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Leadership: what a muddle!

By Peter Honey (August 2004 Issue)
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I have a confession to make: I’m not at all sure what leadership is. Believe me, it’s not for want of trying. For years I have studied those lists that purport to distinguish between managing and leading. You know the sort of thing:

Managers                                                Leaders
Administer                                               Innovate
Keep their eye on the bottom line       Keep their eye on the horizon
Ask how and when                                 sk what and why
Do things right                                        Do the right thing
Make incremental changes                  Make transformational changes
Delegate                                                  Empower1

But I always find that the overlaps are greater than the differences, that the boundaries are so fuzzy as to be indistinguishable. Surely managers need to lead and leaders need to manage? Doesn’t everyone need to be ambidextrous?

Then we have those lists of characteristics that researchers claim are displayed by successful leaders. Warren Bennis, for example, lists five characteristics that his studies of 150 ‘outstanding’ leaders have revealed. They all had:

1. a strong sense of purpose, a passion, a conviction, a sense of wanting to do something important to make a difference
2. the capability to develop and sustain deep and trusting relationships
3. positive illusions of reality allowing them to be the ‘purveyors of hope’
4. a balance in their lives between work, power and family or outside activities
5. a bias towards action and risk taking.2

Unfortunately I always find lists like this raise more questions than they answer. Might these five characteristics be coincidental to the success of these leaders? Are these the critical characteristics or just the ones Warren Bennis favours? What about all those other characteristics other researchers list? How many leaders, despite having these five characteristics, failed – overwhelmed by circumstances beyond their control?

Finally, we have those lists that read like recipes for successful leadership – especially in times of change (that’s all the time!).

* Set the vision.
* Communicate it.
* Get buy-in from key stakeholders.
* Identify the values and behaviours that are consistent with the vision.
* Incorporate them into the performance management systems.

And so on … I find recipes like this arrogant because they assume that this is the answer regardless of the situation (yet another version of one size fits all). They are too generic, too tidy, too linear.

With all these doubts and confusions, imagine my delight when I listened to Professor Amin Rajan at the launch of his Heads, Teachers and Industry (HTI) Issues Paper ‘All that jazz’.3 The gist of his paper is that effective leadership is all about adaptability and improvisation. Here is a telling quotation from the paper:

The workplace is a messy indeterminate place. Like the universe, it is a living entity that conforms to Heisenberg’s famous ‘uncertainty principle’: as soon as you touch or move something, it’s never the same again. The modern day chaos theory, in part based on this principle, stipulates that outcomes from an initial change are rarely predetermined. Like a game of chess, they depend on the iterative actions of the individuals concerned. Each iteration produces a unique situation. The key to success is to exploit the situation opportunistically before going to the next iteration.

I’m much happier with the notion that leadership is all about improvising in the face of the unexpected, helping people to understand the need for a change of tactics, and learning from the experience (some good, some bad) of each iteration. This fits with the reality I have come to know and love!

I have never understood the sense of having a long-term business plan – unless you want it so that you have something to change, or to impress the bank manager! In my small company we have a four-month rolling business plan. This gives us the flexibility we need to react quickly to unexpected events. I find that so long as we have an overall strategy (yes, we have one of those too!) it is best to delay, for as long as possible, deciding how best to achieve it. Furthermore, I have come to regard everything we do as a series of experiments with uncertain outcomes. Some experiments work out fine and some don’t, but either way we learn from them.

Interestingly, whenever I have asked the great and the good whether they planned to do what they are doing today, they have always dropped their voice (as if it was a shameful thing to admit) and told me candidly that they put their glorious careers down to a series of coincidences, being in the right place at the right time, and sheer opportunism. The only exceptions I have found are some musicians and artists who, at a tender age, decided what they wanted to do and didn’t deviate.

So, I’m ever so grateful to Professor Rajan for going some way to legitimise my let’s-make-it-up-as-we-go-along approach. If uncertainty is the way of life (not a way, but the way!), then I’m comfortable with the need to improvise like an accomplished lead trumpeter in a jazz band.

References
1. Warren Bennis, Managing People is Like Herding Cats, Kogan Page, 1998.
2. Ibid.
3. Amin Rajan, ‘All that jazz’, HTI Issues Paper 5, 2004. (HTI can be contacted at Herald Court, University of Warwick Science Park, Coventry CV4 7EZ.)

 

Dr Peter Honey, FRSA, FCIPD, FIMC is a Chartered Psychologist and founder of Peter Honey Publications. He can be contacted on +44 (0) 1628 633946, at peterhoney@peterhoney.com or visit www.peterhoney.com

 

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