Mapping Motivation for Leadership

James Sale, Jane Thomas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351257022
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Développement personnel
• Subtopic: Réussite personnelle

Mapping Motivation for Leadership, co-written with Jane Thomas, is the fourth of a series of seven books that are all linked to the author's Motivational Map toolkit. Each book builds on a different aspect of personal, team and organisational development.

This is a practical guide to leadership in the 21st century and builds on the '4+1' model outlined in the author's original book Mapping Motivation: Unlocking the Key to Employee Energy and Engagement. There is an increasing body of evidence, that the single most important aspect of being a leader relates to managing emotions effectively, and this management goes way beyond simply 'understanding' emotional intelligence; it is in fact a practice and one that is intimately connected with personal development and growth, and with energy. Energy, as Mapping Motivation made clear, is synonymous with motivation. The effective leaders of tomorrow will be those who understand their motivators, who regularly measure their motivators, sustain and replenish and maximise their motivators, and who do the same for their employees.

Clearly, there is a link here with the book on engagement, for leaders who do so will engage their employees. However, this book not only covers the motivational side of leadership, but also explores in detail the skill sets necessary in the '4+1' model: thinking skills, action skills, team skills and motivational skills plus that indefinable 'something' that is a commitment to personal development, so that we as leaders are not trying to solve today's problems with yesterday's training as our only internal resource.

Chapter 1

Unpacking the ‘4+1’ leadership model of leadership

We talked in the Introduction about the four theories of leadership, and how what we wanted was something practical, useful, relevant; and also, something that was ‘teachable’. By this we mean that if we take the view that leaders are born, not made, then the whole idea of individuals raising the level of their performance, of stepping up to the mark, is nonsense, since if they weren’t born leaders, then nothing is going to make them one. All we can hope for, through our recruitment processes, is that we can find those born to lead us! But of course we do not accept that premise: leaders are made in the furnace of experience (and sometimes affliction) and in the crucible of learning, whether that learning is formally constructed, or informally acquired. In the latter case, such acquisition might well be through what might be called mentoring, or working with a strong role model that one wishes to emulate. Indeed, the learning can occur through a process of ‘reverse mentoring’: we experience dreadful leadership, note what it’s components are, and ever after swear never to do that. Perhaps the best example of this is in parenting – a very important form of leadership: we surely all have met excellent parents who when asked the secret of their success reply that their own parents were so awful they were determined never to bring their own children up like that. So they lead – parent – like real parents. The metaphor of the good leader being like a good parent is not that far-fetched either. Many organisations, even today, have positive paternalistic (as well as maternalistic, here especially in some public sector type organisations) cultures where leaders can successfully be surrogate parents to the employees; though this is becoming rarer, as pressure to deliver KPIs¹ accelerates across all types of organisations, and there is less and less time to ‘care’ – as one would for a loved child – for the staff in a personal way.

Thinking about leadership metaphorically is actually a very powerful way of establishing what leadership is like and just as importantly what it is leadership does. Leaders are like parents we are saying. But how are they like parents?

Activity 1.1

Make two lists. In the first, itemise how (good) leadership and (good) parenting are similar. For example, we have already alluded to the fact that both care about their charges. How else are they similar? And keep in mind, all metaphors – comparisons – break down at some point. So, how are parents and leaders dissimilar?

There are many points of similarity between good parents and leaders: caring, commitment, honesty, reliability, vision for their future, investment in their learning and development, which is also teaching and training, interdependence, results, pride, and ultimately autonomy. And many more similarities too. But there are also dissimilarities: leaders may need to subordinate all personal issues in order to achieve the organisational mission, but for parents the child is the mission; leaders are not usually related by blood to employees, whereas for family this is usually critical; leaders tend to be more aware, more objective about the values underpinning their actions, whereas parents tend to be more subjective and more accepting, so less critical, of what their values are. We could go on, but we hope the point is clear: metaphors provide instructive and directive images as to what something – in this case, leadership – means in a given context. But leadership as parenting is just one metaphor.

Activity 1.2

Think about another metaphor for leadership. What is leadership like?

Leadership is …

Note and explain why, in your example, the metaphor and leadership are similar.

It may seem strange, this working in metaphors, but in fact it is the essence not of childishness, but of maturity, and it is fundamental to our appreciation of the world because it enables us to see the invisible relationship between things, ideas and processes. Metaphor is essentially dynamic – precisely what leadership is. If we wish to capture the essence of the dynamism of leadership we will use a metaphor in order to ‘grasp’ it; if we wish to compartmentalise leadership and exhibit essentially static models we will use competency boxes. Both models have their uses, but the former is far more inspiring, and far more likely to motivate than the latter. And once we can do that, then we may be able to break the metaphor down into helpful parts.

Here is, then, what we see as a brilliant metaphor for leadership: leadership as/is a performing art.² Peter Vaill considers three main ways (or subsidiary metaphors) in which leadership is theatre. See Figure 1.1.

Figure 1.1 Leadership as a performing art

Leadership is a performance

There is an ‘up-front-ness’ about leadership, which is undeniable even in the most retiring leaders. The performance we must remember is essentially task-orientated: the purpose is to do the performance, and before an audience. Thus, a good leader must be outcome orientated, since audiences are always evaluating what we do. The essence of any stage performance, of course, is motivation: whether the leader is the star on stage, or the director of the play, motivation leads and drives what they are doing.

Leadership is intrinsically connected to teamwork

Yes, the star on stage may well be the leader, but the play – the performance – can only be as good as the weakest member of the cast. Unless rehearsals involve everybody, performance – no matter how ‘strong’ the leader – will be weak. A strong personality who does not pay attention to his staff proves a weak leader, and clearly is exercising ‘personality’ at everyone else’s expense. But again, since even the weakest link is vital in a stage performance to make the whole presentation ‘authentic’ or ‘compelling’, then the leader has to, or find means to, motivate everyone. Team motivation, like individual motivation, is vital.

Leadership is about ‘play’

Theatre is a play in both senses of the word. There is a recreation and re-creation in the activity. It is what we all complain we have lost. As children our ‘work’ was our ‘play’, and thoroughly enjoyable it was too! We didn’t want anyone to send us to bed. Now, we find we collapse only too readily in bed, exhausted by work – a work that is devoid of ‘play’. This is a vital thing about our leadership activity we need to re-discover: that work should and must be a form of play, or that play is somehow integral to it, and if it is not then we are heading for trouble. Overtime – overwork – has no psychological meaning when we ‘play’ (are being creative), since the only limits are those that the task itself defines for us, and which we readily accept. But we are invariably motivated to play; why is that? Because play meets our motivators head-on. When we are really playing, that is, not doing the play prescribed for us by others, we are intrinsically interested in what we are doing and so time stops. We stop counting the clock and become absorbed. We enter the zone, or what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called the ‘flow’³ state. These metaphors, then, all lead us back to a fundamental fact that we cannot help repeating: the centrality of motivation at the heart of leadership; for motivation, too, flows. Which means, also, that it is dynamic.

Thus, to get a sense of what leadership is – a performing art – and one driven by motivation is to begin to get a sense of its true nature. This nature involves flow; it involves responding to reality in the moment; but it also involves a clear picture of what the final ‘work’ looks like. And so another word we can introduce here is change: good leaders, great leaders are individuals who master change, who make it happen in order to deliver a better outcome for an organisation or entity than would otherwise be the case.⁴ To do this they are architects (a metaphor!) of the strategy which it is necessary to devise and put in place. But in short, to put it at its most dramatic: leadership is about life, because change is life; for if we cannot cross the bridge and get from A to B, if we remain stuck at A – and there is no change – we die, either literally or metaphorically. Take a moment to think about this practically: in the UK (and USA and everywhere else) long-established companies and organisations are dying – going bust and closing down – because they had not been led to respond to the changes. Perhaps the most famous example of this is the rise of the internet,⁵ and Amazon specifically, as a retail force. Its attack on the shopping habits of customers in the high streets and malls has been nothing short of amazing. Major stores in the UK such as British Home Stores, Maplins, Toys “R” Us, HMV have all gone to the wall. But other stores, for example, Next, Aldi and Waitrose, have continued to thrive despite the online onslaught. Why is this? At the end of the day it will almost certainly be down to the leadership, and specifically the leader; for leaders are those who are awake – they see the writing on the wall and take action to avert it. Even better, the truly great leaders see the writing on the wall and interpret it not as a threat, but an opportunity to be embraced. So, they and their organisations emerge stronger from the threat.

As it happens, then, our model of the ‘4+1’, whilst neatly compartmentalised in a way metaphors are not, captures the essence of what needs to happen to develop leaders, so that they become a living ‘performing art’, and perform, build teams, play and more beside. This essence starts with the individual and their empowerment and developing capabilities, and leads on to the teams and organisations and their realisation of their full potential. Great leaders become the best they can be, and they enable those they lead to do the same. Notice that in saying this there is a strong moral and ethical dimensions to leadership.⁶

So our model looks like Figure 1.2.

Before we start unpacking this model in depth (and see Figure 4.1 for a short diagnostic of using this) in Chapter 2, let’s consider all the five (‘4+1’!) elements of it in turn to get a sense of what we are talking about and how Motivational Maps is relevant to it.

Figure 1.2 Motivational Maps ‘4+1’ model of leadership

First, and most critically of all, true leadership begins with the Self. What is the Self? The Self is the modern psychological term used to describe what in the past we called the soul. What this Self or soul is lies beyond the scope of this book, but one does not need to be specifically religious to resonate with the idea, common all over the world, “that there is some part of us which should not be sold, betrayed or lost at any cost”.⁷ It is who we are at a root level; and one only needs to reflect that everybody ...