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Beyond the heroic CEO: the changing challenge of leadershipPeter Hawkins, Professor of Leadership, Henley Business School

Beyond the heroic CEO: the changing challenge of leadership | Peter Hawkins

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IntroductionFor the last thirty years I have been working with senior leaders and their organisations in addressing the many challenges they faced. The question I found most useful in helping these organisations and individuals explore their collective and individual strategy was:

‘What can you uniquely do that the world of tomorrow needs?’This question is like a moebius ring, answering one half of it changes your answer to the other half and thus keeps you in a continuous loop of deepening inquiry. When I arrived at the age of sixty, I asked myself the same question: ‘What could I uniquely do in my sixties (that I could not do in my !fties or forties or seventies) that the world of tomorrow needs?’ How could I utilise the enormous privilege of education, connections, experience in many sectors, countries and organisations and the freedom to chose what work I do to make the best contribution to a greatly challenged world? After much re"ection I arrived at a core concern. I was encountering leaders throughout the world who faced massively increased challenges and yet seeing that the industry of leadership development was not evolving at the same rate. It appeared that, in many cases, the next generation of leaders and the leadership role was not being supported as well as it should be. This is what brought me to Henley Business School – to develop a leadership and leadership development research centre that can provide a two-way bridge between the leading-edge practice in leadership and leadership development in organisations and the best of what was being discovered by academic research. At the same time we hope to bring together the best thinking on what will be the emerging challenges for tomorrow leaders.

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The changing challenges for leadershipMy initial review has involved talking to hundreds of leaders in different sectors and different countries, as well as an analysis of some of the recent literature and research in leadership development. This reveals seven signi!cant challenges for leaders and collective leadership:

! Winning the hearts and minds of your people by engaging people with EQ not just IQ. In #$$% Hooper and Potter wrote that the key issue facing future leaders is… ‘unlocking enormous human potential by winning people’s emotional support … our leaders of the future will have to be more competent, more articulate, more creative, more inspirational and more credible if they are going to win the hearts and minds of their followers.’

" Doing more with less – which means realising the potential in others; inspiring them to go beyond what they think they can achieve. Since the recent economic crisis the pressure to achieve more with fewer resources is an ever- increasing demand in many sectors. In the public sector across Europe this is particularly pronounced. I call it the ‘unholy Trinity’, where every public sector organisation is tasked with !nding a way of simultaneously meeting increasing demographic demand, increasing expectations of quality and decreasing !nancial resources. Raising the collective organisational capability and capacity to respond and connect all three points of this triangle, requires col-lective senior leadership that does not disaggregate the quality issues from responding to increased demand or from reducing !nancial costs.

# Ensuring your leadership team performs at more than the sum of its parts. Many leadership teams are full of very bright, talented and hard working individuals, yet the collective team functions at much less than the sum of its parts. There is much work to be done to help teams become truly high performing. Katzenbach and Smith, in Harvard Business Review, March #$$& de!ned a high performing team as, ‘A team is a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, set of performance goals and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable.’ In my recent book on leadership Team Coaching, I added to this that, in addition, ‘a high performing team … effectively meets and commu-nicates in a way that raises morale and alignment, engages with all the teams key stakeholder groups in a way that grows performance and provides constant learning and development for all its members and the collective team.’ Hawkins, '(##. Later in this paper I suggest ways we can respond to this particular challenge.

$ Embracing constant change. A few leaders still complain about the ‘goal-posts being moved’, but the majority now realise that they are in a world where, not only do the goalposts constantly move, but the rules of the game are also constantly changing. Elsewhere (Hawkins and Wright '(($) I have written about how it has become increasingly dif!cult to achieve competitive advantage through technology, product quality or thought leadership, as these are all essential to continue to be in the game. Whatever the sector, competitive advantage comes from providing a differentiated client/customer experience that stands out and can be trusted for its consistency, reliability and ability to be responsive. As customers and clients increasingly have greater expectations and choice, change will continue to accelerate and the unresponsive organisations will fall by the wayside.

% Orchestrating connections across boundaries. Increasingly the majority of challenges lie not within the parts of an organisation but in the interconnections. The bigger challenges span organisational boundaries and can only be addressed by organisations partnering and collaboratively addressing the ‘wicked issues’ that lie in localities, sectors and joined up working.

& Relating transculturally. This involves not just learning about the differences located in other cultures, but also becoming aware and sensitive to the differences and culture you bring into the room with you. The majority of white people still act on the premise that they do not have a colour or ethnicity, for they are ‘normal’, and are blind to the insensitivity this brings into transcultural relationships (Ryde '(($).

' Creating shared value. Michael Porter, the highly in"uential thought leader in the !eld of strategy, wrote with his colleague Mark Kramer, a ground breaking paper on ‘Shared Value’ for the Harvard Business Review (Porter and Kramer '(##), in which they argue that part of the current economic and global crisis comes from the breakdown of alignment between company goals and social progress: ‘companies … remain trapped in an outdated approach to value creation that has emerged over the past few decades. They continue to view value creation narrowly, optimising short-term !nancial performance in a bubble while missing the most important customer needs and ignoring the broader in"uences that determine their longer-term success.’

They go on to advocate:

‘The solution lies in the principle of shared value, which involves creating economic value in a way that also creates value for society by addressing its needs and challenges. Businesses must reconnect company success with social progress … It is not on the margin of what companies do but at the center. We believe that it can give rise to the next major transformation of business thinking.’

Like Porter and Kramer I would argue that the value of any organisational change is only realised by the subsequent changes in how it engages with, and creates value for, all its stakeholders.

‘Many leadership teams are full of very bright, talented and hard working individuals, yet the collective team functions at much less than the sum of its parts.’

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Beyond the heroic CEO: the need for collective leadershipEven when faced with these ever-increasing challenges we still believe in the heroic CEO who can manage it all. The myth of the perfect CEO or perfect leader is prevalent in many companies, organisations, sports teams and indeed even in the politics of nations. We expect more and more from our leaders, invest such hope in their miraculous powers to turn things round and then are quick to criticise and blame them when they do not live up to our unrealistic expectations.

Warren Bennis, who has spent a life time studying leadership, writes: ‘Our mythology refuses to catch up with us. And so we cling to the myth of the Lone Ranger, the romantic idea that great things are usually accomplished by a larger-than-life individual working alone. Despite evidence to the contrary – including the fact that Michelangelo worked with a group of #) to paint the Sistine Chapel – we still tend to think of achievement in terms of the Great Man or the Great Woman, instead of the great Group.’ (Bennis, !""#)

Since Bennis wrote this the challenges of the world have continued to grow exponentially, in terms of complexity, interconnection, speed of change and the major threats now facing us as a species - and there is more to come.

‘The next thirty years will be the most exciting time to be alive, in the whole history of human beings on this planet.’ So said Tim Smit, the inspirational founder of the UK’s Eden Project, ‘for in that period we will discover whether Homo is really Sapiens or whether we are going are going to join the fossil records of extinct species’.

The leadership challenge is indeed greater now than it has ever been, for, when we wake up in the morning and look in the mirror, we see staring back at us one of the many endangered species on this planet. The challenge would be great if we were just facing global warming or population explosion or technological interconnectedness or the volatility and fragility of the !nancial markets or the exhaustion of accessible oil supplies or the extinction of species at a rate #,((( times greater than ever before; but we are not. We are facing a world where all of these challenges and many more are happening in a systemically complex web of interconnecting forces, at an exponentially accelerating rate so that no expert can possibly understand the whole pattern, let alone know how to address it.

These interconnected challenges can not be addressed satisfactorily by individual expert scientists, nor by teams of scientists drawn from the same discipline, not even by multi-disciplinary teams of scientists drawn from the !nest institutions in the world. It certainly can not be solved by politicians, even with coalitions and a greater level of cross border co-operation than has ever existed, nor by pressure groups focussing on one aspect of the complex pattern. The current world challenges task us as a species to !nd a way of working together, across disciplines

and borders, beyond local and self interest in a way that has never been attained before in history. In working together we need to generate new ways of thinking, for as Einstein so memorably pointed out, you can not solve a problem with the same thinking that created it.

So, if the world needs more highly effective collective leadership and leadership teams, and the challenges and hurdles they have to overcome are getting even greater, we need to explore what can be done to support the development of such leadership.

Yet even here, I would contend, the tide has been "owing against the direction that is needed. So much of the literature and training on leadership is based on developing leadership capability within individuals. The industry of leadership development, including coaching, which together is a multi-billion dollar business world wide, has so far failed to move fast enough to address the changing challenges and needs.

Many people use the term ‘leadership development’, when what they are actually talking about is leader development. Leadership does not reside in individuals for leadership is always a relational phenomenon which at a minimum requires a leader, followers and a shared endeavour. A great deal of leadership development has taken individual leaders, many of whom have IQs (intelligence quotients) many times greater than their EQs (emotional quotients) and who are, by nature, over individualistic and less skilled at collaboration, away from their current context and challenges and provided them with individual and cognitive based learning. No longer are yesterday’s leadership development practices adequate for the enormity of the task that faces leadership.

A series of initial research projects into best practice in leadership development found leadership development was best when it was:

Real time – based on the real challenges that were current for the leaders and which they had a hunger to resolve.

Behaviourally transformative – not just leading to new insight and good intention, but to new actions and relationships, live in the workshop, coaching session etc.

Relational – leaders learning together with colleagues, where attention is given not only to the individuals changing but also the relationships between them.

Involving real stakeholder perspectives – including the challenges from employees, customers, partners, commissioners and regulators in live interaction.

Including unlearning – addressing limiting assumptions, mind-sets, habitual patterns that have been successful in the past and previous roles but need to be unlearnt for leadership to progress.

Henley’s leadership development approach has long focussed on real time challenges and on the relational aspects of leadership development – building self-awareness that allows leaders to understand their role in a collective leadership team. Now we are planning to develop more extensive, global research on best practice in leadership development – discovering how we can continue to best support leaders and leadership

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teams as they tackle these new, unprecedented challenges. We will explore the characteristics of a global leader and how to develop global leadership. We’ll look at how to develop top leadership teams over time; leadership that can engage effectively with multiple stakeholder groups – shifting hearts and minds in the moment / in the room. We will investigate how to develop whole-system leadership for a sustainable world and consider how leaders should handle the power and in"uence that inevitably comes with their responsibilities. This research will support the essential conversation about genuine change in the way we approach leadership in this new world.

To this end a number of my colleagues are already carrying out important research in leadership and leadership learning. Dr. Bernd Vogel has worked with his colleague Heike Bruch, on how leaders and leadership can better engage their people, to boost and focus their organisation’s energy to ignite high performance. My colleague Dr. Kleio Akrivou is researching leadership ethics and moral engagement and my colleague Claire Collins is researching leader development and the role of coaching.

Developing high performing leadership teamsMy own recent work has been in looking at how to develop high performing leadership teams and is published in my new book ‘Leadership Team Coaching: Developing Collective Transformational Leadership.’ (Hawkins $%!!). I begin with an example:

In one company I worked with the senior board had spent months complaining about their new chief executive, a recent external appointment to the company. After being continually lobbied to do something about him, in a board meeting I turned to them all and said: ‘I’m fed up with you all telling me what is wrong with your chief executive. I think you are all delegating leadership upwards and playing the game of waiting for the perfect chief executive. So the question for you as senior team members is: “How are you as a team going to take responsibility for his weakness?”’

In this book I present a new model of the !ve disciplines of the high performing team. For a team to be successful it needs clear commissioning. This includes a clear purpose and de!ned success criteria by which the performance of the team will be assessed. Then the team must clarify its own mission including purpose, goals and objectives, core values, ways of working, roles and expectations and importantly a compelling vision for success. Living this is a different challenge. The team needs to constantly co-create together so the mission has a bene!cial in"uence on performance. The team must then connect outside to engage staff and stakeholders and transform relationships that drive improvements in the organisation’s performance.

At the centre of the model is core learning that sits in the middle and above the other four. This is the place where the team stands back, re"ects on its own performance to consolidate the learning for the next cycle of engagement.

The high-performing leadership team needs to be effective in all !ve of these disciplines. Although there is clearly an implied progression for moving through these disciplines, they are a continuous cycle and there is a constant dialogue between them. So, as is often the case, if the commissioning is not clear the team needs to have a dialogue between creating its own mission and getting buy-in and agreement from stakeholders.

A high-performing leadership team takes time out to take stock, re"ect on the patterns within and between disciplines and learn more about both its own team functioning internally and externally.

Great teams are those who know exactly what is required and have a passion for their collective purpose. They have a keen interest in each other’s successes, setbacks and learning and a real sense of partnership between the team and with the board and stakeholders.

This does not occur by happenstance. It occurs when the !ve disciplines are in place, connected and in balance. Team coaching needs to be able to work with all !ve of these disciplines, each of which require a different team coaching approach and a team coach who can connect the personal, interpersonal, group, organisation and wider system and business dynamics and help the team not only become high performing but create greater value for the system they serve.

A carefully selected and well supported team has far more chance of being successful in leading today’s organisations than a heroic leader. But, we must be aware of replacing one myth with another about a super-team. A successful team needs to practice, have a commitment to learning and development and receive quality team coaching to be effective.

‘Great teams are those who know exactly what is required and have a passion for their collective purpose.’

Core Learningco-ordinating

and consolidatingRe!ecting, learning,

integrating

Task

Process

OutsideInside

Clarifying Primary purpose Goals Objectives Roles

Co-creating Interpersonal and team dynamics. Team culture

Commissioning Ensuring a clear commission for the team and contracting on what it must deliver

Connecting and engaging all the critical stakeholders

(within boundary) (within boundary)

The (ve disciplines of high-performing teams

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References Bennis, W. & Biederman, P.W. (*++,) Organizing Genius: The secrets of successful collaboration. London: Nicholas Brealey.

Bruch, H. & Vogel, B. (-.**) Fully Charged: How Great Leaders Boost Their Organization’s Energy and Ignite High Performance. Harvard Business Review Press.

Hawkins, P. (-.**) Leadership Team Coaching: Developing Collective Transformational Leadership. London: Kogan Page.

Hawkins, P. and Wright, A. (-..+) Being the Change you want to see: developing the leadership culture at Ernst and Young” Strategic HR Review Vol / No0 -..+ pp*,–-1 Emerald Group Publishing

Hooper, R.A. & Potter, J.R. (-...) Intelligent Leadership: creating a passion for change. London: Random House.

Katzenbach, J., and Smith, D. (*++1a). The Discipline of Teams. Harvard Business Review, March/April *++1, ***-*-..

Porter, M.E. and Kramer, M. R. ( -.**) Shared Value: How to re-invent capitalism and unleash a wave of innovation and growth. Harvard Business Review: January: February -.** Vol: /+: Issue*/-:2-–,,.

Ryde, J. (-..+) Being White in the Helping Professions. London: Jessica Kingsley.

Peter Hawkins, Professor of Leadership at Henley Business School, is also joint founder and emeritus chairman of Bath Consultancy Group. He is a leading researcher, consultant and writer on leadership and change, Board and top team development, coaching strategy and organisational strategy as well as chairman of a number of SME companies. He has worked with many leading organisations in Europe, South Africa, America and the Far East co-designing and facilitating strategy reviews as well as major change and organisational

transformation projects. Peter is a thought leader in executive coaching and team coaching and President of the Association of Professional Executive Coaching and Supervision (APECS). Peter is the author of a number of books, the most recent being ‘Leadership Team Coaching’ published by Kogan Page in Spring "#$$. peter.hawkins@henley.com

Professor Peter Hawkins

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Executive EducationHenley Business School Greenlands Henley-on-Thames Oxfordshire, RG9 3AUexec@henley.com Tel +44 %0&1491 418 767www.henley.com

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