Future of the CLI

Why do we need to reimagine leadership?

There is no better time to consider the future for a new way of thinking about public leadership.

The common descriptors for the future of public leadership today concern “what will new normal look like?”, “how do we build back better?”, and “what skills will leaders need in the future?” As we continue to work through the challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic, perhaps a more appropriate question (before we can answer these specific questions) is “Why do we need to change?”

A key message throughout this online network forum and repository is that we need to reimagine leadership. It is entirely right to ask why? As Simon Sinek argues ^[1] “great businesses know why they’re doing what they’re doing” and describes how their mission acts as their guiding principle. We know that the mission statement is important but – on its own – it has no utility; it needs to be lived. The mission defines the purpose of why the organisation exists and is supported by a vision and values. Philip Selznick ^[2] writing some fifty years earlier told us that creating a sense of mission and purpose infuses groups with values and provides direction by virtue of long-term objectives. Sinek tends to conflate mission and vision whereas Selznick is more precise. Selznick suggests that an institutional leader must:

“specify and recast the general aims of his organization so as to adapt to them, without serious corruption, to the requirements of institutional survival” (p.69).

This is what Selznick means by the definition of institutional mission and role. The aims of large organizations are often very broad. He argues that a certain vagueness must be accepted because it is difficult to foresee whether more specific goals will be realistic or wise. Once agreed, the next steps are to embody key institutional values based on the building of this institutional core, so that mission (the why), vision (the what in terms of broad organisational goals) and values (the how) define the core purpose. We can agree with Sinek in that the HOW is the practical and operational knowledge that brings the vision to life, but the clearer longer term aims of the vision provide more substance to the absolutely critical but less precise articulation of the organisational mission. The core institutional purpose thus comprises the mission, the vision and the values.

Once we understand the why? then we can consider the remaining five intelligent leadership questions (ILQs) that were introduced in the portal to this forum progressing logically with the WHAT? and HOW? questions. The who question should be the final one determined. This brings us to one of the reasons why we should reimagine leadership: The tendency is to choose the WHO before the WHY, the WHAT and the HOW and this tends to be the selection of an individual, rather than the collective. If one person (a ‘WHO’) is charged with leading the WHAT and the HOW and one who fails to engage or empower collective others, then a much less inclusive and integrated leadership style is likely to be adopted.

So, back to the WHY? (of reimagining leadership)

We need to adapt to the changing political, economic, social, technical, legal and environmental conditions of our current world. The case for reimagining leadership and repurposing management has been around for a long time – some forty years – but has rarely taken root in practice. The preponderance of targets and objectives introduced in the 1970/80s through, for example, management by objectives (MBOs) and so-called public sector reform targets (New Public Management) have led to a focus on what Einstein refers to as ‘Counting what can be counted’ rather than what ‘counts’.

As the leadership world continued to adapt with an increasing tendency towards globalisation and where technology enables the transfer of trillions of dollars across the globe literally in seconds, corporate greed rose. This was accompanied by the demise of the traditional engine (and primarily family-owned businesses) creating a shift towards corporatism. The mindset, however, was driven by common interests towards financial dominance. The continuance of traditional management and leadership is not what was needed but there was a tendency to show a shift in values that became more corporate-facing as opposed to public-facing values and focused on metric-based targets rather than socially desirable outcomes. The financial crash of 2008 brought these matters to a head. It took another decade for the global economy to recover although the impact of austerity measures remained up to the point at which the Covid-19 pandemic overshadowed even the financial crash.

The challenge is that public services, particularly health services, had suffered so much that it was generally not able to respond to the unprecedented demand that was brought to the fore by the pandemic. Throughout these crises, little changed in terms of leadership style with top-down, leadership-through-the-line still being dominant. The pandemic has brought tragic consequences. We owe it those who have lost loved ones to do all that we can to build on the opportunities that are emerging. We have seen the emergence of community resilience and well-being as a major public value. Although the political and economic impact of both the financial crash and the pandemic are clear, less was evident in terms of societal challenges. Can we make a shift to a post pandemic paradigm for public leadership?

In considering the potential for the approach towards new public leadership as a form of collective leadership as opposed to the traditional approach to command and control through the line, we must still adhere to a sense of balance. There will always be the need for individual leaders to step up to the plate, particularly at times of crisis. It is that three-lettered word ‘Ego’, however, that will be the defining factor in making the difference. The reimagination of leadership has a clear mission in its own right; to put the public interest at the core of everything that leaders do. Our failures of the past have in part answered our ‘why?’ question. Our new generation leaders will be the guardians and stewards of our future. We stand at the most significant watershed of all time. As Ron Heifetz tells us in the title of his classic book; it is ‘Leadership without Easy Answers’. The challenges of the future are to:

Recognise that the world is complex, and that chaos will be forever present; it is the nature and scale of chaos that will continually morph.
The universe is patterned and everything that makes up our systems are patterned even though we acknowledge that humans create all systems apart from the Universe!
Individual leaders are fundamentally flawed in several respects. As Grint argues “they are not the embodiments of perfection that we would like them to be ”.
A key role for leaders is to ask the intelligent question and enable collective others to add to the question and influence the answer. A focus should be on looking for answers to the ‘unknown unknowns’ as well as the ‘known knowns/unknowns’.
Distributed and shared leadership is associated with a new type of change agency and aligned closely with learning and leadership development; it is not an attribute of individual leaders or expert change agents, but a process of system learning that could be shared by many people. The challenge is that this view is not universally accepted, although Senge’s work on the ‘learning organisation’ is popular and would rely on such shared and distributed leadership.

A personal view on the future for Collective Leadership

By Dr Stephen Brookes (CEO and Founder of Compass Leadership Limited)

The next section introduces the key components of collective leadership and will address the gist of what is required to move from where we are in terms of collective leadership through to where we want to be.

The Collective Leadership Model (CLM) has been developed throughout this time alongside the development of my personal thinking on collective leadership. This is described in some detail in chapter three of my book when I outline my chosen research approach of realist evaluation, briefly described earlier in this section.

In providing a link between this section of the website to the following section which explores collective leadership, I want to briefly comment on the implementation challenges. I have discussed these challenges with many hundreds of leadership development participants from across the world during my fifteen years as a ‘pracademic’ (as an academic, drawing upon extensive experience also as an active practitioner in my subject area). Whilst receptive and responding positively to my question “Is (selfless leadership) an impossible ideal?” we often engage in debate about the current culture of leadership – particularly in the public sector – which is more to do with leading-through-the-line and ‘do as I say’ rather than leading-in-the-round and asking the intelligent questions. If this is challenged – akin to what is described as ‘constructive dissent’ by those leaders who are open to challenge – some leaders will not respond, and participants fear that to pursue this constructive dissent will be career limiting. This is why leadership needs a change of mindset.

I have been a passionate exponent of collective leadership for well over twenty-five years. As a police divisional commander in one of the most diverse policing areas in the United Kingdom in the mid 1990s, my prime change programme was to introduce a community-based model of policing against a background of rising crime, declining community confidence and inter racial tensions. The aim of this ambitious change programme was to work with the community rather than deliver policing to the community.

Towards a Collective Leadership Model

I argued for a coactive (as opposed to a reactive but also incorporating a proactive) approach, a term that I first used during my PhD studies in the 1990’s which I adapted to the leadership of community policing. I defined a strategy based on the police working cooperatively with other agencies to identify and address the conditions needed for improved community safety. Significant reductions in crime and an increase in community confidence resulted after two years of implementing a problem oriented approach to policing. The model won an international award at the Herman Goldstein Problem Oriented Policing Awards in San Diego. The model was also influential in encouraging a neighbourhood policing style focused on collective leadership and problem solving.

In 2000, I was then appointed as a founding Home Office Regional Director (HORD) in one of ten Government Offices for the Regions, with responsibility for working with the five chief constables, forty local authority chief executives and a range of other public, private and voluntary organisations in relation to crime and community safety specifically. In the final eighteen months, I had additional responsibility for overseeing cross cutting government policy ranging from crime and community safety through to education and economic enterprise in one of the counties within the region. These responsibilities gave me a unique insight as a key participant in relation to the strengths and weaknesses and opportunities and threats of collective leadership across widely diverse organisations and institutions, including the for-profit sector. The overall reflection on this experience was the importance of aligning individual values with those of institution and, beyond that, networks. I led two national projects on behalf of the Home Office which both focused on the importance of multi-agency partnership working. It was at this point that I left policing/Home Office and took up my career at the University of Manchester (Manchester Business School) being appointed to the Centre for Public Policy and Management. I brought with me my passion for public leadership and almost immediately secured funding from the Economic and Social Research Council to run a two year series of Seminars on the Public Leadership Challenge. This ultimately led to the publications included in my biography. Of note, the New Public Leadership Challenge which I co-edited with Keith Grint and the Selfless Leader drew on further research in creating the Collective Leadership Model that underpins this online resource and forum.

The Benefits of the Collective Leadership Model for the Future

The CLM is premised on the definition of collective leadership as a means of defining a shared purpose with the overall vision of leading the in the public interest. It builds on the Collective Leadership Framework (CLF) which comprises the 20 Ps of New Public Leadership. The difference between the framework and model is described as follows:

A framework is a way of representing the empirical relations between every aspect of inquiry and highlighting how the variables relate to each other. Statistical tests can be applied. The 20P outline of New Public Leadership represents this framework.
A model is something used to represent or explain the operation and mechanism of the variables and outcomes. It is a conceptual model which exists in one’s mind, often consisting of symbolic representations. It helps in explaining and interpreting the operation of the mechanisms in practice but with the confidence on knowing that it is consistent with the validity and representativeness of the research.

The empirical and statistical facets of the research have been briefly described in the earlier papers in this section with more detailed explanation available in the book “The Selfless Leader”. We have confidence that the validity and representativeness of the research will enable both the Framework and the Model to be applied in any leadership context, whether for-profit or not-for-profit. It has been used in relation to local authorities, policing and health organisations in the UK, focused on public leadership in support of a local authority leadership development programme, community safety across multiple agencies and, similarly, tackling inequalities in health more specifically.

The aim is to now use this approach in similar research internationally as well as further, more detailed research in the UK. We believe that this is now appropriate to the collective leadership approach that is conducive in a potential post pandemic paradigm and in influencing the change that is necessary

We begin this journey by providing a narrative and discussion in relation to the meaning, application and strengths and areas for development of collective leadership in the next section. The Collective Leadership Framework and Model are well placed to assess leadership in all contexts. It draws on our three-dimensional approach to Leadership³ which is also briefly reviewed on this portal. The three-dimensions are consistent with the CLF and CLM, comprising (1) the need to build capacity and capability of collective leaders, (2) using a collective style of leadership incorporating individual, shared and distributed leadership and (3) focusing on not just the known/knowns and known/unknowns but also giving emphasis to discovering the patterns that will help in identifying and responding to the unknown unknowns. This is the essence of authentic transformational leadership. The three-dimensional approach to leadership is discussed further in other sections but is summarised in the illustration below

Transformational Collective Leadership framework in tackling the Unknown Unknowns

¹Sinek, S. (2011) Start with why : how great leaders inspire everyone to take action [Online]. New York ; London: Portfolio/Penguin.

²Selznick, P. (1957) Leadership in Administration: a sociological interpretation. Evanston, Ill: Row, Peterson.

Introduction to the Collective Leadership Model