Developing Leadership and Management Skills

Jeffrey Gold, Lisa Anderson

• Publisher: CIPD - Kogan Page
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781843984559
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Gestion des ressources humaines

Developing Leadership and Management Skills is essential reading for anyone studying the Level 5 CIPD L&D module of the same name as well as all learning and development professionals looking to develop the skills of leaders and managers in their organisation. With a thorough grounding in scientific management, leadership theories and the similarities and differences between leaders and managers, reader will fully understand the distinction between the two roles. There is also comprehensive coverage of the role of L&D in developing leaders and managers including designing learning interventions, using e-learning and blending learning, talent development, succession planning and employee engagement. Developing Leadership and Management Skills also includes guidance on how L&D professionals can ensure ownership and success of leadership and management development programmes. This includes indicators of success, individualised interventions and how to demonstrate and communicate achievement of success ensuring that L&D professionals have all the tools they need to effectively develop leaders and managers in their organisation.

01

The Distinction Between Leadership and Management

For most of the last century and into the present there has been an ongoing concern with the work of leaders and managers and their development. For example, in 2014 there was a high-level enquiry into the state of leadership and management in the UK (CMI 2014), which concluded that:

The underlying weakness in management and leadership is holding back our economic performance.

Suffice to say, that this was not the first time that such a conclusion had been reached and if you have the time and interest, you might like to examine previous considerations of this issue such as:

• The Handy Report (Handy 1987)
• The Constable/McCormick Report (Constable and McCormick 1987)
• The Council for Excellence in Leadership and Management (CEML 2002).

EXERCISE 1.1

Find out why these reports were written. What impact did they have?

Such reports are usually followed by a degree of interest in LMD and attempts to gather evidence on good practice such as AIM (2009), but still problems persist. The latest report (CMI 2014), for example, suggests that poor management causes lost working hours, low engagement of staff and lack of innovation and these are partly the result of managers being underqualified. We could therefore expect renewed interest in LMD and the knowledge and skills required from leaders and managers. To begin, we consider some of the key ideas relating to knowledge and skills that are drawn from theories and practice over the last 100 years.

Scientific management

Taylorism

Whatever the titles used, or the skill areas to be developed, there has been a history of ideas, theories and models that have been presented to form a body of knowledge to inform what managers and leaders are meant to do. During the first part of the twentieth century, when the emphasis was on management, in the US, F.W. Taylor (1911) famously is credited with pioneering an approach to what he called scientific management. He sought to use tools of analysis so as to find a ‘one best way’ to define the work of managers and others. Working in a Pennsylvania steel company in the late nineteenth century, Taylor believed that the production was inefficient with poor management control. Through the analysis of work tasks, he sought to design work so that it could be carried out more efficiently where the performance of work could be fragmented into measurable and standardised processes. For managers, the key idea was that they could control work and reduce waste at standards set by managers rather than workers. Managers are cast as neutral and unbiased but scientifically informed decision-makers who are separate from the personal connections with workers. Decision-making is rational, based on facts and measurement.

QUESTIONS

Does this image resonate with current views? In your experience, are leaders and managers neutral and unbiased? Do they make decisions rationally, using measurement and facts?

These ideas, still referred to as Taylorism, provided stimulus for further developments under the heading of scientific management such as time and motion studies and planning tools such as Gantt charts. During the twentieth century, advances in applied mathematics and technology created strong interest in management decision-making based on quantitative analysis for solving problems. Programmes of management science or operations research were offered in universities, making use of these developments (Anderson et al 2015).

Classical management

Other ideas emerged from a search for the meaning of a ‘one best way’ of management in order to define the work of managers. In France, Henri Fayol (1949) identified five functions of management – planning, organising, co-ordinating, commanding and controlling or POC3. These categorisations of managerial work have been used in many ways for LMD, such as providing training courses in planning or organising staff. They also form the basis of many books on management. Over time, there have been extensions and supplements, such as ideas on bureaucracy and written rules by the German sociologist Max Weber (see Watson 1980) and together, the body of knowledge that developed became known as Classical Management. The influence of the principles can also be seen in some of the key processes in LMD which seek to find a ‘one best way’ to link LMD to organisation performance and success. Mabey (2013) sees such LMD as instrumental, based on a functionalist way of talking and acting in organisations.

QUESTIONS

How does the influence of these ideas continue in LMD? Does your organisation use a competency framework or assess leaders and managers using neutral tools such as psychometric tests? Is there a ‘one best way’ in leadership and management?

Human relations school

There has been for many years a strong critique of how there is a tendency to make simple assumptions about people at work, such as the motivation of people towards money, their willingness to be controlled and deskilled and the influence of group pressures on completing work, however it might be designed through task analysis.

QUESTION

What are your assumptions about why people come to work?

Mary Parker Follett

Even as scientific management was becoming accepted during the late 1920s and into the 1930s others such as the sociologist Mary Parker Follett were suggesting the importance of groups for the growth of individuals and the potential for conflict between groups. Follett (1920) advocated the need for groups to use power responsibly and managers to help train them to do so.

The Hawthorne Studies

Elsewhere, in what became known as the Hawthorne Studies, researchers sought to work scientifically to consider how productivity could be improved. The research took place at the Western Electric Company’s Hawthorne Works in Cicero, Illinois, USA and was initially based on the impact of varying lighting levels on the productivity of a group of workers. Over time and different tests (see Mayo 1945), the researchers learned that their experiments became less meaningful and they could not make valid predictions about the behaviour of workers nor the link to rising or falling production. Instead, it was the relationships between the workers as a group and with the researchers that seemed to be important. The latter became known as the Hawthorne Effect and the idea that paying attention to the staff and the influence of groups and teams on behaviour became known as the Human Relations School. The work of Mayo and others resulted in growing interest in how psychology and behavioural understanding could help leaders and managers respond more sensitively to workers and solving problems. There was interest in motivating workers other than through financial rewards, how groups and teams could develop and how leaders and managers could vary styles of behaviour to get improved results.

QUESTIONS

How do these themes inform current considerations of relationships at work? You m...