MODULE 1 UNIT 3

Video 1 Part 1 Transcript

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Module 1 Unit 3 Video 1 Part 1 Transcript

TIM MORRIS: Within both business and society, we’ve moved beyond the earliest theories,
that saw leadership as the preserve of great men born to be powerful leaders. We now
recognise that effective leadership consists of traits and behaviours that are both inherent
and acquired, and that leaders can work to become more effective.

How exactly can you become a highly effective leader? In this video, we have assembled
some guest experts to discuss their strategies for developing effectiveness as leaders.

How do you know ineffective leadership when you see it?

JULIE NERNEY: I think ineffective leadership comes across as being inauthentic. And
people spot that, they can see it. And there’s normally between one and three reasons for
that.

So, it’s because the leader is thinking about themselves, so the individual, rather than the
collective. It can be when a leader is to task-focused, so very much focused on getting stuff
done, rather than thinking about the people element, not having that in balance. Or it can
be about where there’s not a good cultural fit. So, you might be working in an organisation
and leading a team there which is very collaborative or consensus-driven, but you’re very
dictatorial or authoritative, and that’s a bad fit.

MICHAEL GILL: So for the purposes of this point, I’m going to define effective leadership
as successfully organising the activities of the group to set, and then achieve, goals,
whatever those goals may be. And, therefore, ineffective leaders are those individuals who
cannot organise a group to achieve particular goals.

But it’s not that straightforward, even though it may seem straightforward to understand
ineffective leadership in this way. Because many people, within and without a group,
including a leader, will have different views on whether goals have been achieved, or even
whether they could be achieved. This raises a much more subtle point, which is when we
asked what makes an ineffective leader, the real question that belies this is, “ineffective for
whom?”

This means that a leadership failure, or an ineffective leader, is often in the eye of the
beholder. You only need to look at political leaders in most countries to see examples of
this. Even great leaders from the past were frequently derided by certain elements of their
constituency. And even if we were to say, “a person needs to do X”, even if they simply
achieve X, that doesn’t account for the fact that many people view leadership not just in
terms of achievement, but also how something is achieved. So not just did you achieve it,
but how did you achieve it?

STEVE MOSTYN: For me, it’s fairly straightforward. It’s about framing the issue, framing
the issue for the team or the organisation. And the misdiagnosis of what needs to happen
is, for me, the number one failure in leadership. It’s either a process or an individual
attribute, and the two are quite different things. That that’s how I see it. I don’t particularly
linked it to personality, or preferences, or any of those dynamics. It’s more around the
wrong diagnostic of what an organisation needs to do to grow and flourish.

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If you were asked to describe what constitutes an “effective leader”, what comes to
mind? How do you think people act as effective leaders?

GILL: So for the purposes of reflecting on effective leadership, I will define effective
leadership as the ability to successfully organise the activities of the group, to set and then
achieve goals, whatever those goals may be. And that raises several questions. Typically,
well, what are the factors that drive effectiveness? What drives effective leadership? And
answer that, we need to consider the history of leadership. And there’s been an incredibly
long history of ideas and theories about precisely what it is that enables a leader to be
effective. So it may be worth considering these briefly, to show that how we think of great
or effective leaders has changed over time.

So if we go back, one of the most common-place and dominant theories, modern theories,
of leadership was in the 19th century, and it’s called great man, or trait, theory. And this
suggests that effective leaders possess certain traits or characteristics. So, for example,
they may be very decisive, or intelligent, or strong. That theory was superseded by a
recognition that, actually, some people can learn to become leaders, and those skill sets
of leadership can be taught. And then there are other theories, like contingency theory,
that, said, actually, it’s important to understand leadership in context; what might work in
one setting doesn’t work in another. And then from the 1960s and 70s, there was a focus
on charismatic leadership, and emotional intelligence, and emotional leadership, and all
these ideas became popular particularly towards the end of the 20th century.

So the scholarship has generated huge amounts of insights into these different factors that
might drive effective leadership, but it consistently reminds us that, to be an effective
leader, you must consider the context. So, for example, we might consider decisiveness
as a key trait to be effective, but there are some times when being indecisive is a real boon.
And you will frequently find cases where ostensibly valuable traits hindered leadership.

So all of this means that it depends, of course it depends, but the question is, well, what
does it depend on? And to understand that is a question of context, and whether a leader
is effective or not in this process of managing this context, depends on who is judging
them, and when they are judging. So there’s a more subtle point here, which is, when we
ask what makes an effective leader, the real question is, “effective for whom?” And this
means that effective leaders need to be clear about what they are trying to do, and how
they would define success.

Typically, this means understanding your constituents and the broader context. So, for
example, the people who will be affected by your decisions. This might be shareholders, it
might be staff, it might be the wider society. But to do that is difficult. It’s time-consuming,
and to understand the needs of your constituents is an ongoing task, because it will keep
changing. And, therefore, it is likely that you will also need to change how you lead over
time. There will always be challenges. So, for example, there’s a lot of research at the
minute around leadership how it can affect mental health, and being aware of different
trends and different needs of people, enables you to be an effective leader.

MOSTYN: I think it’s about framing the right need of the organisation. And how do you do
that? And I’m not convinced that leadership is an attribute of authority figures, and there’s
a wonderful irony that we are working in a business school, we work with execs. Many
executives don’t show leadership, and many other people show leadership, but are not
executives.

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But it’s about identifying, what is the work? What is the real work? And the best leaders do
that, I think, with their team and with the wider context of their organisation. So they involve
everyone in, I think, a conversation about the organisation, and what its priorities are. So
good leaders, I think, do diagnostic work with the team, it’s a mutual effort, and then they
put pressure on the system to make sure resources are aligned accordingly to that. And,
of course, you know, leadership is a simple, human process. So doing it from a human
standpoint and understanding what motivates other people, I think, is so important as well.
Those are the kind of baseline of what I see effective leaders do.

I think the key is about building leadership capability, it’s not just an individual thing we’re
trying to develop. So I think capability is system-wide, and one of the most exciting
examples, that I’ve been part of, is with the Further Education Community in the UK. We’ve
now had about 170 CEOs through that programme. And it’s about building common
capability of leadership, and also to develop the next leaders and generation with them as
well. We’ve seen some incredible results of people moving from vice principal into principal
roles, having been involved in our process, which is asking those key questions of how do
you build leadership capability and capacity?

And, in summary, it’s about managing transitions effectively. Every single challenge for a
leader is managing a transition from being a line manager, to a director, to being a finance
specialist, to being a general manager, and helping with those transitions is key.

NERNEY: So I think a leader only has one job to do, and that’s to create an environment
which lets everybody be the best version of themselves. That’s it. That’s their job.

And you do that by two things. First, is being really clear about “what”. So what are the
goals, objectives, priorities, for whatever you’re leading? And the second is by investing
time in shaping the “how”. So how people work, the ways of working, the culture. And those
two things are vital together, and, in fact, I think the “how” is more important than the “what”.
So I’ve seen people focus really hard on the “what” and not on the “how”, and then delivery
is poor, or it’s late, or is substandard. Whereas people who invest time in shaping the
“how”, and the culture, and the way of working, get a greater sense of performance. It’s a
performance accelerant. And so, they could get past a very average “what”, by having
invested time in the “how”.

And that’s, for me, because effective leadership is always about people. People are the
differentiator. They’re the things that make the difference between successful or
unsuccessful delivery.

The other thing you’ll notice about effective leaders is you’ll see they’ve got really strong
feedback loops. So, they’ll be constantly looking for feedback, and they’ll be evidently
focused on their own continuous improvement and learning. And that’s really important.
You can see it in action.

And I think, ultimately, that’s because great leaders have the right balance between
confidence and humility. So enough confidence to be able to lead, and enough humility to
know that they don’t have all the answers, and the self-awareness to know they need to
continually improve their leadership practice.

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