Introducing Leadership

David Pardey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317392156
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Introducing Leadership is a highly practical textbook which draws on robust research to present a clear picture of what leadership actually involves. It explores why leadership has become so important in recent years; the role leadership plays in achieving organisational success; the skills that effective leaders need; and the steps that anyone can take to become an effective leader.

This second edition expands its coverage into ethical practice and emotional intelligence, and looks at the impact that our increasing understanding of the brain is having on leadership behaviour and performance. It also considers the importance of trust for effective leadership.

Throughout the book there are boxes providing detailed exploration of key concepts, and case studies and review questions appear at the end of each chapter to stimulate critical thinking.

Introducing Leadership is for people at all levels in organisations, particularly those aspiring to their first leadership role or studying for leadership qualifications at ILM or CMI Levels 3 to 5.

1 The new leadership challenge

There is a lot of discussion about leadership and its importance in determining organisational performance, but it’s not necessarily a new discussion; in the past there have been similar discussions about the need for better management. This shift, from emphasising the importance of management to emphasising the importance of leadership, may reflect a change in the nature of the problem, and its consequent solution, but it is just as likely to be a change in the language.

As we will see, there is often confusion about what is meant by the terms ‘leadership’ and ‘management’ and this confusion doesn’t help us understand how to become a better leader (or manager, for that matter). In this first chapter, we will explore where this challenge, the challenge of being a better leader, is coming from, and use this to start our exploration of what leadership is, an exploration that continues into Chapter 2.

The journey from administration to leadership

A few years ago I had a conversation with Richard Boyatzis (see box 1.1), who has dedicated his research career over more than 30 years to exploring what makes people successful as leaders and managers. He argued that US organisations became concerned about their ability to compete internationally during the early part of the twentieth century, and encouraged the growth of university business schools, teaching business administration (hence the MBA – the Masters in Business Administration).

Box 1.1: Richard Boyatzis

Richard Boyatzis is Professor in the Departments of Organizational Behavior, Psychology, and Cognitive Science at Case Western Reserve University. In recent years he has become one of the world’s leading academic authorities on emotional intelligence (something dealt with in Chapter 5), but underlying this interest is his valuable contribution to our understanding of the set of behaviours that define effectiveness in leadership and management – or competence.

His pioneering 1982 book, The Competent Manager, offers a model of leadership and management competences (the Integrated Competency Model) that is based round four major clusters of competencies – human resource management; goal and action management; directing subordinates; and leadership. Thirty years later, writing The New Leaders with Daniel Goleman and Annie McKee, the same themes emerge, that effective performance, whether as a manager or a leader, depends on a cluster or clusters of abilities, attributes or competences (the name doesn’t really matter) and that weakness in one can inhibit performance across the whole cluster. This is an idea that informs Introducing Leadership – the different components of effective leadership performance are all equally important, and strength in one area can only partially compensate for weaknesses elsewhere.

However, Boyatzis said, by the 1950s and 60s encouraging people to learn about business administration was not working as well as was required, and so it was renamed ‘management’, although what was being taught was very much the same. By the end of the twentieth century, management education was still seen as failing and so the search was on for something new, and the solution was leadership, so management development programmes were relabelled leadership development!

Although this is a bit cynical, there is some truth in what Professor Boyatzis said. All too often the word ‘leadership’ is used to refer to what is seen as being a better version of ‘management’. By describing management as leadership, we somehow seem to raise its status and value, without necessarily changing what people actually do, or how they do it.

Worse is the tendency to use ‘leadership’ as a label for what the people at the top of organisations do, and ‘leaders’ as a title for them, with ‘management’ and ‘manager’ reserved for the more junior people involved in the smooth running of the organisation. Seeing leadership as something more important, superior or powerful than management reduces any distinction between the two terms to one simply of scope and power, rather than there being any fundamental difference. This view of leadership – that it is simply management for more senior people – is certainly a view held by some people, but not one that is reflected in Introducing Leadership. In my view, and it is one that is well supported by research, leadership does differ from management. It’s not better or worse, just different and complementary, and one that demands at least as much effort to develop as management does.

Furthermore, leadership doesn’t simply exist at the top of organisations (and all too often doesn’t exist there at all), but is found right through them; what’s known as distributed leadership. The notion of leaders as the senior executives of an organisation is one that, I believe, is very misleading, and leads to poor management and leadership.

One final point to make at this stage, and one that we will return to, is the idea that all managers need to develop their leadership capability, that it is a necessary part of being effective as a manager, but that not all leaders are necessarily managers. There are plenty of people who emerge as leaders (in that other people are willing to follow them) but who don’t have a managerial role. This fact lies at the heart of my perception of the two concepts, as you will see as we progress through this chapter. But now …

A bit of history

Of course, leadership is not something new or revolutionary, as a concept. In fact, it predates management, having been used in the context of politics and the military for centuries. By contrast, management only really emerged as a distinct concept in the early twentieth century (although it was often referred to as administration, as we have seen). The first really significant book on management was by French engineer Henri Fayol, published in 1916. Administration industrielle et générale; prévoyance, organisation, commandement, coordination, controle (‘Industrial and general administration: foresight, organisation, command, co-ordination, control’) argued that management (administration) consisted of five core tasks:

1.Foresight (by which he meant forecasting and planning)

2.Organising

3.Commanding

4.Co-ordinating

5.Controlling (by which he meant monitoring and feedback).

Most modern management books still refer to most of these tasks or functions in describing the management role; the exception is command, which is generally regarded as inappropriate in modern organisations. The word control is also not well liked either, but Fayol’s meaning – monitoring what is happening and providing feedback to others – is widely seen as being a core function, even if the language differs.

But what makes Fayol’s hundred-year-old book relevant to us today, in understanding leadership, is that he also argued that effective performance depended on 14 principles which guide managers in carrying out these five tasks (see box 1.2).

Box 1.2: Henri Fayol’s 14 principles

1.specialisation/division of labour

2.authority with corresponding responsibility (‘personal integrity and particularly high moral character’)

3.discipline (to ensure standards, consistency of action, adherence to rules and values)

4.unity of command (an employee should receive instructions from one superior only)

5.unity of direction

6.subordinate individual interest to the general interest (a shared set of values)

7.‘fair’ remuneration of staff

8.centralisation

9.chain/line of authority

10.order (people must see how their role fits into the organisation)

11.equity

12.stability of tenure (promotes loyalty to the organisation, its purposes and values)

13.initiative

14.esprit de corps

What’s all this got to do with twenty-first-century leadership? If you look through the list you will see that many of the concepts he refers to in his 14 principles are characteristics that we will be examining as central to effective leadership, such as the ability to exert authority through moral character and personal integrity; unity of direction; acting equitably; promoting loyalty to the organisation, its purposes and values; showing initiative and establishing esprit de corps (which means being aware and proud of belonging to a particular group, and sharing a common purpose and values).

Why does this matter? Because the idea that the need for managers to demonstrate leadership capability is a recent phenomenon is clearly wrong – it was part of the core concept for Fayol at least. Unfortunately, this aspect of management was all too easily overlooked. The growth of management as an occupation resulted from the growth of large corporations during the twentieth century. The owners of small businesses generally didn’t require a special class of employee called a manager – they might have a foreman who supervised work groups but this role was very limited in scope. Large organisations needed to have managers – something that is immediately clear if you ask an organisation how it is structured. Organisation charts are diagrams showing the management hierarchy, its roles and responsibilities, power structure and accountability. Many have the names of the role holders in them, illustrating how management provides the framework through which the organisation is organised.

On the whole, management education and training during most of the twentieth century tended to focus on the more technical elements of the role – determining work tasks and controlling task performance (stemming from the American engineer Frederick Taylor’s idea of scientific management, which was so important in the growth of large-scale manufacturing), understanding markets and customers, budgeting and costing, hiring and firing.

Frederick Taylor’s scientific management was a way of dealing with the new manufacturing, where traditional craft skills were no longer needed, because the division of labour meant that one person only had to do one small part of the work, repetitively. This in turn meant that poorly educated people could be trained quickly and easily to do the work; unfortunately it also meant high labour turnover and poor industrial relations, as people hated the working environment.

By the middle of the twentieth century there was certainly a growing awareness of the importance of understanding people and their relationships, especially if they were to be motivated to perform effectively. This human relations approach (drawing impetus from the famous Hawthorne studies and influenced by Abraham Maslow’s theory of motivation) was seen as a reaction to scientific management. By recognising that people did not want to be treated as adjuncts to the machines they operated, the human relations school encouraged the view that people wanted to be involved in the work process. The best example of the contrast between these two viewpoints was Douglas McGregor’s Theory X and Theory Y, a way of contrasting managers’ different perceptions of human behaviour at work (see box 1.3).

Box 1.3: Douglas McGregor’s Theory X and Theory Y

Theory X managers believe that people are inherently lazy and only work because they have to. Consequently, people need to be tightly controlled and managers should use threats of punishment as well as rewards to ensure that objectives are met.

Theory Y managers believe that people are motivated by their ambition to succeed and enjoy their work. They are able to draw on their creativity to solve problems but their abilities are often unrecognised and unused.

What makes McGregor’s approach so relevant to leaders is that he drew attention to the way that managers often attribute their own attitudes and beliefs to others – those managers who are dissatisfied with their own work will assume that everyone else feels the same. Some (unpublished) research I did for the Institute of Leadership & Management (ILM) in 2007, just as the first edition of Understanding Leadership was published, found that around 60 per cent of managers were reluctant managers – they had become managers because that was the only way that they could advance their careers, but would far rather be doing the work they did before they became managers. Their own lack of job satisfaction shapes their view of their job and the people they work with. In fact, the most dissatisfied – one in five of all managers – are so unhappy in their role that they deliberately act contrary to the organisation’s requirements.

This is something that we will look at repeatedly throughout Introducing Leadership – the way that our own values, attitudes and beliefs are shaped by our own experiences and in turn shape how we see and understand other people and their actions. The challenge of leadership is being able to stand outside ourselves and see the world through other people’s eyes, and appreciate how their views may differ from our own. This doesn’t mean accepting those views, but by understanding why people behave as they do, we are better able to influence that behaviour.

And more recent history …

Towards the latter part of the twentieth century a new set of ideas gained some traction; the idea that managers only behaved in one way was challenged. Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard suggested that the extent to which a manager focused on the task (which was very much Taylor’s focus) or on the person doing it (as the human relations approach would encourage) determined which leadership style they adopted. This situational leadership model, where leadership style reflected the manager’s assessment of the situation, could lead to managers:

■ Telling (a focus on getting the task done by taking control)

■ Selling (still deciding what to do but trying to gain support for the actions from those being managed)

■ Participating (sharing decision-making with those doing the work, but still having some control over the final decision)

■ Delegating (allowing those doing the work to make the decisions within the defined ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Boxes
• Introduction
• 1 The new leadership challenge
• 2 What leaders do
• 3 Making things happen
• 4 Why culture, values and trust matter
• 5 Getting the best out of people
• 6 Creating and leading effective teams
• 7 Communicating effectively
• 8 Dealing with conflict
• 9 Developing a coaching style
• 10 The insightful leader
• 11 Leading with integrity
• 12 The emotionally intelligent leader
• 13 Becoming a trusted leader
• 14 Continuing to learn and improve
• Select bibliography
• Index