Transformational Leadership 2

I previously wrote about transformational leadership on 6th February this year.  However, two things I read recently made me reflect again on leadership style.

One was an article, “Transactional to Transformational Leadership” by Bernard M. Bass.  Bass contrasted “transactional”  leaders, who relied on contingent reward (do the job or don’t get paid at its most crude) and management by exception, with “transformational” leaders.  Bass believed that transformational leaders achieved great results through charisma, showing individualised consideration to staff, and stimulating those staff intellectually.  I have no beef with the latter two as good things for a leader to do, but I do mistrust charisma (which Bass believed could be learnt).

The second thing I read was an article about Mike Wake wasting millions and his dubious involvement with and promotion of women employees in his organisation Novas.  I has the pleasure of working for Novas many years ago, and for myself and others who knew the organisation, the main surprise is that the allegations mentioned in the article took so long to come out.   Mike was not a charismatic leader in the conventional understanding of this, and Bass recognises that quiet but visionary people with a lot of determination are charismatic.  He did intellectually stimulate and show individual consideration to employees, but as this included promoting women he had relationships with, it was a parody of the ethical transformational leader.  Over a period of less than twenty years Mike Wake led his organisation from nothing to a large organisation and now, possibly, back to nothing again.

The picture at the head of this article displays the very picture of the leader that worries me.  The leader is at the centre, communication is to spokes of the wheel, and the followers are not connected.  Maybe this works well if the leader is a great and selfless one (met lots of those) but even then it neglects emergent potential from employees.

Bass himself recognised the potential problems of transformational leadership that is selfish or antisocial (“The Two Faces of Charismatic Leadership”, Leaders Magazine).

If there is a remedy to this, it lies in more distributed leadership.  The UK government has invested much money in leadership training and development, and its big money for consultancy firms.  The case of Mike Wake suggests that unless this concentrates on leaders giving away power and pushing responsibility downwards, then the Novas scenario is all too likely.  My own view is that if we replace “charisma” with the redistribution of leadership throughout an organisation, then we may get better ethics and longer term success.

Leadership and action logic

David Rooke and William Torbert wrote an article about the “Seven Transformations” of leadership.  Lots of people seem to like their ideas (e.g. another blog I read on this). It was originally published in the Harvard Business Review back in 2005.

Their basic premise was that the effectiveness of a leader depends on their “action logic” – how they interpret their surroundings and react when their power or safety is challenged.  They identified 7 stages in leadership development, each more effective than the next.

Their research and model is impressive.  However, I am always suspicious of models that show any sort of linear progression, and neatly divide things into stages.  I’m also suspicious of something based on top executives at big international Western businesses.  For someone like me working in the not for profit sector, it has to really ring true for me to feel it is relevant.

In the article the three middle categories, to which the majority of managers belong, were the most recognisable for me.  I could see how I went through the transformations myself.  I’ve given them below:

Expert	Rules by logic and expertise. Seeks rational efficiency.	Good as an individual contributor.
Achiever	Meets strategic goals. Effectively achieves   goals through teams; juggles managerial duties and   market demands.	Well suited to managerial roles; action and goal oriented.
Individualist	Interweaves competing personal and company action logics. Creates unique structures to resolve gaps   between strategy and performance.	Effective in venture and consulting roles.

I remember when I started to study an MBA that my learning was characterised by the idea that there was a right way to do things, the “expert” action logic. Its something I see often in organisations, who want solutions to problems, and want them fast.

The “achiever” makes me think of an organisation I worked for (and many I know) where the focus was on multiple targets, achieving goals, taking lots of action – and seldom ever reflecting.

As for being an individualist – I remember the step a couple of years back to asking the question, “why these targets?”.  “What is the assumption behind this?”  “Can we think differently?”.

The reason for my suspicion of the model is that, like most  linear models, a lot of it actually happens all at once and not in stages.  The action we take depends on how we are thinking at a particular moment.  One day I might reflect, think a lot, take into account lots of factors and people’s different realities.  Another time I might look for a solution without reflecting, or be pressured enough to go for a target whether I think its worthwhile or not.

To Rooke and Torbert’s credit, they recognise this, speaking about the “dominant” action logic for a leader and do not treat it as clear cut.  I suspect the simplicity of the model will help many people make sense of leadership development, but be a trap for “experts”.

Leaders and followers

In previous posts about transformational leadership and Singapore, I began to wonder about the leader and the led.  In Singapore I perceived a leadership focused on the material and secular, whom people were willing to follow because it delivered success.  This appeared to produce a sameness that I found stifling.

Should leadership also be about the spiritual in government and secular organisations?  In the UK church and state have been kept largely separate, but I’d like to apply the question to leading organisations.  Singapore also kept these things separate, and a wonderful diversity of religion existed – Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Chinese.  Yet outside this strict rules and materialistic sameness were backed by a culture of conformity.

Lee Kuan Yew’s (former Prime Minister) leadership might be termed transformational – he inspired people with a vision of a materially better future and led them to it.  However, this also created conformity and sameness that carries a risk for the future, one where the reliance of the people on good leaders is a weakness.

An alternative for a leader, be they a business or political leader (and are the 2 different?) is to lead not through inspiration, but by creating the conditions for people to question.  The Internet (self organising and changing like a living entity) is an argument that you don’t even need the leader, and that leadership distributed amongst participants is equally strong in the right circumstances.

Whether you need the leader or not, I’d suggest that a leader’s job must always be spiritual as well as material.  How we think and feel is linked critically to how we act and so to the business of business.  This is normally expressed as motivation, but I believe it is more than that and that a truly transformational leader would inspire people to examine their own beliefs and ways of being.

I’d like to suggest that its important for all of us to move from followership to discovery, and that the key to this is how we go about learning.  I’ll end with a quote I find important:

Learning to become an effective self-directed learner is probably the greatest intellectual and psychological challenge that an individual can face in a lifetime……  Some people never attempt to acquire the competencies of serious learning to learn as they are addicted to the deferential prescriptive approach.

- Dealtry, R. (2004), “The savvy learner”, Journal of Workplace Learning, Vol. 16

Innovation – failure and success

I have led two similar innovative projects for not for profit organisations, one of which was implemented, and the other of which suffered prolonged delays.  While many innovation projects stumble and fail, working on two similar projects gave me a chance to compare factors that may have contributed to getting through the planning stage to implementation.

First, I asked myself if it was me?  The projects happened at roughly the same time and I don’t think my approach was significantly different.  In both cases participants were very enthusiastic and I paid insufficient attention to some of the powerful stakeholders involved.

Next, I considered how they differed in scope.  The one that suffered the most delay was more ambitious and involved greater potential innovation.  This made it harder to persuade the powerful stakeholders to approve implementation.

However, the most significant factor appeared to be the forces driving the need for change.  The delayed project had powerful business drivers, but they were not as acute as in the other case.  In addition, the CEO set a clear deadline for the one that went successfully through to implementation, forcing other stakeholders to make decisions.

I’ve drawn several tentative lessons from this:

1. Projects need a powerful champion who can ensure barriers to timely implementation can be overcome.
2. Pay attention to powerful and interested stakeholders, even if they are only going to be involved in a final review and sign off – the importance of persuasion and politics.
3. Outside forces help promote change.
4. Smaller step by step adaptations are easier to implement than more ambitious innovations.
5. A big change requires either a very pressing need and powerful champions, or involvement of as many interested stakeholders as possible.

These lessons apply to my work in the not for profit sector, where the involvement of all potential stakeholders is widely expected and risk can often be treated conservatively.  Note that I am only thinking about getting a project through into implementation here, not about the quality of the final result.

Point 5 links to reasons why it is so hard for organisations to change and innovate in a timely way, and why strategic drift may be so widespread.  Innovation changes culture, culture can represent a mindset that it is hard to step out of, so perhaps the biggest job for any significant innovation is to manage powerful stakeholders so that they are ready for change.