What is your organisation’s number one success factor?

What is it about your organisation that will make it successful? 

And we do not mean in the short term! You can increase production; increase your selling price; cut costs; lay people off; reengineer; and ‘wield the axe’ and make impressive short-term gains. And, yes, chasing short-term gains is sometimes both necessary and desirable. But what is it about your organisation that will ensure long-term sustainable success? Is it your products, processes, technology, management systems, culture, resources or perhaps leadership? Or something else? What is it?

Leadership takes precedence…

We suggest that leadership is the key factor in determining organisation success. And again, we are talking about the long-term sustainable success of your organisation.

There are some management theorists that do not buy the argument that leadership is the key factor in determining organisation success. They assert that culture, or efficient management tools, or any number of ancillary attributes are the key factors for success. These things are important. But leadership takes precedence over all other success factors.

The reason is simple. Leaders create the culture and use the tools. Successful cultures do not automatically spring up – leaders create and nurture them. Management tools have no usefulness unless they are applied correctly and appropriately. Leaders make these decisions. In fact, many management tools, and specifically reengineering, are needed precisely because leaders in the past failed to exercise the leadership needed in order to realign and refocus the organisation.¹ 

Our hypothesis is that: Leadership takes precedence over all other organisation success factors. If this is correct, the question then is not whether leadership is the key factor of organisational success or not. The question is: What are you doing to develop leaders at all levels? 

What are you doing to develop leaders at all levels?

If leadership is as important as believed, then you need to approach the development of leadership in your organisation thoughtfully, intentionally, and systematically. Developing leaders is too important for your organisation’s sustainable success to be left to chance. 

You can test this by asking a few basic questions. What will your organisation do when:

• Competitors imitate your products, processes, and management systems
• ‘New’ technology renders your ‘old’ technology obsolete
• Market forces leave you with a product that no one wants to purchase at your sustainable price point
• Your resources run out
• Your culture becomes counter-productive

Leadership is the only factor in your organisation that can answer these questions and provide solutions. It is vital that organisations have leaders at every level who can take smart decisions and implement them rapidly and effectively. Winning organisations have strong leadership at every level. The ability to develop leaders needs to be a core competency that your organisation possesses.

How can you approach the development of leaders in a thoughtful, intentional, and systematic way? How can you ensure that leadership development interventions ‘stick’ and provide an acceptable ROI?

In the rest of this article, we argue the need for a comprehensive, integrated, and common leadership development framework in organisations to provide the foundation for leadership development.

Terminology

Before we look at the arguments, it is important to define the terminology. We argue for a leadership development framework that is comprehensive, integrated, and common. This is what we mean by these terms:

• Framework: A common architecture that fully represents the reality, scope, and complexity of organisational leadership practice
• Comprehensive: Must be able to completely represent the totality of the leadership role of all leaders in the organisation
• Integrated: Linked vertically through all levels of leadership
• Common:  Relevant to all leaders at all levels in the organisation

Seven Arguments

1. The Performance Argument

Provides Leadership Role Clarity

Two thoughts are important here:

• Organisations stand or fall by the quality of their leadership
• Role clarity is the number one correlate to organisational performance 

If we link these two thoughts, then it becomes imperative for organisation performance that all leaders have absolute clarity concerning their leadership role. All-round leadership performance is essential. Deficient performance in one area will substantially reduce the overall effectiveness of leadership in other areas. This suggests a comprehensive development framework that considers the full spectrum of a leader’s role at all levels.

Assists Integration Between Leadership Levels

Low organisation performance is often due to the ‘dislocation’ between levels. A development framework that is integrated and common between leadership levels and supported by organisational leadership practices will assist connectedness and therefore performance.

Supports Sustained High Performance

Leadership, which is effective and well executed, and that mobilises broad support, while being supported by organisation practices, is much more likely to bring about sustained high performance. This can only sensibly and deliberately occur if there is a comprehensive, common, and integrated framework of leadership. 

 2. The Development Argument

Compliments Good Learning Principles

Learning best takes place within a metacontext (overarching framework) towards which all the parts are understood, integrated, and hung for systemic recall.² For this truth to be leveraged in the organisation, a comprehensive ‘meta’ organising context (framework) of leadership becomes an essential requirement.

Enhances Experiential Learning

A 20-year empirical study has shown that 60 – 80% of a leaders’ current practice in terms of their leadership can be ascribed to experiential rather than formal developmental interventions. Andrew Kakabadse goes further and suggests that ‘leadership development is not about learning new facts as much as releasing the insights that already exist.’³ If this is so, then a method to enhance experiential learning must be found. This only becomes feasible if there is an organising framework to which leaders can refer and relate their experiences.

Improves Self Development

Self-development is a key area of leadership development. When leaders become aware of a leadership performance gap, they put considerable energy and effort into closing that gap through self-learning. Here again a comprehensive organising framework must be used as a diagnostic base to identify the gaps. If it is not comprehensive, then the leader may not necessarily be aware of any gap.

Improves Coaching and Mentoring

The power of coaching and mentoring efforts is enhanced when all supervising leaders (coaches) have access to a common leadership framework and reference base from which to perform these activities. This facilitates language and therefore understanding. It also provides a diagnostic base from which priority areas for coaching and mentoring can be derived and related. It is also much more likely to bring about a common leadership culture. 

Enhances Training and Development

Building mastery in areas of weakness through formal, on the job, in-house or outsourced training and development interventions is enhanced by being able to contextualise the learning to a complete framework. Making sense of the countless leadership gurus and development programmes available assists in the choice of solutions as well as the contextualisation of content. This allows for more targeted solutions based on clear and comprehensive need identification as well as improved assimilation, recall and on-the job application. 

Organisation wide leadership improvement interventions can also be targeted to the actual needs and priorities of the organisation as they emanate from diagnostics and references to a common framework.

Assists Fast-Tracking

From time to time, it becomes vital to fast-track people. This process can become a hit and miss affair without a normative leadership development framework. On the other hand, the process is facilitated by a framework that can continuously indicate the existing gap so that development can be prioritised.

3. The Contextualisation and Institutionalisation Argument

Organisation Wide Interventions

Few would argue that for organisation interventions to be effective they must be driven through the organisation’s leadership at all levels. The better these interventions are contextualised to the leadership role of each leader the more effectively they will be institutionalised. These could include themes such as:

• Safety
• Diversity Management
• Teamwork
• Continuous Improvement (Innovation)
• Performance Excellence
• Cost Reduction
• Behavioural Change, etc

Here too it is important to have a framework of leadership that can demonstrate clearly what the leadership practices required are for leading such a theme through the organisation.

Grounds Critical Organisation Practices

Certain leadership practices are essential for ensuring sound organisation wide leadership. These could include:

• Planning and Goal Setting
• Performance Management
• Succession Planning
• Mentoring, etc

These can only be sensibly and coherently done if they are contextualised within the architecture of a shared and comprehensive leadership organising architecture.

4. The Integration Argument

Vertical Connection and Alignment

To create a strong leadership engine in the organisation, leaders at each level must be strong and play their part optimally. This goal is enhanced by having a leadership framework which allows for the diversity of requirements at the distinct levels of leadership complexity yet is also vertically connected and integrated.

Creating the context and understanding for sound up and down communications within the organisation is enhanced by a common framework useful for observing, diagnosing, analysing, and interpreting leadership issues and their remedy.

5. The Common Language and Culture Argument  

Assists Forming a Shared Leadership Culture

It is common knowledge that language and symbols are important in the creation of culture in any organisation. It is also true that leaders have by far the greatest impact on the creation of culture. A common and integrated leadership framework that forms the basis for shared leadership language and understanding is therefore crucial in the formation of a shared culture. 

 6. The Transformation Argument

Assists the Integrity and Coherency of Transformation

Organisation development and transformation is often brought about through implementing certain ‘themes’ into the organisation. As we have seen earlier, these are enhanced by having a shared, comprehensive, and integrated leadership framework.

Most transformation efforts fail because there is a vertical and horizontal dislocation of purpose, goals, understanding and/or culture. This leads to poor contextualisation throughout the organisation. A common, comprehensive, and integrated leadership framework would go a long way towards eliminating this risk.

A key area of competence for leaders is the ability to bring about transformation. Transformations are successful when the overall integrity and coherency of leadership is kept intact throughout the transformation. This requires supreme contextualising and integrating of all the parts to each other. This task is assisted by a common and understandable leadership architecture.

7. The Learning Organisation Argument

One of the cornerstones of a learning organisation is self-directed learning discussed elsewhere in this article. The Chinese words for learning means ‘mastery of the way to self-improvement.’ This neatly encapsulates the idea of continuous learning required to remain effective in modern organisations, which also presupposes the need for an organising architecture towards which learning must build.

Another cornerstone of a learning organisation is the efficient learning from experience and from interaction with one another. This too has been discussed elsewhere in this article.

The three key guiding ideas for a learning organisation⁴ are: 

• The primacy of the whole
• The community nature of self
• The generative power of language

All three these ideas would argue for a systemic view of organisational leadership and therefore some sort of organising framework. Without this, Senge’s view that ‘we are inevitably drawn to an endless spiral of superficial quick fixes, worsening difficulties in the long run, and an ever-deepening sense of powerlessness’ is highly likely to be the continual outcome.

Conclusion

It can be seen from the above that a comprehensive, common, and integrated leadership framework is essential in organisations that wish to enhance:

• Organisational performance
• Leadership competency building
• Contextualisation of leadership actions
• Institutionalisation of sound leadership practices
• Integrating leadership through all the levels
• A common leadership language and culture
• Integrating of leadership and management
• Becoming a learning organisation
• Organisation development and transformation

A comprehensive, common, and integrated framework is also the only way to sensibly ensure that the following occurs effectively and coherently:

• The improvement of personal leadership
• The improvement of the leadership of others
• The improvement of organisational wide leadership
• The institutionalisation of key leadership practices

We believe that the arguments for a comprehensive, integrated, and common leadership framework within your organisation are compelling.

Contact Five Arenas to learn more about the Five Arenas Leadership Framework and associated products and services.