How to Grow Leaders

The Seven Key Principles of Effective Leadership Development

John Adair

• Publisher: Kogan Page
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780749454807
• eBook ISBN: 9780749460099
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

How to Grow Leaders is a ground-breaking book which sets the record straight on leadership development, the nature of leadership and how it can be taught.John Adair identifies the seven key principles of leadership development, and answers vital questions on how to select, train and educate leaders at team, operational and strategic leadership levels. In doing so he discusses topics such as the manager as leader, how people become leaders, how to manage leadership training, learning to be a strategic leader and training team leaders.Effective leadership is a crucial factor in business success. How to Grow Leaders will help you to develop these skills in others, whilst guiding you on your own personal journey towards excellence as a leader.

Part 1

Exploring Leadership – A Personal Odyssey

By the end of reading Part 1 you will have explored with me into the heart of leadership, following three uphill paths – the Qualities Approach (what a leader has to be), the Situational Approach (what a leader has to know), and the Group or Functional Approach (what a leader has to do). But we have no option to follow these paths separately: think of them as a whole. Not as a chemical mixture but as a compound.

Together they constitute nothing less than the generic role of leader. It is a discovery as significant in the social field as either Einstein’s general theory of relativity in physics or Crick and Watson’s double-helix structure of DNA in biology.

The proof of the pudding is in the eating. Putting that 1960s breakthrough in understanding the generic role of leadership – the integrated or composite theory I developed – to work in selecting and training leaders has proved to be spectacularly successful.

Ad fontes, ‘To the fountains’, was the motto of a famous English Renaissance scholar and medical doctor. Together in Part 1 we shall journey back in time to the very roots of modern thinking about leadership and how to grow leaders – Athens in the time of Socrates. Fasten your seatbelt!

1

The Qualities Approach

It was said that he had all the qualities of leadership which a man of his sort could have.

Xenophon

The highest-scoring British fighter ace in the Royal Air Force during World War II was Johnny Johnson. In his memoir Wing Leader (Chatto & Windus, 1956), he reveals the impact that the legendary legless Douglas Bader’s leadership made upon him and his fellow young pilots in the early, hazardous days of the Battle of Britain. When Bader was eventually shot down (he became a prisoner of war), Johnson writes:

At Tangmere we had simply judged Bader on his ability as a leader and a fighter pilot, and for us the high sky would never be the same again. Gone was the confident, eager, often scornful voice. Exhorting us, sometimes cursing us, but always holding us together in the fight. Gone was the greatest tactician of them all. Today marked the end of an era that was rapidly becoming a legend.

The elusive, intangible qualities of leadership can never be taught, for a man either has them or he hasn’t. Bader had them in full measure and on every flight had shown us how to apply them. He had taught us the true meaning of courage, spirit, determination, guts – call it what you will. Now that he was gone, it was our task to follow his signposts which pointed the way ahead.

Johnson was not alone in finding Bader such an inspiring example. In a letter to The Times (12 December 1996), the widow of another celebrated pilot, Hugh Dundas, who flew with Bader in 1940 and 1941, quoted from her husband’s wartime letters to her about his commanding officer: ‘He showed me quite clearly by his example the way in which a man should behave in time of war’ and ‘Here was a man made in the mould of Francis Drake – a man to be followed, a man who would win.’ Her husband, she continued, was aged 20 at the time, had been shot down a month before and viewed the prospect of combat with real inner fear. Bader’s leadership and courage enabled him to continue flying Spitfires in action in Europe, and Bader remained a great and true friend until his death.

THE LONG SHADOW OF A TRUE LEADER

In later life Douglas Bader seized every opportunity to visit people, especially the young people who faced the trauma of amputations and the prospect of learning to walk again after leg amputations.

In August 2002 a racing car driver criminally knocked 36-year-old fireman Rob Green off his motorbike, killing his wife Lorna. Scarred by bad burns, Rob also lost both legs.

As the drugs wore off, he became terribly depressed. ‘I felt so empty,’ he says. ‘I had lost everything; my beloved wife, the active life I had loved, my work – I wish I had died too. I never considered suicide, but I felt dying would have been much easier than living the life I had been left with.’

The final stage of his recovery was at a London hospital, where he spent three months learning to walk using artificial limbs. While learning to walk, Rob drew inspiration from the late Douglas Bader, the famous fighter ace who lost both his legs in a plane crash, but learnt to fly again.

‘I’d seen a film about him before I lost my own legs. While in hospital I read his autobiography and it really helped me. One of his quotes which really spurred me on was “A disabled person who fights back is not disabled; they are inspired.” It gave me courage to keep fighting.’

The sentence of Johnny Johnson’s reminiscence that I have placed in italics above serves to introduce what I call the Qualities Approach to leadership and leadership development. It was virtually universal when I was born, the only horse in the race. Indeed, in that year (1934) Dr Hensley Henson, the Lord Bishop of Durham, gave a lecture on leadership to the University of St Andrews. He informed his audience:

It is a fact that some men possess an inbred superiority which gives them a dominating influence over their contempor-aries, and marks them out unmistakably for leadership. This phenomenon is as certain as it is mysterious. It is apparent in every association of human beings, in every variety of circumstances and on every plane of culture. In a school among boys, in a college among students, in a factory, shipyard, or a mine among the workmen, as certainly as in the Church and in the Nation, there are those who, with an assured and unquestioned title, take the leading place and shape the general conduct.

The assumption behind the Bishop’s comments is both obvious and simple, an axiom that everyone took for granted. Leaders are born and not made; leadership consists of certain intrinsic traits or qualities that a person either has or has not.

The Qualities Approach certainly gave a strong answer to the most basic question in the field of the study of leadership: Why is it that one person becomes the leader in a working group rather than another? But it seemed to shut the door forever on young people like myself – conscious that we were not ‘born leaders’ but still wanting to be leaders.

How, if at all, could these ‘qualities of leadership’ be acquired? ‘Smith is not a born leader yet,’ said one school report. How could Smith be born again?

CAN LEADERSHIP QUALITIES BE DEVELOPED?

One overcast, rainy morning in 1897 a 12-year-old boy, Jafar Al-Askari, his brother and a soldier servant boarded a kalak, a native Iraqi river raft made of wood and inflated goatskins, and left Mosul in northern Iraq. As he narrates in A Soldier’s Story(Arabian Publishing, 2003), Jafar and his companions sailed down the Tigris, passed Tikrit – home of a later and more infamous Iraqi leader – until seven days later they reached their destination. ‘I enrolled in the Military School in Baghdad, and then later transferred to the Royal Military College in Constantinople [Istanbul]. There I was to graduate as an officer at the age of 19, when I was commissioned as a lieutenant in the Ottoman Army.’ Later, in World War I, General Jafar Pasha – having changed sides – fought alongside T E Lawrence against the Turks for Arab independence, and later still he served no less than five times as prime minister of the newly-created Iraq.

On the College syllabus in the days of his youth Jafar comments in his memoirs: ‘Our military education absolutely excluded any training in leadership qualities.’ I doubt that in 1904 any other military academy in the world offered such training either, but it is interesting that Jafar clearly regarded it as an omission.

THE SECRET INGREDIENT

In the 1930s a Japanese naval officer cadet on a course at the Royal Britannia Naval College at Dartmouth was found by the orderly officer wandering around the corridors late at night with a notebook in hand.

‘What are you doing?’ he was asked.

‘I am looking for the lectures on leadership,’ replied the Japanese cadet. ‘Obviously you give these lectures in the middle of the night so that we students from foreign countries should not be privileged to attend and learn about this subject which is so important to you.’

The belief that leadership qualities can and should be taught grew as time went by; what was less clear was how it should be done. The obvious approach seemed to be to list the constituent qualities and then to talk about each of them, with illustrations from the lives of great leaders.

An early example of the approach is a sixpenny self-help booklet published in 1912 in the United Kingdom entitled How To Be a Leader of Others, which I have on my table in front of me. The author begins:

There are in our midst ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• About the Author
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part 1: Exploring Leadership – A Personal Odyssey
• Part 2: How to Grow Leaders – The Seven Principles
• Conclusion
• Index