Developing Leaders and Managers

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CHAPTER 17

Developing leaders and managers

THE PURPOSE OF THE CHAPTER

The purpose of this six-part chapter is to explore how an organisation’s leadership and management development (LMD) processes can help to build its future capability as well as aiding the achievement of excellent performance in a current situation (SLIDES 1 and 2).

THE LEADERSHIP PIPELINE

Who are the leaders and the managers?

The two Reflections reproduced below can be used to stimulate general class discussion or as the basis for group work and presentations in plenary session.

To what extent does corporate leadership in your own organisation seem to successfully tackle the tasks discussed in this section? Where do you see the greatest barriers and aids to effective corporate leadership to lie?

Feedback comments

The key tasks of corporate leadership are shown on SLIDE 3. Major barriers to the effective performance of these tasks include:

• a dominant logic that works against unlearning, double-loop learning, creativity and innovation (see Chapter 5)
• a poor-quality strategy process (see Chapter 12)
• lack of appropriate performance management and development of both employed and voluntary members of the corporate team.

Reflecting on any group of front-line or operational leaders in your organisation, what seem to be their leadership tasks, and what help do they receive in developing the knowledge, skills and behaviours needed to perform them?

Feedback comments

The key leadership tasks of operational and front-line leaders are shown on SLIDES 4 and 5. Recalling material in Chapter 6, it is helpful to note that front-line managers are defined by Purcell and Hutchinson (2007) as those who are are accountable to a higher level of management for the performance of a work group of approximately 10 to 25 people. The task of FLMs is to help to create, or transmit, impressions of the organisation as a whole (commitment) and to make jobs satisfying by influencing how demanding the job is, how much autonomy the employee has in the job and the sense of achievement that comes from doing the job. They therefore largely determine how effectively the AMO model operates in the particular situation (see SLIDE 5).

Operational and first-line leaders need particular support from HR policies and practices, training and development in people management skills, and reward systems that recognise effective performance of their leadership role.

HOW EFFECTIVE IS LMD?

Key failings in LMD

The key failings identified in research are summarised on SLIDE 6. Two other issues of longstanding concern noted in this subsection of the chapter are:

• Development programmes are often politicised by being used to reinforce instead of challenge the leadership and management status quo.
• Both in the UK and across the world complacency regarding the competence of organisations’ managers remains a major barrier to improving the poor performance of many.

ASSESSING THE EVIDENCE

RESEARCH PROBLEMS

SLIDE 7 summarises main issues raised in this part of the section.

Key findings

At this point you may find it helpful to re-read the Procon UK case study in Chapter 8 to see how that company approached the planning and design of its major programme for front-line managers. You should pay particular attention to the three factors just discussed above.

Feedback comments

The three factors mentioned in this Reflection are those that, according to an international consortium’s research findings over a seven-year period, account for 25 per cent of variance in organisational performance (Mabey and Terry, 2007). I relate them here to the way in which top management at Procon Manufacturing UK’s Birmingham site (the focus in Chapter 8) approached the planning and design of its front-line managers’ development programme:

• a strategic approach to HRM, ensuring its integration with business strategy

At the Birmingham site not all HR practices were well integrated with business strategy and this prevented the fully effective transfer of the FLM programme’s outcomes to the workplace. The FLMs were particularly dissatisfied with the inconsistent way in which recognition and reward policies were implemented across Procon’s workplaces, and in their informal evaluation of the FLM programme (at the end of the case study) senior managers singled out the firm’s performance management system as being particularly in need of overhaul.

• a thoughtful, long-term approach to developing managerial capability

At the Birmingham site this approach was evident in the emphasis placed by the chief executive and his top management team on a long-haul approach to the development of FLMs, which they saw as a four-stage journey that would take some years to complete. However, the approach to middle management’s development seemed to have been given less detailed consideration. As a result leadership and management development overall lacked full consistency and integration.

• a belief by line managers that their employer is taking management development seriously

At the Birmingham site there were many indicators to show that middle and front-line managers believed that the firm took management development seriously. The emphasis in the workplace, in the performance management system and in training and development programmes on the Five Key Values was intended to ensure a clear understanding of the difference between a high-performing company and one that fell below acceptable standards. Again, though, the failure to ensure that all middle managers were actively committed to the FLM programme and to facilitating the transfer of participants’ learning to the workplace meant that the intentions of top management in relation to management development were to some extent frustrated.

PUTTING FINDINGS INTO PRACTICE

THE STARTING POINT

SLIDE 8 repeats the questions that research suggests should form the starting point for planning a leadership and management development strategy, and that underpin Figure 19 in the text (SLIDE 9).

WHAT KIND OF DEVELOPMENT?

Organisationally-based LMD

Lippitt (1983) emphasised the need to reinforce new attitudes through ‘meaningful renewal systems’. It is important to consider just what that quotation means, and in so doing, to return to points made earlier in the chapter.

Dogmatic attitudes in leaders and managers will make them unable to function effectively in a changing world because of their refusal to acknowledge that they themselves need to change. LMD that does not focus on attitudes can, unwittingly, simply ensure the perpetuation of old mindsets to the detriment of new learning. Therefore when designing development strategies and programmes it is essential to consider the kind of workplace that will be conducive to the acquisition, retention and full utilisation over the longer term of values and attitudes that participants acquire. How many graduate trainees, for example, quickly leave the organisation they have joined because, despite promises of fast-track advancement and the stimulus of an innovative development programme, the reality of life in that organisation increasingly contradicts the expectations that the programme has encouraged them to hold? How many middle and front-line managers in the leadership pipeline, eager to put into practice new ideas and new ways of managing and behaving, are unable to do so because there is no support for such changes among their leaders?

Hence the need for a genuine commitment by corporate leaders and throughout the organisation to accept the changed values and attitudes, as well as the new competencies, that can result from a powerful LMD programme. If the ‘renewal’ it offers is resisted by those who hold the most powerful positions in the organisation, it can only indicate that the true agenda for the programme is a political one and that the process is not intended to produce fundamental changes in the status quo.

This, in turn, raises other issues. For example: in order to ensure that the organisation has an adequate supply of leaders whose attitudes and values are future-oriented, who are adaptive to change and who are receptive to new ideas, what balance should there be between investing in internal management and leadership development and buying in from outside? And at what point and organisational level should any buying in start?

Competency frameworks that inform LMD programmes

It may be helpful to amplify the discussion in the section concerning these frameworks. As an informative CIPD factsheet points out (CIPD, 2008), although in the 1980s and 1990s HR professionals drew a distinction between ‘competencies’ and ‘competences’, now the two terms are often used interchangeably. It provides the following distinction between the two terms:

‘Competency’ is more precisely defined as the behaviours that employees must have, or must acquire, to input into a situation in order to achieve high levels of performance.

‘Competence’ relates to a system of minimum standards or is demonstrated by performance and outputs.

Basically, in the context of LMD there are two kinds of competency framework:

National competency frameworks

These have been popularised in the UK through the work of the Management Charter Initiative (MCI) mentioned in this part of the chapter. The MCI was established in the late 1980s with the aim of improving the performance of UKorganisations by increasing the standard and accessibility of management education and development. Supported by the Confederation of British Industry, the British Institute of Management, the Foundation of Management Education and the Department for Education and Employment, it led to the establishment in 1997 of national professional management qualifications at three levels – certificate, diploma and degree/master’s level – existing qualification courses such as the Diploma ofManagement Studies and MBA being integrated into a national, hierarchical structure.

The MCI competency framework is derived from functional analysis. The national standards relating to this framework are expressed as a ladder of qualifications to complement the continuous development of managers in the workplace. They are popular with many organisations as aids to staff recruitment and appraisal as well as training and development, and in encouraging and enabling first-level management trainees to get their learning nationally accredited (as was the case in the first-line managers’ programme described in Chapter 8).

The MCI competency-based framework’s aim is to improve the capability of managers by applying standardised criteria to the description of their roles and tasks and appraising their performance against clearly defined, measurable behavioural and task targets. The approach fits best the declining number of organisations structured on relatively stable, hierarchical lines with a range of positions through which managers can systematically develop and progress along specified career pathways. Programmes can be run at different management levels and career stages, and can develop both core and role-specific competences.

However, the MCI framework is also applied in some much less relevant contexts, both in public and private sectors, such as newly decentralised units where middle managers face radically changed roles and tasks. Here, attempts are often made to give the framework a future-oriented thrust by including a development centre component from which every participant leaves with a tailored development programme specifying present competency levels and appropriate developmental priorities together with an agreed L&D plan to achieve them.

Customised organisational frameworks

To quote from the CIPD’s (2008) factsheet:

Many organisations develop their competency frameworks through an internal research programme, sometimes aided by advisers from an external consultancy. Methods of developing a framework range from importing an existing off-the-shelf package through to developing the entire thing from scratch. The best solution usually lies between these two extremes, namely internally generating a framework that builds in business relevance, but do this by adapting existing models that have already been widely used and have proved successful.

Various surveys show that competency frameworks are now widely used in the UK (CIPD, 2008). The CIPD factsheet mounts a spirited defence of their benefits, attributing most of their alleged weaknesses to poor design or unskilled use. Concerns, however, remain although most – but not all – are directed at functionally-derived frameworks, especially those tied to national standards. Key points are made in the text, but I will expand on three here:

• The hectic and fragmented nature of managerial and leadership work

Partridge’s (1989) point about this was cited earlier in the chapter and it is a crucial one. Even first-line managers use a range of skills that cannot easily be categorised. Many of those skills are, and must be, integrated in their practice, and this tends to a synergetic effect – that is to say, one where the outcome of management action is greater than the sum of its parts. Such skills have been styled as ‘overarching competences’ (Burgoyne, 1989) and are to do with achieving synthesis, balance and perspective. There is a clear danger that reliance on functional frameworks when planning the development of strategic managers will mean that ‘the integrated work of managing still gets lost in the process of describing it’ (Mintzberg, 1994a: 11).

Of course managers at whatever organisational level do need to develop functional competencies. But what is at issue is how far higher-level capacities– needed by those moving into as well as those within the leadership pipeline –to do with judgement, intuition, mental elasticity, abstract thinking and tolerance of risk and ambiguity can be viewed in the same light as more measurable ‘competencies’ (Mintzberg, 1994a and 1994b).

• Problems of scale and change

A decade ago a report by Guile and Fonda (1998) identified as many as 20 capabilities that managers even then needed to operate in roles and jobs that, for many, will have continued to change dramatically. Can functionally-based competency frameworks adequately cope with such a variety of ‘capabilities’ and with such a rapid pace of change? And what is the cost, in time, money and expertise, in regularly updating them in order that they can attempt to do so?

• Problems of strategy and dominant logics

A distinguishing feature of many competency frameworks is their aim of formalising and linking both individual and organisational competencies to strategic priorities and to human resource systems (Alvarez, 1996). Organisational competencies are those unique and core capabilities that enable an organisation to innovate and gain competitive advantage. A fundamental concern here is that a competency framework can simply reinforce any given strategy, regardless of its quality. This can lead to a dangerous narrowing of managerial perspectives, inhibiting the intellectual independence needed to question given strategy in the light of an ever-changing environment (ibid). Certainly, a competency framework is likely to develop from, and become part of, the dominant logic of an organisation, defined as ‘the way in which managers conceptualise the business and make critical allocation decisions’ (Prahalad and Bettis, 1986: 490).

This is a reminder that management is not a fully objective and consistently ‘rational’ activity but a process that involves constantly calculating how to make a way through ‘contradictory demands in a world of uncertainty’ (Edwards, 1990). Political skills, courage and creative ability are crucial in enabling managers to cut through such complexities, and many competency frameworks may by their nature be poorly equipped to aid them in those endeavours.

Here is an exercise to build on learning about organisationally-based LMD. Its aim is not to test students’ programme design skills as such, but to focus their attention on evaluation of programme outcomes and on learning methods related to those outcomes. They may find it useful to review relevant content in Chapters 7 and 8 as a preparation for the exercise.

Group work:

EVALUATING A LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT PROGRAMME AND ITS LEARNING METHODS

Purpose:

To encourage a critical approach to the design and evaluation of leadership development programmes.

Case: Hays’ leadership development programme

Hays is a global recruitment firm, and until 2007 it had never had any structured development for its 300-strong leadership group. By then, however, the company’s plans for growth made it essential to achieve ‘strategic agility, cross-company collaboration and change management skills’. The plc board therefore decided to make a significant investment in a programme to develop all its leaders.

It was decided to start with the 80 most senior people in the organisation, in order to gain the commitment of those at other organisational levels. Their one-year programme began in October 2007, with the cohort split into groups consisting of eight people from different global locations to encourage understanding of each other’s challenges and promote networking. A year later the programme was rolled out to the rest of the company’s leaders.

Core components of the 2007–8 programme were two psychometric tests, a 360-degree feedback exercise using the consultancy’s own leadership competency model and personal discussion on its outcomes with a business psychologist, the subsequent development of an action plan to build on the individual’s strengths and address any risks, and further development of the plan as a result of an intense six-hour business simulation and a full and frank feedback discussion.

The board has already perceived a positive change in the top team’s behaviour and culture. The most common feedback received from the 80 participants who entered the programme in 2007 was that they felt for the first time part of a global organisation. Following the end of the programme they were to do a further 360-degree exercise and their team performance over the previous year would be assessed.