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So my reality for the past week has been a liminal one, slowly
making my way from our adopted country of New Zealand back to the UK to take up
a lectureship at The Open University. But as much learning derives from
reflecting on liminal experiences, I thought I would jot down a couple of
thoughts.
Two things spring to mind. The first, having briefly stopped
in Istanbul, concerns the splendor of Empire contrasted with the thriving
passion for trade in Turkey. I am not about to advocate the return of a eunuch
hierarchy (or the harem for that matter) but I left Istanbul thinking there is
much we could learn in leadership terms from the Turkish people. You don’t have
to be engaged in a deep ethnography to notice the entrepreneurial and
collaborative spirit of the country’s businesspeople. I was overwhelmed by the
sheer number of businesses and wondered aloud how they can possibly hope to all
stay in business – surely they would eat up each others’ business? The answer
of course lies in integration and collaboration, perhaps a lesson for
sustainable leadership in the future.
While not advocating an Ottoman-style eunuch hierarchy, we could learn much from the bustling leadership on display amongst the traders of Istanbul
The second, as I am about to leave my wife’s home country of
Montenegro, concerns the importance of leadership (and management) in national
life. A beautiful country packed full of smart, young people, Montenegro, in
many ways, has it all. As Montenegro looks toward membership of the European
Union, the importance of our work in developing leadership was brought home in
a powerful way. Although everyone here shares a belief in the importance of
leadership, there is little in the way of opportunities to develop it in a
formal way, with universities, for example, overwhelmingly focused on gritty
economics and finance. As important as these are, without an overarching
framework of leadership (economics for what?), such learning surely is always
limited. Leadership development needs to reach more people, as the challenges
of our world don’t appear to be abating.
The next post will be written from a slightly less liminal
perspective and will mark a return to more conventional leadership development
territory. But for now, it’s time to hit the skies once more and to keep
thinking those liminal thoughts.
Leadership is one of those concepts well known to divide
opinion. Is leadership primarily about heroic individuals inspiring others? Is
it a phenomenon held collectively by a group? How is it different from
management and command?
These are basic, foundational questions any leadership
development designer should approach before thinking of the nitty gritty detail
of how a programme should unfold. How one conceptualises leadership will
undoubtedly hold major implications for learning outcomes and design of
development sessions. For example, why worry about critical organisational
questioning if your definition of leadership is more akin to developing clear
lines of hierarchical communication?
Yet it is amazing how many programmes I have observed or
read about which actively choose not to work with a specific definition of
leadership. This approach is commonly referred to as a ‘smorgasbord’ strategy,
named after the Scandinavian buffet (a bit of this, a bit of that). The logic
goes something like this:
We are dealing with a group of
smart participants with a host of experience. Who are we to tell them what
leadership is and isn’t? Our job is to present participants with a range of
(often conflicting) opinions and research and to let them make their own minds
up about what is valuable and what is not.
My problem with this approach is that is lacks coherence. Surely
the point of developing an individual, or group, is to move from one point to
another. If you are not sure, roughly, what point B should look and feel like,
what’s the point? The allure of the word ‘leadership’ as simply signalling
something other than ‘management’ seems a loose justification for a programme
of development.
A smorgasbord approach to leadership development lacks coherence of learning outcomes and can lead to vanilla conversations
Ducking definitional work also betrays a lack of professional
confidence on the part of leadership developers. Facilitating leadership
development is a specialised, challenging profession. Developers should have
more confidence in their experience and abilities.
I have seen programmes where the lack of definition of ‘leadership’
at the outset leads to what I have come to refer to as the ‘Jenny Problem’. The
Jenny Problem relates to a musical sketch by New Zealand comics Bret McKenzie
and Jemaine Clement. In the sketch, Bret and Jermaine play the role of two
apparent strangers who meet alone on a park bench. The two engage in a musical
conversation, whereby a parallel but unrelated conversation unfolds. Jemaine,
playing the Jenny character, is convinced that the two of them know each other
intimately. Bret, playing the character of ‘man in the park’, unwilling to
disappoint Jenny, plays along with the conversation as if he were really the
man Jenny believes him to be.
And so the Jenny Problem often unfolds in development
programmes. As leadership remains undefined, participants seem to hold parallel
but quite unrelated conversations about leadership. Politeness and a certain social
anxiety about not wanting to be seen as undermining the views of others become
factors in the thinking of participants. The result is a kind of confused
series of vanilla conversations. When asked about their experiences of such
programmes participants usually label them as ‘interesting’ and focus on their
rating of individual presenters. Development programmes can become an exercise
in edutainment. Such an engagement with a development programme is problematic,
as the whole point is that participants take ownership for their learning. One
would hope for evaluative descriptors with a little more sense of ownership, or
‘skin in the game’ as New Zealanders call it.
At the New Zealand Leadership Institute, developers take the
issue of definition seriously. It would be unthinkable to proceed with a
programme without having a ‘rattling good row’ with participants about what is
and isn’t leadership. Such debates create an ethos for a programme of open
debate and discussion. I have seen many effective ways of approaching the
problem of definition. Not one single approach is universally effective.
One of my colleagues, Sarah Bowman, with whom I facilitate
our student leadership programme, has developed a way of working with the
definition of leadership which immediately draws students into a quite heated
debate. Sarah’s thinking is that the power differential between developers and
students needs to be broken at the earliest opportunity in order to create a culture
of development over education.
I have also seen approaches to definition which illustrate a
particular view of leadership via a case study. Such cases invite participants
to make choices, in the moment, which draw out the differences between
leadership and its alternatives of management and command. As with any case study,
the key seems to lie in ensuring that the case material is as close as possible
to the worlds of participants.
Without the definitional hard graft it would be impossible
to develop practices related to leadership – because we would be back on the
park bench engaged in parallel Jenny conversations!
I spent
most of last week feeling sorry for myself, railing against this flu epidemic
which seems to be gripping Auckland. I’ll spare you the detail!
So I knew
something was up when I woke last Saturday morning. I was due in to facilitate
a student leadership programme at the university the whole day. But boy, was I
feeling rough. I dosed myself up and in I went.
My lesson
for the day? Strong design conquers most things … even the flu. The beauty of a
strong design rooted in properly thought through learning outcomes is that you
can have faith that there are unlikely to be too many surprises in store.
When I
discovered the work of David Baume in the UK, via the wonderful PGCert in
Academic Practice at the University of Auckland, it was a revelation. In
summary, David advocates for flipping conventional learning design on
its head. Think learning outcomes first, then design your learning to support
students in reaching these goals. In practice this strategy forces the designer
to build support and gradual attainment of outcomes into the learning
activities.
If the
material does not support the attainment of a learning outcome, out it goes. Of
course David’s work is primarily focused on assessed, classroom design. Nevertheless,
I believe it also holds great promise for the design of leadership development.
I have
found myself increasingly slimming down the amount of new ideas I factor into a
day’s schedule. So on Saturday I was working with a group which had some
exposure, but not a huge amount, to the idea of collaborative leadership. I
realised that the core objectives for the day had to be developing a capacity
for students to articulate a definition of leadership and to engage in some
reflection about how this definition might be of value to their lives. It was
an uncluttered, unhurried day.
Tempting as
it may be to suppose that others will very quickly grasp a notion of leadership
as highly collaborative, this is simply unrealistic. We may be excited by this
material but others need to be drawn in and need to take the time re-evaluating
their old concepts of what it means to lead and follow. You can’t rush a good
learning outcome!
If you want
to find out more about David Baume’s design theory, I have attached one of his
slide presentations here:
