There’s so much leadership learning on offer, but how much of it truly reflects the reality of what leaders have to learn?  Ann Gammie explores the challenges and solutions

The problem with much of today’s learning is that this knowledge is becoming more difficult to transfer to an arena that’s becoming ever more complex. If you accept the premise that, “Leadership is the activity of engaging internal and external followers in complex changing situations, within a complex changing organisation, with complex and changing people – to deliver a series of desired outcomes”, then you’ll certainly relate to the challenges that today’s leaders face. You’ll also appreciate the difficulty experienced in transferring knowledge gleaned from books, courses or development programmes, and realise it may not suffice for some of the complexities leaders are grappling with today. Consider the following examples:

Challenge 1: The choices I make are a function of multiple dilemmas!
Every leader that ER Consultants work with describes his, or occasionally her, world in terms of its complexity – a dynamic world. Metaphors such as “juggling plates on sticks” are often quoted.

The uninitiated work hard to either stop the plates spinning or ignoring/delegating some of them. In either case, as the initiated know, the leadership role will not be sufficiently fulfilled. 

One of the first things good leaders learn is that there are multiple trade-offs to be made and ever-shifting sands to navigate in mastering leadership. These dimensions embrace such things as:

• Understanding the external pressures and how they play against the internal pressures;
• How the history and the current situations help or hinder future possibilities.

It is less a case of pinning these down ‘once and for all’ as making ‘sense’ at points in time that focus the choices and enable decisions and forward movement. It is easy to see how direction can be confused or decisions about it delayed as a scenario plays out. However, good leaders learn to act decisively while the situation continues to move. At a personal level leaders start to learn about themselves and what
they as individuals need to do to survive in this dynamic complexity.

Challenge 2: I need eyes in the back of my head!
The need to be concerned with past, present and future applies even for the leadership incomers to organisations. Historians are well ahead of the rest of us in respect of being ‘past’ oriented and understanding that reflection illustrates and illuminates pitfalls and opportunities for the future. Rather fewer of us are 'futurologists' and spend time speculating on how the world or our domain of interest could or might be. Good leaders do this! They learn to contemplate possible futures, they make links and connections, check trends and indicators to see how things might go. Then they marry the past to the future in the light of the present organisational health and situation. This continuous looking in all directions is a tough challenge for many people. Most of us have a preference for being past, or present, or future oriented, but rarely all three. So, the leader learns to work with multi-directional lenses repeatedly asking questions such as:

• Who have been our allies in the past? Have we made enemies who lie in wait?
• What is our current visibility, what are the priorities and choices the organisation faces? Where do we need to act right now?
• What is the next big step? Where will our energy best be focused?

These questions will also have a personal dimension:

• How do I cover my back?
• How can I make a difference?
• How can I keep moving forward?

So, the effective leader learns to continuously operate with multi-lenses on both organisational and personal progress, balancing effort and resources along the way.

Challenge 3: Do my personal and organisational agendas stack up?
The dynamic nature of leadership makes it a risky role, one that may well go wrong from time to time. It is a situation of likelihoods and probabilities. Leaders learn to gauge risk, to differentiate probability from impact and to make informed choices. Clearly, a leader’s reputation can be made or broken by their track record on risk-taking and understandably there can be a high price to pay if things don’t go as anticipated. The risk of personal failure prompts some individuals to act in line with their personal agendas and less the organisation’s. This can become the slippery slope that ends up with either wild swings in organisational direction or too timid an approach to survive competition or match Government demands. Good leaders have a commitment to their organisation’s health and in the legacy they leave.

This can work the other way, where an individual will do what is right for the organisation even when it leads to his/her own demise. While this may feel right in an ethical sense, it can backfire if there is no successor who has the right kind of capability to take the organisation forward. So, in some cases, more modest shifts in direction with continuity of leadership may be appropriate at least for the short term while succession is assured.

What this tells us is that good leaders can judge when the combination of their style/approach is right for this period in the organisation's development. We all know of leaders who retire or move on when significant challenges face the organisation. It is not always because they are ‘old dogs’ who cannot learn but because they are self-aware, organisationally aware, and know when to stand down in favour of a different approach.

So, the question of matching agendas requires leaders to understand how they impact their organisation and to accept that they may not always be the
best answer.

Challenge 4: ‘Just a minute’ - sense, no sense, nonsense?
This examines how we can learn to make realistic sense of complex data, multiple and conflicting sources and diverse stakeholders with their own personal agendas.

How well understood is the nature of your organisation, its culture and its purpose? You can test this by simply asking 5 people to describe it in 1 minute only and see what you get.  How much coherence is there?  Would it actually make sense to someone who had never heard of or experienced your kind of organisation? Even where the ‘just 1 minute’ challenge appears to be successful, examine closely what has been said. What meaning has been conveyed and how much of it is trite?

“Developing leadership capability and effectiveness is much more complex and dynamic than simply honing skills and behaviours”

Sense is achieved when our brief description presents coherent meaning from a complex situation. No sense is when the description doesn't adequately account for the complexity or introduces dissonance. Nonsense occurs when fine sounding words don't actually tell us much – they endeavour to blind us, while pushing away further examination.

What the leader learns is how to use all three, how to spot all three and hopefully how to optimise their ability for making sense so that others may grasp the same picture.

Challenge 5: Leakage or leadership
It is amazing that the day you take on the label of a role on which demands power, people less senior will look at you differently and treat you differently. I can recall individuals who were offended and surprised at the reaction to their donning a director label. Those in power are expected to act powerfully and this heightened level of expectation never dims. As such it puts senior people in the spotlight – no casual word is deemed to be casual, no throw-away line is less than an instruction or direction.

"Transferring knowledge gleaned from books, courses or development programmes, may not suffice for some of the complexities leaders are grappling with today”

Leaders learn about the power of informal and formal communication and incidental signalling so that they transmit consonant messages, even at times of change. They learn that leakage – i.e. the unintended communication – is just as eagerly heard as the road-show script.

However, it is not enough to learn about consistency and making sense for oneself, the really smart develop dialogue with a wide range of others so that they are making sense based on a wide range of sources of data. They are, in fact, constantly learning about their organisation, its people and its external interfaces. They are continuously building a common sense with others of what is happening and why. In this way they leave less room for speculation and take more people with them.

This, of course, can subject leaders to sycophants and game-players who are smart enough themselves to appear to satisfy this thirst for knowledge and understanding, but who use the situation to gain favour or satisfy their own agendas. The careful leader learns to discriminate, to evaluate the sources, to triangulate the data and identify the trustworthy.

The solutions
So, what nature of development will enable learning about leadership and help deal effectively with such challenges? It is blatantly insufficient to take apart leadership capability into bite sized, categorised (skills, knowledge, etc) chunks and offer them back as collectable nuggets. This will not emulate the learning situation that fresh and experienced leaders face. Learning about leadership centres on how individuals and teams experience and respond to the multiple pushes and pulls, demands and opportunities that present themselves or are invoked.

When we ask what leaders learn, we are really talking about the learning of people in leadership positions, those who have recognised roles that carry a leadership tag. While our attention and interest is most often with such people, it is helpful to remind ourselves that people who are not in leadership positions may still be learning about leadership. How well do we provide and shape that learning, acknowledge it and make use of it. If we understand better how people learn about leadership then we can create more effective learning environments and situations across the organisation.

From the scenarios painted in this article, there should emerge a sense that developing capability and effectiveness is much more complex and dynamic than simply honing skills and behaviours. We need these too, but within the context of understanding the holistic leadership experience.

ER Consultants has found that there are five purposes that individuals require from their leadership development:

• Remind and refresh, so nothing new or fundamental;
• Offer insights and hooks to help me make more use of what I know/do;
• Provide a reality check so that I can grasp the breadth and depth of the role;
• Make me conscious of my (in)competence, help me keep/develop awareness;
• Move me up that learning curve – help me become a more effective leader.

The first two of those can work well enough with a standard behaviours and skills approach. But for those people who sign up to the other three purposes, the standard short courses and workshops will not serve. We must provide more meaningful learning that can make a difference. Somehow we have to recreate the reality that has been described above, then throw in the specific challenges and help people respond as leaders. For example, through simulations – a way of holistic learning that can be created artificially to give people the understanding and experience of working in different ways

Through a combined approach, a whole range of skills and behaviours will be picked up along the way, but more importantly, individuals will be more confident and able to act as leaders in their complex environments. In that way, organisations gain levels of capability that are applied and deliver the required pay-back.