Quietly leading us along the road to success

Monday, August 24, 2009

Good leadership isn't simply a question of self-confidence and shouting the loudest, says Professor Chris Mabey. It's about treating people as individuals and inspiring them to believe in the true value of the projects they are working on

In April 2009, a small group of European researchers assembled in a meeting room at CERN in Geneva with hushed anticipation. Their intention was to interview Dr Peter Jenni, the spokesman for the ATLAS particle physics collaboration.

Since the late 1980s he has masterminded a unique international "big science" experiment to discover the Higg's Boson. Today there are 2,500 scientists in 37 countries working in the ATLAS collaboration.

A few minutes later a man quietly entered the room, carrying an engineer's hard hat, and sat down. Softly spoken and low-key, Dr Jenni proceeded to describe to the assembled expectant researchers the fascinating history of the multi-million euro experiment. After an hour of riveting, self-effacing storytelling, he ended with: "Things work when people identify themselves with the project," and slipped away.

If ever we needed contradiction of guns blazing, top-down, self-possessed leadership this was it. Indeed it confirms the finding of Jim Collins in his research-based book Good to Great. He found that consistently successful companies – over a 15 year period – are frequently led by quiet, even shy individuals who are nevertheless rigorous in people decisions, resolute in pursuing a shared vision and win the loyalty of their staff.

Leadership is a hot topic. Governments lament the lack of it (and just now the public questions a dearth of it in government), setting up a succession of leadership centres and colleges in the higher and further education sectors, the NHS, the police service, local government and so on. Private sector organisations spend millions trying to develop it. Consultancies charge huge sums trying to conjure it. Individuals, in all walks of life, aspire to and pursue it. Meanwhile researchers are prolific in analysing and writing about it.

For all this, leadership remains an elusive target. It is difficult to define, hard to do and even more slippery to measure.

What can be said is that the prevailing landscape of leadership is shifting. It is no longer:
• seen as an isolated and axiomatic set of attributes. Leaders cannot be divorced from their con-text and especially from those around them, who give them the power to act.
• reducible to a set of universal competencies and pre-defined behaviour. To do so robs the leadership role of important qualities like creativity, idiosyncrasy and constructive deviance.
• the preserve of the charismatic hero figure, the province of the gifted few. Leadership can be shared, distributed, travel across networks. And, dare we say it, leadership can be entirely absent!
• about delivering short-term results at all costs – recent scandals around banker bonuses (together with FSA and government collusion) have surely discredited such selfish irresponsibility for good.

Interestingly this places universities in an exciting position. We have always been here to confront unpalatable facts, to ask uncomfortable questions and to invoke cherished values with our students, the leaders of tomorrow.

Maybe, in the midst of a leadership crisis, we need to consider these questions ourselves in relation to the way we teach, conduct research and manage ourselves.

To what extent do we recognise that, in any situation, there will be competing interests and muted voices; that diversity is to be celebrated rather than airbrushed away; that an ethos of loyalty and commitment requires consistency over the long haul.

Yes, leadership should be rigorous and informed, but it is also relational, collective, distributed, emotional and values-based.

Professor Chris Mabey is director of the Centre for Leadership at the University of Birmingham. He is the author (with Tim Finch-Lees) of Management and Leadership Development, published by Sage