Merry Christmas to you. Thanks for being part of this blog experience. It has been quite a year getting this web site and blog underway and the response has been very gratifying.

I wish you, your family and friends the kind of uplifting Christmas joy shown in this photo.

I am taking a break for the festive season and will be back again with my next post on 5 January 2009.

The positive intentions behind negative responses to change proposals

Clients are often quick to point out those in their teams who are likely to resist a proposed change, or who they think are not likely to get with the programme. The CEOs and managers who are embarking on significant organisational change seem to have some ‘problem children’ they can readily identify and point to as being tricky people to bring on board.

These perceptions have arisen through a history of the CEO’s interaction with that person, from which certain patterns have developed, that can be intractable, seemingly impossible to change.

It becomes very easy to overlook any positive intentions of the other person. What if, in relation to the particular structure review or new technology that you are implementing, that ‘problem child’ actually has positive intentions in their negative response to the change proposal? Their actions would not look much different from those of someone who was just trying to pull the change down.

To dissolve resistance to significant change, the key is to enter into what I call ‘joint enquiry’ with the affected people. The heart of this joint enquiry is to understand the positive intentions behind the response of the other person.

Because there might just be something in there that will prevent a disaster or vastly improve your results. You won’t know about it if you don’t approach that person with a view to finding out.

Dealing with resistance depends on how you deal with difference

People who resist change are negative, troublemakers, or just don’t understand the benefits. Right? Not necessarily.

Perhaps they have legitimate concerns about the change as it is framed and planned. If so, these concerns, even legitimate ones, when expressed would sound to senior managers like resistance, wouldn’t they? Cooney and Sewell see dealing with this resistance as a question of who we deal with difference.

Cooney and Sewell’s stimulating research article is called Shaping the Other: Maintaining Expert Managerial Status in a Complex Change Management Programme, and is published in December 2008 in the academic journal Group and Organization Management.

Cooney and Sewell identify three means of dealing with difference:

• Confrontation – overt domination through the exercise of power – in other words, crush all opposition.
• Appropriation - a more subtle form of confrontation in which you take ownership of their position. For example, managers might appropriate the technical knowledge of the workers by eliciting it and representing it in a standardised and formalised manner, and then use it in service of their own ends.
• Dialogue – engagement with the other in a process that recognises each other’s difference and does not seek to dominate or appropriate them.

Note: the above are based on the work of the German philosopher Hegel, as discussed in the work of Collins.

While at first blush the dialogue option seems to be the most desirable, I think it is unlikely to be attained. Why not? Because of the power relations that are part and parcel of all human relating.

However, these alternatives gave me an insight into the work of the leader in making change happen, and my own role as a consultant in facilitating change.

I think that it is quite possible and indeed likely, that the issues of staff and managers are based on genuine concern for the organisation. I don’t assume that people are damaged.

In sessions I run with managers and staff, I am seeking to recognise difference, and not to dominate the discussion, in line with the dialogue option above. I do all sorts of things to minimise the power differential between me and the participants in order to meet this objective. And I am seeking to create dialogue. However, everyone knows that there is a power relationship going on, no matter how unacknowledged it might be. People are often surprised that I am actually listening to them, and that their views are reflected in the written documents that are produced in the course of the change project.

But nevertheless, the organisations I work with are not democracies (whether they be private sector, government agencies, NGOs or Crown entities), and the power differentials are real. By the way, do not read this as meaning that I think the power is all on the side of management. In one restructuring project I worked on successfully, a previous attempt to do similar things resulted in pickets and the resignation of the CEO. Naturally enough, the new CEO, General Manager and I took this very seriously as it graphically illustrated that the power was not unilaterally on the side of the CEO.

How are the power differentials in your organisation getting in the way of you dealing with difference (and resistance)?

I am totally over "best practice." It is a term used by consultancies (including myself in past lives) and those trying to sell ideas internally, intended to get emotional support for the ideas being promoted.

If you have a think about best practice, it is an off shoot of benchmarking. The idea of benchmarking is that one can investigate the best organisations in other industries, and adopt their practices into your own organisation.

There are two assumptions behind this that I have come to see as unrealistic. The first is that practice is universal and can be adopted in a general way in other organisations. The second is that doing what others do will automatically improve your performance.

For me, the classic example of best practice being adopted is when quality circles were adopted in US companies. American vehicle manufacturers looked at what Japanese manufacturers were doing and one of those things was quality circles. When these were adopted the results were entirely mixed. You cannot import a practice from one organisation to another "holus bolus." You can take ideas from one industry and consider how they might apply in your own industry. You have to take into account the specific organisation and its norms and values.

Even if so-called best practice could be imported into your organisation, there is still the assumption that doing what others do will make your performance better. To me this is a nonsense. At the best, it would make you as good as anybody else. But it does not account for breakthrough performance.

Instead, pay attention to what is going on in your organisation at the moment. Instead of asking "what should we be doing," ask "what is going on right now." When you understand what is happening at the moment this will lead to ideas about what to do about it. Too often we are thinking about what should be, not ‘what is.’

Leadership competencies tend to reinforce individualistic behaviours that downplay the meaning that their leadership work has for practising managers – the "emotional and moral labour of creating chioices and meanings for themselves and others," as Bolden and Gosling put it.

I think our leadership development activities should have far more reflection and discussion on real life practice and experience.

Bolden and Gosling use an apt musical metaphor – the behaviours articulated in leadership competency frameworks can be considered like musical notes on the page, or the scales practiced by the musician. However the experience of a great musical performance relies on interpretation, improvisation and interaction, with the other musicians and with the audience. Likewise, the richness of leadership involves emotion, intuition, experience, and symoblic and narrative processes of collective sense making in the organisation.

Competencies are not enough, and in fact divert attention away from the important aspects of how meanings emerge and transform over time.

We often hear that leaders lead through action, but in practice they lead through their words. You could say that the actions are acts of speech.

In an interesting research method, Bolden and Gosling compared the language of 29 different competency frameworks with the language of approximately 250 practising managers who gave reflective accounts of their own leadership practice. There was a distinct difference.

Bolden and Gosling found that in the competency frameworks, leadership was presented as a set of traits and behaviours possessed by the leader. As noted in earlier posts, this is an individualistic approach in that leadership is seen as a characteristic of the individual, not as being jointly created with others.

The narrative accounts of leadership by practising managers emphasised the moral and relational dimensions of leadership, dealing with complexity and uncertainty with an emotional engagement with others.

According to Bolden and Gosling, the competency frameworks tended to neglect the more subtle, moral, emotional and relational aspects of leadership. 

That is why I think our leadership development efforts should spend more time on these subtleties and less time on competencies. In fact I would go so far as to say that the usefulness of our leadership development courses is actually in the extent that they encourage reflection on these subtleties. And in many programmes this kind of reflection is only incidental, rather than being given a central place in the design.

What do you think about this?

Henry Mintzberg, no less, asserted that "acquiring competencies does not necessarily make a manager competent," in his 2004 book Managers Not MBAs.

I think this is equivalent to my realisation that the fact that I can plonk my way on the piano in very hesitant steps through a Beethoven minuet for easy piano does not make me a musician. Or at least not someone who can earn my living as a musician.

Simply acquiring a competency does not necessarily mean you will use it and nor does the absence of a competency make you "incompetent," according to Bolden and Gosling. In fact, excessive levels of a seeming useful competency such as ‘team orientation’ can turn to indecisiveness – having too much of a competency can lead to failure. Lominger competencies address this issue by including behavioural indicators that demonstrate over-use of a competency, and this is a popular selling point for Lominger’s competency model.

Nevertheless, in spite of efforts like this, at the heart of this issue is that competencies consider the worker and the work as distinct entities. The strong emphasis on individual behaviour mean that outcomes are invariably attributed to the individual irrespective of any collective effort or contextual factors that were involved.

The upshot? You can safely file competencies under I for ‘individualism.’

Competencies reinforce and disguise assumptions about the nature of organisational life and leadership

Richard Bolden and Jonathan Gosling in their article "Leadership Competencies: Time to Change the Tune?" (article is subscription only) in the journal titled Leadership, cite Marcus Buckingham from Gallup as identifying three further assumptions behind the competency approach. Sorry no link to Gallup – they don’t make it easy!

Assumption 1

That those who excel in the same role display the same behaviours.

Response 1

That is why competency models look so similar to each other and yet the leaders and the organisations they purport to describe look so different from each other. And of course many individual leaders achieve similar results via different approaches.

Assumption 2

That these behaviours can be learned.

Response 2

Competencies come down firmly on the "made" not "born" side of the leadership traits debate. This to my mind is not necessarily a problem, but is this assumption acknowledged in your own thinking about leadership competencies?

Assumption 3

That improving on your weaknesses leads to success.

Response 3

Many individual leaders have managed to be successful despite significant personal flaws e.g. Napoleon and probably any successful CEO you can think of from your own experience.  

Yet More Assumptions!

As if that were not enough, Salaman points out some fundamental but often unacknowledged characteristics of the competency approach:

• The competency approach is a framwork for measuring, monitoring and regulating the behaviour of managers. 
• Competencies require a translation from strategy to organisation to the individual manager, which tends to disguise organisational objectives and priorities which then remain hidden and unquestioned.
• Because the list of competencies serves as a specification for further improvement, the first management competency is commitment to the list of management competencies itself.

All in all, Bolden and Gosling suggest that leadership competencies are like written music, the notes and scales that denote the music, but that it is only in the performance of the music that it comes to life and has meaning for those who participate. Carrying this metaphor further, they suggest that the ability to play solo does not mean they can be an effective member of a group or orchestra (i.e. organisation) and the ability to read music or play certain notes does not make one an excellent musician. Further, being a successful musician in one genre such as classical does not mean that the talent will be able to be transferred to another genre such as jazz, rock or hip hop.

In summary, following the leadership competency approach means that you risk being able to do  scales or musical exercises, but not being able to create music that will stir the emotions and move your people towards the ends that you desire.

In this post, four assumptions behind the competency approach are challenged.

The competency approach is so commonplace in organisational life that it hardly seems worthy of comment. It has become like the air that you breathe, always present so that you take it for granted and hardly notice it.

Here are four assumptions behind the competency approach that are rarely mentioned. For these, I have drawn on Carroll, Levy and Richmond’s article Leadership as Practice: Challenging  the Competency Paradigm.

• Human behaviour can be described in a manner that is free of context and other people – as an individual agent choosing what behaviours to exhibit, in isolation of the specific context.
• Human actions can be reduced to fragments and then rebuilt into a complete ‘whole’.
• What has worked in the past will inevitably continue to be relevant for the future (competencies are based on past behaviour).
• Competencies, which by their nature can only articulate what is tangible, ‘objective’ and measurable can be used to describe leadership, a phenomenon which is intangible, subjective and not measurable. 

As I consider each of these assumptions I come to the conclusion that they are not accurate assumptions.

Human behaviour can surely only be described in particular situations with other people, not in disembodied descriptions of context-free behaviour.

The reduction of human action to fragments is potentially useful for thinking about some micro aspects of behaviour, but the ‘whole’ can only make sense in the context of the relationships between the people concerned, the past background of those involved, and their intentions. The kind of ‘whole’ that can be built from these fragments does not seem to me to be very useful.

It seems that the future may be quite different from the past.  As I write this it seems that the world is about to head into a recession. Many of the people managing organisations currently or in the past, upon whom the various competency models are based, will have learnt their skills in a very different world from that we anticipate in a recessionary environment.

And as for the final assumption above, I do not think that applying reductionist methods to the world of human beings does much except give us an unrealistic view of human behaviour.

We need to find better ways of understanding human beings, ways that acknowledge the interdependence of humans, ways that acknowledge that we cannot step outside of human relating to break it down into its component parts, ways that acknowledge the unknowability of some aspects of being human.

There is little empirical research support for the leadership competencies approach.

Leadership is an academic journal on leadership published in the UK. The November 2008 issue just out has an article by Brigid Carroll, Lester Levy and David Richmond of Auckland University, entitled Leadership as Practice: Challenging the Competency Paradigm. The authors take as their starting point Richard Boyatzis’s definition of competency as "an underlying characteristic of an individual that is causally related to effective or superior performance in a job."

Carroll, Levy and Richmond say that the key words of this definition are "individual," "causally," "superior" and "performance." In other words, the individual agent takes primacy, there is a linear relationship between intention and intervention, and superior performance is the result of a strategic plan formed by purpose and principles.

The article goes on to challenge these assumptions, and this is the first of several posts in which I want to explore the competency approach to leadership and whether it stacks up. Because, as you’ve probably guessed, I don’t think it does.

Competencies are ubiquitous in NZ organisations, and in particular Lominger competencies are prominent in the public sector. The 67 Lominger competencies are very appealing because they are ready made, consistently worded, behavioural indicators for effective performance in ineffective performance are all developed and there are even behavioural indicators for overdeveloped use of each competency.

And yet there is surprisingly little empirical research robustness behind the leadership competency approach, according to Carroll et al and Bolden and Gosling. In spite of competencies having been in widespread use for many years, the concept is not at all proven!! Carroll et al say that "Many of its assumptions do not hold true when subject to scrutiny."

My next post on Tuesday explores the assumptions of competency-based leadership.