Leaders may be in charge but they are not always in control. Those leading complex organisations need a high tolerance of uncertainty and ambiguity; the capacity for reflexivity, enabling them to notice how they and others are being caught up in the game of organisational life; the ability to recognise patterns of activity between them and their colleagues and more broadly in the organisation; and political savvy as well as knowing how to negotiate, persuade and form alliances.
This is a highly social understanding of leadership which turns on the idea that leading arises in an ensemble performance. Leaders can only lead in participation with others being led. This raises the question about what kind of education or development is needed to produce leaders better able to cope in today's highly complex environments.
Many business schools, training institutions and consultancies offer educational or development programmes which still cleave to the highly individualised understanding of leadership. This isn't surprising because, to an extent, that's what people expect.
The idea of the heroic leader is widespread and co-created, and is a phenomenon to which many business schools feel the need to respond. Orthodox courses usually place great emphasis on the transformational or visionary qualities of individual leaders, partly in response to popular expectations – discussions about leadership on MBA courses where I teach will always eventually call on Steve Jobs or Richard Branson as examples to follow. What would Steve or Richard do?
Or there is an assumption that a leader can adopt a particular leadership style to fit the circumstances in which they find themselves, which is consistent with and amplified by the popular interest in personal make-overs. This way of thinking immediately puts the leader in control of the project of the self and how a person can present to other people, instead of assuming that leaders are as much acted upon as acting; the context defines them as much as they define the context. Leaders may have little choice over which leadership style to adopt since, as Mike Tyson once observed, everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.
Leadership programmes adopting a more social orientation, such as the ones I have been involved in at the University of Hertfordshire and recently in the NHS, are run experientially and encourage discussion about the kinds of problems and dilemmas that people are actually experiencing at work.
This takes the focus away from idealised models of what they should be doing, and concentrates instead on what they are already doing. The idea is to make their current practice more visible to them in order for them to gain a bit more awareness of the game they are caught up in, and so create the possibility of gaining more control.
So what do we find ourselves talking about on these programmes? Participants often develop the ability to notice and talk about power and how it is exercised. Our starting point is that power is neither good nor bad, and it can be both. Organisational life would be impossible unless leaders and managers exercised power. So how are they doing so, and to what end, and how do others respond? Who's in and who's out, and why?
Secondly, we notice how everyday organisational life provokes strong feelings in us, and in our colleagues. Affect is not something to cover over, as the opposite of professionalism, but can be a helpful guide to what is going on for us, and for other people. Learning to be more detached about our involvement can be the start of tolerating uncertainty.
And finally, in having to tell our stories we have to form them, putting a shape to what's going on for us that we might not yet have made sense of until we begin to say it out loud. When we are obliged to give an account to other people we have to structure experience which may have seemed confused to us before. In articulating this we can then notice the degree to which our experience resonates with other people's: patterns begin to emerge about what's going on in our organisations as a result of our talking about it.
In this kind of programme leading is considered to be in good part about noticing, thinking, feeling and above all talking about what we are noticing, thinking and feeling. The more confidently we can do this ourselves, the more we might be helpful to others.
Chris Mowles is professor of complexity and management at Hertfordshire Business School. He is director of the doctor of management programme and author of Rethinking Management: Radical Insights from the Complexity Sciences
Join the community of sustainability professionals and experts. Become a GSB member to get more stories like this direct to your inbox
View all comments >