Professor Andrew Kakabadse’s leadership insights remain vital for today’s HR and L&D professionals. Drawing from decades of research and consultancy experience, Steve Macaulay distils six essential principles that equip leaders to thrive in a complex, unpredictable world. These lessons demand a fresh, values-driven approach to development, governance, and organisational culture.
Leadership and governance expert Professor Andrew Kakabadse, who died recently. His work is particularly relevant for L&D and HR professionals today: these core essentials are highly focused on meeting the challenges of an unsettling and ‘difficult-to-know-what next’ world.
“Creating value requires a different kind of leader. Delivering on the promises made to stakeholders and the markets is enormously challenging, calling for not just political and leadership skills, but a distinctly different personal and organisational approach“
Professor Andrew Kakabadse
The following are six core leadership development essentials, distilled a lifetime of his work, where he was well-recognised and had a wealth of knowledge on leadership and governance. Professor Kakabadse spent a lifetime studying leadership, both from a research perspective and actively putting this into practice in face-to-face consultancy throughout the world.
He worked with a host of different organisations, from governments to small organisations, across the globe and produced a large body of work on the subject of leadership, with 40 books and over 250 articles. Having worked closely with Andrew over a number of years, this article gives an overview of his stand-out essentials for an L&D and HR audience seeking answers to effective leadership development in our changed world.
1. Leadership is underpinned by a Holistic Framework of Competencies
Successful leaders do not rely on a single trait. Kakabadse’s hallmark contribution is the “5Qs” framework, which outlines five essential, interrelated intelligences:
- IQ (Cognitive Intelligence): The ability to grasp new ideas and understand them
- EQ (Emotional Intelligence): The ability to relate to others
- PQ (Political Intelligence): The ability to operate with skill and understanding in a political environment
- RQ (Resilience Quotient): Personal resilience, crucial for the long hours and challenges of leadership
- MQ (Moral Intelligence): A sense of morality in decision-making and dealing with others
Action for HR/L&D: Move beyond technical and cognitive skills in recruitment and assessment. Leadership development programmes must deliberately build these five capabilities, and performance management and succession planning should embed them as key criteria for leadership readiness.
2. Culture dwarfs charisma in leadership success
While charisma is often cited as a key to organisational success, it pales in comparison to the power of a strong leadership culture. Kakabadse identified several elements often found in powerful leadership cultures:
- Encouraging diversity of thought
- Fostering alignment and engagement across all levels of the organisation
- Backing up strategy and decision-making with firm foundations
He summarises this with the formula:
Strategy + (Engagement × Alignment) = Value Delivery.
Action for HR/L&D: HR must be instrumental in shaping organisational culture through policy and leadership behaviour. L&D can help leaders translate strategy into engagement and alignment, while engagement and alignment surveys become crucial metrics of success.
3. Master the detail, don’t just make the leap
Transformational leadership—making a big leap forward—is critical. However, Kakabadse stresses that significant time must also be spent on transactional details to ensure decisions work in practice. He suggests a rough 20/80 Pareto proportion: 20% on transformational work and 80% on transactional detail. The challenge is knowing when to switch focus.
Action for HR/L&D: Leadership training should balance visionary strategy with operational execution. Career pathways should expose future leaders to both operational and transformational roles, and performance systems should recognise success in both domains.
4. Adapt to context
Based on a large global study, Kakabadse argued that leadership effectiveness is primarily determined by a leader’s ability to read and adapt to context, not their innate traits. This “situational intelligence” is key for navigating a dynamic environment.
Action for HR/L&D: Prepare leaders for adaptability through scenario planning, cross-cultural training, and by equipping them with tools for environmental scanning and data-driven decision-making. Leadership development must be aligned with external trends like hybrid work and ESG responsibilities.
5. Boards need to work well, but often don’t
While boards are stereotyped as unified, research shows this is frequently not the case, with tensions often left unaddressed. Productive boards must welcome differing perspectives and engage in active dialogue rather than just making statement. Kakabadse identifies engagement as the critical factor that binds organisations together, and a lack of consensus on the board can isolate it from the rest of the organisation.
Action for HR/L&D: HR can facilitate board effectiveness through evaluations, feedback, and development. L&D can support with workshops on governance and dialogue, helping boards productively surface tensions.
6. Recognise the dark side of leadership
Kakabadse warns of unhealthy signs that leadership is being misused, such as manipulation disguised as charisma, personal agendas, and the misuse of power. When these issues are known but not addressed, transparency is undermined.
Implications for HR and L&D
Andrew Kakabadse is spot-on, that leadership development must adapt to a more complex, values-driven world. HR and L&D should lead this shift by embedding ethics, accountability, and adaptability into organisational strategy. Their role is more than supportive, it is transformative, shaping leaders who are both principled and resilient.
Steve Macaulay is an associate at Cranfield Executive Development. He can be contacted at: s.macaulay@cranfield.ac.uk
