Yesterday I spent a most informative and interesting day at the Leadership Academy run by the University of Surrey.
Here is a digest of the notes I made as well as some of the questions that have occurred to me as I have thought about the day.
The day started with a brief talk by Mannie Sher of the Tavistock Institute on Styles of Leadership. The interesting points that came from this talk were:
1. That leadership is dispersed through others as part of an organisational culture. One way to interpret this is that the leadership style of the chief executive or departmental head may well permeate down throughout the organisation as it is copied by others. From my experience this would seem to be largely true.
2. A key skill of good leaders is their ability to empower others, perhaps to encourage them to take responsibility for their own decisions and actions. Such empowerment will inevitably cause good leaders to grow in the lower echelons of an organisation. This philosophy (developed by Wilfred Bion) leads to the concept that leadership should be distributed throughout an organisation so as to maximise the human potential.
3. Leadership is an on-going learning process. The lessons will depend on the changes occurring within the organisation.
4. Question: should organisations move away from the concept of the heroic leader; the Winston Churchill, Andrew Carnegie, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates types who dominate their organisations and towards a more consultative style of leadership? Does this decision depend on the tasks that need to be carried out? Perhaps we need to consider here that “leadership can be seen as the collective capacity to create useful results.”
5. Should we be training people in good “followership” both to make it easier for our leaders but also to help them to be more aware of leadership and how they can get the most from following good leaders. The reason for exploring this idea is that being part of a group limits the capacity of each individual for autonomous behaviour.
6. “Leadership is the collective capacity to create useful results.”
7. Envy, the unconscious desire to spoil, is one of the greatest enemies that leaders face. Envy gives rise to attacks on authority. (Read more in Melanie Klein’s book Envy and Gratitude).
8. Optimum leadership style probably requires a collaborative approach.
9. Soft skills have become the new hard skills for leaders.
10. Good leadership relies strongly on the leader’s intuition.
