It is pretty well guaranteed that every business magazine I read will either have an article about leadership or feature one or more new books on the subject. In front of me, in one of the monthlies, is a full-page review of a typical example of the genre called Living Leadership: A Practical Guide for Ordinary Heroes.¹ Based on four years of research working alongside ‘leaders’, the authors have written a guide for ‘people at all levels who make organisations work’.

I thought we used to call people who did that ‘managers’. I will confess to some weariness with the cult of leadership, which seems to reflect a western obsession with personalities and so-called celebrities. ‘Everyone can be a leader if they try hard enough and really want it’ would seem to be a popular US approach. Of course, most organisations do genuinely perceive a need for ‘better leaders’. That will always be true on the basis that we can never say we ‘now have the best’ or ‘we have achieved perfection’. But when they say this it is not confined to the top people; it tends to mean everyone who is within a grade-defined ‘leadership population’, which will include many who do not manage people at all. In many organisations the amount spent on leadership development is probably the highest component of the budget. At the same time they are hard put to describe in any quantitative way what it is all achieving, although one outcome is sure – people look upwards and have a more acute sense of their leaders’ shortcomings.

In the UK, it all started with John Adair in the early 1970s, who by drawing on his army experience produced his Action Centred Leadership,² which was taken up by the Industrial Society. I still use his three-circle model today, and it was significantly formative in my own management learning. It is an extremely practical model, not focused specifically on a set of competencies or personality traits, but on the things that have to be done to get results through people. At the time I was a manager of 30 people – yes, I did some leadership things with them, setting goals and providing inspiration and encouragement, but most of my interaction with my people was the hard daily grind of getting the job done together.

Jim Collins, author of Good to Great,³ which has topped the business charts for a long time, would woo us away from the notion that ‘leadership is the answer to everything’. His whole thesis is against the personality cult, the focus on individuals. Just as Henry Mintzberg campaigns (rightly in my experience) that you cannot learn management through academic degrees,⁴ so we cannot learn to be leaders in the classroom. We can study great leaders but we cannot imitate them. We can be bombarded by endless research studies as to the characteristics of effective leadership. We can become self-aware through feedback, and adjust some of our behaviours. We can try to create a vision with which to inspire our people. But the reality is that the vast majority of people who have a responsibility for others have limited degrees of freedom as leaders. Their objectives and agendas are set for them by others. They are enclosed within a restrictive web of policies, procedures and systems, within which they are driven for results.

To be successful they have to be good managers. Yes, we definitely want inspirational strategic leadership from the top, but down below we need to get things done through motivated people. We can call them ‘leaders’ if it makes everyone feel better, but we need to make sure they know how to manage. One of the more useful of today’s fashions is the concern for employee engagement. I am involved in some studies as to how this affects performance. Time and again, with people at all levels and especially the ‘front line’, the message is that management skills are a primary influence on engagement. That includes people skills, of course – communicating the right things to the right people in the right way at the right time; dealing with performance; understanding individual and team needs (as Adair would put it) – but also competence at getting the task achieved. Those ‘professional management’ skills of planning, organising, scheduling, controlling, project management, and so on, have to go alongside the people skills. Look at one of the registers of training courses available and see how many ‘management’ or ‘leadership’ courses tackle these ‘professional’ skills compared with those focused on self-awareness, self-development and people management.

I hear the response: ‘But it’s the people skills our managers lack so much!’ This is because many of them have been promoted because of their technical knowledge, and it is often true. But technical knowledge is not the same as ‘professional management’, as I have described it earlier. It’s a good strategy in determining learning needs to look at everyday simple things that have gone wrong in the organisation and with its customers, then to work backwards to ascertain the causes. We’ll find time and time again that it was some area of poor management. Why do public services often work so badly in the UK? Is it because we have a default in leadership of those organisations responsible? Probably yes – although not because they lack strategies and visions and change programmes, but because they have failed to invest in good management. To come back to the aim mentioned at the beginning of this article, they don’t have people at every level who make organisations work.

References
1. George Binney, Gerhard Wilke and Colin Williams, Living Leadership: A Practical Guide for Ordinary Heroes, Financial Times Prentice Hall, 2005.
2. John Adair, Action Centred Leadership, Gower Publishing, 1979.
3. Jim Collins, Good to Great, Random House Business Books, 2001.
4. Henry Mintzberg, Managers not MBAs, Financial Times Prentice Hall, 2004.

Andrew Mayo is a consultant, speaker, writer and facilitator in international HR management, with specialisms in people and organisation development. He can be contacted on +44 (0) 1727 843424, at andrew.mayo@mayolearning.com or visit www.mayolearning.com

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