The ‘Jenny’ Problem: Or, the importance of definition in leadership development

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!

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- - Owain