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Epic Think Tank
Leadership for the Top Team
Leadership and learning
'Leadership and learning are indispensable to each
other.' John F. Kennedy (1917-1963)
With great power comes great responsibility (to quote
Spiderman's uncle). The people at the top of large organisations
have a hugely enhanced capacity, as individuals, to affect those
organisations' destinies for good or ill - with the result that
they often become closely aligned with the personal qualities of
their leaders. Virgin without Branson, Body Shop without Roddick,
are unimaginable.
High-profile, transformational leaders can produce
great success for the enterprises they head up. Conversely, one
need only look at the recent history of Marconi to see what havoc
can be wrought when the top gets it wrong. The knowledge and skills
that inform high-level decision-making are obviously of critical
importance.
So with great power comes great training need… Or
does it?
What exactly are the knowledge needs of top leaders?
Do they have distinctive requirements in this regard or are they
fundamentally much like anyone else (just more motivated)? What
are leaders like as learners - and is leadership, at this level,
something that can be learned, or something entirely innate?
Several Think Tank debates have addressed the topic
of leadership, but this is the first time we have focused on leadership
for the top team. We asked a group of learning professionals from
both public and private sectors, all of them near the top of their
respective organisations, to debate the following questions:
- Are leaders different?
- How do we engage leaders as learners?
- How can we keep leaders learning?
On the following pages you can read the results of this fascinating
debate.
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Cometh the hour, cometh the...MBA?
Learning from the post boy
Tough love for top leaders
Conclusion
Cometh the hour, cometh the… MBA?
It's tough at the top: nightmare scenarios and stark
choices; ever-tightening time-frames... The ability to lead, in
these circumstances, requires an unusual level of decisiveness,
and the confidence to state complex challenges in often quite simple
terms.
Something of this starkness must have rubbed off on
our discussion, because for the first time in an Epic Think Tank
we found that there was a very simple answer to our initial question.
Yes: leaders are different.
For a start, one of the most discussed issues in our
think tanks, motivating learners, simply isn't an issue here. Leaders
are almost by definition highly motivated individuals. They will
get the knowledge and skills they need in order to perform the job
they have to do. If they don't have these themselves, they will
surround themselves with people who do.
And this holds true despite the important distinction
that must be made between 'leaders' and 'leadership'.
Transformational, inspirational leaders like Branson
and Jack Welch of GE are probably born and not made. MBA courses
do not necessarily equip people to make the sort of imaginative
leaps called for at this level of operation. But in the tier below,
among the people who surround and support such a leader, you will
find a different type of leadership. These are not necessarily 'natural
leaders', although they may possess many leadership attributes and
qualities. They might never become number ones; but they have the
professional, managerial capability that mediates (and often mitigates)
the transformative energy moving and shaking the organisation from
above.
According to our delegates, of these two categories
it is (perhaps surprisingly) among the second that you will find
more examples of leadership as a transferable skill. Inspirational,
transformational leaders are often the product of a highly particular
'time and place', and if you took them out of their sector and even
particular organisation would not necessarily perform with the same
effectiveness - a case of 'cometh the hour, cometh the man' (or
woman). But the 'eternal second-in-comand' types below them, it
seems, osmoze comfortably between sectors.
Then there is the category of aspirant leaders to
take into consideration. Further down the organisation - throughout
the organisation, in fact - you will find the leaders-in-waiting;
those who aspire to leadership and might, if successful, find places
among the first or the second categories.
The existence of this third, aspirant category has
long been recognised in organisations such as the civil service,
where a five-year 'fast track' programme exists, or in the traditional
graduate trainee programmes. However, as society and business have
changed, the emphasis has moved away from background and qualifications,
and towards self-selection. A lot of corporate initiatives around
leadership now look to putative leaders as a group that can be nurtured
and supported through learning, at whatever level of the organisation
they present themselves.
So it seems we have three categories of leaders that
we might loosely brand as Loose Cannons, Safe Pairs of Hands and
Apprentices. What else do they have in common - and how best can
they be engaged as learners?
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Learning from the post-boy
A second thing that leaders and potential leaders
seem to share as a group is a heightened sense of discrimination
when it comes to the provenance of knowledge.
One facet of this discrimination is a scepticism,
and even a distrust, which is at root a tough-minded disinclination
to simply accept what one is given - or to take any information
at face value.
This scepticism can be so intense that leaders often
distrust their own knowledge. A delegate round the table from one
of the UK's foremost management schools asked a group of mature
MBAs what they had learned from the experience of doing the course.
Nothing, it transpired, that they hadn't known or suspected already.
However, the course had equipped them with massive reserves of confidence
in their own judgement, which came from having tested their empirically-gathered
knowledge against the best available authorities.
For some leaders, this will not be tough-minded enough.
Leaders in general have high expectations of authority, and a limited
ability for blind compliance. They're not going to accept the corporate
leadership programme without question: they're going to want to
know how it stacks up against 'real' education. They want the best
(and they want it now).
Where what is on offer doesn't measure up, very often
the favoured route will be a return to original sources via the
DIY route: which will in practice mean falling back on Amazon.com.
A lot of CEO learning doesn't look like learning, simply because
it eschews the formal constraints of 'the course', resulting in
a lot of bookish behaviour and ad hoc knowledge gathering.
Many leaders are great knowledge managers, because
they are able to cope with the inherently chaotic conditions one
finds at nodal points of the information flow. Chaos is full of
opportunities for leaders, and that's why you'll always find them
wherever the information is flowing thickest and fastest. It may
not seem like a course; it may not even look like learning - but
it's learning none the less.
This discrimination over provenance makes leaders
tend to prefer the trusted source - the prestigious educational
brand, the seasoned CEO lecturer - but it also makes them wary of
taking just one opinion. Why not consult the internet, where there
are millions of opinions (shortly after the internet achieved critical
mass, it started to be noted that corporate leaders were among the
most enthusiastic users within their organisations). Peer learning
is an important source of knowledge for those who do not readily
truckle to authority.
Neither are leaders, as impatient people, always prepared
to wait for ideas to achieve the respectability that comes with
age. An important engine of leader learning is the ceasesless search
for new, quicker, cheaper ways of doing things.
So who, exactly, does a Jack Welch or a Richard Branson
choose to learn from? Surely there can't be too many people around
in their organisations who know more than they do themselves?
The answer is: the post-boy.
Pete Waterman, the pop impresario, claims that he
has made more money-spinning decisions off the back of what the
post-boys in record companies tell him they think than on the judgements
offered by heads of A&R. Both Welch and Branson have reputations
for seeking out the youngest and lowliest in their organisations
to find out what they know. Some companies enshrine this in process,
by having the top team mentored by 24-year olds within the organisation.
It is risky, of course, learning from the young, who
tend to have a higher risk profile than greyer heads (and often
come a cropper in consequence). But leadership, as we've seen in
previous Think Tanks on the subject, is intimately bound up with
risk. The shocks and scares most of us try to avoid in life are
meat and drink to top leaders. They like making their own judgements,
even when they're wrong; and the shock of the new provides a more
thrilling stimulus to them than the me-too mindset of best practice.
However, getting ideas is one thing; avoiding old
mistakes another: where is the support mechanism that, while keep
leaders learning, will stop them haring off down false paths? In
this democratic age, no leader is self-sufficient enough, surely,
to be able to do without the odd bit of guidance? And who is going
to tell them when they're wrong?
At this level, and with the unique intensity of the
soft skills issues that present themselves to leaders, this sort
of development is liable to have an extremely high teacher-pupil
ratio. One to one, in fact: we're talking executive coaching...
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Tough love for top leaders
It's not only tough at the top, but lonely. Leaders
often feel more in common with their opposite numbers at other companies
than they do with those they lead and manage, who don't necessarily
face the same intensity of challenges, and may have very different
knowledge needs.
Some participate in learning sets, which allow them
to contrast and compare their experience with others in leadership
positions. There has also been a rapid growth, in recent years,
in the practice of executive coaching; practiced face to face, over
the telephone or by electronic means.
Opinion around the table was divided about the value
of this, but one revealing anecdote was shared by a delegate from
a major telco on the subject of coaching. It seems that there was
one particular department head within the company for whom nobody
liked working. He was intellectually brilliant, and a decisive and
effective leader, but he lacked people skills - to the extent that
it was causing serious problems in the business. The answer arrived
at by top management was to allocate him a personal coach, with
a hidden agenda - to expose this weakness to the person in question
and help him tackle it.
This raises an interesting issue. Leaders tend to
be outward-looking, outcome-orientated people; more interested in
doing, than in reflecting on their own habits and behaviour. In
a sense they don't need any encouragement to learn: they are restless,
hungry people always looking for new ideas that are going to make
a difference. So, in some circumstances it may be that what they
need is less to be supported than to be challenged. There may well
be a place for the sort of 'tough love' meeted out in the example
above.
In order to manage others, so the popular wisdom goes,
it is first necessary to manage oneself. And if the others you are
managing can be counted in tens or even hundreds of thousands, then
surely the job of self-management becomes that much larger - and
its outcome that much more critical. It is often said nowadays that
the heads of large corporates, in particular, have more power than
heads of government. And with great power comes… just ask Spiderman's
dad.
Here is the third important difference between leaders
and 'normal' people: leaders can face personal development issues
on a different order of magnitude entirely from the rest of us.
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Conclusion
We discussed three distinctive differences between
leaders and other groups of learners in this Think Tank:
- Motivation is not an issue
- Leaders are more discriminating about provenance
- Personal development issues become organisational issues
Although e-learning has hardly been mentioned in this report, the
discussion has clear implications for the style of learning that
could be used to meet these needs.
- Leaders are impatient - whatever you present them with will
have limited time to make an impact; and if a book is a quicker
way to get the information, they'll buy the book
- Leaders are discriminating: they like premium educational brands
- Leaders blend naturally, accepting learning in whatever form
or medium it arrives: conversely, they will not wish to be forced
down too proscriptive a path in their learning
- Integration of learning with knowledge management is key
- Provenance of information is important, and comparison of different
viewpoints: open-ended learning structures will suit leaders best,
with well-referenced sources and outward links for further exploration
- Leaders are outwardly focused and want to know what their peers
are up to: focus on collaborative learning, peer-to-peer learning,
etc.
- Learner support for this group may be less about encouraging
attendance and keeping up motivation than about challenging the
learner
John Helmer for Epic, July 2003
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