Enhancing leadership: Liberalise organisational leadership

According to recent studies, more than 50 percent of young people want to become leaders in their organisations, although they don’t necessarily view organisation in a traditional way. We know that they also seek challenging assignments and are willing to work hard but their greatest fear is that there’s a “lack of professional growth opportunity” in too many organisations. Their willingness to stick around may well be contingent upon how well leadership developers and managers respond to this need. (From “Learning Leadership” by James Kouzes and Barry Posner).

The idea that leadership is an activity for a limited and gifted few hinders the development of leaders. Leadership is an activity for all who are interested and even those who may not be interested but are introduced to it. The limitation of leadership to a small section of individuals enables that section to monopolise something that should be liberalised. This article in the series on enhancing leadership makes the argument for liberalising leadership with four organisational perspectives.

Leadership is everyone’s business

The common question about whether leaders are born or made raises a counter question – that of whether people are born with leadership DNAcan learn leadership. There is as yet no research evidence that leaders are born. Some may argue that it is a mix of both but what there is proof of is that leaders are made. People can and do develop as leaders and this takes place regardless of gender, age, nationality or any of the factors that differentiate human beings.

Leadership is everyone’s business. It is neither a place nor a position. It requires skills and abilities that are applicable at all levels and in every place. Being at the top of an organisation does not automatically imply theexercise of leadership. Organisations need to understand and demonstrate the philosophy that leadership is everyone’s business.

Leadership at all levels

Emerging from the premise that leadership is everyone’s business is a related notion that leadership takes place at all levels. A security man at the gate to a corporate office exercises leadership at his level. The cleaners who take care of the areas used by the most senior people in an organisation display leadership at their level. The newly employed management trainee could well be leading a small team within one year. This was my personal experience but nobody told me at that time that I was a leader or taught me anything about leadership.

A trainee is in a leadership position whether it is deemed significant or not and has to lead others. Neglecting what happens to leaders at the lower level of organisations considerably accounts for the diminishing quality of leadership as employees move up the career ladder. Corporate entities cannot expect staff that have become strictly functional experts to present leadership expertise when they are higher up in the hierarchy. The reality of today’s workplace is that you can know how to do a job but not know how to get it done through people. To remedy this gap, organisations should instil leadership skills into their employees from the onset.

Leadership competencies as a progress prerequisite

If you want to fill a legal officer’s role, you will not be looking for an engineer. If you want to fill an accountant’s role you will not look for a physicist. Yet, in trying to fill leadership roles, organisations identify employees with strong functional competencies and assume they will automatically plug into leadership. Career progression is typical focused on functional competencies. There is hardly any leadership training offered nor preparation for the transition from the functional to the relational.

Research by Zenger/Folkman Training Database conducted in the U.S. suggests that managers first obtain leadership training at an average age of 42 – ten years after they begin supervising people. This pattern is applicable in several organisations within my professional purview. By the time employees are getting into leadership programmes, they are set in their largely functional mind sets. One solution to this problem is to include leadership competencies as a prerequisite for career in addition to technical skills.

Pipeline of ready leaders

A well-known failure of organisational leadership is the absence of suitable successors. Without succession, the impact of otherwise good leadership is severely diminished. Unfortunately, organisations talk about succession planning far more than they activate succession plans. The absence of succession plans cuts across organisational hierarchies. It is especially evident when even long-tenured CEOs are replaced with externally sourced individuals. This situation throws a challenge to CEOs to ensure that their replacements are ready and in waiting. General Electric (GE) has mastered this approach by consistently having various options for the CEO role. The surplus of ready leaders has made GE a leading source of CEOs for other companies. Corporations should be deliberate about developing pipelines of ready leaders at all levels.

Conclusion

If leadership is to be enhanced, it should be liberalised by organisations. This entails making it everyone’s business, developing leadership at all levels, using leadership competencies in determining progression and having a pipeline of ready leaders.

 

Weyinmi Jemide