http://news.ft.com/cms/s/71347c6a-a462-11d9-9778-00000e2511c8.html
Leadership training lacks vision
By Morgen Witzel
Published: April 3 2005 18:37 | Last updated: April 3 2005 18:37
Kofi Annan, UN secretary-general, has been cleared of wrongdoing over the oil for food scandal in Iraq, but he remains under pressure. Some now regard Mr Annan as a weak leader who failed to prevent the scandal. He is not the only high-profile leader under pressure at the moment; last week, Phil Purcell, Morgan Stanley's chairman, responded to continuing criticism of his leadership of the bank by firing several top executives.
Is there a wider crisis in business leadership? Two recent studies suggest so. In an article in the latest issue of the Harvard Business Review, David Rooke of Harthill Consulting and William Torbert, professor at the Carroll School of Management in Boston, find that 55 per cent of leaders are associated with below-average corporate performance. Only 15 per cent of the leaders they studied over 25 years showed a consistent ability to manage innovation and organisational change.
The UK's Chartered Institute for Professional Development last week published a report suggesting that many companies are suffering from a shortage of effective leadership. Particularly disturbing was the CIPD's conclusion that, though companies are investing large sums of money in leadership training, such training is failing to deliver the skills that leaders need if they are to be effective.
The research suggests that companies need to look again at the way they train and develop leaders. Managers should bear in mind, though, that training cannot work miracles. Professor Peter Case of the Centre for Leadership Studies at the University of Exeter cautions against treating training as a "philosopher's stone" that will automatically produce successful leaders. Leadership requires good raw material to work with, and leaders must have some inherent ability if training and development are to make a difference.
Nonetheless, virtually every successful leader in history has had a tutor or served an apprenticeship that taught them necessary skills. Alexander the Great studied under Aristotle; in modern times, Jack Welch trained as a junior engineer at General Electric before rising to become its leader. Both men's approaches to leadership were shaped by their early experiences. Natural intelligence and ability are essential for leading, but it is just as essential that these qualities be developed and enhanced.
If training and education can turn a potential leader into an actual one and make good leaders better, what is wrong with the current approach to training and development?
First, consider what needs to change to make a leader more successful. Rooke and Torbert argue that the factor that determines leadership success is what they call "action logic", in other words, how a person views the world around them and reacts to challenges and threats. Further, they believe that underperforming leaders can be helped to change their action logic.
Such leaders fall into several categories, including "opportunists" who seek to manipulate others to protect their own position or "diplomats" who try to avoid conflict and please everyone at the same time. Mr Annan is a classic example of a diplomat in this sense.
With training, suggest Rooke and Torbert, leaders can move to a different level, becoming, for example, a "strategist" - someone with long-term vision who sees barriers to change as a series of challenges to be overcome - or an "alchemist", someone who can reinvent an organisation and draw people to share his or her vision almost effortlessly; the authors cite Nelson Mandela as an example.
Another great alchemist was Pierre du Pont, who in the early twentieth century built up first his family company, Du Pont, and then General Motors to be world-class organisations. Du Pont had a genius for transforming companies, which he achieved mainly by recruiting top-flight management teams who shared his vision and knew how to achieve it.
Henry Heinz, who created one of the world's most enduring brands, may be regarded as a great strategist. Heinz systematically overcame all barriers to growth, at least in part through a sense of personal belief in his company and its mission to provide people with safe, high-quality food.
But are leaders getting the training they need to achieve such transformation? Richard Bolden, research fellow at the Centre for Leadership Studies at Exeter University, believes not. In a recent research paper, Mr Bolden criticises one of the most common approaches to leadership development and assessment: leadership competency frameworks.
These are lists of defined skills and abilities that each company believes it requires from its leaders, such as the ability to think strategically, communications skills, analytical skills, the ability to manage change and so on. Leaders and potential leaders are measured against these frameworks, and analysis of the resulting gap shows where skills and training are required.
Most competency frameworks currently in use, says Mr Bolden, concentrate on such skills. The problem, he adds, is that personal skills and abilities are necessary, but not sufficient, for leadership. While most competency frameworks focus inward, on the leader, leaders themselves are usually looking outward, trying to make sense of the world and their place in it. His study shows that the leadership issues of greatest concern to leaders themselves - vision, trust, personal belief, ethics, moral courage - are not included in most competency frameworks. The emotional, ethical and cultural aspects of leadership, he says, are being sidelined or ignored.
The social aspects of leadership have long been known. In Leadership in a Free Society, published in 1936, Thomas North Whitehead, a Harvard academic, observed that leaders are social beings with attitudes and actions strongly shaped by those they lead; leadership is not a case of those who give orders and those who follow them, but is an interaction between leaders and subordinates.
Others have reinforced the importance of wider aspects of leadership. Warren Bennis, a noted writer on leadership and professor at the Marshall School of Business, has argued that the key dimensions of leadership include factors such as vision, meaning, trust and self-knowledge. These are not skills that can be taught by rote; they are personal qualities that must be nurtured and developed.
What happens when leaders lack these qualities? Len Sayles, professor emeritus of management at Columbia University, argues that many corporate scandals of recent years came about at least in part because leaders began to believe in their own mythical status.
Like the "masters of the universe" satirised by Tom Wolfe in The Bonfire of the Vanities, top managers sought personal glory and reward over the interests of their business, and chased short-term financial performance instead of long-term sustainability. Kenneth Lay of Enron and Bernie Ebbers of WorldCom would have scored highly on most measures of personal leadership skills, but vision and trust were replaced by the ability to finesse the numbers and look good on television. We all know the result.
So, how can companies get the leaders they need? Training in communications skills, empathy and analytical ability is certainly necessary. Yet much more is needed. Leadership training programmes that assume human and social qualities are already present in the leader - that all that is required is the development of skills - are doomed to fail.
Mr Bolden's research suggests that it is precisely in the area of personal, ethical and emotional development that leaders themselves are calling for help. A shift in leadership training away from generic skills and towards personal development may be the only answer.
Request notifications