DOWN WITH LEADERSHIP!

There is nothing wrong with leadership in and of itself. It is a critical part of ensuring that organisations have clarity of purpose and direction. The problem is that leadership has become associated with visioning, strategising and creating clarity where there is ambiguity. What has been left behind, by comparison, is the art of being a great boss which has been relegated to the sidelines in terms of importance.


Leadership appeals to one’s ego and creates a subtle connection with those at the very top of the organisation. The status generally associated with being a leader can create a heady cocktail of emotion, ambition and significance where the focus of attention is on the leader, their values, beliefs and behaviour. But what about the followers? In a leader centric organisation the experience of many is that fitting in means accepting the values of the organisation and your leader. Where there is alignment between these, there isn’t a problem but this is rare. The reality is that more often there is a real tension between an employee’s expectation of the leader and the leader’s expectation of themselves. Overlay this with the organisation’s demands of leaders and it is easy to see why the focus in organisations isn’t always on results.

The personality and inner purpose of the leader has become much more important in recent years. A great many training and development programmes have emerged which encourage leaders to understand their real life purpose and to harness this to create a leadership style which is deeply personal and intensely connected with their personal beliefs and aspirations. Whilst this can be a very liberating experience it can also develop leaders who are somewhat disconnected from the purpose of the organisations that pay their salaries and the expectations of the employees that make up their staff teams.

Martin works for an American Media organisation and recently experienced such a development programme. “It was a very personal experience. I am very pleased that my company felt that I was worth investing in to attend as it was quite expensive both in terms of the cost of the course and the time away from my job but the outcomes for me were much more about me and my life and I actually made a decision to leave my company – not immediately but when the time is right as this isn’t a role that fits for me. I do feel guilty about it but that’s just the way it is.”

It may well be that this was an appropriate development programme for Martin and his decision may have happened irrespective of his attendance but it is interesting to reflect on what his team, left back at work whilst he was away, might have wanted him to learn to improve as their leader.

When asked this question directly Martin responded “Oh probably to communicate more, I’ve had that feedback in the past. When I am under pressure I tend to get very single minded and shut myself off. I am not sure that I have really improved on that”

This is essentially the challenge. Leadership must be as much about the followers as it is about the leader themselves and until this balance is restored to more healthy levels we will continue to have organisations, teams and individuals who are not receiving the attention, support, direction and encouragement that would enable them to increase their effectiveness and contribution.

Organisations need to recognise the multiplier effect created by a leader who is also a good boss and who can therefore harness the talents of their teams.

The plea is not so much down with leadership, as this is of course an important dimension of individual effectiveness, but up with the art of being a great boss as this is what generates the collective energy that realises (or releases) the potential and talent of the greatest number of people in organisations.

The whole notion of a focus on being a boss restores the balance in a helpful way as the boss skill set is largely about delivering on the needs of followers. And is in fact entirely complementary to the important leadership and management skills sets but needs additional emphasis as it has been (in our view) overlooked.


Leadership- Developing Clarity on vision, purpose and strategy

Management- Managing and coordinating resources to achieve goals and objectives

Boss focus- Focus on the needs of followers as the best means of ensuring that organisational goals are achieved

One in Twelve

“Leadership – Management - Boss Focus”. Are the differences just artificial? Aren’t they all really the same thing? Actually the definitions themselves are less important than making sure that all of the activities are being given the right focus.

Many organisations have developed competence frameworks where one competence within a framework of 12 competencies focuses on Boss Focus. This simply does not do justice to the importance of managing others. The results are often a jumbled mixture of behavioural descriptions that seek to define all the important people related areas. There are very few that do this really well. The example below is quite typical of many of these frameworks.

Even more worrying is that often the people management competence is just one area being measured across a much larger number of competences.

This leads to a very unhelpful levelling out of the competence areas so that “managing others” simply becomes one competence with no more emphasis or attention than any of the other 11 areas. It’s no wonder then that many managers can avoid what is often the most difficult competence through their strengths in other areas.

That isn’t to say that planning and organisation, analytical capability and decision making aren’t important areas. They also in their own way filter through to impact either positively or negatively on followers but it seems illogical to give these the same status as those competences that are so intimately connected with others effectiveness.

In our view competence frameworks should have a hierarchy that is explicit and keeps the focus of attention where it should be. Those who have responsibility for the line management of others, are in a sense accountable, not just for their own performance but also that of the team or teams that they lead.

Making sure that the total talents of the team are harnessed and aligned properly to delivering organisational goals should be taken very seriously indeed. But is it?

The reality is that though the intent of the organisation is often to maximise the contributions of employees, the decisions and actions on people matters do not seem to be subject to the same rigour as other types of decisions.

As an example an average senior manager with a professional team of six managers might invest up to 24 hours of time preparing for, conducting and following up on the annual appraisals of their team members. If the time invested by the staff members is added into the equation along with the HR time invested in setting up and managing the appraisal process it very quickly adds up to a figure that many senior managers would not be authorised to sign off in terms of budgeted expenditure on a corporate credit card. Even if they were empowered to spend such figures there would be a level of scrutiny over time, sign off by their line mangers, people in Finance checking the validity of the expenditure, Internal Audit reviewing the degree of compliance with process, all these efforts targeted at ensuring that the organisations resource is being properly deployed.

So why is it then that so much time can be invested in people processes like Appraisal reviews and yet no one really seems to care very much about whether the investment in time and effort has yielded any significant value to the organisation at all. Is it any wonder that managers might be more concerned about the way that they complete an expenses form than the way that they conduct their annual performance review meetings.

Of course this paints a very stark and slightly controversial picture and of course there are organisations that do better than the worst examples presented here, but actually our research tells us quite compellingly that we are kidding ourselves if we think that we have got this balance anywhere near what is necessary to truly translate the capabilities of individuals into organisational results.

The messages that managers receive about what is important are subtle and powerful. The saying “what gets measured gets done” is a common one and could be utilised to much greater effect in terms of ensuring that mangers are clear about the priority that they could and should be giving to people issues. If they get the message that managing others is just one area of skill amongst many that they are expected to master, and there are greater consequences to failing to deliver in other areas, this very quickly creates the situation where managers make understandable choices about where and on what to focus their energies.

What is quite frightening though, is that if the same senior manager in our example conducted appraisal reviews in such a way that even half of their direct reports felt demotivated (as a result) for the better part of the rest of the year and worked at 20% less effectiveness, the aggregated cost would attract the kind of interest from others that would mean that this would not go unresolved for long.

Everyone knows that in the vast majority of organisations the people costs are a significant part of the overall cost profile so it’s not as though these costs are even hidden. In our view they just aren’t connected up in people’s minds as investments in quite the same way that other expenditure is.

This would not be a major issue save the fact that this is just another way in which the value of people matters is under played.

Less layers, more staff

Another challenge in raising the importance of people matters in bosses’ minds is that as a result of reorganisations, delayering and flattening of structures the span of control of many bosses has increased.

Small team leader type roles, supervisory or senior technician roles are easy targets when organisations are looking for cost savings. Why pay two people to effectively supervise the output of one person? Remove the more junior person and let the line manager manage the staff member directly. The employee will be more empowered and used their new found freedoms to make a better contribution unconstrained by the weight of too much interference from too many bosses.

Actually we would not dispute the thinking here, there is a logic to ensuring that people are not prevented, by too much supervision, from giving of their best. In fact our research indicates that over controlling the work of others is a very clear mark of a bad boss.

However this does cause two further challenges. Firstly there is a great assumed belief that the line manager can in fact provide all the supports that were in place before the costly layer was removed. Secondly what happens is that managers need to be better bosses to handle bigger teams and the outputs required, often without having had the opportunity to cut their teeth in a more junior and less risky first time manager or supervisory role.

And have we recognised that these organisational changes have generated a need for more emphasis on improving boss capability as many of these jobs have effectively increased in size? All the evidence suggests otherwise. Lack of training in our research was highlighted by staff as being one of the most important factors in the underperformance of bosses.

Our view is that it is not just a lack of investment in training but training at the right levels – i.e. early on enough in people’s careers to create good boss habits and also training of the right type.

Is this all a bit unfair? What about the many organisations that make sizeable investments in training and management development activity? We would offer quiet applause because even the best of these find it hard to make any real connection between the activities that are funded and the capabilities of bosses.