TJ - The Publication for Learning and Development

Focus opinion

By Jonathan Gosling (October 2004 Issue)
0 Comments Comments
Article Rating:

Poor Best

Email to a friend | Print Version

A short while ago I joined the advisory board of a major national training institution. At my first meeting the CEO explained the planned merger of two parts of the organisation and invited discussion on his medium-term strategy. Various members of the board asked probing questions, to which the CEO responded with comprehensive explanations. Then one answer about the merger invited another question, and suddenly the whole board, it seemed, was alert to something going on beneath the presentation. Within a few minutes the underlying assumptions of the strategy were exposed and open to serious, well-informed and responsible discussion. By its conclusion, the CEO was clear about the managerial and leadership job facing him if his strategy was to be effective.

The most impressive aspect of this board was the way in which each individual could keep hold of his or her personal insight and yet collaborate so effectively to probe for the underbelly of the strategy, and then to unfold it like a carefully packed garment on the long walnut table between us. The quality of the conversation was crucial – not just what each person knows and understands, but the spirit and skill with which we worked together. This was an example of leadership – collective and corporate, but crucially dependent on the people. The important point is that this peculiar event became a leadership event because of the way it fits with the entire organisation.

Months of work by managers preparing their reports and business plans, by an executive team interpreting the markets and the political currents of relevant ministries, all produced the possibility of this conversation, and will pick up and respond to its outcomes. Leadership exists in networks of interactions, and all of these actions mean things – usually quite different things – to those involved and those observing.

So leadership development includes training individuals to handle themselves in these networks of meanings (I call this a sophisticated kind of worldliness). Leaders have to be aware of the context, and of their own part therein – what meaning do other people attach to me-as-leader? This is only answerable by a kind of instinctive and constant reflectiveness – something that includes but goes beyond the self-knowledge developed through psychometric instruments, but which can be immensely enhanced and strengthened by effective coaching, and by careful, methodical observation of leadership in other settings.

In my leadership programmes, I ask participants to swap over to observe each other at work for two or three days and I invite them to enquire together how leadership is or might be accomplished in their specific contexts. Personal skills and behaviours certainly play a part; but they have power only in the network of interactive meanings, motives and objectives that make up any organisation. We call this process the ‘leadership exchange’, and it draws heavily on observation methods from anthropology and infant observation.

Leaders also need to be action-orientated, to impel things forward. But this all too easily becomes a logic of its own: change for the sake of change – because if we don’t change we might have to face up to simply doing things better! So a huge amount of any leader’s job is to maintain continuity: to help people to feel that the things they have been working for are worthwhile and valuable, that the challenges ahead are an episode in a continuing drama (not a once-off crisis). Leadership in the real world is akin to the production of soap opera – all the twists and turns have to be directed, and also responded to. Rather than being simply an agent of change, a leader has to provide the conditions in which both change and continuity can thrive. I call this the leader’s catalytic role – a catalyst being a temporary architecture that arranges existing structures in ways that enable new realities to emerge.

How to produce all this? I am tempted to say that we need training, education and development to produce the skills, knowledge and systemic wisdom. I’ll be more specific: engage managers, leaders and advisers in long-term, sustained processes of inquiry (that is, active curiosity) into the leadership challenges they are actually facing, here and now. Be flexible, varied and imaginative about it, but be disciplined and methodical about it too. What you are looking for are signs of reflective, worldly and catalytic mindsets.


Jonathan is director of the University of Exeter’s Centre for Leadership Studies. The centre is dedicated to the development and further understanding of leadership, and its flagship programme is an MA in Leadership Studies. Prior to this appointment, Jonathan was director of the Strategic Leaders Unit at Lancaster University, and he remains chair of the International Masters in Practicing Management. Jonathan’s research focuses on leadership and ethics in current strategic changes, and on contemporary innovations in leadership development. Jonathan can be contacted at Jonathan.Gosling@exeter.ac.uk

Back to top | Current TJ

 

Readers Comment

Comment on this story here >

Be the first to comment on this news story