Leadership and Management Development

Jeffrey Gold, Richard Thorpe, Alan Mumford

• Publisher: CIPD - Kogan Page
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781843982449
• eBook ISBN: 9781843983262
• Edition: 5
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Gestion des ressources humaines

How do you measure managers and leaders? How do you assess their development needs? Leadership and Management Development covers these and other key topics that form the requirements for the CIPD Level 7 Advanced module of the same name. Retitled and revised to focus on leadership as well as management, the book includes multiple perspectives from those who have either experienced or provided leadership and management development alongside analysis and critique to help paint a full picture of the subject. Students will learn to analyse the concepts of leadership and management, identify leadership and management development needs and formulate and implement strategies and interventions.This fully updated 5th edition of Leadership and Management Development features increased coverage of diversity, ecology, ethics and SMEs. At least two case studies per chapter support academic and critical context, and the book takes a more international perspective by considering global leaders and presenting international examples. It is ideal for students studying leadership and management development as part of a CIPD qualification or as part of a general business or HR degree. Online supporting resources include an instructor's manual and lecture slides.

CHAPTER 1

Leaders and managers, leadership and management development

CHAPTER OUTLINE

Introduction

Leaders and managers

What leaders and managers do

Are leaders and managers different?

Leading and managing in organisations

Leadership and management development

Approaches and purpose to developing leaders and managers

Summary

LEARNING OUTCOMES

After studying this chapter, you should be able to understand, explain, analyse and evaluate:

•the meaning of leadership and management

•findings in what leaders and managers actually do

•whether leaders and managers are different

•some of the key contextual factors in managing and leading

•alternative definitions of leadership and management development

•various approaches and purposes to developing leaders and managers

INTRODUCTION

Consider the following news item that appeared in People Management on 26 March 2009:

HOSPITAL LEADERSHIP FAILINGS

‘Appalling’ management at an NHS trust contributed to patients’ dying needlessly, according to the health service watchdog. The Healthcare Commission said there were deficiencies at virtually every stage in the care of people at Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust. Insufficient staffing and poor training contributed to higher than expected death rates at Stafford Hospital. Steve Barnett, chief executive of the NHS Confederation, said the findings were ‘an extreme example of what happens when leadership fails to focus on the things that really matter’. Health Secretary Alan Johnson apologised for ‘a complete failure of management to address serious problems’.

The report is based on an investigation by the Healthcare Commission published in March 2009 (Healthcare Commission 2009) into high mortality rates among patients admitted as emergencies at Mid Staffordshire Hospital, which had held Foundation Trust status since April 2005. Foundation Trusts have been created since 2004 and allow greater freedom and flexibility to hospital trusts to make decisions which are more responsive to local needs. The report found many failings, with much criticism levelled at the leadership and the lack of an open culture that would allow learning.

Can you see why we should be concerned with leadership and management development? The needless death of people in any context could hardly be more serious and here we find responsibility attributed for the failings to leadership. However, throughout the report, the terms ‘management’ and ‘managers’ are used as well as ‘leadership’, so a key issue arises about whether it is management or leadership which is lacking, or both. Certainly in recent years, ‘leadership’ seems to have become a more popular term – a hot topic of our times, perhaps (Storey 2004), and with it the expectations that those with the title leader will ‘focus on the things that really matter’. Witness the growth of leadership programmes, leadership centres and frameworks. For example, if you go to the website http://www.nhsleadershipqualities.nhs.uk/, you will find the Leadership Qualities Framework of the NHS, setting out the requirements for ‘outstanding leadership’. Events in recent years and months have only served to highlight the need for effective leaders, often described as those who are visionary, creative, inspirational, energising and transformational, although we still need people to effectively manage the day-to-day operations, as is very evident in the Mid Staffordshire case above. Thus in the UK as well as elsewhere there have been continuing concerns about the quantity and quality of leaders and managers and the desire to extend good leadership and management practice not only into original areas in manufacturing but also into areas such as professional firms, schools and the public sector generally, small businesses and voluntary and community organisations. Whatever effective leadership and management are, we apparently need more of it (CEML 2002), although as we will suggest, it is difficult to make sweeping generalisations about what leaders and managers need to learn to do to be effective.

LEADERS AND MANAGERS

Given the concern about the quantity and quality of leaders and managers, there are many people in the UK who carry a job title containing the words ‘manager’ or ‘leader’, although what these terms indicate can vary from one organisation to another. For example, in a building society we know, Customer Service Teams have a team leader but the Customer Service Department has a department manager who is more senior than the team leaders. Alternatively, some organisations have always distinguished between managers and those at more senior levels by using the title ‘executive’, as in Chief Executive Officer (CEO), but this term too might also be used at other levels – eg customer service executives. We could add other titles, such as ‘co-ordinator’ and ‘supervisor’. Sometimes a titles game is played. For example, in one university faculty we know, the Faculty Management Team was renamed the Faculty Leadership Team, although no one could discern any noticeable difference in what the team actually did as a consequence.

These issues make it very difficult to be precise about the numbers of leaders and managers and even more difficult to make generalisations about what the people who hold these titles actually do and how they should be developed (Burgoyne et al 2004). Nevertheless, some effort has been made at a national level to calculate numbers, and in the UK the Economic and Labour Market Review publishes quarterly figures for Employment by Occupation. In December 2007 there were over 29 million people in employment, of which around 4.5 million or 15.2% were recorded as ‘managers and senior officials’ (not as managers and leaders). Of course, this classification can easily avoid the work of many people who manage and lead in their daily jobs. For example, all professionals and those in skilled occupations are likely to complete activities such as planning, organising and decision-making, which could be seen as managing and leading. This is likely to be the case in many situations where work is knowledge-based and service-driven (Moynagh and Worsley 2005) and most organisations are small or medium-sized (SMEs), where managing and leading are closely tied to everyday working and formal titles have less meaning.

WEB LINK

Go to http://www.statistics.gov.uk/elmr/ for the Economic and Labour Market Review, where you will find updated figures.

Given the difficulties arising from the titles game, for the purpose of this book the ‘leadership’ and ‘management’ parts of Leadership and Management Development (LMD) are taken to mean the description of activities carried out by managers and/or leaders. Leadership or management in the sense of a group of individuals holding power and authority is an important but less useful focus. To say that ‘Management here is too autocratic,’ or ‘The leadership don’t know what they are doing’ may be a useful precursor to analysis of exactly who has these failings, and therefore what kind of development needs and solutions may emerge. But the use of ‘leadership’ and ‘management’ rather in the pejorative way that people talk about ‘they’ is less useful. A major reason for this is that LMD has consistently overprovided for general statements of need, and generally applicable solutions to those needs. As Burgoyne et al (2004) argue, LMD ‘works in different ways in different situations’ (p.49), so any design for development needs to consider specific circumstances.

1.1¹ REFLECT – CONCLUDE – PLAN

We might argue that the greater the degree of generalisation in LMD and the lower the attention to the particular needs of individuals in particular situations, the less effective LMD will be.

What is your reaction to this generalisation? How applicable is it in your experience of defining management and leadership, and of LMD?

What impact could it have on the provision of effective LMD?

What might you do as a result of your argument?

WHAT LEADERS AND MANAGERS DO

If we turn our attention to considering leadership and management as activities which people enact in work situations, it is common to invoke various studies and theories from the past, completed with varying degrees of rigour, that nevertheless play a major part in what is understood as the body of knowledge we call theory. Management theory usually begins with the work of the American F. W. Taylor, who sought to define the role of managers and is recognised as the pioneer of scientific management. Through analysis of work tasks, managers could find the ‘one best way’ to control work and eliminate waste – a process referred to as Taylorism. This search for the ‘one best way’ model of management has continued ever since. Henri Fayol (1949) identified five basic managerial functions – planning, organising, co-ordinating, commanding and controlling, or POC3. Early forms of management education in the UK and the United States used these categorisations, supplemented by additional aspects such as staffing, directing and budgeting. You might recognise the categories as the main areas of coverage and theory presentation in management textbooks. Extensions to Fayol’s view, supplemented by the experience of Alfred P. Sloan’s Forty Years in General Motors (1945) and Max Weber’s ideas on bureaucracy (Watson 1980) became in a sense the classical descriptions of managerial work, because they were the first serious attempts. However, Classical Management remains very much the tradition in management education and there remain continuing debates on the value of this tradition in describing management work (Caroll and Gillen 1987).

These classical descriptions of managerial work, however, and derivatives of them, were neither particularly helpful in causing managers better to understand what they needed to do, nor seriously helpful in facilitating the development of managers to meet these requirements. They do not usefully describe in behavioural terms what managers or leaders need to be able to do, and therefore what development actions would be appropriate. Notice also that the focus was on management with implicit implications for leaders but mostly leadership was still seen at the time as something mysterious based on the...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Preface to the 5th edition
• CHAPTER 1: LEADERS AND MANAGERS, LEADERSHIP AND MANAGEMENT DEVELOPMENT
• CHAPTER 2: STRATEGIC LEADERSHIP AND MANAGEMENT DEVELOPMENT
• CHAPTER 3: MEASURING LEADERS AND MANAGERS
• CHAPTER 4: ASSESSING DEVELOPMENT NEEDS
• CHAPTER 5: LEADERS, MANAGERS AND LEARNING
• CHAPTER 6: ACTIVITIES FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF LEADERS AND MANAGERS
• CHAPTER 7: COMBINING WORK AND LEARNING
• CHAPTER 8: EVALUATING LEADERSHIP AND MANAGEMENT DEVELOPMENT
• CHAPTER 9: LEADERSHIP AND MANAGEMENT DEVELOPMENT AND SOCIAL CAPITAL
• CHAPTER 10: THE FUTURE SUPPLY OF LEADERS AND MANAGERS
• CHAPTER 11: DIVERSITY AND ECOLOGY
• CHAPTER 12: THE DEVELOPMENT OF LEADERS AND MANAGERS IN SMALL AND MEDIUM-SIZED ENTERPRISES
• CHAPTER 13: FUTURES LEARNING FOR LEADERS AND MANAGERS
• References
• Index