MBA Level Term Paper

Current Practices Howard Risher, Ph.D., and William G. Stopper, Editors

Reflections on the State of Leadership and Leadership Development

Rich Hughes. Director, Sustainable Leadership Capacity, The Center for Crearive Leadership, Colorado Springs Campus

The learning agenda of The Human Resource Planning Society has recently been strategically refocused on four key content areas: HR strategy & planning, organizational transfor- mation, leadership development, and intellectual capital. HRPS has identified certain individuals and/or organizations as key partners in advancing that learning agenda. The Center for Creative Leadership Is now HRPS's partner in the area of leadership and leadership development, and on behalf of this ''knowledge leader." 1 attended the 2002 Annual Conference in South Beach, Miami. Florida, to observe and reflect on the state of leadership and leadership development as represented in the ideas and practices of the various conference presentations.

The challenges our organizations face call for something of a transformation in the way we think about the very nature of leadership and leadership development.

One unsurprising complication to this task proved to be the very richness of the presentations themselves. Many, if not all, eluded simple classification into just one of the four content areas. For example, was Len Schlesinger's keynote presentation on "Aligning Your Culture with Your Brand" about organiza- tional transformation? Of course. Was it also about HR strategy and planning? Sure. Was it also about leadership? Certainly.

One implication of such complexity is that the state of leadership and leadership development is not adequately repre- sented by only those presentations dealing explicitly with that topic. While it is useful to have clarity of focus around the four content areas, it is no surprise that these areas are also interrelated. For example, leadership development has obvious connections to broader questions of HR strategy and planning as well as to being a driver of organizational transformation.

I raise these points because the challenges our organizations face - as reflected in the conference presentations - call for something of a transformation in the way we think about the very nature of leadership and leadership development. And that's the idea I explore here.

What Is Leadership? To provide a framework for this exploration, others have

found it helpful to think about leadership in terms of four tasks that need to be accomplished in any organization:

1. Providing direction 2. Assuring alignment 3. Building commitment 4. Facing adaptive challenges

Conceptualizing leadership in terms of these four tasks seems both intuitively easy and useful to most people. Taking this perspective, building leadership capacity within an organi- zation would naturally seem to include certain key activities like selecting individuals whose individual competencies correspond well to those tasks. For example, individuals would be selected for leadership positions who have special compe- tencies in providing direction (e.g., high scores on assessments of being visionary), assuring alignment (e.g., high scores on assessments of being organized), building commitment (e.g., high scores on assessments of being inspirational, empower- ing), and facing adaptive challenges {e.g., high scores on assessments of being a resourceful problem solver). Similarly, leadership development would focus on strengthening those competencies in select individuals.

Let's use this framework to examine how several conference presentations touched on the ways individual leaders can help accomplish the leadership task of building commitment.

Building Commitment: Individual Leaders Matter Marcus Buckingham of the Gallup organization presented a

strong case for the organizational benefits of greater employee engagement at work, as reflected in indices of employee per- ceptions, such as routinely having an opportunity to exercise their unique talents, having others at work recognize and praise their work, and having their opinions seem to count. He cited data that more than 70 percent of U.S. employees are not engaged in their work, at considerable tangible cost to the organization. What's more, the longer employees stay in an organization, the less engaged they become. According to Buckingham, this happens in all organizations, representing a pervasive and systematic depreciation of human capital. It should also be clear that when employees are not engaged, the leadership task of building commitment is that much more challenging.

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Emotional intelligence seems to be a clear advantage in accomplishing the leadership task of building commitment.... It should also be clear that when employees are not engaged, the leadership task of building comtnitment is that much more challenging.

While this seems to be a pervasive trend in organizations, there are nonetheless pockets of excellence within any organiza- tion. Within any company there are employees who are quite engaged in their work in addition to those who are not. Interestingly, such engaged employees are not distributed ran- domly throughout the organization. In every organization there are some managers who have greater proportions of engaged employees than other supervisors in that same organization. Quite simply, good supervisors make a difference. To put it differently, some supervisors are better than others at building commitment among employees.

In another presentation. Daniel Goleman highlighted the impt>rtance of emotional intelligence as a characteristic of effec- tive leaders. For example, he noted that emotional intelligence is nearly six times as important as IQ and technical skills in distinguishing between effective and ineffective leaders. He described leaders with lower emotional intelligence as dissonant leaders, emotionally off-key with those around them, and hav- ing no sense of the pulse of their groups. In contrast, more emo- tionally intelligent re.sonant leaders have greater self-aw are ness and greater empathy for others. This is key, Goleman said, to developing trust within groups. Emotional intelligence seems to be a clear advantage in aecomplishing the leadership task of building commitment.

For any organization seeking to build its leadership bench strength, these two presentations offer some degree of encour- agement and guidance: The key. it would seem, is to select or develop more leaders like those Marcus Buckingham described, those who had more engaged employees; or to select or develop leaders with greater emotional intelligence. Of course, these are but two specific cases of a long-standing and deep-seated incli- nation to construe leadership primarily in terms of what some individuals "have/" or what some individuals "do." More than a half-century of scholarly research on the traits and behaviors of effective leaders, and widespread use of 360-degree feed- back systems for leadership, are but two broader manifesta- tions of that same tendency to view leadership primarily in individualistic ways.

That tendency represents an unnecessarily constrained way of thinking about leadership. The disadvantage of this way of thinking is exacerbated by a corollary view (typically taken for granted rather than consciously deliberated) that leadership development is limited to the work of developing individual leaders. The very suggestion that leadership development might involve something other (or more) than developing individual leaders might strike some readers as implausible. In order to see both the sensibleness and potential advantages of this view, let

us return to the four tasks of leadership. For the sake of simplic- ity, we focus our attention once again on the leadership task of building commitment.

Building Commitment: It's More than Having Good Individuai Leaders

Think about the leadership task of building commitment in this way: Assume you've been tasked to build commitment among people throughout your organization (e.g., greater com- mitment to the organization itself, to perform their jobs well). Also assume you've been given considerable discretion as to how you will accomplish that task, and considerable resources to apply to it. Think of all the different ways their commitment conceivably might be enhanced. Maybe you heard Fran Solomon's keynote presentation on the power of play, and decide to adopt some of her suggestions in order to build a more engaging workplace and business environment. Maybe you'll invest in a difl'erent-motivational-speaker-a-day program (then again, maybe not). Or perhaps you'll systematically engi- neer your company's reward portfolio to increase employee commitment and engagement, as conference speaker Thomas Davenport advised. Yet another option, of ct)urse, might be to challenge all the leaders in your organization to behave more frequently in ways likely to build employee commitment, and less frequently in ways likely to diminish commitment.

The very suggestion that leadership development might involve something other (or more) than developing individual leaders might strike some readers as implausible.

In fact, Buckingham argued that some approaches to leader- ship development lead to significantly better organizational outcomes than others. More specifically, he described several advantages of "strength-based organizations'" and delineated the disciplines needed to build one. As noted previously, of course, individual leaders still play a critical role in the strength-based organization; Buckingham might even argue that it's precisely in a strength-based organization that leaders are truly able to bring out the best in their employees. Importantly, however, Buckingham said it was the intentional design of policies, systems, culture (e.g.. performance measurement and appraisal systems, succession planning) that creates conditions where employees are more consistently engaged across the organization. This suggests that accomplishing the leadership task of building commitment depends as much on broad questions of organiza- tional culture and systems as on the design and implementation of specific leadership development practices. The same logic equally applies to accomplishing the other leadership tasks.

So What? What difference does it make to think about leadership and

leadership development in terms of these four leadership tasks? And what is the value of recognizing explicitly that any leader's

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impact may be somewhat enhanced or diminished by the broader organizational context in which he or she leads? Isn't that obvious?

Ironically, some organizatiotis seem to believe that if "only enough" individual leaders are developed, then we will have better leadership in the organization.

In answering such questions, it is helpful to reflect on the extent to which common leadership development practices have desired levels of organizational impact. Have you, for example, been completely satisfied with the organizational impact result- ing from individuals participating in your company's leadership development programs or practices? Are you getting enough organizational ROI for what you spend on leadership develop- ment? To be sure, there are plenty of reasons why rigorous evaluation of the effectiveness of development programs is difficult. Even more fundamentally, however, one reason orga- nizational impact may be difficult to document is because of an implicit model many of us have shared about how organizations build their collective capacity for leadership.

In general, this approach can be somewhat ungraciously characterized as "putting leadership into people." In a simple version, an individual might be selected to attend an external leadership development program. The individual then "gets developed" at that training program, and subsequently returns to work, presumably a better leader. Assume even that the indi- vidual experienced the program as personally quite beneficial. Lo and behold, however, that individual's actual leadership behavior after returning to work remains little changed. Perhaps you've seen versions of this scenario yourself Ironically, some organizations seem to believe that if "only enough" individual leaders are developed, then we will have better leadership in the organization.

Outcomes like this are probably not that uncommon, perhaps not even surprising. It's not difficult to identify forces and pres- sures at work that conspire against effecting significant behavior change as an individual leader. The implicit assumption of the "putting leadership into people" model is "putting leadership into people, returning them to the same unchanged organization, and still expecting them to act differently."'

Fortunately, there may be an alternative model, one that might be described as "design leadership into organizations." In this model, leadership is seen as something the organization is designed to draw out of people. Accomplishing the four tasks of leadership is something organizational culture and systems would be intentionally designed to support and facilitate. In practical terms, taking this view could lead to the organization's senior team asking itself questions about how organizational culture and systems constructively support accomplishment of the four leadership tasks of providing direction, assuring align- ment, building commitment, and facing adaptive challenges. This would likely be a useful and different conversation than

one (a more typical one, T suspect) examining whether individual leaders in the organization are effective at providing direction, aligning others, etc.

Both of these conversations seem important, and the likeli- hood of both occurring seems greater if the top team think about leadership in terms of tasks that need to be accomplished within the organization rather than merely as competencies of individual leaders. Furthermore, when the challenge of enhancing an organization's capability of meeting its leadership agenda is framed in this way, then distinctions between leadership development and organizational development become less clear. Leadership development and organizational development become part of a blended and inherently integrated whole.

Fortunately, there may be an alternative model, one that might be described as "design leadership into organiza- tions." In this model. leadership is seen as something the organization is designed to draw otit of people.

What Does This Mean for HRPS? Perhaps it only means the beginning of a conversation

among members about how best to take advantage of the focus provided by the four content areas of its learning agenda. An additional consideration is the important interactions between the four content areas, or the "'white spaces" that exist between them (for example, the result of a more intentional exploration of potential synergies between leadership development and organizational transformation). This suggests the possibility of both a richer and also more complex learning agenda for the Society: a learning within each of the four content areas, but also an agenda focused on synergies among all of them.

CCL, an international nonprofit educational organization, has been chosen as HRPS's Knowledge Leader in the area of Leadership and Leadership Development. Rich Hughes represents CCL in that role. Knowledge Leaders help ensure that HRPS is regarded as the source of superior knowledge and best practices in each of four selected strategic content areas.

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