Stephen Billing’s Blog

Can we rely on the findings of leadership research? If there were no such thing as leadership, would we know?

The assumptions, methodological preferences and ideological commitments permeating many leadership studies are often not acknowledged by the researchers. This means that their findings are likely to lead us into false conclusions unless we consider what these underlying assumptions might be.

One such assumption is that such a thing as leadership exists. Many studies ask respondents to choose between multi-choice items on a questionnaire, all of which are based on the assumption that leadership is a thing and that the researcher has been able to work out all the possible choices that the respondent might make. The very act of collating these responses then creates the phenomenon of leadership that is reported on in these studies. This suggests that any leadership studies should be taken with a grain of salt, or at least that you should check their research method before accepting the results. Alvesson and Sveningsson (Article is subscription only, unfortunately) point out that it is possible there is a real phenomenon behind the discussion about leadership, but it is also possible that there is not. Much of the leadership research would report on findings about leadership because of the assumptions of the researchers, even if the phenomenon known as leadership does not actually exist.

Alvesson and Sveningsson point out that there is a lot of leadership literature around, but that there is also a lot of discontent with that literature. For example, back in 1979, Sashkin and Garland say that the study of leadership has failed to produce generally accepted, practically useful and widely applied scientific knowledge. Ten years later, Yukl concludes that leadership theories are beset with conceptual weaknesses and lack strong support when studied in practice. The results of many studies are contradictory and inconclusive.

The scientific approach to studying leadership, which promises the accumulation of knowledge through the development and verification of hypotheses has not delivered universally accepted theory that can guide leadership action, unlike, say, the law of gravity which is universally applied and has been such an important underpinning of many developments in Newtonian physics. In fact, practitioners mostly view academic research on leadership as abstract, non-practical and of little relevance. Imagine if gravity were so diffuse that people said "I wish you would come up with a more practical theory of gravity." And yet much leadership theory has been developed with the intention of trying to find immutable laws of leadership that apply just as much as the laws of gravity.

Not very successful, it seems. More to come in future posts.

Corporate values redux.

I was talking to a new reader of the blog the other day who said that she didn’t agree with some of what I’ve written  about values. She saw people’s individual values as being important.

I realised that my opinions about shared values may have been interpreted to mean that I don’t think personal values are important. Quite the contrary.

I think that personal values are very important and are experienced as a kind of voluntary compulsion of what it feels right to do. They provide an uplifting experience that feels good and right to us. This is a very important aspect of being human.

On the other hand, I do not think it is important to work out what values an organisation should have and to write them on a wall chart, and then to try and get people to "align" themselves to those values.

1. The values that are written down are generalised abstractions. GH Mead called them "cult values" to remind us of their generalised nature, and that when they are applied directly regardless of the circumstances, this amounts to a cult.

2. Values are always in conflict and are negotiated in particular situations. For example, should the CSR answer the telephone within 3 rings or attend to the customer standing in front of them? This conflict is never resolved once and for all, because the next time the phone is ringing and there is a customer in front of them, the CSR has to negotiate the conflict all over again.

3. If everyone has the same values, then you have a homogenous organisation in which the agents are very similar. By analogy from complexity theory, when similar agents interact, the patterns of interaction that emerge have significantly less novelty, innovation and change than when the agents are dissimilar.

4. Organisations are not people and cannot have values. Organisations are habitual patterns of relating, always with the potential for novelty to arise from any particular interaction.

5. People cannot design their values in advance, but they can discover or become aware of their values through reflecting on problematic or difficult situations, and working out what has been important to them in negotiating that particular situation. So it makes no sense to try and design the organisation’s values and commit them to wall posters and other artefacts.

In which a friend’s accident with a horse stimulates me to reflect on the place of reflection in leadership practice.

I was talking today to a friend who came to visit, walking with a crutch. It turned out that although he is a very experienced and skilled horseman, he had been kicked in the leg recently by a horse. Very painful. I asked him how it happened.

He had been getting on the mare using in the usual way, and for some reason the rein was looser than usual and she had moved unexpectedly, swinging him off balance. Then, when he fell, the horse had instinctively kicked out prior to attempting to run away, which is apparently what horses do – their instinct is to kick and run.

It was most interesting talking to the horseman to hear him then say, that, with hindsight, he could see that the mare was distracted, her attention was on something else and in fact if he’d been noticing properly, he would not have got on her at that point but would have settled her a bit more before trying to get on.

What piqued my interest was his comment about hindsight, and I realised that he’d been reflecting at length on what had occurred. Attempting a move (i.e. mounting) he had undertaken many times before with many horses, including that particular mare, he got a response that was quite unexpected, and was caught unprepared.

Looking back, he could see that the horse was not ready. He actually said that it was his own fault.  What it amounts to is that his own need to get on the horse at a particular moment overrode his observation of whether or not the horse was ready.

I suspect that he will always in future notice when he is getting on with horses so that his perception of what is going on with the horse he is working with, is enhanced. He will see not only his own need to get on the horse now, but also he will observe his horse’s readiness in a more finely nuanced way.

This, I think is part of the tremendous value of reflecting on leadership situations. Reflection helps you to review situations in which you have been highly involved, and this reflection allows you to bring some detachment to your view of the situation. The detachment potentially available from the process of reflection can allow you to notice more of what is going on around you rather than just your own intentions obscuring a fuller view of what is happening.

In other words, you can notice more of the intentions of others, not just your own intention. The horseman I met today was, at the time of the accident, heavily involved in his need to get on the horse right now. The detachment available from his reflection allowed him to realise the horse was actually not in the right state, rather than being focused only on his need to get on the horse at that moment.

The greater your ability to notice the nuances of what is going on around you right now, the greater your ability to adjust your response according to subtle shifts of power and need, and the more effective your actions as a leader will be.

You may know that I have a chapter in the new book that is due out soon, "Client-Consultant Collaboration" edited by Anthony F Buono and Flemming Poulfelt.

My chapter is called "Inside the Client – Consultant Relationship: Consulting as Complex Processes of Relating." It is expected to be out by the end of August.

Here is the flyer for the book (in PDF format), it even includes a special deal for purchases. I like the vibrant colours on the cover.

Very exciting.