APS Human Capital Matters: Leadership DevelopmentOctober 2011, Issue 8
Editor’s note to readers
Welcome to the eighth edition of Human Capital Matters—the digest for time poor leaders and practitioners with an interest in human capital and organisational capability. This edition focuses on Leadership Development.
Enhancing the skills and performance of leaders has been the focus of public service reform over many years. The renewed focus on public sector leadership across developed countries is in response to the demands of an increasingly complex, fast-paced environment and in recognition that senior public servants are at a critical juncture between strategy making and strategy execution in government. The APS Reform Blueprint also recognises that improving government performance, agility and efficiency rests partly on the quality and capacity of public service leaders, thereby placing particular weight on the importance of developing the capabilities of APS leaders.
Leadership and leadership development is the subject of a significant and varied body of research and literature—from early models of leadership which focused on studying the individual leader and their characteristics to a greater focus on the leader in their context and the relationship between leaders, their peers, followers and culture. Much of the contemporary leadership development literature focuses, not on teaching leaders skills, but on helping leaders to learn through their experiences and relationships, in addition to classroom-based learning.
The Australian Public Service Commission’s Strategic Centre for Leadership, Learning and Development has been established to take a strategic and coordinated approach to developing leadership capability across the APS. In April 2011, the Secretaries Board was briefed on and agreed to support ongoing funding for the implementation of the APS Leadership Development Strategy. Implementation of the strategy will help build leader capability in the context of both enduring requirements on senior public servants and increasingly complex challenges and heightened citizen expectations.
The APS Leadership Development Strategy has drawn heavily on a combination of extensive consultation across the APS and a review of contemporary practice and research. A number of the key documents used to inform the strategy have been included in this edition of Human Capital Matters. These articles deliberately do not enter into discussions on defining leadership or debating whether it is born or made; rather they focus on the development of leaders through the exploration of three key questions:
· What is the nature of leadership for a changing world?
· What capabilities do leaders need in this evolving context?
· How do we best develop these capabilities for individuals and organisations?
About Human Capital Matters
Human Capital Matters seeks to provide APS leaders and practitioners with easy access to the issues of contemporary importance in public and private sector human capital and organisational capability. It has been designed to provide interested readers with a monthly guide to the national and international ideas that are shaping human capital thinking and practice.[1]
Comments and suggestions welcome
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Bernard M. Bass and Ronald E. Riggio, ‘Transformational Leadership’, 2nd ed., Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah, New Jersey, 2006.
The authors provide a clear understanding of transformational leadership and review the sizeable body of research that the transformational leadership model has stimulated in a relatively short period of time. They attribute the burgeoning interest in transformational leadership to its emphasis on intrinsic motivation and the positive experience of its adherents, many of whom find it a more appealing approach than the social exchange process of transactional leadership. Transactional leaders, in a definition made popular by James MacGregor Burns in 1978, lead through social exchange; for example, business leaders promise financial rewards in exchange for high-level performance. Transformational leaders, in contrast, inspire their employees to achieve what are often extraordinary outcomes and, in the process, develop their own leadership capacity. Transformational leaders also help potential leaders to grow into the leadership role and elicit high-order performance from their employees.
The book analyses transformational leadership within the broader context of the Full Range of Leadership (FRL) model. The latter includes transformational leadership as the most effective, or optimal, level of leadership, with transactional leadership (based on rewards and disciplinary actions) as the mid-level, and laissez-faire leadership serving as the basis for the ineffective, or suboptimal, level. It contains 15 chapters. Chapter 1 (Introduction) defines the key concepts used throughout the volume. The second chapter examines the structure and measurement of transformational leadership and the FRL model. It also includes analysis of tools used to measure transformational leadership, chiefly the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ). Chapter 3 looks at the contribution made by transformational leadership to employee commitment, involvement, loyalty, and work satisfaction. The fourth chapter reviews research on the link between transformational leadership and performance.
Chapter 5 explores the ways in which transformational leadership helps employees to cope with stress during crises, emergencies and other extreme situations such as natural disasters. The sixth chapter examines how contingencies—sudden changes in the external operating environment, for instance—can influence the effectiveness of transformational leadership. Chapter 7 explains how organisational cultures can be described and understood in terms of both their transformational and transactional qualities—transformational cultures appear to be more adaptive (the chapter also explores how such leadership is influenced by the wider culture of the nation, territory, or region). The eighth chapter assesses the large and growing literature on transformational leadership and gender; women leaders, for example, tend to be more transformational than men. Chapter 9 explores the implications of transformational leadership for the organisation’s image, policies, and strategic planning as well as its impact on recruitment, selection, promotion, personnel development, and management education. The tenth chapter looks at the issues surrounding the development of transformational leaders, as influenced by data, counselling and feedback, and as generated by formal training programs based on the FRL model.
Chapter 11 reviews research into the correlates and predictors of transformational leadership, for example, the influence of traits and beliefs. The twelfth chapter examines the influence on leadership behaviour in all sectors of status, rank or means of acquiring a leadership position. Chapter 13 discusses the role and importance of transformational leadership in empowering more junior employees to perform better. The fourteenth chapter considers whether or not there could be effective substitutes for transformational leadership—in shared or team models, for instance. The final chapter proposes areas for future research in transformational leadership.
As a typology of leadership behaviour, the transformational approach is in general better suited to 21st century needs because managers are required, in an age of globalisation, innovation and competition, to transform organisations in non-traditional ways—among them carrying employees with them in their attempts to drive capability improvement or increase profits (or both). But transactional leadership approaches still have a role to play in generating high performance in sections of the workplace where high-order results are necessary in achieving efficiency and effectiveness. A function for both seems assured, but, as the authors are at pains to emphasise, within an environment in which leaders engage in ‘authentic’ transformational leadership. This leadership approach has at its centre a genuine concern to forge approaches characterised by qualities such as trust, which themselves can generate ‘inspirational motivation’ in employees. The authors also conclude (Chapter 10, pp. 142–167) that the elements of transformational leadership can be taught, developed and learned. This book, first published in 1998, is a well-written and comprehensive survey-analysis of the subject and one likely to be of value to scholars and practitioners as well as the reader looking for a scholarly but not intimidating examination of traditional leadership.
Bernard M. Bass is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus based at the Centre for Leadership Studies at Binghamton University in upstate New York, and Professor Ronald E. Riggo is based at the Kravis Leadership Institute, Claremont McKenna College, Claremont, California.
John Benington and Jean Hartley, ‘“Whole Systems Go!” Improving Leadership Across the Whole Public Service System’, National School of Government, Sunningdale Institute, Ascot, UK, 2009 (Report), 33pp.
This report was commissioned by Britain’s National School of Government and the Public Service Leaders Alliance (now known as Public Service Leadership). It addresses the question: ‘What would it take to create more effective leadership of the whole governmental and public service system?’ The authors argue that today’s challenging economic times are propitious for considering this question. However, economic challenges are not the only catalyst for change. The world is in the throes of a far-reaching geopolitical transformation which requires a radical re-design of key elements of public sector capability, including leadership development. The authors base their analysis and recommendations for improvement on research by the University of Warwick Business School and set these out in seven propositions for reform:
Proposition 1: The need for new paradigms of governance as a complex adaptive system and new practices of political, managerial and civil leadership across the whole public service system.
Proposition 2: The necessity for new patterns of ‘adaptive leadership’ to tackle tough, complex, cross-cutting problems in the community, where there may be no clear consensus about either the causes or the solutions to the problems.
Proposition 3: Whole systems thinking and action which includes the capacity to analyse and understand the inter-connections, inter-dependencies and inter-actions between complex issues, across multiple boundaries—between different sectors, services and levels of government.
Proposition 4: Leadership development programs need to join up in order to address whole system challenges, with the Centre supporting this through new organisational and financial architecture.
Proposition 5: Leadership development programs must translate individual learning into organisational and inter-organisational action and improvement—an approach which would require completely different starting points from traditional leadership development programs.
Proposition 6: Strengthening leadership skills and capabilities for working across the whole public service system will necessitate radical innovations in practice (e.g. fast-track graduate entry, mid-career movement innovation, the establishment of corporate leadership top teams).
Proposition 7: The above commitments to action-oriented leadership development across the whole public service system need to be counter-balanced by an equally strong commitment to ongoing analysis of the changing context and serious reflection on developments in leadership practice—both positive and negative.
At the time of writing, Professors John Benington and Jean Hartley were Fellows of the Sunningdale Institute, the National School of Government’s high-level public policy research facility, based at Sunningdale Park near London.
Ronald A. Heifetz, Marty Linsky and Alexander Grashow, ‘The Theory Behind the Practice’, (Chapter 2 of their book), ‘The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organisation and the World’, pp. 13–41, Harvard Business Press, Boston, Massachusetts, 2009
The chapter explores the concept of ‘adaptive leadership’, which is defined as ‘the practice of mobilising people to tackle tough challenges and thrive’ (p. 14). It rests on a number of assertions about the key elements of adaptive leadership. These include several drawn from the field of evolutionary biology. For example, successful adaptive change builds on the past rather than jettisoning it; organisational adaptation occurs through experimentation; adaptation relies on diversity; and adaptation takes time. Among the principal arguments of the paper is that the most common cause of failure in leadership derives from treating adaptive challenges as if they were technical problems. What is the difference and why does failure ensue from this misdiagnosis? Technical problems, however complex, can be resolved through the application of authoritative expertise and the organisation’s current structures, procedures and ways of doing things. Adaptive challenges can only be addressed through changes in people’s priorities, beliefs, habits and loyalties.
In order to drive adaptive change effectively, a leader must be able to provide 1) direction; 2) protection; and 3) order to his/her organisation and employees. These are the key prerequisites for successful adaptive leadership. The contrast between the narrower technical problems approach and the more ambitious adaptive leadership one is reflected clearly in Figure 2.3 (p. 28).
Direction Technical—Provide problem definition and solution; Adaptive—Identify the adaptive challenge, and frame key questions and issues.
Protection Technical—Protect from external threats; Adaptive—Disclose external threats.
Order Technical—Orientation: Orient people to current roles; Adaptive—Disorient current roles, and resist orienting people to new roles too quickly
· Conflict: Technical—Restore order; Adaptive—expose conflict or let it emerge.
· Norms: Technical—Maintain norms; Adaptive—Challenge norms or let them be challenged.
The authors acknowledge that technical and adaptive challenges often have common elements; they are not always easily distinguishable—most challenges are mixed with technical and adaptive elements being intertwined. However, they stress the need for a strong commitment to addressing problems in pursuing an adaptive strategy and flexibility to change tack when such a strategy is clearly failing.
Ronald A. Heifetz and Marty Linsky are co-founders and Principals of Cambridge Leadership Associates (based near Cambridge, Massachusetts). Alexander Grashow is a Director of Consulting Practice at Cambridge Leadership Associates.
Manfred Kets de Vries and Konstantin Korotov, ‘Creating Transformational Executive Education Programs’, INSEAD Business School (Faculty and Research Working Paper, No. 38), 2007, 31pp http://www.insead.edu/facultyresearch/research/doc.cfm?did=2760
The authors discuss the design of transformation executive learning/development programs. They draw extensively on their experience as teachers and consultants in doing so. A transformational program presupposes a change in the participant’s behaviour which produces personal or organisational benefits (or both). In order to understand the transformational process they posit three triangular conceptual frameworks: 1) the mental life triangle; 2) the conflict triangle; and 3) the relationships triangle. The first shows that cognitive and emotional processes need to be taken into consideration in order to create changes in behaviour. The second triangle describes the sources of thoughts and feelings that may produce anxiety and cause defensive reactions which prohibit change and productive use of talents. The final triangle explains how a person’s previous experiences create patterns of response that are repeated throughout life and can become dysfunctional.