An Interesting News Articles:

Organic or genetically modified? Leadership development and the working environment.

George Edwards-Head of trategic development-Institute of Leadership & Management. ILM. He has written over 20 management workbooks and texts, contributed to numerous journals and conferences, and is a fellow of the RSA.

Training Course Providers:

As we enter another year of changing training themes and priorities, new imperatives, slicker e-learning models, and yet more extraordinary mechanisms for 'developing' people, we can be fairly sure of one thing, demand for 'leadership development' will continue to grow and grow. With this growth will come more and more books and articles attempting to both define 'leadership' and lay claim to the secret of 'developing' it.

In Britain we seem to have an ambiguous, if not thoroughly muddled, attitude to leadership and its development. Several times a year some high profile event grabs the media's attention, and there is a concerted attack by the media on the quality of leadership in some PLC, public utility or government department. Usually during the furore, the issue of 'leadership', whether good or not, is finessed into a search for the 'guilty leaders', which is not at all the same thing. Later it usually turns out that the faults being laid at the doors of 'leadership' are more properly failures of management.

No one disputes that there is a certain degree of overlap between leadership and management skills. After all, without some 'soft skills', leaders would never be able to enact anything, because before managers can get on with doing it, they need to be persuaded, motivated and equipped for the task. All of which has to be set in the context of an understanding of the business and its markets, structures and processes.

Management or Leadership:

Whilst there are these fairly obvious areas where such overlap occurs, it is equally true that in that great Venn diagram of leadership and management skills and competences, the differences are greater than the similarities.

The ellipse of commonality is small. People who are good at the great vision, at identifying the opportunity for innovation, at refining the dream, are seldom also very good at making it actually happen. They become impatient and bored. They find new models to examine. They move on. They are not managers. Their 'management' style is all too often likely to produce either chaos, confusion, or paralysis.

This is not to say we might as well all throw our hands up in the air and despair of ever being able to develop leaders from the pool of talent we may have in our management teams. Nor is it to say that the pool of potential leadership talent is likely to reside only in our management teams.

Potential leadership resides at all levels. Ask any company which runs a suggestion scheme, and they will tell you their version of a story about an employee who had an idea that seemed initially to be impossible, but then turned out to be the idea of the year, transforming some aspect of work, quality, output, or profit. It would be called 'producing change through vision', but it can't be, because the person is not wearing a label that says 'leader'.

Creating Leaders:

It is probably not currently politically correct to promulgate the view that leaders are born and not made. It is worth examining however.

There will be many people who might be suited by personality and competence to a leadership role, but simply never have the opportunity to become leaders. Many of these may elect not to be leaders, perhaps preferring the quiet life of followership. Some will try to become leaders, and perhaps fail. Some will also come through, and achieve the accolades that good leadership brings.

But it cannot be true to hold a position that because obviously not all those supposedly born with the potential actually go on to leadership, the corollary that it must therefore be possible to make anyone into a leader is correct.

There cannot be some sort of unique process, one single specification, a best design, a national occupational standard, for leadership. An NVQ (at any level) in leadership would be nonsense. As Napoleon (the pig, not the Emperor) put it so eloquently, "all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others". Indeed they are. The armed services know it well.

For a very long time the British Army has been noted as among the most successful developers of leaders we have. Even they don't attempt 'silk purse construction' from their ranks. They instead spot 'potential' leaders in the junior ranks by identifying the early signs they know. They then build the leadership characteristics they value from these foundations, by repeatedly placing the neophytes in situations where they can experiment and develop their leadership capabilities.

Many excellent organisations today are developing their leaders in a similar manner. Often called 'fast tracking', they will pick from the new entrants, or even poach from outside, and adjust work roles, duties, rewards, and responsibilities, even locations, to provide the opportunities for leadership talent to grow at a fast pace.

Schemes such as the Post Office leadership programme have shown great success using this strategy. The crucial factor seems not to be any specific type or programme of agreed syllabus of training, but rather the provision of a rich environment which encourages leaders to develop and grow.

Developing a Strategy:

For organisations without the resource to support this strategy, maybe without the spare capacity, leadership development strategy tends to be a semi-structured ad-hoc process.

Some naturally occurring leadership sprouts, some is imported, sometimes good management, especially in relatively stable and un-pressurised environments, has been enough thus far.

But with the constant acceleration of work pressures, even these relatively contented organisations will find they have a need for a lot more, a lot better, leadership at all levels, in good part to overcome the problems caused by the clash of single level of decision taking with an increasingly intimate relationship with customers.

For these organisations there is a grim scenario emerging; will they be able to attract any potential leaders at all?

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