in themselves and others that until then they had taken for granted. There is a shift in perspective about the link between ‘self’ and ‘other’: a stranger is no longer a stranger; the world as it is can no longer accommodate the re-definition of who one is, emotionally and cognitively, and one feels an imperative to change. In this moment when we finally pay attention, there is an inner transformation that causes the re-cognition of our common humanity, both in the sense that we now see (recognize) the other as familiar, and in the sense that there is a new cognition about the ties that bind us together. This does not mean that we idealize the other; rather, that his or her needs become our own, regardless of flaws or limitations. But he’s a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He’s not to be allowed to fall in his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person. (Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman, Act 1) It is as if we were looking at a jigsaw puzzle that we used to think was complete, but now we realize one piece is out of place; or a Rubik’s cube where all the surfaces looked complete, but we now notice that one little square is still out of place. This newfound dissonance impels us to action. Suddenly, we have to fix this one piece of the puzzle, this one tiny square in the cube. This action does not feel heroic, but utterly natural: the opposite – not doing something – feels unacceptable, unthinkable. We do not stop to wonder if moving that puzzle piece, that square in the cube, will cause such a rearrangement of the other parts that we are actually making a long-term commitment to work on the puzzle or the Rubik’s cube. We are not deterred by lack of resources or knowledge of what will happen, or the immensity of all that needs to be done: at this moment we are willing to try, to risk failure, to do just this one thing. And then we find that this first step can take us into a path of no return, and that there might be pain, but also learning and transformation, through which the puzzle, the cube – we – become whole. As Jorge Muñoz said in an interview to The New York Times, ‘once I started, I can’t go back’ (Ellick 2007). And as he said in the interview with the Mega News Spanish broadcast, what he does makes him feel complete in the inside: ‘sentir completo por dentro’ (Mega News, October 29, 2009). Mukhtar Mai’s story also describes how her first step (filing an official complaint with the police) set in motion the long judicial process and the chain of events (media attention, monetary resources) that transformed her and launched her mission. It might seem unorthodox that we did not choose to tell here the learning leadership stories that one would expect to find in a management book. Instead, we told the stories of a poor immigrant school bus driver in New York and an illiterate peasant in a remote little village in Pakistan – ordinary people learning to do, and leading others to do, extraordinary things. We chose this on purpose, to show that love and learning leadership paths can, and often do, start in obscurity, in the most unlikely places. Anyone reading this can probably think of many other stories of ordinary people doing extraordinary things. But that is exactly our point: these stories are happening all around us. We only hear about those that are close to us, or become famous, or strike a particular chord. Most quiet leaders remain outside of the limelight, and thus remain unknown unless we are

Learning leadership 87 in their immediate circle of activity. But for those who do reach the spotlight, the way they handle it becomes one more challenge in their learning leadership journey. Some get seduced by public attention, and see their mission transformed into an instrument for personal gratification. On the other hand, people like Muñoz and Mai do not seek fame, or bask in the limelight. They just accept the spotlight as one more tool with which to do their work. They remain themselves – they are learning leaders well before the spotlight of fame or history finds them, and continue quietly on their paths long after the spotlight moves on to another story. It should also be noted that by using contemporary stories we have benefited from resources such as online videos, which paint a much more vivid image of real people, following tangible paths of love, leadership and learning. But we should remember that the core concepts underlying these stories date back thousands of years, across religions and cultures: start with your neighbours; love others as yourself; treat others as you want to be treated; change the world by remaining deeply rooted in it. Given that we opened this chapter with a Lao Tzu quotation, let us sum up with another one of Tzu’s famous quotes which says that ‘the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step’ – but it has been argued that a better translation should emphasize the stillness that precedes action: ‘The journey of a thousand miles begins beneath one’s feet’, or ‘even the longest journey must begin where you stand’ (Moncur 2004). The reason we view Muñoz and Mai as learning leaders is not that they can do things we cannot. Rather, it is because they make us feel that if they can do it, so can we. It is true that their stories are powerful because they capture our imagination. But it is even more true that they are powerful because they free up our imagination to realize that we, too, can take that first step, and the next, and the next, as we follow the path of love and learning leadership. Our hope is that these stories of learning leadership in practice move you as much as they moved us; they opened our eyes and our hearts to imagine the potential for leadership and learning as a labour of love to enhance the connections that practice calls for – namely loving what we do and doing what we love. Now, we invite all those thoughtful practitioners across the conventional labels of ‘academic’, ‘researcher’, ‘manager’ and ‘policymaker’ to imagine the potential impact of embracing learning leadership in the context of their management practice (scholarship, business or policy). Management practice is embedded in organizing and organizations, and not just institutions. The very institutional structures that define management and organization practices, however, are fundamentally shaped in turn by the social actors that perform such practices. This means, for example, that business practitioners inspired by this chapter could explore how their current management practice (irrespective of the role or title they may hold) provides scope for them to practise and improvize using learning leadership. In other words, we invite thoughtful practitioners to take time and make space for reflexive critique in relation to their management practices, so that they can experiment with new possibilities to make a difference to those around them through their responsible and accountable mode of organizing.

Summary 1

The stories discussed here raise significant research questions. In the tradition of positive psychology, we need to know much more about ‘ordinary’ people like Muñoz and Mai. For example, what is the psychodynamics, the alchemy of the first step? What made Muñoz ‘see’ the food being thrown away, ‘see’ the immigrants on the street corner, and galvanize those two perceptions together into action? What made Mukhtar leave the

88 Elena Antonacopoulou and Regina Bento 2

straw pallet where she was thinking of suicide, and go to file a police report of her rape? One of the obstacles to pursuing these questions is that academics tend to be sceptical by nature, and to remain tied to classic conceptions of ‘rigour’. They are like the poems we used to love until they were ruined by classroom analysis and book reports. It is no accident that the language we used in telling Muñoz’s and Mai’s stories may sound more emotional than the detached, impartial tone traditionally used in academia. We cannot learn enough from these leaders if we stay in strictly rational terrains; we need to open our emotional barriers, experience empathy, be willing to be transformed ourselves. This does not mean, however, that we should let go of any critical impulse. Rather, we could contemplate acting as psychoanalysts who carefully examine the emotions that are raised in themselves by each patient, trying to use the exploration of transference and countertransference as windows onto that individual’s uniqueness.

Questions for discussion 1 2 3

How are the journeys of people like Muñoz and Mai rooted in their environments? What makes them believe that they are on a path of no return, even when facing challenges that would cause many others to drop off? What seems to sustain them when they are exhausted? What kinds of people do they attract, and how do those who are attracted proceed themselves in the path of learning leadership?

Notes 1 Several scholars have discussed the distinctions that Aristotle has introduced in relation to modes of knowledge (McIntyre 1985; Flyvbjerg 2001; Eikeland 2007). They remind us that Aristotle drew attention to three modes of knowledge, one of which we tend to systematically ignore. We seem to be more familiar with scientific (Επιστη′µη – episteme) and technical (Τε′χνη – techne) knowledge than we are with practical (praxis) knowledge (Φρο′ νησι§ – phronesis). 2 Individuality refers here to a person’s unique qualities, which need to be identified and utilized. It would be argued that it is in our unique characteristics as individuals – that which makes us different – that our leadership may lie; i.e. our difference makes the difference. The meaning of individuality, however, extends here to embrace the other meaning of what being individual means; namely undivided, an inseparable part of the social whole. 3 http://gp0811.wordpress.com/2009/08/11/good-samaritan-in-new-york-city/. 4 http://video.nytimes.com/video/2007/11/21/nyregion/1194817108239/an-angel-inqueens.html. 5 www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2Vep1WPoPI. 6 See also: http://www.cnn.com/2009/LIVING/03/19/cnnheroes.jorge.munoz/index.html#cnn STCVideo; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KTN0xXiHgI (with a follow up: http://www. youtube.com/watch?v=r2Vep1WPoPI&feature=related); http://abcnews.go.com/video/player index?id=8265706; http://www.youtube.com/user/migeli98#p/c/E120C54DEB53CA73/2/ 18jhhSct8ZI (in Spanish). 7 http://www.youtube.com/user/migeli98#p/c/E120C54DEB53CA73/2/18jhhSct8ZI. 8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KTN0xXiHgI. 9 http://www.cnn.com/2009/LIVING/03/19/cnnheroes.jorge.munoz/index.html#cnnSTC Video. 10 http://www.anangelinqueens.org/. 11 http://www.goinspirego.com/. 12 Muñoz was named a ‘CNN Hero’ – http://www.cnn.com/2009/LIVING/03/19/cnnheroes. jorge.munoz/index.html#cnnSTCText); his mission was chronicled in a New York Times article (Ellick 2007) – http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/25/nyregion/thecity/25dinn.html?_r=2&oref =slogin&pagewanted=all); in a blog posting on the Huffington Post (Lam, August 1, 2009) –

Learning leadership 89 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/toan-lam/an-angel-in-queens-new-yo_b_248571.html); in an interview in the TV morning news programme ‘Good Morning America’, (August 26, 2009) – http://abcnews.go.com/video/playerindex?id=8265706). He was honoured by the New York Knicks team at Madison Square Garden – http://www.knickknax.com/tag/jorge-munoz/ and http://www.cnn.com/2009/LIVING/03/19/cnnheroes.jorge.munoz/index.html#cnnSTCVide o. Jorge’s fans get together on a Facebook group – http://www.facebook.com/group.php? gid=14835060244 – and follow him on Twitter. Toan Lam’s videos about Muñoz’s mission became a viral phenomenon on YouTube, with almost 100,000 hits between August and November of 2009, and receiving five-star ratings by viewers – first posted on August 1, 2009 at http://www. huffingtonpost.com/toan-lam/an-angel-in-queens-new-yo_b_248571.html, and followed up on August 11, 2009 at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2Vep1WPoPI&feature=related. One could criticize Muñoz’s mission with the argument that it fosters dependence. But Toan Lam responds: ‘Some cynics say they believe the old Chinese proverb, “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” Although I agree with this old adage, I also believe in this comment, from one of my blogger readers, “Yeah, but the fisherman [or fisherwoman] has to eat while fishing, don’t they?”’ (Lam, August 1, 2009, http://www. huffingtonpost.com/toan-lam/an-angel-in-queens-new-yo_b_248571.html). As in any entrepreneurial venture, the issue is not just the value of an idea, but also one’s willingness to take action and how one operationalizes the idea. This is when we know an idea works, because it is fortified with love. At a time when regular food banks struggle to keep up with significantly increased demand, and immigrants are afraid of going to conventional food distribution sources because of the spectre of deportation, Muñoz’s work is more desperately needed than ever. CNN pays tribute to his single-minded devotion to serving the needs of his community: ‘With the economic downturn, donations have slowed as the crowds awaiting Muñoz’s arrival have grown. But he is determined to do all he can to meet their needs’ (http://www.cnn.com/2009/LIVING/03/19/cnnheroes. jorge.munoz/index.html#cnnSTCText). 13 See http://www.bohemiafoundation.com/bohemia_newsletter_mar09.pdf. 14 The evolution of her identity was manifested in a new name: instead of Mukhtaran Bibi, the girls in her school started calling her Mukhtar Mai, ‘respected big sister’. Mukhtar’s fame spread. She has published a book – In the Name of Honor (http://authors.simonandschuster.com/MukhtarMai/39343260); has been featured extensively in The New York Times (http://topics.nytimes.com/ top/reference/timestopics/people/m/mukhtar_mai/index.html?inline=nyt-per) and BBC News (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/4620065.stm); has been honoured by Muslim organizations abroad (http://www.bohemiafoundation.com/bohemia_newsletter_mar09.pdf); and has been ABC News ‘Person of the Week’ (http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/PersonOfWeek/ story?id=1237950&page=1). In a twist of irony, this shy woman, always wrapped in modest traditional clothes, was named Glamour magazine ‘Woman of the Year’. Travelling to New York to accept the award, she soon grew tired of reporters asking her about the rape, when she really wanted to talk about her school. She appeared on TV around the world, while longing to be back home, with the girls of her school.

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6

Designing and delivering leadership education and development The role of corporate universities Rob Paton, Scott Taylor, John Storey and Geoff Peters

Chapter outline This chapter: • • •

Explains a major type of strategic leadership initiative – the corporate university phenomenon. Describes the specific attempts made to develop leadership within these institutions. Draws upon Weber’s theories to understand how corporate universities seek to capture and develop charisma as a more routine corporate resource.

It seems that educationalists have been unable to resist trying to shape leadership practice since Plato set up his Academy in fourth-century BC Athens (Grint 1997). This chapter describes and analyses a recent intervention – ‘corporate universities’ (CUs), an educational initiative often oriented towards the development of leaders. We examine interventions in four multinational companies and two UK public sector initiatives. The companies operate across continents, each employing tens of thousands of people, and each with its own corporate university; the public sector initiatives are intended to transform two of the largest areas of state provision. We explore how leadership development is prioritized within these initiatives and the methods used for developing leadership. We suggest that CU-based approaches have distinctive features, and consider the tensions and uncertainties associated with them. We suggest that CUs are an attempt to rationalize the mysterious aspects of leadership. Drawing on the work of German sociologist Max Weber (1978), we explore the desire to include the charismatic and the efforts made to manage, routinize, and transform charisma into something that can be educated for and developed.

The corporate university phenomenon Each of the initiatives we look at in this chapter can be categorized as a corporate university (CU). There are different types of CU with different missions, a variety of structures and diverse contributions to the host organization (Blass 2001; Paton and Taylor 2002). Here we focus specifically on CUs oriented towards selective development of current and future leaders. These CUs work within a mission framework that also includes corporate values development, the maintenance of ‘corporate glue’ through transmitting values, and personal development programmes dedicated to fast-track, high-potential employees. This kind of CU is identified with selectivity, focuses on an identified organizational elite, and often has a rural, ‘stately home’ location (Paton et al. 2005a). As discussed elsewhere in this collection, languages of leadership have been very much to the fore at a variety of levels in recent years. This rise has coincided with the growth of interest in

94 Rob Paton, Scott Taylor, John Storey and Geoff Peters CUs. In the early 1980s, fewer than twenty could be identified in the US. This list included initiatives such as Hamburger U (McDonald’s), the Disney Institute and, perhaps best known of all, Motorola U. Less than 15 years later, the US-based CU consulting firm CU Xchange (see http://www.corpu.com) claimed that there were more than 1,200 CU initiatives in the US alone. In addition to this, large European organizations across a range of industries began to develop CU initiatives: thus, for example, Unipart U sought to be known as the ‘third university in Oxford’, Cable and Wireless set up its own UK-based college near the University of Warwick, and UK-based banking groups such as Lloyds TSB and Barclays invested in CU initiatives. We think it is significant that the rise of CUs closely parallels the spread of leadership as a language. As this chapter will demonstrate, leadership is a key focus of CU initiatives. The chapter explores the reasons for this, and examines the ways in which leadership development provision is structured by CU initiatives, and what leadership development provision through CUs might mean for both the managers being developed and the leadership programmes. The rest of the chapter is structured as follows. First, we examine the concept and outline the development of corporate universities, from their early roots in the US to the current global presence. We discuss the characteristics of CUs, provide a summary of the cases that form the empirical foundation of analysis in this chapter, and note the key differentiators of CUs as an innovation in the management of corporate training and development. Second, we explore the concepts and models of leadership that underpin leadership development in our cases, locating our analysis within contemporary understandings of leadership as both corporate and public policy discourse. Third, we explore the pragmatics of leadership development programmes delivered within CU initiatives, focusing on the pursuit of strategic alignment, the methods employed, and operational issues such as costs, infrastructure and partnerships. Finally, we conclude with a discussion of the dilemmas and ambiguities associated with attempts to institutionalize leadership development in this way. In the process, connections are made to some longstanding debates about the place of leadership and leadership development in organizations. What are corporate universities? Early discussion of CU initiatives focused on the way private companies were seeking to appropriate the terminology and symbolism associated with institutions of higher learning (e.g. Eurich 1985; Craig et al. 1999). There is a powerful symbolic importance for established universities in the corporate trends of organizing training and development under titles such as ‘University’, ‘College’, or ‘Academy’. Such symbolism operates both within the host organization and beyond into wider society (Taylor et al. 2010). However, for the purposes of conceptualizing CU initiatives as sites of leadership development, the precise term a company may (or may not) use is less important than understanding both the continuity with and the differences from previous methods and structures for delivering workplace-based learning. In our view, a corporate university is best understood as the most recent approach to providing a structure that enables important forms of work-related learning to occur within and for companies, including leadership development. CUs should be seen as a pragmatic and practical development of notions such as the learning organization (Senge 1993) or the learning company (Pedler et al. 1991). But if we examine the history of training and development further as an aspect of the industrial organization of work, then we can begin to see CUs as part of ongoing attempts by managers to structure employee engagement with knowledge and learning, and to incorporate such engagement within wider strategic concerns. From this perspective, CUs are less a new fashion than the latest manifestation of a longstanding effort to meet corporate, organizational, or societal learning requirements.

The role of corporate universities 95 The emergence of CUs In the private sector, ‘corporation schools’ emerged in mid-nineteenth century USA, when large companies such as DuPont and Edison set up technical and liberal arts education for current and prospective employees (Eurich 1985). These institutions were intended to correct perceived inadequacies in state provision, as employers reportedly found it difficult to recruit employees with the requisite skills or attitudes (indicating that what we think of as contemporary concerns often have long roots). These early initiatives trained employees well into the twentieth century, expanding to include the emerging profession of management. This structure was challenged, however, by technical colleges and universities willing to deal with business and management as a subject area. The success of the first schools of commerce in the UK, in Birmingham and Manchester, was an early indicator of the potential that universities might find in engaging with work organizations. This early faith has been borne out: business and management courses today are the single most popular subject in UK universities, and over 20 per cent of undergraduate courses contain a component relating to this area. Schools dedicated to the study of business and management are now found in most British universities, and few universities around the world do not have a business school of one kind or another. Wiggenhorn (1990) indicates how the educational themes underpinning corporate schools and university business schools continue to be relevant in contemporary organizations. He explains the managerial rationales behind restructuring employee education in Motorola, arguing that initial investment in Motorola U was stimulated by the need to implement new working practices requiring a more autonomous worker. Line managers found themselves unable to implement corporate directives on new methods of working with the large proportion of employees who were functionally illiterate and non-numerate or unable to follow instructions in English. According to Wiggenhorn, the ‘discovery’ of this employee lack resulted in two key innovations in corporate training. First, managers began to assess employees on a wide range of key skills that would normally have been taken for granted, and, second, Motorola representatives began to make more demands as to course content and delivery from third-party suppliers. From these roots, CU initiatives have spread across US industrial sectors and can now be found in most manufacturing and service sectors. In addition, in common with many managerial fads and fashions (Littler 1982), CUs have been exported across the Atlantic on the assumption that what is good for US business is beneficial to UK and European organizations. This process has been in part driven by the development of a consultancy miniindustry around CU initiatives, led by Jeanne Meister (1998). Meister provides an outline of the business drivers for implementing a CU initiative, setting out some generally accepted changes to the conditions of organization, such as moves from bureaucratic to post-Fordist principles, knowledge economies, or moves from lifetime employment to employability. She also locates CUs within the learning organization discourse, asserting that a common goal of CUs is to sustain competitive advantage through lifelong learning. Finally, Meister codifies key aspects of CU initiatives: the commitment of senior management to the initiative, forming learning alliances with existing educational providers, increased use of technology to deliver learning experiences, and the operation of the CU as a separate cost centre. The origins of the public sector corporate universities in the UK follow a parallel path to their private sector equivalents. With the public sector as a major employer, countries like the UK developed staff colleges to both improve the level of basic skills and education and to professionalize the specialist aspects of roles in the police, firefighting, armed services and parts of the civil service. By the beginning of the twenty-first century several of these reformed or merged staff colleges, alongside some new entrants, emerge as fully fledged corporate

96 Rob Paton, Scott Taylor, John Storey and Geoff Peters universities, often with leadership as a sole or a key aim. The Defence Academy, created following a strategic review of all defence training, brought together several existing military colleges and a newly formed Defence Leadership Centre (Defence Training Review 2001); in health both an NHS University and a separate NHS Leadership Centre were created and subsequently merged into a smaller Institute (though by 2009 there were plans to create a separate NHS Leadership Council); and a National College for Leadership of Schools and Children’s Services was originally launched in 2000 as an initiative for school leadership alone. These initiatives are mirroring private sector CUs and are also wrestling with the extent to which leadership in government should be more ‘joined up’. Two quotes from a senior civil servant involved in establishing the National College of School Leadership (NCSL) demonstrate this: I mean it became clear that the numbers were completely different if you talk to the folk at Unilever, or whatever, about what they did. . . . we were having lots of conversations within Government with [the Department of] Health at that stage about the extent to which we were talking about generic leadership skills, that were transferable, and trying to establish more of a permeable divide – if you can have a permeable divide, between education leaders and health leaders – or whether one ought to grow a cadre of people who you could, in the medium term, move between roles and responsibilities. Table 6.1 provides a brief summary of key aspects of the learning initiatives in our case organizations. It tries to capture the essential features of evolving organizational arrangements, as they were in all cases subject to significant change even during the course of fieldwork undertaken. These features are: the strategic drivers for setting up and maintaining the CU initiative, as expressed by senior managers within the CU structure; the form and approach that each CU takes; and the location of the initiative within the organization (whether physical or virtual, including the reporting relationship). In addition, the table outlines the issues to which leadership development is perceived to be the solution, the scope and focus of programmes, and the methods that underpin the programmes. Differentiating CU initiatives From this outline of the development of contemporary CU initiatives and the representation of our cases in Table 6.1, we would suggest the following as the distinctive features of this method of organizing leadership training and development: 1

Corporate-level strategic initiatives. CUs are intended to be both corporate and strategically oriented. A higher level of decision is evident in the management of the initiatives than is common in managing training and development, making CUs distinct from the human resource (HR) function in both private and public sectors. CUs aim to deliver on a specific contribution, such as reshaping training and development provision through e-learning, outsourcing supply, or a broad rationalization of supply. In addition, CU managers focus more on the notion of providing a ‘corporate value added’, as one of our respondents put it. This means avoiding the replication of what happens at local level, such as induction or skills training.

Developing senior leadership. Rationalization of global training spend. Empowering individuals to make the most of learning and development opportunities.

Corporate (‘global’) learning remit includes OD and business improvement activities, as well as leadership development. These complement ICTenabled technological and professional development (including some leadership) provided by major business units.

Strategic drivers

Form and approach

Shell

Barclays

‘Blended learning’. Internal design of programmes – mix of internal and externally contracted provision. Emphasis on communities of practice. Complements training and development work undertaken by business units.

Dispersed small centres across UK for lower level training. CU offers higher level training and development as ‘quality assured’.

Post-merger Re-organization of integration. business unit HR Cross-cultural working. function. Technological change. Rationalization of Development of training spend. intellectual leadership, Increase in individual and market responsibility for positioning. career Customer relations. management. Income generation.

Capgemini

Table 6.1 Six corporate university cases and their primary dynamics1

Small HQ staff provides basic e-learning services and infrastructure to group, and approves major learning providers. Provides internal benchmarking / business improvement consultancy. Develops bespoke leadership programmes and offers internal consultancy on leadership development.

Initially, post-merger integration; development of learning organization; knowledge management across business units; internal benchmarking.

BAE Systems

Single headquarters and centre, local provision of inherited courses. Development of online equivalents. Specifies and manages relations with third-party providers. Develops bespoke leadership programmes.

More recently, the development of high-calibre senior leaders. Improve quality of leadership in schools. Boost status of managers in public sector schools.

NCSL

continued

Integration of most existing activity in a single facility. Contracts for whole colleges let to thirdparty ‘academic providers’. Formation of in-house research capability. Creation of Defence Leadership Centre.

Rationalization of advanced (mainly postgraduate) training across armed services and Ministry of Defence civil servants.

Defence Academy

A, B, C, D.

Methods2 A, C, E, F.

A, B, C, D, E.

Top tier (currently).

Originally, little consistency of approach across merged business. Raising awareness of managers to corporate ethics and responsibility. Recently, need for world-class top leaders to maintain and improve business performance.

No one central (bricks-and-mortar) learning facility. Originally reporting to board, latterly reporting jointly to HR and technology vice-presidents.

A, B, C, D, F.

Senior management and heads of department.

Perceived underperformance of schools and their pupils; lack of attention to important aspects of the headteacher’s role by all concerned.

New purpose-built facility with own governance arrangements – close links to government department.

A, B, C, E, F.

Officers and equivalent, especially those likely to reach the corporate/ strategic level.

New challenges arising from increasing complexity of day-to-day business and in strategic/ corporate management.

Redevelopment of existing site. Direct links into Ministry of Defence and high-level policy board with top civil servants and chiefs of staff.

1 This table is necessarily a simplification of complex and developing arrangements at the time of the research. 2 Key: A – competency framework; B – coaching; C – use of e-learning and blended learning; D – networked community; E – business school consortia and partnerships; F – academic advisors (employed on CU board or as strategic advisors).

A, B, C, E, F.

All levels, including high potentials and potential ‘thought leaders’.

Scope and High potentials, focus of through all leadership management levels. programmes

Top tier of each business unit.

Difficulty of differentiating service; need for cultural integration of traditionally autonomous business units.

Need for consultants to cope with high levels of uncertainty and ambiguity, and to show initiative and resilience.

Issues to which ‘leadership is the solution’

Need for senior leaders of highest calibre if company’s position in industry to be maintained.

Administrative offices near corporate HQ. Small sites around the UK.

Location in Purpose-built facility Purpose-built facility company within corporate HQ. near company HQ, space reporting directly to executive board.

Table 6.1 continued

The role of corporate universities 99 2

3

The pursuit of continuing strategic alignment. Following from this, a core differentiator in managing leadership development through a CU is the intent to control training and development activities in relation to strategic priorities. Allied to this is an aspect of leadership development management that we explore in more detail below: as strategic priorities change, so must CUs and their programmes, meaning that everything about and in CUs is provisional. The attempt to raise standards, expectations and impact as regards training and development. This aspect of CUs reflects the priority afforded to strategic learning, seen in attempts to identify and engage high-quality providers; development of sophisticated frameworks to increase consistency of provision; reinforcement of key messages and competences between levels and across diverse business and cultural settings; programme designs, including much greater attention to pedagogy; information and communication technologies (ICTs) in elearning and blended learning and fostering distributed communities of practice; and rationalization of the sourcing of education and learning services from external providers. Clearly it would be false to suggest that all of this is new and that all previous corporate training and development was non-strategic, unsophisticated, or non-innovative. As Eurich (1985) argues, corporate education has consistently adopted new forms and methods of educational provision before other providers. Nevertheless, we argue that CU managers operate at very senior levels and from within strategy.

It is important to emphasize here that the notion of a corporate university remains loose and is still evolving. Even within our case organizations we find a variety of managerial logics, structures and ideologies. In addition, organizational sponsorship and location are diverse. For these reasons we have elsewhere (Paton et al. 2005b) referred to these phenomena as Strategic Learning Initiatives (SLIs) and Strategic Learning Initiatives Public Sector (SLIPs). Nevertheless, we suggest that the aspirational characteristics listed above, in combination with the appropriation of educational symbolism and terminology, can be found across CU initiatives. These characteristics express our working hypothesis as regards what is distinctive about CUs compared with more familiar approaches to training and development. They also provide the structure for describing and discussing how leadership development is provided through CUs.

Leadership and its status in CU programmes Leadership as a corporate priority The language of leadership heard within CUs is an aspect of two significant recent trends in managing people: human resource management (HRM) and competence frameworks. Within HRM, a shift towards transformational leadership and away from transactional line management is a key demand on the managers responsible for implementing new practices (Storey 1992). Similarly, competence frameworks refer to leadership either in addition to or in place of ‘management’ as a key skill for the contemporary workplace. The embedding of leadership indicates how much of a corporate priority it is. From being a preserve of high fliers and those at the apex, leadership (or at least the language of leadership) appears to be percolating down through corporate hierarchies, in part accelerated by CU structures. Parallel to these workplace developments, leadership also currently forms a central aspect of state policy towards management and personal development. This is most evident not just

100 Rob Paton, Scott Taylor, John Storey and Geoff Peters in the creation of SLIPs with a leadership focus, such as the National College for Leadership of Schools and Children’s Services (see Chapter 11 and below) and the Defence Leadership Centre, but in various other government initiatives. First, a UK government review of management and management education in the UK sat under the title ‘Council for Excellence in Management and Leadership’; appointed in 2000, it was the first such statesponsored committee to include leadership within its remit. Second, as part of ‘Modernizing Government’, professional development programmes within the senior civil service are now highlighting the language and practice of leadership, rather than management or administration (e.g. the PRIME: Leadership educational materials commissioned from within the Cabinet Office for the senior civil service). The adoption of the language of leadership reflects also broader currents in industry and government, as shifts in rhetoric and discourse provide further legitimacy and urgency to initiatives. Some form of leadership development appears to be obligatory in contemporary organizations. These trends are reflected in our case organizations – indeed, leadership development was seen as a core activity in all of the case CUs. The high priority was revealed in different ways. It was made central to the operation of the CU at Barclays through the creation of a ‘faculty’: As part of the establishment of the university we’ve created four faculties. We’ve got one on leadership, we’ve got one on customers, we’ve got one on technology, and then [one on] reputation, which covers both the risk reputation side of banking, which is a traditional one, lending money, but also the brand and marketing side of reputation. We have deans of faculty in each case – each one of those people is a member of the executive committee, so they are significant players in their own right. The leadership faculty is supported by an external professor to give us some kind of benchmarking and to challenge some of our thinking. (CU Project Manager, Barclays) The same manager later showed the priority he and others gave to leadership development in describing why he had decided to develop a tailored leadership programme: A chief executive of a business unit wanted a leadership programme . . . The director of OD [organizational development] said to the CU director, ‘Look can you solve me a problem here? Pragmatically can you solve it?’ Now if somebody else came to us from a team with a hundred people in an office in London and said, ‘Will you develop such and such a [generic training] programme for me?’ I’d say no, I can’t do that because I’ve only got this much time and this much money. I’m going to divert that money on to that which I think is intrinsically high value. (CU Project Manager, Barclays) This manager also spoke of the effort that CU staff gave to making sure that the ‘top leadership’ team within the bank was involved in development. Providing opportunities of this kind for the highest levels in the organization also ensures visibility, and potentially support, for the CU. At Shell, leadership was on the agenda at both corporate and business unit levels. For the former, it was a very large part of the brief given to the head of Global Learning by his manager:

The role of corporate universities 101 [His] brief to me when I arrived was really two things: ‘We need a learning strategy for the mid-term to underpin the people strategy, which makes reference to learning but doesn’t really indicate where we are going . . . And very specifically within that, leadership development is already on the agenda because we know we haven’t been doing anything in this area and we’re getting concerned about identifying future talent – future potential talent – and what we should be doing to not only assess the talent that we have, but in fact developing that talent for the future’ . . . So it was a great brief . . . And very quickly, leadership development . . . was at the front of those two things. (Head of Global Learning, Shell Group) Concepts and models of leadership in CUs As you might expect, managers in our case organizations grappled with the meaning of leadership even as they emphasized its importance. For example: Shell was already using leader and leadership terminology, but when you asked what that meant there was relatively little understanding other than a replacement for the term ‘manager’ and ‘managing’ . . . So the first thing we did was to work on the Shell Group leadership framework to give substance to our use of this language. (Head of Global Learning, Shell Group) Both he and the project manager for the Shell CU emphasized that, without a common language to frame the notion of leadership, promoting a consistent concept of leadership across an organization is problematic. Diverse approaches remain, dependent on the provider with whom the organization works. Most organizations are therefore likely to develop competence frameworks as a common language to frame discussion of leadership and as an underpinning for leadership programmes. This is seen in the competences described for the UK’s Senior Civil Service development programme: giving purpose and direction; making a personal impact; thinking strategically; getting the best from people; learning and improving; and focusing on delivery. Each carries a set of related behaviours. However, such frameworks did not entirely resolve questions of meaning and usage: What does leadership mean? To me there’s a blend, isn’t there, of tangibles and intangibles. That is what leadership is about. I think, from an organizational point of view, BAE Systems has put together a competence framework that is there to measure the tangibles. And the intangibles – the things like integrity, energy, inspiration – are still very important and somehow you still need to work out how those fit, and how you get that rounded individual. (Leadership Development Director, BAE Systems) This illustrates the tension between defining leadership in such a way that ‘it’ can be developed through an organization – measured and appraised for in terms of behaviour, and then further developed if necessary – and maintaining the more individual, mysterious element of leadership. The Defence Academy acknowledged this tension quite explicitly – indeed, those involved built it into their approach. They developed a ‘Leadership Helix Model’ comprising nine qualities, the last of which was designated as ‘The unique attribute – ?’ (see box below).

102 Rob Paton, Scott Taylor, John Storey and Geoff Peters

Attributes of the Defence Leadership Centre’s double helix model (after Defence Leadership Centre 2004) Integrity • • • • • •

Builds mutual trust Inspires and reciprocates loyalty Demonstrates appropriate values and standards Provides example Demonstrates consistency Demonstrates moral courage

Vision • • • •

Creates a shared vision of success Demonstrates resilience Clarifies boundaries Driven

Communication •

Facilitates: networking, negotiation, encouraging brainstorming, influencing and persuading, confidence within team, two-way feedback, a climate of openness, motivation – all leading to understanding

Decision taking • • • • • • • • •

Manages creativity Boldness Sound analysis – weighs risks Clarity of thought Intellect Decisiveness Handles complexity, uncertainty and ambiguity Judgement Delivery

Innovation • • • • • •

Lead change Creative thinking – imagination Fresh approach Encourages a culture that is not risk averse Open minded Raising the bar

Professional knowledge • •

Contextual understanding Individual core knowledge and skills

The role of corporate universities 103 • •

Wisdom through experience Effectiveness within complex adaptive systems

Developmental focus • • • • • • •

Developing: future leaders, cultures, people, strategic teams Developing self and professional knowledge and skills Creating a climate that enables the team to develop their potential while doing their best Respect for learning Mentoring, coaching Regulatory and legal compliance Financial analysis

Humility • • • • •

Welcomes diversity Appreciates own fallibility Values others and respects their contribution Suspends judgement The attributes that mitigate between confidence and arrogance

The unique attribute – ? •

Additional qualities or attributes which are unique to defining an individual leader

A second feature of leadership discourse in the case organizations was that of links to current strategic issues – to an extent, the discourse provided a forum for discussing or addressing a wide range of problems. For example, at BAE Systems post-merger integration was a key challenge, and it is interesting that ‘leadership’ provided a legitimate way for senior managers to express their concerns: About 18 months ago we commissioned some focus groups with the top 600 [managers]. They were asked a number of questions about how they felt about the organization, how they felt the [recent] merger had gone, what they thought the issues were that needed to be addressed, and leadership came out as the key issue in that. Since that point it’s become a pillar, one of the things that’s been a hot topic. After the mergers I think the company had indigestion, it was so busy trying to get people into jobs and sort out what it owned and all those sorts of things. I think that feeling now has passed, and people have come to terms with it one way or the other. They’ve either got disenchanted with it and left, or they’ve said, ‘I can see what type of organization we are now’, so now it’s more about what type of leadership we want, what type of leadership we want to aspire to. (Leadership Development Director, BAE Systems) This challenge is echoed in a description from the Cap Gemini Ernst & Young (Capgemini) corporate university:

104 Rob Paton, Scott Taylor, John Storey and Geoff Peters When I joined the university [it] had lost its way a bit – it lost its footing within the organization and when the new [CU] president was brought in, he had the role of telling the CEO what we should do with the university. Either we turn it around and we make it a central player again or we close it down. This is when I was recruited – he brought me in to put into place the International Business School [for high potentials], which was the first programme that bridged the [two recently merged] organizations. It was the first group programme, the first time that we said, ‘Okay, let’s go and let’s get our talent and let’s create a bridge across these two parts of the organization.’ At that time within the company the big buzzword was what we call ‘convergence’. (Director of Education, Capgemini University) Capgemini has located leadership development within this broad remit of promoting a central, corporate understanding of values, approaches and methodologies. However, concepts of leadership within CUs are not simply a function of current management issues; they are also related to industries or sectors, and the challenges that parent organizations or government face. These influences show up in different ways. For example, the leadership competence framework at Shell includes the items ‘demonstrates professional mastery’ and ‘demonstrates courage’, both directly reflecting the advanced technological capacities and challenges that characterize the company’s activities. As one informant put it, reflecting on the strengths and weaknesses of leadership in Shell as evidenced by benchmarking data: It’s very interesting having applied this now for the past two years to start to get the data about the leadership population as well as individual profiles . . . We know that Shell is hugely strong on, erm, professional mastery. You don’t get into the organization without demonstrating professional mastery and you survive on the basis of professional mastery. It’s fascinating to see the evidence build up over time. Some real strengths and some significant weaknesses and some stuff we are getting better at. [We’re] really quite courageous – [this] stems from, again, [being] at the frontier of technology, sometimes at the frontier of wilderness exploration, vast investment in platforms and drilling and so on, we know something about going for it with courage. And you can relate all this stuff to . . . the feel for the culture you get when you’ve worked in the organization for a bit. (Head of Global Learning, Shell Group) By contrast, Capgemini managers working in information systems related to business consulting, process re-engineering and large-scale systems implementation saw a need for employees to be able to tolerate high levels of uncertainty and ambiguity, to maintain a sense of direction and priorities, to take risks and to ‘make things happen’ without waiting for direction or approval. The culture of this industry is represented in books like Thriving on Chaos (Peters 1987), as one informant pointed out. Another referred to Leading the Revolution (Hamel 2000), and went on to say: So many times in organizations everyone sits there and says, ‘Well, if the top were giving us the strategic directions, if the board were telling us this or that’, and, you know, it’s never going to happen. Maybe we should just be adults and say, ‘Well, maybe that’s not where we should be looking for it. Maybe that’s not what their job is.’. . . [What we try to do is] create bubbles of sanity and excellence within the organization . . . that means that a lot of that stuff isn’t going to be coming from the top, it is going to be happening

The role of corporate universities 105 in the middle where people are actually interfacing and have those day-to-day interactions with the clients . . . So we’re saying, you know, ‘Look, that’s not just a bedside book anymore . . . it’s life!’ (Director of Education, Capgemini University) In sum, senior managers are promoting CU initiatives in order to enable organizational reflection on the meaning of leadership, and as structures within which methods to construct an agreed notion of leadership can be operationalized. Thus, a key contribution of CU structures in leadership development is the provision of frameworks and processes through which concepts of leadership can be understood, made locally meaningful, and then implemented more or less consistently across diverse settings. It appears, too, that considerable effort is invested by CU managers and senior executives in constructing a comprehensible language through which such leadership development can then be pursued.

Approaches to leadership development through CUs Strategic alignment We noted earlier that a key purpose in creating a CU was to ensure continuing and close alignment with corporate priorities. This concerns how CUs operate, and not just the content of the programmes delivered. We can illustrate this by indicating how some CUs addressed three interrelated and recurring strategic concerns – integration (aspects of which have already been referred to), cost reduction/value for money, and building knowledge communities. The rationalization of learning provision was a recurring theme in accounts informants gave of their CUs. As the CU director in Barclays related, the corporate group has been able to rationalize the existing supply of training in two ways, the first of which is by taking stock of the training and development on offer across the business units. This is exemplified in the area of leadership development: Barclays’ CU offered one course in this area, where there used to be twelve different options for line managers across the group. Second, the ‘headcount’ in business unit support functions was assessed and managed down. Comparable developments took place at BAE Systems, while at Shell and Capgemini the focus was on identifying the best training and development professionals and facilities within the group and making them the basis for future provision. Such rationalizations were seen as delivering a combination of reduced cost, improved quality and greater consistency. The delivery of e-learning resources across company intranets was another way of ensuring a shared vocabulary and consistent messages, at the same time achieving cost savings. Leadership integration A concern for integration lay behind the explicit linking of leadership development with knowledge management and the building of company-wide professional networks and communities of practice. In other words, the concept of leadership was seen as relevant in professional and technological domains, as well as in business strategy and decision making. Thus, at Capgemini: This is the place where people come to build and to maintain their communities; this is the place where you’re going to come and meet with your fellow specialists or the people

106 Rob Paton, Scott Taylor, John Storey and Geoff Peters that have a similar area of competence that you do, or that are on a similar track. If you start looking at things like – we call it talent development, but in other organizations it’s called leadership development – if you look at that area, those are people that are on a similar track and they face similar challenges. What’s interesting about them is that they form a microcosm of the organization because they cut through all the different professions, across the different countries, everything. [The] people that are in our high potential group are on a similar track so they need to be leveraging things across the organization. Those [two areas] are very important to the positioning of the university. (Director of Education, Capgemini University) Distributed leadership and leadership community The competence frameworks already referred to are central to CU efforts to engender a degree of coherence across very diverse cultural and operating environments. ‘Coherence’ here means vertical and horizontal consistency across business units. Hence the companies use structured and stepped or staged development from first appointment leader through to senior executive. For example: We have the top team and what we call the Performance Centred Leadership population – these are the strategic leaders – and the development of that group is very much supported by the CU. We also have leadership programmes in what we call executive development and functional development, and these are handled in the business units, as is the leadership development of our manufacturing and administrative staff. (Leadership Development Director, BAE Systems) And: We go through and we say, ‘What’s the competency level?’ For talent development there are four key areas in our organization. There’s ‘Young Professional’, between 12 and 24 months into the company; then ‘Manager’ level; then ‘Executive Proving Ground’; then the ‘Global Executives’ level. This is going to be through the managers at foundation level. (Director of Education, Capgemini University) Such programmes give renewed emphasis to high potentials and elite leaders. They are multitrack and multi-method, making learning resources on leadership widely available, while also targeting high-cost elements more selectively, on the basis of different forms of assessment – for example: We took that leadership framework into an assessment setting and have extended Shell’s experience with assessment centres for graduate selection – for which we’re sort of world famous – into assessments for development at various stages in leaders’ careers. And we now provide some of the most comprehensive data on personal strengths and weaknesses in terms of needs for development that I’ve ever seen in an organization . . . [Later, pointing to diagram:] In the leadership assessment and development area [there are] four key leadership transitions: first, appointment leader – 10,000–15,000 of them around Shell; managers of managers; executives; and the senior executive group.

The role of corporate universities 107 A leadership framework underpinning all of this with assessment for development on this side of the framework, and education on the other side. So educational activity responding to need via assessment. (Head of Global Learning, Shell Group) For high potentials, considerable effort is made to sustain and reinforce leadership development. The ‘communities’ at Capgemini are one important means for this – but other methods are also used: We organize learning events for the alumni on a regular basis. This is about developing them and their personal effectiveness – we have an ‘Advanced Leadership Seminar’ done with an external person, which allows them to talk about their careers, perhaps make connections to people that they didn’t necessarily know beforehand because they were on a different programme. One of the things in that programme that we build in is coaching – it creates a buddy who you can reach out to and kind of say, ‘I’ve got a question about this . . .’. They really appreciate that sort of stuff. (Director of Education, Capgemini University) Likewise, the idea of maintaining an alumni network was taking root at Shell: We’re closely connected to INSEAD online because people who have been through a Shell/INSEAD programme basically say: ‘Am I now part of an alumni network? Where’s the continuous development? What’s next? What access to resources do I get?’ So we’re using INSEAD online as an initial answer to that . . . in the same way Wharton has a thing called Wharton Knowledge, so everybody who has been through a Shell/Wharton programme gets access to Wharton Knowledge. IMD has a thing called IMD Wednesday Webcast that [is] only available to people issued with IMD passwords, so Shell alumni going through IMD programmes get access to that. So there are bits and pieces around at the moment, not separately developed but off the back of business school partnerships . . . It’s a bit fragmented but we’re playing and experimenting. It’s on the agenda . . . What I’m trying to do – on the basis of cooperation between the schools – is to build the Shell alumni network irrespective of which school you’ve been to, drawing on the continued use of resources in schools. But that’s more complex . . . But the basis that anybody that has been through a Shell leadership programme – irrespective of level – becomes part of an alumni . . . a learning network . . . that’s established. (Head of Global Learning, Shell Group) Another feature of the leadership development methods used by the CUs was their willingness to experiment with unconventional approaches. For example, within its consulting industry ‘Thought Leadership’ was an important concern for Capgemini, and its university developed a programme – ‘Guruschool’ – specifically to support this. They were also prepared to create emotionally challenging activities for participants: [We] have the ‘Leaders of Leaders’ programme – that’s done externally. The facilitators discuss [issues] with the executives in our company, the global executives. For the teaching part of Leaders of Leaders we have quite a confrontational approach, so we want that to be done by someone externally. (Senior manager, Capgemini)

108 Rob Paton, Scott Taylor, John Storey and Geoff Peters Organization and partnerships The CUs we researched are made up of a small core group of staff who design, commission or quality assure programmes, working with and through partners and suppliers to deliver them. The most common business model is for some infrastructure and programme development costs to be covered centrally but for the main costs of programmes to be recovered from business units. Three features of such arrangements need to be emphasized. First, the CU itself is generally separate, or at least semi-detached, from HR and from business unit training and development: In reporting terms, there is a joint responsibility to the group HR director, the director for Technology and the director for Strategy – there are thus three key players to whom the Virtual University reports. But the HR function in the business units and the senior leaders of those units are our key customers and we need to ensure that the development solutions we provide meet the strategic needs of the businesses they work in. (Leadership Development Director, BAE Systems) The position was more complex at Shell, where ‘Global Learning’ was part of a small corporate HR team. But the Shell Open University was a discrete entity with a separate reporting line: We are responsible for the technical, engineering training, and they [the central HR department] see themselves as responsible for generic management skills and the competencies, the top managers, and also the high flying youngsters who come in and want to get on the career ladder and do management training, leadership and coaching. (Head of Learning, Shell Exploration & Production) However, both parties explicitly acknowledged that clear boundaries between technical and personal skill development would never be established; blurring and overlap was inevitable, and the key was to ensure consistency through common frameworks. Second, though a special corporate programme might be mandated at the most senior level, CUs were generally selling their frameworks and leadership programmes into business units. In such cases the buying decision remained with the business unit. The arrangement at BAE Systems was described as follows: There’s nothing to stop a business unit going out and buying training from wherever it wants to – the only proviso to that is [exclusion of] the top 650 of the company we’ve determined as a corporate population, and they’re all subject to the same sort of people processes like personal development reviews, 360 peer review, management review, career management, all that sort of stuff. It’s kind of like a corporate framework, a corporate leadership framework. But below that, yes, you can go, theoretically, you can buy from who you want. (Head of Leadership Development, BAE Systems) Of course, not all needs are met though in-house courses, so another important service provided by CUs is to identify and signpost quality provision for the centre and for business units: What I would be doing, rather than saying ‘here’s a brochure’, I’d be saying: ‘We’ve done some research on this. We know who the providers are. This has been quality

The role of corporate universities 109 assured and I can tell you this is the best place we’ve come across for your particular need.’. . . Brokerage with quality assurance. An example of that is when a senior leader comes along – as they quite often do in the early evening – drops by the office: ‘I really recognize a particular area where I’m feeling more and more vulnerable. I really don’t want to expose this on a Shell activity . . . but I need a programme or a workshop, or something.’ . . . Or an executive coach, yep, that’s a really good example: ‘Erm, what’s your advice Mike? Give me the best two or three to choose from.’ That’s happening all the time. (Head of Global Learning, Shell Group) Third, CUs used external, often global, standards to define high quality for a given need, but often also as a means of benchmarking and driving down costs: [Our primary academic partner], yes, their research rating is important – they’ve got a five star, but usually it’s personalities. It’s like when you buy from a consultancy, my experience is you want to hire a top individual. (Head of Leadership Development, BAE Systems) Likewise, at Capgemini: When you get up here [to senior management level] it’s almost all external people [delivering programmes], because we’re pushing our high potentials to think ‘It’s not business as we do it today, it’s about how we could be doing business tomorrow.’ The main content portions and the big pieces are almost all external, although when I say external it doesn’t necessarily mean professors. It can be professors from business schools – we have professors from London Business School, from INSEAD, from Oxford, from North Western, but it can also be consultants that are from specialized consulting companies. So we have their critical messages [and] they work with a communications consulting company based in the UK that is specialized in communicating with the City and with the financial press, because that’s what this is all about. It’s about delivering business results – they are going to help them work on structuring their messages just as they would help CEOs structure their message to the City or to analysts. (Director of Education, Capgemini University) However, the CUs were not handing over control of the programmes to such suppliers. Rather, they were making very searching and specific demands, on what were often elite partners, concerning content, case studies, and timeliness.

Discussion: practical tensions, theoretical perspectives The picture that emerges from private and public sector CUs is of leadership development efforts that are comprehensive, sophisticated and sustained. This does not mean that they operate without problems. On the contrary, the challenges facing these CUs – especially regarding the cultural, organizational and operational diversity schemes they have had to encompass – are colossal, and tensions are inescapable. Relations with customers in business units can be bumpy, and all longer-established initiatives had experienced searching ‘reviews’ in which costs had to be justified and confidence in long-term benefits re-established. ‘Eighteen more people at head office is not fashionable nowadays’, as one manager put it. In

110 Rob Paton, Scott Taylor, John Storey and Geoff Peters the public sector, the 2004 end-to-end review of the NCSL in 2004 shows this perfectly. Moreover, those involved were often ready to acknowledge the limitations, dilemmas and difficulties involved: So, you know, is it perfect? No! Will it ever be perfect? No! And, you know, I would love to say that all the conversations are easy, but there are quite a few that aren’t. But that’s part of being in a professional position as well. (Director of Education, Capgemini University) Sometimes these tensions reflected different conceptions of development and how it was best undertaken: I think you can actually integrate learning into their day job, but when [the company has] an engineering base like us, we like to believe in things that are absolutely tangible. Naturally then the organization says, ‘Well, tell me what training programmes there are, how long they will be, and how much they cost’ – almost regardless of whether that’s the right solution. We are starting to get people past that approach now, thank goodness. (Head of Organizational Learning, BAE Systems) More specifically, the Head of Leadership Development at BAE Systems pointed to a key issue at the heart of his role: The Strategic Leader Programme is about giving our senior leaders (many of whom do have a very similar profile, many of whom have been internally developed so they are home-grown senior leaders) an exposure to a different worldview, a different perspective. And it’s also about how they take that and translate it into how they are and how they behave. How that affects them in the way they lead. So that’s what it’s about. And a good way of helping them challenge their perspectives on how they see the world is by getting them to experience bits of the world and to run up against things that challenge their values and challenge their perspectives. For example, we took a group out a few years ago to Bosnia, and we went to Mostar, we went to Sarajevo. We did everything from meet the Prime Minister and have discussions with him, through to talking with artists and musicians. You know, when they walk through the streets they see the devastation . . . each morning we ran a reflection session just about what’s going on. For some people it has huge impacts, for some people it doesn’t. When it was designed it was quite risky. It’s not a ‘tools and techniques’ course – though there are some business-type inputs, so you’ve got some tangible parts. It’s a programme that’s been a bit of an investment of faith over the years. It’s hard to measure. (Leadership Development Director, BAE Systems) The underlying issue here concerns whether and how far leadership development is a process that can be rationalized and institutionalized reliably. This tension was experienced and expressed very acutely by another interviewee: They [the company board] wanted the CU to be two things. They wanted it to become a project run in a particular fashion, and they wanted the leadership programme that they were running at the side of it to be run as a project. And I thought, ‘We’re talking about development as a project?’ It was crazy – there was just so much effort put into the

The role of corporate universities 111 project formation that you were knackered before you started. It was supposed to run like a Swiss watch and yet it totally disengaged the individual. (Project Manager, UtilityCo (pseudonym)) The point here is not just whether a particular event or programme is perceived by participants to be valuable or to give rise to company benefit. Rather, it concerns whether such discrete events and courses can be coherently integrated and sustained to provide longterm corporate benefits in relation to a diffuse and notoriously elusive concept. One well-established way to conceptualize leadership, that recognizes these elusive aspects, is in terms of charisma. The term was introduced by Weber (1978 [1922]) as a means of understanding authority, contrasted with traditional (patriarchal) and bureaucratic forms. Charisma’s key attributes, as concept and practice, are: response to extraordinary needs rather than everyday or mundane desires; lack of formal structure or method; fragility, as it is dependent on the performance of miracles and the belief of followers; and revolutionary force, especially when challenging to traditional forms of authority (Weber 1978, Chapter XIV). The processes of routinization that underpin organization, manifest in the problem of succession concerning the next leader and in the development of structure, are in direct opposition to many of these characteristics (Bryman 1986). The quasi-routinization of leadership and its development in CU programmes may therefore be seen as a method of ensuring succession while attempting to retain a sense of charisma within leadership and leadership development. Kanter’s (1972) notion of ‘institutionalized awe’, whereby charisma is made to permeate a social entity rather than remaining lodged in an individual, is also relevant here. She argues that routinized structures can become imbued with a sense of charisma. This is another means of understanding leadership development in CUs. It opens up the possibility that CUs are an attempt to reconcile the Weberian opposition between leadership and organization. However, for this to happen, CUs, or at least key aspects of their activity, have to become institutionalized – that is, valued, stable and enduring features of the corporate landscape. It is far from clear how this might happen. A central characteristic of CUs, we have argued, is their commitment to continuing strategic alignment, and this means their priorities must continually adapt to an evolving corporate agenda. Though in some respects they are a space apart from the turbulence of corporate life, in other respects they are supposed to be at the heart of it. The continuity and longevity associated with elite universities could not be further from the experience of CUs, which in some cases have been substantially redesigned every five years. Ensuring the necessary continuity and embedding of leadership programmes in such circumstances is thus likely to be a major and continuing challenge.

Conclusions This chapter has argued that CUs and leadership development are close cousins. Both are compensatory responses to the new forms of organization that have emerged from twenty years of global integration, industrial restructuring, and IT-led change. CUs are an attempt to maintain integration, culture building and knowledge management in order to realize the benefits of mergers and restore intellectual capital lost through acts such as delayering. The provision of explicit ‘leadership programmes’ is a recognition that corporate structures and management development processes may not provide the sorts of people who can point the way ahead in the turbulent, pressured and loosely structured corporate environments. Moreover, requirements (for versatility, risk taking, self-confidence, interpersonal skills,

112 Rob Paton, Scott Taylor, John Storey and Geoff Peters resilience, sensitivity to context and ‘multilingualism’, for example) are significantly different from what was sought through management programmes in the past. The required competences cannot be whistled up through a one-week course or two, or even by an analytically focused MBA. Hence, comprehensive and sustained leadership development programmes have become a priority for CUs. The result of such efforts appears to be the emergence of a new process of leadership formation – in the sense of deliberate formative experiences being provided early in a career, and then being extended and reinforced in a consistent way thereafter. It is extremely difficult to judge how successful these efforts are, and they face major challenges with regard to embedding and continuity. Making leadership routine will continue to be problematic, however, for as long as it is seen as a something other-worldly, exceptional, and God-given. But, as we have shown, leadership development through corporate universities is being undertaken in earnest. In the cases considered, the initiatives have been well resourced and are subject to sophisticated thinking using a wide combination of methods, and (in the main) with wide support and involvement from critical stakeholders at the most senior levels.

Questions for discussion 1 2 3

What would you say are the most important distinguishing features of a corporate university/academy? What seem to be the most important types of corporate university? How would you evaluate CUs as a means of attempting to grow leaders?

References Blass, E. (2001) ‘What’s in a name? A comparative study of the traditional public university and the corporate university’, Human Resource Development International, 4 (2): 153–73. Bryman, A. (1986) Leadership and Organizations, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Craig, R., Clarke, F. and Amernic, J. (1999) ‘Scholarship in university business schools: Cardinal Newman, creeping corporatism and farewell to the “disturber of the peace”?’, Accounting Auditing and Accountability Journal, 12 (5): 510–24. Defence Leadership Centre (2004) Leadership in Defence, Shrivenham: Defence Academy. Defence Training Review (2001) Modernising Defence Training, Report of the Defence Training Review, London: Ministry of Defence. Department for Education and Skills (2004) School Leadership: End to End Review of School Leadership Policy and Delivery, London: Department for Education and Skills. Eurich, N. (1985) Corporate Classrooms: The Learning Business, Princeton, NJ: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Grint, K. (1997) Leadership: Classical, Contemporary and Critical Approaches, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hamel, G. (2000) Leading the Revolution, Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press. Kanter, R. M. (1972) Commitment and Community: Communes and Utopias in Sociological Perspective, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Littler, C. (1982) The Development of the Labour Process in Capitalist Societies, London: Heinemann. Meister, J. (1998) Corporate Universities: Lessons in Building a World-class Work Force, 2nd edn, New York: McGraw-Hill. Paton, R. and Taylor, S. (2002) ‘Corporate universities: between higher education and the workplace’, in G. Williams (ed.) The Enterprising University, Buckingham: Society for Research into Higher Education (SHRE) and Open University Press. Paton, R., Peters, G., Storey, J. and Taylor, S. (2005a) Handbook of Corporate University Development: Managing Strategic Learning Initiatives in Public and Private Domains, Aldershot: Gower.

The role of corporate universities 113 Paton, R., Peters, G. et al. (2005b) ‘Corporate universities as strategic learning initiatives’, in R. Paton, G. Peters, J. Storey and S. Taylor (2005a) Handbook of Corporate University Development: Managing Strategic Learning Initiatives in Public and Private Domains, Aldershot: Gower. Pedler, M., Burgoyne J. and Boydell, T. (1991) The Learning Company, London: McGraw-Hill. Peters, T. (1987) Thriving on Chaos, London: Book Club Associates. Senge, P. (1993) The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, London: Century Business. Storey, J. (1992) Developments in the Management of Human Resources, Oxford: Blackwell. Taylor, S., Bell, E., Grugulis, I., Storey, J. and Taylor, L. (2010) ‘Politics and power in training and learning: the rise and fall of NHS University’, Management Learning, 41(1): 87–99. Weber, M. (1978 [1922]) Economy and Society, vols 1 and 2, Berkeley: University of California Press. Wiggenhorn, W. (1990) ‘Motorola U: When training becomes an education’, Harvard Business Review, July–August: 71–83.

7

Can leadership be taught? Graham Mole

Chapter outline This chapter: • • •

Describes a number of reservations about leadership development and training from the perspective of a major corporate client. Highlights the more valued and the less valued elements of leadership training and development offerings. Describes a more systematic and evidence-based approach than is normally offered or demanded.

By simply asking the question ‘can leadership be taught?’ one is immediately putting oneself in danger of ringing alarm bells and raising hackles on a truly grand scale. That is because an enormous amount of business activity, on a global basis, is based on creating the belief among buyers that not only can leadership be taught, but that there are many who are qualified to teach it, through a variety of methods. These include textbooks, conventional training courses, unconventional training courses (such as getting managers to perform Shakespeare plays or abseil down rock faces with their colleagues) and computer-based training programmes. The market for these products and services is large, growing and genuinely global. Well established since the early twentieth century in North America, and later in Western Europe, the leadership teaching business has spread to nearly all parts of the world, with recent high growth in the emerging economies (Szamosi et al. 2008). An examination of the market for ‘leadership skills’ books will quickly reveal the type of territory in which leadership training providers operate; in fact the very use of the word ‘skill’ is highly indicative. The three key implications are as follows. First, that leadership capability can be acquired didactically, through instruction in relevant knowledge and techniques. Second, that these ‘skills’ are universal and, once acquired are applicable to any and all leadership roles and situations. Third, that leadership is, in essence, an individual-level phenomenon or, put another way, the base unit of analysis in the study of leadership must always be the individual rather than the group, the organization, the surrounding society and culture, or humankind. The social and cultural contexts in which leaders perform are deemed secondary to how they conduct themselves, particularly in applying their leadership skills. In this chapter, I shall critically examine each of these implications and use this analysis to try to address the question of whether, as many are keen to assure us, leadership can be taught. Before doing so, however, it would be worthwhile spending a little time looking at what those who want us to believe that leadership can be taught are trying to tell us. Let us start

Can leadership be taught? 115 with those books which claim to offer the reader the knowledge that they need to become an effective leader. A first observation is that such books are numerous. Keying ‘leadership skills’ into the Amazon.com book search, I recorded over 19,500 entries. I confess that I have not examined every title, let alone read all the books. But as one begins to trawl through the list and descriptions of content one quickly discovers that these books, for the most part, constitute a distinct genre. There appears to be a fairly standard plot, which can be expressed as follows. The reader is, or aspires to be, a leader. Leadership isn’t easy, but by reading this book the reader will learn how to lead effectively. It will set out the fundamental characteristics of great leadership, the qualities and capabilities needed to develop and lead others. Then follows a list, typically of between six and twelve items. The list will usually comprise some attributions (such as ‘vision’, ‘passion’, ‘integrity’ and ‘fairness’), mixed with personality traits (such as ‘resilience’ and ‘self-confidence’) and capabilities (such as ‘ability to motivate’, ‘communication skills’). A chapter is then devoted to each main characteristic, setting out what the reader needs to do to successfully emulate it. Often, the authors of such books will make reference to real leaders, alive or dead, to illustrate their points, frequently citing the behaviour of leaders who are generally well known and regarded by most people as successful. Where the book is autobiographical – and many are – authors will frequently use their own recollected experiences to illustrate their points. There is always a danger, when pointing to leaders who are seen as successful at the time a book is written, of being caught out by what we might term the ‘in search of excellence fallacy’, in which some of the people and organizations regarded as ‘excellent’ today (Peters and Waterman 1982) fall from grace, consciousness or existence tomorrow. Scientific researchers are aware of the limitations of cross-sectional studies using small samples of nonrandom cases, and with no control group. But promoters of self-help remedies are not motivated primarily by the advancement of science (Goldacre 2008). This leads naturally to the question – if the dominant model of leadership portrayed in popular management literature is not based on research, on what is it based? The most plausible answer, it seems to me, is that it is based on the stereotype – defined here as one of a number of ‘cognitive and perceptual biases which have important implications for intergroup relations’ (Brown 1993) – of the successful leader. The leader stereotype is an enduring one, though moderated to some extent by fashion. At the current time, in addition to the usual list of heroic attributes, leaders appear to be required to constantly display ‘passion’, an idea that would have seemed strange, even alien, to many leaders throughout the nineteenth century, and much of the twentieth, when the display of coolness under fire was more fashionable. What is the leader stereotype? I suggest here a method of quickly and reliably accessing it, which I have used in many development sessions in North America and Europe and with consistent results. Ask the group you are with the question, ‘what is the one thing a person needs in order to be a leader?’ This will elicit a list of individual qualities, frequently ‘integrity’, ‘vision’, ‘confidence’, ‘communication skills’ and, of course, ‘passion’. Cited slightly less frequently are cognitive capacities, such as ‘ability to plan’, ‘decisiveness’ and ‘judgement’. It is perhaps cruel, yet necessary, to point at this stage to leaders who lacked some or all of these qualities but nevertheless were, at some stage, occupying a position – sometimes an extremely high position – of leadership. This in turn may lead to other suggestions like ‘charisma’, ‘trust’, ‘credibility’ and ‘ability to motivate’. These are getting warmer, but one senses that those who are citing these things are still seeing them as reified properties of the individual, rather than as variables in a social interaction. Finally, with considerably more prompting, one may be fortunate to receive the only technically accurate answer, which is ‘followers’. We shall return to the concept of ‘followership’ later.

116 Graham Mole Now, if most of the books on leadership resonate with popular conceptions of what leadership is, we can begin to derive an explanation for a number of things about them, such as their enduring appeal, despite their homogeneity and lack of originality. They perform a similar function, as I have noted elsewhere (Mole 2000), to that of cookery books, for which there appears to be an equally insatiable appetite. Where cookery books offer recipes for successful meals, leadership books offer success recipes for organizations, the ingredients of which are a set of simplistic universals which we are encouraged to believe we can read, mark, digest and readily apply. Alongside the books exists a vast number of leadership training programmes, offered by internal training departments and third-party contractors all over the world. How do these differ from the books? Essentially, in only one respect: that they tend to be delivered in classrooms by trainers, and thereby allow for – but do not always guarantee – a degree of interaction between the trainee and trainees, and between the trainees themselves. An examination of the material taught, however, reveals that it is predicated on the same leader stereotype as that portrayed in the books. A simple experiment will demonstrate this. If you key ‘leadership training programmes’ into an internet search engine, you will be rewarded with over 30 million results. From those, I suggest you select at random ten sites – a few more if you have time – for suppliers who offer programmes. Some suppliers give more information on the contents of their programmes, some give less, but if one strips away the fashionable buzzwords – for example, there is clearly a current belief that citing ‘emotional intelligence’ will have a particular appeal to buyers – one is left with two distinct impressions: first, that these offerings are practically undifferentiated in both tone and content; second, that the material on offer bears a striking resemblance to the material contained in the leadership textbooks. One may also observe another development, that many suppliers are offering these programmes in the form of online learning or DVD, with no human trainer involvement at all. All this must call into question the validity of these attempts at teaching leadership, but trying to pursue an evidence-based approach to this proves to be frustrating and, ultimately, futile. Indeed, attempts at measuring the validity of any training, leadership or otherwise, have proved so awkward that most organizations do not even bother to try, beyond the ritual collection of ‘happy sheet’ reactions to training delivery (Tannenbaum and Yukl 1992). Those who write leadership textbooks and deliver leadership training do not customarily offer performance monitoring to their purchasers. That is left to the purchaser. And most corporate purchasers do not even try to gauge the business impact of the training they provide for their employees (Spitzer 2005). There must, however, given the size of the leadership training market, be an abiding motivation in organizations to strengthen the quality of their leadership, coupled with a belief – or at least a hope – that people can be taught, through didactic methods such as books and training courses, to be more effective leaders. That motivation and the concomitant demand it generates, are, I contend, examples of powerful myth-making, described by Boje et al. (1989: 608) as ‘an adaptive mechanism whereby groups . . . maintain logic frameworks within which to attribute meaning to activities and events’, where myths are ‘social attempts to “manage” certain problematic aspects of modern organizations through definitions of truth and rational purpose’ (1989: 609). That leadership is seen as a ‘problematic aspect of modern organizations’ is beyond doubt. Grint (1995: 124) recorded that ‘approximately every six hours, somewhere, someone publishes a paper on leadership in English.’ This was based on a four-year sample from 1990 to 1994. If we were to repeat the exercise now, I have no doubt that we would find that the frequency of leadership article publication has increased. This interest in – or perhaps obsession with – leadership reflects the strength of contemporary belief in the magnitude of

Can leadership be taught? 117 the effect of leaders on organizational performance. Some chief executives are elevated by their supporters and the general public to celebrity, even cult, status, and sometimes – as in the Enron debacle – with disastrous consequences (Tourish and Vatcha 2005). And the material rewards of leadership can be extremely large, some would say disproportionately so. Numerous surveys of the compensation gap between chief executives and average production workers reveal a growing ratio. Murphy (1999: 51) noted US CEO earnings as 210 times those of the average production worker in 1996. According to more recent surveys conducted by Mercer Consulting, and reported by the Economic Policy Institute and CNN, the ratio surged in the 1990s to hit 300:1 in the year 2000, and according to CNN it was 431:1 by 2004 (www.epi.org; http://money/cnn.com/). Small wonder, then, that so many people aspire to be leaders, and that so many others are willing to ‘teach’ them how to do it.

Why can’t leadership be taught? Let me start by stating that I do not deny outright the logical possibility of teaching people leadership, or at the very least about leadership. (And sometimes, I would venture, why it might be unwise for some people to consider leadership as a career.) Nor do I contest that leadership can be learned, to a greater or lesser extent, to which I shall return later. My main point here concerns method: that the didactic methods most commonly employed are likely to be of little use, being based on the positivist myth of leadership derived from individual personality and ‘character’, rather than from socially constructed reality. The persistence of that myth flies in the face of decades of research. Study after study has failed to find any positive association between leadership and personality traits or types (Fraser 1990; Kniveton 1996: Landy 1989). In fact, the tired old question, ‘are leaders born or made?’ is, so far as my analysis is concerned, an entirely pointless one, since it derives from the self-same positivist myth. One might equally ask whether non-leaders are born or made, though nobody ever does, since non-leaders are of little popular interest. The position to which I subscribe is that people are leaders only at those times when, and for as long as, they are performing a leadership role. If the role ceases to exist – when the individual, for whatever reason, loses the support of his or her followers – that individual immediately becomes a non-leader. Any capabilities or characteristics that helped the leader achieve, or maintain, the erstwhile leadership position are now redundant – at least until that individual is offered, and accepts, a new leadership role. People who occupy leadership roles are constantly susceptible to the loss of support of their followers, and thereby their roles. Loss of leadership office is an everyday occurrence in politics, in organizations, in communities, in criminal gangs; indeed in any human social grouping. Somehow, the individual qualities which formerly attracted and maintained a followership are no longer valued quite so highly. Perhaps the success which an organization enjoyed under its current leader has begun to diminish. The fortunes of the organization are so strongly, symbolically associated with the persona of the leader (Schein 1992) that, should the followers believe that there is a threat to their own positions – for example to their lives, livelihood, status, power or privileges – the most expedient course of action is to eject the leader and appoint another. Were this not so, Charles I and Louis XVI would have kept their heads, and Margaret Thatcher would not have been deposed by a putsch from within her own ranks. Of course, ejection is not quite so easy to achieve in the case of an absolute dictatorship, but even dictators need the support of a clique of henchmen in order to maintain their position. If the henchmen become disaffected – as, for example, in the case of Julius Caesar – they can engineer the leader’s removal from office, and in that particular case, from

118 Graham Mole life itself. But even if the henchmen remain loyal, disaffection among the majority – such as the core workers in an organization – can lead to subversive, even mutinous behaviour (Ackroyd and Thompson 1999) which could ultimately threaten the leader’s position. Sooner or later after the old leader’s removal, a new leader will emerge, since human nature abhors a power vacuum. It carries just too much uncertainty and anxiety for us to bear. As Bion (1961) observed, leaderless groups struggle to fix who among them should take on the role of leader, even when the group has no tasks to perform, objectives to meet or decisions to take. The group members will go through a process of articulating ‘role expectations’ (Katz and Kahn 1978: 201–202), identifying among themselves a ‘focal person’ they believe can perform to those expectations and ‘sending’ the role to that individual, who may ‘receive’ and accept it, or reject it, in which case the search for a focal person will continue until the leadership role is assigned. This process of role sending and receiving may be ad hoc and informal, as in the case of a leaderless group, or highly formal, even ritualized, as in the search to recruit a new leader into an organization. Once the focal person has accepted the role of leader, it is incumbent on them, if they wish to keep the role, to keep the support of their followers. How to maintain this support – through displays of behaviour, interactions with, and interpretation of responses from their followers – lies at the heart of what we might term, borrowing from the language of organizational psychology, the ‘psychological contract’ (Conway and Briner 2005) between leader and followers. If, at any point, followers feel that the contract is being violated, that will increase their uncertainty and cause them to bring into question the suitability of the current leader. It seems that if we were to try to understand the phenomenon of leadership to the point that we could actually teach it, we would need to know as much about the followers – their predispositions, characteristics, states of mind – as we would about the leader. Yet, as Grint (1995: 144) points out: ‘One of the problems with any attempt to model leadership is the bifurcation between leaders and followers. Compared to the enormous outpouring of material on leadership there is a dearth of material on followership.’ Let me just expand the notion of ‘followers’, which has connotations of subordination, into that of ‘stakeholders’, that is all those individuals who are, or believe they are, to some extent dependent on the performance of the leader as it affects their interests. This places a leader in the centre of a network of interdependent relationships, not only with subordinates but with many others – superordinates and peers within the organization, for example, and multiple external stakeholders, such as shareholders, customers and suppliers. This network is highly fluid and dynamic in terms of its physical composition, the levels of significance attaching to particular individuals or groups at any one time, and the states of mind of individual members. It is possible, indeed almost inevitable in the case of a large social grouping, that the interests of individual members will be different, or even conflicting (Robarchek 1997). In the case of a very large organization, the membership of the chief executive’s network could be vast. When I have worked with groups of senior and middle managers, and asked them to estimate the number of relationships they have to concurrently maintain in order to perform their leadership role, the normative response, after some thinking about it, is 200 to 300. I suspect this is an underestimate in most cases. The other factor to bear in mind here is that no two leadership networks are identical; every leader’s network is unique to that leader. The biggest challenge facing replacement leaders, particularly those coming into a particular organization for the first time, is not likely to be lack of technical knowledge so much as the ability to achieve quick and successful socialization into the leader role and network (Berger and Luckmann 1991; Van Maanen and Schein 1979), so as to start shaping these in line with their own preferences and capabilities (Nicholson and West 1988).

Can leadership be taught? 119 Concepts such as followership, the psychological contract and effective socialization are not the stuff of most leadership textbooks and training programmes. It is far easier, and probably a lot more appealing to would-be leaders, to perpetuate the essentialist ‘great wo/man’ myth; to represent leadership as a replicable formula and to exhort aspiring leaders to dutifully study and practise its components, just as though they were learning a piece of music. In this way, the possible variables in leadership performance are reduced to a tolerable number, and the untidy complexities of interactionist theories neatly avoided. Leadership is tamed through the magic of reductionism. And yet leadership is, according to the above analysis, fundamentally a role. Cannot roles be learned? And cannot some people learn – and ultimately perform – their roles more effectively than others? Using, for the moment, the analogy of theatre, all actors have the same access to the written lines of any given play, yet some bring to their roles a quality which seems to give special life to the part being played and result in what many onlookers perceive as a distinctive, original and great performance. True, these actors have learned their lines; that is a necessary condition for an acceptable performance, but not sufficient for a great one. So they have learned something else, something that transcends the mere recitation of words. What is it that leaders learn, and how?

How is leadership learned? I stated my belief earlier that leadership is essentially a social phenomenon, not an individual one. We learn about social phenomena by growing up with them, learning about them tacitly, in the way we learn about culture (Schein 1992). We understand, probably from very early in life, that it is uncomfortable for us not to have a leader figure within sight and reach, a role usually performed by one or both parents. If a parent, or any other significant figure, has wants or expectations about us performing a leadership role in later life, they are, using the Katz and Kahn (1978) model I cited earlier, likely to start sending us opportunities or imprecations to take a leadership role whenever it is offered. If we willingly receive them, we are likely to find that we are positively reinforced by our parents or others to keep doing so. (This is the usual lot, in societies based on male inheritance, of the oldest son.) If raised in this way, and even though we may never be granted a leadership position as an adult, we grow up, through operant conditioning, with a predisposition to accept the leadership role when offered, and all without the benefit of a single textbook or training programme. Of course, all that role sending and receiving does not necessarily make us an effective leader, merely a person who is willing – and possibly more willing than others – to take the leadership role when it is offered, or to vie for it when it is not offered. That, perhaps, is the genesis of the cult of the ‘natural leader’. How we might learn to become an effective leader is a slightly different, though strongly related, story. Of course, we may debate and disagree about what is and is not effective, and hindsight is a wonderful thing. The UK prime minister in the period leading up to the beginning of World War II, Neville Chamberlain, tends to be treated quite harshly by history, often reviled as a weak appeaser of the Hitler regime. Yet after his return from Germany in 1938, having signed the notorious Munich agreement which threw Czechoslovakia to the wolves, his actions were ecstatically approved by the many Britons who still hoped that war was avoidable. Effectiveness is in the eye of the stakeholder. The same is true for organizations, although the criteria for organizational effectiveness most commonly tend to relate to goals such as financial performance, productivity, quality, growth, survival, innovation and the establishment of a distinctive competence (Schmitt and Klimoski 1991). Although keeping the support of all stakeholders is, as noted earlier, a complex endeavour, a leader is more likely

120 Graham Mole than not to keep it if the organization he or she leads is seen to be meeting its goals, or if the leader can successfully, through plausible ‘sense-making’ of conditions and events (Weick 1995), get away with moving the goalposts. As we have already seen, to qualify as a leader requires not only to be sent, and to receive, the leadership role in the first place, but to keep it thereafter. Is this capability learnable? Since leadership is a social phenomenon, we may discover some possible answers to that question by turning to social learning theory (Bandura 1977a, 1977b). Central to this theory is the concept of self-efficacy, the ‘strength of people’s convictions in their own effectiveness’ (1977b: 193). ‘People fear and tend to avoid threatening situations they believe exceed their coping skills, whereas they get involved in activities and behave assuredly when they judge themselves capable of handling situations that would otherwise be intimidating’ (1977b: 194). The theory views the learning of behaviour as a dynamic, continuous, reciprocal process – how the individual perceives the environment, acts on the environment and in turn how the environment responds to the individual, giving that individual feedback that will either encourage or deter similar actions in future. In my analysis, for those acting in a leadership role, the most salient aspect of the environment is likely to be the responses of stakeholders. Learning to be their leader does not come from a classroom event, or even a series of classroom events. It comes, instead, from the continuous interaction between leader and stakeholders. Arguably, therefore, when leadership fails its cause lies in a failure to learn effectively from interaction, or to interact sufficiently with stakeholders to allow the requisite learning to take place. Common criticisms of deposed leaders are that they became ‘too remote’, that they ‘did not listen’ or that they ‘listened to the wrong people’. Another aspect of social learning theory is how people use their environment to learn, and thereby increase (or reduce) their sense of self-efficacy in given situations. Bandura identifies four ‘sources of efficacy expectations’ (1977b: 195): performance accomplishments, vicarious experience, verbal persuasion and emotional arousal. Let us take each of them in turn and relate them to the leadership role. Performance accomplishments To paraphrase Bandura, this is essentially learning by doing, and developing high expectations of being able to do similar things in the future based on the success one has achieved through such actions in the past. ‘After strong efficacy expectations are developed through repeated success, the negative impact of occasional failures is likely to be reduced’ (Bandura 1977b: 195). As for any other role, leaders develop a repertoire of learned responses on which they can draw when the occasion demands. However, that repertoire needs to be constantly adjusted to keep it adapted to organizational context. One part of that is technical – what the organization does – but another, about which I have already warned, is the social and cultural context: why the organization does things that way. The myth-makers would have us believe that leadership ‘skills’, being universal and teachable, are also portable. So, can someone who has performed a senior leadership role in the military readily transfer these skills to running, say, a chocolate-making business? Perhaps, but I would suggest not by trying to directly replicate actions from the military, whose core competence is technically efficient killing, onto the manufacture of chocolate. Rather, it would be by very quickly gaining an understanding of the new context, being selective about the actions to use (and discard) from the old repertoire and rapidly developing, and applying, a new one. In social learning theory, application is everything. I have for years been fascinated by the way organizations handle what are commonly termed ‘presentation skills’. Being able to make

Can leadership be taught? 121 a presentation to an audience is now regarded as of much – maybe of more – importance for leaders and managers as it has traditionally been for salespeople. When an individual is deemed, perhaps as the result of appraisal, to need such skills, the normative response is to send them on a presentation skills course. Here they learn how to structure and format their material and to choreograph their performance, with much emphasis on eye contact, facial gestures and hand signals. The one thing they will never learn on such courses is how to actually engage and interact with a real audience in an authentic setting. That can only be done by doing it; by being highly sensitive to the interactive and post-event feedback one gets about it, and modifying one’s performance accordingly. My frequent observation has been that many managers return from such courses as fearful – if not more fearful – of giving a presentation as they were before they attended the course. The result is that they continue to avoid making presentations because, as Bandura (1977b: 194) puts it: ‘Those who cease their coping efforts prematurely will retain their self-debilitating expectations and fears for a long time.’ One outcome, and again I have frequently observed this, is that such managers become serial attendees at presentation skills courses, or customers of ‘presentation coaches’, but never effective presenters. Vicarious experience Or, to paraphrase again, ‘learning by example’. People learn by observing others do things. As Bandura puts it: It is difficult to imagine a culture in which language, mores, vocational activities, familial customs and educational, religious and political practices are gradually shaped in each new member by direct consequences of their trial-and-error performances without benefit of models who display the cultural patterns in their behaviour. (2007: 1–2) In the case of leadership, we should expect vicarious experience to be a significant, and possibly the pre-eminent, method of learning. Such learning may be deliberate or inadvertent. We may consciously observe and try to emulate the behaviour of individuals whom we have identified as ‘role models’. We may equally watch a leader making a complete mess of a speech to senior managers and subconsciously tell ourselves never to behave like that if we want to keep people’s support. The great thing about vicarious experience is that, for the observer, watching someone do something competently before trying to do it oneself reduces the risk of getting it wrong, and increases the expectation that one can get it right. However, as Bandura says: Vicarious experience . . . is a less dependable source of information about one’s capabilities than is direct evidence of personal accomplishments. Consequently, the efficacy expectations induced by modelling alone are likely to be weaker and more vulnerable to change. (1977b: 197) Ultimately, it is not enough to observe another leader’s behaviour and rehearse in one’s mind how one will imitate it. Sooner or later, one has to perform. The performance, when it comes, should not look like just a cheap imitation of the original product, particularly if the members of the audience are familiar with the individual being modelled. This could

122 Graham Mole well lead to embarrassment on the part of the audience, and discredit on the part of the performer, since, to be successful, such an encounter must ‘consist of effectively projected claims to an acceptable self and the confirmation of like claims on the part of the others’ (Goffman 2008: 106). Verbal persuasion In this context, Bandura notes that: ‘People are led, through suggestion, into believing they can cope successfully with what has overwhelmed them in the past.’ Leaders are never short of people offering them advice on how to overcome problems, from people within their own organizations and those outside. As a training director, I regularly received hundreds of unsolicited e-mails every month from training suppliers telling me, in not so many words, how I could do my job better. Many leaders, encouraged by stories of successes in other organizations, are tempted to imitate the actions taken by their counterparts. This is made easier by the existence of ready-made ‘solutions’, often pre-packaged by consultants, who are inevitably the main transmitters of the success stories and who are well aware that many leaders are susceptible to fashions (Gill and Whittle 1993). Although at first sight this may look like vicarious experience, it usually isn’t. The leader of an insurance firm in Birmingham UK, on being excited by a consultant’s story of the success of a ‘re-engineering’, ‘managed change’ or ‘talent management’ programme in a plastics manufacturer in Pittsburgh USA, will be far more disposed to accept the story through the consultant’s honeyed account than to contact the plastics manufacturer directly to learn what was actually done. Before leaders succumb to this type of temptation, and potentially commit their organizations to a large amount of pointless but costly activity, I would urge them to heed Bandura’s (1977b: 198) warning on verbal persuasion: ‘. . . to raise by persuasion expectations of personal competence without arranging conditions to facilitate effective performance will most likely lead to failures that discredit the persuaders and further undermine the recipients’ perceived self-efficacy.’ Those who have observed the departure of a chief executive from an organization shortly after the departure of consultants, whilst the organization continues to experience overwhelming problems, should – if they have learned the value of vicarious experience – require no such warning. Emotional arousal Here, Bandura (1977: 198) observes that: ‘Because high arousal usually debilitates performance, individuals are more likely to expect success when they are not beset by aversive arousal than if they are tense and viscerally agitated.’ One problem for leaders is that, if stakeholders become aware that a leader is displaying more than mere temporary bouts of tension and agitation, they may begin to have doubts about the leader’s capability. Recall my earlier point that what followers want for themselves from leaders is increased certainty and reduced anxiety. As Bate (2002) has noted, leaders and managers in organizations may be actively discouraged from displaying emotions in order to avoid causing anxiety in others. As one of Bate’s respondents said: ‘You soon learn how to be seen as good at your job – you keep your head down and above all you keep your cool’ (Bate 2002: 196). Another problem is that one would expect leaders to find themselves in more tension-creating situations than their followers, given that they are expected to make decisions, and often under time, financial or even moral pressures. The worst thing a leader can do, at least from a learning perspective, is to try to avoid such situations for, as Bandura (1977b: 199) says: ‘Avoidance of stressful

Can leadership be taught? 123 activities impedes development of coping skills, and the resulting lack of competence provides a realistic basis for fear.’ Note that the issue of ‘personality’ does not come into this analysis, though some might be tempted to infer it and conclude that leadership is – as they suspected all along – only for the courageous, the resilient, the hardy, and so on. What the theory tells us is only that, if one wants to gain and keep a leadership role, one must actively engage with stressful situations to the point that one experiences a high degree of self-efficacy in dealing effectively with them.

From theory to practice The best test of a learning theory is how readily and effectively it can be applied. In the context of leadership development, social learning theory has done well (Burke and Day 1986; Latham 1989). An impressive example is the landmark study by Latham and Saari (1979), in which the researchers designed an ingenious experiment to test the applicability of social learning theory to the training of forty supervisors. Their design incorporated the use of a control group, so that reliable pre- and post-training evaluation measures for the experimental group and control group could be obtained. The method was to run a training programme, in two-hour weekly sessions over nine weeks, designed as a five-stage training process. The programme was applied to a number of issues where the supervisors’ current overall performance had been specifically identified as problematic to the organization concerned, such as the need to reduce staff turnover and absenteeism. The training process included the use of vicarious experience, through the use of film showing a supervisor modelling how to handle a situation effectively; performance accomplishment, based on supervisors practising the required behaviours through role play, then applying the learning points to their actual work and receiving feedback on it; and to some extent verbal persuasion, through the use of group discussion. Latham and Saari note that the programme initially met with some hostility from the supervisors concerned, but the positive values of the training outcomes were compelling in terms of the critical outcome variables of learning transfer, behavioural change measures and changes in the supervisors’ job performance. As Latham and Saari say (1979: 245): ‘These are highly significant findings because few training programmes have shown empirically that they do anything but please the trainee, and this positive reaction frequently dissipates over time.’ To use a further example from my own experience, I was asked to design and run a training programme for approximately 150 senior and middle managers in a financial services organization, as part of a co-ordinated programme of performance improvement for a large processing centre. This began with briefings by very senior managers to staff explaining the rationale for and requirements of the programme. I did not have the luxuries of well-spaced learning over nine successive weeks or a control group; my programme comprised a one-day course for approximately twelve managers per session, with a follow-up half-day for the same group approximately eight weeks later. However, I was able to incorporate elements of social learning theory into the design, particularly performance accomplishment and to some extent vicarious experience and verbal persuasion. As part of the initial one-day session, each manager was asked – and all agreed – to describe a specific performance problem he or she was currently experiencing. This usually related to the underperformance of one individual in the manager’s team, and could range from mild lack of attention to detail to dysfunctional behaviour causing severe disruption of the work of the whole team. Many problems described were chronic. The whole group discussed each

124 Graham Mole manager’s issue in turn. Towards the end of the session, each manager prepared a specific plan for how he or she would work on the issue, using the learning points from the day, and reviewed it with a fellow participant. In the follow-up session, after a recapitulation of the main learning points, each manager described in turn the action they had taken with respect to the problem they had first described. The results were very encouraging. In about 80 per cent of the cases, the manager described actions he or she had taken which had either already resulted in, or looked set to result in, a positive outcome in terms of team productivity and morale. For those problems where a positive result had already been identified, which was in just over one-third of all cases, I was able to help the managers concerned to identify the effect in terms of results, by asking them to numerically estimate the effect on team productivity, then convert that into a conservative estimate of opportunity cost saving based on salary costs. This provided positive reinforcement of the action taken both directly for the manager concerned, and vicariously for the other managers in attendance. Indeed, many were initially taken aback by just how consequential their actions had been. Taken together at the end of the training period, the savings identified up to that point were estimated at £360,000. Now, some might say that in citing those two examples I have destroyed my own argument, and demonstrated conclusively that leadership can, after all, be taught. I would argue that in both cases the process was not to teach leadership, but to increase the self-efficacy of people who perform leadership roles. If this sounds like splitting hairs, it is not. There are some significant differences between the example programmes I have described immediately above and the approaches to leadership skills teaching that I described earlier in the chapter. First, the example programmes were grounded on a sound theoretical base, not on folklore, anecdote, over-generalization and pseudo-science. Secondly, the design employed, to a very large extent, the actual roles and direct experiences of the participants themselves as its source material. The nature of the learning was, therefore, experiential, not instructional. The programmes were, in the true sense of the word, educational, remembering that the Latin verb ‘educere’ means to draw out, not to fill up. Thirdly, the models used were real human beings, performing roles to which the participants could directly relate because they were similar to the roles they performed themselves, and within the same technical and cultural context. Participants were not required to relate to an iconic super-hero stereotype brimming with leadership genes, personality and ‘character’. Indeed, the designs were uncontaminated by any preconditions or distractions about the intrinsic nature of leaders. Fourthly, the learning outcomes were demonstrably behavioural, both in encouraging changes to behaviour and reinforcing those changes. Finally, and crucially, the programmes achieved demonstrable performance improvements beyond reaction, learning transfer and behavioural change criteria (Kirkpatrick 1959) and showed a positive impact on organizational results. As most of the training practitioners reading this would, I trust, agree, this is the equivalent in the training world of striking gold – bearing in mind, as already noted, that most organizations do not even take the trouble to look for it.

Conclusions So what is the future for leadership development? Will it now begin to move from the static, atheoretical set of contructs on which most of it is based, towards a more grounded, dynamic, evidence-based approach of the type I have advocated here? One might hope so, but my expectation is that it will not. As I have stated, we need leaders in order to reduce or take away our uncertainty and anxiety, to make sense of events and give us confidence about our

Can leadership be taught? 125 futures. That need is what keeps the leadership teaching monster so well fed and thriving. Sadly, the world in which we live seems – whether it is objectively so or not – to become a more uncertain and risky place, both politically and economically. The 2008 banking crisis and subsequent worldwide economic recession is an especially graphic case. It was not just the magnitude of the events but their apparent speed which was so disturbing. In such a world the hunt is on as much, or more than ever, for messiahs and for quick-fix methods of locating or creating them. The purveyors of such methods can probably rest easy. However, I am not entirely pessimistic. A welcome sign is the increase in recent years in genuinely critical and reflective literature on leadership – this volume is a good example – and leadership development. There appears to be a growing number of scholars from a variety of social science disciplines – human resource management, organizational psychology, social psychology and sociology – who are prepared to challenge the positivist and, it must be said, US-centric conventional wisdom about leadership. Moreover, from my own experience, some of this thinking appears to be permeating the consciousness of greater numbers of training practitioners, particularly those who are prepared to sacrifice convenience, or resist pressure to conform, in order to achieve better results. Our biggest challenge, as always, is to influence not only practitioners, but their leaders, into starting to think this way. For, as Berger and Luckmann (1991: 127) so concisely put it: ‘He who has the bigger stick has the better chance of imposing his definition of reality.’

Questions for discussion 1 2

In summary, what are the main criticisms this corporate client of leadership development puts forward of standard leadership courses and events? What forms and features of leadership development does he value?

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126 Graham Mole Goffman, E. (2008) Interaction Ritual: Essays in Face-To-Face Behaviour, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Goldacre, B. (2008) Bad Science, London: HarperCollins. Grint, K. (1995) Management: A Sociological Introduction, Oxford: Polity Press. Katz, D. and Kahn, R. L. (1978) The Social Psychology of Organizations, New York: Wiley. Kirkpatrick, D. L. (1959) ‘Techniques of evaluating training programmes’, Journal of the American Society of Training Directors, 14: 13–18, 25–32. Kniveton, B. (1996) ‘Social influence’, in D. Howitt (ed.) Social Psychology: Conflicts and Continuities, Buckingham: Open University Press. Landy, F. J. (1989) Psychology of Work Behaviour, Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/Cole. Latham, G. P. (1989) ‘Behavioural approaches to the training process’, in I. L. Goldstein (ed.) Training and Development in Organizations, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Latham, G. P. and Saari, L. M. (1979) ‘The application of social-learning theory to training supervisors through behavioural modelling’, Journal of Applied Psychology, 64 (3): 239–46. Mole, G. W. (2000) Managing Management Development, Buckingham: Open University Press. Murphy, K. J. (1999) ‘Executive pay’, University of Southern California Marshall School of Business Working Paper Series, June 1999. Nicholson, N. and West, M. A. (1988) Managerial Job Change: Men and Women in Transition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Peters, T. J. and Waterman, R. H. (1982) In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s Best Run Companies, New York, NY: Harper & Row. Robarchek, C. A. (1997) ‘A community of interests: Semai conflict resolution’, in D. P. Fry and K. Björkvist (eds) Cultural Variation in Conflict Resolution: Alternatives to Violence, Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Schein, E. H. (1992) Organizational Culture and Leadership, San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Schmitt, N. W. and Klimoski, R. J. (1991) Research Methods in Human Resources Management, Cincinnati: South-Western. Spitzer, D. R. (2005) ‘Learning effectiveness measurement: A new approach for measuring and managing learning to achieve business results’, Advances in Developing Human Resources, 7 (1): 55–70. Szamosi, L. T., Psychogios, A. G. and Wood, G. T. (2008) ‘At the crossroads of leadership education in emerging economies: Global relevance versus local applicability’, Business Leadership Review, 5 (4): 1–9. Tannenbaum, S. I. and Yukl, G. (1992) ‘Training and development in work organizations’, Annual Review of Psychology, 43: 399–441. Tourish, D. and Vatcha, N. (2005) ‘Charismatic leadership and corporate cultism at Enron: The elimination of dissent, the promotion of conformity and organizational collapse’, Leadership, 1 (4): 455–80. Van Maanen, J. and Schein, E. H. (1979) ‘Toward a theory of organizational socialization’, Research in Organizational Behaviour, 1: 209–64. Weick, K. E. (1995) Sensemaking in Organizations, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Part IV

Leadership and career development

8

Positive career development for leaders Wendy Hirsh

Chapter outline This chapter: • • • • • •

Examines the importance and nature of career development as part of leader development. Reveals the range of ideas and methods for career development using case examples. Explores the balance between organizational and individual responsibility for career development. Examines how career development strategy and broad career paths may be articulated. Identifies the key career development processes. Examines useful practices, as well as challenges, in implementing effective career development.

Introduction This chapter addresses the place of career development within the overall challenge of developing leaders in organizations. It does so from a predominantly practical point of view, using illustrations from a number of major employers. Although primarily addressing these issues in large organizations, many of the ideas presented here are applicable, albeit in a simpler form, to much smaller organizations. The chapter starts with general ideas about ‘careers’ and the conflicting attitudes to career development in organizations. It then examines three main aspects of the career development of managers and leaders. First, how a career development ‘strategy’ may be articulated in terms of broad kinds of career path and different balances of responsibility for career development. Secondly, we examine career development processes, and thirdly, the challenges of implementing what we might call a ‘positive’ approach to career development. This chapter is concerned with the career development of leaders and managers. Leaders and managers do nearly all of their developing through the sequence of work experiences that they have – in other words, their ‘careers’. The skills and confidence to manage and lead others are especially difficult to acquire without the opportunity to learn by doing these things in a work situation. It is also difficult to be credible in very senior leadership roles without considerable experience of managing people and business issues earlier in the career pathway. And yet organizations find the development of leaders and managers through their careers very difficult to implement. Why is this? First, career development is not a single or even a small set of clear-cut interventions or processes. Careers come about through a complex web

130 Wendy Hirsh of people-management practices, often mainly designed to achieve other purposes, such as resourcing, training or managing performance. Second, career development has to deal with tensions between the needs of the business and the interests and aspirations of individual employees. This means talking to employees about very personal things, such as how they see themselves and what they want from work. Organizations are pretty inept at dealing with their employees as real people – it is a messy, challenging and, therefore, uncomfortable thing to do. Third, effective career development requires persistent and consistent attention over fairly long periods of time. Human resources (HR) departments are always under pressure to produce quick fixes and the HR profession develops masses of jargon and ever-changing fashions in this area. Also, HR directors often stay in post for only a short time. This lack of clear, consistent and sustained activity from the HR function often leads to employees and line managers becoming cynical about the degree of organizational commitment to career development.

Ways of looking at careers Before we address the practical problems of the career development of managers and leaders, it may be helpful to identify some more general ideas about careers and career development. There are many strands of thought here, reflected in a rich but very fragmented literature. Arnold (1997) and Gunz and Peiperl (2007) provide useful accounts of the varied definitions of ‘career’ and the development of career theory. Social scientists, especially psychologists and sociologists, have long been interested in the meaning which individuals attach to their careers and the many factors which influence their choices of work. These factors are not just about skills or even aspirations, but include personal values (Schein 1990), life stage (Sheehy 1974) and the ever-increasing challenges of work/life balance. The importance of career in personal, as well as work, identity and in how people tell the story of their working lives has led to an interest in what is sometimes called the ‘subjective’ aspects of a career (i.e. how the individual perceives and feels about his/her career). This contrasts with the ‘objective’ career (i.e. the actual series of jobs someone has held). The concept of the ‘psychological contract’ between employer and employee has also usefully been applied to careers (Herriot and Pemberton 1995). Meanwhile economists see careers in the context of an ever-shifting labour market, with shortages or surpluses of people with different kinds of skills. The economic perspective emphasizes career decisions as rational responses to the opportunities and risks the labour market presents. These risks and opportunities need to be understood by both employees and employers. A number of specialist professional groups engage directly in helping individuals manage their work/life choices, for example career guidance and career counselling practitioners (Kidd 2006). There are also many books and materials (increasingly on the Internet) to support individuals going through the processes of career planning and job search (Bolles 2009; Hopson and Scally 1993; Hawkins 1999). Much of this self-help material is relevant to those developing their careers inside an organization. Several of the case organizations cited later in this chapter have made such materials available to their employees, often through a company intranet. In comparison with this very extensive literature on individual careers, that on ‘organizational careers’ is more limited. Schein (1978) and Hall (1976) emphasized the need to manage both organizational and individual career requirements – an issue just as relevant today. Baruch (2004) and Yarnall (2008) set this fundamental tension in current organizational contexts and with reference to evolving HR practices.

Career development 131 Much of the recent literature on organizational career development, especially of managers and leaders, now emerges in writing on ‘talent management’ (Tansley et al. 2007; Lubitch et al., 2007; McCartney and Garrow 2006; IDS 2008). ‘Talent’ has been very much the HR buzzword of the last five years and one can argue with some justification that it is, to a large extent, a rebranding of the idea of organizational career development (Yarnall 2008).

Conflicting attitudes to career development in organizations Careers in organizations are seen simultaneously as a problem, a necessity, and a way of attracting the best employees. Careers as a problem In normal English usage, the word ‘career’ has been used for centuries to talk about occupations or types of work, and also progression or pathways from one job to another. Posters advertising educational courses still stress the career doors they will open. Actors on chat shows talk about the highs and lows of their careers. The idea of career has been especially important to those in managerial jobs, as management responsibility is usually seen as an upwards career step from whatever came before. Likewise, and especially in the second half of the twentieth century, organizational careers were an accepted phenomenon. A number of factors came together around the early 1990s to challenge the organizational career. Significant levels of white-collar redundancies took away the employment security which large organizations had provided. For those who kept their jobs, ‘flatter structures’ were seen as reducing promotion opportunities. Partly as a result of these factors, there was more acceptance of skilled employees moving from one employer to another. At the same time the old mechanics of organizational career planning and managed career moves was largely dismantled except at very senior levels. There was a lot of talk about the loss of ‘careers for life’ and the development of more freewheeling careers. Terms like ‘portfolio’ and ‘boundaryless’ were used to describe these (Arthur and Rousseau 1996). Some even foresaw the possible disappearance of organizational employment (Bridges 1994). Alongside all this doom and gloom there was also a more productive debate about more flexible and self-managed careers (Waterman et al. 1994). The predominant organizational response, however, was to back off from talking very much about careers. Indeed, the tendency became to talk about what was not on offer: no jobs for life, no career paths, less upward movement and, above all, no promises (Hirsh and Jackson 1996). Despite all this, labour market data show that the myths of ‘the end of the career’ vastly overstate the reality of change over the past ten years or so (Moynagh and Worsley 2005). Careers as a necessity for the organization Organizational careers developed for good reason. Those reasons have been present for many hundreds of years, and they are too fundamental to go away, especially for managers and leaders. Large organizations still aim to grow the majority of their managers from their employees. This results in those employees moving from one job to another with increasing amounts of management responsibility. Although recruitment from outside at all levels is healthy, it is too risky to rely on the external labour market for all the management skills needed.

132 Wendy Hirsh So managerial careers serve two fundamental functions, and have to do both at the same time. Career moves pull into jobs people who have most of the skills they need to carry out those jobs. While working in any job, employees are also gaining experience and learning some new skills and knowledge which will equip them better for future job roles. These two fundamentals – careers as resourcing and careers as learning – are what career development is there to do for the organization. Careers as attractive to employees Employees, especially those confident of their own ability and with high aspirations, see positive career development as one of the most important aspects of their employment package. Especially in early career, opportunities for varied and stretching work, rapid promotion and individual attention paid are all highly attractive. So employers want to make a positive career offer and a promise of personal career attention as a way of winning their fair share in the ‘war for talent’ (Chambers et al. 1998). Such attention taken to extremes can be very dangerous, as Gladwell warns in his analysis of Enron (2002). However, the PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) case in this chapter shows the need for a positive career offer as part of the employer brand. So even though the word ‘career’ has become problematic, organizations know they do need to do something about the career development of their skilled workforce. The rest of this chapter will look at the three levels on which this task is approached: • • •

The strategy level – what is the overall intention for the career development of managers and leaders? The process level – what mechanisms can we see which facilitate career development? The implementation level – how do we make these mechanisms effective in practice, and especially who needs to do what?

Career development strategies for managers and leaders There are many ways of looking at career development strategy, and here we choose just two of its dimensions. A career development strategy for managers and leaders should be based on the kinds of careers we expect managers to have, so the first dimension we look at here is the changing career needs of the rather diverse group of people we call ‘managers’ or ‘leaders’. The second dimension is what we might call the ‘career deal’ – the balance between employer and employee responsibility and what is really being offered and expected on both sides of that relationship. The changing career needs of managers and leaders This book shows the increasing demands being made on managers and leaders. The term ‘leadership’ in itself signals some shifts in skill needs which the word ‘management’ does not seem to embrace so clearly. In the context of careers, there is an ever-growing list of the career experiences seen as desirable for senior managers and leaders in order to develop the ever-widening range of skills and knowledge required. The list includes: •

broad business experience – especially of different products or markets, the wider political and economic context, and sometimes experience of other organizations or sectors;

Career development 133 • • • • • • • •

cross-functional experience; direct-line responsibility for other employees – often including employees of varying kinds, e.g. professional staff versus those in clerical or shop floor jobs; strategic experience – often this means head office roles; delivering major projects – especially those crossing organizational boundaries; managing in particular situations, e.g. start-ups, mergers, joint ventures; initiating and leading people through major change, now seen as a really key requirement of leadership; working in other cultures, especially in other countries; staying in some of these roles long enough to show real delivery of business goals!

This list is by no means exhaustive but it is still potentially exhausting to achieve. Organizations generally have the strategic aim of offering wider career experience to those likely to reach senior general management positions (e.g. managing director or chief executive of an organization or significant unit within it). This broadening is perhaps the clearest strategic intention of the corporately managed approaches to career development or ‘talent management’ which we discuss later. Such careers are very likely to include lateral or diagonal moves and project working, as well as promotions. However, we must not only think about management careers in terms of the tiny minority who will reach the very top of the organization. The first move into managing other people is a key career step both for the organization and the individual. It is too easy to promote people into management roles who do not have the necessary potential or attitudes, simply because they have been good at doing the job underneath. The transitions between broad levels of management work – often junior (or first line), middle, senior, plus sometimes a small ‘top’ tier – each require significant changes in skills and attitudes. The career strategy needs to support each of these major career transitions and build in ways of checking that the right decision is being made both for the organization and the employee. Recruitment is also a critical career transition and can occur at any level. Recruits at professional and managerial level are often brought in to fill a particular job without much thought as to their future career. The 1980s and 1990s saw a preoccupation with ‘general managers’ – people who are both senior and manage multifunctional teams. Good general managers were seen as being a cure for all ills. This obscured for a while the varied management roles which large organizations have, and the diverse career paths they imply. Functional managers and leaders are far more numerous than general managers. Nearly all first-line managers have a strong functional focus to their work, i.e. they are responsible for a particular type of work. At middle-management levels, functional managers head up a department or division which often has a particular functional focus (e.g. production, sales or marketing, finance, etc.). Even at board level, many jobs are what we might call functional leadership roles (finance director, marketing director, etc.). These jobs combine a strong element of professional judgement with the need for many of the generic leadership skills required by general managers. The career paths of functional leaders need to develop both breadth and depth within the function across business units, with perhaps some excursions into other functions. So career development for managers and leaders needs to recognize the diversity of managerial careers both by level and by career path. The emphasis in such paths changes as business needs change. BP, for example, has a long history of strong career development for general managers but has also needed to re-strengthen functional as well as general management careers.

134 Wendy Hirsh General managers, functional leaders and also high-level specialists are all seen as contributing to the leadership capability of the business in a climate requiring continuous improvement.

CASE STUDY BP BP, a global energy company with around 100,000 employees, has all the challenges of developing managers and leaders in a complex business with a large geographical spread. The majority of employees are highly skilled, many of them scientists and engineers by background. For many years BP has actively developed the careers of those seen as having potential for the most senior roles. Through the late 1990s and into the 2000s the company went through a period of major acquisitions, and this placed a premium on general management and commercial leadership skills. Career progression for those with high potential was rapid and aimed at maximizing their breadth of experience across functions, business streams and countries. By around 2005, the company was shifting to a period of consolidation and continuous business improvement. This has increased emphasis on operational efficiency and functional expertise. Investment and innovation has been focused on where it has made business sense to do so. Job tenure needs to be longer to achieve the desired business results, and managers and leaders are more likely to progress their careers through a business segment or function than by hopping between different parts of the business. The senior executive team members are accountable for the career development of the top 500 people in the business and ‘talent meetings’ are held three times a year to review individuals and ‘bench strength’. This includes detailed succession planning for the top 100 or so jobs and a watching brief on succession for the 400 jobs below that. About 340 people are on Career Acceleration Programmes. Many of these are below the top 500 jobs but are seen as having potential for this level. Others are already in the top 500 population with potential for group leadership roles. Their career development is mostly managed on a devolved basis by their function or business stream, but selection into the CAP is via a common corporate assessment process. This looks for leadership potential on top of outstanding performance, as signalled by the performance management process. There are also corporate management development offerings for those in the CAP population. Since the early 1990s, BP has emphasized the management of people as a crucial part of business performance. Line managers are expected to be strong both on the performance management and the development of their staff. With a well-qualified workforce, the employee is also expected to take the initiative in their own career and development. Below the top levels in the business, jobs are internally advertised and individuals apply, with line manager approval. Employees seeking to develop their careers are expected to have a personal development plan and discuss it with their boss. One challenge for BP is to keep a balanced age profile in the workforce when recruitment is largely focused on those with specific expertise, who are often well into their careers. Recruitment of younger people is also constrained by shortages of high-quality science and engineering graduates in BP’s traditional recruiting grounds of the UK, US and Western Europe. Just as its business is truly global, so its hunt for future talent will need to be.

Career development 135 Turning to the public sector, there are also issues about the range of career experiences leaders will require. For example, the Civil Service is seeking to strengthen functional and people management experience in a culture which has tended to grow its leaders through Whitehall policy work rather than more operational management roles or key business support functions (finance, IT, HR, etc.). In common with many large organizations these corporate career priorities for those who may reach the very top have to be achieved through a vast diversity of career options and paths at lower levels in the constituent parts of the wider organization.

CASE STUDY CIVIL SERVICE The UK Civil Service employs about half a million people in over twenty departments of government and over sixty-five executive agencies. It delivers many different public services in a vast number of locations as well as supporting ministers in making policy and drafting legislation. Departments and agencies deal with most employment issues in a devolved way. The Cabinet Office, one of the central departments of the Civil Service, provides strategic leadership and co-ordination on some HR issues and works with departments on the corporate management of the 4,500 or so people (less than 1 per cent of the workforce) defined as being in the Senior Civil Service (SCS). There is a national leadership model at this level, emphasizing direction setting, delivery of results, developing people and living the Civil Service values of integrity, honesty, impartiality and objectivity. The Cabinet Office takes a hands-on role in the career management and development of the top 200 or so civil servants. It works with departments to identify high-performing directors and deputy directors and supports their career development through a talent management programme. It is also involved in development programmes to support the transition of individuals newly promoted into the SCS. Careers in the Civil Service are extremely diverse and include almost every profession or business function one can think of. Many departments and agencies run particular career entry schemes and development programmes to meet their own business needs and provide structured development for their people. The Civil Service has a strong tradition of investing in the training of its staff through off-the-job courses. This does present a challenge, however, to getting employees and their managers to recognize learning in the workplace and through career experience as the most important way of developing. Improving the quality of managers and leaders has been a central concern in the Civil Service for many years. More recently, there has been growing recognition that many senior roles are not concerned with making policy but with leading large workforces in service delivery or being accountable for major corporate functions like finance, HR, IT and so on. A common skills framework – Professional Skills for Government (PSG) – sets out the competencies required at different levels in the service for different kinds of work. Under PSG, the Cabinet Office has recommended that Senior Civil Servants should have experience in at least two of the three main career areas of policy, operational delivery and corporate services. Also all those in the SCS are expected to show people leadership and to have financial and project management skills, again increasing emphasis on people and business leadership at the top. Central leadership development programmes are used on entry to the SCS and at further key transition points higher up. The Civil Service has a well-known Fast Stream entry for about 500 very able graduates each year. Although selected centrally, Fast Streamers are managed within departments and

136 Wendy Hirsh normally receive a range of postings in their first four years or so to accelerate their careers and learning. In line with PSG, there are now Fast Stream entries for the HR profession and Technology, as well as the established generalist entry and schemes for economists, statisticians, science and engineering, the Diplomatic Service and the Houses of Parliament. In future it seems likely that careers in the Civil Service will be more like the professional or functional careers we see for managers and leaders in other sectors. As in other sectors, career moves to broaden experience will be important for those aspiring to the most senior levels. Although central frameworks and principles help to articulate the way careers will need to change, managers still need to take a stronger personal interest in developing those who work for them. Individuals also need to recognize the benefits of gaining more experience earlier in their careers of leading people, often in service delivery environments.

The career deal for managers and leaders The types of careers we need managers to follow need to be linked to a second key aspect of strategy – the nature of the career development ‘deal’. The model shown in Figure 8.1 illustrates a range of career development deals in terms of the extent to which the organization takes responsibility for proactive development (Hirsh and Jackson 1996). Positions to the left-hand side of this diagram are ones in which the organization is taking the main role in career planning and offering development which is highly integrated with future career possibilities. We see this deal most clearly for ‘high potential’ and senior managers. At the right-hand extreme we see no career development offered by the organization. This does not preclude proper training for the current job, but skill or job progression is simply not on the agenda. In the middle we have a term now in widespread use – ‘career partnership’. In this deal, the employer and employee have pretty equal responsibility for development, which is explicitly negotiated as part of the employment relationship. Valuable specialists often come closest to the partnership deal because their power to leave the organization is often high, and so the employee can negotiate over both the job role he or she has and the training they receive. Most large organizations operate a segmented career development strategy, with some staff getting more proactive development and career attention than others. This segmentation may Career

Learner

Flexible

Contribution

Job

Integrated career and development

Planned development

Negotiated development

Supported self-development

Unsupported development and job training

EMPLOYMENT OFFER

DEVELOPMENT OFFER

RESPONSIBILITY FOR DEVELOPMENT

Organization

Partnership

Figure 8.1 The career development continuum Source: Institute for Employment Studies (Hirsh and Jackson 1996).

Individual

Career development 137 indeed be an appropriate strategy, but it is very seldom honestly reflected in those vague policy statements about employees developing within business needs. The career continuum model has particular relevance to managerial careers in two ways. First, the overall career development climate of an organization is set by the career deal offered to the majority of staff. There is a big difference in management climate between an organization that shows no interest at all in the careers of most staff, compared with one offering some career support to all staff who are interested. Second, the diagram helps us see how much the career deal for an individual manager can alter dramatically with time. If employees come in as graduate recruits, they will be on the planned development or ‘learner’ deal for a while, with their work experiences largely planned by the organization. When they finish the graduate scheme, they fall off this deal and return to whatever degree of career support everyone else gets – usually pretty far over to the right-hand side of the diagram. If they are picked up later by some management development or fast-track scheme, they find themselves moving left again. If they reach a career ceiling, or even if their career slows down, they move back to the basic deal. If or when they enter senior management, they may feel their career is planned again, but not always. At the very top, board members can have a ‘job’ deal again, and CEOs can have just short-term contracts – in career terms, a move back to being an office temp! Little wonder that many managers feel very confused about the issue of career ownership and whether the organization is any consistent kind of partner in their career. Something closer to the middle-ground ‘partnership’ strategy would seem to make basic business sense for the majority of professional and managerial staff. As a group which is relatively expensive to employ and replace, it should repay the organization to have a strong interest in the deployment and career direction of these individuals. This strategy does not imply that all managers be told that they are promotable, and indeed it naturally emphasizes lateral career moves. The partnership strategy does expect the employee to make much of the running in career terms, and so does not take us back to the idea of the organization planning an individual’s career. Rolls-Royce comes close to implementing this partnership strategy through its Development Cell process, described later in this chapter. The other advantage of upgrading the deal and adopting a true partnership approach for all managers is that a rather more strongly planned approach for selected groups (e.g. graduate trainees, high potentials, senior managers) can more easily overlay it. PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) uses the language of talent management, as in Figure 8.2, to offer positive career development to all its staff, overlaid with specific career and development interventions for those seen as ‘key talent’ likely to reach senior leadership.

Everybody is talented and important Develop people for business impact as far and as fast as they can and want to go

Attract

Identify

Develop

Figure 8.2 The PwC talent model Source: PricewaterhouseCoopers, 2009.

Deploy

Engage

138 Wendy Hirsh CASE STUDY PRICEWATERHOUSECOOPERS LLP PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP (PwC), the professional services firm, is a member of the global network of PricewaterhouseCoopers, which employs 155,000 people in 153 countries worldwide. Over 15,000 work in the UK firm across tax, advisory and assurance services. In many ways career development can be seen as the engine that drives the partnership, with a continuous need to refresh the workforce with high-quality graduate entrants as well as the recruitment of experienced hires. Careers in PwC are an essential part of the employment brand, as the annual report says: ‘The more we develop our people, the more we understand our clients’ businesses and can offer new perspectives. We invest in our people’s development throughout their careers. We seek to provide an optimal mix of client experience, coaching and development programmes, supported by a range of activities including international assignments, community partnerships and voluntary programmes’. The term ‘talent’ at PwC, as shown in Figure 8.2, is used inclusively but also acknowledges that individuals will have very different kinds of careers within the business, moving at their own pace and in their own direction. Early in their career, many employees take professional qualifications, for example in accountancy and tax. Planned career experiences are built into these professional structures, and so career movement is very much a part of the organization’s ethos. The term ‘cycle of experience’ is used to convey how moving from one work experience to another builds skills and knowledge and also helps the individual explore their career interests and think about their future career direction. People skills and business understanding are vital to PwC’s relationships with its clients, and so they are ‘embedded from day one’ alongside technical skill development. A coaching culture is also encouraged at every level. The wider responsibilities of business – for example in supporting communities and the environment – are also visible to all employees through opportunities for volunteering in work time or taking secondments. So the skills and responsibilities of those in senior leadership roles – as Partners – can be seen as a natural progression of the skills valued at much earlier career stages in the professional workforce. The term ‘key talent’ is used to signal people with high potential whose careers are accelerated and who are given additional development opportunities. High potential is defined in terms of a set of behaviours and motivators seen as signalling ‘learning agility’. The Emerging Leaders Programme develops about sixty ‘high potential’ managers each year and is additional to structured development offered to all managers. At more senior levels there are programmes which give a global perspective and further develop the personal and ethical aspects of leadership. Each business unit has a People Partner with responsibility for talent management at a local level. A senior HR or L&D (learning and development) leader will support this process. Investment in people at senior levels needs to be carefully managed, to ensure a business return on investment and also to give individuals realistic career expectations.

Career development processes for managers and leaders So how do these strategies manifest in practice? As we have discussed, career development strategy for managers and leaders is tending towards varying blends of support for employees in managing their own careers, plus more organizationally planned careers for selected

Career development 139 subgroups of managers. It should be no surprise, then, that the formal processes for developing managers’ careers operate in a similarly two-legged fashion (Hirsh and Jackson 2004). In this section we will look briefly at practical approaches to supporting self-managed careers for managers, then at more corporately planned careers and, finally, at how these two can work together. Supporting the self-managed career The recognition that self-managed careers require support from employers was advocated by Waterman et al. (1994) in their influential exposition of the need for ‘career resilience’. However, organizations have been rather slow to admit it, and much slower to act on it. Of course the implication is that the organization has to do something with and for the majority of employees. It is the strategic arguments around attraction, retention, skill development and motivation which have persuaded organizations like PwC to offer some career support to all staff. There are many possible processes for supporting individuals in managing their own careers, but a simple way of looking at them is through the underlying functions these processes support, as shown in Figure 8.3. The top left-hand function – that of feedback to individuals on their performance, skills and potential – supports those individuals in understanding themselves. The top right-hand function, of providing information on career options, informs the employee about the structure of the internal labour market. The two central functions of advice plus planning and negotiation support individual career planning and decision making. They help to answer the question, ‘where am I going?’ They are shown as two separate but closely linked functions, as advice can aim to be impartial, but planning and negotiation are about finding solutions which meet the needs of both the organization and the employee. In the career partnership strategy, the planning and negotiating function is critical. The bottom two functions – giving access to work experiences and skill development – address the question, ‘how do I get there?’

Career advice

Feedback

Information on career options

Planning and negotiation

Access to work experiences

Figure 8.3 Supporting individual career development

Access to skill development

140 Wendy Hirsh They are shown separately here because offering access to skill development (for example, through e-learning or even qualifications) does not necessarily give employees access to varied or progressive work experiences. Just to illustrate what this all looks like in practice, most organizations are operating mainly with only a few core processes, which only partly address the needs for support. Other organizations are starting to offer a richer range of support mechanisms. Access to skill development is often extensive, but for most employees focuses only on training for their current jobs. Appraisal is assumed to be the main way of giving feedback to support career development. In fact it does this rather poorly, often addressing performance but not potential or suitable career directions. In a study of effective career support at work among a largely professional and managerial population, appraisal accounted for a very small proportion (about 7 per cent) of useful discussions individuals had about their careers (Kidd et al. 2004). An open internal job market is seen as the main process through which employees move from one job to another. Internal job vacancies are advertised to employees, who then apply for the next job they want, and it is up to the line manager concerned to select the successful candidate. Hirsh et al. (2000) found rapid growth in open internal job advertising, increasingly through corporate intranet sites. The process of internal job application in effect becomes the main process by which employees manage their careers. It does not normally cover the very top of the organization, but has extended well into management in many organizations. It can cover project assignments as well as permanent job moves. Although a popular process with employees, there is a hidden trap. If the appointing managers always select the ‘best fit’ candidate for internal job moves, then it is difficult for employees to achieve a change of career direction within an organization. The catch-22 is that you will only be selected for a new job if you have done a job very much like it before. This makes self-managed crossfunctional or cross-unit moves particularly difficult. Companies are starting to recognize the need for overview information on job options and for career advice. Organizations usually advocate some form of personal career plan, often incorporated into a personal development plan (PDP). It is usually assumed that such planning is facilitated by a dialogue between the individual and his or her line manager, either in the annual appraisal or in a separate development review. Managers do not find that these processes really address their career issues (Kidd et al. 2004), and the boss is often not the person they need to speak with. The current fashion for asking managers to put employees into a nine-box grid which rates three levels of performance and three of potential is hardly likely to lead to improved career dialogue. Being put in a box is not really a very exciting process for the individual and can often be downright demoralizing. Two further types of support for individuals are being considered. Tools which employees can use for themselves to think about their career plans are increasingly being made available in large organizations, often through electronic means. The second option – more personal one-to-one support – poses a much greater challenge. Some organizations run career workshops to help a group of employees work together over a day or two on their selfassessment and career planning. ‘Career coaching’ has recently become a fashionable term for one-to-one career support, but there are difficulties in sustaining access to trained career coaches, even when these people are performing this function on a volunteer basis inside the organization. Sometimes the HR function offers more in-depth support on a formal or informal basis, as in Rolls-Royce for example. Nestlé never did go through the rejection of organizational careers in the 1990s and retained for longer a rather ‘paternalistic’ career culture. It is now seeking to help individuals take greater responsibility for their own career development. This involves increasing

Short-term 0–2 years

Long-term 3–5 years

Aligned Expectations

Career paths and how to get there

Talent Strategy Building capability for the future

Progress and Develop Guide

Talent Cycle

Feedback and learning in my current job

Talent and succession reviews Sourcing, deployment and training

Me

Nestlé

Figure 8.4 Aligning business and individual career development needs in Nestlé Source: Nestlé 2009.

employees’ access to useful tools and sources of advice. Figure 8.4 shows a model designed to explain how different career processes address the needs of employees and the business on both short-term and longer-term timeframes.

CASE STUDY NESTLÉ Nestlé is a food and nutrition company, headquartered in Switzerland and with about 280,000 employees worldwide, of whom about 7,000 work in the UK and Ireland. Nestlé has traditionally had a rather paternalistic approach to employment, including career development, which has worked well. However, with an increasingly diverse range of businesses, and its sheer size, combined with changes in employee expectations (Generation Y etc.), Nestlé is now encouraging its employees to take a much more active role in developing their own careers. The challenge in this rebalancing is to retain the high degree of loyalty which Nestlé employees have felt traditionally towards the company, while bringing the employment relationship up to date and putting the employees in the driving seat of their own career, in partnership with management. Nestlé UK has been in the forefront of this change, in particular developing a

142 Wendy Hirsh set of tools around the year 2000 to help individual employees plan their own careers and find out about different kinds of jobs in the company. This shift is now becoming much more visible corporately and career tools are being developed, including information on career paths by business function. Both managers and employees need to understand the strategy for career development and the processes which support it. Figure 8.4 shows these in terms of the relationship between individual and business needs and also between short-term development (usually in the current job) and longer-term development (through career movement). Nestlé is expecting all its managers to develop their people, including having structured career conversations with them each year. To date, managers have received less training in how to approach such conversations than in discussing current performance. The company is advising employees to think about their career experiences and skills (their ‘know-how’), but also their interests and values (‘know-why’) and their networks (‘know-who’). Five actions are proposed for employees wishing to develop their careers at Nestlé: 1 2 3 4 5

Perform to a consistent high level and maintain your personal development and career plan (called the Progress and Development Guide). Build your skills, get feedback and understand the company direction. Manage your career and discuss it with your manager. Build a support network, including a mentor, and talk to HR. Market yourself – have a CV, ask and research.

Nestlé continues to manage careers at the very top of the company corporately – those in the top 100 or so jobs, plus their 300 or so successors. It is also practical that most people below senior management develop their careers within a function at a fairly local level in the business. In between lies the most challenging population from a career development perspective – senior managers in about 700 jobs globally, and around 2,000 people who are seen as ‘emerging talent’ for these roles. It is more difficult at this level for the line manager to take most of the responsibility for career development, as people are more likely to need a move between countries or across functions. So the management teams of regions (‘zones’) and of global functions play an active role facilitating the careers of these groups. This is done principally via regular Talent and Career Review meetings across the matrix structure, facilitated by HR. Nestlé regards international experience as very important for aspiring executives, but this need for international mobility creates a continuing challenge to developing the careers of women through to the highest levels in the company.

Informal support for individuals is a crucial part of the jigsaw. Some of the most important advice comes from managers other than the direct boss, and arises naturally in work situations. Sometimes long-term informal mentoring relationships result. The importance of informal networks in getting access to jobs is also important. Even where more formal processes govern the selection process, personal knowledge and the judgements of others will inform the decision, perhaps especially so at management levels. So employees do need to make themselves visible, and this is usually much more difficult for someone at an early stage in their career than it is for established senior managers. One of the reasons that internal secondments or assignments so often lead to career moves is because they simply make an

Career development 143 individual more visible to and better known by another part of the organization. When a vacancy arises, they are much better placed to get it. The big gap in this collection of practices is a real opportunity for the organization to understand and support the career plans made by the individual. Even if the line manager tries to do this in appraisal or development review, it does not give any collective management support for bringing that plan about. Corporately managed careers It is interesting that the prevalent strategy of largely self-managed careers has not led to the demise of corporately driven career planning. Organizations still seek to plan ahead for some of their employees and to proactively facilitate career moves as well as skill development for them (Gratton and Hailey 1999). The populations which receive this higher degree of investment from the organization are usually senior managers and those seen as having potential to fill these jobs in future. The term most often used for planning of this kind has been ‘succession planning’. It is a slightly misleading term, as, in its modern form, it is likely to put emphasis not just on planning for specific posts, but rather on identifying and then developing various ‘talent pools’ in the organization (Hirsh 2000). These pools are usually made up of individuals seen as having ‘high potential’ but identified in mid-career, and sometimes recruited in early career. Over the past decade the language of ‘talent management’ with talent pools and talent schemes or programmes has become prevalent, with the assumption that those selected to be in ‘talent pools’ will have their careers accelerated in various ways. Yarnall (2008) examines the advantages and disadvantages of the talent pool approach. We should also note that high potential development often expects the individual to be geographically mobile and also to work very hard indeed. However, these approaches often focus on people between the ages of roughly thirty and forty – a time when employees of both genders are often raising families and managing two careers. This is a particular challenge in global companies, as the Nestlé case shows. It is an important aspect of succession planning or talent management that it is a collective management activity – that is, groups of managers discuss and agree plans, and take some collective responsibility for supporting the implied development for individuals. Succession planning and high potential development can be devolved in large organizations, reflecting the different locations at which appointment decisions are made. The very top of the organization is still usually handled at the corporate centre, as are often the top teams at divisional, country or subsidiary levels. However, at layers of senior management below that, a similar and linked succession planning process might plan for jobs critical within countries, divisions or functions. There can also be focused career development interventions in such a devolved model within functions, units or localities. Development ‘programmes’ or ‘schemes’ can combine planned development to support career progression with formal and on-the-job learning. In companies with clerical or shop-floor workforces, such development schemes are often used – formally or informally – to prepare prospective candidates for supervisory jobs. Although many organizations operate a fairly simple process for the very top of the organization, this more ambitious devolved model takes a lot more discipline and effort to implement. The Rolls-Royce example we look at later on shows the use of a process called Development Cells, which is a form of succession and development planning taken much

144 Wendy Hirsh further down the organization – into most of the professional and management population. It gives company attention to the careers of far more junior managers and professionals. Just as self-managed approaches fail to get buy-in for an individual’s plans from wider management, so the big challenge for corporate processes is to get close enough to the individuals they are planning for. In theory, succession processes should feed back to the individuals concerned, but often this does not happen in practice. Again, sensible management development or HR directors talk to high potential staff to keep in touch with any issues or concerns. This should complement the discussions they have with their own line managers. Combining self-managed and corporate career development Figure 8.5 shows just a few of the wide range of processes which play a part in career development for managers and leaders. Those towards the left tend to be corporately driven, and those towards the right tend more towards supporting self-managed careers. Some processes in the centre of the diagram – such as appraisal, frameworks of competencies or behaviours and assessment processes (e.g. assessment or development centres, 360-degree feedback or feedback from staff surveys) – can support both aspects. As we have seen, the biggest challenge is to establish serious dialogue between the organization and the individual. It is not clear who speaks for the organization in this relationship, as bosses come and go and are often not there to help the individual action an agreed development plan. This is most critical when it comes to supporting lateral or unusual career moves. CORPORATELY MANAGED CAREERS

CORE HR PROCESSES

SELF-MANAGED CAREERS

Succession planning/ talent reviews

Appraisal / development reviews

Open job advertisements

High potential / talent pools or programmes

Frameworks of competencies / behaviours

Management development schemes

Personal Development Plans

Self-help tools and career information

Skill assessment processes Career events / workshops Training and education

Mentoring and /or career coaching

Informal career information, advice and networking

Figure 8.5 Some career development processes

Career development 145 Rolls-Royce has a number of corporate talent pools, as shown in Figure 8.6, but also attempts to use its much wider Development Cell process to achieve a more thorough sharing of understanding between the individual and the organization.

CASE STUDY ROLLS-ROYCE Rolls-Royce plc operates in the very competitive global aerospace and power systems market. It has about 39,000 employees, of whom roughly 60 per cent are in the UK. Career development is seen as central to the effective deployment and development of the workforce, and also to the attraction and retention of world-class people. Managers and leaders have careers that often start in a technical or functional area of expertise. Twothirds of senior executives have an engineering background. Career paths have to be flexible to respond to continuously changing business needs and employees’ aspirations and to operate in a matrix organization structure. There has always been a strong emphasis on development in Rolls-Royce, and this has increasingly emphasized management and leadership, as well as technical, expertise. To quote the chief executive, ‘It is one of our fundamental company values that achieving business success and promoting individual development go hand in hand. The Rolls-Royce name is recognized internationally and we operate worldwide. Our management development policy will make us a world-class business through having world-class people.’ A process called Development Cell drills a succession and development approach right down through the managerial and professional populations. Development Cells are, in essence, meetings of groups of managers to review and agree actions on the career and skill development of those they manage. They cover succession planning and the identification of high potential, against a common corporate set of indicators. Cells look both at individuals and at groups within the workforce, and facilitate career moves across business or functional boundaries where necessary. At their best, Development Cells help to establish a consistent and strong approach to development that is both business focused and interested in each individual. Cells use a common approach but are flexible enough to accommodate varied agendas and local needs. Although the Development Cell approach has been in operation for twenty years or more, it seems if anything to be increasingly important as the business has become more global and its products more diverse. It goes all the way up the company with directors leading Development Cells covering their senior management populations, and the group executive team acting as a Development Cell managing succession and development at the top of the business. Rolls-Royce identifies four corporate talent pools of people seen as having high potential, whose careers are of special interest at group level. These are shown on Figure 8.6. In addition to pools in early career, mid-career and at executive level, the specialist pool meets the business need to develop excellent technical specialists as well as managers and leaders. Individuals are expected to be active in developing their own careers, supported by a range of tools and discussions with the line manager and, where relevant, HR. One of the continuing challenges is to link individual employees into the Development Cell process. Feedback from Cell meetings should be provided to the individual by their line manager, and can involve a more senior manager if appropriate. Some employees are proactive in this link by, for example, booking discussions with their manager when they know a Cell meeting is coming up, and asking for feedback afterwards.

146 Wendy Hirsh

Figure 8.6 Corporate talent pools in Rolls-Royce Source: Rolls-Royce plc 2009.

Implementing career development for managers and leaders Even if the strategy and processes are articulated, actually delivering career development requires persistent hard work. Most large organizations load most of the responsibility for career development onto line managers. This is often taken to mean the immediate line manager, a less than satisfactory solution. The immediate boss is often not well placed to be the main facilitator of career development. There are many tensions between keeping a good team member and encouraging them to move on. The employee may also not wish to ‘rock the boat’ by raising career issues with his or her boss. In addition, bosses often know little more about career opportunities than those they manage, and may have little power to facilitate developmental opportunities beyond the current job. So career development needs to be a responsibility of the whole management community, not just the immediate boss. The boss’s boss, for example, can play a key role in spotting potential and opening up opportunities. Nor can the HR department just design the appraisal form and sit back. Career development is only partly facilitated by formal processes. HR managers can play a number of important roles. In terms of planning processes, such as succession, HR needs to make sure key information is challenged, shared, then acted on and reviewed. In terms of offering support to individual employees, HR managers often have a much better overview of opportunities than local line managers. They can also network with their HR peers in other parts of the organization and find out about opportunities or facilitate developmental experiences such as secondments, job swaps, etc. HR managers can also make an important contribution to career advice, especially when employees need a more confidential discussion.

Career development 147 Of course, an HR function which sees itself as too strategic to talk to employees, or conversely which does not know how to handle sensitive information, will not fulfil this role. Career development makes distinctive demands on those involved both as ‘givers’ and as ‘receivers’ of support. Some of the generic skills needed to do this apply to many aspects of developing other people, but these generic skills are not enough (Kidd et al. 2004). Employees need to know how to manage their own careers and those who help them need to feel they have adequate skills, knowledge and confidence to take on this role. Many organizations now train managers in aspects of performance management (objective setting, giving feedback, etc.) and some in coaching skills. It is high time that career development skills were added to the mainstream agenda for management training.

A positive approach to career development for managers In summary, this chapter suggests that organizations need to adopt a more ‘positive’ approach to the career development of managers and leaders. The 1990s served a useful purpose in highlighting the need for individuals to take much more responsibility for their own careers, but also left us with unhelpfully negative messages about careers in organizations and the role of the employer in career development. The talking up of ‘talent’ in the boom of the mid-2000s gave lavish development support to very small populations of managers and leaders but often continued to neglect the career development of the majority of managers who are the backbone of any high-performing organization. Career development for managers and leaders is better thought of as a joint responsibility between employer and employee. Getting positive means a much more up-front and realistic career message which says what the organization can offer, rather than dwelling on what it can’t. The career message for managers needs to clarify the deal for all managers (and probably at least for professionals too), and not just focus on the small numbers of corporately identified high potentials or the most senior layers of leadership. Getting positive also means explaining to employees what formal and informal processes they can use to develop their careers. These processes need to build in real dialogue and provide opportunities for in-depth discussion of career issues. There is a need for much more effective career support at more local level, earlier in the managerial career. If corporate career-planning processes, such as succession planning or talent pools, are used, then all employees should understand what they are for and how they work. Getting positive also implies equipping employees and those who manage and support them to discuss career issues properly and act on their discussions. The active role of HR as broker and advisor – not just systems designer – is crucial. Individual managers, or potential managers, should have access to a range of people who can help them with their career issues. Effective career development is not just vital for growing good managers and leaders at all levels; it is a remarkably cheap and powerful way of motivating and retaining good people. More than anything else, effective career development really calls upon employees to understand the changing needs of the business, and seriously engages the organization with the people it employs. That engagement is what counts, and that is why career development is not amenable to a quick fix.

148 Wendy Hirsh

Questions for discussion 1 2 3

4

Of the range of methods discussed in this chapter, which do you judge to be the most important for improving leadership capability? What might increase the chance of individuals in organizations having well-informed, open and honest discussions about their careers? If we want more leaders and managers to have more developmental work experiences, do we have to accept the need for more job moves to be negotiated by the employer and fewer through open internal competition for vacant posts? How will the extension of working life, to, say, seventy years of age, affect how we view managerial careers and the career development of managers and leaders in large organizations?

References Arnold, J. (1997) Managing Careers into the 21st Century, London: Paul Chapman. Arthur, M. B. and Rousseau, D. M. (eds) (1996) The Boundaryless Career: A New Employment Principle for a New Organizational Era, New York: Oxford University Press. Baruch, Y. (2004) Managing Careers: Theory and Practice, Harlow: Pearson Education. Bolles, R. N. (2009) What Color is Your Parachute?, Berkeley, CA: Ten Speed Press; updated annually. Bridges, W. (1994) Job Shift: How to Prosper in a Workplace without Jobs, London: Addison-Wesley. Chambers, E., Foulon, M., Handfield-Jones, H., Hankin, S. M. and Michaels, E. D. (1998) ‘The war for talent’, McKinsey Quarterly, 3: 44–57. Gladwell, M. (2002) ‘The talent myth’, The New Yorker, 22 July 2002, pp. 28–33. Gratton, L. and Hailey, V. H. (1999) ‘The rhetoric and reality of “new careers”’, in L. Gratton, V. H. Hailey, P. Stiles and C. Truss, Strategic Human Resource Management, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gunz, H. and Peiperl, M. (eds) (2007) Handbook of Career Studies, London: Sage. Hall, D. T. (1976) Careers in Organizations, Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman & Company. Hawkins, P. (1999) The Art of Building Windmills: Career Tactics for the 21st Century, Liverpool: Graduates into Employment Unit, University of Liverpool. Herriot, P. and Pemberton, C. (1995) New Deals, Chichester: John Wiley. Hirsh, W. (2000) Succession Planning Demystified, IES Report No. 372, Brighton: Institute for Employment Studies. Hirsh, W. and Jackson, C. (1996) Strategies for Career Development: Promise, Practice and Pretence, IES Report 305, Brighton: Institute for Employment Studies. —— (2004) Managing Careers in Large Organisations, London: The Work Foundation. Hirsh, W., Pollard, E. and Tamkin, P. (2000) Free, Fair and Efficient? Open Internal Job Advertising, IES Report No 371, Brighton: Institute for Employment Studies. Hopson, B. and Scally, M. (1993) Build Your Own Rainbow, Leeds: Lifeskills Associates; first published 1984. IDS (2008) ‘Talent management’, IDS HR Studies, No. 869, May 2008. Kidd, J. M. (2006) Understanding Career Counselling, London: Sage. Kidd, J. M., Hirsh, W. and Jackson, C. (2004) ‘Straight talking: the nature of effective career discussion at work’, Journal of Career Development, Spring 2004 , 30 (4): 231–45. Lubitch, G., Devine, M., Orbea, A. and Glanfield, P. (2007) ‘Talent Management: A Strategic Imperative’, Ashridge Consulting, Key Research Findings. McCartney, C. and Garrow, V. (2006) The Talent Management Journey, Horsham: Roffey Park Institute. Moynagh, M. and Worsley, R. (2005) Working in the Twenty-First Century, Leeds: ESRC. Schein, E. H. (1978) Career Dynamics: Matching Individual and Organisational Needs, Reading, MA: AddisonWesley. —— (1990) Career Anchors: Discovering Your Real Values, San Francisco: Pfeiffer, Jossey-Bass.

Career development 149 Sheehy, G. (1974) Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life, New York: Dutton. Tansley, C., Turner, P., Foster, C., Harris, L., Sempik, A., Stewart, J. and Williams, H. (2007), Talent: Strategy, management measurement, London: CIPD, Research into Practice. Waterman, R., Waterman, J. and Collard, B. (1994) ‘Towards a career resilient workforce’, Harvard Business Review, July–August: 87–95. Yarnall, J. (2008) Strategic Career Management – Developing Your Talent, Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann.

9

The individualization of the career and its implications for leadership and management development Jane Sturges

Chapter outline This chapter: • •

Explains the concept of career. Shows how this concept is useful in understanding the potential for leadership development.

Introduction: the career as a context for leadership and management development A central issue for organizations is how to align the development needs of their employees with their own staffing and leadership requirements. The concept of the ‘career’ offers a useful means of exploring how this matching might best take place. The concept of career ‘has meaning to both the individual pursuing an occupation – the “internal career” – and the organization trying to set up a sensible developmental path for employees to follow throughout their working life in the organization – the “external career”’ (Schein 1978:1). This chapter discusses how career theory might inform leadership and management development. To do so, it focuses on the individual perspective of the career, which employers must consider if organizational and individual needs are to be matched. It is not just individuals’ competencies that matter in terms of the identification and development of leaders and managers, but their career-related preferences and dispositions, which may (or may not) dispose them towards leadership in general and specific types of leadership roles in particular. The way in which a person’s career unfolds – career development – is a process that has value both for the organization, which wishes to maximize the contribution that an individual makes at work, and for the individual, who has career-related aspirations which he or she wishes to achieve. Attempts to influence the career development of individuals – career management – can also be undertaken by the organization and by the employee. Both have different but related interests in this development process. Ideally this development benefits the organization – in terms of the contribution that the individual makes at work – and the individual – in terms of job satisfaction and self-fulfilment (Sturges et al. 2005). For leadership and management development to take place successfully, it is important that both perspectives are properly understood and assimilated into the career development process. The individual perspective of the career has increased in importance with the emergence of the so-called ‘new’ career, a phenomenon which will be discussed in detail below. Amongst

Career individualization 151 other things, the concept of the new career has led to an increased emphasis on individual (rather than organizational) management of the career. There has also been some erosion of careers bounded by a single organization and a new focus on the development of individual career competencies. This chapter argues that this has resulted in an ‘individualization’ of the career which has important implications for management and leadership development. One aspect of this is an increased focus on individual career orientations (for example, Schein’s concept of career anchors). The existence and value of such orientations are discussed in the next section. Briefly, career orientations theory implies that individuals may be suited to different styles of leadership and indeed to different leadership roles (Nicholson 2000: 69). Therefore, a better understanding of such orientations is likely to inform more efficient selection of potential leaders, as well as more effective leadership and management development. The individualization of the career is a consequence of the necessity for individuals to take responsibility for managing their own careers and building career competencies which will enhance career portability and development in an environment where they can no longer look to their employer to provide security and a predictable career ladder (King 2004). Increased individual responsibility for career management may appear to be at odds with organizational efforts to develop leaders and managers successfully. It is therefore important to understand what this kind of individualization means and to what extent it exists, if leadership and management development are both to reflect and enhance individual behaviour in a ‘boundaryless’ career environment. Indeed, in a boundaryless environment where organizations offer a shorter career ladder, the main focus of development may be on the learning of ‘near’ leadership skills, such as empowering and team-building skills, rather than ‘distant’ leadership attributes, such as autocracy and coercion, which may be less appropriate in this kind of organizational context. The individualization of the career is further augmented by the increased diversity of the workforce, an acknowledgement of differences in individual values, especially according to generational cohort, and growing individual interest in balancing work with the rest of one’s life. A desire for work/life balance both affects what individuals seek to achieve in their career and how they seek to achieve it. Thus it is increasingly something which organizations must take into consideration in terms of individual development at work. Furthermore, if increasing numbers of individuals have values at odds with those traditionally espoused in organizations or are choosing to subordinate the development of their career to an emphasis on more rounded life goals, then the pool of potential organizational leaders may in the future be considerably smaller than it has been in the past.

Individual career orientations The subjective meanings which people ascribe to their careers are often described in terms of their career orientations. Such orientations affect the kind of career choices which individuals make – where they work, the kind of jobs they want to do, and the kind of education and training they undertake. Understanding career orientations can therefore be a useful means of discovering what kind of management and leadership roles suit individuals in terms of personal preferences and capabilities (Suutari and Taka 2004). Career orientations can also offer useful insights into how individuals might best be developed in terms of leadership competencies. Schein described career orientations in terms of career anchors. This concept refers to individuals’ conceptions of themselves in terms of an occupation. Career anchors are based

152 Jane Sturges on individuals’ talents and abilities, motives and needs, and attitudes and values. Five career anchors were originally identified by Schein’s research: a technical and functional competence anchor, where the individual’s career is guided by a desire to emphasize the functional specialism of a job; a managerial competence anchor, where the individual’s career is motivated by a desire to rise to positions of managerial responsibility; a security and stability career anchor, where the individual’s career focuses on securing long-term stability; a creativity career anchor, where the individual’s career develops from a desire for self-expression at work (for example, through the creation of a new business which can be closely identified with their own efforts); and an autonomy career anchor, where the individual’s career is driven by a wish to be as free from organizational constraints as possible (Schein 1978). Later research led Schein to add a further three career anchors to his list: a sense of service/dedication to a cause anchor, where the individual’s career is shaped more by strong values than actual talents and competencies; a pure challenge anchor, where the individual’s career is dominated by a desire to seek high levels of challenge in their work; and a lifestyle anchor, where the individual’s career is seen as an integral part of their total lifestyle (Schein 1993). Since the career anchors concept was developed in the 1970s, the popularity of different anchors has shifted away from an emphasis on managerial competence and technical and functional competence anchors towards autonomy and lifestyle anchors. In the 1970s and 1980s, roughly 25 per cent of the populations that Schein studied espoused a managerial competence career anchor, and a further 25 per cent were anchored in technical and functional competence. By the 1990s, the popularity of these career anchors had waned and as many as 50 per cent of those surveyed considered their career anchor to be lifestyle (Schein 1996). This may reflect generational differences, as well as the changing nature of work, with the prevalence of downsizing and restructuring threatening the nature and longevity of the managerial career. It also poses questions for organizations who may still wish to develop employees for senior management or specialist roles, since it appears to suggest that fewer individuals may aspire to traditional leadership roles within organizations. It has been suggested that this typology might be used to inform a pluralistic approach to management development, giving individuals the opportunity to pursue different kinds of career paths which reflect their personal orientations, rather than simply adhere to a traditional hierarchical career structure. As well as better meeting individual preferences, this approach would allow employers to cultivate a more diverse range of skills and capabilities within their workforce, thereby offering them a potential source of competitive advantage (Brousseau et al. 1996). Such an approach would be reflected in a range of career track options, development systems and training opportunities offered by the organization. As such, it may also be used to support the development of individuals in a range of ‘near’ and ‘distant’ leadership roles, to suit the organization’s strategic requirements. It is important to note that an individual’s orientation towards particular kinds of careers may change over the course of his or her lifetime, and that individual career orientations have become even more diverse because the traditional career ‘ladder’ no longer exists in many organizations. This could operate to employers’ advantage; for example, individuals with a ‘creativity’ career anchor may be deemed to be better leadership material during times of turbulence, change and shortened product life cycles. As part of their career orientation, individuals are also likely to have their own subjective definitions of what career ‘success’ means to them (Heslin 2005). While organizations tend to measure success in objective terms, using markers such as hierarchical status, these criteria on their own do not appear to be sufficient to make many people feel that their careers are actually successful (Scase and Goffee 1989). A better understanding of what success means to individuals is important because

Career individualization 153 traditional models of leadership are based on the assumption that people aspire to fill senior roles in the management hierarchy. If this is not in fact the case, then it may be much harder to interest staff in taking on such leadership roles. In fact, research has shown that many people incorporate other, more subjective criteria, such as recognition, influence and personally defined achievement, into their own definitions of career success, and that these criteria can change as individuals grow older and their careers develop. Four types of individuals have been identified in terms of how they define career success (Sturges 1999): the climber, the expert, the influencer and the self-realizer. The climber The climber is the type of manager who describes career success very much in terms of objective criteria, such as hierarchical position, promotion and reward. Their view of success is thus closest to the ‘traditional’ concept of organizational career success and is often expressed as reaching the most senior levels of leadership or management. Climbers do not only aspire to move up the organizational hierarchy but also seek the status which they believe this will bring. Being in a position of influence at work is not sufficient to make them feel successful; they have to achieve a perceived status as well. Climbers tend to be very goaloriented in terms of their attitude to their career progression: they set themselves regular stretching goals and targets relating to their level of pay and their position in the hierarchy. Linked to this emphasis on career goals, climbers often have a strong competitive instinct. However, they also need to enjoy their work to feel that they are successful. In fact, they frequently believe that any material success they achieve is meaningless if they do not enjoy their work. It is the climber’s notion of success that has traditionally underpinned models of ‘distant’ leadership in organizations. The expert For the individuals who define their career success as experts, success is seen as achieving a high level of competency at their jobs and achieving personal recognition for being good at what they do; that is, being regarded as an expert or winning the respect of the people they work with. Affirmation of what they accomplish at work is central to the experts’ perception of career success; this affirmation can take many forms, such as being given positive feedback, being thanked for their efforts or winning awards. For many experts, hierarchical position is not part of their definition of success at all. Other experts, especially younger ones, do include grade, promotion and reward in their definition of career success, but only because they see them as another form of personal recognition, not because they value them for their own sake. To experts, the content of the job they do is more important than their position in the hierarchy or their status within the organization. They often indicate that they are not prepared to sacrifice a job they enjoy doing for advancement within the organization. The expert’s emphasis on personal competence may mean that individuals with this success orientation are well suited to supportive and empowering ‘near’ leadership roles, where they are well placed to lead by example. The influencer To the influencer, career success means being able to do things at work which have a tangible and positive effect on the organization they work for, regardless of their position in the

154 Jane Sturges hierarchy. The influencers’ idea of career success is thus grounded in criteria such as leaving a mark or having an impact on the business. The way in which they think they might achieve influence varies. For older influencers in particular, the idea of leaving a mark on their organization is extremely important, and often linked to gaining autonomy at work, particularly for those managers who have not reached senior levels in the managerial hierarchy. For younger influencers, or those who wish to progress up the hierarchy, influence is frequently seen as attaining a level of responsibility within the organization, and, as such, something to aspire to as their career develops. Influencers commonly try to make an impact at work, sometimes by getting involved in activities outside the normal remit of their job, which allows them to attain greater levels of influence than their position in the hierarchy might permit. Influencers who believe that their grade in the hierarchy is important do so for the influence it allows them, rather than for the status which it endows. Individuals with an influencer career success orientation may be well suited for senior leadership roles, but will be motivated to seek these for the power and influence that go with them, rather than the hierarchical status. The self-realizer For the self-realizer, career success is very much an internal concept, based on the idea of achievement at a very personal level, sometimes in a way which means little to other people. Self-realizers’ definition of success is thus as far removed from objective hierarchical success as possible and closest to the notion of personal fulfilment. They often value being good at their job, because this can lead to a sense of achievement. However, while success for selfrealizers can be the result of specific job-related achievements, they frequently have difficulty in describing their very personal idea of career success in organizational terms at all. It is essential to them that their work is challenging at a personal level in some way. Meeting a challenge not only adds to their sense of achievement but is also seen as helping them develop as managers, something which the self-realizers value. Their definition of career success often includes an achievement of balance between their work and home life; it is important to them that they succeed in both spheres on their own personal terms. Individuals who subscribe to a self-realizer career success orientation may be suited to certain types of leadership roles which offer them the kind of very personal challenges they enjoy. Summary Career orientations theory offers insight into the diverse meanings individuals ascribe to their careers and what success might mean to them on their own terms. Such insights might usefully inform organizational policy and practice regarding leadership and management development. Understanding such individual orientations and conceptions of success is important because, if organizations wish to motivate and develop their staff, they must take heed of their career preferences. Furthermore, individuals may be suited to different roles and models of leadership, appropriate in particular organizational circumstances (for example, change or innovation), depending on their career orientation. Without consideration of an individual’s career orientation, their inclination to certain types of roles may be hard to identify. The literature on career orientations also suggests a more pessimistic perspective on leadership, in that the popularity of senior management positions may be limited, if people do not necessarily aspire to positions of management responsibility. Evidence of difficulties in filling senior roles in fields such as education and health in the UK may support this conclusion.

Career individualization 155

The ‘new’ career and its impact on individuals Despite an acknowledgement that organizations must engender some kind of stability in their human resources in order to meet strategic needs, many senior teams have been rethinking what kind of ‘careers’ they wish to offer their employees. In order to remain competitive in a business environment dominated by globalization, recession and rapid advances in technology, firms have restructured, delayered, and been through mergers and acquisitions programmes. This has reduced the opportunities for hierarchical progression in many organizational structures. In addition, the continuing insecurity of the environment and the perceived need to be able to respond quickly to business imperatives has meant that employers are questioning whether it is in their interests to offer long-term career opportunities to their staff. Potentially this could have important implications for the development of leaders within organizations, in that if fewer opportunities are presented employees will not only look to develop their careers elsewhere but may also see less reason to aspire to senior management roles at all. In fact, it has been suggested that for many people ‘traditional’ organizational careers delineated by hierarchical progression may soon cease to exist. Some have argued that as a result, careers have become ‘boundaryless’ and ‘protean’ (Sullivan and Arthur 2006; Briscoe and Hall 2006). This new type of career is described as boundaryless because individuals may no longer feel physically or psychologically bounded by one organization (Sullivan and Arthur 2006), and protean because careers may change to suit individual goals and values (Briscoe and Hall 2006). It is also depicted in terms of a ‘new deal’, where the psychological contract that exists between employer and employee has shifted to reflect the fact that there is no longer a promise or an expectation of a career for life (Sturges et al. 2005). The dissipation of traditional organizational boundaries implies, amongst other things, the emergence of a new set of leadership skills suited to an environment where networks and coalitions need to be managed. The notion of the ‘new’ career has two crucial implications for individuals and organizations. The first key implication of the new career relates to individuals’ career-related behaviour; in particular, the management of the career. If organizations can no longer offer individuals a career for life, then it is argued that nor do organizations have any responsibility to manage careers for their staff. In the past, the process of career management in organizations was seen as predominantly the responsibility of the employer (Orpen 1994). While individuals acted to further their own careers – performing activities such as setting careerrelated goals and devising appropriate strategies to achieve them (Noe 1996), this was more in support of their employers’ career management activities than a substitute for it. The new career implies that the balance between organizational and individual responsibility for career management has shifted to a position where the onus for managing the career now rests with the individual. Therefore, many organizations now stress that their staff must ‘manage’ their own career; that is, find themselves suitable roles, make sure they get the training they need, and promote their own interests at work. This approach further encourages the individualization of the career, as individuals are expected to take responsibility for the management and development of their career. As such, the notion that career management has become the responsibility of the individual rather than the organization also appears to be at odds with the aims and process of leadership and management development. It is potentially difficult to see how companies can orchestrate individual career management and organizational leadership development without compromising either or possibly both of these activities.

156 Jane Sturges Career self-management is said to consist of gathering ‘information and plans for career problem solving and decision-making’ (Kossek, Roberts, Fisher and Demarr 1998: 938). It consists of a complex and interwoven range of behaviours, including: networking behaviour; visibility behaviour (such as drawing attention to work achievements); positioning behaviour (for example, pursuing valuable job opportunities); influencing behaviour, intended to influence the decisions of superiors at work; building human capital (for example through training and education); validating behaviour (related to establishing a professional identity); and mobility-oriented behaviour (that is, making plans to leave the organization) (King 2003; Sturges et al. 2002; Sturges 2008). It is important to note that this behaviour can be aimed either at furthering the individual’s career within the organization or outside it. Research has shown that, despite the rhetoric of the ‘new’ career, there is still a close reciprocal relationship between what people do to manage their own careers and the career development help which they receive from their employer (Sturges et al. 2002). Organizational career-management help appears to encourage the practice of career self-management aimed at building a career within the organization, and this leads to further experience of organizational help. This suggests there may be the potential for employers to create a ‘virtuous circle’ of career management activities in which individual and organizational activities complement, rather than contradict, each other and help to build organizational commitment (Sturges et al. 2002). If this is the case, then it may well suggest a means of resolving the contradictions posed by the ‘new’ career’s emphasis on individual management of the career in the context of the need for organizations to identify and develop leaders and senior managers. Indeed, organizations traditionally had an interest in ‘managing’ their employees’ careers – placing them in jobs, giving them training and development, and establishing career ‘paths’ for them to follow – in order to maximize the contribution they made at work. It would appear that the wholesale rejection of this approach in favour of an overemphasis on career self-management could endanger organizational attempts to secure any kind of employee development at all. Promoting career ‘self-management’ unreservedly is likely to encourage individuals to try to further their careers elsewhere, as well as undermine organizational leadership development initiatives. It is clear that, if employers do not make a contribution to their employees’ career development, employees’ commitment to the organization may be weakened. They are apt to engage in career self-management aimed at furthering their career outside the organization, since there will be little incentive for them to remain there (Sturges et al. 2000). Furthermore, research has shown that fulfilment of the career deal between employer and employee not only builds commitment to the organization but also has a positive impact on other attitudes and behaviours at work, in particular job performance (Sturges et al. 2005). When employees get career management help from their employer, this is reflected in a healthy psychological contract between individual and organization, which in turn leads to higher levels of job performance and lower levels of career self-management behaviour aimed at obtaining a new job outside the organization. It is in employers’ interests, therefore, to fulfil their side of the career deal if they wish encourage both the development and performance of their employees. A further key implication of the ‘new’ career relates to the skills required by individuals to secure both career and leadership development. If managers and leaders perceive their careers to be less bounded by the organization than in the past, then it may be necessary for them to develop new collaborative knowledge and skills. Such skills include referral skills – the

Career individualization 157 ability to diagnose situations and act as a broker between individuals and resources; partnering skills – the ability to create relevant networks and contractual arrangements; and relationship management skills – the ability to prioritize the needs and preferences of customers and partners (Miles and Snow 1996). It has been argued that a resource-based theoretical perspective is a useful means of conceptualizing how individuals might facilitate their career development in a boundaryless environment (Jones and Lichtenstein 2000). Taking such a perspective, the career is conceptualized as a repository of knowledge (Bird 1994) or an accumulation of capital (Inkson and Arthur 2001). Within this framework, it is suggested that, in order to secure career development, individuals must cultivate career competencies – that is, skills and know-how – which build career capital. Thus, through the acquisition of career competencies, individuals put themselves in a position where their careers can prosper in the boundaryless career environment. Three key forms of career competency have been identified: knowing-how competencies; knowing-why competencies; and knowing-whom competencies (Inkson and Arthur 2001). Knowing-how career competencies reflect career-relevant skills and job-related knowledge needed for competent performance in work roles. As such, they relate to tacit as well as explicit knowledge, and soft skills as well as technical expertise. Knowing-why career competencies relate to values, meanings and interests that shape the way in which an individual’s career develops. Such values and meanings relate to the career orientations, such as career anchors (Schein 1978), and can be expressed, for example, as a desire for autonomy, security or challenge. Knowing-why career competencies also relate to having the confidence, motivational energy and self-assurance to pursue a desired career path (Inkson and Arthur 2001). Knowing-whom career competencies involve the creation of social capital by gaining proximity to those who may provide opportunities and resources to aid career development. It has been shown that managers with greater numbers of external ties earn more (Belliveau et al. 1996) and secure jobs more easily (Granovetter 1974). The scope for and importance of such networking activities is clearly more important in a boundaryless career environment where individuals must facilitate their own career development. As well as giving a focus for individual development, career competencies might also provide a useful framework for the development of leadership capabilities from the perspective that both individual and the organization should benefit from this process. Knowing-why career competencies allow both the individual and organization to understand better to what kind of leadership roles and situations a person is suited. Knowing-how career competencies allow potential leaders and managers to develop the kind of leadership capabilities needed to deliver ‘accomplished performances’. Knowing-whom career competencies may help provide the networking skills necessary for leaders operating in a boundaryless environment. Indeed, research has shown that all three types of career competency contribute to managers’ career satisfaction and perceived marketability (Eby et al. 2003).

Changing values and the desire for work/life balance Careers have been individualized further as a result of a growing expression of interest by individuals in balancing work and career with other aspects of life, such as family, friends and personal interests. Recent research shows that over 80 per cent of the UK workforce would like to spend more time with their family and around two-thirds say that the demands of their job sometimes interfere with their family life (Crompton and Lynette 2007). Around threequarters of employees say that they would like to be able to spend more time with friends (ibid.).

158 Jane Sturges Achievement of a balance between home and work has been shown to be increasingly a priority for all employees (Schein 1996), not just parents. As long ago as the late 1980s it was suggested that UK managers were becoming less interested in career success as it has been traditionally understood and more interested in career advancement as a means of enhancing personal lifestyles which are separate from, rather than subordinated to, work roles (Scase and Goffee 1989). This conclusion is borne out by research findings that show that growing numbers of people are endorsing a ‘lifestyle’ career anchor (Schein 1996 discussed earlier in this chapter). It is this aspect of career individualization which most threatens the identification and development of leaders and senior managers, in that it implies that such roles, and indeed the work environment itself, may be far less attractive to many individuals in the future than they are assumed to be at present. There are a number of important benefits for organizations of ensuring that their employees are able to experience a good work/life balance. For employees, having this balance leads to higher rates of job and career satisfaction, greater commitment to the organization and higher motivation (Eby et al. 2005). For organizations, making it possible for their employees to achieve a good work/life balance improves their ability to recruit and retain staff and reduces rates of absenteeism (Dex and Scheibl 1999). Likewise, a number of potentially serious consequences have been identified that result from a lack of work/life balance. These include stress-related psychological and physical health outcomes, such as anxiety, depression and burn-out; high blood pressure; and greater alcohol consumption (Eby et al. 2005). Employees who do not have a good work/life balance are more likely to think about quitting their job and are more likely to take days off sick. Their satisfaction with their life overall is also likely to be reduced (Judge et al. 1994). The entry of women into the workforce has made issues concerning balancing home and work more relevant for more people. The UK is typical of Western countries, in that women now comprise 50 per cent of those at work. Some have concluded that this could mean massive change for organizations, in that they may have to rethink completely the way that work is structured, in order to accommodate the competing demands of individuals’ non-work responsibilities. At the very least, employers are under pressure to recognize the importance of families and out-of-work responsibilities to individuals, by offering benefits such as parental leave and part-time working. This is due to both increasing numbers of women at work, and men becoming more inclined to play a greater role in bringing up their children. Furthermore, younger members of the workforce – sometimes referred to as Generation X and Y – have been shown to value the achievement of a balance between work and their lives outside work especially highly (Lewis et al. 2002). It has been suggested that what is most important to them is to live their life on their own terms and not necessarily make work its main focus (Smola and Sutton 2002). Yet the demands of the workplace often mean that young people experience an unsatisfactory relationship between home and work (Sturges and Guest 2004). If younger workers are keen to achieve success on their own terms, not those of organizational norms, and to seek a good balance between work and the non-work aspects of their lives, then one cannot necessarily assume that traditional leadership roles in organizations will be attractive to them. The need to understand the issue of work/life balance is more pressing in the current context, where it has recently been shown that the hours that people work are on the increase (Trades Union Congress 2008). Over 3.6 million people in the UK now regularly work over forty-eight hours a week. The situation is particularly bleak for those in managerial

Career individualization 159 and professional jobs; nearly 90 per cent of managers regularly work over their contracted hours (Worrall and Cooper 2007). This long-hours culture is partly perceived to be the result of downsizing and the more demanding workloads with which those who remain in employment must contend (McGovern et al. 1998). It may also be a consequence of the widespread belief that, in order to succeed, individuals must demonstrate an indefatigable commitment to their work, regardless of personal cost (Anderson-Gough et al. 1998). Pressure to demonstrate commitment by working long hours is likely to have a particularly strong impact on individuals at the start of their career (Coffey 1994), at the point when competition to succeed in the promotion tournament is fierce (Rosenbaum 1979). This may reinforce younger individuals’ desire to seek a balance between home and work. Career theory has utility as a framework which can elucidate attitudes to and behaviour concerning work/life balance. It has long been recognized that career roles, activities and experiences impinge upon the non-work domain as well as the work domain (Barley 1989). Indeed, it has been suggested that individuals’ work and non-work lives are inextricably intertwined (Sekaran and Hall 1989). If this is the case, then achievement of work/life balance may be considered to be a career phenomenon. As such, it impinges crucially upon the issue of leadership and management development. The links between work and non-work are strengthened by the emergence of the ‘boundaryless’ career. This implies an enlargement of the ‘career space’, since work and nonwork roles are likely to overlap and intermingle to the extent that they jointly shape a person’s career identity and sense of self (Mirvis and Hall 1994). This overlapping and intermingling is significantly reinforced by the widespread use of technologies which ‘invade’ the non-work sphere, such as laptops, virtual networks and mobile phones. Thus, any notion of a ‘boundaryless’ career which overlooks the boundary between work and non-work is likely to be incomplete (Fletcher and Bailyn 1996). This suggests that the importance that an individual ascribes to work/life balance will both influence and be influenced by a broader range of attitudes, dispositions and orientations through which they pursue the nature, direction and progress of their career. In this sense, attitudes relating to work/life balance will contribute to the individualization of the career. In particular, what individuals seek to achieve in their career and how they define career success for themselves is likely to affect and be affected by the meaning they ascribe to work/life balance and how they manage the boundary between work and home. Their disposition and attitudes relating to leadership roles will be similarly affected. Secondly, this implies that an individual’s career-related behaviour will both influence and be influenced by activities concerned with managing the relationship they seek to achieve between the work and non-work domains. Behaviour aimed at managing this relationship could be considered to be an integral part of the broader range of activities which individuals pursue in order to manage the nature, direction and progress of their career. Thus, individual and organizational behaviours aimed at assisting the management of the balance between home and work can be seen as part of a wider range of personal career management behaviour (Sturges 2008). Employers must acknowledge employees’ desire for work/life balance, in order to recruit, retain and develop their staff. This means they need to be concerned not just with offering employees ‘family-friendly’ policies but with recognizing the impact of a desire for work/ life balance on employees’ career orientations and behaviour. In particular, they must take this into consideration with regard to the management and development of employees’ careers. An individual’s orientation towards demanding and time-consuming leadership roles is likely to be influenced considerably by the extent to which they wish to lead a ‘balanced’

160 Jane Sturges life. Increasingly, for many people, aspiring to such roles may entail sacrifices that they do not wish to make. Organizations can therefore no longer necessarily assume that those with identifiable potential will aspire to the management positions they would like them to assume.

Conclusion: the individualization of the career and its implications As identified at the beginning of this chapter, a key challenge for organizations wishing to establish developmental pathways for leaders and managers is how to match individual needs with organizational requirements. The career can provide a useful framework through which to view this matching process. However, the challenge which this presents is being exacerbated by the increasing individualization of the career, a phenomenon discussed in detail in this chapter. What is meant by individualization in this context is the manifestation of the career as an individual rather than an organizational property. This reflects both the growing importance of the individual perspective on the career and an acknowledgement of the diversity of this perspective. In a practical context, it means that increasingly the focus of career sensemaking, decision taking and activity is at an individual level. This is important for the context of leadership and management development, because such individualization fundamentally challenges the organizational ‘control’ over the determination of who should be developed for positions of senior responsibility and how this development should take place. As this chapter has discussed, a number of factors are influencing the emergence of career individualization. The phenomenon is partly a result of changes in organizations, in particular the emergence of the new career ideology. The main theme of this rhetoric is that the career is no longer primarily an organizational entity, but the responsibility of the individual, who must take charge of its development and management. Career individualization is also partly a result of a growing awareness that individuals have diverse career values, wants and needs, and an acknowledgement that these differences matter and should be respected in the workplace. These two important influences are probably mutually reinforcing, in that, by placing greater responsibility for career management and development on the individual, the new career rhetoric encourages the individual to reflect on and pursue their own values, wants and needs, rather than those of the organization. Career individualization manifests itself in a number of ways. It is demonstrated by the diverse range of career orientations which individuals espouse; for example, personal definitions of career success which incorporate criteria other than the objective measures of success currently emphasized by most organizations. It is apparent in the now widely held view that the career is just one part of life, of which other aspects such as family and personal life may be equally or more important, depending on the individual’s circumstances and preferences. It is exhibited in an acceptance of what the boundaryless career implies. This leads individuals to realize the need to take personal responsibility for management of the career (sometimes to the detriment of loyalty and commitment to the organization) and to acquire portable skills, rather than those only useful in their current job, with the aim of building career capital of value across boundaries. From the perspective of career theory, the emergence of career individualization means that more research is needed to explore and define individual, as opposed to organizational, dimensions of the career. Organizations need to know more about what people think and how they behave with regard to their career, if they are to delineate and respond to increasing individualization. In particular, research is needed to investigate the personal and subjective

Career individualization 161 dimension of the career, and the meanings people ascribe to their own career-related values, wants, needs and behaviour. Research is required which examines the sense people make of the work and non-work aspects of their lives and how the two parts of their life should and do fit together. From the individual perspective, a wider acceptance of the individualization of the career gives peoples’ career-related values, wants and needs more latitude and more credibility. If people, motivated by personal models of success, cultivate skills which are meaningful for the kind of career that they want, rather than those which suit an organization’s requirements, then this could make conventional career norms less relevant. Traditional hierarchical organizational careers may not be so attractive to many people; long hours may become otiose and intolerable; people may choose increasingly to pursue individual developmental paths and fulfil leadership ambitions in other, less conventional, ways, possibly even outside the organization altogether. From the organizational perspective, the individualization of the career has important implications for leadership and management development. In a bid to match individual and organizational needs more carefully, employers may be obliged to endorse different models of leadership and multifarious career paths. This may both suit individuals’ diverse aspirations and respond to the reduced opportunities for hierarchical advancement restructured organizations can offer. Different developmental processes and experiences may be appropriate, based on diverse models of success and individual career orientations. Less traditional models of leadership – for example, roles which offer short-term specific challenges or roles based on expertise in a particular situation – could be endorsed, if organizations acknowledge that the status of leadership may be derived from a personal preference for and success in terms of expertise or influence, as well as hierarchical position. Such roles may not only add to an organization’s strategic capabilities but also provide the basis for new career paths that will motivate and secure the commitment of employees. It is clear that organizations cannot abnegate all responsibility for career management with impunity, especially if they wish to retain the right to select and develop leaders. Individuals need help to help themselves in terms of managing their careers; organizational career management and career self-management are not mutually exclusive; the former may aid the promotion of the latter, as discussed earlier in this chapter. Moreover, if organizations do not provide help with career management, then they are likely to undermine job performance and lose valuable staff, negating any attempts to develop a leadership cadre. Absence of career management and development help may set in place a vicious circle, where the employee becomes more inclined to leave than to stay, just as provision of help can promote the establishment of a virtuous circle, where the individual willingly engages in activities aimed at furthering their development within the organization. As discussed in this chapter, the ‘career competency’ model could provide a useful framework for organizational developmental practice in an environment where the career is increasingly individualized (Jones and Lichtenstein 2000). This acknowledges the kind of career capital individuals need to accumulate for their careers to develop in a boundaryless career environment, and ascribes the importance it deserves to the individual dimension of the career in the form of knowing-why career competencies (Inkson and Arthur 2001). Reference to the career competency model could help organizations gain insight into what individuals want from their careers and what kind of roles they are capable of filling, as well as what skills and developmental experiences will be required to help them achieve their goals. Traditional career interventions such as assessment centres, career planning workshops, career counselling and mentoring schemes could all be used to help ascertain

162 Jane Sturges individuals’ personal career and leadership preferences, facilitate career self-management and plan future development. It is necessary to strike one further note of caution amongst the positive implications of the individualization of the career. With the upbeat rhetoric of the new career and the acknowledgement of individual notions of success, it is easy to overlook the possibility of individual failure. Yet, paradoxically, failure may be both more common and more painful in an environment where individuals are encouraged to seek success on their own terms, rather than perhaps expecting not to succeed according to criteria set by the organization. Organizations therefore must endeavour to set realistic expectations and deal sensitively with individual failure, as part of the establishment of new developmental pathways and processes.

Questions for discussion 1 2 3

What evidence is there that careers have become individualized? What are the implications for leader development to the extent that this process has been happening? Do leaders need different kinds of skills in an environment where careers have become individualized?

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164 Jane Sturges Sturges, J., Guest, D., Conway, N. and Mackenzie-Davey, K. (2002) ‘A longitudinal study of the relationship between career management and organizational commitment among graduates in the first ten years at work’, Journal of Organizational Behavior, 23: 731–48. Sturges, J., Guest, D. and Mackenzie-Davey, K. (2000) ‘Who’s in charge? Graduates’ attitudes to and experiences of career management and their relationship with organizational commitment’, European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 9 (3): 351–70. Sullivan, S. and Arthur, M. (2006) ‘The evolution of the boundaryless career concept: Examining physical and psychological mobility’, Journal of Vocational Behavior, 69 (1): 19–29. Suutari, V. and Taka, M. (2004) ‘Career anchors of managers with global careers’, Journal of Management Development, 23 (9): 833–47. Trades Union Congress (2008) Return of the Long Hours Culture, London: TUC. Worrall, L. and Cooper, C. (2007) The Quality of Working Life 2007: Managers’ Health, Motivation and Productivity, London: Chartered Management Institute.

Part V

How does leadership fit with business strategy in the private sector?

10 Strategically aligned leadership development Catherine Bailey, Martin Clarke and David Butcher

Chapter outline This chapter: • • •

Explains different types of alignment. Identifies key issues in leadership development when viewed from a business perspective. Presents results from recent research which reveal the importance of pursuing a discriminating approach to leadership development strategy, method and evaluation and the centrality of individual leadership in this process.

Since the first edition of Leadership in Organizations there seems to have been little to dampen the belief in business leadership as a pillar of organizational success. It is therefore perhaps not surprising that advice proliferates on designing and implementing leadership development programmes. Much of this is still consistent with the ideas encapsulated by Fulmer and Wagner (1999) in eight core principles. These highlight the importance of: aligning leadership development to business strategy; developing an HR and business partnership; using competency frameworks; developing home-grown talent; forging strong links to succession planning; encouraging action learning; ensuring high-level support for development activity; and comprehensive evaluation of outcomes. However, anecdotal evidence and increasing academic research suggest that organizations find approaches based on this advice to be problematic, signalling an enduring gap between the theory and practice of leadership development. Criticisms of leadership development practice continue to refer to a lack of strategic integration between HR, management development and the business (Mabey and Gooderham 2005; D’Netto et al. 2008), poor evaluation of outcomes (Yorks et al. 2007), the quality of HR specialists (Wright 2008), and the overuse of action learning projects (Kramer 2008). It is not surprising, then, that numerous authors note that we are still some way from realizing strategic integration of HRM and HRD in practice. Moreover, with insufficiently rigorous data on the effectiveness of leadership development approaches, the relative strategic impact of development activities remains an area of conjecture (Boaden 2006). So, is the longstanding best practice advice fundamentally flawed or is it simply in need of refinement or contextualization? This question marked the starting point of a two-phase research project we have conducted at Cranfield University to provide a critical understanding of the current state of business leadership development (BLD), and to identify directions for innovative future practice. The focus on business leaders allowed us to avoid much of the conceptual confusion about different levels of leadership noted by Lowe and Gardner (2001) and Storey (2005), and

168 Catherine Bailey, Martin Clarke and David Butcher enabled us to focus on the assumed critical relationships between leadership development, business leadership and business strategy and performance. Business leadership was defined as those roles which reflect general management content, and which have the potential to impact on business strategy and performance (typically, heads of business units and senior functional specialists). These roles are predominantly concerned with leadership within an organization rather than leadership (governance) of a corporate organization (Storey 2005). The results of phase one, based on the BLD experience in twenty UK organizations and reported in the first edition of this book, revealed the extent to which BLD in practice was an unfocused and extremely diffuse activity, which is neither well evaluated nor aligned to business needs. This malaise was found to be the product of four interrelated factors: 1 2 3 4

aligning BLD strategy to received HR wisdom about best practice rather than medium/ long-term business needs; lack of senior management vision for BLD; poor-quality HR thinking; differing agendas and organizational politics surrounding leadership development.

When combined, these four factors create ‘negative-loop’ situations where development progress is prevented by mutually limiting constraints. For example, attempts to make better organizational use of BLD are restricted when senior managers have a limited view of its value; a view that is only likely to change through their own experience of BLD. In response to this widespread lack of coherence, phase two of the research sought to understand how those involved in BLD made sense of their situation and came to decisions about strategy and action, enabling them to overcome complex sets of unfavourable circumstances. This involved an international survey of views about BLD practice and the analysis of cases of successful and innovative BLD initiatives identified in phase one. These cases, which form the basis for this chapter, allow us to explore the four barriers to BLD discussed above. This chapter identifies potential generative mechanisms that produce patterns of effective BLD, particularly in relation to achieving business relevance and strategic alignment. These qualitative cases are also presented as vehicles for personal learning, following Buchanan (1999). Written as potential ‘classroom’ cases, we believe that they can be used to stimulate debate about the processes of strategic alignment. Using only four cases, our purpose is exploration rather than prediction. However, practical suggestions are offered that may be of help to HR/development professionals, and potential areas for further research are identified.

Strategic integration of BLD The resource-based view (RBV) of business strategy proposes that sustained competitive advantage originates in the selection, development and deployment of a firm’s resources. Delery and Doty (1996) have classified the RBV literature in HRM into three main theoretical standpoints: universalistic, contingency and configurational. Most scholars are now moving from universalistic perspectives that prioritize ‘best practice’ approaches to leveraging these resources (Martin-Alcázar et al. 2008), to focusing instead on contingency models that emphasize the importance of vertical fit between business and HR strategy, and configurational approaches that highlight both vertical fit and horizontal bundling of HRM activity. These bundles are believed to create synergies; and ‘flexibility’ of response over time.

Strategical alignment 169 More recently, Colbert (2004) extended this classification to include a complexity perspective in which HRM strategy is conceived in terms of enabling organizations constantly to coevolve with their environment. Not surprisingly, leadership development is seen as central to this process. As a vehicle for enhancing the establishment and implementation of both strategic fit and flexibility, leadership development potentially forms a critical process within the HRM canon. Yet achieving strategic relevance in BLD seems problematic. Since Rainbird’s (1994) analysis, there has been consistent evidence revealing a lack of integration between HR, management development and the business. More recent studies suggest that although the main drivers of management development appear to be strategic, development in practice is more directly influenced by individual job-related requirements identified through the appraisal process and requests from line managers (Thomson et al. 1997; Sung and Quinn 2005). Mabey’s (2005) study shows a continuing gap between management development activities and business strategy. The literature offers two potential reasons: the quality of MD/HR professionals; and the complexity of the task. Alongside concerns about the quality of HR professionals in general (Sheehan 2005; Wright 2008), Meldrum and Atkinson’s (1998) study of management development professionals in particular found line management to be largely ambivalent or negative about the organizational influence of HR professionals, their ability to act as good role models, to match needs to developmental activities, and, significantly, to take a strategic overview of the business. Concerns about the quality of training and development thinking have also been voiced by Mole (this volume), Tate (this volume) and, more generally, by Sanders et al. (2008) who, replicating an earlier study by Rynes et al. (2002), found that there are large discrepancies between empirical findings and practitioners’ beliefs about effective HR practices. On this basis alone, the application of universalistic approaches to the strategic alignment of BLD is open to question. However, there is also evidence that in reality Fulmer and Wagner’s principles may also need refinement in increasingly complex organizational environments. For example, the recommendation to ‘obtain senior management buy-in’ implies a degree of order and rationality that may not reflect organizational life. In today’s environment, where organizations increasingly resemble fragmented marketplaces of competing and mutual-interest groups, it is often difficult to obtain collective agreement about an activity perceived to be of doubtful value relative to short-term priorities. In such circumstances, political savvy and the ability to instigate change from below may well be significant factors in how those who lead business leadership development are able to implement their ideas (Sheehan 2005; D’Netto et al. 2008). Similarly – while it is apparently accepted wisdom that in-company development programmes are most cost effective and fit better with the development of strategic leaders (Conger and Benjamin 1999; Sung and Quinn 2005) than do public or open development programmes, which ‘tend to have little impact on a leader’s ability to produce better results’ (Zenger et al. 2000: 27) – in practice, studies of evaluation processes question the bases for these conclusions (Mabey and Thomson 2000; Dexter and Prince 2007). Cairns (1997), for example, found that half of the evaluations of open executive programmes focused on immediate post-programme effects, and only 6 per cent evaluated the effectiveness after one year. For in-company programmes, only 18 per cent assessed impact one year later. Over ten years later, Suutari and Viitala (2008) found in a study of Finnish managers that overall, longterm management education programmes consisting of multiple sessions and experiential learning were considered most effective regardless of whether the programme was organized internally or externally.

170 Catherine Bailey, Martin Clarke and David Butcher These apparently contradictory perspectives formed the background to phase two of this study, in which we sought to identify cases that would highlight factors which seem to enable effective BLD strategy formulation and implementation, and reveal how HR and MD professionals tackle the complexities of strategic integration in practice.

The case studies The four case studies reported below were derived from the phase one research which was designed to explore the potential gaps between BLD theory and practice, or strategic intent and practical experience of BLD. This study consisted of interview data from 103 managers in 20 organizations from a broad cross section of industries and sizes, and included several multinational enterprises. The generalizability of findings was checked by a postal questionnaire representing a further eighty-seven managers from companies in Europe, Africa and the Far East. In response to criticism of HRM studies that rely on single HR responses, four different organizational perspectives were explored to permit a level of triangulation on BLD in practice: senior business managers; BLD recipients; HR and MD managers responsible for BLD strategy; and those responsible for BLD provision. One-hour interviews were built around twenty question sets designed to surface perceptions about relationships postulated in an initial model of effective BLD (see Figure 10.1, A virtuous development cycle). This model suggested a self-reinforcing set of relationships between the strategic context for BLD, its drivers, BLD activity, and its perceived impact. Given the lack of coherence found between BLD strategy and implementation, phase two was designed to identify a range of solutions that would allow organizations to break the self-perpetuating negative-loop situations we had identified, and to develop alternative approaches to effective BLD. A case-study approach was considered appropriate as this would allow us to focus on examples of effective practice, and thus better understand the generative mechanisms that impact on the connections between business strategy, leadership development and the contribution of HR/MD. How to relate BLD to sustained business performance?

How to improve futureoriented thinking and determine future leadership needs?

Business Strategy and Business Leader Capability

Evaluation of BLD

BLD Strategy How to develop BLD in unfavourable circumstances

BLD Impact How important is evaluation?

Figure 10.1 A virtuous development cycle

BLD in Practice

What are critical development methods? (including internal and external experiences)

Strategical alignment 171 The cases below were identified by applying two criteria. First, to ensure that organizations were representative of ‘best practice’ in leadership development thinking, the selected cases were required to reflect a majority (at least five) of the eight principles identified by Fulmer and Wagner (1999). Secondly, we chose cases so as to illustrate the successful application of one of four distinct BLD strategies that had emerged from phase one (see Figure 10.2, BLD strategy framework). The BLD strategy framework differentiates and defines approaches to BLD according to the nature of their content (corporately consistent or individualized), and according to development population coverage (targeted or inclusive). This meta-level framework allowed us to study BLD in different environments (Pettigrew 1990; Harrison 2002). Rather than seeking to establish broad generalizability, the case data were intended to facilitate an explanation about the structure, process and generative mechanisms of strategic alignment in these different circumstances. The four distinguishable approaches to BLD that we sought to illustrate are: •

•

HiPo (high-potential) tailored – highly targeted/individualized provision: a structured approach driven by the need for succession planning that targets high-potential managers through talent-spotting processes, and nurtures individual development through tailored activities. HiPo (high-potential) programme – highly targeted/corporately consistent provision: groups of managers are identified and proceed through a series of planned and consistent HiPo activities based on corporate business needs.

Who? Targeted individuals

Inclusive

Individualized content

HiPo tailored

Selfmotivated

Corporate consistency

HiPo programme

Generic programme

What?

Figure 10.2 BLD strategy framework

172 Catherine Bailey, Martin Clarke and David Butcher •

•

Self-motivated – inclusive/individualized provision: no defined approach, where development is open to all but is dependent on individuals’ own motivation and skill in making things happen for themselves. Generic programme approach – inclusive/corporately consistent provision: corporate-wide programmes to develop/ improve specific organization capabilities, often cascaded down through different levels of management.

Although not mutually exclusive, as some organizations employed more than one approach in different divisions, we concentrated on a particularly successful example of each to highlight four very different – yet valuable – BLD strategies, and to describe why and how each was found to be effective for the business context in which it was adopted. The intent was to explore how strategic alignment can be achieved, to provide comparative information on development strategies and to offer ideas about alternative approaches. Each case presented below describes the organizational context for development and the company’s approach to business leadership development in relation to the BLD strategy framework, and briefly summarizes the key aspects of each.

CASE STUDY BANKCO: HIPO TAILORED – AN EXAMPLE OF STRATEGICALLY ALIGNED SUCCESSION PLANNING Researched before the 2008/2009 recession, the financial services industry appeared to be highly dynamic. In a huge deregulated market with low barriers to entry, competition was intense, and new entrants were quick to capitalize on the blurring of the traditional boundaries between retail and investment banking and the insurance sector. For leading international players like BANKCO, this was a global challenge. At the time of writing (and more so today), their executives were being asked to tackle problems that would have been unimaginable ten years previously. But turning the direction of an organization consisting of many tens of thousands of people was taking time and required a steady supply of managers who were able to think innovatively outside of their role, organization and industry. It was this business need that formed a distinctive focus for BANKCO’s approach to management and leadership development. In particular, they had been careful to distinguish between the development needs of their future business leaders and those of other managers. The bank needed leaders who were able to cope with high levels of uncertainty and ambiguity in order to be able to deliver and continue to develop its future strategy. In consequence there were very clear development processes for the top 200 executives. Development was managed through two separate programmes: the Group Executive Resource (GER) for the top 50 managers; and the Top Management Resource (TMR) for the next 150 high-potential managers. These populations were nurtured by an eight-person Executive Resourcing Team. Donal, who led the team, believed that the business need for good succession planning was so well accepted by the board that the chief executive personally saw good succession planning as a key priority for the business. In both programmes, managers attended an externally managed assessment centre where they were assessed against a limited set of bespoke competencies that reflected the senior management capabilities required by the business, given its history, culture and future aspirations. These included new behaviours for the bank, such as ‘restless curiosity’; the

Strategical alignment 173 ability to take an external perspective and to bring that successfully inside BANKCO; and the ability to build good relationships, not just with peers and team members but also in partnerships, joint ventures and with suppliers. Whilst many of these competencies were relatively new to the bank, importantly they were viewed as changeable, to be reviewed as a living model to ensure that the bank stayed ahead of the game. Following an initial assessment, individual development was tailored according to each senior manager’s requirements. Each person in the GER had his or her own ‘account manager’ from within the Executive Resourcing Team to ensure that resources and opportunities were optimized. The range of activities available was wide. Managers could attend external programmes at well-established business schools and engage external coaches. They had internal mentors (usually a company director), received regular 360degree assessments and benefited from carefully selected job moves. They could also attend business consortium programmes to rub shoulders with peers from other leading organizations, and were encouraged to network to share their insights and know-how. At the point of data collection it was relatively early days to measure long-term effectiveness and there was some debate as to what the most appropriate measures were. However, the metrics that were being used focused on what the bank called ‘talent flows’, the number of career moves by the GER group across, and up through the hierarchy, and recruitment and retention rates for this high-potential population. Throughout our interviews with HR and line managers it was clear that both believed that such activity had a direct positive impact on current and future business performance. This case example illustrates the HiPo tailored approach. With significant changes in the financial services industry, the bank’s senior management identified that succession planning in particular was a major priority. Leadership development played a key role in preparing potential successors for the uncertainty and ambiguity of the globally competitive environment by developing the ability to form productive relationships in diverse circumstances and incorporate ideas from outside their business and industry. But, given BANKCO’s culture, and the uncertainty about the future of the industry, attention was given to developing a new approach to leadership development; one that was fluid but helped managers understand what was expected of them without being prescriptive. This directly influenced the individualized BLD approach that the company adopted. The company was highly selective about who formed the GER but, contrary to much best practice advice, were not at all prescriptive about the development process. A broad range of opportunities were made available to develop these capabilities. Whilst at the time of our study it was still early days to assess progress, the success of this approach was evident in the time and resources it received from senior management, the investment the programme attracted and the positive feedback about it from those involved.

CASE STUDY SOFTCO: HIPO PROGRAMME – AN EXAMPLE OF ALIGNMENT IN ‘UNFAVOURABLE CIRCUMSTANCES’ At the time of our research, SOFTCO was a small, independent software and services business focused on niche financial applications, employing around 600 employees in the UK, USA and Asia-Pacific region. In a highly competitive market, senior managers had become aware of the need to improve SOFTCO’s operational flexibility in providing cross-product and cross-service solutions for customers. There was common agreement amongst the

174 Catherine Bailey, Martin Clarke and David Butcher senior group that the company needed to develop its ability to become more responsive to customer requirements, and needed to encourage greater levels of proactivity and crossfunctional working broadly in its management population. The company was under pressure to improve its financial performance, but did not have a history of formal business leadership development, nor did all the senior team recognize the value of leadership development as a way of tackling their business issues. Despite these unfavourable circumstances and the lack of clear executive commitment, Bill, the HR Development Director, developed a strategy with some senior colleagues using leadership development to tackle these issues. In short, this strategy was to identify highpotential managers who would receive shared and consistent development that focused on knowledge sharing and innovation. These managers were to be encouraged to create ‘pockets of good practice’; to ‘role model’ change for the rest of the business. The Management Action Programme (MAP) established by Bill was developed for a limited number of high-potential UK middle managers selected by a small group of senior colleagues. Whilst this approach attracted some concerns about elitism, Bill and his colleagues, working within tight time frames and a limited budget, and in the absence of a validated assessment tool, considered that executive managerial judgement about those most able to benefit was an effective approach. On the surface, the programme content was not unusual. Its aim, in line with agreed business needs, was to improve cross-functional working and equip managers to take more responsibility to ‘make things happen’. What was particularly noteworthy was the way in which the programme integrated personal development with key business issues. As well as providing much-needed business knowledge, the programme deliberately fostered a real sense of group identity, enabling employees to work collectively and independently to initiate change, sometimes despite considerable organizational constraints. Programme evaluation was predominantly anecdotal but both the target population and other senior managers noted a number of significant outcomes. For example, the participants felt they were more open with each other after the programme so that it became easier to achieve cross-functional activities. They also felt more confident, tackling difficult issues without needing to seek permission, and felt better able to see the bigger business picture. The action learning projects resulted in the successful introduction of a new customer care strategy that led to a significant decrease in customer complaints, and a corporate intranet believed to have substantially improved cross-organizational working. Significantly, these positive outcomes were achieved in a largely unsupportive environment and with a relatively low budget of £30,000. It illustrates what can be achieved through business leadership development activity that does not rely on top-down support and development processes. The participants were mainly middle managers and were able to initiate change from the ‘inside out’. By working on projects that were local and important to participants, and not ‘imposed’ as is sometimes the case in such initiatives, business benefits were valued and realized. Of particular importance in facilitating this was the HR development director’s deliberate role, both in protecting the programme from interference from those less convinced of its merits and through his leadership of the development project. This leadership was demonstrated in the form of copresenting the programme, coaching and mentoring, and helping to clear the path for the business improvement projects. HiPo programmes are characterized by activities that have consistent development content designed to increase future leadership capability, combined with the need to be selective about who receives that development. In this case, the HR director and close colleagues perceived the need to initiate corporate-wide change from within, and therefore

Strategical alignment 175 selected for participation those managers they believed were capable of initiating and delivering this change and used the MAP as a vehicle for facilitating, focusing and creating mutual support for change activities. An inclusive approach would not have provided participants with the same potential, and a tailored design might not have produced the same critical mass with a common focus. In contrast to BANKCO, the SOFTCO example demonstrates how targeted programmes do not necessarily require unanimous senior management approval, nor do they depend on providing a wide range of non-targeted development activities to mitigate concerns about elitism. Instead, in this case, it appeared to be the personal purpose, commitment and leadership of the HR director that helped make the intervention successful.

CASE STUDY PARCELCO: SELF-MOTIVATED – AN EXAMPLE OF ALIGNING INDIVIDUAL AND ORGANIZATIONAL NEEDS PARCELCO is a world leader in international logistics, an established innovator since it commenced operations over thirty years ago. At the time of study it employed over 68,000 people, servicing 635,000 cities in 228 countries. The most substantial operation outside the US was in the UK. The culture of PARCELCO had for some time given a priority to encouraging frontline management autonomy. This provided managers with the opportunity to exploit the company’s traditional entrepreneurial spirit; a quality – along with the scope to deliver the substantial growth the company was experiencing – seen as particularly important in the highly competitive logistics sector. In consequence, PARCELCO needed managers who were self-sufficient and able to work independently, and a training and development function that had a strong commercial orientation. In this context, the format for business leader development that emerged was one in which individuals took responsibility for their own development. Such an approach risks best practice criticism since it can appear highly fragmented, individualistic and lacking any real strategic purpose. However, PARCELCO has been able to introduce a number of core processes that have contributed to creating an extremely positive development culture, consistent with strategic aspirations of the business at that time. At the heart of this strong development culture were two development centres, open to all managers according to organizational level. This, combined with a strong operational competency framework and a well-supported personal development planning process, meant the company had the building blocks for individuals to develop themselves. The training and development department, described as ‘easily accessible’ in terms of getting support and influential with the senior executive team, was seen as significant in creating this culture. Thus in practice, the PARCELCO approach at that time provided a consistent front-end assessment process from which managers at all levels could map out their own development from a wide range of activities, including coaching, work assignments, mentoring, external programmes, MBAs and educational scholarships. The company also provided internal programmes addressing key commercial activities. There were some development activities that necessitated targeting, but on the whole this was not as strong as the need for selfmotivated development. Despite the apparently open-ended nature of the development process, the development content was usually aligned to PARCELCO’s business needs, as

176 Catherine Bailey, Martin Clarke and David Butcher choices were based on a well-regarded assessment process tied to an organization-wide competency structure. The strategic relevance and sensitivity of this choice of BLD approach was highlighted when, in the face of increasing competition and a plateau in market growth, PARCELCO identified the need for enhanced operational harmonization. With a heightened emphasis on global synergies and greater job harmonization, the development function began to play a wider role in supporting international succession planning through more corporately consistent development provision. Nevertheless, the ‘self-motivated’ approach to development was still valued but driven by a wider strategic consideration: if the business didn’t respond to individual aspirations for development, it faced a potential loss in intellectual capital. In the self-motivated quadrant, organizations are responding to the needs for an inclusive yet individualized strategy. Given the PARCELCO business model, which required strong local autonomy, it was important, as one senior manager expressed it, that ‘everyone has the opportunity to develop themselves’. To give priority to targeting and corporate consistency would have been counter-cultural and have generated inappropriate levels of centralization. However, by ensuring the establishment of robust selection and assessment processes, the approach avoided becoming an uncoordinated ‘free for all’ whilst allowing activities to be aligned to broad business needs. The success of this approach was evident in the extremely positive way interviewees talked about PARCELCO’s development culture, and in their belief that they really did have the opportunity to develop both themselves and their business. Perhaps the best evidence of the effectiveness of this approach was the company’s ability to sustain remarkable organic development over many years.

CASE STUDY RETAILCO: GENERIC PROGRAMMES – AN EXAMPLE OF CORPORATE ALIGNMENT RETAILCO, one of the UK’s leading retailers, at the time of the study had a turnover of £25 billion and employed over 250,000 people in the UK, continental Europe and South East Asia. At the heart of this success is a business model that ensures a consistently high-quality customer experience. The development of RETAILCO’s culture, based on two key values – ‘treating people how we like to be treated’ and ‘no one tries harder for customers’ – was consistent across all its activities, and is widely recognized as an essential part of this success. The effectiveness of such value-driven business models depends on the degree to which leaders throughout the organization ‘role model’ key behaviours. Leadership and management development closely aligned with RETAILCO’s business needs had a significant part to play in enabling managers to take up this challenge and embed the RETAILCO way of doing things. The need to develop a clear ‘RETAILCO way’ provided the impetus behind a whole range of corporately consistent inclusive leadership development activities. For example, the company undertook a five-year programme to ensure that all its 8,000 managers, from the top through to first-line supervision, had a common language about core managerial processes. This included skills programmes that enabled the company to adopt a consistent approach to effective meetings, use rapid reaction teams, coach and give performance feedback, and problem solve. Despite this predominantly inclusive approach, some targeting did take place in recognition of the different needs of general management and business

Strategical alignment 177 leader populations, but even then on the basis of corporate consistency. For example, the top 1,500 managers participated in a Situational Leadership programme and all store managers attended an in-company business school programme. Corporate inductions, special change programmes and the development of an organization-wide managerial competency framework supported these types of activities. The success of these generic culture-change programmes often lies in an organization’s ability to take account of employee views about these values in action and to respond to concerns about what they see as being important. Without a real interest in employees, such processes can become overbearing and subject to considerable scepticism. In response, the business took great care to assess continually employee attitudes via formal surveys, and through the content and frequency of returned personal development and performance review reports. The attitude survey was supported by a balanced scorecard-monitoring process that ensures the integration of people, operational, financial and customer strategies. Each quarter the process flags up where the company may be falling short of its objectives on a green/amber/red-warning basis. Such methods help to ensure that management development plans do not become disconnected from the business. Other processes which helped to ensure the deployment of such management development were values workshops and 360-degree appraisal processes that encouraged managers to link their objectives to the key organization values. However, despite the success of this robust set of generic programmes, RETAILCO’s development professionals were acutely aware of the danger of relying purely on these for future leadership growth. In consequence, the approach was supported with a programme of continuous improvement and a competency framework that was nimble enough to respond to rapid change. Furthermore, inclusive programmes run the risk of not differentiating sufficiently between leadership and management. Such approaches need a robust set of selection processes, to ensure that the best rise to the top. If selection is only made on here-and-now assessments through performance appraisals, there is a danger of building current and short-term priorities into a BLD strategy. Additional processes are therefore required to ensure that leadership attributes promoting a longer-term and more challenging view are developed. With this in mind, the ‘RETAILCO Academy’ was created; it afforded more targeted and individualized approaches and acted as a vehicle for developing the next generation of RETAILCO leaders, for whom the challenge was to balance adherence to the ‘RETAILCO way’ with the need for greater innovation. Adopting a generic programmes approach is consistent with seeking to influence corporate culture through inclusive and corporately consistent development. Driven by a clearly articulated business need for a consistent high-quality customer experience that is embedded in the value-driven ‘RETAILCO way’, the company used this approach extremely effectively. Senior management were expected to work hard to live the espoused values and show a real interest in listening to employees, thus trying to minimize the gap between senior management rhetoric and organizational reality. An undue emphasis on targeting and tailoring would have undermined the establishment of that inclusive culture implied by ‘treating others as we would like to be treated ourselves’. The success of the approach was not only reflected in RETAILCO’s performance, but in their employee feedback and positive views about their meritocratic organization culture. However, strong cultures can become inward looking and complacent unless care is taken to inculcate a broader external business perspective. Similarly, the drive for inclusion can mean there is a danger that leadership needs become undifferentiated from more general management development. RETAILCO

178 Catherine Bailey, Martin Clarke and David Butcher proceeded to focus on these very issues, demonstrating the need for a critical view of the continuing relevance of any particular BLD approach in meeting the anticipated strategic and business needs as they change.

Emerging themes These cases were chosen to reflect very different approaches to BLD and illustrate how different development strategies can align with particular strategic, business and cultural circumstances. Our case selection method would of course lead to some common features, such as development of home-grown talent, use of competency frameworks and so on. But beyond these obvious points of similarity, what kind of generative mechanisms do the cases raise that may help practitioners tackle the problems of achieving strategic relevance, developing a vision for BLD, enhancing HR/development thinking and managing multiple agendas? Five substantive themes appear to be significant, each reflecting the transformational impact of individual agency in shaping the social processes and structures of effective BLD. Linking BLD strategy to business need The importance of aligning BLD activities to business needs is now taken for granted. Yet phase one of our study revealed that organizations did not find this easy to achieve. Only 20 per cent of respondents in the survey were able to identify strategic drivers for their organization’s BLD approach. Lack of clarity about BLD purpose was frequently revealed by the confusion about whether development should be for a targeted audience or inclusively for all managers, and whether development content should be individually tailored or corporately consistent, provoking simultaneous complaints of elitism or lack of focus. And some practitioners, applying multiple strategies, were not clear about how these related to one another or how together they aligned to their organization’s business needs. Finally there were frequent examples of practitioners confidently pursuing a development strategy in one framework quadrant whilst line managers believed their focus should be in another. Significantly, in the case organizations a critical causal mechanism appeared to be the clarity of individual agents about their business context, the major strategic issue they were trying to address and therefore the choice of approach which would prove to be most relevant. For example, the HRD Director in SOFTCO recognized that, given the scale of the change required in cross-functional working, he needed to target his development population selectively, but at the same time ensure that BLD content was consistent in order to achieve the critical mass required. In RETAILCO, similar insights were achieved; high levels of targeting would undermine the declared values of inclusion. In PARCELCO inappropriate levels of corporate consistency were considered to detract from the autonomous business model. A good understanding of their business circumstances as well as current and critical strategic imperatives thus enabled individual agents to make critical content and population judgements to ensure a high degree of relevance to their business circumstances and aspirations. Whilst it is not clear whether BLD decision makers were working knowingly with the distinctions which structure the dimensions of the BLD strategy framework, it is clear that they were defying some aspects of conventional universalistic HRD practices to achieve strategic alignment.

Strategical alignment 179 Linking development method to business need A key driver for leadership programmes is often the need to build a common approach and network amongst senior managers (Kamoche 2000). Combined with prescriptions to develop home-grown talent through action learning, and a view that in-company programmes provide a better fit with the development of strategic leaders (Conger and Benjamin 1999), it is not surprising that internal programmes are popular. These cases, however, highlight how some BLD practitioners are moderating such takenfor-granted assumptions and are not restricting themselves to such an internal or inclusive approach. Instead they are using agreed perceptions about business need to guide the development approach. For example, in BANKCO, an organization that traditionally had been inward looking, senior management are using external activities for selected individuals to stimulate the development of an external perspective. This suggests that these selected managers are seen to have the potential personal influence to modify existing social processes that encouraged BANKCO’S introspection. Managers in RETAILCO also recognize the risks of developing an inward-looking culture, and hence also recognize the need to inculcate a broader external perspective. However, in contrast to BANKCO, this case study emphasizes the use of formal structures such as a leadership academy, competency framework, and vision and value statements, both to reinforce and modify existing managerial practices. In PARCELCO the drive for local autonomy and entrepreneurial spirit meant that corporate consistency was not essential and external development activities had a potential value in modifying existing structures by stimulating broader and innovative business thinking. The PARCELCO case is supportive of Mabey’s (2002) finding, that when responsibility for development is given to individual managers there is a corresponding increase in diverse development activity. Clarity about the role of management development in strategy implementation In our initial survey, although we found many HRD practitioners who had great clarity about the role of management development and how it aligned with different business drivers, these plans were often not well communicated to their internal customers, a point echoed about HR in general by Guest and King (2004). Consequently line managers tended to see a raft of seemingly unconnected development activities and were unsure how their own needs were being managed. This underlines the need for clarity about the vision for management development in addressing these business issues and about how best to communicate this role. In contrast to earlier criticisms of the ability of development practitioners to lead change, it was apparent that in each of these cases, practitioners were challenging existing definitions of the relevance and role of BLD. For example, Bill in SOFTCO was prepared to generate change from below in the absence of senior management appreciation of, and investment in, development. In BANKCO Donal introduced senior management competencies that challenged existing conceptions of leadership, and in RETAILCO the development specialists were rethinking the future competencies of a more international and nimble organization. In our cases, communicating this role was done better than most, but still with room for improvement. Processes varied from BANKCO’s use of internal corporate communications via the Internet and brochures, to Bill’s very personal approach in SOFTCO. In RETAILCO the balanced scorecard provided employees with information annually about how people development initiatives contributed to the overall business.

180 Catherine Bailey, Martin Clarke and David Butcher A discriminating, strategically based approach to evaluation Surveys repeatedly report the inadequate assessment of leadership development activities (CEML 2001). Lack of clear objectives and the difficulty of establishing quantifiable results have been cited as significant reasons (Cairns 1997). In our cases the organizations evaluated the results of their investment and overcame some of the reported problems, once again by taking a more discriminating approach. In BANKCO the focus on creating a stock of highpotential managers enabled the HRD team to evaluate their work through business-wide measures related to talent flows. In SOFTCO the significant measures were again a reflection of the development goals; perceived improvements in cross-functional working, proactivity and customer service. The drive for corporate alignment in RETAILCO has led to a range of business outcome measures such as attitude surveys and balanced scorecard evaluations. In each case, selecting measures appropriate to strategic intent surmounted the perennial problem of evaluation. In turn, this differentiated approach forced and enabled better-quality thinking in those responsible for BLD. Individual leadership in BLD The ‘negative loop’ situations that surround BLD in many organizations leave management development professionals trying to initiate BLD in extremely unfavourable political circumstances. Yet success in these case studies appeared to be closely related to one or more people taking a substantive leadership role in the design and implementation of BLD. In particular, the illustrative examples reflect the importance of individual agency in influencing the establishment of a strategic focus. This is supportive of other research (Murphy and Southey 2003) about the role of leadership in HR innovation, but suggests that agents can make progress even when legitimate organizational support is lacking. For example, in SOFTCO, BLD itself was used to challenge dominant definitions of the way the organization worked. Bill’s vision, acknowledgement of different power bases, and challenge, were all central to overcoming the complex set of political barriers that beset the BLD arena. This is supportive of Truss’s (2001) observation about the criticality of informal processes in implementing effective HRM, and Ogbonna and Whipp’s (1999) view of the inherently political nature of the connections between strategy and HR. The kind of leadership displayed in these cases provides an initial insight about how it is that individuals can make a difference to the effectiveness of BLD in the face of unfavourable political circumstances.

Points for reflection and action We believe that this analysis builds on the HR integration literature in several ways. In recent years there has been considerable debate about the relative value of vertical and horizontal integration between business and HRM strategy, and the need for flexibility of response over time (Wright and Snell 1998; Buyens and De Vos 2001). We consider the BLD strategy framework described here adds to this debate by providing a conceptual tool that synthesizes concerns for both fit and flexibility considered critical by Wright and Snell (1998) and Purcell (1999). The four distinct options discourage a best practice universalistic orientation, emphasizing instead the importance of a configurational approach in which strategic context drives the alignment of HR strategy along with horizontal reinforcement processes for development methods, evaluation systems and the role of BLD. The top two quadrants offer opportunities for flexibility in as much as they are designed specifically to enhance behavioural repertoires that can provide organizations with options for pursuing strategic alternatives (Wright and

Strategical alignment 181 Snell 1998: 761). Indeed, this formed part of the driving force behind the PARCELCO and BANKCO approaches in which innovative thinking was encouraged by the development of wider external perspectives. The model can therefore be viewed as a tool to help ensure that BLD is concerned with ‘ensuring fit among a subset of strategically relevant variables whilst simultaneously seeking to build generic organizational capabilities that can be applied toward both discovering and implementing a variety of diverse strategic initiatives’ (Wright and Snell 1998: 767). This is achieved by helping those responsible for BLD to discriminate between a bundle of practices (not a definitive list) that highlight how, over time, BLD processes can be translated into behaviours that suit the changing needs of an organization (Purcell 1999). We argue, therefore, that explicit recognition of different development populations, different sponsors, interest groups and strategic timeframes will form the basis for a more informed discussion about strategic alignment of BLD. While the strategy framework may understate the realworld complexity of organizational possibilities (Colbert 2004) in only providing four possible configurations of BLD, these are not mutually exclusive and might be operationalized for different organization populations. In Mabey’s (2002) study, four key variables in UK management development practice are highlighted: the corporate context; the decisions made about development choices; the content and extent of the development activities; and the qualitative value attached to the investment in management development. While these four variables and their linkages are reflected within the five emerging themes, our cases also reflect the importance of informal activity, individual agency and politics in their execution (Truss 2001; Sheehan 2005). The individual clarity, motivation and leadership of those championing BLD clearly impacted the effectiveness of the causal linkages between business context, BLD strategy and execution. Indeed, it may well be this individual orientation that enabled these organizations to work through the inevitable ambiguities and contradictions of HRD policy. By mobilizing relationships, power resources and structures to challenge the enactment of BLD, agents were able to ‘transform’ the structures of BLD to achieve levels of BLD coherence. Returning to our original question, as to whether ‘best practice’ advice is fundamentally flawed or in need of refinement or contextualization, the findings from our research suggest that these principles should be applied discriminately. In combination, the five themes revealed here potentially promote such a differentiated approach. In each case, organizational members appeared to avoid the pitfalls identified through the initial survey, particularly those of strategic relevance and quality of thinking. Although these themes do not provide a complete answer, they do raise a number of helpful considerations for HR/ development professionals. For example, thinking more acutely about the relationship between business need/context, target population and development method forces betterquality thinking about BLD strategy. This clarity of intent can form the basis for challenging existing approaches, increasing the likelihood of encouraging a contingent and configurational perspective and developing a more effective business role for BLD. These insights suggest useful starting points for management development specialists and senior managers in reviewing and improving the BLD strategy and practice in their own organizations: • • •

Are we clear about where our current BLD strategy sits in the BLD strategy framework matrix? Are we clear about which business conditions support that position? Are we clear, therefore, about how to demonstrate a real payback to the business?

182 Catherine Bailey, Martin Clarke and David Butcher • • •

•

Which set of factors (corporate consistency, individualization, targeting, inclusion) is most important for meeting current business needs? Do different business units/activities/levels/management populations require different approaches/development methods? How well are these plans and their strategic drivers communicated to the different management populations so that they understand how their different needs are being managed? How will anticipated changes to the business and future strategic intent influence the future positioning of our approach in this matrix?

This analysis also raises questions for further research. First, although part of a larger international sample, all the cases focused on the UK context, albeit that three are part of international corporations. Would effective approaches to alignment differ in a different cultural context? Secondly, the cases do not provide detailed evidence about the relative effectiveness of different development methodologies. Are there any development methods that are more appropriate in different quadrants of the BLD strategy framework? Thirdly, in contradiction to ‘best practice’ advice, organizations are successfully using both internal and external methods of development, so what is the relative value of internal and external activities for BLD, and under which conditions? Fourthly, one of the most significant barriers to a coherent strategic approach to BLD identified through our research was the lack of a meaningful senior-management vision for BLD. Perhaps one of the most important questions that needs to be researched is how senior management view the relative value of leadership, and therefore business leadership development, against other potential drivers of business performance improvement, such as brand development, product development or creating culture. Until greater certainty about these relationships can be obtained, widespread progress on the impact of BLD may be limited.

Questions for discussion 1 2 3

What are the advantages of a strategically aligned approach to leadership development? What are the main difficulties and barriers to it? What lessons can be drawn from the case studies to help with this approach?

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11 Linking development with business William Tate

Chapter summary This chapter: • • •

Argues the need to shift the focus of leadership development from the individual to the organization and the business. Shows why leadership development works best when tied closely with organizational and business needs. Offers insights and case examples of how this more systemic approach can be delivered.

Introduction Leadership development has traditionally concentrated on individual managers and their needs, treating them as clients. Typical activity develops managers’ generic leadership ability in relation to those reporting to them, i.e. leadership as high-end people management. This is valued by learners and considered useful for their jobs, careers and marketability. Such activity is tactical in nature, being semi-detached from the business’s own needs and agenda. Other than showing concern for the ‘transfer of learning’ problem, developers mostly leave the learners themselves to make the connection with the business and the workplace. All parties are fairly comfortable with this arrangement, including the employer underwriting the development. Yet it leaves much to chance from the business’s standpoint. Contrasted with this familiar picture are some more strategic options for development’s focus, where there is scope for a firmer link to the business. The first of these alternatives concerns collective leadership. This can reach beyond merely developing the leadership of managerial teams and extend into company policy issues such as the wider distribution of leadership power through the hierarchy. Another – and I would argue better – focus for leadership development acknowledges the organization as the direct source of leadership challenges. The way the organization functions offers targets for organization development (OD) interventions such as improving the leadership culture, removing system blocks to managers applying their leadership, improving the way that leadership is held to account, and stopping the misuse and waste of leadership talent. Beyond this level lies consideration of the business entity itself, having its own identifiable needs, journey, goals and plans. By way of example, in 2004 the incoming chief executive of Boots the Chemist gave his diagnosis of the store chain’s ailments; he said the business ‘was introspective, slow to respond, poor at taking money in an orderly fashion, and lacking basic

186 William Tate shopkeeping skills’. Such business agendas drive the enterprise’s needs for improved organization leadership as well as its external projection into the market of responsible and professional leadership. Successfully linking with the realities of the organization and business makes development more effective, relevant and valuable. It offers the possibility of realizing the strategic goal of making the entity better led as a whole, with clear benefits to be gained by learners, their bosses, the business and its stakeholders. The choices described above for forging a better link between leadership improvement and business needs can be summarized as constituting four possible levels: level 1 level 2 level 3 level 4

the individual manager/leader and personal leadership; collective leadership teams and issues; internal organizational systemic leadership effectiveness; the business entity’s overall use and manifestation of leadership.

A two-way argument The arguments for connecting strongly with the business and the interests of the top executives are not all one way. Paradoxically, there are times when a loose connection may work best for the employer. A case can be made for developing human potential independently of the employer’s goals. Managers add value when they don’t just follow orders, but challenge their employer. Besides, most organizations are unclear about their own needs for improved leadership and lack an easy means of thinking about and articulating this. Development should not be constrained in what it aspires to achieve, sometimes in spite of the employer. Beyond helping to achieve the organization’s known, current and narrow aims there lies the ‘business in society’ role and the sustainable development agenda. There is a legitimate role for developers to press these wider issues about safeguarding tomorrow and promoting a more socially, ethically and environmentally aware agenda (Sadler 1999). All this makes the subject of linking with the business quite a minefield; one that is as yet largely unmapped. Finding support mechanisms to embed individual managers’ learning post-training is just one minor and better-known aspect. To focus development’s purpose and conduct on the organization and business requires a new mental framework. The chapter does the following: • • • • •

addresses the conceptual and strategic issues; challenges conventional assumptions about development’s role and performance; explores a range of tactical devices and mechanisms; examines what some companies are doing and the motivation for their choices; offers suggestions about what more can be done.

The strategic challenge Putting strategy ahead of training Linking development appropriately with business can be approached both top down and bottom up. ‘Top down’ requires business leaders to take an informed view about how leadership development and improvement activities can more directly serve business aims and goals, and strengthen the organization. Bottom-up approaches consist of initiatives that

Linking development with business 187 developers themselves take to make their efforts have a greater meaning for, and impact on, the organization and business. Together, these considerations potentially make leadership development a strategic activity more than a training activity. Consideration of purpose and the business’s needs take precedence over learning methods, thereby positioning development as a means to an end. Outcomes (sought beneficial change) take priority over outputs (required new behaviour) and inputs (relevant teaching). The question for developers and business leaders alike becomes ‘who and what is development in service of?’ Development’s unfulfilled potential to serve business needs has long been recognized. Rainbird’s study concluded that neither ‘the integration of the training function into other policy areas, nor the integration of employees through their involvement in training programmes, has occurred to any great extent’ (1994: 87). Research by Ezzamel et al. showed that the ‘integration of HRM [human resource management] and business strategy was the exception’ (1996: 76). Research undertaken by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) found that ‘many organizations are putting their performance at risk because management development itself continues to be a victim of poor management practice, disconnected from the imperatives and challenges of the enterprise’ (Court et al. 2002: ix). Developing the organization and the business A useful distinction can be made between the organization and the business. These terms are often regarded as synonymous with company, institution and enterprise. ‘Organization’ conveniently embraces both public and private sectors. Much of the time such general usage doesn’t matter. However, there are times when it is important to use the words distinctively. Strictly, the business consists of variables that are outwardly focused; i.e. customers, markets, brands, prices, products, competition, shareholders, etc. The organization, on the other hand, is the set of internal arrangements that enable a soundly conceived business to succeed in practice. Among the many organization variables are its structure, culture, systems, relationships, rules, competence – and, of course, leadership (Tate 2003). This places the organization at the service of the business. It can be argued that if the organization’s leadership process is developed to be fully effective, it will naturally handle changing business needs. For this reason, and for ease and practicality, developers show more concern for linking their activities – especially leadership development activities – with the organization than with the business. In practice they may target neither, and seek to make improvement only indirectly by enhancing managers’ leadership effectiveness in their jobs. This approach assumes that managers, once their leadership ability has been developed, will know what to apply their leadership to and will not be encumbered. However, where the employer’s need is more corporately strategic and stretches beyond the manager’s immediate team, this is a tall order. The system’s influence An important lesson for leadership developers is not to expect an organization intervention to rescue a company or even an industry that is flawed in its fundamental business. Taking an example, the pensions mis-selling scandal of the 1990s was an industry-wide problem. It represented a collective failure of that industry’s leadership to address political, competitive, ethical and structural issues. Yet company leaders cynically blamed their employees and

188 William Tate poor training, and they launched wholesale retraining in the hope of winning round public opinion. That lesson was not learned: witness the banking collapse in 2008, where the sector’s leadership remained fixedly short-term, narrowly competitive and self-serving. The leadership shortcomings were systemic, lying beyond development as commonly understood and practised. This serves to make the point that leadership in the wider sense is an important subject both in respect of its development-sponsoring role and in receiving development. The finance sector’s failure was a systemic leadership failure, not an individual one. The causes of misguided behaviour were to be found in what surrounded individuals – whether salesmen given unsuitable targets and incentives, or chief executives who were watching what the competition was doing as well as their own share price, short-term financial results and ensuing bonuses. The system that surrounds people can be imagined as a fishtank, with various degrees of cloudiness and toxicity depending on where you swim within it and how big a fish you are. In this analogy managers and others are trying their best to see what the organization needs, how to navigate what may be shark-infested waters, and how to stay safe and minimize stress. An important role of the senior manager is maintaining the tank in good health to make it easier for the individual fish to exercise personal leadership (Tate 2009b). Glatter (2008: 9) identifies the important task of those in formal leadership positions to create organizational climates that support rather than stifle bottom-up innovations, initiated and driven by informal leaders. But what part does development play in this? Popular advice is to inject the reality of people’s context into their development, but what if the contextual climate itself is contaminated and needs development (Tate 2007)? What licence does the business give to developers to challenge what surrounds the people, including managers, that it wants developed? What or who is the target? For conceptual, political, practical and commercial reasons, developers traditionally devote most time to level 1 action; i.e. the individual manager/leader and personal leadership. This is the dominant market – it is what clients understand; they know what they are getting, can limit and control its impact and can budget for it. But it is at the other levels where development can potentially make the greater impact for an employer. Many people fail to distinguish between collective development at level 2 and systemic improvement at level 3. The Government’s Council for Excellence in Management and Leadership made this category error (CEML 2002). The improvement of systemic leadership is a major blind spot for developers – and beyond. Reflect on the failure by politicians, regulators, the police, local councils and media to understand systemic leadership in the Baby Peter case in 2007, and in other failures by authorities to protect children at risk. Or consider the leadership failure shown by the Metropolitan Police’s shooting in 2005 of the innocent Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes (Tate 2009b). These cases represented more than collective failure; they revealed a breakdown in how the system needed to work to deliver appropriate leadership by those involved. Other than in some large corporate culture-change programmes, for most organizations level 4 is viewed as a hoped-for outcome, beyond practical consideration as an intervention. It is level 3 – systemic leadership – that remains the most needed and least understood aspect, and the biggest challenge when it comes to improving organizations, especially in delivering complex and multi-partner public services. Its focus can be defined as:

Linking development with business 189 Improving the way an organization is led, based on an understanding of the organization as a system, focused on the interdependency between leadership and the organization, concerning how leadership is applied, managed and developed. (Tate 2009a: 5) In this systemic model, organization developers are concerned with the twin questions of what effect is leadership having on the system, and what effect is the system having on leadership? Their objective on behalf of their client organization is to enable appropriate leadership to flourish. The reality of individual-centred leadership Individual-centred development is appropriate if, say, managers are not in employment or want to improve their marketability irrespective of whom they work for. In such cases the individual, and not the business, is a legitimate target. But most development is sponsored by organizations, with the prime purpose of benefiting the business. Even if the employer’s motivation is to improve the individual’s performance in order to benefit the business indirectly, this will only be effective if the organization contributes context, concerns and content to development’s planning and design. If the development process is undertaken at arm’s length from the organization’s needs and realities, and concentrates on individuals’ characteristics, qualities, capabilities and competences, there will be less impact on the organization. This typically happens where the organization is the sponsor but is willing to settle for generic individual-centred development. The problem is exacerbated where there is no awareness of the possibility of the organization doing some work on itself. Organizations suffer dysfunction and have their own development needs. However effective the development of individual managers and leaders, the result will always fall short of the grander aim of improving leadership and management in, of and by the organization. In terms of the inputs–outputs–outcomes continuum, conventional development primarily concentrates its expertise on the inputs. But if managers’ potential is to be realized, it requires two further ingredients: will and opportunity. ‘Performance is potential minus interference’, claimed the coach Timothy Gallwey (2003); this refers to personal psychological obstacles. But we can extend Gallwey’s concept to the organizational level (see Figure 11.1). Most development activity enhances potential but does little or nothing about interference (that is, by the organization). Beyond such interference lies the opportunity for more positive organizational contributions to facilitate enhanced individual leadership.

Changing the mindset Challenging assumptions Development activity appears so self-evidently worth business investment that it can become immune from serious criticism. Yet development has traditionally been built on unquestioned and unproven assumptions that continue to constrain its relevance and effectiveness – for example, the assumptions that: • •

leadership is the sum of what individual leaders do; concerns about the quality of leadership are best addressed by developing individuals;

190 William Tate • • • • • •

development of the organization results from, and is best pursued via, individual development activities; development is synonymous with improvement; developers can be left to set their own agenda; development first means training; the training industry can provide most leadership solutions; increased spending on development and training will result in better leadership.

Consequently, the chief executive officer who is concerned about leadership in the organization typically assumes that the solution lies with development. But the connection between problem and solution is tenuous. The quality of leadership and management in companies and in Britain plc leaves much room for improvement (Storey and Tate 2000). Numerous enquiries by professional institutes and the government continue to reveal poor leadership and management skills in managers and companies. Despite increasing volumes of management training (Storey et al. 1997), under the present set of assumptions the quality of leadership and management in business is unlikely to improve significantly, however much is spent on development (Clarke 1999). Despite all that is known and written on the subject, there are no obvious signs since then that leadership has enjoyed a step change. Leadership – and not just in the business domain – appears to be almost impervious to improvement and destined continually to repeat its mistakes. A chief problem, of course, is that individual leadership is the consequence of what surrounds it. It occupies a place in an organization’s leadership culture (‘the way leadership

The organization provides a purposeful context, important problems to solve, a supportive framework, permeable boundaries, an absence of obstacles and restrictions, the least bureaucracy and protocol, a minimum of needless checks, etc. The organization’s facilitation of opportunities

(enabled to do) INDIVIDUAL LEADERSHIP

ORGANIZATION ACTION (want to do)

People’s effort, will, motivation, desires, values, beliefs, perceptions and volition The organization provides a clear vision, goals, challenges, a fear-free culture and positive climate, constructive feedback, good job–person matches, fair recognition and rewards, etc.

Figure 11.1 Converting individual leadership ability into organization action

Linking development with business 191 is round here’). For improvement to happen that leadership culture has to change itself. But its view of itself is compromised and self-interested; hence there is a natural tendency in favour of the status quo. The route to business improvement However challenging, the goal behind sharpening development’s links with business is to try to obtain improvement for the employing organization and business in all sectors, for the business world in general, and for the society that is impacted by business, and upon which business in turn depends. Achieving these goals clearly requires strategies beyond those that focus on developing the individual in isolation: [Self-development methods] are now sometimes perceived as all very well for personal growth, but as less functional for moving forward the organization. The same point can be found embedded in the useful distinction between manager development and management development. The former can include all manner of educational and training experiences which enhance the individual. The latter more directly impacts on the functional capability of the managerial stock as a whole, and improves the collective management performance in a manner relevant to business needs. (Storey and Tate 2000: 198) Weaknesses in the popular model can be identified: . . . individually oriented strategies of change, such as training, are not effective in bringing about organizational change. This is due to at least three basic problems. The first relates to the age-old issue in training – transfer of learning. The simple fact that most training occurs in a location other than the individual’s work space produces the problem of re-creating the training milieu and learning back on the job. Critical mass is a second problem. How many people must one train to obtain the desired impact on the organization? . . . A third problem relates to the social psychological principle . . . that individual behaviour in a group context is considerably shaped and regulated by social norms. Individual training often requires individual deviance from accepted norms . . . Trainers . . . do not understand that groups are easier to change than individuals . . . Training should facilitate change, not attempt to provide it. (Burke 1972: 30–34) Katz and Khan reinforce the argument for a systems perspective: Attempts to change organizations by changing individuals have a long history of theoretical inadequacy and practical failure. Both stem from a disregard of the systemic properties of organizations and from the confusion of individual changes with modification in organizational variables. (Katz and Khan 1978: 658) Aside from social norms, organization forces of politics, bureaucracy and inertia conspire against the aspirations of even the most determined individual: Important though it is, individual excellence is only one component of business excellence. The most skilled, committed and enthused spirits can be dampened by a

192 William Tate negative climate and inappropriate procedures. The desired outcomes will happen only when the whole system is subject to scrutiny. (McHale 2000: 54) If we adopt a mindset that begins with the business’s need for leadership to be practised (rather than how individuals’ abilities are developed) and then ask how we can get that business need met, we are led down a different route. There are several consequences. One is that it engenders an improvement process rather than a development process. Another is that it brings organization development into close proximity with management development (the Confederation of British Industry uses the expression ‘organizational management development’). The distinction between the individual and organizational ways of conceiving of development somewhat mirrors that of strategic HRM’s growth over the last thirty years from the platform of traditional personnel management. The latter is focused on the needs and problems of individual employees, while strategic HRM takes the organization as its client. Whilst companies still need employees’ everyday personnel needs to be administered, the HR profession has grown to embrace a more upstream, longer-term, business-driven role. In this more strategic model, the business itself provides the yardstick by which the function’s success is measured. In practice, the development function hasn’t travelled far down this road. Holistic thinking In setting out its terms of reference in 2000, the UK government-sponsored Council for Excellence in Management and Leadership (CEML) equated management and leadership with managers (Tate 2000). Ostensibly about the activity of ‘management and leadership’, its stated objective was ‘to ensure that the UK has the managers and leaders of the future to match the best in the world’. CEML became a charter for development, rather than the more holistic and wider range of management and process issues that need attention if leadership is to be practised. The CIPD research Developing Managers for Business Performance (Court et al. 2002) did much the same. To a lesser extent, so did the UK government’s Performance and Innovation Unit (PIU) research into Effective Leadership in Delivering Public Services (2000): its brief was ‘to ensure that the public sector has the leaders it needs in the future’. The brief of the Chartered Management Institute’s Leadership: The Challenge for All (Horne and Stedman Jones 2001) was ‘to address the question of how leadership potential is best developed, and the effectiveness of particular developmental tools’. Each of these studies ultimately made proposals that extended into organization dimensions, most notably the PIU. But the core of work was initially shaped by a supply-side way of thinking; this equates improvement in leadership and management in organizations with individuals’ development and training. This habitual way of thinking is, unsurprisingly, especially prevalent amongst providers. Lacking sufficient access to the dynamics inside organizations (both the factors that foster and those that thwart attempts at improving and practising leadership), developers imply that all will be well with businesses if they are fed with a sufficient flow of qualified, talented and trained individuals. We know this is not the full story, however. Consider the acute shortage of good school headteachers. Development processes such as the Heads, Teachers and Industry (HTI) initiative are imaginative and worthwhile, but they do nothing to address (any more than does high pay) a range of systemic obstacles, especially deputy heads’ perceptions of the job’s lack of autonomy, unbearable workload, stiff accountability, excessive bureaucracy, inherent

Linking development with business 193 insecurity and risk of reorganization. This example simply makes the point that a multipronged approach to leadership is needed, one that combines demand-side and supply-side strategies (Tate 2006). CEML’s own research admitted to ‘the propensity to seek supply-side solutions to demand problems’ but squandered this opportunity by limiting advice on the latter to the simple ‘need to improve demand for management and leadership development’ (CEML 2002: 12). Demand-side issues consist of much more than this, starting with clarity over what leadership is required for, then making that known, and ultimately holding leadership to account. A balanced approach In sum, the familiar approach (supply-side, semi-detached, individual development, skills focus) takes no account of what organizations can and should do to make full use of talent, including that which they already have. Pouring more talent in at one end is only a partial solution if it leaks out further along the pipe. The answer lies in development activity that connects with the full reality of organizations, the particular business’s unique needs and agenda, and the expectations of stakeholders. An approach that takes account of the business’s own needs redresses the dominance of supply-side strategies. It reduces reliance on development ‘providers’ to make good the deficit. It takes account of the dynamics of organizations. And it admits to the work that organizations must do on themselves to remedy their own dysfunction. A UK government report on Strengthening Leadership in the Public Sector (PIU 2001), while focused primarily on leaders and leadership development, recommended taking into account some of the wider demand-side organization issues such as: • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

supporting leaders in post; the climate for effective leadership; arrangements for getting good leaders in place; the retention of good leaders; diversity in appointing leaders; incentivizing current and potential leaders; leaders’ freedom to operate; space allowing leaders to lead, take risks and change course; decision-making and planning processes; public recognition; barriers to leadership (organizational, regulatory and cultural); the impact of systems and targets; accountability; the effect of organizational life cycle on types of leaders needed; distinctive values of the organization; responsible followers (to act as a check on leaders).

The Chartered Management Institute’s research commented on the crucial difference between grounding development in the leader’s characteristics compared with the leader’s role, especially as framed by relevant organizational processes: . . . people tend to mix their perceptions of the characteristics of leadership as displayed by individuals, with the concept of leadership as a specific role in an organization process.

194 William Tate [The latter is] an organizational process: the types of systems and procedures that distribute responsibility, decision-making, knowledge and power within an organization. (Horne and Stedman Jones 2001: 15) Disentangling development Fresh thinking about leadership and how best to improve it requires a mental separation of leadership from leaders, and also from their development. This shifts the focus onto the activity of leadership more than its personification. Leadership is to a stage performance what development programmes are to drama school. What businesses (should) value most is the whole show. A successful stage performance depends on good relationships between the individual actors, and between the actors and the audience; good props; good front-of-house and back-of-house support; and – crucially – a compelling script or plot (Tate 2009a: 6). The same is true of an organization. Modern-day leaders need a sympathetic system and a relevant purpose if they are to succeed in the eyes of the organization and stakeholders. They also need critical followers: We might consider a failure of leadership and followership in the form of Rodney Ledward, the gynaecologist from William Harvey Hospital in Ashford, Kent, who was ‘able to severely maim hundreds of women patients because of a hospital culture in which consultants were treated as “gods” and junior staff were afraid of telling tales’. (PIU 2001: 4, Annexe D; based on an article in the Guardian, 2 June 2000) The God-like status may be concentrated on an individual (often a chief executive) or a group (e.g. hospital consultants). Whether fostered by the leaders or by their followers, it is a facet of a dysfunctional leadership culture. It discourages authentic dialogue and encourages hubris, as a former Royal Bank of Scotland manager explained: ‘Fred Goodwin was revered within the bank as some kind of founding father, and we all wasted a lot of time and energy discussing how to manage him and trying to second-guess how he would react to things’ (Tate 2009a: 155). This chapter shows that it is possible to develop leadership by doing things other than by directly developing leaders, through organization-enhancing initiatives that aim to improve leadership as practised. According to Ludwig Wittgenstein, the linguistic philosopher, if we want to think and act differently we need to speak differently. If we limit discussion to ‘development’ we instinctively think about a process that does things to individuals. ‘Improvement’, by contrast, is a more empowering word. Improvement is a resulting outcome. Development becomes just one of several ways of bringing that about. You can improve an organization’s leadership by recruiting better leaders. You can reward the best leaders to help retain them. You can even make leadership better by retiring tired leaders. You can rejuvenate the leadership culture. You can remove obstacles in the path of those who wish to exercise leadership. You can hang onto talented leaders. You can plug the gaps in the relationships between leaders and between functions. Most of these valuable activities would not normally qualify as ‘development’ or receive the attention of developers. The remit of HR Development departments usually spans training, education, appraisal, career and succession issues. Responsibility for recruitment, reward and termination falls outside this definition. If we focus all improvement efforts on ‘development’, we may

Linking development with business 195 overlook other relevant HR activity, and we may exclude other HR specialists from improvement discussions and action. (Tate 2003: 21) Leadership as a system resource The suggestion of mentally separating leadership from leaders implies that there are other relevant ‘vehicles’. One approach is to think of leadership as a property of organizations per se. The Business Excellence Model by the European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM 2002) and the Burke–Litwin Causal Model of Organizational Performance and Change (Burke and Litwin 1992) treat leadership as a component of the system, alongside other system components (e.g. culture, mission, competence, environment, etc.). This conception turns high-quality leadership into a resource, one of an organization’s prime assets. A natural consequence of such thinking is that this asset has to be managed, paradoxical as that sounds. The Chartered Management Institute hints at this resource concept when it advises that ‘understanding leadership as an organizational process is essential to understanding how it might be improved and developed’ (Horne and Stedman Jones 2001: 15). If managing leadership seems a difficult concept to accept, consider what happens when leadership is not well managed. It languishes in backwaters, goes unrecognized, is misdirected, serves self-interested goals, lacks coordination with colleagues, escapes to competitors, damages the environment, and so on. In short, a poorly managed system allows leadership energy and potential to leech away or point at the wrong things (Tate 2009a: 109). Although making a slightly different point about the ease with which leadership talent can be wasted, focusing on the systemic dimension of leadership sits comfortably with the notion that organizations need to learn as systems (Pedler et al. 1991). James supports this: ‘the learning resides in the systems and processes of the organization not just in the individual minds of its members’ (James 2002: 4–5).

Making practical connections Managing leadership along the employment spectrum Just as businesses may be described as being vertically or horizontally integrated, so too may development. Discussion thus far about linking development more closely with the business assumes vertical integration, i.e. linking the individual, through the organization, to business purpose and outcomes. But scope exists for horizontal linkages too. James’s review of best practice undertaken for CEML recognizes this: ‘Leadership development must link to succession planning, which involves linking assessment, development, feedback, coaching and succession planning into one integrated system aligned with the strategy’ (James 2002: 19). The PIU report recommends a ‘more joined-up approach to recruitment, development and promotion’ (PIU 2001: 1). An integrated model seeks to establish horizontal links between development and a range of other HR interventions that together increase the chance of obtaining the desired outputs for the business (see Figure 11.2). By contrast, organizations that lack joined-up thinking across HR activities risk: •

developing leaders at considerable expense, then letting them languish in unimportant functions where their talents cannot be used fully;

196 William Tate OBTAINING LEADERSHIP TALENT

DEVELOPING LEADERSHIP TALENT

UTILIZING LEADERSHIP TALENT

LETTING GO LEADERSHIP TALENT

Development Qualifications Mentoring Coaching Conferences Projects

Assessment Promotion Job rotation Assignments Leadership climate Leadership obstacles Appraisal Rewards

Retention Limiting tenure Exiting information Severance

Consideration of: Recruitment Appointments Succession Talent audits Assessment

Figure 11.2 Managing leadership along the employment spectrum

• • •

structuring the HR function in such a way that one department recruits talent while another selects people for redundancy on the cost criterion rather than ability; failing to act upon poor leaders when they become part of the problem rather than part of the solution; pouring leadership talent in at one end of the employment pipeline, and then carelessly letting it escape at the other (Tate 2009a: 140).

An integrated approach calls for a structure, culture and licence for those with strategic HR responsibility to have access to relevant decisions affecting recruitment and selection; training and development; career and succession planning; manpower planning; reward and recognition; severance; and so on. It also requires a spirit of co-operation rather than competition or a silo mentality between these specialisms. Development-related issues arise at several places on the employment spectrum – phases in careers that call for optimal HR management. Besides having discrete development inputs at an appropriate career point, related considerations include the following: • • • • • • • •

What leadership talent needs to enter the system? How can the most talented leaders be allocated to the most important jobs? Should newly developed leaders receive a change of job? What criteria are used to assess the effective practice of leadership? How is good leadership recognized and rewarded (and bad leadership ‘punished’)? What criteria are used to assess suitability for promotion to senior positions? What provision is made for successors? How is leadership talent escaping unplanned from the organization? (Tate 2009a: 140)

Line supervision of development If developers are to link their activities more clearly to business purpose and outcomes they need to think strategically about what they do. They cannot do this in isolation. They

Linking development with business 197 need access to the employer’s agenda – direction, long-term plans, goals, business strategies, problems and opportunities. One model consists of a dialogue process sponsored by the chief executive. Called business, organization and management review, this encourages managers to explore . . . the connections between the business model(s) that will enable the enterprise to succeed in its competitive environment and the distinctive competencies that will support them. [Managers then explore] the gap between performance goals and actual performance and the required characteristics and capabilities of the organization. (Court et al. 2002: 20) This means distinguishing between two agendas: sustaining the current business model and developing future business models; each holding distinctive implications for development activities. Other than in large corporations, sophisticated planning processes like this seem quite rare. The amount of time business leaders spend with their developers may not be sufficient to build a relationship of trust and credibility from which true dialogue can emerge. Developers can find themselves pigeonholed or viewed negatively (Atkinson and Meldrum 1998). They may not be invited to business meetings, may not be expected to understand the business, to ask searching questions about it, or to know what to do with the information. Business leaders may or may not be enlightened about development’s potential, and may or may not be skilled at opening up discussion and listening to developers’ suggestions. Such leaders often display more advocacy than enquiry (Senge et al. 1994), when more of the latter is required. In reality, both parties can be comfortable with the ring-fencing that often surrounds developers’ activity; this accords with many developers’ self-image. For external providers this problem of isolation is exacerbated. The fashion for contracting out aspects of training and development risks widening the gap between organization problem and developer’s solution. An important context in which to foster mutual exploration is when the person with executive responsibility for the development function is appraised by the business leader to whom he or she reports. Some searching questions are shown below. They focus the mind of developers and help the business leader understand the contribution that development can make.

For business leaders who oversee development professionals Questions to ask • • • • •

How do your strategies relate to where the company is currently, and to where it is going? What development are we doing which is markedly different from our competitors? What values and beliefs about development are driving the service you provide me with? What assumptions are you making about how easily off-the-job learning can be applied to the benefit of the business? What are you doing to migrate development activity towards actions which are most likely to realize a payoff, to the company and the individuals? (extract from Tate 1995: 239)

198 William Tate Developing for the unknown Whilst there is a danger that development activity is insufficiently related to the business, the opposite may also be true. There is a risk of development being too engaged with current issues and supportive of how the business is now, thereby maintaining the status quo and the current regime’s interests (Hopfl and Dawes 1995). It may also rely on what is currently known about the likely future. If development activity is to realize its full contribution to the business, it needs to help learners to do two things: • •

see ways of doing things differently (which their bosses may not yet be in a position to recognize and value); develop their potential as fully as possible in preparation for the unknown and unknowable (their own and the organization’s).

Developers walk a tightrope Developers can find themselves walking a tightrope. On the one hand they risk being accused of colluding with their charges in subverting what they collectively perceive as dysfunctional behaviour and control processes in the organization. On the other hand, if they accept things as they are, they may insufficiently help the organization to raise itself to a higher level. Gosling and Ashton describe this dilemma: . . . directors of courses find themselves in the midst of conflict . . . when, on the one hand, they assert a traditional professional dedication to the development of each student, but, on the other hand, reassure sponsors that their delegates will make continuing contributions to the corporation. In effect, such reassurances indicate that there will be no change in the dominant dependent relationship. (Gosling and Ashton 1994: 271) An antidote to this lies in the relationship between developers and those to whom they are accountable. Some developers claim that they best serve the long-term interests of the business by being a catalyst for organizational (and social) change. This may call for ‘a role in undermining the assumptions and values that create the rules of the game’ (Clarke 1999: 47). Dialogue based on a relationship of trust and embodied in a three-way learning contract (between sponsor, developer and learner) can bring out into the open and help resolve problems caused by conflicting roles, values and loyalties. Developing for diversity For an organization to survive in a complex environment (business, technological, political and social) calls for its internal resources to be equally diverse. This is known as Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety (Tate 2005). Organizations can learn from nature: without such a multiresponse capability an organism cannot compete and will die. This principle is becoming increasingly important for organizations. Growing complexity means that opportunities and threats are becoming more diverse and rapid. Future challenges are becoming more difficult to predict: ‘Old skills and responses may be insufficient to meet them’ (James and Burgoyne 2002: 2). Leaders are inclined to recruit in their own image (Chapman 1991). This may make them feel more comfortable but it can undermine the critical skills available to the organization.

Linking development with business 199 A crucial argument for diversity lies in the risk of complacency that may result from similarity and ‘groupthink’ (Tate 2009a: 119).

CASE STUDY DIGITAL EQUIPMENT In the 1980s the computer manufacturer Digital was experiencing uncomfortable relationships in its management team in the UK. There was awkward dissent over business strategy from senior managers. So the leadership designed a management development programme that had as its express purpose ‘to ensure the company’s directors are supported’. Shortly thereafter the company hit trouble as it became clear that its business strategy for personal computers was badly flawed (its board thought that there was no market for PCs, believing that most individual managers would not want a PC on their desk). What was needed here, in management development terms, was a ‘fresh think’ approach that would license managers to challenge the board, rather than a ‘group think’ approach that would generate compliance.

The need for divergent thinking leads naturally to the question of appropriate learning processes. The effect of pure training is convergence of ability around an external view of best practice, or compliance with some model favoured by the organization, such as a leadership competencies framework. It is assumed to deliver performance against currently known and desired business goals. By contrast, the effect of pure development and education is divergence. This capitalizes on the rich variety of views, abilities and values found in humankind, and its idiosyncratic nature and unpredictability. Divergence is especially important for innovation since it generates both the freedom and the ability to challenge the status quo. A careful balance between convergent and divergent learning approaches is needed to manage both today and tomorrow. The precise balance, and who needs which when, depends on the business agenda, the form of organization and the operating environment. A valuable idea is that the role of ‘delivering today’ is an act of managing within the prevailing paradigm. But managers have a second role: they call upon and display their leading ability when they challenge that paradigm in order to bring about improvement and change and thereby ‘safeguard tomorrow’ (Tate 2009a: 42). In this model the purpose of leadership is to ensure that tomorrow will be better than today. Transfer of learning Linking development to business is assisted by using learning material that is clearly relevant to the business and directly impacts on learners’ jobs. These criteria are frequently unmet. Developers often choose the convenience and apparent cost and time effectiveness of generic materials (such as longstanding, well-researched case studies) rather than using material based on the current organizational and business context and the preoccupations and needs of their learners. They frequently place learning efficiency (a teaching/input consideration) ahead of learning effectiveness (an application/output/outcome consideration). Alternatively, they may deliberately offer appealing experiences that are significantly different from work and psychologically ‘safe’. These include personal growth and team development through outdoor challenges, and exploring the leadership styles of others, such

200 William Tate as Shakespearean characters. All such methods leave learners to find their own ways of transferring their learning back into their real work lives. The consequence is that the further the materials and experiences are from the actuality, the greater is the gulf to be bridged. Mole argues forcibly that ‘it is the issue of training transfer which gives the ultimate lie to genre training as an effective method of management development and places it in its rightful domain, management entertainment’ (1996: 13). He offers some tests. These include the question of the resemblance between the learning experience and the work, the familiarity of trainers with the work (job, organization and industry), and the nature of the involvement of the learner’s management before and after training. There is a further dimension to the ‘reality’ issue. Using company-specific material because of its direct relevance to real work issues assumes that all the learners may be from the same unit. This strengthens collegiate support for behaviour changes back at work. Yet the impact of learning with and from strangers and even those from other sectors, with different goals, backgrounds, circumstances and worldviews, can be a powerful experience. In a South-WestEngland-based, mixed-sector and mixed-size programme, managers from NatWest Investment Bank claimed to learn a lot about customer service from a local hairdresser (Centre for Tomorrow’s Company 2000). The case for greater proximity is not all one way. However, in respect of the favourable transfer of learning to work, the greater the face validity of the learning, the better the prospects appear to be. The options facing developers in choosing a learning experience are shown on the continuum set out in Figure 11.3. Whilst the use of abstract learning material may be difficult for learners to relate to, as well as generating a transfer problem, the use of real learning material (i.e. the company’s own current issues) is open to misuse. The British Bakeries example shows how ‘reality’ is a matter of degree.

CASE STUDY BRITISH BAKERIES British Bakeries used to train its heads of departments in the skills of developing strategies for their own functional areas. Learning as a team under the expert guidance of business educators, they had to produce a radical business strategy for the whole company. They were then required to present their new business strategy to their board of directors. The learning was a rich experience for the managers and the resulting strategy was of high quality. Having worked on and off for several months, the managers became very attached to their strategy and considered it superior to their board’s. They were shocked when the board politely listened but then did nothing with their strategy, correctly reminding the ‘learners’ that it was no more than a learning exercise (i.e. position 3, ‘potentially real’ on the continuum in Figure 11.3) because that was the deal they had struck with the developers.

The problem with British Bakeries arose because the learners experienced the chosen material as ‘live reality’ (position 4 on the continuum). However, the sponsor and developers had decided that, despite its ‘reality’, the exercise was for learning purposes only (position 3). Reflect for a moment: how could the board directors realistically have been expected to admit

Linking development with business 201 1 VISIBLY FALSE

Patently removed from real work life (e.g. outdoor pursuits and games such as how to survive on the moon)

2 OSTENSIBLY REALISTIC

3 POTENTIALLY REAL

4 LIVE REALITY

Resembles typical work-type material, but not actually the learner’s own or his/her company’s

Genuine learner’s company material, but agreed for use only as learning opportunity

The learner’s own work problems and needs in a context from which to learn and take action

Figure 11.3 False–real learning materical continuum Source: Tate (1995a).

that their subordinates’ business strategy might be superior to their own? The contract between the parties was flawed and dangerously raised the learners’ expectations. An example of how to overcome the problem is offered by British Airways.

CASE STUDY BRITISH AIRWAYS The airline designed a management development programme aimed directly at the real business. It got its senior management, again learning off the job in teams and under expert tuition, to examine the changing nature of the competition. The managers learned the techniques and skills of competitor analysis by working on current material about Air France, Lufthansa, KLM, etc. They not only acquired new skills that they could use in the future, but took away with them completed up-to-date competitor analyses which they could immediately use back at work. Besides shortcutting the learning transfer problem, note how this is a rare example of level 4 on the individual, collective, organizational, business scale.

The level 3 systemic leadership approach described earlier brings teams of managers together in a way that is, at the same time, developmental for the managers themselves. Day (2001) suggests that instead of starting with individuals as the unit of analysis for leadership development programmes, and then attempting to translate their individual learning into changes in performance within their parent organizations, it may be more effective to start with an organizational or inter-organizational network as the unit of analysis, and to aim to develop the whole leadership team as a working unit (Bennington and Hartley 2009). Brown draws on best practice cases in advising that Effective leadership development requires a systems approach combining formal training, on-the-job coaching, and developmental assignments in a mutually reinforcing way. This is achieved by closely linking leadership development to organizational culture and business goals . . . Individuals and organizations find that the line between work and

202 William Tate learning is becoming blurred. Learning is part of getting work done; it is both an input and an output. (Brown 1999–2000: 13) As a broad generalization, learning appears most likely to be effective in realizing changed action in the workplace if it does the following (Tate, 2009a: 134): • • • • •

takes place with colleagues rather than strangers; develops collective capability; focuses on the organization and business, not just the individual’s ability; integrates with complementary action that is designed to improve related system variables; makes use of real material rather than abstract/generic examples.

There are times when exceptions to the above are necessary and indeed desirable. The executive coaching model doesn’t satisfy all the above criteria (the executive is not normally learning alongside colleagues) but is still able to bring learning and business into close proximity. Whichever learning approach is used, it is important to have a clear understanding between all the parties about the nature of the learning experience and its relationship to workplace reality and the organization’s needs.

Summary Not all development is undertaken with the employer as the explicit client and with organization-level improvement in mind, but that which is designed from this perspective is likely to be better served if a number of principles are observed. Key among these is regarding development as one improvement method with a clear business-related purpose in mind, undertaken in conjunction with other reinforcing activity. Supporting this is the placing of the output (leadership practice) ahead of the input (developing capability). That requires recognizing the organization as a system and managing leadership as one of its prime resources. This legitimizes interventions aimed at the system as well as at the person. It means optimizing existing leadership talent and avoiding waste, as well as enhancing further levels of talent through development processes. To achieve that calls for co-operation and co-ordination between HR specialists involved at all points on the employment spectrum. Designing appropriate learning calls for political and practical judgements that focus on what will be relevant and can and will be supported and applied. It means tackling the thorny issue of an explicit or implicit contract between the parties as a way of managing expectations and building open relationships. With the aim of making developers’ activities more directly serve their business’s needs and deliver needed business outcomes, the box below offers a practical framework. It will help developers to challenge their own assumptions, and plan how to modify their relationships and practices with their various stakeholders.

Linking development with business 203

Decision-making structure for strengthening development links with business: questions for developers to ask themselves 1 • • • • •

Stakeholders Who are my key stakeholders? Who impacts on my work? Who is impacted by my work? How am I held to account? By whom? What duty do I owe to my organization sponsor? What duty do I owe to learners in my charge? How clear is my contract with the various parties?

2 • • • •

Business know-how What more should I know about the current and future business? What is changing about what managers should learn? How can I find out more about the chief executive’s preoccupations? How can I build a better relationship between development and business leaders?

3 • •

Horizontal integration How can development professionals work more closely with other HR specialists? How can development activity reinforce, and be reinforced by, other employment levers?

4 • • •

Organization development How can the leadership and management culture be improved? How can the management hierarchy work more effectively? How can I help to remove obstacles in the path of learners?

5 • •

Needs analysis What are the organization’s needs for improved leadership and management? Which of these needs are best met by development activity? And which by other forms of improvement? Where is leadership and management talent leaking away? How can the loss be stemmed? What are the main gaps in the organization that development activity can help plug? If leadership and management are regarded as resources not to be squandered, how well are they being managed? How can I surround managers and leaders with all ingredients necessary to get ‘the painting, not the artist’?

• • • •

6 •

Balance What balance do I seek between training to solve short-term known needs and sustain the current business, and developing talent for future unspecified needs and tomorrow’s business model?

204 William Tate •

How much time relatively do I spend developing individuals, teams and groups, the organization as a system, the business entity?

7 •

Systemic How can I improve my expertise in ‘systems thinking’ and applying OD to leadership? How can I gain a remit and access into the systemic domain?

• 8 •

The role of business in society What role should I play in developing managers and leaders attuned to society’s expectations of business?

9 • • •

Transfer of learning How wide is the gap between learning and action? How can my design of learning interventions minimize that gap? How can I and others help learners bridge that gap?

10 Evaluation model • How can I focus more on ‘are learners doing anything different?’ and ‘is the business benefiting?’, than ‘did they enjoy it?’ and ‘did they learn anything?’ 11 Private conscience • How much do I really care about the business as long as I help individual managers learn? • How much do I care about how well the organization works as a system to deliver leadership? • How much do I want to develop managers to undermine rather than support their bosses? • What risks do I fear in attempting to more closely meet the business’s needs? • How much do I want to be left with a free hand even though it might not be healthy for the organization?

Chapter summary 1

2

3

The important question of whether and how development interventions should relate to the host business’s needs and organizational context should be seriously considered and analysed. In practice, generic approaches are often favoured by developers, mostly for reasons of convenience, raising misgivings about the transferability of learning to managers’ jobs in the real world. Gaining an understanding of what leadership means for the organization and what it needs enables it to pull appropriate development to itself, rather than being vulnerable to development providers who push their commercial offerings onto prospective clients. The result is a better match between supply and demand. There are many means of providing practical links between development and an organization. Vertical links may connect individuals through their jobs to planned

Linking development with business 205

4

5

6

change and the business’s future. Horizontal links may align the various HR levers so that they act together to improve leadership as a well-managed resource. Thinking about leadership improvement as well as development opens the mind to a wider range of activity. Ultimately, this can take in leadership improvement action that targets the way the system works to deliver and make use of leadership, rather than being limited to individuals and enhancing their personal leadership capability. Important though development is as a means, ultimately what matters is the end to which it is put. For this reason, leadership improvement ultimately embraces issues such as ensuring that leadership capability – with or without development enhancement activity – is not blocked or wasted by the organization, and is also monitored and held to account for delivering a well-led business. Leadership improvement can be brought about through a mix of management development (MD) and organization development (OD). While MD concentrates on what lies at the heart of an individual’s capability and practice, OD concentrates on what surrounds individuals and affects their opportunities, motivation, behaviour and performance; i.e. what goes on between and around individuals and between them and the system of which they are a part.

Questions for discussion 1 2 3 4

What are the key differences between leader development and leadership improvement? What does it mean to conceive of leadership as a ‘system resource’? What practical steps can those customers and providers planning leadership improvement take in order to ensure a sound link with business outcomes? What would it take to allow the kind of changes in approach advocated in this chapter to happen in reality?

References Atkinson, S. and Meldrum, M. (1998) ‘Don’t waste money on management development’, Organisations & People, November: 4–10. Bennington, J. and Hartley, J. (2009) Whole Systems Go: Improving Leadership Across the Whole Public Service System, report by the Sunningdale Institute, National School of Government. Brown, P. (1999–2000) ‘New directions in leadership development: a review of trends and best practices’, Public Manager, Winter: 37–41. Burke, W. W. (1972) ‘The role of training in organization development’, Training and Development, American Society for Training and Development, 26 (9): 30–4. Burke, W. W. and Litwin, G. H. (1992) ‘A causal model of organizational performance and change’, Journal of Management 18 (3): 523–45. CEML (2002) Managers and Leaders: Raising our Game, London: Council for Excellence in Management and Leadership. Centre for Tomorrow’s Company (2000) Pathfinder Programme, London: Centre for Tomorrow’s Company. Chapman, J. A. (1991) ‘Matching people and organizations’, Administrative Science Quarterly, 36: 459–84. Clarke, M. (1999) ‘Management development as a game of meaningless outcomes’, Human Resource Management Journal, 9 (2): 38–49. Court, S., Young, D. and Chambers, C. (2002) Developing Managers for Business Performance, London: Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development. Day, D. (2000) ‘Leadership development: A review in context’, Leadership Quarterly, Vol. 11, 581–613.

206 William Tate EFQM (2002) Business Excellence Model, London: European Foundation for Quality Management. Ezzamel, M., Lilley, S., Wilkinson, A. and Wilmott, H. (1996) ‘Practices and practicalities in human resource management’, Human Resource Management Journal 6 (1): 63–80. Gallwey, T. (2003) The Inner Game of Work: Overcoming Mental Obstacles for Maximum Performance, Los Angeles: Texere Publishing. Glatter, R. (2008) ‘Of Leadership, Management and Wisdom’, Report for the National College of School Leadership, UK. Gosling, J. and Ashton, D. (1994) ‘Action learning and academic qualifications’, Management Learning 25 (2): 263–74. Hartley, J. and Hinksman, B. (2003) Leadership Development: A Systematic Review of the Literature, report for the NHS Leadership Centre, Coventry: Warwick Business School. Hopfl, H. and Dawes, F. (1995) ‘A whole can of worms! The contested frontiers of management development and learning’, Personnel Review, 24 (6): 19–28. Horne, M. and Stedman Jones, D. (2001) Leadership: The Challenge for All, London: Institute of Management (now the Chartered Management Institute). James, K. (2002) Leadership and Management Excellence: Corporate Development Strategies, London: Council for Excellence in Management and Leadership. James, K. and Burgoyne, J. (2002) Leadership Development: Best Practice Guide for Organizations, London: Council for Excellence in Management and Leadership. John, K. A., Northcraft, G. B. and Neale, M. A. (1999) ‘Why differences make a difference’, Administrative Science Quarterly, 44: 741–63. Katz, D. and Khan, R. L. (1978) The Social Psychology of Organisations, New York: Wiley. McHale, J. (2000) ‘Thought for tomorrow’, People Management, 20 January: 54. Mole, G. (1996) ‘The management training industry in the UK: an HRD director’s critique’, Human Resource Management Journal, 6 (1): 19–26. Pedler, M., Burgoyne, J. and Boydell, T. (1991) The Learning Company: A Strategy for Sustainable Development, Maidenhead: McGraw-Hill. Performance and Innovation Unit (2000) Effective Leadership in Delivering Public Services (study), London: HM Government Cabinet Office. —— (2001) Strengthening Leadership in the Public Sector (report), London: HM Government Cabinet Office. Rainbird, H. (1994) ‘The changing role of the training function: a test for the integration of human resource and business strategy’, Human Resource Management Journal, 5 (1): 72–90. Sadler, P. (1999) Leadership in Tomorrow’s Company, London: Centre for Tomorrow’s Company. Senge, P., Roberts, C., Ross, R., Smith, B. and Kleiner, A. (1994) The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook: Strategies and Tools for Building Learning Organizations, London: Nicholas Brealey. Storey, J. and Tate, W. (2000) ‘Management development’, in S. Bach and K. Sisson (eds) Personnel Management, 3rd edn, Oxford: Blackwell. Storey, J., Mabey, C. and Thomson, A. (1997) ‘What a difference a decade makes’, People Management, 12 June: 28–30. Tate, W. (1995) Developing Corporate Competence: A High-Performance Agenda for Managing Organizations, Aldershot: Gower. —— (2000) Implications of Futures Studies for Business, Organisation, Management and Leadership, London: Council for Excellence in Management and Leadership. —— (2003) The Organisational Leadership Audit, Cambridge: Cambridge Strategy Publications. —— (2005) ‘Training people for a better future’, Finance Today, May. —— (2006) ‘Looking inside the organisation for leadership’, Developing HR Strategy, May. —— (2007) ‘Organisational leadership wins’, CEO Today, October. —— (2009a) The Search for Leadership: An Organisational Perspective, Axminster: Triarchy Press. —— (2009b) Systemic Leadership Toolkit, Axminster: Triarchy Press.

12 Leadership development in multinational firms Paul Evans, Adam Smale, Ingmar Björkman and Vladimir Pucik

Chapter outline This chapter: • • • •

Emphasizes the importance of international firms. Argues that there are significant challenges in seeking to extend leadership capability from a domestic to an international level – described as the problem of ‘intransitivity’. Walks the reader through the key steps required to identify and grow global leadership capability. Identifies a series of tensions and dilemmas and offers practical advice for their resolution.

The task of developing global leaders is a priority for multinational firms. Even in international firms that normally pay scant corporate attention to human resource management, leadership development is invariably an area of top management concern (Scullion and Starkey 2000). In one 2007 survey of corporations in forty countries, over 75 per cent of senior HR executives cited the development of future leaders as a critical challenge (IBM 2008; see also DDI 2009). With accelerating globalization (Evans et al. 2010), surveys of Fortune 500 enterprises have shown that 85 per cent were concerned about the insufficient supply of global leaders – people with the ability to manage uncertainty, and with the organizational and business savvy and the cross-cultural skills needed to run such an organization (Gregersen et al. 1998; Black et al. 1999; Ready and Conger 2007). It is above all the explosive growth in emerging markets that fuels the gap.1 In the BRIC countries of Brazil, Russia, India and China, the shortage of management talent is most acute at senior country levels (Ready et al. 2008). Indeed, rapid growth combined with a small pool of experienced leaders means that the lack of global leadership skills has been the primary workforce challenge for enterprises in Asia-Pacific, as well as Latin America (IBM 2008). So this is a problem confronting not just Western firms, but also acting as a brake on the growth of multinational firms based in those emerging countries. Despite recognizing its importance, multinational firms face a number of challenges in developing global leaders. In this chapter, we focus on those that stem from the ‘intransitivity’ of leadership in multinational firms (that is, the difficulties of translating leadership capability at one level to capable accomplishment at the next level). We also highlight dilemmas in identifying and developing potential leaders and discuss some of the weaknesses of existing leadership development practices. We conclude the chapter by outlining one of the frontiers for research and practice, also presenting arguments for how global leadership development, despite its complexities, can facilitate global co-ordination in such firms.

208 Paul Evans, Adam Smale, Ingmar Björkman and Vladimir Pucik

Leadership intransitivity in multinational firms Although many believe that global leadership requires different skills from ‘domestic’ leadership, there is no accepted definition of the global leadership construct or established body of tested theory. Still, a substantial literature has developed over the last decade addressing the questions of what skills global leaders need to be effective and how these skills can be developed (e.g. McCall and Hollenbeck 2002; Caligiuri 2006; Mendenhall 2006; Mendenhall et al. 2008). One of the limits to the idea of mapping out global leadership competences is that the leadership skills needed at one level in the multinational firm are different from those needed at the next level. A long tradition of research, gaining momentum in the last decade, has explored this notion of leadership ‘intransitivity’, the recognition of which goes back forty years to the humorous ‘Peter Principle’.2 The challenges of making the transition to a new role as a leader, requiring a new identity, have been explored by Kotter (1990), Hill (1992), McCall (2004), and Guillen and Ibarra (2009), among others. For example, Kotter (1990) argued that leadership involves a set of behaviours that differ from managerial behaviours. Considerable research suggests important skill changes as individuals transition from novice to middle and on to senior leadership levels (Lord and Hall 2005). Charan et al. (2001) developed the concept of the ‘leadership pipeline’ as a series of leadership transitions, where each new role requires different skills from those required in the previous position. Prior to globalization, managers moved upwards in the organization into bigger and bigger general management roles; Bartlett and Ghoshal (1997) used the image of the matryoshka, or Russian doll, to capture this. But with increasing internationalization, they argued that the shift towards transnational enterprise is increasing the degree of leadership intransitivity. In a fast-moving, competitive global environment, strategic initiatives come from the operating-level managers, not from top management. The operating managers heading up business units and subsidiaries need to be aggressive entrepreneurs, creating and pursuing new business opportunities, as well as attracting and developing resources, including people. In contrast, the senior managers heading up businesses and countries/regions, to whom these entrepreneurs report, need to be integrative coaches with strong skills in lateral co-ordination, able to cope with the complexity of vertical and horizontal responsibilities simultaneously. They must be able to stretch, and at the same time to support, the local units; facilitate crossborder learning; and to build strategy out of entrepreneurial initiatives. Finally, top managers need to be institutional leaders with a longer time horizon, nurturing strategic development opportunities, managing organizational cohesion through global processes and normative integration, and creating an overarching sense of purpose and ambition. We suggest that rather than trying to map the skills of a global leader, more empirical research is needed to understand the skill requirements at different levels of multinational firms. This intransitivity has important implications for global leadership development. Many people who perform well in entrepreneurial leadership roles at the operating level will find it difficult to adjust to more ambiguous roles as lateral co-ordinators and integrators in business areas or regions. Those individuals who have the potential to master such a transition need to be identified, and appropriate developmental experiences need to be provided to build the new skills they will need. In this chapter, we focus in particular on the transition from operational roles to business-area or regional leadership positions.

Identifying global leadership potential Selection involves identifying the most suitable person from a pool of candidates – internal and/or external. It focuses on assessing the fit between the candidates and the job or career

Multinational firms 209 opportunity – here the future global leadership role. The way in which this is done may involve bias, so selection is closely linked to the management of cultural, gender and other forms of diversity. There is broad agreement among both practitioners and scholars that there is no universal approach to selection. Selection is the area of human resource management (HRM) where cultural and institutional differences play the biggest role.3 The traditional ways of selecting people for leadership roles – of identifying potential – vary from company to company and from nation to nation. But the prevailing pattern today in international corporations is what we call the multinational model of internal selection. According to this model, local companies recruit and develop professionals for functional jobs, and individuals from within these ranks are subsequently identified as high potential using assessment centres, local nominations, exceptional salary reviews, and other mechanisms. One recent survey found that 60 per cent of large corporations used this approach, asking local companies to identify talent that can be moved into corporate development programmes.4 There are several dilemmas involved in the process of identifying global leadership talent and deciding who should get the most rewarding developmental opportunities. We focus on those dilemmas that are particularly salient to the multinational setting. When to identify potential? A lot of career politics are associated with getting visibility early on in the eyes of top management in order to secure the challenging jobs that count. However, there are dilemmas associated with the age at which potential should be identified – early or late? Japanese companies have historically identified potential at the time of graduate recruitment, leading to an extended developmental trial period (Pucik 1984; Evans et al. 2010). This makes sense in a culture where individuals pursue lifelong careers in the same firm. In Anglo-Saxon countries, however, other firms are likely to poach high potentials, especially if the enterprise has a reputation for selection and development. This happened to P&G in the 1980s and early 1990s when it developed a reputation as a top-notch incubator, feeding the management ranks of competitors in the fast-moving consumer products industry. Japanese firms can maintain their own approach because it is still virtually impossible for Western firms to lure away top Japanese leadership talent. Alternatively, one could argue for the late identification of talent, by which time experience and track record enable one to make good judgements on potential. However, this strategy is similarly flawed, since there is insufficient time for high pay-off developmental actions.5 If talented international staff are identified much later than those in the home country, their leadership prospects will be compromised. Indeed, this may be a factor explaining why GE has been less successful in developing high-potential leaders from their Asian operations. Talented individuals in the US were spotted much earlier than their counterparts in Asia – Immelt came to the attention of Welch when he was 27 – but, until recently, GE had no regional corporate offices outside the US that could take on the task of identifying and developing regional talent. How much transparency? A key challenge in multinational firms is procedural justice, ensuring that the evaluation of performance is undertaken on a globally consistent basis. However, once a judgement has been made about who has potential, there are often dilemmas concerning the appropriate degree of transparency about the decision.

210 Paul Evans, Adam Smale, Ingmar Björkman and Vladimir Pucik Multinational firms from distinctively egalitarian cultures such as the Nordic countries wrestle with the issue of whether or not to inform high potentials about their status after talent reviews, sometimes based on forced ranking. The differential treatment of such employees in terms of developmental support or compensation can be a sensitive matter. If the status of high potentials is not made public, this can lead to frustration and turnover amongst high performers who do not feel adequately recognized. However, if high-potential status is communicated, there are two corresponding fears: first, good performers who were not identified as having high potential are likely to lose motivation and leave; and second, false expectations about advancement might be raised amongst those identified as having potential. The former is unavoidable, endemic to any ‘quota’ process, and one can argue that keeping people in the dark about their career progress in the hope that they will stay in the firm is shortsighted, if not unethical. As for the second fear, if one accepts that people develop through challenge, then one consequence of being identified as high potential is stretch. It is both difficult and ill-advised to hide this, though most companies choose to announce it with a certain amount of discretion. Some companies have responded to these dilemmas by encouraging self-nomination instead of top-down identification. Commonwealth Edison in the US allows people to nominate themselves as high potentials, submitting a list of peers and superiors who will be asked to provide references, similar to the process of tenure review in the academic world. At Tatweer, a Dubai group, employees must apply for a place on a high-potential programme, going through a challenging process of assessment and reviews with outside consultants. They are then expected to continue to perform at a high level in their current job while they participate in the programme. Those who are not truly motivated and capable will simply shy away.6 Some of the risks associated with transparency can be minimized by ensuring that judgements on potential are reviewed regularly. By demonstrating that talent pool inclusion is a dynamic process, those who are not yet identified as high potential have an incentive to work themselves into the designated talent pool; while those that are labelled as high potential realize that they need to continue to prove themselves in order to progress in their career. The quality of these periodic reviews is arguably one of the most important aspects of talent management. Who should be accountable? If the skill requirements at one level of responsibility are different from those at the next level of leadership, there are good arguments for suggesting that the process of identification and development of high-potential individuals should be managed by the corporation or region, not by the business or country. GE and other firms are explicit about this: those individuals become what many multinationals call, formally or informally, corporate property. Therein lies a major challenge for many multinational corporations, especially those coming from a heritage of local responsiveness – how to get the local company to pay attention to leadership development at early career stages. In a tightly run, cost-conscious local operation, there may not be much room for high-potential people with advanced degrees and high expectations but no hands-on experience. Furthermore, operationally oriented local HR managers may be ill-equipped to cope with the challenges of recruiting, developing and retaining such individuals. In some cultures, senior management may also be reluctant to recruit young people who want to go beyond the job by exercising initiative. An additional obstacle for leadership identification in multinationals is the natural tendency of subsidiary managers to act in their own interests and hide their best people (Mellahi and Collings 2010). The more one praises an indispensable individual, the more likely it is that the person will be moved elsewhere in the name of corporate leadership

Multinational firms 211 development. A survey of HR executives from multinational firms singled out this problem as one of the major challenges in talent management (Guthridge et al. 2008). Consequently, chief executives such as A. G. Laffley of Procter & Gamble (P&G) are adamant about the importance of releasing talent, since talent development is a corporate value on a par with financial performance.7 For them, hiding talent is an act of corporate disloyalty. In the past, one might have expected loyal expatriates, representing the corporate perspective, to combat such a silo tendency; but in many markets the senior ranks are increasingly local. Therefore, nurturing talent has often become a key responsibility of regional management, or of an experienced local HR manager who works with subsidiaries across the region. Schlumberger, the world’s leading oilfield services provider, navigates this issue by reengineering the whole process. In countries where local management is operationally focused and strongly technical in orientation, the corporate or regional HR function recruits highpotential individuals, who are then placed in entry-level functional jobs in a third country with a reputation as a talent incubator. When these recruits have successfully mastered the core operational roles, they are repatriated to their home country for the next step as engineering or service managers – ready to move again as they progress through the organization. How to avoid bias in global talent reviews? In many firms, talent reviews are guided by a three-by-three matrix or similar framework, structuring the differentiation of individuals on performance, potential and/or behavioural fit with values. By way of example, Novartis evaluates its managers on two dimensions – whether they exceeded, fully met or only partially met expectations on performance objectives, with a similar three categories on expectations regarding desired leadership behaviours and conformity to corporate values (Chua et al. 2005). While it is expected that a majority of managers will fall into the central cell of the resulting nine-box matrix, attention is focused on those in the four corner cells. The purpose of differentiation is not just to place people’s names in boxes, but to ensure that an open dialogue takes place about per-formance, assessment and development implications. However, it is not uncommon in many multinational firms for reviews to be nothing more than formal rituals performed by a quasirepresentative committee of stakeholders defending their favourite candidates. More specifically, one pitfall is that these reviews are often biased against managers who are far away from the home country and who do not have personal relationships with key decision makers sitting at headquarters (Mellahi and Collings 2010). An individual seen by locals as a strong contributor with high potential may be given only token consideration by the people with power at head office. Consciously or unconsciously, they do not trust local inputs and ratings, and they give at best a formal stamp of approval to the person. Moreover, there is an inevitable halo effect – candidates who share certain similarities with the evaluators are judged as having higher potential (Mäkelä et al. 2010). Local units learn that their views are not taken into account, so they start taking the process lightly – the makings of a selffulfilling prophecy. The consequence will often be that the best local employees will look for opportunities outside the firm; at which point, head office says, ‘why bother to invest in them, as they will leave in any case?’ To minimize such risks, companies may follow the example of GE and make sure that their senior executives get to know local talent. That someone who may be less qualified gets a promotion or developmental opportunity is not the most important consequence of biased decisions – people’s qualifications can often be debated. The important consequence is the loss of procedural justice and diminished credibility of both the review and the appointment-making process in the eyes of managers (and potential leaders) around the world. The process is seen as biased and unfairly loaded,

212 Paul Evans, Adam Smale, Ingmar Björkman and Vladimir Pucik and it gradually becomes a time-consuming formality that adds little real value, undermining the credibility of the HR function in a wider sense. Exemplified by GE’s so-called ‘Session C reviews’,8 the quality of information, candid dialogue among line executives, and professional preparation by both line and HR should lie at the heart of the talent review. A number of these aspects of leadership development are illustrated in the case of General Electric, as shown below.

CASE STUDY LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT AT GENERAL ELECTRIC (GE) The idea behind GE’s famed leadership engine, the origins of which go back nearly a hundred years, is that a leader is a steward of human capital, whose primary job is to leave a legacy of talent that can carry the company forward. Building on his predecessors’ emphasis on merit, Jack Welch as CEO brought added candour and honesty when he took ‘Session C’, General Electric’s core process for talent review, development planning and succession management, out into the businesses. Every spring, the CEO and senior vice president of HR visit each of GE’s operating units and hold a day-long audit, assessing the performance of the management team and the potential of rising talent. A follow-up takes place six months later. ‘We have made leadership development the most important element in our work’, said Welch. ‘We focus on some aspect of it every day. It is in our blood. We put people in the right job and let them develop a strategy, in that order. You can’t start with strategy and then appoint someone to execute it. So my most important job is to choose and develop business leaders who are bright enough to grasp the elements of their game, creative enough to develop a simple vision, and self-confident enough to liberate and inspire people.’A To drive this, Welch used metrics in the shape of a ‘vitality curve’, where individuals were ranked into As (top 20 per cent), Bs (middle 70 per cent), and Cs (bottom 10 per cent) on performance, potential and fit with company values. Linking this to rewards – and punishments, since the bottom 10 per cent would not be there next time around – created shock waves around the world. ‘I own the managers,’ Welch said to GE’s businesses. ‘You only rent them from me.’ His successor, Jeff Immelt, is equally committed to talent management. ‘Every initiative I’m thinking about gets translated into recruiting, Crotonville [training], and Session C.’B For example, to translate innovation into action, each business was asked to identify five high-level ‘pillar jobs’ that involve the challenge of building customer-facing innovation. Top management reserves the right to fill these positions with the candidates of their choice. In this way, GE makes sure that its best people will be given the challenge of leading a breakthrough opportunity that, if successful, could be grown into a new business. Nevertheless, the globalization of leadership development remains a challenge. Welch often hinted that his successor could be from another country, or would at least have extensive international experience. Yet Immelt never held a position outside the US, and in 2009 only one of the top eighteen corporate executives was not an American. Still, Immelt and his colleagues go out of their way to meet with high potentials when they are on trips abroad, and GE continues to win nominations as one of the best three companies in the world for developing leaders.C

Multinational firms 213 Notes A B C

‘Follow the Leader’, Industry Week, November 18, 1996: 16. Bartlett, C. A. and McLean, A. N. (2003) ‘GE’s talent machine: The making of a CEO’, Case Study No. 12128659, Harvard Business School, Boston. An annual award conducted by the Hay Group with Chief Executive Review, based on polling peers, academics and experts. GE won the award as best company for leaders in 2006 and 2007. P&G and 3M have also won this award in recent years. See www. chiefexecutive.net/articles/.

Going beyond identification The purpose of formally identifying and reviewing people with leadership potential is to ensure what we term ‘unnatural acts’ – value-added actions that would not happen unless attention has been paid to fair assessment of potential. An example of an unnatural act would be ensuring that local nationals who do not have an impressive education but who demonstrate high potential come to the attention of senior management; and that they are provided with special coaching to accompany a challenging project that would not otherwise have been assigned to them. In this respect, many multinational firms fall into the trap of engaging in excessive identification and assessment of potential, at the expense of development action. This is partly because the identification side of leadership development involves work that can be facilitated by the HR function, increasingly using globally standardized tools and processes. On the other hand, little on the development side can be undertaken by HR without the commitment of the business and local managers – apart from sending someone on a corporate training programme. This has a couple of important implications. First, companies are advised to be selective, even conservative, in their judgements about who is of high potential, because it is preferable to under-forecast than over-forecast future needs. Undertaking rigorous reviews – with action planning and follow-up, as GE undertakes with its Session C reviews – is time consuming, and not worth doing unless it is done well (see Evans, Pucik and Björkman (2010) for an outline of GE’s Session C, as well as the box above). If the focus is too broad, it will dilute the attention given to it by line managers. One survey of twenty-five multinationals concluded that no more than 5 per cent of the local workforce should be considered as high potential, and that the more successful organizations tended to have small talent pools that they reviewed regularly (Eddy et al. 2006). Second, senior line managers in the business or functional units must adopt a talent development mindset and take ownership of leadership identification and reviews. The HR function has to undertake important groundwork, but it is the attention of line managers and those at the top of the organization that counts. The CEO of P&G, cited above, comments: ‘I spend a third to half of my time on leadership development . . . Nothing I do will have a more enduring impact on P&G’s long-term success than helping to develop other leaders.’9 The challenges that multinationals like P&G face in developing global leaders is the focus of the next section.

214 Paul Evans, Adam Smale, Ingmar Björkman and Vladimir Pucik

Developing global leadership potential A common problem underlying most of the dilemmas that multinationals face when developing identified potential is the difficulty of optimizing both the short-term performance and long-term development of leaders. This is seen clearly in dilemmas around decision making on promotions and assignments. Balancing demand-driven and learning-driven assignments When planning appointments, there are often real trade-offs between immediate performance, which argues for appointing a manager with the skills and experience required, and learning and development, which will mean nominating a high-potential individual who will learn from the experience. This is similar to the distinction between demand-driven and learning-driven expatriation (Pucik 1992; Evans et al. 2010). One of the roles of the HR function should be to voice these trade-offs so they can be managed objectively. When a key position opens up in a unit, there will typically be a local functional candidate with many years of experience, a loyal and low-risk person who is sure to perform solidly. And there may be another candidate from the regional talent pool, an outsider to local operations, who has less experience but who might bring new ideas and extraordinary results, and develop into a higher-level executive. Who should get the position? There are no standard answers, though the preference of local management is usually clear. Unless there is a countervailing force in the shape of a strong regional HR manager who has the backing of senior line management, the conclusion is foregone. Paradoxically, the longer-term outcome is that local managers will continue to complain that senior leadership remains dominated by expatriates. In this sense, multinational leadership development has been appropriately described as guerilla warfare (McCall 1998). Cappelli (2008) points out, however, that great value in talent management comes from exactly that process of spotting ‘hidden’ local talent and nurturing its development, rather than developing more obvious talent that is already clearly labelled by degrees and qualifications, and thereby more likely to leave the firm for opportunities elsewhere. Nevertheless, companies often find it particularly difficult to find positions abroad for learning-driven development. Headquarters may have the clout and legitimacy to find such assignments for people from the home country – after all, there is typically a tradition of expatriation of home-country high potentials. However, although everyone may accept that China is a key future market, it is another matter to find developmental jobs for Chinese high potentials in the home country or nearby. ABB deals with this through norms of swapping – if you want to send someone abroad, you have to be prepared to take in someone from outside. 3M has a general principle that the country managing director should not be a local person, thereby ensuring opportunities for geographic mobility at senior levels. Focusing on A-positions as well as A-players Sustainable competitive advantage comes from building strong organizational capabilities that are hard for others to imitate. Leadership development should therefore ensure that future leaders acquire experience in domains regarded as key capabilities. In this sense, development discussions should not focus excessively on individuals – the so-called A-players – without considering the A-positions. A-positions refer to the ‘strategic’ jobs that are critical to a firm’s competitive advantage, as well as for the development of skills future leaders will

Multinational firms 215 need (Huselid et al. 2005; Boudreau and Ramstad 2005). For example, most people think about pilots as occupying the key positions in an airline, though in fact pilots are relatively easy to replace. Critical A-positions are often the roles of landing slot negotiators at major airports. GE translates its strategy of market innovation by identifying market-facing roles in developing new businesses as A-positions, or ‘pillar jobs’ as they call them. Indeed, the systematic identification of such positions that differentially contribute to an organization’s sustainable competitive advantage is advocated as the starting point for any strategic talent management system (Collings and Mellahi 2009) and a necessary precursor to firms pursuing a differentiated HRM architecture (Lepak and Snell 2002). Since one of P&G’s core capabilities focuses on trusted brands, virtually all high-potential leaders will move through a P&L position on a brand team – the plum jobs in that organization. In GE, these A-positions focus on business development as well as mergers and acquisitions management. The company then earmarks positions that are linked to strategic capabilities as corporate property. In tightly networked multinationals such as Nestlé, Shell and Unilever, the A-positions are a series of different types of positions across which high-potential individuals will be moved to develop the generalist perspective and skills that are deemed necessary for senior leadership positions. In effect, these career paths accentuate the development of firm-specific skills: mastering networks and understanding the complex value chain, as well as confronting specific business and organizational challenges.10 The flipside of this firm-specificity is that these individuals have fewer options at the same level of responsibility outside the firm should it become clear that their future within it is limited. Functional expertise travels well from firm to firm, but firm-specific, generalist experience has limited market value. Achieving the right amount of mobility Although some would like to believe that global leadership skills can be learned at home by working with a diverse workforce, it has been estimated that the experience of living and working overseas is indispensable for the development of over half of all significant global competencies (Hollenbeck and McCall 2001). Managed mobility (often called job rotation) is a critical lever for intransitive leadership development – moving people to new challenges outside their expertise so they will learn how to develop the integrative skills of setting direction, aligning people and focusing on strategic development, rather than exercising the authority of their expertise. However, there is a danger of taking learning and mobility to extremes. In this respect one could question the advice given by the authors of the McKinsey studies who suggested that ‘. . . after two or three years the learning curve in any position tends to flatten out, and capable people start to chafe . . . One company’s line executive held 18 positions in 24 years, and though not everyone can or should move so quickly, companies tend to leave executives in jobs much too long’ (Michaels et al. 2001). Too much mobility will compromise the ability to manage change – there is little that can be executed thoroughly in eighteen to twenty-four months, especially at middle and senior-management levels. After all, it is not strategy and plans that count, but the quality of their execution. This is the reason why one should talk of mobility rather than ‘job rotation’. Especially in emerging markets, where there are many career opportunities, in some companies rapidity of movement becomes a quasi-indicator of potential. This creates a zigzag management pattern where newly appointed leaders of local units seek out initiatives that respond to the strategic intentions of senior management. However, just when the initiatives

216 Paul Evans, Adam Smale, Ingmar Björkman and Vladimir Pucik are taking hold, the individual is promoted. If the successor is cut from the same cloth, s/he will take the unit off on a different initiative, since there are few rewards for implementing changes started by someone else. The consequence is that local organizations go through periodic campaigns – cost cutting, customer orientation, time-to-market and so forth – but never develop deep capabilities in any of these domains. Instead, the key to achieving the right amount of mobility should be to ensure that there is a clear link between accountability and tenure when planning assignments. If the assignment is learning-driven, aimed at building experience, it is unlikely that the individual will be accountable for performance and capability building; the assignment can be of short duration. But if the assignment is demand-driven, involving capability development, and if the individual is accountable for that performance, then that assignment will be of longer duration, depending on the time it takes to ensure effective implementation. Mobility is complemented by cross-boundary project assignments – what we call working in split-egg ways (Evans et al. 2010).11 According to a recent survey of 12,000 business leaders around the world, special projects within the job that allow cross-functional exposure, the honing of project management skills and fostering business acumen were at the top of the list of tools for effective leadership development (DDI 2008). Succession planning versus talent pools The process of reviews and planning development assignments is known as succession planning in some companies, leading ultimately to a fixed plan to fill positions as they become vacant. Succession planning is widely practised in Europe, but less so in the US except at the most senior levels; while in Asia succession planning has mostly been used at operational levels because of the severe talent shortages that companies experienced during the boom years (DDI 2008). Succession planning has come under attack for being excessively mechanical. In reality, the decision about who gets the job is all too often made through informal discussion without consulting the succession plan, which is sometimes viewed by line managers as little more than a ritual of the HR function. Indeed, in flat organizational hierarchies, the decision to indicate person X as a likely successor for position Y may be somewhat arbitrary. Also, the requirements for a role may change after the original plan was agreed, or a new CEO may have different criteria for leadership appointments. When only 60 per cent of the moves occur as planned, this may spill over into scepticism about the whole process of leadership development. In fact, in the US the majority of companies have abandoned all pretensions at succession planning (Cappelli 2008). Succession planning may be viable in slower-moving, predictable work environments, but in many firms it is complemented by talent-pool management. The advantage of talent pools over succession planning is that the former can be set up relatively quickly to form a reservoir of skills linked to critical organizational capabilities, which can then (in theory) allow firms to deploy these critical people across functions, businesses and geographies. The typical scenario in most multinational firms today is that the local business unit is expected to engage in succession planning in its own interest, while the region or corporate level maintains a talent pool of high-potential managers. When a position becomes vacant, the local unit will propose its own successor, while the corporate level will consult the talent pool (sometimes referred to as an acceleration pool) to see if there is a suitable individual who would benefit from the role and contribute to it. This leads to a review of who is the most appropriate candidate.

Multinational firms 217 It is then a short conceptual step for multinational firms to consider opening up the talent pool to all candidates, not just those on the regional or corporate list, especially if talent pool candidates end up filling most of the vacancies. This leads us to discuss an emerging challenge, that of balancing the top-down and bottom-up in global talent management.

Striking the right balance between top-down and bottom-up The approach to managing leadership development in multinationals, as we have outlined it, is naturally top-down, directed from the centre, because of the intransitive ‘unnatural acts’ that leadership development involves. The expense involved is justified by the fact that leadership development is a critical item on the strategic HRM agenda of most international enterprises, as mentioned at the outset of this chapter, typically driven by the CEO or other senior executive. But an open-market, individual-driven, bottom-up approach to talent management is spreading, often known as ‘open job resourcing’. Multinational firms will have to pay increasing attention to striking the right balance between the two approaches, which we would argue are not mutually exclusive. Some major corporations, like Carrefour and Honda, did not have a corporate HR function until a relatively late stage in their history, when it was created to manage global leadership development. Honda’s founder, Soichiro Honda, believed that people management and marketing were so important that he did not wish to compromise line management’s responsibility by functionalizing them. However, Honda found it had to make an exception for leadership development. Without a dedicated organization, functions and countries took local perspectives with too short a time horizon; leadership development took place within silos and without the necessary mobility. Until recently, leadership development has largely been managed in this top-down way, which means that the organization took the prime responsibility for managing the careers of its strategic talent. For non-strategic staff, external recruitment has come to prevail in the United States and increasingly throughout the world, complemented more and more by intranet-based, open job resourcing (internal labor markets). In some multinational firms, bottom-up staffing through open job markets is now spreading up the hierarchy to professionals and management (see Evans et al. (2010) and Cappelli (2008) for a more comprehensive overview of these issues). Accelerated by the global standardization of HR processes and the development of e-HR technology, the spread of bottom-up approaches is driven by the prospect of being able to deploy talented people and ideas across borders far more effectively, rapidly and cheaply than with conventional top-down methods. However, there are major obstacles to realizing these benefits. One of the far-reaching implications of open job resourcing is that the responsibility for career development shifts from the company to the individual. An increasing number of multinationals are now capitalizing on major investments they have made in self-help, ebased HR technology as well as standardized global HRM processes to develop platforms aimed at helping people to help themselves – albeit with the best interests of the firm in mind. In 2007, IBM created an e-platform that provides self-help in learning, networking, mentoring, career track management and other elements of traditional top-down career management. The firm has also completely changed its formerly secretive attitude about its work strategy to one of internal transparency. Cisco’s internal job market is built around a ‘jobs can find you’ principle, according to which people are expected continuously to look for job openings that correspond to their aspirations. On the company side, Cisco carefully plans the competences and roles needed to implement its short and medium-term strategy. These

218 Paul Evans, Adam Smale, Ingmar Björkman and Vladimir Pucik openings and the underlying strategy are made transparent through the intranet, and employees worldwide can apply for openings that most closely match their aspirations (Doz and Kosonen 2008). At Starwood Hotels, all positions up to the level of regional manager are posted on the global intranet, leading to increased mobility; though positions at and above regional manager are managed top down. Open job resourcing continues to spread upwards into the managerial ranks of multinational firms, though rarely if ever to the most senior levels. All positions at Hewlett-Packard, except for the top 100, are available on the internal open market, as they are at Microsoft. At Shell, positions up to the top 250 have been posted internally since 2002. Striking the right balance between a top-down and bottom-up approach to leadership development has become a question of how far down in the multinational firm to cascade centrally managed talent pools and globally standardized practices of leadership development – and how far up in the firm to allow individually driven practices such as posting jobs and developmental opportunities on internal job markets. We expect the interplay between topdown and bottom-up approaches in leadership, management and professional development to be one of the interesting frontiers for research and practice (see Evans et al. (2010) for a more extended discussion). We witnessed one major multinational that initially abandoned its well-honed traditional top-down management development processes when it put global open job resourcing into place, creating substantial confusion at the time. Recently the company has been learning how to mix effectively its top-down and bottom-up approaches to global talent management.

Leadership development as a facilitator of global co-ordination One of the reasons why top-down leadership development will persist for the foreseeable future in multinational firms is that leadership development is a powerful vehicle for global co-ordination. In the past that co-ordination was provided by the structure, with decisions referred up reporting lines to top management. However, that process was too slow and bureaucratic. Firms have therefore started to build lateral co-ordination mechanisms such as joint boards and steering groups. How can they go further? Explicit career pathing for highpotential leaders is one effective way. Let us take an inter-functional example. The firm specifies publicly that no one will get onto the management team in the commercial division unless they have proven themselves in at least one middle-level position for a reasonable period of time in the operations division – and vice versa. What are the consequences? First, the consequent mobility will develop a better quality of leadership, since managers are obliged to hone their leadership skills via cross-functional moves. Second, it ensures that the leaders at the top have broad perspectives, the ‘matrix in the mind’ that comes from assuming the responsibility for results in another discipline. Third, it builds relationships between key people in the two disciplines, with the trust that will allow them to work through inevitable differences in functional interest. And fourth, this changes the culture of the enterprise. Ambitious young professionals who want to move into leadership positions quickly learn that it is vital to be professionally competent in one’s base discipline, but also important to build networks and collaboration with other functions. Building co-ordination capabilities in a multinational firm requires ‘unnatural acts’ that will only occur if there is senior management intervention. If a company is to get out of its dependence on home-country expatriates in key positions, talented locals need experience in challenging line positions at the headquarters that will provide them with the matrix

Multinational firms 219 perspectives, the global mindset and the social networks to equip them for senior leadership positions in their regions. Yet these positions are precisely those that high-potential homecountry nationals are jockeying to obtain. Without strong top-down leadership, probably from the highest levels, the path to transnational ‘global and local’ organizational development will be inevitably slow.

Conclusion With the spread of multinational organizations, including new MNCs from emerging markets, the demand for global leaders with the skills to manage the complexity of such organizations has remained strong for several decades. But leadership development does not happen naturally because it involves intransitive development – what we call ‘unnatural acts’. Consequently leadership development in such firms involves selecting those who have the potential to master such transitions, and then developing corresponding leadership skills through appropriate challenges, mobility, coaching and training. The associated dilemmas that we have reviewed in this chapter become more acute as the talent pool in question moves from consisting of home-country expatriates to a global pool. These dilemmas are linked to traditional top-down leadership development. Meanwhile, open job resourcing, building on internal labour markets, is spreading upwards in organizations to professional and indeed managerial positions, facilitated in some firms by new e-based approaches to talent management as well as global standardization of HR processes. However, the top-down approach, which facilitates global co-ordination, is likely to remain in place for the most senior levels of leadership in multinationals.

Questions for discussion 1 2 3 4

What are the particular requirements and challenges facing leaders in a multinational firm? What do you understand by the term ‘intransitivity’? What would you identify as the most important dilemmas for a senior team seeking to grow global corporate leaders? What are the most important practical lessons contained within this chapter?

Notes 1 There has been only a slight dip in 2008/2009. Other factors influencing the gap include demographics (for example, the ageing of experienced executives in the West) and increasing inter-firm mobility. 2 The Peter Principle suggested that employees will rise in a hierarchy until they reach their level of incompetence (Peter and Hull 1969). It is a notion captured today in the popular Dilbert cartoons. 3 There is a vast research literature on selection methods and tests according to culture and context. See, for example, The International Journal of Selection and Assessment. See Brewster, Sparrow and Vernon (2007) for a more detailed overview from the perspective of the international corporation. 4 ‘Leadership 2012’, Research Report, Corporate University Xchange, Harrisburg, PA, 2007; cited by Cappelli (2008: 145). See Evans et al. (2010) for more information on the multinational model of internal selection. 5 This was shown by a natural experiment that occurred at Exxon some years ago. Many Exxon executives started their careers at one of the two refinery breeding grounds in the US. However, senior management consistently came from one of them, Baton Rouge. Why? Ultimately they found only one explanatory difference – at Baton Rouge, leadership potential was identified at age 27–28, whereas at the other refinery the target age was in the early 30s.

220 Paul Evans, Adam Smale, Ingmar Björkman and Vladimir Pucik 6 The Commonwealth Edison and Tatweer examples are taken from Cappelli (2008: 197–9). 7 ‘Best companies for leaders’, November 2005, www.chiefexecutive.net. 8 ‘Session C’ is a formal, multi-level review of organizational performance, and leadership assessment. It is an annual process that evaluates employees through a variety of tools including formal meetings, performance and promotability assessments, 360-degree feedback and identification of development needs of senior managers. This Session C framework and toolkit is also offered by GE’s consulting arm to other corporate clients. 9 ‘Best companies for leaders’, November 2005, www.chiefexecutive.net. 10 The idea of firm-specific leadership skills has been developed further by Ulrich and Smallwood (2007) using the concept of building a leadership brand. They regard about 60–70 per cent of leadership skills as generic (vision, the ability to deliver results, interpersonal skills, etc.) and 30–40 per cent as specific to the industry and the capabilities of the firm. 11 Rather than trying to resolve conflicting needs between local and global or short-term and longterm through matrix structures, managerial roles can be matrixed. The responsibility for strategic initiatives and lateral co-ordination is added to the operational responsibility of the manager, in what we call the manager’s project role. The manager now has two roles: operational and project. Our way of illustrating this is with an egg diagram, split into two – with the horizontal project role at the top and the vertical operational role at the bottom. Hence the term ‘split egg’ or matrix role (see Evans et al. (2010) for details). After settling into a new job, high potential managers are expected to spend, say, 30 per cent of their time or work on change or improvement projects with a longerterm and cross-boundary perspective, typically involving formal or informal teamwork. These managers are paid for their performance on their operational roles, but they are promoted because of the leadership initiatives that they take in their project roles.

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Multinational firms 221 Gregersen, H. B., Morrison, A. J. and Black, S. (1998) ‘Developing leaders for the global frontier’, MIT Sloan Management Review, Fall: 2–32. Guillen, L. and Ibarra, H. (2009) ‘Seasons of a leader’s development: Beyond a one-size fits all approach to designing interventions’, Academy of Management Proceedings, 1–6. Guthridge, M. and Komm, A. B. (2008) ‘Why multinationals struggle to manage talent’, McKinsey Quarterly, 2: 1–5. Hill, L. A. (1992) Becoming a Manager: Mastery of a New Identity, Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press. Hollenbeck, G. P. and McCall, M. W. (2001) ‘What makes a successful global executive?’, Business Strategy Review, 12 (4): 49–56. Huselid, M. A., Beatty, R. W. and Becker, B. E. (2005) ‘“A” players or “A” positions?’, Harvard Business Review, December: 110–17. IBM (2008) ‘Unlocking the DNA of the adaptable workforce: the global human capital study’ (URL: www.ibm.com/cy/pdfs/HR_Study_2008.pdf. Kotter, J. P. (1990) A Force for Change: How Leadership Differs From Management. New York: Free Press. Lepak, D. P. and Snell, S. A. (2002) ‘Examining the human resource architecture: the relationships among human capital, employment, and human resource configurations’, Journal of Management, 28: 517–43. Lord, R. G. and Hall, R. J. (2005) ‘Identity, deep structure and the development of leadership skills’; Leadership Quarterly, 16 (4): 591–615. Mäkelä, K., Björkman, I. and Ehrnrooth, M. (2010) ‘How do MNCs establish their talent pools? Influences on individuals’ likelihood of being labeled as talent’, Journal of World Business, 45 (2): 134–42. McCall, M. W. (2004) ‘Leadership development through experience’, Academy of Management Executive, 18 (3): 127–30. —— (1998) High Flyers: Developing the Next Generation of Leaders, Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press. McCall, M. W. and Hollenbeck, G. P. (2002) Developing Global Executives: The Lessons of International Experience, Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press. Mellahi, K. and Collings, D. G. (2010) ‘The barriers to effective global talent management: the example of corporate élites in MNEs’, Journal of World Business, 45 (2): 143–49. Mendenhall, M. E. (2006) ‘The elusive, yet critical challenge of developing global leaders’, European Management Journal, 24 (6): 422–9. Mendenhall, M. E., Osland, J. S., Bird, A., Oddou, G. R. and Maznevski, M. L. (eds) (2008) Global Leadership: Research, Practice and Development, London: Routledge. Michaels, E. H., Handfield-Jones, H. and Axelrod, B. (2001) The War for Talent, Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press. Peter, L. J. and Hull, R. (1969) The Peter Principle: Why Things Always Go Wrong, New York: William Morrow. Pucik, V. (1984) ‘White-collar human resource management in large Japanese manufacturing firms’, Human Resource Management, 23 (3): 257–76. —— (1992) ‘Globalization and human resource management’, in V. Pucik, N. M. Tichy and C. K. Barnett (eds) Globalizing Management: Creating and Leading the Competitive Organization, New York: Wiley. Ready, D. and J. Conger (2007) ‘Make your company a talent factory’, Harvard Business Review, June: 68–77. Ready, D., Hill, L. and Conger, J. (2008) ‘Winning the race for talent in emerging markets’, Harvard Business Review, November: 63–70. Scullion, H. and Starkey, K. (2000) ‘In search of the changing role of the corporate human resource function in the international firm’, International Journal of Human Resource Management, 11 (6): 1061–81. Stahl, G. K., Björkman, I., Farndale, E., Morris, S. S., Paauwe, J., Stiles, P., Trevor, J. and Wright, P. (2007) ‘Global talent management: How leading multinationals build and sustain their talent pipeline’, Faculty & Research Working Paper, INSEAD, Fontainebleau, France.

222 Paul Evans, Adam Smale, Ingmar Björkman and Vladimir Pucik Stahl, G. K., Chua, C. H. Caligiuri, P., Cerdin, J.-L. E. and Taniguchi, M. (2009) ‘Predictors of turnover intentions in learning-driven and demand-driven international assignments: the role of repatriation concerns, satisfaction with company support, and perceived career advancement opportunities’, Human Resource Management, 48 (1): 89–109. Ulrich, D. and Smallwood, N. (2007) Leadership Brand: Developing Customer-Focused Leaders to Drive Performance and Build Lasting Value, Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.

Part VI

Leadership and its development in the public sector

13 Leadership in public and third sector organizations Beverly Alimo-Metcalfe and Juliette Alban-Metcalfe

Chapter outline This chapter: • • • •

Explains the challenges facing those seeking to develop more effective leadership in public sector organizations. Links the idea of leadership with the concept of ‘engagement’. Describes a new model of engaging leadership and describes the research of its validity. Using case studies, shows how engaging leadership can be developed. As our public services face the reality of an end to the years of rapid growth in investment, it is hard to see how the quality of service we all aspire to see – employees and citizens alike – can be achieved without putting the enthusiasm, commitment and knowledge of public sector employees at the forefront of delivery strategies . . . Engagement, going to the heart of the workplace relationship between employer and employee, can be a key to unlocking productivity and to transforming the working lives of many people for whom Monday morning is an especially low point of the week. (David MacLeod in the preface to Engaging for Success: Enhancing Performance Through Employee Engagement, 2009: 3–4)

Organizations across the public sector face enormous challenges in aiming to provide services of the highest standards to their clients and service users, while operating with strictly limited resources. This is even truer during the present global economic climate than it was when the Cabinet Office Performance and Innovation Unit (PIU) produced the report ‘Strengthening Leadership in the Public Sector’ (2001). That report highlighted the need for modernization, and for closer orientation to the needs and wishes of customers: higher expectations of public services, and increasing opportunities for, and requirement for, partnerships both across the public sector and with private and voluntary organizations. At the same time, the Cabinet Office (ibid.) showed its awareness of the confusion surrounding the study of leadership. In this context, it was noted that, There is little shared understanding of the qualities required for effective leadership in today’s public services [and that] . . . Fundamental to improved leadership is a clearer shared understanding of what leadership behaviours work in delivering today’s services. (Key Findings, Section 3: 1)

226 Beverly Alimo-Metcalfe and Juliette Alban-Metcalfe More recently, with the greater realization that the challenges facing organizations, and society in general, are so complex and demanding that they cannot rely solely on those few people who occupy the most senior leadership positions, there has been a significant shift in the focus of leadership research. Researchers are moving away from a preoccupation with studying the characteristics of individuals who occupy formal leadership roles, to understanding the nature of leadership as a social process – and one that is distributed across the organization, irrespective of formal role or position in the hierarchy. The fact that times are going to be much tougher for organizations in the UK – particularly those in the public and third sector – in an era of global economic downturn, than they were in the late 1990s and the first few years of the new millennium, has focused the mind of senior management on the fact that organizations will have to get even more out of employees, and with fewer resources. However, while ‘getting more for less’ might be possible in the short term, if the method employed to achieve this ignores the potentially damaging impact on employee motivation, morale and well-being, not only will this be unethical, it will lack ‘business sense’ since any performance improvement will, at best, be short-lived. The priority of leadership must then be to address the question: How can we achieve continuous performance improvement, while reducing resources available, in a way that sustains, if not increases, staff morale and well-being? In line with this, there is a realization that the way organizations approach leadership development can no longer be aimed purely at supporting the strengthening of ‘human capital’ by investing mainly in leadership programmes for the few. They must do far more, and also ensure that there are strategies in place for building leadership capacity within the organization by focusing on strengthening ‘social capital’ more widely. This chapter will look at developments in leadership and its relationship to staff engagement, and will provide evidence that engagement works, as well as describing recent research into the nature of engaging leadership, and the validity of the model. Finally it will describe three case studies of how adopting this model of leadership as the basis for leadership development and cultural change initiatives has enabled organizations to become more effective, build their internal leadership capacity, and improve the services offered to the communities they serve.

Developing leaders or developing leadership? In a recent article, Iles and Preece pointed out that Leader development refers to developing individual-level intrapersonal competencies and human capital (cognitive, emotional and self-awareness skills, for example), while leadership development refers to the development of collective leadership processes and social capital in the organization and beyond, involving relationships, networking, trust and commitments, as well as an appreciation of the social and political context and its implications for leadership styles and actions. (2006: 325) This must surely be even more the case for public sector organizations. Thus, ‘Leadership development involves the development of leadership processes in addition to the development of individual leaders’ (Iles and Preece 2006: 323). Leadership development, then, which is predicated on a ‘distributed’ model of leadership, is about enabling individuals and groups to work together in meaningful ways. It has, as its goal, the building of social relationships involving all members of the community, both

Public and third sector organizations 227 internal and external to an organization, in order to respond proactively and effectively to changing circumstances, and thereby achieve organizational and societal goals. What form of leadership is required? As described in Chapter 2 of this book, notions of leadership have changed over the period during which it has been the subject of formal study, in large part affected by changes in society. ‘New paradigm’ thinking, with its emphasis on ‘charisma’, ‘vision’, and ‘transformation’, had the tenor of ‘distant’, often ‘heroic’ leadership, (e.g. Alimo-Metcalfe and AlbanMetcalfe 2002; Northouse 2007; Wright 1996). These models have, in turn, come in for criticism for a number of reasons (Alimo-Metcalfe and Alban-Metcalfe 2005, 2008; Collins 2001; Mintzberg 1999; Northouse 2007), particularly following the corporate scandals that resulted in the demise of Enron and WorldCom. Indeed, there has been a growing awareness of what has come to be described as the ‘dark side of charisma’ (Hogan, Raskin and Fazzini 1990), or even ‘toxic leadership’ (Lipman-Blumen 2007). This relates to flaws in the personal characteristics of some of those occupying leadership roles, such as narcissism, arrogance, selfaggrandizement and manipulation of colleagues to serve their own ends. This has again come to the fore (e.g. Tourrish and Vatcha 2005), and has been reinforced by the ‘financial tsunami’ which led to the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008 and the ensuing global economic crisis, consistently attributed to the conspicuous greed of many in the banking sector. Hogan has been at the forefront of research into ‘the dark side’, and has extolled organizations to not only focus on identifying the presence of certain positive characteristics, but equally importantly to ensure the absence of ‘dark side’ traits, particularly those that alienate other colleagues, most importantly subordinates, and the inability to build and support a team (Hogan, Curphy and Hogan 1994). This mode of thinking emerged almost simultaneously in the UK and the US. In both cases it reflected an increasing awareness of the value of ‘engaging’ with staff – a value realized not just in human terms, but also in terms of the profitability or impact on the bottom line of the business. Extensive survey data (e.g. Robinson, Hooker and Hayday 2007; Towers Perrin 2005; Watson Wyatt 2006) provides correlational evidence of the benefits of the approach.

The importance of ‘engagement’ Given the fact that public sector organizations will have to maximize the realization of the potential of all of their staff, it is not surprising that the phenomenon of ‘engagement’ has moved centre-stage as a matter of serious consideration, and this in turn has enormous implications for our understanding of what constitutes effective leadership. There is, however, no single definition of engagement. Engagement at work has been defined variously, in attitudinal, affective (emotional), cognitive, and behavioural terms; for example, as: harnessing of organizational members’ selves to their work role. In engagement, people employ and express themselves physically, cognitively, and emotionally during their role performance. (Kahn 1990) A positive, fulfilling, work-related state of mind that is characterized by vigor, dedication, and absorption. (Schaufeli et al. 2002)

228 Beverly Alimo-Metcalfe and Juliette Alban-Metcalfe . . . a positive attitude held by the employee towards the organisation and its values. An engaged employee is aware of business context, and works with colleagues to improve performance within the job for the benefit of the organisation. (Robinson, Perryman and Hayday 2004) And as being characterized by: . . . energy, involvement, and efficacy – the direct opposites of the three burnout dimensions. (Maslach et al. 2001)

Leadership and engagement On the basis of a three-year investigation of the nature of day-to-day, or ‘nearby’, leadership in UK public sector organizations, and a parallel study in the UK private sector (AlbanMetcalfe and Alimo-Metcalfe 2007; Alimo-Metcalfe and Alban-Metcalfe 2001), we define engaging leadership as leadership that has a powerful effect on the motivation, self-confidence, self-efficacy, or performance, of staff. In essence, engagement is regarded as important to organizations because it is believed to have a significant impact on the degree of discretionary effort employees are willing to apply to their work in the organization. It is recognized that whatever their level or role in the organization, every employee ultimately chooses whether to contribute the minimum levels of performance required (or even to undermine or to sabotage output), or to go beyond the minimum required by the post and to offer outstanding effort in their role. Over the last few years, numerous studies, most of which have been conducted in private sector companies, have shown that employee engagement is good for organizations. Thus, for example, a recent US survey over the previous five years of twenty-four publicly traded companies with a total of over 250,000 employees, found that the stock prices of the eleven ‘high morale’ companies increased an average of 19.4 per cent, while those of other companies in the same industries increased by an average of only 8 per cent – a margin of 240 per cent (Sirota Survey Intelligence 2006). A study by Watson Wyatt (2006) based on data from over 100 medium to large size companies concluded that a company with highly engaged employees typically achieves a financial performance four times greater than a company in the same sector with poor employee attitudes. A survey conducted by Towers Perrin (2005) of over 85,000 employees working for large and mid-size organizations in sixteen different countries on four continents found that companies with high employee engagement levels also experienced a higher operating margin (up to 19 per cent), net profit margin, revenue growth and earnings per share (up to 28 per cent) than companies with low employee engagement. In a recent review of studies involving the investigation of the effects of engagement, Bakker and Schaufeli (2008) list a variety of positive outcomes for organizations, including: reduced ‘intention to leave and (increased) organizational commitment (Schaufeli and Bakker 2004), financial turnover at the end of the work shift (Xanthopoulou et al. 2007), academic performance (Schaufeli et al. 2002) and service quality as rated by customers (Salanova et al. 2005)’ (2008: 151). Harter et al. (2002) conclude in their meta-analysis of Gallup survey studies, that ‘levels of employee engagement were positively related to business-unit performance (i.e. customer satisfaction and loyalty, profitability, productivity, turnover, and safety)’ (cited in Bakker and Schaufeli 2008: 151).

Public and third sector organizations 229 One of the most encouraging aspects of a focus on increasing employee engagement is that not only is it good for organizations, it is good for the employees themselves. In Bakker and Schaufeli’s review cited above, they add that engagement, when defined ‘as a positive, fulfilling, affective-motivational state of work-related well-being . . . is the [antithesis] of job burnout’ (Maslach, Schaufeli and Leiter 2001, cited in Bakker and Schaufeli 2008: 151). Other studies have found a link between engagement and: well-being and health (Sonnentag 2003); reduced depressive symptoms, somatic complaints and sleep disturbances (Hallberg and Schaufeli 2002); and higher self-efficacy (Salanova et al. 2005). In other words, this creates the opportunity for a win-win situation for both employee and organization in approaching the significant challenges ahead. However, although the case for engagement appears to be unequivocal, surveys such as those referred to by Towers Perrin have found that unfortunately ‘while many people are keen to contribute more at work, the behaviour of their managers and the culture of their organisations is actively discouraging them from doing so’ (Towers Perrin 2005). Similar conclusions emerge from studies by the Institute for Employment Studies (IES) and the Improvement and Development Agency (IDeA 2004; Robinson et al. 2007). The starting point must surely be, then, what kind of leadership results in high levels of staff engagement? In addition, since an organization may encourage a form of leadership that increases engagement, it is also crucial to ensure that the culture of the organization is such that it strengthens this form of leadership rather than destroys its efforts. A second question, which will be discussed in a later section, is: ‘What sort of organizational culture will sustain and nourish the appropriate form of leadership?’ These questions have been the primary focus of the authors’ research over the last decade, although at the time of beginning their first major study – which was an investigation into the nature of day-to-day leadership in the public sector in the UK – they referred to the model of leadership as ‘nearby’, transformational leadership, since this was the dominant terminology at the time. Figure 13.1, below, shows the relationship between the importance of leadership and culture in influencing engagement, and ultimately, organizational performance. The boxes on the left of the diagram represent the daily input individuals apply in their job, which includes their knowledge, experience, skills and competencies, in combination with the resources provided by their organization, including information, clarity of goals, feedback and development. However, there are various moderating variables that affect the degree to which people exert effort in employing the resources at their disposal – whether personal resources or organizational – and amongst these variables are well-established factors such as job satisfaction, motivation, and engagement, with the resulting ‘performance’ representing the output of their efforts. Performance of individuals across the organization enables the organization to achieve its vision. Our initial research study was aimed at identifying the day-to-day leadership behaviours of line managers that significantly affected these moderating variables, including engagement. Our second study, which will be described in a later section, was intended to investigate the nature of leadership culture that predicts team productivity, morale and well-being. The diagram also reflects the fact that, as is well established in the research literature, leadership and culture are inextricably linked (e.g. Bass 1992, 1998; Schein 1992).

What is the nature of engaging leadership? In 2001 Alimo-Metcalfe and Alban-Metcalfe completed a three-year investigation of the nature of leadership experienced daily in peoples’ working lives – initially in the UK public

I

Individuals’ knowledge, skills, abilities, competencies, experience, potential

+

CULTURE

LEADERSHIP

Job satisfaction, motivation, commitment, engagement

Individuals’ performance

OUTPUTS

Figure 13.1 The relationship between leadership, culture and engagement, and the inputs and outputs of performance

P U T S

N

Organizational resources provided (e.g. time, goals, information, staff, feedback, equipment, etc.)

Achievement of the organization’s vision

Public and third sector organizations 231 sector, but later replicated in the private sector. There were several reasons why they initiated this research, which it should be remembered, was at the time that the ‘heroic’ models of ‘charismatic-inspirational’ models of leadership dominated the received wisdom. These reasons included the fact that these models were: • • • • •

based on US studies; based on studies of ‘distant’ leaders, such as CEOs of large commercial organizations, or senior military officers; based largely on the study of males; based predominantly on white populations; based, in the main, on the views of those occupying formal leadership positions.

The authors’ methodology was very different, not least because they wished to investigate the nature of ‘nearby’ as opposed to ‘distant’ leadership (Shamir 1995), and moreover they wished to understand how leadership was seen through the eyes of those whom ‘leaders’ (line managers) are intending to ‘lead’. That is, ‘nearby’ leadership was studied, as perceived by those individuals working at middle to chief-executive level, in various organizations in the public sector (and later replicated in three FTSE 100 companies) based in the UK. The findings from the public and private sectors were virtually the same (Alimo-Metcalfe and Alban-Metcalfe 2002; Alban-Metcalfe and Alimo-Metcalfe 2007a). The study An empirical investigation of leadership in local government and the NHS, conducted when the first author was based at the University of Leeds, elicited the constructs of leadership of direct reports in relation to their line manager, i.e., constructs of ‘nearby’ leadership, based on actual experience (Alimo-Metcalfe and Alban-Metcalfe 2001). The sample of 150 was inclusive with respect to age, ethnicity, gender, and level in the organization (chief executives; top, senior and middle managers). This research led to the development of the ‘Transformational Leadership Questionnaire (TLQ™)’, the factorial structure of which was determined among a sample of 1,464 local government managers and professionals, and 2,013 NHS managers and professionals. Methodology Of key importance in the present context is the phraseology used to elicit the constructs, which was undertaken using the Repertory Grid Technique (Kelly 1955). Direct reports were asked to compare line managers with whom they had worked whom they regarded as ‘outstanding’ or ‘poor’, or ‘average’, plus to consider their ‘ideal’ leader/line manager. By randomly comparing individuals in these various categories, they were asked to give specific examples of the kind of leadership behaviours that distinguished between them, such that the manager: ‘had a particularly powerful effect (positive or negative) on their motivation, selfconfidence, self-efficacy, or performance’. In other words, individuals were asked what these managers did that had a significant effect on their degree of engagement in their work. Over 2,000 behavioural constructs emerged. This led to the development of the ‘Transformational Leadership Questionnaire (TLQ)’. Details of the methodology are described in various articles and research papers (e.g. AlbanMetcalfe and Alimo-Metcalfe 2008; Alimo-Metcalfe and Alban-Metcalfe 2001, 2002, 2008).

232 Beverly Alimo-Metcalfe and Juliette Alban-Metcalfe Confirmatory studies The same range of constructs emerged in three other studies: a Home Office-sponsored and independently conducted study of 1,022 police officers and staff, which was additionally inclusive in relation to declared sexual orientation (Dobby, Anscombe and Tuffin 2004); a separate Home Office-commissioned study of leadership in HM Prison Service, conducted by the authors, which involved governor-grade staff and principal and senior officers in 48 prisons in England and Wales (Alimo-Metcalfe and Alban-Metcalfe 2003, Report for the Home Office HMPS confidential); a study of 743 staff from FTSE 100 and private sector companies (Alban-Metcalfe and Alimo-Metcalfe 2007). Reliability and validity The scales that comprise the TLQ show high levels of internal reliability (α ≥ .80) and high inter-item correlations (r > .30). Evidence of its content, criterion and predictive validity comes from a number of sources (see Alban-Metcalfe and Alimo-Metcalfe 2000, 2007; AlimoMetcalfe and Alban-Metcalfe 2005, 2006, 2008; Dobby, Anscombe and Tuffin 2004; Kelly, Johnson and Gill 2006). The fourteen dimensions that comprise this model, now referred to as ‘engaging leadership’, are presented in Figure 13.2. The dimensions have been described in four clusters to make the model more meaningful. First, the emphasis is not on heroism, but on supporting others and enabling them to display their own leadership. At its core are two dimensions relating to transparency and integrity, including lack of defensiveness when criticized, and openness to the feedback of others. Secondly, it contains a persistent theme of team-working, collaboration, and ‘connectedness’, and of removing barriers to communication and encouraging the sharing of ideas, whether between individuals in one’s team, or between different teams and departments, or with outside ‘stakeholders’ and partners. It reflects a respect for others’ views and experiences and a willingness to take on board their concerns and perspectives on issues, and to be open to working with their ideas. Another persistent theme is to encourage questioning and challenging of the status quo, and to ensure that this happens by creating an environment in which such ideas are sought, listened to, and valued, and in which innovation and judicious experimentation is encouraged. It includes behaviours that encourage the creation of a culture that supports individuals’ personal development, in which the leader is a role model for learning, and in which the inevitable mistakes are exploited for their learning opportunities. Gone is the heroic approach to leadership, along with the notion of one person – the solipsistic leader – having a monopoly on the vision. It is replaced by a ‘distributed’ approach, with a commitment to building shared visions with a range of different internal and external stakeholders. It exploits the diversity of perspectives and the wealth of experiences, strengths and potential that exists within the team, department, or organization, and with partners and other stakeholders. Given the emphasis that the government is putting on the notion of ‘place’ and the importance of partnership working across the community, it is important to note that this model encourages the removal of traditional barriers between agencies and the creation of shared visions, which transcend old loyalties for the benefit of the communities being served.

Public and third sector organizations 233

ENGAGING INDIVIDUALS Showing genuine concern Being accessible Enabling Encouraging questioning

PERSONAL QUALITIES AND CORE VALUES Being honest and consistent Acting with integrity

ENGAGING THE ORGANIZATION

MOVING FORWARD TOGETHER

Supporting a developmental culture Inspiring others Focusing team effort Being decisive

Building shared vision Networking Resolving complex problems Facilitating change sensitively

Figure 13.2 The model of engaging leadership as assessed by the TLQ

Engaging leadership – in summary In the light of our research into the nature of ‘nearby’ transformational – later referred to as ‘engaging’ – leadership, we propose the following description: An engaging leader may be defined as someone who encourages and enables the development of an organization that is characterized by a culture based on integrity, openness and transparency, and the genuine valuing of others and of their contributions, and a concern for the impact of one’s behaviour on the well-being and morale of others. This shows itself in concern for the development and well-being of others, in the ability to unite different groups of stakeholders in articulating a shared vision, and in delegation of a kind that empowers and develops potential, coupled with the encouragement of questioning, innovation and experimentation, and of an approach to thinking which is critical as well as strategic. Engaging leadership is essentially open-ended in nature, enabling organizations not only to cope with change, but also to be proactive in shaping their future. At all times engaging leadership behaviour is guided by ethical principles and the desire to involve others in the co-creation of ways of working towards a shared vision. (based on Alimo-Metcalfe and Alban-Metcalfe 2008: 16)

234 Beverly Alimo-Metcalfe and Juliette Alban-Metcalfe Before describing our second study – which investigated whether embedding this model of engaging leadership in teams predicts their productivity – it is important to draw the distinction between competencies and leadership behaviours, particularly as so many public sector organizations have invested so much in frameworks based on the former, believing that it will strengthen a culture of engagement and innovation. Developing engaging leadership and the role of competencies There has been a substantial increase in the use of competencies as the basis of leadership frameworks which inform organizational recruitment, development, performance-management and appraisal processes across the UK public sector in line with the government’s modernization agenda of the last decade. Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to say that they are ubiquitous (Bolden, Gosling, Marturano and Dennison 2003). Within the public sector, these include those developed by the Fire and Rescue Service, the National College for School Leadership, the NHS, the police, and the Senior Civil Service. In some cases, there is differentiation of the competencies required of staff at different levels, and in different roles. We believe that this has been due to a lack of clear understanding of the relationship between competencies and effective leadership practice, the latter of which is clearly all about getting things done by engaging the efforts of employees (Alban-Metcalfe and Alimo-Metcalfe 2009). It is important to state from the start that we do believe that competencies or ‘skills’ are crucial for the effectiveness of anyone, whatever their job; it would be a nonsense to believe otherwise. However, it is becoming more and more evident that competency frameworks alone are not sufficient for assessing the full range of leadership behaviours that are required for effective leadership and organizational success. Many of the competency or ‘leadership qualities’ frameworks, as they are sometimes now called, fail to make a distinction between actions that a leader performs and the personal qualities that underlie what he or she does, and this can lead to a misunderstanding of the difference between the two. Thus, for example, the personal quality of being ‘resilient’ or ‘tenacious’ is a requirement of someone who shows ‘competency’ in ‘achieving results’, just as ‘effective communication’ is a prerequisite for ‘working in a team’. However – importantly – showing resilience or tenacity does not guarantee achieving results, any more than possessing emotional intelligence ensures effective team work, or having integrity ensures that someone can be a successful finance director. It follows, then, that the possession of certain qualities and values is necessary, but not sufficient for achieving success. If a leader is to be successful, he or she must learn to use personal qualities and other attributes in certain ways, and values need to be applied. We are not alone in pointing to the dangers of adopting a competency approach as the sole basis of leadership development interventions. UK writers Bolden and Gosling (2006) who reviewed twenty-nine such frameworks, have pointed out that: 1 2 3

The competency approach has been criticized for being overly reductionist, fragmenting the role of the manager/leader, rather than presenting an integrated whole. Competencies are frequently overly universalistic or generic, assuming that they are the same, no matter what the nature of the situation, individual or task. Competencies focus on past or current performance, rather than future requirements, thereby reinforcing rather than challenging traditional ways of thinking.

Public and third sector organizations 235 4 5

Competencies tend to focus on measurable behaviours and outcomes to the exclusion of more subtle qualities, interactions and situational factors. They result in a rather limited and mechanistic approach to development.

Buckingham (2001) argues that the competency approach is based on three flawed assumptions: 1 2 3

that individuals who excel in the same role display the same behaviours; that such behaviours can be learned; that improving one’s ‘weaknesses’ necessarily leads to success.

Certainly, there is evidence that individual leaders achieve similar results using different approaches, and despite significant personal flaws (e.g. McCall 1998). From a US perspective, Hollenbeck and McCall criticized what they saw as the four assumptions upon which the competency approach is based (Hollenbeck, McCall and Silzer 2006). In these contexts, they commented: 1

2

3

4

That: ‘As a descendent of the long-discredited “great man” theory, competency models raise again the spectre of one set of traits, abilities, and behaviours . . . that make up the “great leader” (Hollenbeck et al. 2006: 399). That effective leaders are not the sum of a set of competencies, and that the research of McCall (1998) and McCall and Hollenbeck (2002) demonstrates that: ‘What matters is not a person’s sum score on a set of competencies, but how well [or as we would put it, in what way] a person uses what talents he or she has to get the job done’ (Hollenbeck et al. 2006: 399). That the following tautological assumption is correct: ‘Because senior management usually blesses competencies and sometime even helps generate them, they are the most effective way to think about leader behaviour’ (Hollenbeck et al. 2006: 399). That: ‘When HR systems are based on competencies, these systems actually work effectively’ (Hollenbeck et al. 2006: 399).

Here, Hollenbeck and McCall concluded that, ‘we see little evidence that these systems, in place for years now, are producing more and better leaders in organizations’ (Hollenbeck et al. 2006: 399). They pointed out that: [Of the companies that made presentations about competencies at the first Competency Conference, in 1994] some have failed, some no longer exist, and many have struggled to survive . . . Although we would not suggest that the advocacy of competencies by their HR people caused the problems the companies subsequently experienced, neither did the approach save them! (Hollenbeck et al. 2006: 406) In response to a rejoinder by Silzer, the same authors went on to argue that, in their experience, ‘even when implemented effectively, competency-based systems have not worked’ (Hollenbeck et al. 2006: 407). In defence of competency frameworks, it should be pointed out that their value should be judged in terms of what they do, not what they fail to do (Alban-Metcalfe and Alimo-Metcalfe 2009). What competency frameworks – when thoroughly researched, properly constructed,

236 Beverly Alimo-Metcalfe and Juliette Alban-Metcalfe and differentiated to meet the particular needs of different groups of managers and professionals – can do is define and describe what actions a leader needs to be able to perform in order to achieve the goals and targets appropriate to his or her role. Thus, a competent leader may be defined as: . . . someone who enables the functioning of an organisation in a way that is goal directed, and is geared to developing processes and systems. This enables staff at all levels to plan effectively and efficiently, in order to achieve agreed goals. High levels of competency can lead to a degree of consistency, and thereby enable staff to make day-to-day decisions and short-term predictions, with a measure of confidence. Leadership competencies, which are often largely closed-ended in nature, are necessary in order that staff can undertake strategic planning, and in this way help to turn the vision of an organisation, department or team into a reality. (Alimo-Metcalfe and Alban-Metcalfe 2008: 15–16) Acceptance of such a definition leads to the self-evident conclusion that being competent is an essential characteristic of anyone who occupies a management or leadership role. It is equally true, particularly in the light of the earlier criticism, that competency on its own is not enough. In other words, being competent is necessary, but not sufficient for leadership. In response to the question, ‘What else is required?’, the answer is, a realization of the importance of the way in which the competency is enacted. This chapter has focused mainly on the nature of engaging leadership, because of the benefits it has been shown to bring to employees and their organizations. We would suggest then that the relationship between leadership competency and engaging leadership is summarized in Figure 13.3.

B

C

Engaging or ‘nearby’ transformational leadership – the ‘how’ of leadership

A

Leadership competencies – the ‘what’ of leadership

Figure 13.3 Relationship between ‘leadership competencies’ and ‘engaging’ leadership behaviour

Public and third sector organizations 237 Thus, person A can be seen to be highly competent as a leader, but not very engaging in his behaviour; perhaps the kind of person who is very detailed in his planning, or who can devise very effective systems for quality control, but shows a lack of understanding of, or concern for, the needs of others. Conversely, person B is someone who, perhaps, shows great concern for others, and creates a supportive environment in which all staff are valued, but who is unable to deliver what is required of him in terms of achieving goals or meeting agreed targets on time. Such a person’s style of leadership is highly engaging, but he shows a low level of competency as a leader. Person C, then, is the kind of manager or professional who, by acting in an engaging way, with all that entails, can use his competency as a leader in ways that are relevant to the particular individual or situation, and which have a positive impact on the psychological wellbeing, motivation, and effectiveness of all those with whom he interacts. The relationship between competent and engaging leadership can be expressed in terms of the following musical simile: ‘a competency framework could be considered like sheet music, a diagrammatic representation of the melody. It is only in the arrangement, playing and performance, however, that the piece truly comes to life’ (Bolden and Gosling 2006: 151). Put another way, competencies can be thought of as the ‘what’ of leadership, and engaging leadership behaviours, as the ‘how’. For an effective leadership development programme or intervention, it is important to consider both aspects of leadership. The same is, of course, true in relation to recruitment, performance management and appraisal processes. How valid is the model of engaging leadership? Does it predict productivity, morale and well-being? Despite the strong interest in the nature of engagement and the benefits it has been associated with in organizations, and in relation to employees, this body of literature has been based solely on cross-sectional, correlational studies, which cannot be regarded as evidence of a causal relationship . As far as we are aware, there does not appear to be much evidence, if any, of the causal link between engagement and performance. One of the reasons for the dearth of such studies is that in order to prove causation, data must be gathered over a period of time, and this can be costly. To put it more scientifically: cause-effect relationships can only be inferred when independent and dependent variables between which a causative link can be adduced, are measured on different occasions, over a period of time, and shown to be linked, and when attempts have been made to control for the effect of contextual and other moderating factors which may be influencing the findings. We were fortunate to have recently completed, together with colleagues from Kings College London University, a three-year Department of Health-funded longitudinal study entitled ‘The impact of leadership factors in implementing change in complex health and social care environments’ (Alimo-Metcalfe et al. 2007, 2008). It was designed to investigate whether leadership quality in multi-professional teams, in this case specific mental health teams referred to as crisis resolution teams (CRTs), is directly related to team effectiveness. A total of 46 multi-professional CRTs participated, involving 731 team members. These teams, which operate 24/7, 365 days of the year, were set up to treat individuals with mental health problems in their homes and supported in the community, rather than referring them for hospital/institutional in-patient care (Department of Health 2000). CRTs typically comprise ten or more staff, drawn from the following professional areas: clinical psychologists, mental health nurses, occupational therapists, psychiatrists, social workers and support staff. Although there is a designated team lead, the team is led by different individuals at different times of the day. Also, any team member performs a leadership role

238 Beverly Alimo-Metcalfe and Juliette Alban-Metcalfe when working with a particular ‘service user’ and their family. Accordingly, the focus was on assessing the quality of leadership in the team, rather than on any single individual. Team effectiveness was judged by the achievement of the government’s targets for the reduction of in-patient admissions. Since effectiveness in performance could be at the cost of positive staff attitudes to work, and their well-being at work, we were also concerned to investigate these variables. Quality of leadership was assessed at time 1 using the ‘Leadership Culture & Change Inventory (LCCI™)’ (Alban-Metcalfe and Alimo-Metcalfe 2003), which is based on the fourteen TLQ dimensions of engaging leadership identified in our earlier research, to which certain competencies were added which had been identified by ‘experts’ involved in the work of CRTs. In other words, both competence and engaging leadership behaviours were assessed. The LCCI also included twelve impact measures (dependent variables), which assessed the attitudes to work, morale and well-being of the staff responding to the instrument. These included five facets of staff attitudes to work (such as job satisfaction, motivation, commitment) and seven facets of well-being (such as self-esteem, team spirit, reduced stress). It was important also to control for contextual variables which might have been influencing the outcomes. Nine contextual variables were identified by relevant experts, which included the size of the team and the length of time it had been in existence; the resources available to the team, including medical expertise; and the team’s locality and case load. Organizational performance, measured in terms of ‘productivity’ was assessed at time 2, twelve months later. Productivity was defined as the ratio of the number of assessments made by the team to the number of referrals for in-patient care as an average over a twelve-month period, divided by the number of members of the team. The data were analysed in a variety of ways and full details are available (Alimo-Metcalfe et al. 2007). Principal components analyses of the items in the LCCI, which were a combination of items derived from the TLQ and relevant leadership competencies or ‘capabilities’ – revealed two engaging leadership factors and a single leadership capabilities factor (which comprised all the competencies assessed). These were identified as: engaging with others (16 items; α = 0.95); visionary leadership (7 items; α = 0.90); leadership capabilities (14 items; α = 0.94). In each case, the inter-item correlations ranged from 0.36 to 0.65, suggesting that the factors are unlikely to be multidimensional (Cortina 1993), and the coefficients of variation (range = 21.6–26.7) were of the same order of magnitude, and such as to suggest a high level of differentiation in the ratings (Yeomans 1968). Quantitative data were also collected in relation to nine contextual factors (e.g. age of team; composition of team; Mental Illness Needs Index for the area). Stepwise multiple regression analyses of the relationship between quality of leadership, as measured using the three scales, to staff attitudes and well-being are presented in Table 13.1. As can be seen, the degree to which members see their team as competent (capable) in leadership does positively affect motivation, job satisfaction and a strong sense of team effectiveness, though not the other aspects of commitment and well-being. The extent to which the team is seen as displaying ‘visionary leadership’ also positively and significantly affects motivation, and most of the aspects of well-being, including a sense of fulfilment and, importantly, reduced job-related stress and emotional exhaustion, as well as a strong sense of team effectiveness. However, only the scale ‘engaging with others’ significantly affects all aspects of positive attitudes to work, and all aspects of well-being, including contributing to a strong sense of team spirit, which neither of the other two scales predicts. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses and structural equation modelling revealed a statistically significant positive relationship between ‘engaging with others’ and productivity,

Public and third sector organizations 239 Table 13.1 Multiple regression analyses for all subjects in relation to the ‘attitudes to work’ and ‘well-being at work’ items (beta coefficients) (n = 731) Impact measure / Leadership scale

Scale 1: Engaging with others

Scale 2: Visionary leadership

Scale 3: Leadership capabilities

Attitudes to work A high level of job satisfaction A high level of motivation to achieve Staff who are motivated to achieve beyond their expectations A strong sense of job commitment A strong sense of commitment to the organization

0.56 0.41 0.46 0.65 0.65

– 0.18 – – –

0.17 0.18 0.21 – –

Well-being at work A high sense of fulfilment among staff A high level of self-esteem among staff A high level of self-confidence A low level of job-related stress A low level of job-related emotional exhaustion A strong sense of team spirit A strong sense of team effectiveness

0.48 0.46 0.61 0.22 0.34 0.70 0.26

0.28 0.23 – 0.24 0.14 – 0.18

– – 0.12 – – – 0.33

Since at least six of these items (motivation; motivation to achieve beyond own expectations; job commitment, organizational commitment; job satisfaction; reduced stress) have been shown to be predicted by effective leadership behaviour (e.g. Alban-Metcalfe and Alimo-Metcalfe 2000a, 2000b; Bass 1998; Borrill et al. 2005a, 2005b; Parker et al. 2003; Patterson et al. 2004), these results provide evidence of the concurrent validity of the LCCI among this population.

even when the effect of the nine contextual factors (which were also significant positive or negative predictors of productivity) had been taken into account (p < 0.05 in each case). No such relationship was found for either ‘visionary leadership’ or ‘leadership capabilities’. What this evidence suggests is, first, that the kind of distributed leadership that involves engagement with others can be shown to have a significant impact on performance, which in this instance was measured in terms of the teams’ ‘productivity’, judged by government targets of significant reductions in in-patient admissions; and secondly, that so too can a range of situational or contextual factors. This has important implications, not just for the development of leaders and leadership, but also for creating the cultural and other conditions that will enable leaders (at all levels) to be optimally effective – in other words for creating the kind of organizational DNA required not only to build, but also to sustain a culture of engagement. In summary, this second study has provided possibly one of the first longitudinal studies to show a causal relationship between ‘engaging leadership’ – when embedded in the culture of teams – and team productivity, morale, and well-being. These findings, together with our experiences of working with the model over the last decade, have provided us with the confidence to adopt it in supporting leadership development and major organizational culture-change interventions. We have applied it in several large UK public sector organizations – including: central government departments and agencies; local government; the NHS; the police; the Fire & Rescue Service; universities and schools; and in a number of major private sector organizations – to support cultural transformation such that they can improve their performance by embedding a culture of engagement.

240 Beverly Alimo-Metcalfe and Juliette Alban-Metcalfe The next section describes three case studies showing how we have used our model of engaging leadership in supporting leadership development and cultural change in some public sector organizations. It includes our approach to gaining senior management buy-in.

CASE STUDY AN NHS TRUST – SUPPORTING FRONT-LINE STAFF IN ENGAGEMENT WITH PATIENTS The theme of this project was entitled ‘Liberating leadership’. The board and senior management of a large urban Primary Care Trust wanted an approach to leadership that helped the organization achieve its vision of high-quality healthcare for the community, which included several severely disadvantaged groups, and to do this through creating a culture which reflected its vision and values for its staff. The starting point was to identify the vision and values in practice, and to link these to how ‘engaging’ leadership should be enacted at all levels. The model adopted was engaging leadership, based on the dimensions in the TLQ (see Figure 13.2 on page 233). The overarching objective was to focus on the impact of engaging leadership behaviour on patients and service users, and on staff, including those at the front line – a key aspect being to increase a sense of involvement and empowerment, and of feeling valued. Since this project was intended to build a robust culture of engagement which required the full support of the Board, it was decided that the involvement of both executive and non-executive directors was crucial. The commitment of the Board was declared in a halfday workshop which involved significant participation from everyone attending. It was necessary to develop a revised and shorter version of the TLQ for non-executives, which enabled all top and senior managers, together with the non-executives, to become familiar with the relevance of the engaging leadership model in their day-to-day behaviours, and to receive feedback and coaching on the basis of their TLQ results, delivered by us. The outcomes included: Board-level commitment to developing engaging leadership at all levels; personal development based on feedback and coaching; improved team working at executive levels (including relationships with the non-executives, and relationships among members of the Board); and agreement that an empowering, developmental approach was most suited to turning the vision and values into reality. Ten PCT staff were trained as internal TLQ facilitators. Managers and team leaders were involved in workshops and action learning sets so as to build on existing leadership strengths in engaging front-line staff, and continually focusing on small changes that can make a real difference to patients and service users. The outcomes included: individual skill development; increased awareness of customer focus, greater understanding of effectively managing change and of individual working and learning styles, and seeing the service from the perspective of service users. ‘Catalysts for change’ were identified at different levels in the organization, and these individuals were trained to support the managers and teams referred to above. In association with our organization, Real World Group (RWG), they developed a range of activities for managers and team leaders for focusing on excellence in providing for service users, particularly during periods of change. In addition, RWG facilitated a six-module development programme. The outcomes included: individual skill development, including facilitations skills and increased understanding of different working systems; and facilitators trained to work throughout the organization.

Public and third sector organizations 241 Evaluation Examples of the comments made during a formal evaluation of the programme that were relevant to the practice of engaging leadership included: •

•

•

• • •

‘I learnt many aspects of being a good leader, including the importance of supporting others, and not seeing it as a problem when people do sometimes become pessimistic/ negative about work/change, but using opportunities to engage them in finding solutions’; ‘I feel much more confident with knowing that the senior managers in the Trust are really committed to understanding how they can support us, rather than the other way around, as it used to be’; ‘The directors regularly visit us and make themselves accessible to our teams and are willing to empower us to come up with solutions to problems we face in the organization’; ‘Very useful feedback and preparation for my new role in the Trust’; ‘The experience with the facilitator made me feel valued and was constructive where necessary’; ‘Equipped me with skills to change/manage teams’.

Front-line staff working with ‘catalysts for change’ identified over thirty projects which would have a direct impact on improved patient care.

CASE STUDY A UK UNIVERSITY – MOVING TOWARDS 2020 Higher education institutions (HEIs) in the UK are facing a number of strategic challenges. These include: internationalization, which involves the recruitment and provision for the needs of overseas students; funding and sustainability, using income from research, teaching, and knowledge transfer and associated business development; market drivers, including fees and demographics; a performance culture, with influences that include organizational focus, government agendas, and ‘value for money’; the possibility of mergers and the need for differentiation; and decisions about the most appropriate form of leadership and management. In relation to leadership and management, issues include: a retirement bulge among senior academics; the need to attract new entrants; recognition that universities need to think of themselves as businesses; changing societal and government expectations; awareness of new approaches to leadership, management, and the psychological contract between employer and employee; and the importance of adopting an engaging style of leadership. Within this context, the university developed an integrated ten-year plan, focusing on: 1 2 3

Leadership; Dealing with cultural change, leader as coach, and communication; Team building, empowerment and performance (creating an empowered highperformance team).

Running in parallel are four concurrent activities: incentives and recognition; strategic career development; management skills and competency development; and one-to-one coaching.

242 Beverly Alimo-Metcalfe and Juliette Alban-Metcalfe The intervention started with a five-day senior manager programme for the vice chancellor, pro-vice chancellor, and deans, which was delivered in three stages by Real World Group (RWG) using the TLQ as the principal diagnostic tool. The programme has now been rolled out to 350 academic and administrative staff, who have participated in ‘Delivering the vision and managing people’ workshops. In order to ensure the effectiveness and sustainability of the programme throughout the university, fifty-five internal facilitators/mentors were trained. Evaluation (based on feedback from the client) The benefits of the programme have been evidenced in terms of: •

•

individual experiences, e.g. development of new relationships with colleagues, development or confirmation of individuals’ understanding of the challenges facing the university, development of colleagues’ perspective on their leadership roles; culture, e.g. leadership and management development, increased visibility of senior managers and HR, a downward trend in grievance and harassment cases, the initiation of cross-university leadership/management mentoring, the creation of new crossdepartment courses and research projects.

The foundations have been established for a longer-term initiative and cumulative benefits based on maximizing the experience, talent, and commitment of staff across the university.

CASE STUDY A LOCAL AUTHORITY – RAISING MORALE, PERFORMANCE, AND THE QUALITY OF SERVICES This case study involves a large local authority that was seen as clearly ‘failing’ in terms of government evaluations of performance across a range of the services it delivered to the community. This failure was attributed largely to its lack of leadership. Staff morale was also extremely low, with the council ratings falling into the lowest quartile nationally. It was decided by the new acting chief executive and local councillors (who are elected by the local population to represent them, and usually attached to a political party) to introduce a major leadership development initiative across the population of 220 senior managers. Real World Group was told that the top managers were not intending to participate; however, we refused to be involved in the initiative unless they at least attended the programme’s introductory ninety-minute seminar. The chief executive agreed that it was of paramount importance that he introduced this seminar by explaining to the audience of managers: why the development initiative was being introduced; the challenges facing the authority; and the outcomes that needed to be achieved if it was to avoid significant intervention by the government. Together with the top team colleagues, the chief executive was asked to attend the whole session and to join a panel at the end of the seminar to answer questions raised by participants. We have found that eight topics are particularly valuable for increasing the potential effectiveness of an introductory session and included these in this initial workshop: •

The research background to leadership, including why and how models have changed over the decades and why management is no longer sufficient; the fact that leadership

Public and third sector organizations 243

•

• •

•

• • •

is essential for sustained success of individuals and organizations, whilst emphasizing the crucial complementary importance of management/transactional leadership. The critical importance of a leadership style that engages staff in such a way that their morale, commitment and well-being is enhanced, while supporting them in increasing their effectiveness. Findings from our research into leadership and evidence of its validity in increasing staff morale, commitment and well-being. The essential role of 360-degree feedback for supporting leadership development, including an explanation of the ‘Johari window’, showing examples taken from anonymous sample 360-degree individual reports. The importance and moral responsibility of using 360-degree feedback only if there is a real commitment, by managers themselves, their boss and the organization, to support it: the principles of its voluntary nature, confidentiality, ownership of the data by the individual, and, importantly, support for teams’ and individuals’ post-feedback development. Research findings relating to the potential benefits of using 360-degree feedback in increasing leadership effectiveness. The inextricable link between the leadership style of the most senior managers and organization culture. Discussion among groups of participants who were given sample anonymous 360degree feedback group reports and asked to reflect on the possible culture of the organization from which they came, and to consider reasons for the differences in the ratings of various rater groups (e.g. managers rating themselves versus their staff’s ratings, their bosses’ ratings, their peers’ ratings, and ‘others’’ ratings – partners in other agencies, for example).

We encouraged as much discussion and participation in the various exercises as possible, since the idea was to reflect the style of leadership we were advocating. The panel discussion and Q & A session was highly interactive. This approach proved to be successful in gaining the active involvement and commitment of all top managers in this major culture-change initiative, including undertaking the 360-degree feedback process, in spite of their initial reluctance. The programme involved the use of the TLQ for all managers, followed by three confidential coaching sessions, six to eight weeks apart, facilitated by RWG, at which robust PDPs were created in which very explicit objectives relating to personal, team and organizational culture improvements were identified. A programme of interventions was designed which included peer-learning sets, development modules, and other activities tailored around a combination of participant needs and council strategic objectives. In addition, the senior managers agreed with our suggestion that we run, with them, several open workshops across the council, in various locations, to which all staff were invited and at which the reasons for the programme were explained. There were also exercises which involved staff reflecting on what difference a culture of engagement would make to their effectiveness, morale and well-being. These workshops were so successful that it was decided to invite any of the staff in the council to become a ‘change champion’. Those who took on this role would be supported in using the engaging leadership model with their teams, using workshops and other processes and involving colleagues from partner agencies, community groups and other stakeholders as far as was possible.

244 Beverly Alimo-Metcalfe and Juliette Alban-Metcalfe Senior managers increased their visibility by holding a series of ‘tell us like it is, and what we need to do differently’ workshops with staff in their departments at various levels. This had a very significant impact on the culture of the council and the morale and performance of staff. Having worked mainly with the senior managers and with the change champions, we encouraged the council to cascade the programme using their own people to engage staff at all levels. Evaluation Following this intervention, which extended over a period of eighteen months with our involvement and continued for at least a further eighteen months under the council’s management, it was the subject of objective evaluation. Not only did the authority increase in its government rating (Audit Commission Comprehensive Performance Assessment), and receive a national award in the area of services in which it had been perceived as failing (two measures of organizational performance), but it became the first public sector organization to be listed in the ‘Sunday Times Top 20 Best Companies’. As a result of the continued commitment of senior managers in visibly supporting staff throughout the organization, and especially at the front line, the council generated over 900 ideas from staff for making the area a better place in which to work. In three years they transformed themselves from being in the lowest quartile nationally for customer and staff satisfaction, to being in the top quartile of both public and private sector benchmarks on a range of factors.

Leadership development: the key role of top and senior managers One of the most important considerations of any leadership development initiative in any organization is the degree of support from the most senior managers. There is an inextricable link between the leadership style of the top group of managers and the culture of the organization. Therefore, before introducing any major leadership intervention, it is crucially important to try to ensure the commitment, and the active involvement, of these managers. This can, however, be problematic. We are increasingly concerned with the conversations we have often heard in organizations in which we are invited to work, which suggest that the model of leadership that the senior managers or the HR or OD department are espousing is completely at variance to the dayto-day reality of the culture, which may be described as ‘very managerial’, ‘target driven’, or ‘transactional’. In other words, it is operating against the principles of engagement and engaging leadership. If this is the case, then the leadership development programme might, in fact, increase cynicism and turnover amongst the very people the organization is intending to invest in. It might also increase their levels of stress and disillusionment, and result in disengagement. We would suggest that there is a need for a serious reassessment as to whether the initiative should be started before such issues are dealt with, and we think that this is an ethical matter. This brings us to the vitally important topic of top management commitment to leadership development. A number of years ago, one of the authors was commissioned to undertake an investigation into why, despite the substantial expenditure in leadership development initiatives by both private and public sector organizations, most failed after a few years. Together with colleagues at the University of Leeds, we undertook an investigation of the major factors

Public and third sector organizations 245 that impede success, involving a survey and several case studies in a range of organizations (Alimo-Metcalfe, Ford, Harding and Lawler 2000). Several findings emerged, but among the most formidable barriers identified were the attitudes of the most senior managers, particularly in relation to three aspects). The first was their reluctance to participate themselves, believing that they had little need for such support. However, they thought that managers at lower levels did need such development. This lack of commitment to continuous self-development is anathema to the notion of engaging leadership. The second barrier was created as a result of middle-level managers’ greater understanding of the nature of leadership as a result of their development experiences, and a heightened awareness of the lack of appropriate role models among the top managers. The behaviour of the top managers virtually destroyed the potential benefits to the organization of the development investment. The third impediment was the lack of general support by the top managers for the initiatives, and in particular a lack of support for the proposals made by those managers who had participated on such programmes or initiatives. As a result, cynicism among those at lower levels increased, and enthusiasm for applying the acquired development waned. This is why we take the question of whether there is top management support very seriously. Our experience is that external consultants like us may be the only people who can challenge the top managers to accept their responsibility for actively committing themselves to support a leadership development or culture-change initiative. We believe that providing the top team with research evidence is a very strong lever, as is the provision of data from a cultural diagnostic instrument, such as the LCCI, which we are using increasingly as the first stage of a cultural intervention. Data from thousands of staff across the organization are hard to hide, or rationalize away. Such a diagnosis also provides at least four other major benefits. These are that: 1 2

3

4

analysing the data by level, or function, or group, etc., pinpoints which specific interventions are most appropriate for various parts of the organization; plus it helps identify where there are areas of strength in the organization which can, in turn, provide a resource for supporting development elsewhere – and thus builds social capital; using an instrument such as the LCCI also gathers data on the specific impact of dimensions of the culture (e.g. the degree to which it is perceived as supporting empowerment, or encouraging innovation) on staff motivation, job satisfaction, work-related stress, morale, engagement, etc., since it includes a range of ‘impact measures’ (dependent variables). By running multiple regression and other statistical analyses on the data gathered, one can provide evidence of the ways in which staff perceptions of the culture have a significant impact on those factors that have been shown/found to affect (significantly) performance, well-being, reduced absenteeism, and other variables that contribute to organizational success; by assessing perceptions of the culture pre- and post-intervention (e.g. re-running the cultural diagnosis twelve to eighteen months later), data can be gathered on the ROI (return on investment) of the intervention.

In conclusion, the current economic downturn we are facing in the UK – the worst for over seventy years – makes the case for advocating engaging leadership and cultures of engagement a ‘no-brainer’. The government has recognized its importance by commissioning the MacLeod Review, ‘Engaging for success: enhancing performance through

246 Beverly Alimo-Metcalfe and Juliette Alban-Metcalfe employee engagement’ (2009). The simple fact is that public sector organizations will have to manage exponentially greater challenges with proportionally fewer resources. Who will enable them to do this, if it is not their staff? This makes leadership an even more important ethical issue than it has ever been. Too many leaders do harm, and they often do so unintentionally. There is now a wonderful opportunity to challenge leaders at all levels, particularly those in the most senior positions, to ask themselves what do they need to do to release the massive untapped human potential residing in their organizations. What we have attempted in this chapter is to provide empirical evidence and case studies to show how this can be achieved in practice.

Questions for discussion 1 2 3

What differences do you think there might be between the nature of leadership required in public and private sector organizations? What do you understand by the authors’ concept of ‘engaging leadership’? What do you judge to be the most useful suggestions advanced in this chapter for leadership development in public sector organizations?

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14 Leadership and leadership development in education Nigel Bennett

Chapter outline This chapter: • •

• •

Argues that there have been numerous initiatives over a number of years designed to enhance leadership in, and of, schools. Suggests that the National College for Leadership in Schools and Children’s Services has been of special significance since 2000. It has promoted the idea of the critical importance of headteacher leadership as well as offering programmes for leadership at other levels and emphasizing the distributed leadership model for schools. Evaluates and critiques the work of the College with regard to its mission of fostering school leadership. Has relevance for Chapter 6 on Corporate Universities.

Leadership development has become a substantial part of the landscape of teachers’ continuing professional development. In England, which is where this study will be mainly focused, a series of central government reform initiatives has placed increasing pressure on headteachers and other senior staff to deliver central government requirements in both a high-quality and cost-effective way One consequence of this has been an increasing central government emphasis on school leadership, which has led to the field being strongly dominated by one government-funded agency, the National College for Leadership in Schools and Children’s Services. This was originally founded as the National College for School Leadership (NCSL) in 2000, and its remit was expanded to cover all Children’s Services in the autumn of 2009. It is impossible to review the field of leadership development in education in England without paying considerable attention to the work of the College, and indeed its influence has extended internationally, because it has been widely seen as an exemplar of effective leadership development (see OECD 2008; Chapman and Fullan 2007; Hopkins and Higham 2007). This chapter, therefore, is divided into four parts. It begins by outlining briefly the background to the creation of the National College in 2000. It then identifies a number of key aspects of the context of leadership development activity, before examining critically the work of the College. Lastly, it raises some further significant questions and criticisms of the College’s performance and its impact on the field. It is, however, important to emphasize that the College is not the only provider of leadership development in England, and that its remit does not cover Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland. Although all four nations have created qualifications for practising or aspiring headteachers and principals, there are differences between them; particularly

250 Nigel Bennett between England and Scotland, where the Scottish Qualification for Headship was delivered by consortia of universities and carries a postgraduate diploma. England’s National Professional Qualification for Headship (NPQH) has never carried an academic qualification, although universities usually count it towards a Masters degree. Nor was it the first nationally funded leadership development institute – it was, for example, preceded by the leadership development centre in the National Institute of Education in Singapore, which reflects the position of the College in its close relationship with central government.

The background to the National College The formation of the National College was the culmination of the growing involvement of central government in state education since the early 1980s. Bolam (2004) provides a good summary of this development, from early technical courses on timetabling run by HM Inspectorate of Schools, through funded secondments – ‘one-term training opportunities’ – for headteachers (the creation of a National Development Centre at Bristol University charged with producing development materials), to the creation of the School Management Task Force (SMTF) in 1988, which also produced training materials. The focus of this development and support was to promote improved educational management. A key principle of the SMTF’s approach was that training and development should take place ‘on the job’ or ‘close to the job’, and this has guided all training provided by central government-funded agencies since. It can be seen as a response to what was regarded as an ‘over-academic’ and ‘theoretical’ approach to management development taken by the universities, where there had been a significant growth of postgraduate programmes in educational management (Brundrett 2001). The development of university diplomas and degrees in educational management had preceded this central government involvement by some fifteen years, beginning with work at the London Institute of Education (Glatter 1972) and at Birmingham University (Hughes 1973), and then spreading widely through the sector in the wake of work at the Open University. The 1990s saw further, more systematic development of national support and training for headteachers. The Teacher Training Agency (TTA) produced the first versions of three programmes which were to form the basis of the National College’s provision: the National Professional Qualification for Headship (NPQH) as a preparation for headship; the HEADLAMP (Headteachers’ Leadership and Management Programme) for newly appointed heads; and the Leadership Programme for Serving Headteachers (LPSH) for experienced heads. Of these, HEADLAMP was a fund that was available to newly appointed heads to spend in their first two years in post on whatever forms of professional development and support that they saw as appropriate; the other two were formally prepared and presented programmes.

Accountability and diversity as a driver of leadership development provision Two major policy thrusts, discernible in the preceding section, characterize the approach taken to the delivery of public services by both Conservative and Labour administrations since the 1980s. The first is a strong emphasis on target-driven accountability frameworks backed up by rigorous inspections. Strain (2009) has analysed the underlying performativity of this dimension of the English policy context. The English education system reviews school performance through national testing of all children in English, maths and science at ages

Leadership in education 251 seven, eleven and fourteen, and by comparing the overall performance of their pupils in the sixteen plus General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE). (Tests for fourteen-year-olds were abolished in 2008, but at the time of writing the others remain. The tests for seven-yearolds are relatively informal, but eleven-year-olds still undertake traditional pencil-and-paper tests.) The results are published and ‘league tables’ of performance created. In addition, the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) inspect schools on a regular cycle, grading them on a set of performance factors and allocating a rating to each one. If a school is rated weaker than satisfactory then it will be subject to some form of external intervention in order to bring its performance standards up to a satisfactory level. One aspect of this is the policy of creating forms of partnerships between schools, a policy that has a direct bearing on the forms of leadership development that are being provided and which are discussed below. Although there have been detail changes to the assessment structure, the overall arrangement has not changed. The Labour administration added nationally applicable performance targets against these test scores for schools to meet, and these have become more demanding over time. The second thrust has been to introduce what Woods, Bagley and Glatter (1998) called a ‘quasi-market’ in education. This has taken several forms. First, schools have had very substantial levels of funding devolved to them, leaving them free to develop their own policies on spending. Secondly, parents are now given the choice of school, although in reality this is limited in many areas by the availability of schools and their popularity. However, this means that schools have to undertake a process of reputation management, part of which is ensuring that the school’s published test scores and examination results are as good as possible. Last, it has resulted in a wide range of different kinds of schools being created in addition to the existing religious schools which had enjoyed a certain amount of freedom of action through their voluntary aided status. These include trust schools and academies, both of which have substantial degrees of autonomy from local authorities. Academies were usually created to replace one or more schools judged to be failing as a means of raising academic performance. However, this changed after the 2010 election, when the Secretary of State announced that academies would become the norm.

(Re-)enter leadership The policy developments chronicled above increased greatly the importance of the headteacher, and this was recognized by the Labour government. In 1999 a proposal was put forward for a training college for headteachers, and this was begun in 2000, with its new offices opened by the Prime Minister in 2002. The name of the college, the National College for School Leadership, indicated a major change of perception about the role of the headteacher. In part it was the result of the pressures of competition and reputation management. Schools were no longer centres of largely autonomous professional action, as they had been portrayed prior to the 1980s (see, for example, Letch 1984), nor simply the agents of delivery of an externally prepared curriculum. Instead, headteachers had to create an identity for the school that was clearly different from that of their neighbours and ensure that it was well understood outside the school and strongly permeated practice within it. In many respects, this expectation was not different from that underpinning the role of the head in the public schools of the nineteenth century (see Armytage 1970), when creative and charismatic heads like Thomas Arnold and Edward Thring imbued their schools with a particular ethos. In the 1990s this perspective was presented as a response to the external demands indicated above, that would take schools beyond the demands of implementing external policy into the very world of values-driven leadership that characterized the work of these great

252 Nigel Bennett nineteenth-century heads. Headteachers had to recreate a distinctive institutional identity for their schools over and above the rational-technical demands of target-driven government educational policies, and cope with the constant pressure of change as schools responded to new government initiatives and the changing social and economic expectations generated by increasing globalization. As Glatter (2004) points out, the first author to present this analysis was Grace (1995), in part as a critique of government policy, but ‘leadership’ was quickly appropriated by the government so as to emphasize the competitive and autonomous nature of state schools. Government also used the concept to play down both the extent to which schools had become delivery agents of a strongly policed, externally mandated curriculum, and the existence of the relatively mundane day-to-day work of ‘keeping things going’ (Cuthbert and Latcham 1979). With the creation of the government-funded National College for School Leadership, the term had become fully institutionalized in government thinking. Leadership as conceived in official discourse can thus be characterized as the work of generating creative responses at school level to the demands of externally mandated requirements – transformational rather than transactional leadership (Burns 1978) – concerned with developing new understandings of educational practice and schooling, but within clearly defined parameters and increasingly directive and interventionist government policies and strategies. In the ‘loose-tight’ policy context (Peters and Waterman 1982) of centrally defined, performance-based targets and high levels of financial and market autonomy outlined above, this creative leadership was seen as differentiating schools from one another whilst promoting high performance against the mandated performance targets. This is not the place to enter into the debate about the difference between leadership and management, although it is worth pointing out that, even as the change in discourse gathered momentum, Glatter (1997) pointed out that we should not lose sight of the importance of the organization in our move towards the emphasis on leadership. In part he was warning of a tendency to equate leadership with ‘the leader’, a charismatic figure who by force of personality creates the culture of the school and articulates the values it should seek to live by – a return, perhaps, to the very concept of headteacher as leader that was demonstrated in our perception of Arnold and Thring. This concept remains strong, and indeed has received some further support by the move towards ideas of collaborative leadership (Court 2003; Glatter and Harvey 2006), federations of schools (Lindsay et al. 2007) and systems leadership (Hopkins and Higham 2007; Chapman and Fullan 2007; Hopkins 2008) that have become dominant in the school leadership literature. In contrast, the argument that ‘leadership’ was not to be equated with the leader was already strongly articulated (Ogawa and Bossert 1995; Sergiovanni 2000). It should be noted, however, that the role of ‘the leader’ was not lost in such analyses, and the issue of values-driven action as a central dimension of leadership (Gold et al. 2003) has re-emphasized the role even as forms of shared, dispersed and distributed leadership have become advocated (Harris 2008; see also Bennett et al. 2003).

Key issues in educational leadership development Environmental complexity and the role of the headteacher The previous section indicates a significant challenge to the traditional perception of headteachers, both in terms of their role and their relationships with their colleagues. Their role has changed in relation to both their position in the environment of the school and their responsibilities within it. We have already indicated the potential importance of reputation management in an environment of parental choice and multiple categories of school. This

Leadership in education 253 outward-facing dimension of their work has been given further impetus by two other major government initiatives in particular. Central government policies related to their Every Child Matters agenda (DfES 2004; also at http://www.everychildmatters.gov.uk) set out to integrate more effectively the different agencies that have responsibilities for aspects of children’s achievement and welfare (Glaister and Glaister 2005). They have created a strong demand for inter-agency working and stronger forms of collaboration with organizations such as social services, the health service and the police. Another part of this agenda for widening the role and provision of schools is the policy of ‘extended schools’ which began in 2003 (Cummings et al. 2007; West-Burnham et al. 2007), which has greatly increased the range of services schools offer to the community and has developed their role as generators of social capital and cohesion. Responding to new initiatives makes the headteacher a leader and promoter of change, thereby heightening the importance of creativity referred to above. Such creativity requires a strong strategic focus, an ability to prioritize between initiatives and to develop plans for action that can deliver on these priorities (Davies 2006; Fidler 2002; Preedy et al., 2002). The increasing demands of accountability systems Reference was made above to the strong element of public accountability that has underpinned government policy since the late 1980s. One consequence of this has been the institution of regular inspections by Ofsted, which have required schools to submit detailed improvement or development plans that have to be updated every year. In addition, headteachers are now required to submit a range of detailed documents providing a wide variety of information and data, which are then used to assess the school’s performance. Collecting such data involves closer monitoring and supervision of teachers and pupil progress. This has had a considerable impact on the responsibilities of the headteacher. Further, the requirement to provide this information implies an increasing level of supervision and more micromanagement from the centre. The data may, for example, provide benchmarks against which heads and others can assess their performance relative to equivalent schools, but finding, collating and producing the documents that provide the data is time-consuming and can foster a sense of close supervision, both from outside the school and within it. Strategy, vision and values The environmental complexity of the plethora of government initiatives since 1988 has created a new interest in the importance of strategic leadership (Davies 2006; Preedy et al. 2002). This goes beyond a discussion of strategies for successful change (Fullan 2007) towards an emphasis on sustained and sustainable change (Hargreaves and Fink 2006; Davies 2006). But the headteacher as the leader and promoter of change has to have some idea of the direction of the change and how to achieve it. This has often been presented in terms of vision and mission, which draws us back to the issue of values-driven leadership (Gold et al. 2003). It is perhaps worth mentioning that Wright (2001) argued trenchantly that headteachers do not have the opportunity of defining the values of the school in the centrally driven managerialist and performance-driven system created in the 1990s, these being established through the national curriculum and associated initiatives such as the national literacy and numeracy strategies. From this perspective, it would appear that the values driving school leadership are second-order values concerned with programme implementation, rather than first-order values concerned with decisions about what to teach and why.

254 Nigel Bennett A central element of values-driven leadership is that the values should be both articulated and defensible: as Elmore (2008) argues, it is not a question of ‘doing the right thing’ but of ‘doing what we believe to be the right thing’. This provides a potential source of distinctiveness for heads and their schools. Thus, for example, Ryan (2006) argues the fundamental values of ‘inclusive leadership’; Woods (2005) puts the case for ‘democratic leadership’. In their report of a study conducted for the Department for Education and Skills, Gold et al. (2003) comment that the ten principals of schools identified by Ofsted as outstanding appeared to share what they described as ‘broadly social democratic or liberal humanist’ values, concerned with ‘such matters as inclusivity, equal opportunities and equity or justice, high expectations, engagement with stakeholders, cooperation, commitment, teamwork and understanding’ (2003: 136). ‘Doing what we believe to be the right thing’ emphasizes the importance of morality in leadership. This can have the effect for some headteachers of intensifying the dilemma of meeting their own sense of what is ‘right’ with the demands of central government policies. A good example of this is the reaction of school heads to the Standardized Achievement Tests (SATS), once set for all children aged seven, eleven and fourteen but now (2010) amended so that only the tests at age eleven are formal ones. Although many headteachers have objected to the tests – at the time of writing two teacher unions are boycotting them this year – the pressures of league tables and external reputations have led many primary school heads to place a heavy emphasis on the demands of the tests in their children’s final year, especially in areas where competition for pupils is intense. Changing relationships with staff, particularly in the location and distribution of leadership It has always been the case that heads have been unable to do all the work involved in managing the school, and as a result task delegation was the norm even before the introduction of paid promoted posts in English education in the 1950s (Wallace 1986). In the USA, the chairs of departmental subjects are still largely unpaid for the additional responsibilities they take. However, despite Mintzberg’s (1973) argument that leadership is one of the tasks of managers, the move from the language of management to that of leadership in the 1990s has been reflected in discussion of other posts in schools. The National College now refers to ‘senior leadership teams’ rather than ‘senior management teams’, and ‘middle managers’ have become ‘middle leaders’. This formalization of the idea that leadership is spread widely through the organization has helped to promote the development of the concept of ‘distributed leadership’ in the educational leadership literature. As Bennett et al. (2003) pointed out, distributed leadership is a difficult idea to pin down. They suggested that three characteristics could be discerned in the literature they reviewed: that it is the result of concertive action, which is to say that the sum of the interaction between individuals is greater than the sum of the activities involved; that it opens the boundaries of leadership more widely than traditional formulations of leadership; and that expertise is distributed across many members of the organization, not just possessed by a few in senior positions. It will be clear that the concept of ‘middle leader’ referred to above is an attempt to marry together this dimension of distributed leadership with traditional hierarchical school structures. This formulation gives room for other models of leadership, particularly teacher leadership, to be included within the concept, and Alma Harris does approach the concept from the teacher leadership perspective. Although it is possible to identify three broad characteristics of the term ‘distributed leadership’, it is interpreted in quite different ways by its three major theorists – Gronn (e.g.

Leadership in education 255 2003), Spillane (e.g. 2006) and Harris (e.g. 2008). Gronn roots his use of the term in activity theory, and in essence it is a way of dealing with the work intensification faced by the headteacher in response to the ever-extending range of activities indicated above. Spillane uses the term as an analytical construct through which it is possible to discuss leadership in context, and he attempts to address it from a value-neutral perspective; distributed leadership can be both good and bad, depending on the context and the purposes to which it is being put. Harris draws on her perception of teacher leadership as a radical challenge to orthodox leadership practice (Harris and Muijs 2005; Harris and Lambert 2003) to advocate distributed leadership as a structural device for promoting radical change, arguing that it must rest on a moral base of providing a positive impact on learning. The case studies she provides of distributed leadership in action (Harris 2008: 66–100) demonstrate that it can be a deliberate strategy initiated by a strong leader to promote change. They suggest that headteachers can use it to restructure schools and create degrees of uncertainty such that individuals can promote different approaches to thinking about their work. In this sense, distributed leadership may be closer to the idea of delegating responsibility to promote new thinking and collaborative work than Gronn’s approach, and more directive and hierarchical than other radical challenges to traditional views of leadership, such as those of Woods’s democratic leadership (2005) and Ryan’s inclusive leadership (2006). Structural changes in the school system The continuing pressure for school improvement that underpins the strong accountability and inspection systems referred to above has combined with a demographic issue to create a number of significant changes in the structure of the education service. Although the National College recently reported (NCSL 2009a) that the percentage of teachers who now aspire to headship has risen dramatically since the introduction of the revised NPQH and the introduction of the government’s ‘fast track’ scheme, there is still concern that due to the age profile of headteachers a high percentage will retire over the next five years. A National College report (NCSL 2006) stated that one-quarter of all headteachers in post then were over fifty-five, and although the ‘retirement boom’ did not peak in 2009 as was predicted in that report, the head of the College was reported in 2008 as stating that 55 per cent of current headteachers could be expected to retire by 2012 (BBC 2008). One way of dealing with this predicted shortage of heads, that could also potentially address the school improvement issue, is the development of new models of headship which link schools together (Glatter and Harvey 2006). Since the Education Act of 2002 the government has been encouraging the concept of ‘federations’, in which two or more schools link together for some or all of their work. Federations are normally categorized as ‘soft’ or ‘hard’: the key characteristic of ‘hard’ federations is that they share a governing body. Hard federations are more likely than soft to have a single headteacher taking overall responsibility for the schools in the federation; an ‘executive head’. Where an executive head is appointed, it is likely that a deputy head will be appointed with responsibility for running one of the schools within the federation; the executive head may act as head of one school with a deputy taking responsibility for the other. Harris et al. (2006) discuss the concept of executive leadership, and it is interesting to note that as early as 1973 Hughes raised the question of whether the headteacher should be viewed as the school’s ‘chief executive’ or its ‘leading professional’ in his study of the ‘professional-as-administrator’ (Hughes 1973). Federations can be used as a means to create practitioner support for weak or underperforming schools, which are paired with highly successful schools. The head of the successful school becomes the executive head, and that school becomes, in effect, a support school

256 Nigel Bennett for the one that has poorer results. Thus the creation of federations is a further step in the direction of professional development by professionals themselves. It is claimed that these arrangements are created with the consent of the leadership of the weaker schools, and that significant improvements in attainment have been achieved (Chapman et al. 2008); however, the evidence remains fragmentary and it is not clear that all such arrangements are seen as unthreatening. System leadership The concept of federations is an important step away from the traditional relationship between the head and his or her school, and creates the idea of heads taking responsibility in some way for the work of other schools. Shortly we shall look at the idea of consultant heads and national leaders of education, when we examine the work of the National College, but the concept of working with and across schools and taking wider responsibility has given rise to an extended version of educational leadership referred to as ‘system leadership’ (Fullan 2009; Hopkins and Higham 2007; Hopkins 2008). Hopkins (2008) suggests that system leadership has to be understood as a process that moves beyond ‘technical solutions’, to problems, to seeing significant issues as ‘adaptive work’ (Heifetz 1994), which therefore require learning on the part of the person providing leadership. He identifies a range of possible activities for systems leaders, including: taking responsibility for helping other schools, through formal or informal federations; taking responsibility for a school in severely challenging circumstances; and working as a community leader to create partnerships between agencies involved in child care and welfare. These roles indicate that system leadership can be exercised both formally and informally. The key feature of system leaders is that their work is based on a strong moral purpose that views the welfare of the system as a whole as being no less important than the welfare and success of their own school. Further, system leaders recognize that activities do not occur, nor do organizations function, in isolation: they are interrelated. The emphasis is on reducing isolation, opening up practice to the insights of others and sharing insights in return; it means not providing formalized or routinized responses to issues and problems, but treating each one as unique. In Hopkins’s (2008) presentation of system leadership we can see echoes of the charismatic leader tradition, as well as elements of concertive action as in distributed leadership and the moral basis of educational leadership. He states (2008: 33) that ‘it is clear that our best system leaders share a characteristic set of behaviours or skills’. He goes on to propose that these skills fall into two categories: first, they engage in personal development, usually informally by comparing their own achievements with those of others; and second, they have a strategic capability that enables them to convert their vision or moral purpose into operational principles. It is appropriate to point out that although distributed leadership is usually interpreted as a means of spreading leadership responsibilities and opportunities within the organization, the concepts of federations and system leadership also suggest that leadership can be distributed more widely outside the organization by dispersing responsibility from the school leadership to those who are not formally part of the school’s structure. In this section of the chapter we have considered some of the leadership issues and themes that characterize current thought, concluding with two analyses of leadership practice that are seen as providing ways of dealing with some of the issues raised. As stated at the outset, the major provider of leadership development activities in England is the National College, and we turn now to examine the nature of its provision and the extent to which it is addressing the issues we have raised.

Leadership in education 257

The National College The College’s provision rests on a competency-based ‘standards’ model of leadership, a widespread approach in the field. National Standards for Headteachers were established in England in 1998 by the Teacher Training Agency (TTA); Scotland established its own (SEED 1998). A similar approach has been developed in the USA (CCSSO 1996). The National College is funded by the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF), and receives a remit letter each year from the Secretary of State that lays out its priorities for the coming year. There is strong evidence to suggest that the government sees the College as a support agency in policy delivery: the ‘end-to-end review’, carried out in 2004 (Review Team 2004), explicitly states that: In future it would help both parties [the Department for Education and Skills and the NCSL] to have an overall ‘agenda’ with priorities more integrated and explicit between and within the two organisations. (NCSL Review Team 2004: 7, cited by Thrupp 2005: 19) One aspect of this close relationship, which will be discussed later, is that the College can be criticized for generating a strongly normative approach to leadership development, resting on a prescriptive model and the questionable principle of ‘best practice’. Crow (2004) identified three dimensions of College provision: courses, networking and research. Subsequent developments, presaged in the model of leadership development presented below, have added the idea of ‘professional as consultant’ to Crow’s original three. In addition, the College provides through its extensive website a range of resources that can be used for personal or organizational development. These resources are produced largely in response to the demands of government policies or situations the College itself has identified. There are, for example, resource packs on succession planning and inter-agency leadership. An examination of the ways in which the College has developed Crow’s three dimensions reveals some key philosophical stances towards leadership development: a clear framework that links it to a traditional view of teacher careers; course delivery through ‘blended learning’ as a way of maximizing reach and impact; an emphasis on the use of practitioners rather than academics for the provision of programmes; and the development of research opportunities for practitioners as well as commissioning professional research and undertaking in-house work. We consider each in turn. A clear leadership development framework The College’s leadership development framework (NCSL 2001) postulates a five-stage cumulative developmental sequence that relates to both career development and levels of responsibility within schools’ hierarchical structures. It is: 1 2 3 4 5

Emergent leaders – teachers in their first formal leadership post, such as heads of subject departments (‘subject leaders’). Established leadership – senior teachers who are not yet considering headship or who are not intending to move into headship. Entry into headship – senior teachers preparing for headship. Advanced leaders – established headteachers. Consultant leadership – exceptional headteachers who are capable of providing wider leadership and development support to other headteachers.

258 Nigel Bennett Over time, the range of courses provided for each of these groups of staff has increased greatly. Alongside the original courses for specific groups within the framework, the College has established a wide range of courses that have reflected the changing demands of government policy, notably in relation to school improvement. However, although the College has continued with some of its original provision for established heads, notably its international fellowship programme, it has discontinued its formal course for established headteachers, arguing that: the rapidly changing and complex context for headteachers with new models of leadership and the need for great flexibility means that a single national programme, no matter how effective, can no longer meet these increasingly diverse needs. (The National College 2009a) It may perhaps be seen as somewhat ironic that the College, which as we saw earlier presents leadership as widely distributed throughout the community, should single out established headteachers as needing more bespoke support to deal with the complex environmental pressures they face, but sees more ‘off the peg’ programmes as appropriate for less senior staff. There is perhaps a change in the College’s perception of leadership development needs from straightforward leadership training and skills development prior to headship, to a more subtle, less technical perspective on leadership once the trainee has obtained his or her headship. ‘Blended learning’ Blended learning consists of a combination of online materials, individual or group support, and face-to-face activity. This approach makes it possible to reach a large number of potential students in a cost-effective way. The individual trainers are recruited from local school leaders and others, providing a national network of potential tutors, and the courses are provided by consortia. Since the College’s ‘end-to-end review’ by the then-DfES (Review Team 2004) there has been more contracting out of course development and provision, although the specification for the course development work remains very tightly drawn. Practitioners leading training and development This has been a major influence on both the modes of provision and the range of courses and training activities that the College has developed over time. The idea that headteachers, as opposed to academics, could provide this expertise was presaged in the College’s fifth level of leadership development – that of ‘consultant leadership’ – and carries forward the concept of professional training formulated by the SMTF (DES 1990). Although the College established a Universities Partnership Group made up of universities with large educational leadership departments, this group took no part in developing the College’s programmes. A study of the College’s provision in relation to the demands of central government’s school improvement policies is a further demonstration of this position. The College now provides training for heads to become national or local ‘leaders of Education’,1 executive heads2 and school improvement partners.3 All of these roles address the professional development needs and school effectiveness of others. The College also provides leadership development for young teachers in the government’s ‘fast track’ programme that aims to prepare outstanding graduates for senior school leadership programmes within five years of starting out in teaching.

Leadership in education 259 Learning from practitioners is also a key principle of the College’s extensive networking. From 2002 onwards it developed a scheme of online ‘networked learning communities’ (Hopkins and Jackson 2002); a national online forum, ‘Talk2Learn’; and a ‘hot seat’ arrangement in which leading practitioners would be available to answer questions and provoke discussion. All of these initiatives emphasized a knowledge base as possessed and articulated by individuals who were identified as leading practitioners. The development of networks was a very important innovation. Relatively little work had been done in this field related to workplace learning, and the College was to a considerable extent blazing a trail here. The networked learning communities were local networks rather than a single national network, and provided examples of loose ‘social learning communities’ (Wenger 2000), cutting across organizational boundaries and providing wide sources of learning at the individual level. However, as Tynjälä (2008) points out, such crossorganizational contact also provides opportunities for organizational learning. Networking was important for three reasons. First, it emphasized that headteachers could learn from one another, sharing ideas and information, and provided a framework to facilitate this. Second, it enabled school leaders to move away from what Eraut (2004) calls immediate ‘receptive’ learning towards more ‘deliberative’ learning, in which discussion, review, and possibly planning for future eventualities can occur. Third, and perhaps most importantly, it offered the possibility that, simply through the interchange of ideas and experiences, practitioners could generate ‘new’ knowledge: new shared understandings of problems and issues and untried ideas about how to conceptualize and approach problems of practice. In this way networking promoted the development of professional learning communities (Stoll et al. 2006). However, Moore and Kelly (2009) suggest that there was evidence in the networks they studied that members were keeping to government agendas as they explored ways to implement the central government’s national strategies for education. They also emphasize the significance of power relations in the operation of networks, an issue addressed by Wenger but rather overlooked in other writing on professional learning communities. Multiple approaches to research Crow (2004) identified research as the third dimension of College activity. In-house work and research commissioned from management consultants, universities and research units underpins the regular updating of the leadership development programmes and website resources. The College has also promoted research and development work related to leadership theory and practice, both through in-house activity and projects commissioned from management consultants, universities and research units, although the interest in theory has been firmly focused on ‘theory in practice’ rather than the development of ‘theories of practice’.4 Importantly, too, given its emphasis on practitioner leadership, the College has provided research associateships for practising headteachers and other senior staff to engage in small-scale projects. All these reports are published and are freely available from the college website.

The College’s responses to the issues identified A number of elements of the College’s work can be highlighted here, which cross-cut some of these issues. First, there is a strong emphasis on transformational leadership, and the importance of the vision and values resulting from it. Second, we find a strong emphasis on what

260 Nigel Bennett they call ‘learning-centred leadership’. Third, they espouse the principles of distributed leadership. Fourth, a significant element of their work has become the training of headteachers as national leaders of education, and supporting them in their work, especially in relation to the ‘city challenge’ projects established by the government (see note 1). Fifth, through their materials they provide resources to assist heads involved in federations, and are developing from those resources work on system leadership. We will look at each of these in turn. Transformational leadership and the importance of vision and values The idea of leadership as bringing about fundamental change in the organization underpins the courses and research reports provided by the College. It derives from its original purpose, and the remit letters it receives every year are always concerned with ensuring that schools can respond quickly and effectively to central government policy requirements. This leads to a strong focus on the leadership role as involving creating a vision and sharing values widely through the school so as to promote a clear and integrated organizational culture (Martin 1992). As indicated above, a central element of values-driven leadership is that the values should be both articulated and defensible. Statements of educational values are contentious: earlier, we cited Elmore’s (2008) argument, that practice is not a question of ‘doing the right thing’ but of ‘doing what we believe to be the right thing’. The values articulated by the founder of Summerhill School (Neill 1968), for example, and the practices adopted at the school, are quite different from those put forward by national governments since the 1970s. However, both would acknowledge that it is important that school staff subscribe to the set of values espoused by the headteacher and those responsible for the school, which is one reason why it is easier to find values congruence within the staffs and parents of alternative schools and private schools, where participation is an act of deliberate choice. More recently, in work that links together issues of networks and transformational leadership as a system-wide phenomenon, Chapman and Fullan (2007: 208) identify ‘ownership with respect to core values and vision’ as central elements to successful system change. The College is clear about the importance of values as a basis for leadership practice. For example, in its website item on ‘Leadership for Personalized Learning’, it states, At its most fundamental level of expression, leadership is about securing clarity of values and shared purpose. These two factors are significant variables in determining the culture of any school. (NCSL 2009b) This statement shares the language of the National Standards for Headteachers (DfES 2004: 6), in which the headteacher’s tasks in shaping the future are described as: • • •

Ensuring the vision for the school is clearly articulated, shared, understood and acted upon effectively by all; Demonstrating the vision and values in everyday work and practice; Ensuring that strategic planning takes account of the diversity, values and experience of the school and community at large.

Where and how the values are derived and communicated is not indicated: they are presumably embedded in the vision, but this is not clear. The College provides its own answer

Leadership in education 261 in a recent edition of its house magazine Ldr, where Spencer (2009) describes how two headteachers who are deemed to be highly successful have achieved this coherence and unity of approach within their schools. She states that ‘their leaders recognise the need to unite all stakeholders in a common vision in order to build the trust and collaboration for improvement’ (2009: 37). Both heads are described as having achieved this through restructuring. One states: ‘I meet with them [the six vice-principals] twice a week. That’s where they hear it from the horse’s mouth and then spread the message throughout the academy. I also give a ‘state of the nation’ address to every member of staff four times a year, using multi-media presentations to keep it interesting and inspirational.’ (ibid.) The other is described as having set up a new structure in which: nine heads of faculty drive the curriculum, cascading messages in vertical meetings to second leads who in turn meet with senior members of staff, third leads who track students and fourth leads who look after ICT and specialist school work across the curriculum. (Spencer 2009: 38) This headteacher states that: ‘If you believe that everybody in the organization is equal and the cross-fertilisation of ideas, knowledge and experience is paramount, then you have to get away from the traditional model of departments in order to give everyone the chance to meet together and talk. Our vision is to share good practice and address succession planning by creating an environment in which everyone has somewhere to go or aspire to being’. (ibid.) This statement can be seen as potentially at odds with the ‘cascade’ approach to creating shared values described immediately before it. It is similar to the approach to distributed leadership proposed by Harris (2008) as a structural arrangement to force staff to question practice so as to promote change. Harris does not discuss the implications of the possibility that this process of questioning practice might result in fundamental challenges to the value system espoused and articulated by the headteacher: we are forced to return to our earlier definition of school leadership as a creative response to external demands which does not challenge the fundamental expectations of those demands. The interpretation of the relationship between headteachers and their staff, particularly as expressed by the first principal, stands to some extent at odds with the idea of leadership being distributed more widely through the school and exercised informally. The first headteacher in particular can be seen as strongly directive, brooking no nonsense or dissent. In this, it is similar to the example of the headteacher described in Campbell et al. (2003) who pointed out that he had been successful in achieving values congruence because 80 per cent of his staff had been appointed since he took up post and he only appointed staff who shared his perceptions of the purpose of education and appropriate practice. However, despite this emphasis on values-driven transformational leadership, Earley et al. (2002: 80) argue that ‘there is as yet no evidence to suggest that on its own, it [transformational leadership] brings about anything but modest improved consequences for pupil outcomes.’

262 Nigel Bennett This conclusion reinforces that of a landmark study by Hallinger and Heck (1999), which concluded that leaders do make a difference to school outcomes, but that this effect is indirect and mediated by others; principals influence classroom practice which in turn influences pupil learning. To achieve this, Earley et al. (2002: 80) suggest that what they call the other ‘pre-eminent prescriptive model’ of educational leadership is required: instructional or pedagogical leadership. This approach has been adopted by the College under the name of ‘learning-centred leadership’ (NCSL 2005). Learning-centred leadership Earley et al. (2002) define instructional leadership as focused on the behaviours of staff as they engage in activities directly related to student learning. It has been dismissed by Leithwood et al. (2006: 7) as a particularly good example of leadership models which ‘typically serve as synonyms for whatever the speaker means by ‘good’ leadership – with almost no reference to models . . . that have some conceptual coherence and a body of evidence testing their effects on organizations and pupils’. However, the College promotes the principle that leadership is exercised at all levels within the school, and ‘learning-centred leadership’ is the dominant rhetoric of its provision as a companion to transformational leadership – the operationalization of the creation of values-congruence – as Earley et al. (2002) argue. In a document that explores the influence of ‘learning-centred leadership’ on the government policy on ‘personalized learning’, the College states: . . . it is important to investigate and develop clarity about how leaders influence what happens in classrooms. All leaders, be they heads, deputies, members of the senior leadership team, or heads of departments, key stages or subjects need to be able to answer one key question: How do you make a difference to learning and teaching? (NCSL 2005: 5 (original emphasis)) The College’s approach to professional development through national leaders of education represents precisely the combination of transformational and learning-centred leadership advocated by Earley et al. (2002). It is also part of the government’s ‘city challenge’ initiative, which is a direct challenge to the other limitation on principal influence put forward by Hallinger and Heck (1999): the external context of the school. Distributed leadership The College was a relatively early advocate of distributed leadership, which it states is ‘essentially about sharing leadership across an organization’. It states that this is not a new concept, being referred to sometimes as delegated or shared leadership, and argues that it rests on three key ideas: a belief in the value of leadership teams; the need for more leaders in schools as they become more complex; and the opportunity to prepare more staff for senior leadership posts (The National College 2009b). It places so much importance on this approach to leadership that it has its own distributed leadership website and set of materials (available at http://forms.ncsl.org.uk/mediastore/image2/distributedleadership_ web/animation.htm). These materials present distributed leadership as a form of learner-centred leadership, focusing key leadership roles on the subject leaders and other middle leaders. The College’s approach is thus more akin to the pragmatism of Gronn’s formulation as a way of coping with

Leadership in education 263 work intensification than to the others, as it stresses the development of ‘emergent leaders’, and in its pursuit of collaborative leadership it places a strong emphasis on team development. It can be claimed that in promoting a strong emphasis on teams, and leadership by the many rather than the few, the College is addressing the issue of headteacher shortage, albeit at one remove. As was indicated above, there is a tension between the kinds of collaboration and teamwork on which their view of distributed leadership is predicated, and the hierarchical nature of schools and the strong accountability model within which they are working. Networking and consultative support A key element of the College’s provision has been the generation of networking arrangements, which have created a range of potential online learning communities; although as Moore and Kelly (2009) indicated, the learning horizons of at least some of the networks appear to have been somewhat limited. However, the College has also been active in promoting a consultancy-style approach in addition to more conventional networking. The National Leaders of Education (NLE) scheme and the associated Local Leaders of Education (LLE) were set up in 2006, and there is a plan to achieve 500 NLEs by 2012. The College describes NLEs as outstanding school leaders who, together with the staff in their schools, use their knowledge and experience of teaching to provide additional leadership capacity to schools in challenging circumstances. Many NLEs will have previously worked to support schools in challenging circumstances and all have worked beyond their own school. (The National College 2009c) Headteachers are eligible to apply for NLE status if they meet a range of demanding criteria that are related to their school’s performance in Ofsted inspections. Their appointment is reviewed every year, and they are supported by a consultant from the College. The College keeps a register of NLEs who are deployed to schools through local authorities or, if there appears to be a justification for an NLE to work with them, they can ask the College to arrange the placement directly through the local authority. Thus the NLEs are forming a cadre of highly skilled consultant heads who can provide a support network of a different sort from the original online networks. In this arrangement, there is a more overt, though still unstated, power relationship between the NLEs and the heads with whom they are working, that rests on the status accorded to the NLE. This support network, along with the power relationships that are part of it, is expanded by designating the NLEs’ schools as ‘national support schools’ (NSS) whose staff can provide similar support for subject leaders and other members of the school. An important aspect of the NLE and NSS scheme has been its involvement in the government’s City Challenge programme. As indicated in note 1, this began in a small number of London boroughs that faced high levels of deprivation and poor academic achievement, and has now been extended to the whole of London, to Manchester and to three Black County local authorities. The scheme aims to network schools within the area covered by the scheme on the basis of similar characteristics, and also to provide what is referred to as tailored support for individual schools. In this work the NLEs and NSSs play a major role. Thus, although the Challenge scheme is not a College activity, it plays a major

264 Nigel Bennett role in its delivery, strengthening its role in policy implementation that was referred to above, and extending further the principle of professionals providing support and training to their colleagues. The NLE programme demonstrates a move towards the concept of system leadership in its deliberate promotion of a perception of headship as including responsibility outside of the main allocated school. Although the NLE remains a consultant or support for the school with which he or she is working, it is nevertheless the case that the creation of a cadre of such headteachers begins the process of viewing the education system more holistically rather than as an atomistic collection of individual schools. Resources to assist in leadership of federations We can deal quickly with this point. Although the College has recently created a course for leaders of Integrated Children’s Centres to run parallel to its NPQH, it has not explored formal provision for heads working across schools in hard or soft federations. However, it has produced materials to support professional development schemes, and it is clear that it sees the provision of such resource packs as an important part of its work. It has also established a very large website which includes materials and research on both federations and system leadership (e.g. O’Leary and Craig 2007), but access to these does not require a formal application to be made to the College to join one of its courses.

Criticisms of the National College Although the National College is widely presented in the literature as a model for other educational systems to follow (see, for example, OECD 2008), it is not without its critics. Its role as a national training organization and its relation to central government lay it open to significant criticism, some of it reminiscent of problems from before its existence. Glatter (2004) points out that the idea of a ‘staff college’ for school management development was raised periodically from the late 1960s onwards, but that it was argued against on the grounds that it ran the risk of creating a form of ‘administrative orthodoxy’. A staff college had been created in the mid-1960s for the Further Education sector at Coombe Lodge, which like the National College was separate from the university system, but differed significantly in that it was funded through a precept from local authority budgets, rather than directly by central government, and it was closed when local authority funds dried up. Although Coombe Lodge published both books and a journal it was largely concerned with technical dimensions of management, made little attempt to connect itself directly with the requirements of central government policy, and was concerned with the organization and management of much larger educational institutions than most schools. When the National College was established, the same critique Glatter refers to re-emerged, coloured further by the direct nature of its funding and the concerns of some authors about the managerialist national political and policy context within which it was working. We will finish by considering three key and closely related concerns. These relate to: its relationship to central government and the related danger of standardizing practice; its potential for reducing critical research and thinking; and, most fundamentally, the basis upon which its activities and resources have been built.

Leadership in education 265 The close relationship with central government and the danger of standardization First, the College has been criticized for its close relation to the central government at a time when government policy was subject to powerful academic criticism. Key elements of central government’s target-driven approach to school improvement and accountability – particularly the adoption of a quasi-market for schools, a strong inspection framework, competency-based teacher training with a much smaller input from higher education, and the establishment of ‘standards’ or competency frameworks for headteachers – were seen as creating forms of control within a managerialist and performative context that denied or undermined concepts of education as a professional activity. The performative culture and the creation of competency frameworks was seen by Gronn (2003: 10–16) as promoting a new concept of leadership – which he called ‘designer leadership’, to distinguish it from leadership by ascription (where leadership characteristics are largely equated with those of the gentleman, who was naturally endowed with the requirements that fitted him for such a role) and leadership by merit, in which promotion on the basis of merit and achievement meant that individuals were formally allocated leadership responsibilities – a system that married comfortably with the characteristics of a Weberian bureaucracy. Ascription was the result of birth; merit and achievement was the basis of the training regime of the MBA and other higher education qualifications. Designer leadership, Gronn argues, was taking over from leadership by merit by creating a template of ‘good leadership’ through the adoption of competency standards, to which would-be headteachers had to fit. Thus the analogy of designer leadership is that of off-the-peg clothes rather than bespoke made to measure. With the work of revising and updating national standards being largely undertaken by the National College (see DfES 2004), it can be argued that not only has the College accepted the need to train headteachers and other leaders to meet the specification of the standards but has contributed to their creation. A similar argument can be put forward in relation to the leadership development framework. Although the potential exists now to bypass this to some extent through the government’s Fast Track scheme, it is arguable that the framework provides an invariant progress of enculturation into a way of thinking about leadership that maps directly onto the requirements of the standards. Indeed, the Fast Track scheme can be argued to make that congruence even stronger as candidates speed through the training process. The implication of this argument is that the College’s programmes promote both a normative view of the role of the school leader and the skills they should be able to deploy, derived from the National Standards for headteachers, and an uncritical approach to what is being offered. The criticism is reinforced by the NLE programme. Headteachers are eligible for appointment as NLEs if their schools have achieved ‘outstanding’ status in Ofsted inspections. Given the workings of the inspection system and its use of criteria against which to judge quality, it is likely that NLEs will show considerable similarity in their approach to problems and their leadership practice. Evidence to support this is provided by one NLE, quoted by the Innovative Schools Company, a company proposing to create a national chain of twenty or more non-selective academies, as stating: I believe that in order to standardise the outcomes and ethos of a group of innovative schools, agreement has to be reached on the following crucial areas: vision, governance, learning and teaching, accountability, teacher formation, operational procedures – including recruitment, and funding. In essence a collaborative approach and reduction of autonomy of individual schools.

266 Nigel Bennett In order for schools to form a cohesive organisation and guarantee standardised outcomes there must be a shared vision across all schools. (Innovative Schools 2009) There is reason to be concerned, then, about some aspects of the courses and programmes that the College provides. The potential challenge to critical thinking and research Earlier in this chapter, it was suggested that the College’s view of research as a key part of its work was a positive dimension. However, as early as 2002, Weindling (2004: cited in Thrupp 2005) calculated that more than half of all research on educational leadership and management in England was being funded by the College, and the range and scale of the College’s publications list suggests that this proportion may have increased. Much of the research comprises small-scale research projects undertaken by practitioner heads and deputies as part of the research associateship scheme, which is helpful in promoting an approach to investigating personal practice. But there is also a considerable amount of larger work. Much of this has been undertaken by academic researchers (including the present author), but management consultancies and private research organizations have always played a significant role too. A great deal of this research consists of evaluations of policy or literature reviews that are concerned with mapping a field as a contribution to programme development (e.g. Bennett et al. 2003; O’Leary and Craig 2007; Glatter 2008). As a training and development provider rather than an academic institution, the College is interested in presenting cases of what works and why, and it is reluctant to fund studies of a more academic kind that also explore reasons for failure or poor performance. Consequently, the College can be criticized for reducing the extent to which members of the educational leadership and management research community can offer serious critiques of professional development practice. However, it may be that the College is becoming more interested in monitoring progress on broader policy questions rather than evaluations of specific projects, as recent publications include reports that argue that it is too early to provide more than tentative responses to the research questions posed (e.g Chapman et al. 2008). The questionable concept of ‘best practice’ The final issue to be considered in this part of the chapter is associated with the College’s approach to research: its emphasis on identifying and publicizing ‘best practice’. This is visible in the many pages of the College website, which include case studies and video clips of ‘successful’ schools, support materials and guides on implementation. However, as Glatter and Kydd (2003) point out, the concept of best practice is open to question. ‘Best’ implies a defined purpose which is being served by the activities being analysed or described. It also implies a single approach, which may allow for substantial variety of activities within it but is nevertheless strongly normative. A good example of this from education was the move by the government to propose a model for literacy lessons that suggested a three-stage format. This was very widely interpreted by teachers as a mandated lesson format – practice that was integral to achieving the literacy targets that had been laid down. Thus ‘best practice’ involves defining not just what needs to be done but how it should be done. It can be argued that the debate over best practice takes further the designer leadership criticism presented by Gronn (2003). To extend the analogy, it is concerned not just with ensuring that the suit is designed

Leadership in education 267 so as to iron out differences between wearers, but also with laying down how and when it should be worn. As Glatter and Kydd (2003) comment, ‘Check-lists are unhelpful in conditions of complexity – living systems cannot be directed along a linear path.’ This being said, however, there are strong traditions of good professional practice being established through codes of practice and conduct, and good or ‘proper’ craft practice being learned through apprenticeship. These vary from the moral and ethical, like the codes of conduct for doctors and lawyers, to the practical, in terms of issues like safety or the consequences of doing particular tasks in a particular order, as in pottery. There is also a deeper set of expectations about how action should be taken, variously interpreted as reflection in action (Schon 1987) or the integration of discrete items of learning into a holistic and fluent interpretation of a situation and actions appropriate in it (Eraut 2004). Eraut’s argument in particular works against the identification of ‘best practice’ that can be modelled and applied, and moves towards the creation of deeply embedded practice that results from deliberative learning but is transformed into what he refers to as pattern recognition. Although the College’s networking systems can be argued to promote deliberative learning, it can also be argued that the College’s creation and support of NLEs work against it, and in favour of implementing recommended solutions to problems that have been conceived in a particular way.

Conclusions This chapter has focused on the work of the National College for Leadership in Schools and Children’s Services because that organization has dominated educational leadership development in England since its creation in 2000, and is widely presented in the literature as a model to emulate (OECD 2008). It is clear from the discussion that its work addresses many of the issues facing school leaders through a wide range of activities, but it is also apparent that its size and near-monopoly of professional development in the field, allied to its close connection with government policy, has raised problems for the wider development of a critical perspective on leadership practice. This is a major concern in public sector training. A relatively uncritical acceptance of the values and principles of practice of a commercial organization is one thing; to have a similar uniformity of uncritical thinking across a national system, even if publicly funded, may have significant dangers. There is considerable evidence of leadership in schools responding creatively to the demands and expectations of central government – it was suggested above that educational leadership might be interpreted as creative responses to external demands – but this creativity remains bounded within a largely uncritical acceptance of the requirements of the system and the College’s presentation of the issues facing school leaders. The College is now ten years old and its courses have provided training for thousands of teachers and school leaders. It has made major contributions to our thinking about the process of leadership development, in particular through its use of professional networking as a means to broaden and generate new professional knowledge. However, now that the NPQH is a mandatory qualification for candidates for headships, it can be hypothesized that its already wide-ranging influence on thinking and practice about school leadership will be extended further, and the normative influence of what is virtually a monopoly provider will become even stronger. The possibilities and potential dangers of this position are serious challenges to the educational system, to its leaders, and to the position of teachers within it. It is not clear at the time of writing how the issues raised by the position and work of the College will play out in the wider provision of leadership development. Private providers of

268 Nigel Bennett training may encourage a similarly uncritical acceptance of policy expectations, providing assistance to teachers wrestling with new requirements such as using phonics for teaching reading, or they may be advocating a particular approach to particular issues. It is for higher education to take responsibility for generating a critical perspective on practice and potential challenges to policy expectations, but funding and motivation are likely to be a continuing problem. Further, the Labour government’s decision to create a Masters in Teaching and Learning degree (the MTL) as a professional qualification for teachers may, if implemented, have the effect of weakening the market position for other postgraduate higher education programmes and runs the risk of creating an equally uncritical approach to practice under the guise of enhancing its professional status.

Questions for discussion 1 2 3

How effective do you think major centralized leadership development initiatives such as the National College can be? What are their advantages and disadvantages? How would you interpret the reasoning behind the discontinuance of the formal course for established headteachers which is referred to in this chapter? If theoretical work on leadership development and practice is important, as is implied in this chapter, how might it be incorporated into the professional networks that are being created through work supported by the National College?

Acknowledgement I would like to acknowledge, with thanks, the insightful and helpful comments on earlier drafts of this chapter from Ron Glatter, Emeritus Professor of Educational Administration and Management at the Open University.

Notes 1

2

3

4

National and local leaders of education are senior headteachers who undertake work with other headteachers to bring about professional development and school improvement. They are particularly important to the three ‘City Challenge’ schemes set up by the Department for Education and Skills (DfEE) and the Department for Schools, Children and Families (DCSF) in London, Manchester and the Black Country (see http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/citychallenge/) that are intended to improve the performance of schools, specifically in relation to their public examination scores but also in terms of wider collaboration and networking, to which we refer below. Executive heads are headteachers who are concerned with overseeing the work of more than one school, through either ‘soft’ or ‘hard’ federations. This approach to headship is both a means of pairing successful schools with unsuccessful schools in an attempt to improve performance, and an approach to headship that is designed to address a potential shortage of headteachers as the large number of heads in their late fifties and early sixties retire in the next five years. It is discussed in detail by Harris et al. (2006). School improvement partners (SIPS) are headteachers or ex-headteachers who are partnered with another school in order to assist with its ongoing self-evaluation. Under the latest Ofsted inspection framework, schools have to prepare and maintain a self-evaluation form that reviews their ongoing progress and rates their own performance on a range of criteria. This self-evaluation form is the basis of inspections. SIPs are expected to support the development and updating of these forms as ‘critical friends’; however, anecdotally some headteachers feel that they are more critical than friendly, and form another tier of inspection rather than a form of support. At a symposium organized by the Standing Conference of Researchers into Educational Leadership and Management and held at the Open University in May 2005, Professor Geoff Southworth, Director of Research at the NCSL, stated that the college was ‘not interested’ in theory.

Leadership in education 269

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Index

360 peer review 108 3M 213 ABB 214 accountability 65–6 accountability and diversity 250 Ackroyd, S. 118 Adair, J. 27 adaptive capacity 19 Ago, A. 8 Ahold 52 Alimo-Metcalf, B. 225 Amazon.com 4 American Dream 21 An Angel in Queens 80 analysts 47 Anderson 52 Anderson-Gough, F. 158 anti-bureaucracy 59 Antonacopoulou, E. 8, 72 A-Players 214 A-Positions 214 Apple 30 Argyris, C. 64 Armytage, W.H.G. 251 Arnold, J. 130 arrogance 57 Arthur Miller 86 Arthur, M.B. 131 Atkinson, S. 197 attitudes to work 239 authenticity of leadership 73 Avolio, B. 28, 34 Badaracco, J.L.E. 42–4 BAE Systems 103 Bailey, C. 10, 167 Bakker, A.B. 228–9 Bandura, A. 120–1 Bankco 172–4 Barclays 94, 100 Barley, S. 158 Barry, D. 73 Bartlett, C.A. 208, 213

Baruch, Y. 130 Bass, B.M. 15, 28, 229 Bate, P. 122 BBC 5, 255 Beck, U. 49 behavioural requirements and competences 24–6 behavioural theory 17 Belliveau, M. 157 Bendix, R. 23 Bennett, N. 249 Bennington, J. 201 Bennis, W.G. 19 Berger, P. 118 best practice questioned 265 Bion,, W.R. 118 Bird, A. 157 Birkinshaw, J. 33 Björkman, I. 207 Black, J.S. 207 Blake, R.R. 15 Blandford, S 21 Blass, E. 93 blended learning 258–9 Boal, K.B. 73 Boje, D.M. 116 Bolam, R. 250 Bolden, R. 27, 234, 237 Bolles, R.N. 130 Boudreau, J. 214 Bourdieu, P. 72 Boyatzis, R. 25 BP case 134 Bradford, D.L. 30 Bridges, W. 131 Briscoe, J. 155 British Airways 201 British Bakeries 200 Brodbeck, F.C. 21 Brousseau, K. 152 Brown, P. 202 Brown, R. 114 Brundrett, M. 250 Bryce, R. 43, 46

Index 273 Bryman, A. 16 Burke, M.J. 123, 235 Burke, W.W. 190 business leadership development (BLD) 167 business leadership development framework 171 business need 178 Business Schools 10, 59 Butcher, D. 167 Cabinet Office 6, 24 Cable and Wireless 94 Cadbury Report 52 Cairns, H. 169 Cairns, H. 180 Cap Gemini Ernst & Young 103 Capgemini University 104–7 Cappelli, P. 217 career 129ff career acceleration programme 134 career development 129ff career development continuum 137 career management versus career development 150 careers as a problem 131 Carrefour 217 Carroll, B. 27, 72 celebration of leadership 57 CEML 24 Centre for Tomorrow’s Company 200 CEO successions 32 Chambers, E. 132 Chancellor Merkel 21 changing contexts 14 changing mindsets 189 Chapman, C. 198, 249, 256 character 49 Charan, R. 208 charisma, 11 charismatic leader 256 Charles, I. 117 Child, J. 23 Chinese philosophy 71 Christ 63 Chuck Prince 58 Churchill, W. 18 Cisco 217 City Challenge 263 civil service case 135–6 Clarke, M. 167, 189 coaching 28 Coffey, A. 158 Colbert, B. 169 Collins, J. 16, 227 Collinson, 8 Colvin, 4 Commonwealth Edison 210 competences 14

competency approach critique 234–5 competency frameworks 144 conceptual framework for leadership 19 Conference Board 4 Conger, J. 28, 169 constitutive and contructivist theory 17, 18 consultant leadership 257 context 20 contingency theory, 17 Conway, N. 118, 156 Coombe Lodge 264 Cooper, C. 158 Cornwell, R. 45 corporate universities 93ff corrupt leadership 46–7 Cortina, J.M. 238 cost constraints and leadership 8 counselling 130 Court, S. 187, 192 Craig, R. 94 crisis of leadership 56ff criticisms of the National College 264 Crompton, R. 157 Crow, G. 257, 259 Cruver, B., 43, 47 cult of natural leader 119 Cummings, C. 253 D’Netto, B. 167 Dale, B.G. 5 Darzi report 5 Davies, B. 253 Davos 41 Dawson, S. 5 De Vries, M.K. 32 deceit 46–7 Defence Leadership Centre 96, 102–3 definitions of leadership 61 Delery, J. 168 demand-driven and learning-driven assignments 214 Deming, W. 5 democratic leadership 254 DEMOS 6 developing engaging leadership 234 developing for diversity 198–9 developing global leadership potential 214 developing leadership 226 Deverell, J.F. 75 devolved organizations 8 Dexter, B. 169 dichotomy of leaders and managers 8 Digital 199 DiMaggio, P.W. 22 discourse about leadership 20 disentangling development 194 Disney 32 Disney Institute 94

274 Index distant leadership 26 distributed leadership 14, 63, 106, 226–7, 254–5 Dobby, J. 232 Dotlich, D. 28 Doz, Y. 218 Du Gay, P. 59 Du Pont 95 dynamic capability 74 Earley, P. 262 Eby, L. 157 Eddy 213 EFQM 5 Eli Lilley 34 Elmore, R. 254 emotional intelligence 26 engagement 227–8 engaging leader 233 engaging leadership defined 228 Enron 32, 41 enterprise 60 ethics 40ff Etzioni, A. 53 Eurich, N. 94 evaluation of training 114 Evans, P. 207 Every Child Matters Agenda 253 evolving theories 14,15 exchange and path models 17 expenditure on training 4 failings in leadership 57ff false-real learning continuum 201 fast track 265 Ferris, W.P. 73, 75 Fidler, B. 253 Fire & Rescue Service 239 Fisher, R. 26 Fletcher, J. 159 followership 8, 14, 75, 118 Fortune Magazine 43 Fox, L. 43–4 Fraser, C. 117 Fred Goodwin 194 Freud 32–3 FTSE 100 companies 231 Fullan, M. 14, 33, 256 Fulmer, R. 4, 167 Fulmer, R.M. 27 Gallup 228 Gallwey, T. 188 gaps in leadership thinking 9 Gardner, W.L. 73 Garratt, R. 76 Gattorna, J.L. 5 GE 210 General Electric 8

Generation X 158 Generation Y 141 George, B. 73 Ghandi 63 Gherardi, S. 72 Giber, D.L. 28 Gill, J. 122 Gill, R. 17 Glaister, A. 253 Glatter, R. 188, 251 global enterprises 10 global leadership potential 209 Goffman, E. 121 Gold, A. 253 Goldacre, B. 114 Goleman, D. 26 Good Samaritan 80 Gosling, J. 27, 198 governance and leadership 65–7 Grace, G. 252 Gratton, L. 143 Gregerson, H.B. 207 Grint, K. 93 Gronn, P. 254, 255, 265 Guest, D. 31, 179 Guillan, L. 208 Gunz, H. 130 Guthey, E. 65 Guthridge, M. 211 Hamburger U 94 Hamel, G. 104 Hampel Report 52 Harris, A. 254, 255 Harter, JK. 228 Harvard Business School 43–4 Hawkins, P. 130 Hay Group 213 HEADLAMP 250 headteachers 21 Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC) 6 Herriot, P. 130 Hersey, P. 27 Heslin, P. 152 Hewlett-Packard 218 Higgs Report 52 high-potentials (Hi-Pos) 28 Himmelfarb, G. 49 Hirsh, W. 129, 140 Hitler 119 Hodgson, P. 76 Hogan, R. 227 holistic thinking 192 Hollenbeck, G. 28, 215, 235 Home Office Report 7 home-grown talent 178 Honda 217

Index 275 Hopfl, H. 198 Hopkins, D. 249, 256 Hopson, B. 130 Horne, M. 7, 194 Houghton, J.D. 73 House, R.J. 73 how and what of leadership 236 HR and development 168–71 Huffington Post 80 Humphrey, R.H. 26 Hunter, J. 49 IBM 207 ideological aspects 23 Iles, P. 226 IMD 107 inclusive leadership 254 individual-centred leadership 188 individualism 48–50 Inkson, K. 157 inner learning 74 Innovative Schools Company 265 INSEAD 28 Institute of Management 6, 64–5 institutional dimensions 60 integrity 41ff intelligent gambling 45 inter-agency working 253 interim managers 30 International University Consortium for Executive Education 4–5 Intransitivity 208 Islamabad 82 Jackson Heights 78 James, K. 195 Japanese firms 209 Jarzabkowski, P. 72 Jeff Immelt 212 Jeff Skilling 32 Jensen, M.C. 59 Johari window 243 John Lewis 5 Jones, C. 157, 161 Jones, G. 75 Jorge Munoz 72 Kahn, W.A. 227 Kamoche, K. 179 Kanter, R.M. 111 Katz, D. 118–19, 191 Keat, R. 60 Kelly, A. 232 Ken Lay 44 key issues identified 11 Khurana, R. 17, 21 Kidd, J.M. 130, 140, 147 King, Z. 151

King’s Fund 8 Kings College London University 236 Kodak 21 Kotter, J, 30 Kouzes, J.M. 29 Kristof, N. 83 Kupperman, J. 49 Kynaston, D. 49 Lambert, R. 42 language of leadership 101 Lao-Tzu 71 Latham, G.P. 123 Latinos 79 Lave, J. 76 leader as hero 28 leader as mystic 28 leadership and can-do 51 leadership and innovation 34 leadership as a relational process 75 leadership as a system resource 195ff leadership as accomplished performance 24 leadership as doing and knowing 28 leadership as intangible asset 24 leadership as practice 71ff leadership constellation 20 Leadership Culture & Change Inventory 238 leadership development and global coordination 218–20 leadership development methods 27–9 Leadership Excellence Action Programme 6 leadership failure 58 leadership from within 73 Leadership Helix Model 101 leadership integration 103 leadership of federations 264 leadership, culture and engagement 230 leading as learning 76 Leading for Health 5 learning network 107 learning of leadership 72–8 learning-centred leadership 260, 262 Leeds Leadership programme 9 Lehman Brothers 33, 57, 228 Leiner, F. 3 Lewis, S. 158 Lichtenstein, B.B. 73 Liden, R.C. 9, 14 lifestyle anchor 152 Lindsay, G. 252 link with performance 11 lionized chief executives 21 Littler, C. 95 Lloyds TSB 94 Local Authority leadership intervention 242 London Business School 109 London Institute of Education 250 London, M. 28

276 Index Lord, R.G. 208 Louis XVI 117 love and leadership 72–9 Lowe, K. 167 Lubitch, G. 131 Mabey, C. 167, 181 Maccoby, M. 17, 32–3 Mackenzie-Davey, K. 156 MacLoed Review 225 main theories summarised 17 Mäkelä, K.I. 211 Malcolm Baldridge Award 5 Management Action Programme 174 managerial capitalism 49 managers versus leaders 16 Mangham, I. 34 Manz, C.C. 73 Marconi 33 Margaret Thatcher 60 Marks & Spenser 21 Martin-Alcázar, F. 168 Maslach, C. 228 Maslow, H. 27 Mcartney, C. 131 McCall, M.W. 208, 214 McCauley, C.D. 28 McDermott, G.R. 73 McGough, R. ix McGovern, P. 158 McGregor, D. 27, 29 McHale, J. 192 McKinsey, 215 McLean, A. N 213 McRae, H. 42 Mellahi, K. 210 mentoring 144 Merrill Lynch 58 meta-capabilities 25–7 Metropolitan Police 188 Microsoft 218 Miles, R. 157 Miller, D. 23 Miller, P. 60 Ministry of Defence 6 Mintzberg, H. 53, 254 Mirvis, P.H. 159 Mole, G. 10, 114, 200 moral leadership 43 moral reasoning 46–8 Morton, A. 48 Motorola U 94 Moynagh, M. 131 Mrs Zapata 78 Mukhtar’s story 79–84 Mukhtaran Bibi 72 multinational firms 207ff Mumford, 14

Murphy, D. 180 Murphy, K.J. 117 narcissistic leaders 33 National College for Leadership in Schools and Children’s Services 6, 10, 249, 257 national cultures 20 National Development Centre 250 National Professional Qualification for Headship (NPQH) 6, 250 nearby leadership 228 Neill, A.S. 260 Nestlé 141–2 networked learning communities 259 networking 263 Neville Chamberlain 119 new career 155 NHS Leadership Council 3 Nicholson, N. 118, 151 Nietzsche 49 Noe, R. 155 Northern Rock 30 Northouse, P. 227 nurturing 75 O’Leary, D. 265 Oakland, J. 5 OECD 249 Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) 251 Ogawa, R. 252 Ohio State University studies 17 organisational culture 46–7 organization development (OD) 100, 185 Orpen, C. 155 Osborne, T. 59 Oxfam 24 P&G 213 panacea of leadership 7 Parcelco 175–6 partnership working 232 Paton, R. 10, 93 Paul Myners, 21 Pawar, B.S. 21 Pedler, M. 94, 195 People’s Express 32 perceived need for leadership, 21–2 Performance and Innovation Unit (PIU) 193, 225 performance reviews 46 Perrow, C. 21 personal development plan 140 personalities of leaders 21 Peston, R. 21 Peters, T. 29–31 Philip Green 21 Philip Morris 51 Polaroid-Kodak 32

Index 277 police service 7 post-charismatic and post-transformative leadership 28–32 post-charismatic theory 17 Powers Report 43 Pozner, B.Z. 75 Preedy, M. 253 presentation skills 120–1 President Sarkozy 21 private providers 267 Proctor & Gamble 211 professional-as-administrator 255 psychological contract 118 public sector initiatives 6 Pucik, V. 207 Purcell, J. 181 PwC 132, 138–9 questions for developers 203 Quinton, A. 48 Raelin, J. 76 Rainbird, H. 169, 187 RBS 30 Ready, D. 207 referral skills 156 reflexive critique 72 regulators 53 Repertory Grid Technique 231 reputational capital of a leader 24 respect and integrity 44 Retailco 176–7 Richard Fauld 58 Riggio, R. 8, 14 risk 58 Robarchek, C.A. 118 Roberts, R. 49 Robertson, J. 28 Robinson, D. 227–8 Rolls-Royce 137, 145–6 Rose, N. 60–1 Rosenbach, 8 Rosenbaum, J.E. 158 Rowold, J. 28 Royal Military Academy 75 rulers and myths 23–4 Ryan, J. 254–5 Rynes, S. 169 Sadler, P. 186 Salaman, G. 64 Salbu, S. 42 Sancho Panza 79 Sanders, K. 169 Sankowsky, D. 28 Sarbanes–Oxley Act 52 Scase, R. 152 Schatzki, T.R. 71

Schaufeli, W.B. 227 Schein, E. 119 Schmitt, N.W. 119 Scullion, H. 207 Sekaran, U. 158 self efficacy 120 self motivation 171 Selznick, P. 21 Sendjava , S. 14 Senge, P. 8, 94 Sennett, R. 48 sensemaking approaches 24–5 servant leadership 8, 14, 75 Session C at GE 212 Sheehan, C. 169 Sheehy, G. 130 Shell 100–7 Sherman, N. 49 Singer, P. 49 Sirota Survey Intelligence 228 situational theories 17 Smale, A. 207 Smircich, L. 73 Snell, S. 180 social learning theory 120 Softco 174–5 Soichiro Honda 217 Sorenson, G. 4 Soros, G. 49 Sparrowe, R.T. 73 Spencer, A. 260 Spillane, J. 14, 255 spontaneity in leadership 72 Standardized Achievement Tests (SATS) 254 Stanley O’Neal 58 Starkey, K. 207 Starwood Hotels 218 Stewart Rose 21 Steve Jobs 30 Stiglitz, J. 54 Stogdill, R. 15 Storey 58, 99, 167–8, 189, 190, stories of learning leadership 77–80 Strain, M. 250 strategic alignment 103 strategic career management 130 strategic leadership programme 110 strategic learning initiatives 99 strategy ahead of training 186 Sturges, J. 150 succession planning versus talent pools 216 Sullivan, S. 155 Summerhill School 260 Sung, J. 169 superleadership 73 Suuitari, V. 169 symbolic meaning of leadership 23 system leadership 256

278 Index systematic approach to leadership development 185ff systems perspective, 10 Szamosi, L.T. 114 talent development 106 talent management 131 Tamkin, P. 4, 24 Tannenbaum, S.L. 116 Tansley, C. 131 Tate, W. 185 Taylor, S. 93 Teacher Training Agency 257 temporal shifts, 11 theories of leadership 15 Thiele, L.P. 49 Thompson, A. 169 Tichy, N. 29, 31, 248 top-down and bottom-up 217 Total Quality 5 Tourish, D. 117, 227 Towers Perrin 227 Trades Union Congress 158 trait theory 17, 61 Transformational Leadership Questionnaire 231 transformational leadership, 16, 29 Truss, C. 180 Turner, S. 71 Uhl-bien, M. 73 Unilever 96 Unipart U 94 unlearning 74 US Navy 3 Vaill, P. 73 values statement 47 Van Maanen, J. 118 verbal persuasion 121 vicarious experience 121 Vicere, A. 4 virtuous development cycle 170 vision and values 260

Vitello-Cicciu, J.M. 26 Vroom, V.H. 15 Wakhlu, A. 75 Waldman, D.A. 26 Wallace, M. 254 war for talent 132 Waterman, R. 131 Watson Wyatt 227 ways of looking at careers 130 Weber, M. 93 Weick, K. 18, 120 Weindling, D. 265 Welch, J. 8, 19 well-being at work 239 Wenger, E. 259 West-Burnham, J. 253 Westley, F. 16 Wharton Knowledge 107 Wheatley, M.J. 73 when to identify potential 209 wholesomeness 76 why can’t leadership be taught? 117 Wiggenhorn, W. 95 Wolff, S.B. 26 Woods, P.A. 251, 254, 254 Work Foundation 9 work/life balance 130, 159 World Economic Forum 41 Worrall, L. 158 Wright, C. 169 Wright, P. 180 Xanthopoulou, D. 228 Yarnall, J. 130 Yeomans, K.A. 238 Yorks, L. 167 Yukl, G. 116 Zaleznick, A. 16 Zenger, J. 169 Zhu, W. 73