21-Jan-18

MBA

Leadership, Complexity & Change

Session 1: Introduction

Dr Ahmed Shahid

What is Leadership?
• Video: What is leadership?

• Discuss your own definitions of Leadership.

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A ‘critical’ approach to leadership

• “The philosopher leader thinks
differently, asking: What is important?
What if we think about organizations,
leadership, and ethics in this way rather
than that? Where will it take us?”
(Cunliffe, 2009)

• “Leadership should be aimed at helping

to free people from oppressive
structures, practices and habits
encountered in societies and institutions,
as well as within the shady recesses of
ourselves.” (Sinclair, 2007)

Discuss

• What kind(s) of leadership development

activities have you experienced and what
was/is their impact?

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“There is one thing that I have become

certain of and that is that the methods that
have been used in the past to develop
leaders really, truly, categorically will not be
enough for the complexity of challenges
which are on their way for organizations
(and broader society).”
Petrie, N. (2014) Future Trends in Leadership Development.

It’s a VUCA world!

• Volatile
• Unpredictable
• Complex
• Ambiguous

Johansen, B. (2009) Leaders Make the Future, San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler.

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Some thoughts on Change

"People don't resist change. They resist
being changed!” Peter Senge

“Nothing endures but change.”

“There is nothing permanent except
change.” Heraclitus

"There is nothing more difficult to

take in hand, more perilous to
conduct, or more uncertain in its
success, than to take the lead in
the introduction of a new order of
things.”

Niccolo Machiavelli - The Prince (1532)

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More thoughts on Change

“Change is the law of life. And those who
look only to the past or present are certain to
miss the future.” John F. Kennedy

“To improve is to change; to be perfect is to

change often.” Winston Churchill

How
organisations
have/will
evolved…

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How
organisations
have/will
evolved…

The learning organisation

• “Real learning gets to the heart of what it means to be
human. Through learning we recreate ourselves.
Through learning we become able to do something we
never were able to do. Through learning we reperceive
the world and our relationship to it. Through learning we
extend our capacity to create, to be part of the
generative process of life.” (Senge, 1990, p14)

Senge, P.M. (1990) The Fifth Discipline: the art and practice of the
learning organization. New York: Doubleday/Currency.

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Five disciplines of the learning

organisation
1.Personal mastery
–continually clarifying and deepening our personal
vision, of focusing our energies, of developing patience,
and of seeing reality objectively
2.Mental models
–deeply ingrained assumptions, generalizations, or even
pictures of images that influence how we understand the
world and how we take action

Five disciplines of the learning

organisation …
3.Building shared vision
–a practice of unearthing shared pictures of the future that foster
genuine commitment and enrollment rather than compliance
4.Team learning
–starts with dialogue, the capacity of members of a team to
suspend assumptions and enter into genuine thinking together
5.Systems thinking
–the Fifth Discipline that integrates the other four

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About this module

"Experience is not what happens to a man; it is
what a man does with what happens to him.” -
Aldous Huxley, 1932

• Observe
• Analyse
• Reflect
• Discuss
• Experience

Module structure
• 1.Introduction
• 2.Leading and managing people: basic concepts
• 3.Leadership, Behaviours and Context
• 4.Transformational Leadership and Charisma
• 5.Distributed Leadership
• 6.Followership and Psychoanalytic Perspectives
• 7.Leadership paradoxes
• 8.Issues of Power and Gender
• 9. Issues of ethics and authenticity
• 10.Strategy and Change
• 11. Leadership and Culture

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Learning outcomes:
• Understand key aspects of the leadership of organisational complexity and change in
national and international contexts with a greater appreciation of the implications of risk
and unpredictability
• Recognise opportunities to engage proactively with change and adopt an
entrepreneurial attitude, working with others, in order to achieve enhanced group and
organisational performance
• Build collaborations across organisational boundaries and to support inter-
organisational learning within diverse partnerships
• Understand the value of diversity in organisations, including its impact upon leadership
style, individual contributions to groups, and cross-cultural working
• Demonstrate critical self-awareness in relation to the ethical dilemmas inherent in
leadership and reflecting an appreciation of the significance of CSR, sustainability and
political activity
• Creatively and critically Reflect on their own practice, experience and self-development
• Communicate professionally through the clear and well-articulated presentation of
complex ideas and arguments

Assessment
• The module is assessed in two parts, to be submitted via
Moodle and hardcopy on the specified deadline
– Critical summary of Learning Log– personal learning journal,
reflect on experience and relate to leadership theory 1500-2000
words
– Analysis of an organisational experience/event – Using the
literature and drawing upon your own experience, critically reflect
on how you make sense of organisations, yours/others
leadership approach and the nature of organisational change.
1500-2000 words

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1. Critical Summary of Learning Log

• Each student will keep a "Process Log" to record thoughts and
views, each week as the programme progresses. You need to
capture FOUR KEY ELEMENTS OF PERSONAL CHANGE in
relation to YOURSELF AS A LEADER:
– Thoughts - Ideas that develop and/or change
– Feelings- Feelings engendered in response to any aspect of the
programme/experience
– Experiences - From both the classroom interaction/engagement
and work
– Reflection - Take time to reflect and gain deeper personal
insight.

2. Analysis of Organisational
Experience/Event
• Using the literature and drawing upon your own experience, critically
reflect on how you make sense of organisations, yours/others
leadership approach and the nature of organisational change.
Suggest how you might be more effective.
– Identify and describe a change (current or past) in an organisation in which you
have been employed or actively participated. Ideally this should be a change that
you have initiated or have been an active participant.
– Critically evaluate the change event drawing upon organisational, leadership and
change literature.
– Reflect on it at a personal level - feelings engendered in response to any aspect
of the experience.
– Suggest how it might have been improved in practice.

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How do we learn?
• Learning as the process of acquiring knowledge through
experience that leads to an enduring change in
behaviour
– Cognitive theories – importance of how individuals perceive,
evaluate feedback, represent, store and use information
– Learning though thinking, discovering, understanding,
observing practices, relationship and meaning, dialoguing
– Need to make sense and process feedback to learn, e.g. action
learning

Critical Thinking

Reference: Stella Cottrell (2005) Critical Thinking Skills.

Palgrave Maxmillan

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Methodology

Preferred Learning Styles (Kolb & Kolb, 2005)

• CE/RO dominant - diverging style
–Performs well in situations calling for new ideas
• AC/RO dominant - assimilating style
–Understands wide range of information and
summarises effectively
• AC/AE dominant - converging style
–Seeks practical use for ideas and theories
• •CE/AE dominant - accommodating style
–Learns from ‘hands-on’ experience

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Reflective Enquiry
“Unexamined happenings in life are not
experiences – merely things which
happened and passed by without impact.
Experience is something we reflect upon
and which causes us to modify, in small
ways, our perceptions of situations and the
way we behave in them.”
• Pedler et al (2001)

Process Learning Logs

• What thoughts have been prompted by the session?
• What feelings have you experienced as you learn?
• What experiences will you take away from today to
reflect on further?
• What will you reflect on from today over the next
days?
• What future applications of leadership can you
recommend?

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Reflections, thoughts and

questions ?

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