Download There is a revolution going on in the world from old

Highlights from John Adair’s Address to Participants
Windsor Castle, July 8, 2007
There is a revolution going on in the world from old-style management, the concept of
management, to the concept of business leadership. And I use “business” here in the
widest sense that the English language allows, namely, what you are busy in. So, a
hospital is a business or a school is a business or a government is a business as much as a
commercial enterprise.
Since 1968, the Library of Congress reckons there have been 75,000 books written on
leadership and leadership development. To give you some--if you go on to Amazon.com
at the moment, you get 20,000 titles on leadership.
If you take developments in organizational life--just take the United Kingdom as an
example. In the last six or seven years, we have seen the setup of the Defense Leadership
Center, the National Health Service Leadership Center, College of School Leadership,
Local Government Leadership Center, University Leadership Foundation, Church
Leadership Foundation, The Holtzclaw Leadership Program, et cetera, et cetera--Scottish
Leadership Foundation--you can go on, and that is just one country in the last seven or
eight years.
China discovered this revolution that I am talking about in about 2002, four or five years
ago, but China moves extremely fast, and China has set up three leadership centers: one
at the beginning of the Long March, and one at the end of the Long March, and these are
limited to the members of the Communist Party.
…The other one, in Shanghai, the China Executive Leadership Academy, is open to the
world, and deliberately, because China wants to attract all the best ideas in the world to
China on leadership development. It is a $450 million building. It has 1,000 bedrooms.
It has a six-story library on leadership, and it has currently commissioned--researched
throughout the world on the best practice and strategic leadership development, with
major studies going on at the moment.
If you take another example within the family of the United Nations, the United Nations
University set up an International Leadership Institution in Jordan about five or six years
ago, funded by the Jordanians for $1 million a year, and part of the commitment that has
already been made by organizations such as the United Nations and the World Bank to
the institute.
…that institute, and it has already plans to run an Africa leadership program in Liberia in
October for 50 Africa leaders. So this is the kind of overlaps that we are going to have to
face, the complexities that we are going to have to look at during the course of our time
here together. Where do all these bits fit together?
…So that is a bit of background on kind of what is happening in the world. Now, I could
obviously go on and on about what is happening in the corporate world, but you know
yourself, because the World Bank and the United Nations and DFID all have their own
internal leadership programs. So, you experience, yourself, the revolution, if I can put it
like that, and we could get into the micro issues of the pros and cons of programs later on
if you wish.
…Why is this all happening? If a historian was to write a study of this in 50 years’ time
and look back on it--and historians always ask themselves not only what happened but
why. And here the answer is fairly easy. It is in one word, and that is “change.” Change
throws up the need for leaders, and leaders bring about change. The first of those two
propositions is stronger than the second.
If there is a lot of change going on, it is relatively easy to provide leadership, because
there are three conditions in which people tend to look for leadership rather than
management, and they are: conditions of change, conditions of crisis, which is going to
be very relevant to [Grant’s or Brown’s (ph.)] concerns later on, and conditions where
people are seeking ideals or a better world. These are conditions where leaders come into
the fore rather than managers. Now, I will talk more about the differences between those
two concepts later on.
So change is the engine. If you are in an unchanging context environment or situation,
even if you have a genius as a leader, it is very difficult to bring about change. So that is
why leaders should never complain about change, because change is the energy which
makes leadership possible, if I could put it that way.
Now, if I can then move from that to a little further into the concept of leadership,
because change is actually built in to the very word of leadership. The word “lead” or
“leadership” comes from an ancient Anglo-Saxon word, which means a path, a road, a
way, or a course of a ship at sea. It is a very tangible thing, actually. You can touch
roads or paths. In fact, I say it is an Anglo-Saxon word; more accurately, it is a north
European word: the Dutch, “leider”; German, “leiter”; Scandinavian “ladershka” [ph.]-have I got that right, Sue? It is a common-to-north-European word. And you will find it
a surprise that some languages don’t have that concept in it.
So the basic idea behind the image or the metaphor is of a journey with one person--a
person--leading the way and taking other people with him. It is not the same as being a
scout, where you go out in front. The idea is both direction and taking people with you.
That is the core basis of it.
Now, you may say, “Well, why has there been so much confusion about the word? If it is
that simple, why have people been”--and the reason, actually, and I only discovered this
two or three years ago, lies in the second bit of the word, the “ship” bit, which is a suffix.
And the reason for the confusion is there are two senses of the way we use the suffix
“ship” in English. We use it to describe an office or a role, as in “kingship,” and we use
it secondly to describe an ability or a skill, as in “penmanship” or “swordsmanship.”
And so that has generated a lot of confusion. And those of you who are present, and
people in Washington--Professor Lantsburg, you could see his confusion between these
two senses of the word, saying, “I can’t understand why there are so many leaders around
in the world but they don’t seem to be very good leaders.” He is confusing two senses of
the “ship” sense.
Incidentally, the same applies to governance. Governance comes from the same root
image as leader. They are virtually synonyms. In Greek and Latin, the word for a
“steersman” or “helmsman” of a ship was “guvernanta” [ph.], and the key point here is
that, in Greece and Rome, the person steering the ship was also the captain. It was a
leadership image. And the confusion over the “ship” suffix in leadership is also present
in governance, because you can use the word to describe those who hold the office or
position in governance, but you can also talk about good governance and bad governance,
i.e., the ability or skill of those who govern. So there is a very, very close family
connection between leadership and governance.
…there is a body of knowledge about leadership, and this is critically important for the
WBI, because you are in the business, worldwide, of making sure that the world’s body
of knowledge is used. So, it is a big debate.
Now, I have to be honest here and say that I am probably the only person in the world at
the moment who would claim that there is a body of knowledge about leadership. I think
arrayed against me are enormous battalions of academics on all sides of the world who
would say, “No, no, no, no. There is no body of knowledge. It is a free-for-all. We are
in a postmodernist world. You make it up. Choose your own theory.” So dozens of
theories. Nobody agrees on what leadership is. Now, I stand against that.
If I can just sketch out the justification, if you like, or the grounds of my position are this,
that leadership is obviously a very complex subject, in the sense that there have been
75,000 books written on it. The Americans, in particular, since the revolution in
leadership got underway in America, which was around 1981-82; we can almost date it,
and there were reasons why America switched from being anti-leadership in the 1960's
and ‘70s to pro-leadership in the 1980's and ‘90s, and I can explain those reasons if you
like. But the big switch was around the 1980's, and since then, there has been a kind of
carpet-bombing on the subject by massive American flotillas of aircraft who have
dropped great bombs on the subject. But that is not the way we need to do it. Actually,
what you have to do is you have to be Einsteinian over this, and you have to think it out
from first principles, and the key to this is finding the right question.
Now, famously, Einstein said that, when he was a boy, the question occurred to him of
“What would the world look if you were riding on the back of a sunbeam?” And he
pointed out, whereas most people forget about that sort of question, he retained that
question into adulthood and acquired the equipment to answer the question, and then we
get to E=MC2, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and the whole age which we live in.
Now, the key question in this area is, “Why is it that one person is accepted as a leader
rather than anybody else?” A very simple question, and that is the key, and there are
three broad ways of answering the question.
The first way of answering the question focuses on what the person is as a person, the socalled “leadership qualities idea.” And there has been a great deal of research on the
qualities or attributes of leaders, and apparently, in the early stages, because of the great
disparities of the conclusions, there was a tendency to dismiss them as being scientifically
unfounded. I don’t take that view. I think there is a consensus about the nature of the
qualities of leaders universally.
And the first principle is that leaders tend to or should possess the qualities which are
expected or required in their working groups. That’s a bit of a long statement.
So if you take the military, for example, although, if you take courage--although courage
does not distinguish a soldier from a leader, because all soldiers need courage--so it is not
a leadership quality, as such, but you cannot be a military leader if you don’t have
courage. So you have to personify the qualities or attributes expected or required in your
working groups.
Beyond that, however, there are some generic qualities of leadership which are not so
located or earthed into a particular context in which people work, such as enthusiasm--top
of the list--now often hyperbolically called “passion.” You can’t think of any leaders who
lack enthusiasm.
Integrity, number two on the list, which is--and I--defined as “the quality which makes
people trust you.” Integrity has two elements to it. It means literally in Latin
“wholeness,” integer. And it also means “loyalty to values or standards outside yourself,
especially truth.”
Now, why it is that people who adhere to truth create trust, I will have to leave you to
reflect upon it, but it is a pretty fundamental human attribute. As the Roman historian
Livy said, “Trust being lost, all human intercourse comes to naught.” Publicly or
privately, if trust goes out the window, you’ve had it. Very difficult to get it back.
The combinations of toughness or demandingness and fairness is a very important
complex in leadership. Leadership is not about popularity. It is not about being
necessarily liked. That doesn’t mean to say you should enjoy not being liked, but it is not
primarily about being popular.
Warmth, humanity is key to it, too, and an unlikely but significant quality which has
appeared on the scene, lastly, is humility, which means, “lack of arrogance.”
Now, that is just a sketch of the kind of thinking--I am not closing the door. You can go
on thinking about qualities forever. But the big, big, big drawback of the qualities
approach as such is that it is a hopeless base for training or development. So if you
identify that you are in the business of teaching integrity, you’ve had it. You can’t do it.
It doesn’t work.
In fact, we then move on to the second approach, which is teachable, but has other
limitations, and the second approach focuses not on what you are as a leader in terms of
your qualities, but on what you know. It is sometimes called “the situational approach”
or the “contingency approach.”
There are three forms of authority in human affairs: the authority of positional rank: “I do
this because I am the president or boss, or whatever it is”; the authority of personality,
which is sometimes called “charisma”; and thirdly, the authority of knowledge.
Authority flows to the one who knows. And this approach put a lot of emphasis on that.
So, there is no such thing as a born leader. Put a person in one situation and they will
emerge as a leader; change the situation, and they won’t. Like Churchill: a great leader in
wartime, not so good at peace--that idea. So, there is a great emphasis on “authority
flows to the one who knows”--that idea.
It actually goes back to Socrates, the first teacher of leadership in the Western world, not
in the whole world. And although Socrates wrote no books on leadership, two of his
students, Plato and Xenophon, did, and they both give us the same story, you know,
which goes back to Socrates. “Why,” says Socrates, “do sailors who are disobedient in
harbor, when they are at sea in the middle of a storm, will obey the captain? Why?
Because the captain knows.” The contribution of the Socratic, Platonic idea that in a free
and equal society, leadership should go not to the person with rank or money or wealth or
birth but to the person who knows what to do.
Looking at it from the leadership angle, however, there are difficulties with it as a theory.
The reason is that, in many parts of the world, people are promoted on technical and
professional knowledge alone, and it is assumed that they will then be able to lead, and
that we discover is not the case, because there are more general actors involved, which of
course the qualities would try to get at.
So the third approach opened up. And this is the one where we made the major
breakthroughs in my lifetime, the Einsteinian breakthroughs. And this approach did a bit
of lateral thinking. It switched attention away from the leader himself or herself, or the
situation, and it looked at the group, the people, the followers. And it not only started
reading book [ph.], but it actually started studying groups in what we call “group
laboratories.” And the breakthrough here was the discovery that working groups have
three areas--well, let me go back a step. The working groups and organizations are
always uniquely different. They have a group personality of their own, as one of our
prime ministers called it. That means that what works in one group may not work in
another.
If you take four groups in the development field--the World Bank, UNDP, CIDA, and
DFID--although they are all in the same field, they all have their unique personalities, and
what works in one won’t work in another. But on the analogy of the person, just as you
and I are uniquely different, we have needs in common: We are going to feel hungry at
lunchtime and tired at midnight. And according to this approach, there are three
overlapping areas of need present in working groups.
And the first one--if you draw a circle here and put “task” in it, that is the first area of
need, the need to achieve the common task.
Now, the next step beyond that, and this is where the real progress began to be made, was
we can then go and identify the functions that you have to perform in order to link the
three areas, such as defining the task, planning, briefing, supporting, controlling, and so
on.
So, by the side of your three-circle diagram, you should start list functions, key functions
that have to be performed if you are going to link those areas. I will give you some of
them: defining the task, planning, briefing or communicating, controlling, supporting,
and evaluating. Now you have got a model there.
Now what, in fact, you have in front of you, and it took us 40 years to discover this, for
various reasons--again, I can explain why it takes so long--is you have got the generic
role of a leader. Now, technically speaking, the functions that you have just written down
are not leadership functions in that anybody in the group can define the task, or plan, or
whatnot. You can have a group without a leader providing those functions, and the group
will operate well. But in practice, and almost invariably, somebody is appointed or
elected to be responsible for the whole three circles, if you like, and the provision of the
function. So they don’t do it all themselves. There is a kind of--somebody who is a
safety net, who is appointed to look after it.
So that is, roughly speaking, the generic role of a leader, and if you build in the whole
three approaches and that model, you have got the generic role: it’s what you are, what
you know, and what you can do in terms of the skills to achieve the task, build the team,
and develop the individual.
Well, there are two points in what you say, and both are valid, because you have to then
say that, “Well, culturally, universally, does the three-circle model work?” And the
answer is, “Yes, it does,” but there are some very slight variations in the size of the
circles.
In Japan, for example, 20 years ago, the “individual” circle would be very small vis-à-vis
the other society. Now, in Japan, it has gotten bigger, because Japan is part of the global
society.
On your other point, which is a very important one, which has to do with how decisions
are taken within a group, now, if you have an appointed or elected leader, you can then
do another supporting model, which suggests that the decision is like a piece of cake, and
you know you can draw a line through it, and a leader can have 90 percent of the decision
and tell you what to do, or the group could have 90 percent of the decision, and you could
have a consensus model.
Now, this is all very important when you get to the micro stuff, teaching leadership,
because it does tie with more traditional and non-Western views
Now, so you then have to test out whether--you have got your E=MC2, and you then
have to work out whether you get any nuclear energy out of this. And what, in fact, we
did in the 1960s was to apply that model to leadership training and development in the
British Army, Royal Air Force, and the Navy, with about 10,000 people. Before I wrote
the book, 10,000 people had been through the program; and for 40 years since then, the
armed forces have continued to use that model, and we have had about one million
managers through it. So, we know quite a lot about it.
…seven functions and you can see how they apply.
One: providing direction. And that includes three key ideas of purpose, and this is giving
us a common language, which answers the question, “Why are we doing it? Why are we
in business? What is our purpose?” Vision, which is not quite the same, which, in this
context, means having a picture of where you want to be in three, five, ten, and, if you are
looking at the world, twenty, fifty years time away; that’s vision. And the other key term
that you have to know about is “values.” And if you think of values as the stars that you
steer by, going back to the “guvernanta” metaphor, that is very good way of thinking.
You never reach your star, but they give you direction, so the three key concepts within
that very first function of a strategic leader that you have to be able to think clearly about.
The second function of a strategic leader is strategic thinking and strategic planning.
These two are not quite the same thing. We are engaged for a day-and-a-half on strategic
thinking and, hopefully, some strategic planning. So we are performing the second
function.
The third function of strategic leadership is making it happen, and that is the world’s
weakest one. And there are some key elements in what you have to do to be effective. It
is the effectiveness part, and a critical bit of that is the engagement of people and the
ownership of people and the decisions that they take, which is the guts of democracy.
Fourth function is relating the whole to the parts. A fundamental issue in all set-ups is
how do the parts relate to the whole. Now, if you dealing with ICI, that is nine different
divisions, how do they all relate to the whole? And every organization faces this issue,
and you are facing it because you have parts present, represented in this room, which may
or may not relate as a whole.
Number five is forming key partnerships and alliances, which you have to do as a
strategic leader, and we are going to have to do that, or you are going to have to do it.
Number six is releasing the corporate energy from the organization. The task of
leadership is not to put greatness into people but to illicit it, or draw it out, because the
greatness is there already, as John Bacon [ph.] said, and the really--the kind of leaders we
are looking--strategic are those who can draw the greatness out of people.
And the seventh function of a strategic leader, which is highly relevant to us for various
reasons, is that you own the problem of growing and developing today’s and tomorrow’s
leaders.
…in the African context, you are really looking at three key forms of strategic leadership,
if I can put it that: the democratic form of leadership, or governance; the traditional form
of governance or leadership, which is the tribal one; and then the corporate elements of it.
Now, if you look at any of those three strands, you find built into them the idea that
leaders should be morally good, and the reason is going back to that very first principle I
mentioned about qualities, that a leader should exemplify the qualities or attributes of
those that they lead. If, and this is the argument of Confucius--if humanity is good, if
people are fundamentally good, it stands to reason that the only leaders who are good will
be effective. So that is the rationale of it, and that is present in all three traditions of
leadership. You can get a simpler, a quicker fix on it if you take the concept of wisdom,
practical wisdom, what the Greeks call “fronisis,” which is the characteristic which they
expected of leaders.
Now, practical wisdom is made up of three ingredients: intelligence, experience, and
goodness. So, you have it built into the very concept of what a good, practical leader is.
how you select people to be leaders and how you train or develop them to be leaders.
Anything else is irrelevant or of pure academic interest.
Now, there is a case for supporting academic--or there is a case for academic study,
leadership studies, but it is not on the map to support it globally.
That does not mean to say we don’t need research and development; we do desperately.
But one of our big global problems is we don’t have the people who can do it, and that is
the weakness of my whole position.
I may say, “The weakness of my claim, that we can have a global leadership development
strategy is because we don’t have the people to do it.” Now, we will in 10, 15, 20 years’
time, but we don’t now, and that is going to be a big problem.
There are a body of principles, leadership development principles, which are rather like
the laws of aerodynamics, and I won’t go into them theoretically, if I can, because I have
written a couple of books called “How to Grow Leaders” and “Effective Leadership and
Development,” which set out the seven or eight principles which are formal kind of laws
of aerodynamics as to why leadership programs work and why they don’t. We will have
occasion to talk about one of those principles as I go along, but they are very much
focused on the selection and training of leaders.
And the big steps here in the last 30 or 40 years have been this gradual move up from the
team leader basis, where we really do know how to do it. We don’t always apply the
knowledge about how to train and develop leaders, but we know how to do it. I have no
doubts about that.
Where the difficulties came is when we moved up from the operational to the strategic
level, and I can give you the sort of landmarks of that journey, where we started with
bishops here in 1969, and then we moved to vice chancellors of universities, et cetera--all
the time pushy, pushy, pushy.
I think the overlap between the world and the developing world is so great here that it
applies to you.
First, I am not going to call this “political leadership” now, because political leadership,
to me has certain overtones. I am going to call it “national level leadership.” But it is
actually tackling that agenda of providing, for the first time in the history of the world,
opportunities for people before they move in to political office, to have an opportunity to
discuss and explore the nature of leadership: good leadership and leadership for good.
And I see a suite or a range of activities, backed by supporting activities in that area,
which obviously we have got time to explore, if you wish to.
The second big key area is the bottom-up principle of working with individual nations to
evolve their own leadership development strategy, and how we help that process to
happen, how we support and develop it so it can be effective, because the bottom-up and
the top-down principle is fundamental to strategic thinking here.
Now, the third big area is youth. Let me just explain why I say this, because there are 6.6
billion people in the world, half of those are under the age of 25. Now, that at once
means that if you had developed a global leadership strategy which only focused on the
top 100- to 200,000 people and spent billions of pounds on giving them expensive
fellowship scholarships, you are going to lose right away, because that, politically, is not
going to work.
1.3 billion of those young people live in the developing world. 250 million of them are
illiterate. So, you know, there is another set of problems there, but let’s put that aside.
Now, the cost enormity of the numbers that you are involved in, if you are working at the
world level, you have to be very rigorous. I believe in the principle of subsidiarity [ph.],
that you should only make decisions that are appropriate to your level. You should not
do things which are appropriate to leadership development which should be done by
nations or corporations or even regions. You should think out what only the world can
do, and the world is symbolized here by the United Nations, and I am taking a technical
point here. The World Bank is actually part of the United Nations by origin. And
therefore the global brand name is the United Nations here. And everything we do,
globally, at world level, ought to be under that label because there isn’t any other.
Now, what do you do at world level about half the world’s population, who include the
leaders of tomorrow, all the leaders of tomorrow. The strategic, operational team leaders
are all in that mass, and we, globally, have to think not five, ten years ahead, but twenty
years ahead or thirty years ahead. And there is evidence in my field that the big ideas
that people affect their lives are the ones that they take on when they are about 20 or so.
So there are windows of opportunity with young people, which, if you miss, like learning
a language, you don’t ever get it back again.
Now, that makes it interesting to us. And what can be done? Well, you have to break up
young people into four areas.
You have to look at schools. What can we do in schools to encourage and develop
leaders? And here, we have a lot of experience on best practice in parts of the world
which are not reflected in others. We have very, very, very poor communication here.
The next big area is the voluntary sector. And here I have had discussions with the global
players here, people like the Scouts, who have 28 million members worldwide. And the
key thing here is that not only scaling up of leadership, because they do quite a lot of
leadership development, but it also is working out ways of training the trainers, and
training the trainers of trainers of leadership. That is what you do at world level. And the
way to do that is to get people to come together and say, “Supposing we gave you $5
million dollars to grow and develop leadership through voluntary organizations, how
would you spend it? Give us a plan. Talk to us.” And I have spoken to them, and that
could happen.
The next big area with young people is, of course, universities, and, again, we have
examples in our body of knowledge of best practice in leadership development for
universities, which is woefully, woefully limited at the moment, globally.
And the fourth area to look at with young people is scholarships and fellowships. Now,
the position here is that if you go back to the beginning of the story, in 1902, at the
Rhodes Foundation, Rhodes set up the Rhodes Scholarships in a unique way, which
totally escaped the British when they came to set up the Chevening Fellowships, because
Rhodes explicitly said in 1902 that he wasn’t just looking for excellence in academic
ability or sports ability, though he was interested in those, but, thirdly, he was looking for
leadership, and he listed the qualities and attributes that he was looking for. He talked
about people who could lead from the front, et cetera, et cetera, had a sense of
responsibility, to give to people and so on, and that has been an outstandingly successful
program. There have been 7,000 Rhodes Fellows since 1902, of whom 4,000 are still
alive.
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