Leaders Present and Future
The world is going through a huge transition. This is more than just ‘normal’ change. It requires a completely new way of thinking and understanding. In the workplace, the last two years of the pandemic has speeded up that transition radically changing how people want to work and what is important to them. The learning from the pandemic includes:?
However, this is not a list of separate issues but rather interconnected challenges that reflect policies from both business and government during the last few decades.?
At the same time, there is a huge amount of true transformation yet to be achieved. Part of that is a radical new approach to developing leaders who not only understand this new world but want to use their leadership to create a better one. However, there are huge hurdles to overcome first. Just over twenty- one years ago I wrote:?
“Organisations are coming to a point of being ready for transformation, but they are prevented by a dying worldview or paradigm and all the thinking and values associated with it. They are still structured in a hierarchy with the belief that those at the top should decide the purpose. The required changes in the thinking and consciousness of individuals cannot be forced but they can be influenced.” (In Search of Leaders 2020)?
During the last two years, science has gained credibility around the world and science can help us here too. The world has yet to wake up to the meaning of the scientific transformation that took place at the start of the twentieth century and its relevance to leadership. Just as Copernicus transformed our view of the world when he showed that we are not the centre of the universe; just as Darwin transformed our understanding of evolution and how we perceive ourselves and life in this unfolding process; just as Einstein’s theory of relativity led to our understanding of reality at an atomic level – but each time these scientific transformations take place it takes about a hundred years for the reality to be absorbed. This last shift in our understanding of reality was so huge it was necessary for physicists to change their concepts of space, time, matter, object, cause, and effect. This revolution in our understanding of reality overturned Newton’s mechanistic world; a world we thought we could control, that influenced the Industrial Revolution and the birth of management as we know it today with its pinnacle, the MBA, where subjects are broken up into specialisms. This world view belongs to the past. It is not right for today’s fast changing and complex world.?
This new quantum understanding of reality showed that the world, instead of being a machine we could control was in fact about interconnections and inter-relationships. This is the thinking that created the internet, the new mathematics of complexity and shows how our actions affect the planet. New technologies, new strategic alliances, instant communication, increasing competition and disruptions, the growth of China and now the madness of the Russian invasion into Ukraine – alters the way we deal with world and the way the world deals with us.?
New understanding is required in our organisations today. No more is that truer than with those who lead. Before anyone can lead today, they must learn about this new world. Anyone who does not master this mercurial context will be mastered by it. This is the challenge for leaders today.?
We can take an analogy from science to explain how leadership should be understood in this new context. In physics, fission creates energy by splitting the nucleus of the atom. This requires watchful control through layers of systems in the same way management of hierarchical organisations operate. Hierarchical organisations in business and government encourages blindness to learning, entitlement for the few and disconnection from everyone else. Opposite to this is fusion. Instead of splitting atoms apart, fusion joins together atomic nuclei - which isn’t easy as each atom has a positive charge that repels others. This is overcome by removing the atom’s boundary and the result is five times the energy. In other words, our structures, silos, systems and processes with their boundaries and layers of management control are preventing leadership as well as limiting the contribution of everyone or productivity.?
Leadership through the eyes of fusion is about:?
For this, leaders should be at the centre of an organic organisation structure, rather than at the top of a hierarchy. Leadership can then operate through hybrid working and using digitisation, AI, augmented reality, and other technologies rather than trying to fit technology into ‘old’ structures. This is going to require radical transformation in our thinking as well as using innovation and upskilling. Most of all, the thinking and consciousness of where we see ourselves, the organisation and its people, the context in which it operates in, all need to be transformed. We know that business, our economics and consumerism cannot go on as it has, or we will destroy the planet; we know that technology is growing faster than our wisdom and that upskilling to keep up, let alone keep ahead, is too slow. Therefore, the challenge is to have the right leaders to guide us through what we can call the ‘decade of transition’.
However, there is a problem. Personnel Today wrote in 2017 “UK managers lack some of the most desired leadership skills … and UK managers are ill-equipped to lead and get the best from their people.” It was also interesting to see the results of some global research by the IT company Oracle who found that many would rather be managed by a robot then a manager. One of the reasons so few executives successfully make the leap from capable manager to leader is the corporate culture that recognises and rewards left-brain accomplishments only, while leaders are required to be accomplished in both left and right brain achievements. After decades of ‘leadership development’ where are the leaders we need right now??
“Corporations are victims of the great training robbery.”?
So began an article in the Harvard Business Review October 2016 addressing the lack of return on employee training and education. The article entitled: “Why leadership training fails – and what to do about it” wasn’t saying something new. Today many others have concluded that the current prevailing methods of educating leaders are not as effective as they could be.?
Organisations invest in leadership development spending hundreds of millions just in the UK. In June 2019 Forbes estimated the annual spend in the USA alone was $166 billion and globally $366 billion just on leadership development. How is this money spent? Chief Learning Officer magazine states that 74% of organisations use instructor-led workshops or training and 63% use executive coaching. Often using both and with outside consultants. But does this transmit into a real and lasting impact in organisations? A McKinsey Report (2017) concluded that most fail.?
How organisations select and assess individuals for leadership positions is questionable. In addition, how someone translates leadership theory into practice is influenced by context, culture, and previous experience - not from a training room. We still try to ‘fix’ people when in fact the issue is more likely to be the organisation culture that requires ‘fixing’ to enable leadership to thrive. A few years ago, I met a couple of police officers on a programme run by The Work Foundation. At lunch time they told me they were really enjoying the learning but that there was no way they could put it into practice back at work with the culture they operated in. Culture is a huge barrier to any form of development of people. In fact, a decade of studies shows why courses, and most coaching are not working but as the Harvard article states; “… that understanding has not made its way into most companies.”?
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The late Distinguished Professor Warren Bennis wrote in 2005: “I would argue that more leaders have been made by accident, circumstances, sheer grit or will than have been made by all the leadership courses put together. Leadership courses can only teach skills and these result in managers not leaders.”?
Another issue is the credibility of coaches most of whom have never led themselves. Our obsession with qualifications results in lucrative earnings for the qualification organisations. Coaching has become a choice of career for many leaving training or HR. The idea first raised its head in the USA where a culture of the individual dominates and where visibly paying psychologists, psychoanalysts and now coaches is part of their identity. However, having a good mentor who has much experience of leading has a role in developing others to lead. A top executive search company surveyed 1250 senior executives and found that nearly 2/3rds had a mentor, and the outcome was that they were happier in their progress and had greater pleasure from their work.?
The biggest problem is that organisations perceive themselves as an ‘aggregate of individuals’ according to Beer, Finnstrom and Schrader (2016) As such people are selected according to what is believed the ‘right’ knowledge, skills and attitudes. Human Resources Departments send them on programmes believing that organisational change will follow. This development model doesn’t work when the whole system, including role models at the top, culture, and practices work against them. And so, the trainees revert back to what they did previously or feel so frustrated they leave, hoping somewhere else will be better. Yet problems of organisational performance stem from poorly designed and ineffectively management systems created by top management. Many HR managers find it impossible to confront the top with this truth.?
There is a double bind – when we talk of development or upskilling, the perception is that this is for employees not the present leaders. When you see people on executive programmes, they are individuals coming up the ranks, not usually those already at the top. At the same time, business schools are still pumping out theories and models that are out of date and will only replicate what is already there, resulting in the same type of leaders rather than leaders who can deal with this fast- changing future.?
Not all organisations operate this way. New technology companies and other successful entrepreneurial companies have a flattened structure. The people there dress the same, look the same and you might find a table tennis table in the corner. Leadership in the UK is out of tune with the rest of the world. It goes back to the feudal system the Normans instilled in us, with its strong hierarchy that propagates entitlement and huge financial differences. Instead of the King owning all the land, the shareholders hold the wealth. Below the King were the Barons who had control of the land and today we can call these the CEOs. Underneath the barons were the Knights who provided protection and gave military service. Today we could call these the senior executive team. Finally, there were the Villeins, or serfs who provided food and services through their labour who today we could call the employees. In the new world order, this class-based model is not only out of date, with many around the world, but also becoming more and more ineffective. So where are the leaders to change this??
For the last fifty years we have seen many different models of leadership from trait, contingency, and situational leadership to servant, adaptive and transformational leadership. The key to understanding and learning about one- self as leader comes from one’s own life, personality, and experience – not theories about leaders.?
We don’t want any more competency models either, as research shows time and again, they don’t work, but satisfy a need to tick a box. Today’s new world requires something else beyond new tools of interpretation. This is a serious issue as many of our present leaders have yet to develop their thinking and consciousness for a world that is transforming day by day.?
The Future in Leader Development?
Leader development should focus on solving real challenging problems and have an interdisciplinary approach to learning. What is required is a paradigm shift to how we develop leaders - rather than minor adaptations. This is because the change required across business, public services, government, and society, needs to be a radical shift in cognition, pedagogy, and practice and in organisational structure and culture. It should also include broadening the diversity of potential leaders. The best leaders should understand how psychology, sociology, science, economics, geopolitics, risk analysis, sustainable development, use of data, character including integrity and courage, the mathematics of complexity, technology and innovation all work together rather than as different subjects. We are on the cusp of transformation in all aspects of our lives and it will require new thinking and a new consciousness. The work of The Leaders Institute reflects this.?
As David Spangler said:
“If humanity is entering a new world and a new consciousness, if a transformative shift is truly going on, then we must be awake to it and be part of it.”?
Hilarie Owen?
CEO?
The Leaders Institute?
01242 262640?
www.theleadersinstitute.org.uk?