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Think of a few leaders. They can be political leaders, business leaders, leaders from any sphere. Now consider the question, “Are they just like the people around them?”
Most people’s answer to this question will be “No”. If these leaders had been, or were just like the people around them, then the chances are that they wouldn’t have been leaders, would they? They’d have been – well, just like everyone else.
Gandhi led successfully because, unlike many other Indian radicals, he didn’t fight the Raj; Franklin D Roosevelt led successfully because he didn’t buy into the ‘rugged individualism’ that so many of his peers thought was the only defence against totalitarianism; Bill Gates led successfully because he didn’t believe that IBM was ‘the environment’; while Martin Luther King led successfully because he made people believe in a dream.
Leaders are different, not only from the people around them, but also from each other.
So why, I wonder, are so many people who say they are in the field of ‘leadership development’ (or even more worrying, ‘leadership training’) unable to grasp this simple fact? Why do they continue to try to develop ‘leaders’ by trying to make people just like everyone else? I think I know the answer, but I don’t think many people who are professionally involved with the field will like it.
In the 25 years or so that I have worked in development, I have had the privilege of visiting and working with thousands of academics and practitioners who have ‘executive education’ as their area of expertise. Many of these people are brilliant thinkers, excellent developers, exciting motivators, and I have learnt a great deal from working with them.
But, as Charles Darwin demonstrated, great minds can get it wrong.
And they do so not because of a failure of observation, but because of a failure of classification. A great deal of what I see being delivered under the name of ‘leadership development’ is really good, robust, well-researched, well-delivered education. It just isn’t ‘leadership development’.
And the reason for this is that its purpose and outcome (especially if it is well-delivered) is to get people to behave alike.
So what?
Is this so important? So long as people are getting good quality development, does it matter if the name is incorrect?
In my opinion, it is vitally important, because all the while people think that they are doing what is necessary to help good leaders emerge and develop, all we are getting is better qualified managers – we are being denied the leaders we need.
Inside every one of us is a leader desperately trying to get out. But, ironically, a great deal of what well-meaning professionals are doing in the name of ‘leadership development’ is stifling that very leadership. The nascent leadership in promising individuals is being smothered by ‘competency models’, 360o instruments, and well-researched lists of the ‘habits’ of other leaders.
Two kinds of research into leadership
Few people try to deliver leadership development by plucking ideas out of nowhere. Anyone who takes their development role seriously will have looked at research into leadership. I have done so, and have found two quite distinct kinds of research into leadership – limited research and broader based research.
Limited research into what real leaders do or have done focuses on a narrow definition of ‘leader’, concentrating upon leaders whose behaviours are sufficiently alike to enable patterns to be defined. This produces a model of the ‘ideal’ leader-as-hero, or leader-as-consultant, or leader-as-explorer, or even leader-as-best-mate.
Such models are often worked up into ‘leadership competency models’, or into 360o feedback instruments that seek to identify how closely real people actually match up to this ideal.
From there, developers try to teach real people how to emulate this ideal, and lose, along the way, the potential leadership of all those who are not destined to be leader-as-hero, or leader-as-consultant, or leader-as-explorer, but who could be brilliant leaders in their own right – if helped rather than hindered.
Broader research recognises that leaders are different, but is used to develop ‘models’ of leadership that take ‘the best’ from the lessons of this wide range of leaders. We end up with a bit of this and a bit of that, a watered down version of leadership that no real leader would recognise.
From there, developers try to teach people how to become all things to all people, being at the same time strong-willed and absorbent to the ideas of others, determined and flexible, tough and caring, decisive and consultative, responsible and radical. Mother Theresa and Vlad the Impaler rolled into one.
‘Leadership development’ that is based on either of these kinds of research does quite the reverse of what it sets out to do. It prevents leaders from developing.
Is leadership development possible?
In this article I have stressed the differences that characterise leaders, and how this difference is ignored by so many people purporting to deliver leadership development. But can you ‘teach’ this kind of difference? In other words, am I not simply arguing that ‘leadership development’ is an oxymoron?
Absolutely not. But if it is to be true leadership development, it has to be centred on people, not blueprints, or competency models, or any other hoops you want people to jump through. If you want to help develop leaders in your organisation, throw away your competency models and stop trying to teach.
Who taught Bill Gates to be so devastatingly competitive, or Sir John Harvey-Jones to be so responsible, or Ricardo Semler to be so collegiate, or Richard Branson to be so adventurous?
If the leaders I referred to in the introduction to this article have anything in common, it is that each acted with integrity. By that I mean that each of them truly believed in what they said, even though those beliefs were, in many cases, fundamentally different from the beliefs of others, including other successful leaders.
So here’s the hard part. Leadership development is risky, because it isn’t about creating an ideal and then trying to get people to act according to that ideal. It’s about working with people, their beliefs and characters, and potentially letting loose a tower of Babel of potentially conflicting beliefs and values.
Practical leadership development
Being a leader is not taking on a role. It is personal. Leadership development, to be effective, has to be personal. Development that starts with the needs of an organisation, or with the ‘values statement’ of an organisation, or with a ‘competency model’ of an organisation is not leadership development. It may have a very important role to play in an organisation’s portfolio, but it is something else.
To unleash the leadership potential in an organisation, you have to come from the opposite direction, and genuinely put the individual first.
Why should any organisation make an investment like this, when it implies that development funds could be devoted to people whose beliefs are contrary to those espoused by the organisation? The answer is that any organisation, big or small, has the potential to benefit from releasing the energies, the belief, and the capabilities of all kinds of leaders - warriors, sages, adventurers and guardians alike.
The developer’s role is to help identify, explore, and unlock the talents of very different characters, and to help meld those characters into an integrated whole. One in which individuals do not try to become people they are not, but in which those fundamental differences of character can be brought together into a more effective combination.
Not everyone who followed Gandhi was like Gandhi. Martin Luther King had the loyal support of people around him who were very different characters. It is part of the make-up of effective leaders that they learnt how to marshal the resources of people who are very different from themselves, without in any way compromising their own integrity.
Leadership development is the means of speeding up a process that, without the oppressive interventions of blueprints and models, would take place naturally. Leaders emerge, but it takes time, and it takes a good deal of luck. If we want to help speed up this process, we need to be able truly to recognise leadership for what it is, and create the environment where we can nurture true leadership in our organisations.
It can be done. But effective leadership development demands a set of skills and an approach which is diametrically opposed to those suited to training, or even to management development. Leadership development is not management education for the more senior. It is an entirely different territory in which to be effective, a practitioner has to throw away the tools and techniques acquired from years of training.
Think again of those leaders you brought to mind when you read the first paragraph. How many of them would match up to the competency models you are familiar with?
By Keith Patching, former Director at Cranfield Scool of Management and founding partner of LCS Academy (www.lcsacdemy.com) where he specialises in leadership development. Keith has also worked with Complete Trainer on a suite of high level leadership programme materials. Click here for more details. |
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