Developing Change Leaders

Paul Aitken, Malcolm Higgs

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780750683777
• eBook ISBN: 9781136441127
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

Implementing change is a major business challenge. Is your leadership up to the task?

With change initiatives failing so frequently despite many books on the market addressing separately the topics of leadership and change management, Developing Change Leaders tackles in one concise volume the all-important question of how to develop effective change leaders who make a difference to organizational life.

Providing the detailed practical guidance, frameworks and tools that competing titles lack, this how-to book will help you address the challenges of change and develop your own interventions.

Based on the authors' real-life experience of designing development programmes and coaching individual change leaders, Developing Change Leaders will help you to assess your readiness for leading change and develop the necessary skills to make change successful.

Considering the essential background theory, including the contemporary context of change leadership and broader organizational considerations which impact on change leadership capability, the book concludes with an overarching framework for use and adaptation by those responsible for developing change leaders.

Combining academic prowess and industry consultancy experience, Paul Aitken and Malcolm Higgs are the ideal experts to translate academic theory into leadership and human resource practice.

Part 1 The Contemporary Context for Developing Change Leadership

Introduction

In this part of the book we provide a broad context within which the development of change leaders needs to occur. In exploring this development it is important to consider both what we know about leadership and the context of change within organizations.

We begin by exploring the way in which our understanding of leadership has evolved. It has been argued that our attempts to understand leadership have represented a search for the ‘Holy Grail’ (Higgs, 2003). In the course of this search we have consistently critiqued the journeys and conclusions of our predecessors and attempted to supplant them with ‘new truths’. However, as Weick (1995) pointed out:

Social and organisational sciences, as opposed to physics or biology, do not discover anything new, but let us comprehend what we have known all along in a much better way, opening up new, unforeseen, possibilities of reshaping, re-engineering and restructuring our original social environment.

Thus, we should perhaps attempt to understand this journey as a process of ‘sense-making’ rather than one of discovery. Importantly in this context Chapter 1 points to the importance of understanding the impact which corporate culture has on the nature of developing effective change leadership.

Within this sense-making frame Chapter 2 explores the challenges of change faced by organizations today. In doing this we not only explore the drivers of change, but also the reasons why it is so difficult to implement change successfully. This entails not only enumerating the barriers to change, but also attempting to understand the causes of the difficulties we face and the need to challenge many of our assumptions about the reasons for behavior which makes change so difficult to implement.

Finally, Chapter 3 brings together these different contextual themes and explores a number of ways in which we attempt to define the requirements of an effective change leader. In doing so, we explore lessons from research and practice and examine differing frameworks which range from role-based to competence-based models. In doing this we explore an emerging framework which links leader behaviors and the contextual approach required for the leadership of organizational change implementation.

References

• Higgs, M. J. (2003). Developments in leadership thinking. Journal of Organizational Development and Leadership, 24(5), 273–284.
• Weick, K. E. (1995). Sense-making in organisations. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Chapter 1 The Change Leadership Context

DOI: 10.4324/9780080942124-3

I wanna be the leader!

I wanna be the leader!

Can I be the leader?

Can I? I can?

Promise! Promise!

Yippee! I’m the leader!

I’m the leader!

OK, what shall we do?

Roger McGough

Introduction

It is increasingly evident that change is not a process which can be simply managed. Change needs to be led and research has shown the way in which change if led can make a significant difference to the chances of success in achieving change goals.

Before exploring the specific challenges and requirements of leading change successfully (which we will do in Chapters 2 and 3), it is worth reflecting on what we have learned about leadership in general. In doing so, we will explore the following:

• Developments in thinking about the nature of leadership and understanding what it takes to deliver successful performance as a leader.
• The changing context within which leadership is both required and being exercised, plus developing an understanding of the dynamic between context and leadership behaviors.
• The significant role of organizational culture in the selection and development of leaders and the interaction between leader behaviors and organizational culture. In doing this, we will also explore the relationship between culture and change within an organization.

Developments in our understanding of leadership

It is worth beginning our exploration of developments in thinking about leadership by reflecting on Roger McGough’s poem at the beginning of this chapter. What meaning do you take from this poem? In using this poem in introducing leadership development workshops over many years, some of the common responses to this reflection we have encountered include:

• ‘No one understands what leadership is’.
• ‘People pursue leadership for its status and recognition of their ambition’.
• ‘You need to be driven by a desire to be a leader in order to become a leader’.
• ‘You can only become a leader, if you have permission from others to lead’.
• ‘We do not have a clear understanding of what it is that leaders do’.
• ‘Leadership involves engaging others in determining our priorities and plans’.
• ‘Leadership is a team game’.

This experience is by no means restricted to our own interactions with leaders and potential leaders. Burns (1978) pointed out that we do not have a clear view of the nature of leadership. In his research, he identified some 284 different definitions of leadership. The progression of time and further research has clearly failed to clarify this ambiguity. Kets de Vries (1993) commented that:

The more leaders I encounter the more difficult I find it to identify a common pattern of effective leadership behaviours.

Ultimately this leads to a view expressed in this adaptation of a comment by the Canadian educationalist, Lawrence Peters:

Leadership, like truth, beauty and contact lenses, lays in the eye of the beholder.

Indeed the above quotation provides the basis for an important insight; this being that follower’s needs and requirements play a significant contextual role for understanding the nature of effective leadership. We will return to this point later.

Faced with this apparently impossible compendium for thinking about leadership, how can we make sense of what we know and what we have learned? If we consider leadership as a long line of study, it could be argued that societies have had an interest in leadership which stretches back over millennia. Core to this tends to be views concerning the purpose of leadership, the nature of power, the sources of leadership and the nature or source of leadership excellence. Considering these issues could be the subject of a book (or even a treatise) in its own right. However, it may be useful to attempt to chart the developments in this debate over the course of the period during which we have more systematically studied leadership as a significant aspect of organizational behavior (arguably beginning in the 1930s).

The key developments would seem to be:

• The purpose of leadership
  Thinking about leadership has been dominated for a significant period of time by the view that the purpose of leadership is to deliver results. In much of the literature, this perspective has been focused on the specific delivery of financial results. During the 1970s, a somewhat different view of the purpose began to emerge. This saw, in some cases, a shift from seeing the purpose as delivery of results to that of effecting a transformation in the organization. In essence this view saw the purpose of leadership as being to bring about significant change within an organization in order to deal with significant changes in the business environment.
  Many examples of effective leadership, from the business world, began to lose credibility when ‘successful’ CEOs left an organization only to see a significant dip in performance. This, in part, led to a view about the purpose of leadership being concerned with the delivery of sustainable performance. This view, which began to emerge in the late 1980s, positioned the purpose of leadership as being the development of capability. Building individual and organizational capability is seen as central to the delivery of sustainable organizational performance. Today, the thinking about the purpose of leadership is more concerned with an integration of the above three views. This viewpoint sees leadership as enabling results to be delivered through the development of capability; importantly, the capability to effect change, transformation and sustainability.
• The focus of leadership studies
  The focus of leadership studies has shifted notably over the period we are considering. This shift has occurred in two ways. First, our approach to leadership studies has begun to move away from a focus on top leaders, which has traditionally dominated research in this area, to a more distributed view of leadership within an organization. This leadership has moved from being purely associated with position within an organization to being seen to be concerned with the process by which anyone who needs to engage followers in the organization achieves such engagement. In part, this shift responds to the critique that leadership studies have been in essence little more than studies of the traits and behaviors of white, male American CEOs (Alimo-Metcalfe, 1995). In seeing leadership as more widely distributed within the organization, we are now able to move from a constant focus on ‘distant’ leaders to exploring the behaviors and practices of ‘near’ leaders.
  The second shift we have seen under this heading is a move from seeing leadership as an individually centered phenomenon to being more of a collective activity. Hence, leadership is now being seen by many as a team game.
• Sources of power
  In broad terms, the relationships between leadership and power have been under-explored in research into leadership. However, in framing leadership studies it is evident that there have been underlying assumptions made about the source of leadership power. From the early studies of leadership until the 1970s, the dominant assumption about power tended to be that a leader’s power was derived from their position within the organization. In the course of the 1970s, the power base tended to be seen as being less concerned with positional power and more concerned with personal power. This tended to be illustrated by a growing focus on the charismatic aspects of leadership. More recently, as organizational life has become more complex, the power of the leader is being seen to be more concerned with the ability to create connections within the organization. This is clearly linked to the development of the view that the purpose of leadership is to build capability in the organization.
• Existence of leadership
  Underpinning much of the research into leadership has been the ‘nature/nurture’ debate. For a considerable time, views on leadership tended to be dominated by a belief that leaders are born. Clearly, such a belief influences the focus of research and indeed led to a significant focus on attempting to identify traits which were associated with effective and successful leaders. In the 1960s, an opposing belief emerged. The focus in this period was based on a view that effective leaders can be made. Operating on this belief led to a focus on identifying specific behaviors which could be incorporated into the development of leaders. More recently, the view has emerged that leadership is both nature and nurture – leaders are both born and made. This is not an attempt to avoid taking a position. It is a view which suggests that certain traits or characteristics may be necessary to provide a base upon which leadership capabilities might be developed.

In practice, these developments in underpinning assumptions and beliefs relating to the framing of leadership studies have not moved tidily from one stage to another. In reality, many of these exist today in different forms and combinations. What is important, however, is to understand leadership in the context of these assumptions. Against this background, it is worth reflecting on...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Table Of Contents
• Developing Change Leaders
• Developing Change Leaders
• Introduction
• Part 1 The Contemporary Context for Developing Change Leadership
• 1 The Change Leadership Context
• 2 The Challenge of Change
• 3 What Does It Take to Lead Change?
• Part 2 How to Develop Change Leadership Capability
• 4 A Values Dialogue for Change Leaders
• 5 Building a Change Leadership Culture
• 6 The Evolution of a Change Leader
• 7 Development Approaches
• Part 3 Organizational Considerations
• 8 Evaluating the Impact of Change Leadership Development
• 9 Managing Change Leadership Talent
• 10 A Framework for Developing 'Changing' Leadership Capability
• 11 Concluding Remarks
• Index