Leadership for Success is Building Trust

Leadership is not just for the elite

The Cognitive & Behavioural aspects of Authentic Leaders

PSYCHOLOGICAL SELF

Leadership for Success is Building Trust

Leadership is not just for the elite

The Cognitive & Behavioural aspects of Authentic Leaders - a New Model

PHILOSOPHICAL SELF

CAVENDISH

a New Model

PHILOSOPHICAL SELF

Most people, at some points in their lives, are leaders. They assume leadership in familysituations (children need leading!), on the sports field, and in many other situations,including work. Leadership is just not about the qualities of an elite few, although theleadership skills of Chief Executives and their teams are of fundamental importance. Inthe context of work, what is leadership, how does it differ from management, and areleaders born or can they be developed? This factsheet seeks to provide some answers tothese questions to help you.

Some leaders fall behind - Why?

Leadership is important for success and the UK seems to be lagging behindother developed countries on a global scale. A survey carried out by the CIPD1

compared UK leaders with those elsewhere in the world. It suggested that:

Leaders in the UK often lack dedicated attention from their superiors to help themdevelop in a planned fashion through continuous learning, both from jobexperiences and more formal training activities. Hence:

o they tend to arrive in leadership positions less well prepared than theircounterparts elsewhere

o they inspire less confidence in their ability to execute strategiessuccessfully.

Fewer places in the UK are filled by internal candidates, also suggesting a issue(problem) in leadership development.

HR professionals elsewhere in the world are quicker to express confidence in theirleaders at all levels, and particularly first-line managers, than are those in theUK.

What is leadership?

Three Pillars of Authentic Leadership

Leadership is currently much discussed; academic studies have multiplied like amoebasince the 1970s. Entering ‘leadership’ into Google provided around 503,000,000 entriesworldwide, and around 16,500,000 for the UK alone. A similar search on Amazon UKgave 18,741 books on the topic.

There is no single definition that satisfies everyone. John Adair, the leading Britishauthority on the subject, says ‘leadership, like all personal relations, always hassomething unknown, something mysterious about it’.comment - the phrase ‘personal relations’. To attempt a partial definition, leadership isvery much about the ability to influence people by personal attributes and behaviours.

Three Pillars of Authentic Leadership

Leadership is currently much discussed; academic studies have multiplied like amoebasince the 1970s. Entering ‘leadership’ into Google provided around 503,000,000 entriesworldwide, and around 16,500,000 for the UK alone. A similar search on Amazon UK

e 18,741 books on the topic.

There is no single definition that satisfies everyone. John Adair, the leading Britishauthority on the subject, says ‘leadership, like all personal relations, always hassomething unknown, something mysterious about it’.2 But there is a clue in that

the phrase ‘personal relations’. To attempt a partial definition, leadership isvery much about the ability to influence people by personal attributes and behaviours.

TRUSTLeadership is currently much discussed; academic studies have multiplied like amoebasince the 1970s. Entering ‘leadership’ into Google provided around 503,000,000 entriesworldwide, and around 16,500,000 for the UK alone. A similar search on Amazon UK

There is no single definition that satisfies everyone. John Adair, the leading Britishauthority on the subject, says ‘leadership, like all personal relations, always has

t there is a clue in thatthe phrase ‘personal relations’. To attempt a partial definition, leadership is

very much about the ability to influence people by personal attributes and behaviours.

But most people would say that even successful leaders they have known, do not behavein identical ways. They may, in fact, act very differently even in similar situations andthey may have quite different personalities. Moreover, different leadership qualities maybe needed in different circumstances. The classic example is perhaps Churchill, who wasa great war leader, but less successful in peacetime. Similarly, CEOs who excel in turninground ailing companies may perform less well when things are on a more even keel. Allthis may lead to the conclusion that there is no single template of leadership behaviours,which in turn poses the question of whether leaders can be developed: what are thequalities (or competencies) of leadership, and how can they be brought out? There ismore on this later.

However, before people can become successful leaders, they do need certain attributes:

General intelligence, although not necessarily being very much brighter than thepeople they are leading.

Technical or professional knowledge and competence in their particular fields –how otherwise would leaders be respected?

Personality: leaders should be energetic and committed, maintain contact withtheir people, and understand their strengths and weaknesses.

The ability to inspire, although this quality may be rarer than some of the othersand is perhaps the most difficult to develop.

Listening, sharing and delegating skills (and not interfering unnecessarily),because in groups of more than around five people it becomes impossible to knowall the necessary detail.

Self-knowledge, to understand their own strengths and weaknesses, which in turnwill enable them to turn to others in their group to compensate for their ownbiases or deficiencies.

All these attributes will help to develop trust, without which leaders will not commandloyalty. The last four, ‘softer’, non-technical attributes might be summed up as‘emotional intelligence’, a subject which now seems to be gaining a place onmanagement and leadership development programmes.

Adair has developed what he calls a functional approach to leadership based on threeoverlapping circles of needs (see figure 1):

to achieve the common task to work as a `team` to achieve that task to meet individual needs, because people need each other socially, and work is an

important social activity.

Each circle exerts an influence for good or ill upon the others, and the circles thereforeoverlap. These are areas of leadership responsibility that leaders need to understand.They emphasise that leadership is essentially an interaction between the leader, groupmembers and the situation.

Figure 1: Adair's three circles of needs. Taken from: Effective leadership development2

How does leadership differ from management?

The idea of management that evolved in the nineteenth century, and was laterdeveloped into theories by F W Taylor, was based to a large extent upon the militaryprinciples of command and control (although the armed forces have always recognisedthat the sorts of personal attributes described above are central in any officer or NCO).So management was, and to some extent still is, about the planning, organisation, co-ordination and implementation of strategies, tactics and policies imposed from the top inan impersonal and apparently rational manner. Although, career ex-armed forces officersare not very successful in a commercial business environment!

Administration is the word that sums this up, and it is worth noting that postgraduatemanagement degrees are still entitled Masters of Business Administration. Thus, amanager would derive authority from his or her position in the organisation, which alsoimplies power. Promotions were likely to be based on technical abilities, andinterpersonal skills had very little to do with the theoretical idea of management.

From around the 1960s (when, ironically, MBAs began in the UK) the idea of leadershipstarted to gain ground. It was realised that there was more to managing than simplyadministering. The idea of influencing people by virtue of personal attributes andbehaviours gradually grew, admittedly forced by the need to survive in a morecompetitive and less predictable world.

All managers, including first-level supervisors, need to be leaders and to understand theconcept of leadership, although the higher up the organisation one goes, the morecomplex leadership becomes and the more it is concerned with broader and long-termaims. But of course it should be borne in mind that while some organisations may havevisionary leaders in their lower and middle ranks, their Chief Executives andmanagement teams may be still following the traditional managerial model!

So leadership is now a fundamental part of management. But people who are notnominally managers may also function as leaders, influencing others (even if in aninformal manner) by their personalities and behaviours. Under a Taylorist model ofmanagement, this would be frowned upon and such people would be told to stick to theirscrewdrivers and not to think too much. Moreover, it is worth remembering that in someorganisations – hospitals and research organisations are good examples – many peoplemay be senior professionals such as Doctors or Scientists but not managers (at least interms of the formal organisational hierarchy). It would be foolish, however, not to thinkof them as leaders or potential leaders.

Levels of leadership

But taking the formal organisation, it is useful to distinguish three levels of leadership,as follows3:

Front-line or team leadership - in which one person (the leader) is responsiblefor creating specific outcomes usually within a given timescale and with givenresources through their own actions and those of their immediate followers.

Operational leadership - which is to do with day-to-day operations within theorganisation and is a major determinant of its culture and climate.

Strategic leadership - about ‘big picture’ issues such as change, vision,translating that vision into purpose, effective communication, and the behaviourof the CEO and senior management team (also see below).

Like Adair’s three circles, these levels relate to each other, as figure 2 shows.

Figure 2: Levels of leadership. Taken from: Developing effective leadership skills3

Leadership Development

People vary in their capacity for leadership. A few have innate capacity (but even bornleaders will need to be developed further,question, are there born leaders?), some havenone, but most potential managers have it in some degree. Selection of the right people,whether from inside or outside the organisation, is a good part of the battle, but thenthey will need training, yes, they will to be successful!. This may be only a small part oftheir development but it is important to get it right. Adair says the seven hallmarks ofsuccessful courses should be ‘simple, practical, participative, variety, enjoyable, relevantand short’.2

Then comes perhaps the most important part: development through experience. This iswhere management development, succession planning and leadership developmentoverlap. For a full description of the various techniques, including the increasinglyimportant mentoring and coaching, read books on `Management Development` andSuccession Planning, visit the knowledge bank at www.cavendish-mr.org.uk All thatneeds to be added here is that, throughout the development process, leadership shouldbe kept in mind just as much as the technical and administrative aspects of jobs.Coaches and mentors, who may be of a different generation that is perhaps less attunedto the importance of leadership, should also keep leadership to the fore. Take on board aNon-Executive Director to add value to your organisation.

Many organisations now run what they call ‘leadership programmes’. To the extent thatthey emphasise the idea of leadership through having the word in their titles, this is agood thing. However, how far they actually differ from what might have been called untilrecently ‘Management Development Programmes’, is open to doubt, as a glance at someof the headings and descriptions in a survey by Incomes Data Services (IDS) confirms.The difference may be that leadership now receives somewhat more emphasis than it didpreviously, and IDS says that most of the programmes ’we looked at included sessionson personal audit, work-life balance, self-awareness and contrasting leadership styles.Few of these elements would have been found on development programmes ten yearsago.’

Strategic leadership

Although American authors in particular often emphasise the importance of the topleader almost to the exclusion of other leaders in the organisation (the CEO as super-hero), it is true that the Chief Executive sets the tone and his or her leadership role iscrucial. Adair says that the strategic leader must have the ability to:

see the point sense relationships and analogies quickly identify the essentials in a complex picture put two and two together find the salient factors in past experience be able to distinguish clearly between ends and means appraise situations readily see their significance in the total setting of present and past experience get the cue as to the likely line of wise action.

Hooper and Potter distinguish seven core strategic leadership competencies:

1. direction, vision, mission, strategies and values2. alignment3. example and role model issues4. developing people at all levels5. effective communication6. as change agents7. action in crisis and ambiguity.

It is unlikely that all the qualities listed by both sets of authors can be found in oneperson. The notion of leadership teams therefore seems to be finding growingacceptance, but of course they do need to function as genuine `teams`, pulling in thesame direction, rather than as individuals with their own priorities and agendas. Makingsure that they do so is also a key role for the CEO to be successful.

Leadership Tips from Colin Thompson

Care about your people

To be effective, you need to care about your people. Getting the best out of others isessentially a selfless pursuit. If you do not have that altruistic streak, do not become aManager.

Believe in yourself

There will always be others who question what you are doing. If you are affected byeverything they say, you will be unable to execute a strategy fully.

Take the long-term view

There are no management `quick fixes` that will not have costly repercussions. Take thenecessary time to accept the most appropriate strategy and to create the right culture.Success will eventually follow.

Recruitment is key to `team` spirit

If you get selection and recruitment right, a culture of hard work and togetherness willbe borne.

Unthinking obedience is history

In the modern world, people will not just accept what you say just because you are theirboss. You must always explain your actions and plans for success. This is why ex-armedforces officers have a problem in a commercial business environment to managesuccessfully.

Consistency and honesty earn respect

Do not let favouritism or self-interest compromise your decision-making. If your staffsuspect you are thinking of anything other than the success of the team or organisation,you will lose your authority.

Do not be afraid to criticise

People will not improve without constant `feedback`. But, many feel uncomfortable withcriticism. Make them understand that your criticism is evidence of your belief in them.

Learn from other`s mistakes

Aspiring managers should watch others at close quarters and receive in-depthmanagement training before taking on too much responsibility themselves.

Life is all about learning and change, the day we stop learning and changing isthe day we stop living and being successful!

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