Leaders versus Leadership

There is still a lot of the ‘Great Man’ approach to leaders around. Investment has been and still is in the personification of ‘leader’ in individuals rather than the phenomenon of leadership in organisations. But might the latter be the less ego-centric future? If you believe Garrett then leadership competence is entirely contextual anyway, so a great leader in one organisation can move to a different organisation and become ‘incompetent’ overnight (and we’ve seen plenty of that).

There is now a huge ingrained expectation that leadership in your organisation will come from somebody/some people whose job that is. And so it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy in which people look to an authority figure with an expectation which authority figures then feel they must meet. But most of our clients have to stop and decide who they want to include in a programme of work as ‘leaders’ because there isn’t such a thing as a pure leadership population in the first place “well we could get our top 20 to do this but maybe we want our top 100”. Actually don’t we want everyone who has people management as part of their job to do this?”

I’m not sure what this might mean for leadership development except that it might be very much more tangibly an applied issue. Leader is a role whereas leadership might be more of an organisational process which is not properly defined and attended to as it doesn’t structurally exist. So I’m imagining it could in practice be more like ‘Quality’ or ‘ Efficiency’, ‘Sustainability’ or ‘Ethics’, i.e. Not reducible to someone’s job.

I think where that has taken me as a train of thought is to wonder what would we be doing if the intention was to bring about a feeling of strong leadership as a characteristic of the organisation rather than start at the other end with individuals who are nominally leaders? If an organisation was wanting to develop certain characteristics of the experience of being in it like direction, conviction, supportiveness, challenge, responsibility, is it possible to focus on those outcomes and work back to how they would be created and sustained systemically? That would be different to starting with the premise that the organisation is the manifestation of individuals and so we need to start with individuals. You’d still end up working with individuals and teams (what else is there? Chairs and desks?) but would it be working on something slightly or significantly different? Something to ponder on...

Changing leadership habits in the age of 'bite-sized' learning

Neuroscience boffins know more and more about how our brains work and how human beings and therefore leaders, most of whom are human beings, change their habits. See The Neuroscience of Leadership. Any Organisation Development Director or CPO who hopes to influence leaders habits better start out with this understanding. To start with, a leader will need a new insight. This insight must be generated by a critical experience or a self-generated “ah hah!” moment, so don’t even try to get one through compliance. Then the insight needs lots of support and attention over a period of months to establish it into a habit – a new set of brain wiring that will endure and affect follower experience of a leader’s daily practice. Insight + sustained and supported attention = habit change. In the days of long and languid leadership retreats at beautiful country piles, perspective shifting programmes in Africa working with the Maasai or inspiring large group interventions with tons of experiential learning, opportunities for insight and support abounded. What hope for “ah hah!” moments in today’s climate of bite-size learning, on-line workbooks and 1 day in-house programmes? We think there is some, but only if we start with a clear understanding of what really works. Ideas Unlimited Partner Lucy Ball and Eve Poole (friend of Ideas Unlimited and Ashridge Business School Egg-head) will be answering this question in an upcoming article. Please e-mail lucy@ideasunlimited.com with your thoughts or comments or to register your interest in hearing more

Leadership - a team sport

Much has been made of the individual leader. But we think leadership is more like football than long distance running, much more like a morris dance than a ballet solo, much more like group hugging than rocking gently in a corner by oneself. It's no secret now – ask any research from the last 3 years that the secrets to commercial high performance are the clarity and engagement created by leaders. What we know is that this is done by a cohort of leaders at the top of the organisation – say the top 50 or so. So working on the extent to which things are shared between them (like purpose, like stories, like norms of behaviour) is a faster route to high performance than simply honing their individual muscles.

Driving results

You can drive a car, you can drive a golf ball, you can drive a wedge between two people (I know I can), you can drive people crazy, you can drive a horse and cart through my logic but you can't 'drive results'. Results indicate what has happened and they are the 'result' of people's performance. So stop trying to work on the result and instead help your people develop their performance, i.e how they do their work, and see if that affects the result.

Ideas Unlimited Thinks goes to Blog

You can now find Ideas Unlimited's thoughts on organisations, performance, leadership, engagement, development and the price of apples on this blog.