qxd 05/04/2005 12:00 pm Page i HALF TITLE PAGE Prelims_HGL.qxd 05/04/2005 12:00 pm Page ii Prelims_HGL.qxd 05/04/2005 12:00 pm Page iii TITLE PAGE Prelims_HGL.qxd 05/04/2005 12:00 pm Page iv Publisher’s note Every possible effort has been made to ensure that the information contained in this book is accurate at the time of going to press, and the publishers and author cannot accept responsibility for any errors or omissions, however caused. No responsibility for loss or damage occasioned to any person acting, or refraining from action, as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by the editor, the publisher or the author. First published in Great Britain and the United States in 2005 by Kogan Page Limited Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this pub- lication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms and licences issued by the CLA. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside these terms should be sent to the publishers at the undermentioned addresses: 120 Pentonville Road 22883 Quicksilver Drive London N1 9JN Sterling VA 20166-2012 United Kingdom USA www.uk © John Adair, 2005 The right of John Adair to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
ISBN 0 7494 4363 4 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Adair, John Eric, 1934– How to grow leaders: the seven key principles of effective leadership development/John Adair. Executives—Training of.4’092—dc22 2005002853 Typeset by Datamatics Technologies Ltd, Mumbai, India Printed and bound in Great Britain by Creative Print and Design (Wales), Ebbw Vale Prelims_HGL.qxd 05/04/2005 12:00 pm Page v Contents Introduction 1 Part 1: Exploring Leadership – A Personal Odyssey 5 1 The Qualities Approach 7 Can leadership qualities be developed? 9 2 The Group or Functional Approach 15 What is the Group or Functional Approach? 17; Applying the Group or Functional Approach to training 20 3 Leaders or managers? 25 Discovering the generic role of leader 26; Revisiting the Qualities Approach 28; The manager as leader 31 4 The Situational Approach 33 What is the Situational Approach? 33; The origins of the Situational Approach 35; The Socratic tradition: can leadership be learnt? 39 5 Levels of leadership 43 The application of the Three Circles to organizations 45; The role of the strategic leader 46; Is it possible to transfer as a strategic leader from one organization to another? 47; On practical wisdom 50 Part 2: How to Grow Leaders – The Seven Principles 53 Principle One: Training for leadership 55 The most common error 55; The second most common error 64; Training team leaders 68; You do not teach the Prelims_HGL.qxd 05/04/2005 12:00 pm Page vi vi ■ How to Grow Leaders paths of the forest to an old gorilla 70; Do ‘sheep dips’ work? 73; How to manage leadership training 75 Principle Two: Selection 79 How do people become leaders? 79; The principle of election 84; Applying the Group or Functional Approach to first-line leadership selection 86; Selection – the wider framework 90 Principle Three: Line managers as leadership mentors 97 What is a mentor? 98; The apprenticeship method 99; At least you can say ‘goodbye’ 102 Principle Four: The chance to lead 107 The military analogy 107; What can organizations do? 109; What constitutes a challenge? 109; Fortune favours the prepared mind 111 Principle Five: Education for leadership 117 Thinking outside the box 118; Schools for leadership 122; Growing university leaders 129; New opportunities for ‘education for leadership’? 131 Principle Six: A strategy for leadership development 139 Reviewing the strategy 141; Getting the structures right 142; What surrounds and infuses a successful strategy is culture 145 Principle Seven: The chief executive 149 Learning to be a top strategic leader 150; What does a strategic leader have to do? 154; Make your presence felt in training for leadership 156 Conclusion 163 Index 167 Changing things is central to leadership. Changing them before anyone else is creative leadership.qxd 04/04/2005 10:00 pm Page 1 Introduction ‘Can you point us to an organization that is growing leaders?’ they asked me.
Silence fell in my room, and I gazed out of the window, reflecting. At the time I was the world’s first Professor of Leadership Studies, and so I suppose my two visitors to the university understandably expected me to know the answer. ‘Not the armed forces,’ they added, ‘we have already been to see them.’ After a few minutes… well, I could think of plenty of companies that were training leaders – sending their first-line managers, for example, on action-centred leadership courses – but that was not the question they asked. Who is growing leaders? ‘I cannot think of anyone,’ I replied eventually.
‘Alright then,’ they said, ‘we will do it. Will you help us?’ I agreed to do so, and they told me more about their situation. My visitors, Bill Stead and Edgar Vincent, were the senior group human resources managers in ICI, then known as ‘the bellwether of British industry’. (A ‘bellwether’ is literally the leading sheep of a flock, the practice being to hang a bell around its neck.) This particular bell was already tinkling the death knell of old-style management in the UK.
Not that the rest of the flock had ears to hear it. In 1988, Bill and Edgar told me, the profits of ICI fell by a stagger- ing 48 per cent; the dividend was cut for the first time since the for- mation of the company in 1926. ICI was too large (over 60,000 employees), too bureaucratic and in the wrong markets. The main board executive directors had decided that ICI’s top priority was to develop manager-leaders – the first time, I recall, that I had ever heard that particular phrase.qxd 04/04/2005 10:00 pm Page 2 2 ■ How to Grow Leaders Over the next five years we went about growing leaders in the nine divisions of ICI, but here let me ‘cut to the chase’.
After five years ICI was the first British company in history to make a billion pounds profit. I tell you this story as they say ‘up-front’ in order to impress upon you that leadership is not a soft skill, an optional extra for oiling the machinery of industrial relations. It is a key factor in business success – whatever your business and however you define success. The military learnt that lesson long ago.
As the Greek poet Euripides, who died in 406 BCE, put it succinctly: Ten good soldiers wisely led, Will beat a hundred without a head. Success in war or battle tends to go hand-in-hand with good leader- ship at all levels. Leadership exists on three broad levels, which I named some time ago as strategic, operational and team, and that nomenclature is now beginning to catch on. It is a common fallacy that all an organization needs is a good strategic leader at the helm.
The secret of business success is excellence of leadership at all three levels. Organizations may be able to buy-in new strategic business leaders for astronomical salaries, like world-class football clubs changing their managers. But faced with the task of developing excellent lead- ership at all levels they have no option but to follow that distant bell of ICI in the 1980s and grow their own leaders. Exploring Leadership, as that title suggests, I invite you to join me on a journey of discovery about the nature of leadership and how it can be taught.
My reasons are two-fold. First, unless you are reasonably clear what leadership is, and how it relates to management or command, you will be seriously handicapped when it comes to attempting to develop leadership. If you don’t know what it is, how can you develop it? Then we can get to work together in Part 2. How to Grow Leaders – The Seven Principles with your organization in mind.
I can outline 00_Intro_HGL.qxd 04/04/2005 10:00 pm Page 3 Introduction ■ 3 for you the principles, and clothe them as best I can in flesh and blood, but here you will be doing most of the thinking. For you know your fields of business and your particular organization, and only you know how to apply the principles in your context. What you do with the knowledge you will glean from these pages does depend, of course, on your role. If you happen to be in the role of a principal strategic leader – say as chairman or chief executive – then you ‘own the problem’ of developing leaders.
Or, strictly speak- ing, your organization or institution owns the problem and you need to ensure that it is addressing it in an effective and long-term way. Alternatively, you may have the role in an organization – increas- ingly common now – that makes you a professional adviser to your colleagues in talent development matters, perhaps as head of person- nel or human resources. Or you may be one of the growing number of consultants specializing in helping organizations to develop their leaders – a role that, in the language of theatre, I ‘created’ as Adviser in Leadership Training at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst in the 1960s. Before I begin, I should give you a brief historical overview.
We are in the midst of a global revolution, moving fairly rapidly from old-style management to the concept of business leadership (using ‘business’ in its widest sense of what one is busy in). Leadership is now coming to be seen as existing on three broad levels: team, operational and strategic. I call this the ‘leadership revolution’. The origin of this revolution was my Training for Leadership (Macdonald & Jane, 1968), the world’s first book on leadership devel- opment.
In it I sowed the bean that would one day produce the true leadership revolution, namely the seminal idea that being a manager is but one form of being in the generic role of leader. That role I out- lined for the first time in the book. Also in its pages I signposted the concept of the three levels of leadership, though only in my later books did I develop the idea. It is not my intention to write here a history of the leadership rev- olution in the United States, where my work in the 1960s was ignored.
Nor to comment upon the leadership industry that has now sprung up with its intellectual roots in the United States, and the laborious 00_Intro_HGL.qxd 04/04/2005 10:00 pm Page 4 4 ■ How to Grow Leaders way that it is slowly reinventing the various wheels that I discovered in the 1960s. Others have done that, notably in Leadership in Organizations: Current Issues and Key Trends (Routledge, 2004), edited by John Storey, Professor of Human Resource Management at the Open University Business School. This book is in the nature and style of a personal odyssey. Leadership grows by a natural process.
I have sought to understand that natural way, and to advise organizations on how to work with the grain of nature rather than against it. In that journey I have tried to understand and draw upon my own experience of growing as a leader. Hence this book is the most personal and the most reflective of all my writings on the theme of leadership. Yet I write too with a strong sense that my message is highly rele- vant.
The world has moved on its axis. Never before have the climate and conditions been so opportune as they are today for organizations to embrace the practical philosophy and spirit of this book.