Outline
- Introduction
- Schools of thought
- Leadership v management
- Binding the Company together
Search ‘leadership’ on Amazon.com and you get a listing of nearly six thousand books. Admittedly this includes titles such as ‘10 Habits for Effective Ministry’ - but why not?
Always a popular subject for gurus, savants and one minute men, the issue of leadership is today receiving increasing attention. Why? Because as markets mature, products become commoditised and customers more discerning the potential for the magic elixir of differentiation lies with your people. Leadership as such becomes a critical catalyst.
Is this sufficiently recognised? Well, in their Business Excellence Model (see diagram) EFQM allocate just 10% to leadership. Clearly leadership has a part to play in their essentially internal look at a company. Whether they have got the balance right is debatable though.
Schools of Thought
Traditionally leadership has been described as the ability of the superior to influence the behaviour of subordinates and persuade them willing to follow a desired course of action. The leader’s task is to unite all assigned personnel in an organisation and co-ordinate them in an effort to achieve sought after results
A prevalent style in the West has been the hero approach. Great men who rise to the fore in times of crisis. Mythical figures, they focus on short term events and are revered for their charisma. With the urgent crowding out the important this is more often than not the authoritarian school of leadership. Transactional in style, it tends to be associated with a one sided top down style.
‘If it weren’t for the last minute nothing would get done’ Anon
‘Life’s too short for democracy’ Director of a Clearing Bank
The risks of this style - which can be very effective in the short and even medium term - is that such leaders become inelastic, inflexible and unresponsive over time - and this is not necessarily just a function of age!. They also tend not to be too interested in succession planning. As a result many companies falter and/or run in to a performance wall.
Hailed as one of the top fifty business books of all time in the Financial Times, one of the seminal works was ‘Leaders: The Strategies for Taking Charge’ by Nanus & Bennis. Written in the 60’s and recently updated they describe the key ingredients of leadership as guiding vision, passion, integrity and daring.
Sandwiched between these two editions in 1982 was ‘In Search of Excellence’ by Peters & Waterman. Criticised by academics for its poor research base but loved by managers for its’ readability, it was not explicitly about leadership. Yet many of its’ canons of ‘excellent’ practice still resonate and surface in current writings today:-
|
A bias for action
|
getting on and doing something rather than excessive analysis or allowing committees etc. to cause delays
|
|
Close to the customer
|
concern and interest in customers with a focus on customer service
|
|
Autonomy & entrepreneurship
|
small units, initiative and innovation valued
|
|
Productivity through people
|
employees seen as key resources
|
|
Hands on, value driven
|
senior executives promote a strong corporate culture and obtain feedback
|
|
Stick to the knitting
|
stay close to the business they know best
|
|
Simple form, lean staff
|
simple structure, small head office
|
|
Simultaneous loose-tight properties
|
strong core company values, but those who adhere to them are given considerable freedom and errors are tolerated
|
The notion of simultaneous loose-tight properties fits well with many of the more recent expositions on leadership. Many commentators believe that to be successful in this fast changing world, organisations need to be flexible and amoebic in form.
In this environment transformational and strategic leadership is needed - the ability to take a rolling systems based view of events. The preferred style becomes a judicious blend of path finding and response formulation. A critical component is setting a vision, building culture and a high profile involvement in implementation.
To go back to Nanus & Bennis in their updated book, leadership is about:
- character
- fostering intellectual capital
- displaying passion to realise the vision
- generating and sustaining trust
- getting sign up to the vision
- displaying a bias to action.
This relates to Prahalad & Hamel with their concept of the ‘learning organisation’. Here the focus is on the implementation dimension, critical as it is to the well being of the organisation. At root this is a social process with leaders becoming designers, teachers, coaches and stewards. It also recognises the particular needs of the new cohorts of knowledge workers and the needs for flexibility and innovation.
Does this destroy the cult of the individual? Well potentially and indeed in a recent article in the Financial Times (13/10/98) Henry Mintzberg talks about ‘Quiet managing ..about infusion, change that seeps in slowly, steadily and profoundly.’ In his view ‘A healthy organisation does not have to leap from one hero to another; it is a collective social system that naturally survives changes in leadership.’
Does this leave you, like modern man, confused as in ‘I used to be indecisive until I drank Smirnoff, now I’m just not sure’? Does it destroy the romance and mystique of leadership?
‘In the designs, the demeanour and the mental operations of a
leader there must always be a something which others cannot
altogether fathom, which puzzles them, stirs them, and diverts their
attention.’ Charles de Gaulle
Leadership and Management
Shock absorbers, change prevention officers or just the embodiment of Organisation Man, middle mangers have been in the firing line over the last few years. As companies have sought to down size, right size or whatever the current language is, they have felt the full force of cost cutting, lean and mean diet drive and the tend towards flexible organisations.
How to deal with this shell shocked population is another matter. But there is room for the positive as a survivor of a recent corporate merger said:
‘There is more opportunity than I ever imagined’
Managers are an important part of the organisational food chain because leaders are leaders irrespective of the groups they manage. Indeed depending on the nature of the hierarchy they may well be leaders and managers.
Many organisations have developed a recent interest in inculcating leadership at every managerial level. This may be situational reflecting, for example, the differences between the manufacturing and service industries. It may reflect the strategy of the organisation, for example, 3M which has a proud record of entrepreneurial innovation. It may be part of the process of driving customer focus throughout.
How might we distinguish between leadership and management?
|
Role
|
Leaders
|
Managers
|
|
Create Agendas
|
· Establish direction
· Develop vision of the future
· Develop change strategies
|
· Planning/budgeting
· Develop plan
· Develop timetable
|
|
Build networks
|
· Alignment of people
· Inculcate vision in people/teams
|
· Organisation/staffing
· Develop staffing, delegation & monitoring policies
|
|
Execution
|
· Inspire
· Energise others to overcome barriers
|
· Control/problem solving
Monitor & take corrective action
|
|
Outcomes
|
· Potentially revolutionary changes
· Innovation
· Order out of chaos
|
· Order & predictability
· Key results focus
|
Not content with this there is also a new virus of aptitudes a leader and manager should possess - to whit a ‘global mindset’. The underlying premise is that there is now no such thing as a domestic organisation. While companies may not themselves trade globally they cannot be impervious to the broader range of influences driven by technology, communications, travel and increasing customer expectations.
What does having a global mindset mean? It means scanning the world from a broad perspective always looking for unexpected trends and opportunities to achieve our personal, professional or organisational objectives.
Characteristics are:
- seeing the broader picture and context
- accepting complexity ambiguity and conflict management
- understanding that process - systems, procedures, norms of behaviour- is more powerful than structure
- valuing diversity and teamwork
- flowing with change
- seeking to develop themselves
In summary:
|
Domestic mindset
|
Global
|
Resources
|
|
functional expertise
|
bigger broader picture
|
knowledge
|
|
prioritisation
|
balance of contradictions
|
systems view
|
|
structure
|
process
|
flexibility
|
|
individual responsibility
|
teamwork
|
sensitivity
|
Binding the Company together
Complexity and ambiguity are bye words for the modern organisation. If there was a single, simple foolproof remedy to success - the Golden Bullet - then like forecasting the Lottery it would have been found.
Time, space and your attention span don’t allow an in depth discussion of the potential areas here but we will return to some of them in other papers. The areas we list are in our view amongst the key energisers.
- Mission Statements: Frequently dismissed as motherhood and apple pie, many organisations have found the process of crafting and communicating mission statements a useful way of defining culture and values and shaping a common hymn sheet. They also offer the mechanism for a linkage to the external customer brand values. If not the same there should clearly be a high level of overlap.
Beware though! It should clearly differentiate your company. If you can rub out your name and put in somebody else’s without noticing the difference, then its not working.
To put you in the picture:
An analysis of 301 corporate mission statements found the words most often used were:-
- service 230
- customers 322
- quality 194
- value 183
- environment 117
- leader 104
- best 102
- Developing a customer focus : Despite their protestations many companies still just push product. Staff see this - to them it is painfully transparent. As a result quite often you get a metronomic performance not dissimilar to the air hostesses when they do the emergency escape routines.
Building, implementing and consistently delivering customer focus is akin to painting the Forth Road Bridge. Look at BA, back with another multi-million pound programme after their much revered ‘Customer First’ investment. As an aside, is BA still your most favourite airline?
Contact staff respond positively to this focus. It also gives the opportunity to align support functions if you accept the notion that every body has customer. Performance contracts, measurement, mystery shopping and feedback are as relevant in this context as they are when dealing with external customers.
- Open Communications: In this day and age and in an information society one might question if this really is an issue. Most companies have a top down cascade process. Many will be fluent with the notion of internal marketing and using a sophisticated communications mix - satellite tv, conferences, videos briefings and so on to get the picture across.
But if this is all one way then it’s a sterile process. Tell and sell must give way to share and involve. If there is no dialogue and discussion - and that’s not to say advocacy is taboo - then hidden assumptions will not be surfaced and shared. Most people’s mental models are deeply entrenched they need to be shaken, stirred and reshaped.
Of particular concern is that often that critical lifeblood - the flow of upward communication is often impeded by employees perceptions of how the next level up will respond. Even managers be reluctant to feedback information that challenges the status quo. The outcome with no feedback loop is no organisational learning.
- Building Human Talent: A host of issues to grapple with here as companies seek to get hearts and minds. Is it just language - colleagues, associates or partners for bosses and subordinates? Well, language is powerful but this needs to be backed up by walking the talk. And convergent systems and processes.
Key issues are:
- getting people to live the brand;
- getting the Peters and Waterman fit of tight-loose right in the areas of authority, autonomy and involvement;
- explicitly linking customer satisfaction with employee satisfaction;
- investment in skilling and building the competencies of staff - some of these may be lifestyle issues not covered sufficiently by formal education;
- getting the right level of creativity and innovation;
- the whole panoply of recognition & rewards including simple celebration!
Staff should be encouraged to build a portfolio of external and Internal qualifications - courses, competencies, skills, product knowledge and so on. As they say life begins at 50!
Service firms in particular rely not just on knowledge but also on the behaviour and people skills of staff. Staff need not only the ability to do one job but the flexibility to adapt to several others.
- Developing a Performance Culture: it’s an axiom that what you measure is what you get. Rarely is the issue a lack of data although it may be a lack of information and a dearth of insight. This can make, for example, sales performance reviews bankrupt exercises if the focus is just figures, figures, figures.
There’s a whole new lexicon here, shareholder value, roe, roi, sbus, pmus performance indices and balanced scorecards to name a few. The issue is what is appropriate to the level being assessed. How when dealing with customers, staff, operations and sales can this be made holistic, relevant, diagnostic and a stimulus to better performance.