Leadership Development

A Complexity Approach

Kevin Flinn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317390657
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Drawing on the complexity sciences and personal narrative accounts of experience from practitioners based in the UK, Germany, Denmark and North America, this book examines conventional leadership development methodologies with a view to identifying what is useful and what is not. It proffers an alternative perspective on leadership and organisation for business schools, consultancies and corporate training functions to adopt in their development of leaders.

Leadership Development: A Complexity Approach

is essential reading for advanced students and researchers of leadership development, leadership studies, human resource management and organisational development. It will also be of interest to management educators and practising managers whose experience of, or aspirations for, working life are not represented in mainstream academic texts and popular management literature.

1

Leadership, management and entrepreneurship

Leadership, management and entrepreneurship

I don’t believe just ’cos ideas are tenacious it means they’re worthy.

Tim Minchin (2009)

It would seem to be standard practice, in Chapter 1 of leadership development books, for the author to outline his or her current understanding of leadership and leadership development, as well as offering some thoughts on organising and organisations – the contexts in which leadership and leadership development emerge and are played out. Here, however, you will have to wait until Chapter 2 because at this point I feel that it is more important to explore the historical roots of how we have come to think about these phenomena. In this chapter, then, l trace the social and political development of the dominant discourse on organising/organisations, leadership/management, and leadership/management education. My flouting of convention is not a ruse to signal that this is not a standard book on leadership development; rather, and more importantly, it is an invitation to stop and consider how dominant ways of thinking and acting have become taken for granted across all sectors. I unquestioningly advocated this selfsame praxis during my early career as a manager, and throughout my first decade as a management developer. It is a view of the world that I have come to seriously question and challenge – hence the writing of this book.

As outlined in the Introduction (see Caveat 4), entire books (research careers) have been dedicated to some of the themes to which I am only able to allocate a chapter (or part thereof) to here. Consequently, in this and the chapters to follow, I will focus on thinking and research that has helped me to better understand what I find myself doing as a leader of leadership development interventions. I privilege perspectives that inform my sense-making, and are congruent with my day-to-day reality and the lived experience(s) of the participants with whom I work. In my experience such perspectives are afforded little, if any, consideration in mainstream literature and in conventional leadership development programmes.

Over the last forty years, across the UK and many other Western economies, ‘managerialist conceptions of leadership, leadership development, and organisation have come to dominate thinking, education and organisational practice’ (Flinn and Mowles, 2014: 4). Managerialism is based on the belief that all aspects of organisational life can and should be controlled according to rational plans, procedures, structures and systems of monitoring, designed to achieve the objectives set by a CEO, or equivalent, and/or a small group of executive leaders who, it is deemed, bring something special to the table that ‘ordinary’ managers can’t. This perspective ‘has become a naturalised part of the organisational habitus¹ across the private, public, mutual and charitable sectors’ (ibid.: 4, emphasis in the original). Habitus (Bourdieu, 1990; Elias, 1991) is a descriptor for the ways of thinking and working which we unwittingly replicate whether we find them useful or not, hardly stopping to acknowledge, let alone reflect upon, alternative approaches.

In ignoring the historical development of how we have come to think in this way, mainstream discourse covers over and perpetuates the illusion that conventional/managerialist notions of leadership, leadership development and organisation are universally accepted ideas, rather than contested and contestable ideologies, albeit incredibly tenacious ones. And, to paraphrase the quotation from singer/comedian/composer Tim Minchin that opens this chapter, taken from his excellent song, ‘White Wine in the Sun’ (ibid. 2009), tenacity is no guarantee of worthiness.

Where did all the managers go?

For many writers and practitioners management has been superseded by leadership. Management is deemed to have failed and leadership is seen to hold out the pledge of helping achieve that success which management had earlier promised … Management is now to leadership what administration used to be to management – a necessary but not sufficient function in the achievement of organizational success.

Jackie Ford and Nancy Harding (2011)

When I took on my first training role almost two decades ago, the process of working with managers to develop their practice was known as management development. Over the years, management development has been superseded by leadership development. During this period I have worked in and with organisations in the mutual, private, charitable, and more latterly, public sectors in the UK and abroad, and I would say that two of the most noticeable differences between what was initially termed management development and what is now called leadership development are (i) the replacement of the word ‘management’ with ‘leadership’ in the programme titles, materials and marketing paraphernalia that promotes these activities; and (ii) the dramatic increase in the number of managers voluntarily attending such programmes.

In the dominant discourse, the leadership/management debate explores whether leadership and management are distinctive and separate activities. There is no questioning whether leaders/managers are best placed to run organisations in the first place: this is taken as given. Similarly, in mainstream and popular management literature, it is generally taken for granted that the purpose of organisations is to maximise profits, and that the optimum way to achieve this is through efficiency and standardisation – the twin pillars of managerialism (Shenhav, 1999²). However, when we take a look at the history of management and management education we see that there was nothing inevitable about (i) management’s replacement of owner-entrepreneurs at the top of the organisational hierarchy (Khurana, 2007³); (ii) the seemingly universal acceptance of managerialist ways of working that have spread throughout Western, and some Eastern, economies since the end of the Second World War (Shenhav, 1999); or (iii) the setting apart of leadership as something distinct and superior to management (Zaleznik, 1977), which I contend is a rhetorical device to, amongst other things, justify the incredible asymmetry in pay and conditions between senior managers and the rest.

For managers enrolling on the programmes that I run, it is usually the very first time that they have explored how we have come to think about leadership and organisation, and acknowledge that it is just that – a way of thinking. For most participants, hierarchical structures and the vast asymmetry in influence (power) and remuneration between (senior) managers and the rest is just ‘how things are’ and, for some, ‘how they should be’. In the remainder of this chapter, drawing on the thinking of Shenhav (1999); Djelic (1998); Harvey, (2005); Khurana (2007); Crouch, (2011); and Thomas et al. (2013), I draw attention to the fact that managers are a relatively modern organisational phenomenon and that their ascendancy to the top of the organisational hierarchy, the subsequent consolidation of this position, and the acceptance of the ever-widening gulf in pay between senior managers and the rest, was anything but inevitable. Moreover, the view, developed in business schools and elsewhere, of organisations as machine-like systems that can be manipulated at will by a small cadre of exceptional individuals who have something special that the rest of humanity do not have access to, is something that the complexity approach to leadership/leadership development that I explore in this book fundamentally refutes.

Where did managers come from in the first place?

As large-scale corporations expanded in late nineteenth-century America, and owner-entrepreneurs found it more and more difficult to manage the complex organisations that they had founded, a new group of employees started to emerge who not only challenged the foremen and supervisors for supremacy on the shop-floor, but also challenged the owner-entrepreneurs for control of the business itself (Shenhav, 1999). To sustain this challenge, this new class of employees, called managers, embarked on a legitimisation project that looked to establish management as both a profession and a science, akin to medicine or law, and they were supported in this by the newly formed business schools (Khurana, 2007: 3). At the turn of the nineteenth century, this legitimisation project was bolstered during violent bouts of labour unrest in the US manufacturing industry. In contrast to the warring business owners and workers, the managers (mainly mechanical engineers) were able to present themselves as rational, neutral arbitrators working for the common good, and to promote their accumulated knowledge (based on mechanical engineering principles) as a rational, politically neutral ‘science’ of management (ideology) that would help business to maximise profitability through efficiency and the standardisation of organisational processes (systems) for the benefit of society (Shenhav, 1999).

Rising criticism of the legitimacy of such claims in the first half of the twentieth century – a typical example of which being the media backlash following the Stock Market Crash of 1929 – and political contestation over the ownership of the means of production were put aside as large-scale manufacturing’s contribution to the war effort took precedence. Khurana argues that the Second World War ‘generally softened Americans’ historically suspicious attitudes towards large organisations and their management’ (2007: 200). He continues:

Americans were increasingly enchanted by claims that the same technologies that had won the war could now be used to strengthen society. As a result, large organizations came to be seen not only as tools by which certain immediate objectives could be achieved but also as the means by which problems like “social” and “political tensions” could be rectified.

(Ibid.)

However, Harvey argues that irrespective of big business’s new-found respectability, ‘one condition of the post-war settlement in almost all countries was that the economic power of the upper classes be restrained and that labour be accorded a much larger share of the economic pie’ (2005: 15). A form of what Harvey terms ‘embedded liberalism’ emerged across the USA and Europe where ‘market processes and entrepreneurial and corporate activities were surrounded by a web of social and political constraints’ (ibid.: 11). An unintended consequence of one of the US government’s ‘constraints’ on business was the rise of the conglomerate – a form of organisation that, through mergers and acquisitions, combined a range of ‘unrelated’ businesses under a single company umbrella (Khurana, 2007: 208). Conglomerates emerged partly as a means of bypassing government regulations prohibiting the use of ‘vertical or horizontal mergers’ that would make it possible for an organisation to dominate a single industry, and partly as a way of increasing earnings per share, the measure that had become the stock market’s ‘key indicator of a firm’s prospects’ (ibid.: 208).

Khurana argues that the rise of the conglomerate where ‘a single executive was often responsible for ten or twelve different businesses [meant that] concrete, industry or firm-specific knowledge and skills were devalued [replaced by] the newer more abstract tools and techniques of rational management [that] offered an approach to success that operated without regard to industry distinctions’ (2007: 209). Management began to be characterised as a set of technical skills and knowledge that had a universality and transferability to all industries and sectors across the USA, and this new view of management and management ‘science’ (still largely based on mechanical engineering principles) steadily came to dominate US business school curricula. In turn, the USA’s increasing influence on the post-war global economy, meant that it was not long before this perspective was exported to the Western world, with European organisations and business schools adopting US working and business education practices (Thomas et al., 2013), albeit modified to take account of what Djelic (1998) describes as ‘national peculiarities’.

Recovery and growth were strong in post-war Western economies. Indeed, during the 1950s the British Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, told his Tory Party Conference audience that ‘most of our people have never had it so good’. By the end of the 1960s ‘embedded liberalism began to break down, both internationally and domestically’ (Harvey, 2005: 11), with unemployment and inflation surging, and growth falling. The economic downturn continued into the 1970s and company shareholders became jittery as share prices and dividends fell. The challenge that the management elite faced in this period was that they were charged with being stagnant, bureaucratic technocrats, who were not willing to make the tough decisions necessary to maintain profitability, and who had been churned out by business schools which were more interested in producing competent administrators rather than charismatic, visionary leaders (Khurana, 2007).

The subsequent search for a remedy resulted in economic commentators and neoliberal economists scapegoating bureaucratic management. Jensen and Meckling (1976) advocated the explicit introduction of the principles of agency theory, arguing that if self-interest is the best motivator, then the way to encourage executive managers to drive shareholder value is to link their remuneration to the share price. (Crouch argues that like ‘many neoclassical economists, Jensen was perplexed by the rise of corporate social responsibility. [That is] the voluntary acceptance by firms of obligations to customers, workers and, in particular the wider community’ (2011: 105)). Shareholders agree and respond accordingly, incentivising executive managers to drive the value of the share price and dividends upwards, by linking senior management remuneration and bonuses to these measures. Khurana identifies this shift as the point at which the professionalisation project initiated by the early business schools, the first being Wharton in 1881, is abandoned:

[T]he logic of professionalism that underlay the university-based business school in its formative phase was replaced first by a managerialist logic that emphasized professional knowledge rather than professional ideals, and ultimately by a market logic that, taken to its conclusion, subverts the logic of professionalism altogether.

(2007: 7)

Depending on your political persuasion, the economic crises of the 1970s called for either more state intervention or less. This entailed adoption of the interventionist economic principles of John Maynard Keynes or an abandonment of them and a move towards the ‘free market principles of neo-classical economics’, that is, the neoliberal economic ideas advocated by, among others, Friedrich von Hayek (ibid.: 20). Crouch argues that:

Keynesianism’s crisis led to its collapse rather than to adjustments being made to it, not because there was something fundamentally wrong with its ideas, but because the classes in whose interests it primarily operated, the manual workers of western industrial society, were in historical decline and losing their social power. In contrast, the forces that gain most from neoliberalism – global corporations, particularly in the financial sector – maintain their importance more or less unchallenged.

(2011: 1)

In 1977, Zaleznik, in what is considered to be a seminal article, draws a distinction between managers and leaders. He argues that leaders bring inspiration, vision and human passion, which in turn drives corporate success, while managers organise to make these things happen. Business schools, stung by criticisms that they contributed to the decline in economic fortunes, began to echo this split, using it as part justification for the diverging fortunes of senior managers and the rest. During the 1980s business schools repackaged their offerings and started to court leaders rather than managers. They turned their attention to developing leaders,⁴ rather than managers or administrators, thus consolidating the distinction between managers and leaders and providing some credibility/justification for the burgeoning gulf in salary differentials that developed between CEOs/senior managers, middle managers and employees. Between 1970 and 2000 the pay differentials between senior management and the lowest-paid staff in US organisations increased from 20x to almost 400x (Mishel and Davis, 2014). Leaders began to be portrayed as special individuals who could and did single-handedly shape and control corporate futures.

Consultants and corporate trainers followed the business school lead, replacing management development with ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Leadership, management and entrepreneurship
• 2. Rethinking leadership
• 3. Rethinking leadership development
• 4. Coaching, psychometrics and 360° feedback
• 5. Forum theatre
• 6. Experiential exercises
• 7. Action Learning Sets
• 8. No recipes, just rules of thumb
• Index