Leaders are the most important asset a company has. How we train leaders and what we train them in is going to become vital in the global competitive economy. Think about what happens when poor leadership occurs – companies can be brought down. What happened at Enron was about greed, unethical behaviour and a lack of responsibility.
But leadership training is not just about avoiding bad things happening. It is about creating organisations that achieve great strides forward in their particular fields. Think of Google, Virgin, South West Airlines, SAS Institute. All of them are very successful, have their own unique cultures and are in different ways breaking the mould. And of course all of them have great leaders. They are all different but they are certainly not plodding people who care more about conformity than creativity.
I wonder how many such leaders the multi-million dollar leadership development industry produces each year. So much time and effort is quite rightly put into training our leaders. But are we doing a good enough job? And what if we are not?
In this video clip Patrick Awuah talks about the importance of educating young people to be leaders in Africa. He believes that the education of future leaders needs to encompass an exploration of ethics, learning about dealing with ambiguity, a move away from the rote learning of the past and an emphasis on thinking.
This clip raised many questions for me around what we are teaching our leaders and how successful we are being in increasing the overall leadership capability. Awuah quotes one of his students on an email he received: “I am thinking”. How many of our leaders truly think and question themselves and the world versus repeating what they have always done in ways that they have always done it. How many leaders understand that to really think about something means to examine their own values and principles as they underpin what we think, what we believe and what we do.
I would say that we are failing to even aspire to, let alone achieve, the standards of leadership excellence that Awuah refers to. My evidence for this is the amount of activity going on in companies to increase employee engagement, reduce turnover and attract talented people. Problems in all of these areas can almost always be tracked back to inadequate leadership. Great leaders create meaning, set standards, have strong values and ethics, drive for superior performance and thus create cultures where people are highly engaged and want to stay.
Excellent leaders want to be challenged, they want people that push, question the status quo and think for themselves. They understand that to compete in this fast changing world they need their people to be open minded, learning new ways and ditching what is no longer useful. The good news is that the workforce is changing: Generation Y have arrived and they are much more inclined than their older colleagues to behave in those ways.
Generation Y present a huge opportunity to organisations. Yet, too many bosses are still thinking of them as a challenge and are still expending a lot of energy getting them to conform. The old model of leadership still prevails. It looks like this and it is frustrating.
- · The boss needs to be respected for his position in the hierarchy not for his contribution
- · The more junior you are the less you are assumed to know
- · It is not the done thing to challenge senior managers
- · It is not the done thing to challenge prevailing practices such as 9 to 5 working (of course it makes sense that we still work those hours that were necessary in post-industrial factory settings!)
- · The boss’s job is more of a monitor than a mentor
Make no mistake, it is not just Gen Y who are frustrated by this style of leadership (if you can call it leadership), lots of people are. The difference is that Gen Y will are much less likely to put up with it, they will leave.
We need to step up the quality of our leadership training. We need to tackle the tough and thorny issues of values and meaning as well as the essential high performance leadership competency development. Business schools and training consultancies tend to concentrate on the latter because it is easier to do and it lends itself to boxes being seen to be ticked. But running a business is not a tick box activity. It is complex and challenging. Having spent the past year developing a leadership model and development programme that tackles the tricky bits I know it is not at all easy. But we have to try. If we don’t then we are doing a great disservice to our current and future leaders for whom skills and behavioural training will simply not be enough to thrive in this increasingly demanding business world.
Sally
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
It’s the leader’s job to unleash the best contribution of every single person in the organization, not to crush and contain them with bureaucratic systems and byzantine policies. Good leadership isn’t something that just happens. You have to invest time and money into creating great leaders. You only have to compare the number of companies who say “People are our most important asset” to the number who truly live by that ideal to see the scale of the problem.
And there’s a real dollar value to this approach. The quality of leadership is perhaps the single most important factor in determining the morale within a company. Here’s an extract from a recent interview with Brad Bird, Pixar Animation’s two-time Oscar-winning director of The Incredibles and Ratatouille, in The McKinsey Quarterly:
“In my experience, the thing that has the most significant impact on a movie’s budget—but never shows up in a budget—is morale. If you have low morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about 25 cents of value. If you have high morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about $3 of value. Companies should pay much more attention to morale.
Before I got the chance to make films myself, I worked on a number of badly run productions and learned how not to make a film. I saw directors systematically restricting people’s input and ignoring any effort to bring up problems. As a result, people didn’t feel invested in their work, and their productivity went down. As their productivity fell, the number of hours of overtime would increase, and the film became a money pit.”
I’m surprised by Sally’s post because it seems to reinforce the view that leaders are pivotal in making the difference and I’m not so convinced. It reminds my of a poem by I think one of the Liverpool poets which goes something like this:
“I wanna be the leader, the leader
Can I be the leader, the leader
Hooray I’m the leader
Now what do I do?”
The paradox in leadership development is that it is both about the leader and not about the leader. Perhaps what we need to think about is how we educate people to be effective followers? And that also means the leaders need to know too. If the person below you has the bright idea then how do you as a leader follow their idea and them? In future organisational structures, perhaps Gen Y will have transitory leadership, people who lead for just a short time (maybe months, even years) but then will step down back into a followership position (no I’m not going to say “subordinate role” because that implies the leaders are superior and they aren’t) and someone else will take over.
A suppose its a chicken and an egg question, what came first the leader or the followers?
Hi Paul, I know that poem (and love the Liverpool poets!).
This is such a big topic. I think that if a leader is a great leader then he/she is certainly pivotal, if not then the follower’s skills, wherewithal, resourcefulness etc are key to making sure that they get the rght support for themselves. You are right that leadership and followership are both very important. I think perhaps the difference with Gen Y is that they expect good leadership and we are finding that they vote with their feet if they don’t get it.