informal coalitions

Reframing leadership – Seven would-be shifts in how we think and talk about leadership practice

In the previous post I suggested that a wide gap exists between popular conceptions of organizational leadership and how people experience it day-to-day. I also suggested that this is due, in large part, to the continuing dominance of a view of organizational dynamics based on scientific rationality, control and predictability.

This deep-seated belief that there is 'one best way' – if only we can find it - is reflected in the ongoing search for pre-packaged ‘best practice’ solutions; universally applicable ‘n-step’ models; and so on. And the problem is compounded by the taken-for-granted assumption that leadership is exercised and performance delivered through the exception-al actions of individual leaders – the supposed heroes (and occasionally villains) of the organizational world.

Mismatch between rhetoric and reality

The fact that this framing of organizational leadership fails to accord with people’s everyday, practical experience of life in organizations (including managers’ own) makes it no less powerful in influencing their perceptions, interpretations and evaluations of what’s going on and how they are supposed to respond. The theory must be ok (one might think) – otherwise why would it persist? We just need to do things better and get them right next time and all will be well. In this way, unhelpful patterns of thought and behaviour become ever-more-firmly embedded.

Leadership practice and development – Mind the gap!

There is a wide gap between the currently dominant view of organizational leadership - as supposedly practised by those in formal leadership positions - and the complex social dynamics of organizational life, as discussed in this Blog.

Although leadership is supposed to be about creativity, innovation and change, and about enabling staff to pursue the leader’s assumed-to-be-far-sighted and inspiring vision, the reality tends to be much more mundane. And, despite what might be suggested by the formal trappings of organization, decisions arising wholly from rational analysis of ‘the facts’ and step-by-step decision-making are rare – if they exist at all. In practice, people tend to make progress through informal interactions, ad hoc sense-making conversations, ongoing political accommodations, and plain, common-or-garden ‘muddling through’. Most significantly, perhaps, whilst leaders might be formally ‘in charge’, they are not – indeed cannot be – in control of the outcomes that emerge from the complex interplay of the myriad local interactions that constitute everyday organizational life.

This is not a matter of incompetence. Far from it. But it might be portrayed as such, were it not to be covered over by the superficial gloss of management speak and formal process rituals that maintain the illusion of rationality, predictability and control.  Or if there was no post-hoc rationalization of actual outcomes that savvy political behaviour demands.

Reframing accountability

Discussions of accountability can too often degenerate into the search for a scapegoat. That is, someone who can be blamed for perceived (i.e. headline) failure or underperformance.  This might satisfy the felt need of some people for retribution. Or offer a seemingly clear-cut resolution to an otherwise more complex challenge. But it does little to encourage people to comment candidly on their own performance or to enable them, individually and collectively, to strive for excellence. 

Why escaping the chains of the dominant management discourse is proving difficult

Ralph Stacey has argued that a fundamental factor in the global financial crisis has been widespread adherence to a management discourse that bears little relationship to people's everyday experience of organizational life (see here). Despite a continuing gap between theory and practice, the view persists that a generalized set of rational, scientific principles can be identified and applied to organizations. As a result, the expectation that organizational outcomes can be predicted and controlled, based on rational analysis and formal processes, continues to dominate managers’ practice, consultants’ offerings and mainstream management publications.

So why does this unhelpful pattern persist?

As I’ve suggested elsewhere, when the sought-after benefits fail to materialize this is most often blamed on poor implementation rather than unsound thinking. That is, the above discourse contains within it the expectation that shortfalls will occur during implementation.  Perversely, then, failure confirms its validity. It is part of what managers take for granted and ‘know’ to be true. By adopting a “do it better and get it right” stance to implementation, failure is rationalized as a problem with execution and the flawed assumptions remain to fight another day.

But there is also a further characteristic of the complex dynamics of social interaction that, paradoxically, tends to reinforce the dominant management discourse. This is the ability – and often the motivation - that exists post-event to explain outcomes in ways that imply the existence of rationality, predictability and control.  Below, I’ve set out three contrasting examples of organizational dynamics, all of which fall foul of this tendency.

Enabling people to excel - remembering Sid's Heroes

In the mid-1990s, the BBC broadcast a series of six half-hour programmes entitled Sid’s Heroes.  This featured workers from a range of organizations (the “heroes”) who had been challenged to improve the effectiveness of a central aspect of their work, using techniques introduced in two-day workshops by management consultant Sid Joynson.  Sid suggested that a 30% increase in productivity was readily achievable in the chosen processes. And, based on the evidence of the shows, his confidence was well-founded. 

Sadly, on a couple of occasions, crass comments by managers in response to the workers’ findings undermined the work that had been done.  But Sid’s insistence that “the experts” in relation to the work processes were in the room with him, not in the management offices, was well demonstrated.  I recall trying to buy a copy of the series from the BBC – on VHS(!) – but it was never made available for purchase.