Contemporary and Comparative Practice in Events

Lecture 4: Transformational Management for the Event Practitioner

Aaron McIntoshA.McIntosh@gcal.ac.uk

Overview• Changing boundaries

• Transformational management

• Peters and ‘the WOW project’

• Strategic Leadership: creativity and innovation

• The Reflective Practitioner

• Managing the service encounter

• Enhancing service relationships

Changing boundaries• Changing nature of leisure organisation

• public sector links to corporate sector

• voluntary organisations becoming businesslike

• strategic alliances in the private sector

• Need to go beyond ‘technical skills’ (Whitson & Slack, 1989)

• “The traditional boundaries which have demarcated public, voluntary, and private sector agencies have become blurred.” (Slack, 1999, p399)

• transformation as individual and organisational

• Technical, human and conceptual skill needs in management (Lashley & Lee-Ross, 2003)

Transformational management

• Value of looking at the organisation ‘holistically’

• Need to foster creativity among first-line managers– “Solutions are more likely to be novel and creative because the process

is unencumbered by ‘safe’, proven or traditional solutions.” (Lashley & Lee-Ross, 2003, p229)

• Intrapreneurial management thinking requires:– Ideas champion– Sponsor– Orchestrator

• Understanding employee attitudes and aspirations, creating “a self-perpetuating cycle of enhanced reputation, thereby improving attraction and retention of talented workers and minimising the problem of high labour turnover” (Lashley & Lee-Ross, 2003, p230)

Transformational management• Transformational leaders

– Recognise the need for revitalisation– Create a new vision– Institutionalise change (Tichy & Devanne, 1990)

• Need for disintegration, or creative destruction

• Key characteristics include:– Identifying themselves as change agents– Being courageous– Believing in people– Being value-driven– Being life-long learners– Dealing with complexity, ambiguity, and uncertainty– Being visionaries

“It includes leadership that stimulates followers to be creative and innovative, and to challenge their own beliefs and values as well as those of the leader and the organisation. This type of leadership supports followers as they try new approaches and develop innovative ways of dealing with organisational issues. It promotes followers’ thinking things out on their own and engaging in careful problem solving.”

(Northouse, 2004, p177)

Transformational management

• Leadership personality is important…….but goals and strategies, structure, personnel policy, resources, and workload all help or hinder

• Can we get beyond ‘transactional’ leadership? (Gasil, 1997)

• Leaders building upon the potential of their workforce– Bass & Avolio and the Multi-factor Leadership Questionnaire

• Need for transformation at all levels, not just among ‘charismatic leaders’

Peters and ‘the WOW project’• Making staff, and work, important

• Going beyond ‘satisfied customers’

• WOW projects– Matter– Make a difference– Are things you can brag about…forever– Transform the enterprise– Take your breath away– Make people smile– Highlight the value you add…and why– Are NOT hype– ARE a necessity (Peters, 2003)

• “Reward excellent failures. Punish mediocre success” (Daniels, quoted in Peters, 2003, p198)

• Too many organisations are risk averse

Strategic Leadership: creativity and innovation

• High potential for transformational management in the events sector

• Getting things done:

• passion

• imagination

• persistence

“We need heroes: mortal exemplars of the exciting new way of doing things. We need demos: palpable proof that this exciting new way of doing things is eminently doable. We need stories: riveting tales that fire the imagination of future but-as-yet-reluctant heroes-in-waiting.”

(Peters, 2003, p213)

The Reflective Practitioner

• Modern use of ‘reflection-in-action’ (Schon, 1991)

• “Knowledge is created through the transformation of experience.” (Kolb, 1984, p38)

• Reflection as key to being a critical practitioner

• Important in times of change, or in helping make sense of the familiar– What happened?– How do I feel about it?– What does it mean? (Hammond & Collins, 1991)

• Tools for…and barriers against

Managing the service encounter

• Growth of consumer expectations

• Experience affected by the level of service quality

• The service encounter

• intangibility

• inseperability

• heterogeneity (Drummond & Anderson, 2004)

• Event experience often influenced by a number of ‘human element’ factors

Enhancing service relationships

• Understanding the customer journey– Development of pre & post event activity

• Personal effectiveness via staff development

• Importance of benchmarking

• Use of organisational experience, good or bad (Drummond & Anderson, 2004)– Identify new consumers– Re-engage traditional stakeholders

Conclusions

• Need for critical thinking skills (Foley et al, 2004)

• balance between vocational and liberal education

• Competitive advantage coming from the human capital of workers

• Management focus of the future

• manage innovation and change

• grow workforce diversity

• deal with globalisation

• Need to realise the need for revitalisation (Tichy & Devanne, 1990)

Conclusions“Transforming leadership occurs when one or more persons engage with others in such a way that leaders and followers raise one another to higher levels of motivation and morality. Their purposes, which might have started out separate but related, in the case of transactional leadership, become fused…..Various names are used for such leadership: elevating, mobilizing, inspiring, exalting, uplifting, exhorting, evangelizing [pederastic?]. The relationship can be moralistic, of course, but transforming leadership ultimately becomes moral in that it raises the level of human conduct and ethical aspirations of both leader and the led, and thus has a transforming effect on both….”

(Burns, 1978, p20)

References• Avery, GC (2004) Understanding Leadership. London: Sage.

• Bacon, W (1988) The professionalisation of leisure management. A paper presented at the Leisure Studies Association 2nd International Congress, Brighton, UK.

• Burns, JM (1978) Leadership. New York: Harper and Row.

• Bass, BM & Avolio, BJ (1997) Full Range Leadership Development Manual for the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire. Palo Alto, CA: Mindgarden.

• Drummond, S & Anderson, H (2004) Service quality and Managing Your People, in: Yeoman, I et al Festival and Events Management. Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann.

• Ekvall, G (1999) Creative climate, in: Runco, MA & Pritzker, SR (eds.) Encyclopaedia of Creativity, pp.403-412. San Diego: Academic Press.

• Foley, M; Frew, M; McGillivray, D; McIntosh, A & McPherson, G (2004) Problematising “education” and “training” in the Scottish sport and fitness, play and outdoor sectors. Education + Training, Vol.46, pp.236-245.

• Freire, P (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Bergin & Garvey.

• Gastil, J (1997) A Definition and Illustration of Democratic Leadership, in: Grint, K (ed.) Leadership, pp.155-178. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

• Hammond, M & Collins, R (1991) Self-Dreicted Learning. London: Kogan Page Limited.

• Kolb, DA (1984) Experiential Learning. New Jersey: Prentice Hall.

References

• Lashley, C & Lee-Ross, D (2003) Organisational Culture for Leisure Services. Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann.

• Northouse, PG (2004). Leadership: Theory and practice. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

• Peters, T (2003) Re-Imagine! London: DK.

• Puccio, GJ; Murdock, MC & Mance, M (2007) Creative Leadership. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

• Schon, DA (1991) The Reflective Practitioner. Avebury: Ashgate Publishing Limited.

• Shor, I (1980) Critical Teaching and everyday Life. Boston, MA: South End Press.

• Slack, T (1999) Changing Boundaries and New Management Implications for Leisure Organisations, in: Jackson, EL & Burton, TL (eds.) Leisure Studies: Prospects for the Twenty-First Century, pp.399-413. Pennsylvania: Venture Publishing.

• Tichy, NM & Devanna, MA (1990) The Transformational Leader. New York: John Wiley & Sons.

• Whitson, DJ & Slack, T (1989) Deconstructing the discourse of leisure management, Society and Leisure, Vol.12, pp19-34.

• Yukl, G (2006) Leadership in Organisations. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education Limited.