Leadership - leading or following?

Does leadership development come up with the goods particularly when it comes to preparing leaders for dealing with a crisis or ambiguous situations?
Do leadership developers (trainers) know how to develop critical and creative thinking?
We are just finishing off a 5 year research project looking at leadership decision making, problem solving and agility in times of difficulty - when things are uncertain and ambiguous (I will post the articles from this when they are ready). What is becoming very clear is that most leaders have no personal strategy for dealing with difficult situations or ambiguous conditions. The study has found that only about 11% of leaders have such a strategy, or even think about it.

What, you may ask, is the number one leader's strategy for dealing uncertainty or difficulty?
The answer is not very encouraging. It is to see what others are doing and copy it. It's a sort of safety in numbers mentality.

Most leaders don't have a personal strategy for what to do when things get difficult or ambiguous

The second most popular response? To collect more data. The problem here is that the leader's report that this is usually self defeating as the data is normally conflicting and the sheer amount available is confusing. The ambiguity of this strategy usually means that leaders end up making a decision about what data to accept and which to omit. As you can probably guess they largely choose to omit the data that is less optimistic, more confusing and that which they don't understand. When they are confused by the data they fall back on strategy 1. See what everyone else is doing.

The current economic crisis is actually crisis of leadership

You only have to have a look at what is happening in the financial markets at the moment to see this behaviour writ large.

This current crisis is a crisis of leadership. It has been leadership decisions both at corporate and governmental levels that lead us into current economic mess.

Over 83% (the sample size for this study was 1628 leaders from business and service industries in 7 countries) said that they they would not consider them selves to be particularly creative or that they struggled with creativity.

We will look in greater depth this week at leadership development and more from the study.

Risk averse innovation

A number of research surveys including this report in Management Issues highlight the link between risk and innovation.
The ability to think new thoughts, try new things and innovate requires that we break out from the thinking and practices of now. There is a saying

If you always do what you've always done you always get what you always got.

in other words if you want something different you have to do and think different things. The issue here is that in order to do something different takes nerve. To do and think like everyone else, as we have before, may give comfort and make us feel safe, part of the pack. However if we want innovation we have to risk being different, not part of the crowd.
Part of the report mentioned above quotes George Davie, a Managing Director of The Hazelton Group, an Archstone Consulting company:

The survey also found that having a culture that does not foster risk taking was the biggest impediment to innovation.

Basically innovation requires risk taking, the ability to stand out, to think, be and look for difference. Risk averse attitudes brings at best adaption and slow change, making sure that every step is thought through and makes 'sense' - by the thinking of now.
How many organisations reward difference? How many leaders promote real risk taking? How many managers expect and are happy to allow errors and mistakes to be made? Deciding that we need innovation means opening the doors to errors. As any innovation is new there is no knowing what will come up and whether any particular innovation will work or what effect it will have. Indeed many don't, at first at least and need to be played with, tweaked and allowed to mature. For every successful innovation there are many, many ideas that never make it. People who want innovation must be or must become comfortable with ambiguity and risk. The mindset of minimising risk will reduce the appetite to trial and error, experimentation and will stifle innovation. In organisations around the globe the wish to 'just make sure' holds them back. In fast moving and ever changing markets and conditions playing safe is anything but.

Emotional Intelligence / knowledge 1.

"Emotional Intelligence" is a much used and abused term. The concept of an emotional intelligence was first raised by the researcher John Mayer who together with Dr. Peter Salovey developed the idea of EI and later emotional knowledge - a metacognition of a representation of the emotions.

Outside of the current debate about the measurement of emotional intelligence, a useful definition for emotional intelligence is:

An ability, capacity, or skill to perceive, assess, and manage the emotions of one's self, of others, and of groups.

This is worth thinking about in the context of leadership, problems solving and ambiguity. Defining EI as an ability, capacity or skill suggests that ones EI can be raised or developed. Mayer talks much about this and one of the central arguments about EI is whether it is a fixed attribute or whether it can be developed. Notwithstanding this, my argument here is that the ability to perceive or recognise our emotions can be developed (or raised) as can the ability to control and manage those emotions.
Further, that if emotions can affect our behaviours, interpretations and thinking then those behaviours, interpretations and thoughts are more likely to be historically based reactions rather than contextually sound actions based on some form of logic. For example a person who is frightened or in some other emotional state is more likely to react differently to a situation than if they were in a more stable, emotionally neutral state where they could apply a logic not contaminated by emotion. The idea is that emotionally intelligent people can identify what emotional state they are in at any time and understand the affect this is having on their perceptions of the situation, their behaviours and their cognitions. People who are not as emotionally intelligent are more likely to be at the mercy of their emotions in that they will colour and change their perceptions of reality, their behaviour and the way they think and think about their thinking and emotions without being aware of this.

We all probably know leaders like this.

In my next post I will explore the affect of this on how leaders deal with ambiguity.

Oh yes what is the picture all about? The Amygdala at the centre of the brain are almond-shaped groups of neurons located deep within the medial temporal lobes of the brain in complex vertebrates, including humans. Shown in research to perform a primary role in the processing and memory of emotional reactions. More about this later.

Something is missing

I was working with a group of senior leaders in a very large national institution last week. For 90% of the 2 day long meeting the leaders were all working on the problem of how to develop better leadership underneath them and create a more agile and ambiguity tolerant workforce.
The main problem they mused was that people were following orders blindly, not challenging and that there was a total lack of creativity in the workforce.
Solutions abounded about how to fix 'them' and what should be done to solve the problem.

When asked what it is they are doing to increase their own tolerance to ambiguity, develop their own creativity and challenge people in a developmental way there was silence. Indeed if any of us honestly ask ourselves what we are doing to increase our own tolerance to ambiguity and increase our creativity and critical thinking we would draw a blank.
The first issue probably is that we just hadn't thought about it. Once you do start to think about it the second issue then naturally comes forth - just how on earth do you develop your tolerance to ambiguity? Over the next few blogs I will be exploring just that. How can we all get better at dealing with ambiguity?

Back to the meeting - we explored the effects and affects of emotions on problem solving, ambiguity, perceptions of us and them and critical thinking - evidence based thought. It was widely agreed that the key to al of this was understanding our own emotions and the effects they have on our reactions and thinking; emotional intelligence if you like.

So 90% of the meeting was talking about leadership and how to create a more agile, ambiguity tolerant leadership below the board. The other 10% of the time was spent at the end of the meeting reacting to the news that the responsibility for training of new recruits was being removed from this group and was being given to a central agency.

"Our founder would turn in his grave if he knew what was happening"

"We need to stop this before it goes any further"

"They need to be shown the red card"

"This is outrageous how can we indoctrinate them with the right culture if we are not doing it - we need to do something about this now."

The next blog will concentrate on emotional intelligence - what is it and what does it do for us?