Leadership development

Edgecumbe has taught leadership skills to leaders in business, healthcare and public sector organisations around the world.

Our programmes are designed individually to meet your specific needs to ensure that they:

• are set in your context, reflective of your environment and culture;
• help participants to become more aware of themselves and others;
• use real issues and opportunities wherever appropriate as a vehicle for learning;
• are based on a model of leadership of what leaders in your organisation need to do.

Edgecumbe enjoy a strategic relationship with the Saïd Business School at Oxford University, contributing to many of their Executive Education Programmes as well as co-developing and delivery of bespoke programmes for world renowned clients.

At Edgecumbe, we have built our business by having deep skills in the assessment and development of people, teams and organizations. Our approach rests on a common core of ideas, rooted in the research evidence, and our interventions complement each other seamlessly to create a clear agenda for development. These ideas are set out below. Clients sometimes ask us to provide just one piece of the jigsaw, but increasingly we find that they too find the case for an integrated approach is a compelling one.

Our philosophy on leadership

If the challenge is to engage every effort of each member of the organization, the question is ‘how?’ Well constructed reward schemes can help. An attractive and conducive working environment can help. A well regarded brand can help. Good internal communications can help. There is a bewildering array of answers, and an endless list of programmes to implement in order to make progress.

However, over recent years the evidence has pointed more and more consistently to leadership as the most powerful factor. Research conducted by the Corporate Leadership Council in 2004 confirmed that the most important impact on emotional engagement (which is the big driver of discretionary effort, which in turn drives productivity and performance) comes from the direct manager. Fascinatingly though, they found that ‘the value of managers is NOT in their ability to engender commitment to themselves, but in their ability to enable commitment to… the job and the organization’.

This finding is thoroughly at odds with traditional conceptions of the way charismatic managers engender commitment. But it is consistent with other recent research into the psychology of employee engagement, which underpins Edgecumbe’s approach to helping people and organizations thrive.

We believe the current state of the research points clearly to the causal chain illustrated here. Managers and leaders have a measurable and significant impact on culture (what we do), climate (how it feels at work) and on engagement. When the culture and climate are positive and engagement is strong, employees are more likely to stay and to put extra effort into the success of the enterprise. We will develop this argument on the following pages. It has several steps, but we believe the overall case is compelling...

What must leaders do to engage employees?

Leaders have to inspire their people, focus their efforts, enable them to perform, reinforce achievement and ensure everyone learns and develops.

If it is true that leaders make the biggest difference to engagement, what is it that they must do to engender the positive culture and climate that foster the commitment of their teams? Again, recent research has repeatedly come up with similar lists of features of climate which are conducive to high performance.

Brown and Leigh (1996) identified 6 key criteria. First, people need to feel that they are contributing to something meaningful and worthwhile, that they have a sense of purpose. Second, they need clarity about what is expected of them. Third, they need a sense of challenge, to feel stretched. Fourth, they need to feel that they have the support they need. Fifth, they need recognition for their efforts and contribution. And finally, they need to feel that it is safe to express their views and opinions. If these things are present, employees report higher involvement in their jobs, make greater efforts (working both longer and harder) and perform better.

So what must leaders do to engender such a climate?

First, leaders have to inspire people. This is often achieved through vision: a mighty purpose for which the organization exists and which it is designed to pursue.

Then they have to focus the efforts of the team or organization so they know where they need to direct their efforts in order to contribute.

Next, they need to ensure that their people are enabled to achieve what is required of them, through challenge and support and through the provision of a psychologically safe working environment.

Then, in order to ensure that all incentives and rewards are directed towards the same ends, leaders need to ensure that there are appropriate systems in place to reinforce the right behaviours and deal with those who cannot or will not contribute.

Finally, they have to ensure that everyone learns from their performance and experience, so that performance improves over time.

However, the research suggests that it is the balance and combination of these behaviours, the simultaneous ‘pull’ and ‘push’, support and challenge, that creates an atmosphere in which people give of their best, rather than them being a ‘pick and mix’ list of good things to do. And here lies the rub. Research by Huselid and Becker (1995) indicates that just doing some of these things well will not produce great results. The payoff curve is not linear: adding one element at a time does not seem to produce significant incremental gains. Instead, the effect is more like that of unblocking a pipeline: you only get the full benefit by removing all of the blockages, because any one that is left can significantly impair the flow.

In practice, this makes sense. Even if the team is inspired by a lofty vision and has a clear idea of what it should focus on to make it a reality, their chances of success are severely constrained if they lack the necessary resources. And, arguably, the recent financial crisis can be regarded as the product of perverse incentives, where senior executives have been rewarded not for creating sustained success for the organization, but improvements in short term returns, at the expense of an unsustainable increase in the level of risk.

So, if employee engagement and better performance are the prizes available to leaders who do the right things, how can we tell which leaders are best equipped to do those things: how can we identify and develop the ‘right stuff?’

The right stuff: the capabilities leaders need

In ‘Good to Great’, his excellent 2001 study of the drivers of organizational success, Jim Collins noted

"In a good to great transformation, people are not your most important asset. The right people are".

So, what do the right people look like? And what should we be looking at to identify them? The good news here is that the research gives us a pretty good understanding of the underlying capabilities that leaders need to possess in order to discharge these tasks well. The tricky part is that it also shows that it is very difficult for any individual to become really good at all of them. We’ll come back to the tricky bit, but for now let’s focus on the good news.

A major review of recent research by Judge et al. in 2002 concluded that fully 25% of the variation in leadership effectiveness is accounted for by personality alone. That makes personality the single most important determinant of capability, above intellect, experience or anything else.

And this makes it plain why some managers find it hard to develop some competencies: they do not have the necessary personality traits to support the specified behaviour - they are working against the grain of their nature. If you want to know more about which personality traits are linked to which competencies, we would recommend The Owner’s Manual for Personality at Work (Howard and Howard, 2001), which lists personality correlates for 45 common competencies.

Whilst these ideas are all very helpful at the academic level, they do not by themselves go far enough to help organizations identify and develop leaders with the ‘right stuff’. After all, it is not every manager that has, or wants to have, a deep understanding of psychological constructs such as impulsivity, and what is an ambivert?

In order to make these ideas relevant and accessible, we believe organizations need a simple, common language to describe capability, which nonetheless reflects the underlying complexities of the relationship between personality, behaviour and impact.

Traditional competency models typically fail this test in two main ways. First, they fail to link together competencies which rest on common themes of personality, so that even if organizations understand the personality of their leaders, it is not obvious which competencies they will develop easily and which they will not.

Second, there is often no overall model into which the parts can be seen to fit in a logical, understandable way. This makes them hard to remember and harder to use in practice. As a consequence, too often the competencies remain part of the technical language of the HR department and fail to gain acceptance as part of the everyday language of managers in the line.

We conclude from this that organizations need a clear, simple model, which reflects the underlying personality traits which enable the development of capability. The result is Edgecumbe’s Primary Colours Model, which we have used successfully in a wide range of organizations and sectors.

The simple architecture of the model reflects the factor structure which our research shows underlies most organizations’ competency models. The content isn’t original, but the way of organising it is. And the key benefit our clients have found is that it is easy to remember, and easy to use: line managers typically ‘get it’ straight away and there is little debate about what should or should not be included, but instead a focus on how it applies, and could apply, in the context of their particular role and team. Now, that is the kind of conversation which can make a difference.

However, this is not the end of the story. As we indicated earlier, the research shows that it is difficult for any individual to become good at everything, and we need to take that into account when we are thinking about how we can develop these capabilities in leaders.

"People don’t change that much. Don’t waste time trying to put in what was left out. Try to draw out what was left in. That is hard enough".

‘First Break All the Rules’, Buckingham and Coffman (2005)

Raising the bar: developing leadership, not just leaders

The second key message we took from the research on personality and leadership effectiveness was that, in developing leaders, we need to help them to understand and build on their strengths, and we need to stop trying to turn them into people they are not.

And this brings us to another problem with many competency models. Because they often end up as a ‘wish list’ of behaviours, they provide little help in shaping a development agenda for leaders. Certainly they set the standards (often lots and lots of them!), but they don’t help leaders understand where to focus their development efforts.

As a consequence, all too often leaders are faced with an assessment of their own capability, by which they are drawn to focus on the gaps between where they are and where they ‘should be’. The result is typically that they try to close those gaps that are greatest. Again and again, year after year, without seeing significant improvement.

And we think this is a MAJOR problem. Not only is it demoralising for the individual to face the same sort of development challenge year after year (“Bob, you still need to keep working on your time management”), but it is MASSIVELY detrimental to engagement. Research by Gallup’s Tom Rath and Barry Conchie (Strengths Based Leadership, 2008) makes the point starkly. The chances of being engaged at work if the organization focuses on developing people’s strengths are 73%. If it focuses instead on trying to correct weaknesses, the chances are a mere 9%. 9%! Not even one in 10!

This is why, when it comes to our approach to developing leaders’ capability, we start not just with a clear understanding of current strengths and weaknesses, but also the underlying personality factors which indicate where progress is most likely to be achieved. This makes setting the agenda a simple matter at the individual level. And it makes it easier to identify the sorts of support that are likely to be effective in raising effectiveness.

BUT, this is not going to make a leader into a champion in all disciplines. World class performance comes from deploying world class capability, and whilst we have certainly met some talented all-rounders in our time, they are rare. In the same way, the Olympic discipline of the decathlon attracts athletes with a rare breadth of ability. But the Olympic record in each of the underlying disciplines is always held by a specialist. Not one is held by a decathlete.

And this, of course, is why we field teams, both in competing at the Olympics and in organizations. As a result, we see leadership as a team activity. If the leadership team is the unit of performance, then incompleteness of the individual is not a problem. On the contrary, focussing leaders on developing their strengths has an enormous positive impact, both on them and on engagement, as we have seen.

However, for the members of a leadership team to complement each other effectively, everyone needs to understand each others’ key strengths and trust them to play their part when the situation calls for it.

We therefore work with our clients as teams. We help them to understand each other and we help them to build trust, so that they value and rely on the complementary capabilities of their colleagues. In this way, the challenge we address is less one of getting people to lead teams, but rather one of getting teams to lead. And it is by exploiting the complementary capabilities of teams that organizations have the best chance of creating the culture and climate which engender engagement and high performance.

Times are far from easy for many people at present. But all is not gloom: amongst the challenges and anxieties that the current situation brings, there are also real and rare opportunities. In particular, those familiar with trying to engender change in organizations will be only too aware of the value of a ‘burning platform’ in generating the motivation and willingness to change. And so, as Jim Collins (of Good to Great fame) put it to the World Business Forum in 2008, “a crisis is a terrible thing to waste”. And those businesses which take full advantage of the crisis will emerge stronger, more resilient and better prepared to compete when the upturn comes: in short to thrive.