Stephen Billing’s Blog

I was at a client function the other night and one of the managers approached me saying that he was a trustee of another organisation and they’d like to talk to me about how I could help them. This kind of serendipity makes the world go round, in all aspects of life, not just business.

I serendipitously came across an article (subscription only) in the latest edition of Organization Studies by Professor Nicholas Dew of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, USA, in which discusses the role of serendipity in entrepreneurship. (more…)

Three reasons: practising managers are vague about leadership, ideology about leadership is pervasive and research methods can be misleading.

Alvesson and Sveningsson in their article about the disappearance of leadership summarise two main means by which ideas about leadership break down. One is that common definitions of leadership do not correspond to the accounts of leadership produced by people in leadership positions in organisations.

The second is that their initial claim about what is important in leadership is contradicted by their efforts to show what this means when they are applying it in their daily work.

To me, this is very interesting. But there is more.

Reviewing the literature about leadership, the main common aspect amongst various leadership definitions seems to be that leadership is an influence process. Unfortunately this is not enough distinction because you could also say that selling is an influence process. You can probably think of other influence processes such as political lobbying.

What is the difference between leadership and, say, selling or lobbying? Well, one difference is in the context of an asymmetrical organisational relationship. What this is referring to is that the leader/manager has more power and is attempting to influence what those reporting to him or her do. A salesperson or lobbyist is operating in a different context, where there is not the same asymmetrical power relationship.

Alvesson and Sveningsson come to three conclusions in their highly interesting article.

First, highly intelligent managers have rather vague and contradictory notions of leadership, which are only discovered by taking an open ended research approach (questionnaires would not discover this).

Secondly, there are strong ideological overtones to the views people have about leadership, and so the leadership industry should be careful about the extent to which its ideological perspective enables the easy production of leadership as something distinct and robust without adequate questioning. From this study, the phenomenon of leadership seems to be much more fragile than is commonly assumed.

Thirdly, while the researchers do not want to kill leadership off, they do want to make sure that there is clear understanding of the research methods used to draw conclusions about leadership. Do the methods used to research leadership generate the views about leadership that they report on, rather than reporting on observations about leadership?

Ultimately, I think that Alvesson and Sveningsson’s research points to the need to ask of any leadership research what the method was, so that you can decide whether or not the study has avoided the tendency to impose its own leadership ideology, thus creating the leadership phenomenon it intends to report on.

Research that claims that leadership disappears when it is examined. This disappearing act raises the question as to whether there is such a things as leadership at all.

Alvesson and Sveningsson conduct leadership research in which they attempt to avoid the problem of constructing leadership through the process of developing a questionnaire and then getting respondents to answer it.

What they do instead is interview managers/leaders using open questions and ask the managers to describe their leadership in their own terms.

In their article The Great Disappearing Act: Difficulties in Doing "Leadership," Alvesson and Sveningsson’s analysis of the responses is illuminating. The main thing that the responses have in common is the confusing and incoherent picture they paint of what it is they consider leadership to be.

Each manager starts with a statement of what they consider important in leadership, and, perhaps not surprisingly, these statements reflect current fashions in leadership – maintaining the vision, promoting the team, working with key team members, harnessing the energy and so on. One manager who appears to be relatively sophisticated even says leadership is about managing meaning. Although he then says that he is rarely able to find the time to spend with his people because operational issues tend to take priority.

Managers I speak often reflect the same concerns, saying they don’t have time to do the leadership aspects of their roles.

After each manager/leader had said what they considered important (vision/values/team etc) a curious thing happened when the researchers then asked them to describe the most important leadership activities in more detail.  This is where the responses started to get confusing and incoherent.

The researchers described this as being the disappearance of leadership. They identified the following tactics that leaders used in explaining leadership, the result being that leadership undergoes a disappearing act.

• Pointing at what they saw as the crucial issue in leadership, and then being vague and contradictory about how to tackle it.
• Stating the obvious as a uniting vision (e.g. where the vision is simply the function of the business unit such as "providing infrastructure")  and then living the vision through improving social relations.
• Limiting one’s role to presenting ideas and then letting the others decide. The researchers call this minimilastic influencing.
• Stating one leadership principle is crucial and then contradicting it in practice.
• Doing primarily things other than those stated as being crucial, and largely being absent from influencing.

 These things are very different from what most authors on leadership would advocate – typically, an active person trying ambitiously to exercise influence within an asymmetric relation.

Conclusion

As part of my consulting practice I am often concerned with leadership in organisations. This study certainly reinforces my own experience of discussing leadership with those in formal and informal leadership positions.

Leaders always find it difficult to pinpoint what it is that they do that can be classified as "leadership." I find myself in the same boat, wrestling with the question of how to describe what my own practice is, a practice that includes leadership. 

Is it the inadequacy of words to describe the concept of leadership, or is it that there really is no such thing as leadership after all? Or is there some other explanation?

In 1989, Yukl pointed out that the numerous definitions of leadership seem to have little in common other than that leadership involves an influence practice. While Yukl thinks this is a problem, Alvesson and Sveningsson on the other hand doubt that a common definition of leadership is possible, that it would not be very helpful if it were possible, and that it may obstruct new ideas about leadership.  They also note that two thirds of leadership texts do not define leadership at all, and this may well support the view that leadership is indeed difficult to pin down.

Part of the problem may be the requirement for these definitions and insights into leadership to be applicable across such a wide range of contexts – managerial, sports and formally designated leadership, upwards, and peer, for example. A definition broad enough to cover all these situations may well be too general to be useful in specific situations. The problem with defining leadership as some kind of influencing process is that you could then interchange "leadership" with all sorts of other terms associated also with influencing, such as "culture," "strategy," "organisation structure," or other concepts. You have to be able to distinguish one from the other or else you do not actually have a clearly defined concept you can work with.

One of the common conceptions of leadership is based around the idea of the hero’s journey. The hero that is omnipresent in humanity’s various mythologies leaves (perhaps being expelled from) family and comfort, undergoes a series of trials culminating in the achievement of some mighty quest, eventually returning home, bringing an offering and transformed by the process.

In what Meindl et al call the Romance of Leadership, (subscription only, unfortunately) they say that there is a tendency to ascribe leadership to complex and ambiguous organisational events, even though it can be highly uncertain as to whether leadership actually had anything to do with those events or not. In other words, we seek a heroic journey

In other words, in the absence of any unambiguous information about cause and effect, leadership is used as an interpretive device to explain the events that took place. Just because leadership is frequently used to explain an organisation’s success does not mean that this is necessarily so.

It is important to remember that in any study that produces data, the data itself is constructed through the theory held by the researcher. Much research obscures or hides the point of view of the researcher, and so readers who are interpreting the research sometimes have to ask themselves what might the theory of the researcher be. In the case of much leadership research, the built in theory is that leadership exists and the very methodology used by the researchers actually produces the phenomenon of leadership, the phenomenon which the research is seeking to investigate.

How does this occur? In order to reduce the ambiguity of responses to make them easier to process, respondents in leadership research are often asked multichoice questions. This makes coding the answers much easier. At the same time it also has the effect of producing leadership in the frame of reference of the researcher, even if the respondents were not thinking of leadership in that way prior to answering the questionnaire.

A simple test would be to ask "If there were no such thing as leadership, would this research tell us so?" Research in which participants respond to questionnaires would mostly fail this test, because the questions have been framed in line with the researchers’ hypotheses about leadership. If respondents are asked, for example, to indicate which aspects of leadership are most important, then the very process of indicating "clarity of vision" or "feedback on performance" ignores the possibility that there may not actually be such a thing as leadership. Through this process the survey actually creates the phenomenon of leadership. This is an example of a method that could not possibly give the result that there is no such thing as leadership.

So, it is a problem that ambiguity has been neglected in the interests of producing a survey that is easily processed. The rich diversity of experience is rendered invisible (suppressed) in order to make generalisable theory possible. This involves a distortion of social reality in that it privileges certainty and order at the expense of ambiguity and unknown-ness, even though ambiguity and unknown-ness are what we experience in so much of our day to day organisational life in our practice as leaders.

There is much to question about the findings of the leadership research that is presented to us. 

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.

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.

How do you get away from the deficit way of thinking?

In my last post I suggested that the quest for the ideal future diverts people’s attention from what is going on around them in the present moment. Always paying attention to the deficit between where they are now and the ideal where they would like to be, they miss the possibilities of the present.

Again drawing on Patricia Benner’s The Primacy of Caring, here are three questions she suggests that can open up possibility:

• "What can be done now, in the meantime (before the ideal can be realised)?"
   
• "Is there another way to achive the same end?"
   
• "Is the end in sight the most worthy?"

In looking for the possibility inherent in the current situation there is still the notion of desire or some good to be achieved.

Benner suggests that decreasing your reliance on a preconceived end or means of getting there can offer a new point of departure for new possibilities that were not previously available. To me, this applies as much to individuals in their personal lives as much as it does to people in organisations.

The gap analysis perspective can divert your attention from noticing what is going on around you at this very moment.

It is common for many people to see the world as an ideal contrasted with a reality. People are measured against an ideal standard and are diagnosed in relation to that standard. The gap analysis is the classic example – where do you want to be compared to where you are now. There is a deficit and the solution is to work out a plan to close the gap.

Patricia Benner in The Primacy of Caring points out that this orientation towards some future ideal state has some cost. The price people pay for having this mindset is that they become blinded to the possibilities in their current situation. Because their focus is on the future and the gap, it is not on what is going on around them at the present moment.

This reminds me of the acres of diamonds story – I think I heard it from Brian Tracy and it may well be apocryphal. It concerns a farmer who sold up his farm and went off to another country to hunt for diamonds. Years later, he died, penniless and alone. In the meantime, on his farm that he had sold years earlier, guess what they found? Some very very large diamonds.

I think that the focus on an ideal future and the deficit compared to the current state stops people in organisations from seeing the possibilities in what is going on around them. It stops them from seeing the acres of diamonds that are present right now.

In your organisation where are the areas in which you are talking about what should be in the future at the expense of noticing what is going on around you at this very moment?

Suggestions for team meetings

Looking at the whole context of your group’s dynamics over a month or so can help you to identify the natural flows of interaction and how your team meetings can best contribute to and shape it.

What kinds of interaction does your team need? in a month? Most teams need opportunities for the following:

• Understanding what is going on in the organisation that may affect their work.
• Working on ideas for improving your operation.
• Catching up on new developments or information that affects the team.
• Knowing how the team is performing.
• Acknowledging / celebrating success.
• Letting off steam.

Some team meetings rather unrealistically try to achieve all these things in one session – no wonder no one ends up being satisfied! Please don’t think that the team meeting has to accomplish all these things. Think of the other avenues you have for the different kinds of interaction that are required.

For example, do you have Friday night drinks, or a regular day when you have morning or afternoon tea together? If so, then that can provide an opportunity for people to let off steam. You can couple that with acknowledging success. One company I know puts up their wins for the week on a whiteboard at their Friday night drinks – this practice began when they were first starting out. Facing some tough times they decided to use this as a way of focusing on some of the positive things that tended to get buried during a difficult period.

In one group I know, everyone comes to work 30 minutes early (not because they’re super-motivated – it’s so they can get a carpark) and this time before work is where they catch up on how things are going in their personal lives, let off steam and develop their informal relationships with each other.

Even if you don’t have this kind of opportunity for informal group dynamics to take place, you could consider having an ‘informal’ meeting every second time you meet, where there is a much more informal agenda.

Or you could allocate a section of the meeting for informal checking in, perhaps at the start for example. There will always be new developments in your organisation and so it’s good if you can keep this on the regular agenda.

As far as team performance goes, if you are reporting monthly, then you could include this as part of your meeting once a month around reporting time, so it doesn’t have to be on every agenda.

The thing with team meetings is to consider the overall flow of your team’s work and how the team meetings can assist in facilitating the group dynamics your team requires to accomplish its work.

In which I begin contemplating that common bug bear of working groups: team meetings

Recently clients, friends and participants in my management development workshops alike have all been talking with me about team meetings. What are yours like? How frequent? Do you and your team look forward to them? Or are they in the category of “necessary (or unnecessary) evil”. 

When it comes to making team meetings more productive, there is plenty of advice out there about improving team meetings by tightening up control of the meeting.

The following, for example, are all ways of attempting to gain control of the meeting in order to make it more productive:

• Having a preset agenda. 
• Rotating the chairing of the meeting.
• Establishing ground rules.
• Assigning strict amounts of time to each topic.

Of course, these are all attempts by the facilitator to control the meeting in the interests of achieving the predetermined outcomes.

Needless to say I have a different approach.

I think it is useful to consider team meetings in the context of the overall patterns and flows of communication throughout the course of a week or a month.

What do I mean by that? More about this in my next post.