CIPD - Leadership: an overview

Management

Revised July 2008

This factsheet gives introductory guidance. It:

considers the attributes of leadership
explores the differences between leadership and management
discusses how leaders can be developed
looks at top level, or strategic leadership.

Leadership is not just for the elite

Most people, at some points in their lives, are leaders. They assume leadership in family situations (children need leading!), on the sports field, and in many other situations, including work. Leadership is not just about the qualities of an elite few, although the leadership skills of chief executives and their teams are of fundamental importance. In the context of work, what is leadership, how does it differ from management, and are leaders born or can they be developed? This factsheet seeks to provide some answers to these questions.

What is leadership?

Leadership is currently much discussed; academic studies have multiplied like amoeba since the 1970s. Entering ‘leadership’ into Google provided around 503,000,000 entries worldwide, and around 16,500,000 for the UK alone. A similar search on Amazon UK gave 18,741 books on the topic.

There is no single definition that satisfies everyone. John Adair, the leading British authority on the subject, says ‘leadership, like all personal relations, always has something unknown, something mysterious about it’.¹ But there is a clue in that comment - the phrase ‘personal relations’. To attempt a partial definition, leadership is very much about the ability to influence people by personal attributes and behaviours.

But most people would say that even successful leaders they have known, do not behave in identical ways. They may, in fact, act very differently even in similar situations and they may have quite different personalities. Moreover, different leadership qualities may be needed in different circumstances. The classic example is perhaps Churchill, who was a great war leader but less successful in peacetime. Similarly, CEOs who excel in turning round ailing companies may perform less well when things are on a more even keel. All this may lead to the conclusion that there is no single template of leadership behaviours, which in turn poses the question of whether leaders can be developed: what are the qualities (or competencies) of leadership, and how can they be brought out? There is more on this later.

However, before people can become successful leaders, they do need certain attributes:

General intelligence, although not necessarily being very much brighter than the people they are leading.
Technical or professional knowledge and competence in their particular fields – how otherwise would leaders be respected?
Personality: leaders should be energetic and committed, maintain contact with their people, and understand their strengths and weaknesses.
The ability to inspire, although this quality may be rarer than some of the others and is perhaps the most difficult to develop.
Listening, sharing and delegating skills (and not interfering unnecessarily), because in groups of more than around five people it becomes impossible to know all the necessary detail.
Self-knowledge, to understand their own strengths and weaknesses, which in turn will enable them to turn to others in their group to compensate for their own biases or deficiencies.

All these attributes will help to develop trust, without which leaders will not command loyalty. The last four, ‘softer’, non-technical attributes might be summed up as ‘emotional intelligence’, a subject which now seems to be gaining a place on management and leadership development programmes.

Adair has developed what he calls a functional approach to leadership based on three overlapping circles of needs (see figure 1):

to achieve the common task
to work as a team to achieve that task
to meet individual needs, because people need each other socially, and work is an important social activity.

Each circle exerts an influence for good or ill upon the others, and the circles therefore overlap. These are areas of leadership responsibility that leaders need to understand. They emphasise that leadership is essentially an interaction between the leader, group members and the situation.

Figure 1: Adair's three circles of needs. Taken from: Effective leadership development²

How does leadership differ from management?

The idea of management that evolved in the nineteenth century, and was later developed into theories by F W Taylor, was based to a large extent upon the military principles of command and control (although the armed forces have always recognised that the sorts of personal attributes described above are central in any officer or NCO). So management was, and to some extent still is, about the planning, organisation, co-ordination and implementation of strategies, tactics and policies imposed from the top in an impersonal and apparently rational manner. Administration is the word that sums this up, and it is worth noting that postgraduate management degrees are still entitled Masters of Business Administration. Thus a manager would derive authority from his or her position in the organisation, which also implies power. Promotions were likely to be based on technical abilities, and interpersonal skills had very little to do with the theoretical idea of management.

From around the 1960s (when, ironically, MBAs began in the UK) the idea of leadership started to gain ground. It was realised that there was more to managing than simply administering. The idea of influencing people by virtue of personal attributes and behaviours gradually grew, admittedly forced by the need to survive in a more competitive and less predictable world. All managers, including first-level supervisors, need to be leaders and to understand the concept of leadership, although the higher up the organisation one goes, the more complex leadership becomes and the more it is concerned with broader and long-term aims. But of course it should be borne in mind that while some organisations may have visionary leaders in their lower and middle ranks, their chief executives and management teams may be still following the traditional managerial model!

So leadership is now a fundamental part of management. But people who are not nominally managers may also function as leaders, influencing others (even if in an informal manner) by their personalities and behaviours. Under a Taylorist model of management, this would be frowned upon and such people would be told to stick to their screwdrivers and not to think too much. Moreover, it is worth remembering that in some organisations – hospitals and research organisations are good examples – many people may be senior professionals such as doctors or scientists but not managers (at least in terms of the formal organisational hierarchy). It would be foolish, however, not to think of them as leaders or potential leaders.

CIPD members can see one of our web-based training activities describing an exercise which can be used to highlight the differences between leadership and management.

Go to Leadership or management? The differences

Levels of leadership

But taking the formal organisation, it is useful to distinguish three levels of leadership, as follows²:

Front-line or team leadership - in which one person (the leader) is responsible for creating specific outcomes usually within a given timescale and with given resources through their own actions and those of their immediate followers (see our factsheet on line managers' HR role for further information and the qualities and skills lin managers need).
- Go to our factsheet on The role of front-line managers in HR
Operational leadership - which is to do with day-to-day operations within the organisation and is a major determinant of its culture and climate.
Strategic leadership - about ‘big picture’ issues such as change, vision, translating that vision into purpose, effective communication, and the behaviour of the CEO and senior management team (also see below).

Like Adair’s three circles, these levels relate to each other, as figure 2 shows.

Figure 2: Levels of leadership. Taken from: Developing effective leadership skills³

Leadership transitions

Recent CIPD/DDI research has highlighted that ’leadership transitions’, or the stages when leaders’ responsibilities, time allocation and priorities change as a result of promotion, do introduce particular challenges for leaders. The particular difficulties identified by the research as leaders progress include: transition anxiety, looking at things with a new perspective, being aware of politics, gender differences and age differences. These findings indicate how critical it is to provide the appropriate leadership development and support at all stages of leadership.

Go to the CIPD/DDI Leadership transitions report

Leadership development

People vary in their capacity for leadership. A few have innate capacity (but even born leaders will need to be developed further), some have none, but most potential managers have it in some degree. Selection of the right people, whether from inside or outside the organisation, is a good part of the battle, but then they will need training. This may be only a small part of their development but it is important to get it right. Adair says the seven hallmarks of successful courses should be ‘simple, practical, participative, variety, enjoyable, relevant and short’.²

Then comes perhaps the most important part: development through experience. This is where management development, succession planning and leadership development overlap. For a full description of the various techniques, including the increasingly important mentoring and coaching, see our factsheets on management development, talent management and succession planning.

All that needs to be added here is that, throughout the development process, leadership should be kept in mind just as much as the technical and administrative aspects of jobs. Coaches and mentors, who may be of a different generation that is perhaps less attuned to the importance of leadership, should also keep leadership to the fore.

Many organisations now run what they call ‘leadership programmes’. To the extent that they emphasise the idea of leadership through having the word in their titles, this is a good thing. However, how far they actually differ from what might have been called until recently ‘management development programmes’, is open to doubt, as a glance at some of the headings and descriptions in a survey by Incomes Data Services (IDS) confirms.³ The difference may be that leadership now receives somewhat more emphasis than it did previously, and IDS says that most of the programmes ’we looked at included sessions on personal audit, work-life balance, self-awareness and contrasting leadership styles. Few of these elements would have been found on development programmes ten years ago.’

A CIPD/DDI survey UK highlights: global leadership forecast 2008-2009 indicated that a variety of leadership development activities are included within leadership programmes, the most common being formal workshops, special projects and internal coaching. However, this survey also identified that only 42% of UK leaders were satisfied with the development opportunities available to them, indicating that HR professionals should continue to review the programmes they offer to ensure they are valuable to leaders.

Go to the UK highlights survey

Strategic leadership

Although American authors in particular often emphasise the importance of the top leader almost to the exclusion of other leaders in the organisation (the CEO as super-hero), it is true that the chief executive sets the tone and his or her leadership role is crucial. Adair⁴ says that the strategic leader must have the ability to:

see the point
sense relationships and analogies quickly
identify the essentials in a complex picture
put two and two together
find the salient factors in past experience
be able to distinguish clearly between ends and means
appraise situations readily
see their significance in the total setting of present and past experience
get the cue as to the likely line of wise action.

Potter and Hooper² distinguish seven core strategic leadership competencies:

direction, vision, mission, strategies and values
alignment
example and role model issues
developing people at all levels
effective communication
as change agents
action in crisis and ambiguity.

It is unlikely that all the qualities listed by both sets of authors can be found in one person. The notion of leadership teams therefore seems to be finding growing acceptance, but of course they do need to function as genuine teams, pulling in the same direction, rather than as individuals with their own priorities and agendas. Making sure that they do so is also a key role for the CEO.

References

ADAIR, J. (2006) Effective leadership. London: Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development. Available at: http://www.cipd.co.uk/bookstore
POTTER, J. and HOOPER, A. (2005) Developing strategic leadership skills: developing a strategic approach at all levels. London: Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development. Available at: http://www.cipd.co.uk/bookstore
INCOMES DATA SERVICES. (2003) Leadership development. IDS Study 753. London: IDS.
ADAIR, J. (2002) Effective leadership strategy. London: Macmillan.

Leadership: an overview