Gower Handbook of Leadership and Management Development

Richard Thorpe, Jeff Gold, Jeff Gold

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317125228
• Edition: 5
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Gestión

On few occasions in the history of modern management have leadership skills been in such sharp focus as they are now. The ability to direct often very large and diverse organizations; to make sense of the complex and turbulent markets and environments in which you operate; and to adapt and learn seems at an all time premium. The premise behind the fifth edition of this influential Handbook is that leadership, management and organizational development are all parts of the same process; enhancing the capacity of organizations, whatever their size, and the people within them to achieve their purpose. To this end, the editors have brought together a who's who of current writers on leadership and development and created the definitive single volume guide to the subject. The perspectives that the text provides to leadership, learning and development, embrace the formal and the informal, cultures and case examples from organizations of all kinds; and offers readers a rigorous, readable and, where appropriate, ground-breaking book. In the 14 years since the fourth edition of this classic book, very much has changed. But the need for this Handbook is as strong as ever and the Fifth Edition of Gower Handbook of Leadership and Management Development is set to become a definitive read for senior managers and those who develop them and an essential reader for the management students aspiring to become the next generation of leaders.

PART 1
Leadership and Management Development in the Twenty-first Century

1. Leadership and Management Development: The Current State
Richard Thorpe and Jeff Gold

2. National and International Developments in Leadership and Management Development
Kai Peters

CHAPTER 1
Leadership and Management Development: The Current State

RICHARD THORPE AND JEFF GOLD

Introduction

‘Leadership’ has always been a popular term, and has appeared in an ever-increasing number of books, all offering insight into how managers and very often those carrying the title of leader can develop themselves and their organisations in the context of rapid change and globalisation. There has also been a growth in leadership centres – often called ‘academies’ – that purport to improve the leadership skills of particular groups of professionals.1 Those involved in developing managers have long been puzzled by leadership being so prominent at the expense of management, and there has been a great deal of speculation as to why this should be so.

One explanation we offer is that management literature has always drawn a distinction between management and leadership, acknowledging a difference between aspects of an organisation that might be said to be in steady state or routine, and aspects that might be depicted as in flux, unprogrammed, complex, and ambiguous and so on, for which where there are no ‘correct’ answers and management decisions require judgement. Herbert Simon’s2 studies on decision making in the 1950s and Bennis’s3 research on leadership in the 1980/90s exemplify this point. Leadership might be seen as activity that is visionary, creative, inspirational, energising and transformational, whereas management might be seen as dealing with the day-to-day routine, much more transactional and so requiring good operational skills. In one sense then, the growth and interest in leadership might simply reflect the changing nature of managerial work.

However, commentators also detect some degree of inflation in the use of the word ‘leadership’ compared to ‘management’. When management is defined in relation to administration, for example, it is the word ‘management’ that conveys the sense of strategy and creative endeavour, with ‘administration’ seen as embodying notions of efficiency and routine. When leadership is defined in relation to management, however, it is leadership that is then cast as the creative function, with management seen as relating more to day-to-day work. It is perhaps interesting to point out that the MBA degree, the only general master’s qualification in management that is truly international, and still relatively popular, is actually a Master of Business Administration, although leadership will undoubtedly be a prominent aspect of its content.

A related issue that might account for the increased interest in leadership detected by management development professionals is that real long-term changes in the economy and society may be affecting the nature of the task of managing. This argument suggests that management was, in a past industrial age, primarily associated with those who manage the factors of production on behalf of owners or shareholders. Leadership, in contrast, has a longer pedigree and is the term traditionally used in the management of professionals.4 With the increase in knowledge in the new economy, and a commensurate increase in professional employment, the term ‘leadership’ has become dominant when discussing the way powerful, self-directing and knowledgeable workers might be ‘managed’. As with all professional workers, these individuals often have complex if not independent relationships with the organisations in which they work. First, they belong to a distinct community of practice, often a professional society, whilst at the same time often reporting to a range of individuals in the organisations in which they work. Second, their tenure in a job can be a brief one, working on projects, or within teams that disband and reform to focus on new activities.

There have also been other forces at work which provide a strong impetus for promoting leadership as a missing ingredient in the search for improvement and modernisation, especially in the public sector. In the UK, the Council for Excellence in Management and Leadership (CEML)5 was set up in 2000 to provide a strategy for management and leadership development and made particular reference to the need for more leaders to enable an improvement in UK’s economic performance. The Cabinet’s Performance and Innovation Unit, very much driven by a modernisation agenda in the public sector, tried with little success,6 to draw lessons about leadership from private and public sectors on the qualities required for effective leadership and the impact of development programmes on organisational outcomes.

More recently, there has been growing interest in the importance of diversity as an issue for inclusion in leadership and management programmes, as well as attention to ethical and more socially responsible behaviour by leaders and managers.

We feel it is important to raise these issues at the beginning of a book focused on developing managers and leaders, so that readers are clear that leadership hasn’t suddenly made the need for management and administration redundant within organisations. Nor is leadership a substitute for many of the activities and roles that managers and administrators need to discharge. Rather, it is a different aspect of the role that is for many embodied in the same person, and an aspect that may well have been missing from the way we have developed our managers in the past. As society changes, professionals’ work increases and we expect more from our public services, the need to address the development of leadership does so as well.

Not withstanding this increasing interest in leadership as a phenomenon, there is still a dearth of literature that clarifies just what leadership is and how leaders can be developed. A systematic review of the leadership literature7 revealed it to be not particularly robust, with few convincing empirical studies and a sense that little progress has been made since Stogdill8 first suggested the absence of any clear personality traits that reliably predict leadership potential. Of interest to us is the observation by Pfeiffer9 who pointed out the fact that the performance of a business is often outside the control of single individuals – yet the search for the individual as leader and hero continues. In this chapter, we hope to indicate the distributed, collective nature of leadership and help readers to identify how both individual working within collectives might be more appropriately seen as the unit of account and what this means for leadership learning and development.

In addition to these comments on leadership, more broadly it seems that it remains an act of faith than an investment in management development will be linked to measures of success, whether at the level of organisations or the nation as whole. It is very much part of conventional wisdom that management development is a good thing.10 However, there is now growing research to suggest that there is a link between management development and organisation performance, although this link is very much connected to the priority and support given to it by those in senior positions – the leaders.11 Thus leadership development is very much connected to management development, and this theme will be evident in this chapter and throughout the book.

So What is Leadership and Does it Differ from Management?

A number of years ago, when the dean of a British business school visited North America, he asked an Indian chief, to whom he was introduced, why it was he who became the leader of the tribe. His response was that when he was hunting for buffalo on the great plain and the track forked left and right, if he rode right and his braves followed him, he was reaffirmed as the leader; but if he rode right and his braves rode to the left, then he was no longer the leader. The inference is here that for leaders to be leaders, they have to have followers; how leaders create confidence in others to follow is one of the subjects of this chapter.

Charles Handy, when presenting BBC Radio 4’s Thought for Today some years ago, suggested leaders had three qualities – ‘the trinity’ – which connect to the Indian chief’s theme:

1. Do they understand? Understanding means that leaders can both read the external drivers that will affect the organisation’s success and understand internal drivers, such as the organisation’s capabilities, the views and values held by the stakeholders involved in the enterprise, and the possibilities for change.

2. Do they have a vision? Vision means that leaders see a bigger picture: what some writers12 have called the ‘helicopter factor’. They can see not only this bigger picture but also how it can be translated into operational actions.

3. Can they inspire others? Inspiration means that leaders can release the energy within their subordinates and connect with them to obtain their willing if not wholehearted support.

So, in a general sense, leadership demands a sense of purpose, and an ability to influence others, interpret situations, negotiate and debate their views, often in the face of opposition. If this image is one that seems to set a standard for leaders, we perhaps need to explore how far those who are appointed to the role of leader or manager match this standard by observing how they behave and the roles they perform.

A Retrospective Look at the Roles Managers and Leaders Perform

What is clear to leadership and management developers is the way in which the early idea of what management13 is and what managers do is still deeply embedded in the management psyche today. The early studies, undertaken at the beginning of the last century,14 imply that management is at its core a rational scientific process that can be behaviourally studied, systematically trained for and performance-measured. These early writings suggest a number of functions that managers perform:

• Planning: managers determine the direction of the organisation by establishing objectives, and designing and implementing strategies.

• Organising: managers determine the specific activities and resources required to implement the business plan, as well as making decisions about how work should be allocated and coordinated.

• Directing: managers communicate to others their responsibilities in achieving the plan, as well as providing an organisational environment in which employees are motivated and able to improve their performance.

• Controlling: managers guide, monitor and adjust work activities to ensure that performance remains in line with the organisation’s expectations.

This very much remains the orthodoxy for both managers and leaders and forms the basis of many programmes, frameworks, books and articles. However, what have we learnt about what managers and leaders actually do?

From various studies,15 we have learnt that when we imagine a manager or leader sitting quietly behind a desk making decisions and thinking of the future. The observation studies conducted reveal managers and leaders at all levels within an organisation to be working at a frenetic pace, often on a variety of tasks simultaneously, and often being reactive to events – a far cry from the image of a proactive individual. From these studies, a number of themes can be distilled that helpfully illuminate a number of aspects of management and leadership work:

1. Elements: we have already discussed the fact that managers and leaders are seen to undertake both specialist and generalist work, but more important is the fact that they often carry out very similar tasks in completely different ways and, in so doing, achieve similar results. This is, of course, most perplexing for those brought up within the behavioural school, where jobs are thought to be reducible observing what managers and leaders actually do couldn’t offer a more different picture from their functional components, and where training programmes are developed to imp...