Spring 2003

The leadership jigsaw -finding the missing pieceRussell Connor and Peter Mackenzie-Smith

Business Strategy Review, 2003, Volume 14 Issue 1, pp 59-66

Leadership cannot be summed up by a listof action points. Leadership is an activeinteraction with the world and involvesbringing into being new possibilities fromwithin real constraints.

Managing constant change has been a theme for adecade or more. Dealing with discontinuous changeis a much more recent phenomenon. If tomorrow isnot the same as yesterday, what do leaders draw uponto help guide them to make wise decisions? Clearly,past experience cannot be the whole answer.

Though the demands faced by leaders are becomingclearer, the essence of leadership is difficult to capture.The question of what it takes to be a good leader hasbeen the subject of much thought and research – andthe recent increase in interest coincides with the stepchanges in complexity many organisations face.

The demands of leadershipWe live, lead and work in an era of contradictoryforces. The waves of change sweeping the world –including digitalisation, globalisation, demographicshifts, migration and the rapid degradation of socialand natural capital – are creating opposing tensions.You can see these any time you open a newspaper ormanagement journal: speed versus sustainability;exploration versus exploitation; global versus localways of organising; top-down versus bottom-upapproaches to leadership.

While there has always been upheaval in humanhistory, there is something different about today’scircumstances. According to a recent “white paper”,Dialog on Leadership, from the McKinsey Society forOrganisational Learning: “The pace of change issomehow faster, the frequency and amplitude ofrestructuring and reforming are significantly greater,and the pathways of emerging futures seem to be lesspredictable than they were in earlier times”.

These waves of change have been evident for sometime albeit the tensions are increasing as time passes.In addition, in recent years there have been hugediscontinuities in markets and social structures. Wehave seen the inflation and bursting of the dot-combubble, the collapse of global corporations (Enronbeing one example) and upward movement of shareprices give way to wild fluctuations and massivedevaluation of assets. And this is just the businessworld. No list of events marking discontinuouschange could be complete without reference toSeptember 11 2001.

If we cannot look to past experience, technical know-how or acquired knowledge to determine what it takesto be a leader, then what is it that makes a difference?

Prevailing views on leadershipThe following approaches have, to varying degrees,illuminated the subject of leadership:

● Humanistic psychology placed an emphasis on theleadership values such as teamwork, mutualappreciation and dialogue

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● Behavioural psychology and the competencyapproach have attempted to identify what leadersdo and how they act

● Personality theories have attempted to identifypersonality types and combinations of traits thatleaders have in common

● Situational leadership is based on the idea thatthere is not one preferred style of leadership – themost appropriate one will depend upon thesituation that needs to be faced

● Emotional intelligence suggests that genuineleaders have to be emotionally intelligent as “theycreate resonance in those they lead – a reservoir ofpositivity that frees the best in people”

● Comparing and contrasting “leadership” with“management” has sought to differentiateleadership from a more general managerialcompetence

We can best describe the way “leadership” has beentackled as butterfly catching. Researchers,

management theorists and practitioners havebrandished their nets in an effort to find the genuinearticle. After netting a wide variety of species, someof which were truly attractive, they turned theirattention to finding the rarest of specimens inparticularly demanding or exotic ecosystems.

Once caught, the interesting butterflies were pinnedand labelled. The differences with lesser varieties werenoted. However, having pinned, labelled and classified,the essence of leadership remained as elusive as ever.

All of these approaches share a similar frame ofreference. They have taken leadership as an objective“reality” and worked to identify common aspects suchas behaviours or competence. Even those approachesseeking to identify less tangible aspects, such as values,personality traits or even emotional intelligence, havetried to establish leadership “facts”.

What is missing?There is a gap in the practice of social and managementscience. While theorists and practitioners have largelyfocused on establishing the doing of leadership, beinga leader has been left to the “hero” chief executives towrite about in their autobiographies. But even theydo not help us much, usually assuming that theirreaders want to hear what decisions they made ratherthan how they made them.

It is difficult to describe leadership as a list of “mustdo’s”. To quote the Dialog on Leadership again: “Ineveryday experience we do not see what precedesleadership action – the thought processes thatgradually lead to the development of entrepreneurialideas and initiatives. We do not see the full process ofcoming-into-being of social action: we do not see itsdescending movement from thought and consciousnessto language, behaviour, and action. We see what wedo. We also form theories about how we do things.But we are usually unaware of the place from whichwe operate when we act”.

We think we know a lot about experience but in factwe don’t. Few people are able to suspend thepreconceptions and assumptions that make up theirapproach to the world and examine the structuringand layering of experience that underlie them.

The thousands of management books rarely dipbeneath the surface to reveal the real experience of

60 Russell Connor and Peter Mackenzie-Smithw

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making far-reaching decisions. This is not because theauthors just want to demonstrate success or theirproblem-solving prowess. It is rare to be able fully toarticulate the perceptual skills involved in defining andseizing opportunities. People focus on an issue,opportunity or problem without being able fully toset out or report their thought processes. It is becomingwidely accepted that people make decisions as aconsequence of an interplay between what isarticulated and what is not.

Leadership: the key conceptsThe linked concepts of the “work” of leadership andcapability are useful to help gain insight into thesubject of leadership

The “work” of leadershipOne framework for looking at the structure ofmanagerial work has been developed by Bioss(formerly the Brunel Institute of Organisation andSocial Studies), which for more than 30 years hascarried out research into what it takes to manage andlead in environments of increasing complexity. Basedon the work of Elliott Jaques, it emphasises thesignificance of time as the medium for the process ofwork and the criterion for its completion. Work canbe defined as the exercise of discretion withinprescribed limits (real rules and regulations) to achievea goal (objective).

In these terms, time has a dual significance for work.From the point of view of prescribed limits there is anagreed time by which a task must be completed. Thediscretionary content of work is the exercise throughtime of the capacity to create sufficient “pattern andorder” on the path towards the achievement of a goal.

In Jaques’ words: “Having decided how to set abouta task, and having completed it, you can never be surethat if you had decided to do it another way that youmight not have done it better or more quickly. Youjust do not know. Once a task is done it is done. Ifyou set about to replicate the task and the conditionsunder which you did it, you are in the process ofcreating knowledge. However, this is not ‘work’ inthe same sense. While knowledge is one of the essentialtools of work, it is not the work itself. Knowledgealone will not see you through. In work you areconfronted by problems that have no absolutelycorrect answer. You have to use knowledge andjudgement in interaction.”

Seeing knowledge as a tool eases people away fromthe feeling that it is their fault they do not knowenough and helps them to accept that as jobs get biggerand more complex there is a growing degree of“unknowability” in many of the situations wheredecisions must be made.

Obviously some roles in organisations deal with moreuncertainty and complexity than others. Over 30 yearsago Bioss defined the types of work in terms ofcomplexity that are carried out at various levels inorganisations. (See Figure 1.)

This framework is helpful in that it can be used tomake a distinction between leadership and strategicleadership. All levels of work involve discretion andcertain levels of judgement and therefore it is possibleto say that everyone has the opportunity to take aleadership position in their area of responsibility.Strategic leadership involves bringing new possibilitiesinto being and is very different from leadership atlower levels of work where the focus is on resourceeffectiveness, efficiency and best practice.

The leadership jigsaw - finding the missing piece 61

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Using the framework illustrated in Figure 1, four kindsof strategic leadership work can be identified:

● Strategic development. The theme for thiscapability is modelling

● Stategic intent. The theme for this is weaving

● Corporate citizenship. The theme here is revealing

● Corporate prescience. The theme here, now at thehighest possible levels of leadership, is previewing

CapabilityCapability is used to describe the way in which people“pattern and order” their experience as a basis formaking sense of their world and acting in it. Capabilityis not simply an attribute of a person but ischaracteristic of the whole pattern of relationships thathe or she builds up in the process of defining the shape,sense and scale of the world in which that person isgoing to operate.

Capability defines the scope and complexity of the worldpeople construct and in which they act. It is thereforereflected in the degree of uncertainty that people perceiveand can tolerate, the scale of their view of the world andthe kind of inner structure they bring to bear onopportunity identification, definition of problems andthe pursuit of solutions. While individual in reference,the concept of capability does not separate the individualfrom the world. On the contrary, it describes the activeconstruction – in the sense of both building andconstruing – of the world in which that individual lives.

“Pattern and order” is the way individuals build aperspective in the context of uncertainty andcomplexity so that they can make decisions when theydo not know and cannot know what to do.

There are limits to the size and scale of the world weare able to construct and pattern and in which we canlive and work. For some, the ability to find patternand order at increasing levels of complexity developsfaster and further than for others. Capability candevelop at an average, modest rate or, in much rarercases, on a sharply rising curve, enabling people tomake sound judgements even when the ambientcomplexity and uncertainty is at a very high level.Figure 2 gives an example of one manager’s capability– an individual who can grow to potentially high levelsof management but would probably not becomfortable at CEO level.

Bioss research across many nationalities and types ofwork indicates that, although capability grows at anindividual pace it does appear to grow at a consistentpace. Thus, having plotted the individual curve,predictions about future capability can be made withmore statistical confidence than with availablepsychometric measures.

The relationship in Figure 2 between capability andtime (age) can help to explain and illuminate a numberof leadership scenarios. Some people will steadily growin capability so as to be ready for decision making atthe fourth level of complexity – strategic development– in the maturity of their careers. Others will becomfortable at that level at a more precocious age,perhaps on their way to having capability at Level 5or even higher. This model can, for example, help toexplain to a very high-potential young manager thatwhile the long-term prediction for his or her careerpath is very buoyant, there is currently a gap betweentheir capability and their credibility that is almostguaranteed to give them some temporary frustration.

Equally, this model raises some challenging questionsabout the age of leaders and our policies on age ingeneral. In Anglo-American business, over the pastdecade CEOs have been, on average, 10 yearsyounger than in previous decades; they also remainin post for an average of half as long – just overthree years as opposed to seven. It might also besaid at a more anecdotal level that senior businessleaders have never had such low public trust and

62 Russell Connor and Peter Mackenzie-Smith

Added valuefor the present

Practice [3]

Service [2]

Quality [1]

Strategic [4]development

Strategic intent [5]

Corporatecitizenship [6]

Corporate [7]prescience

Added valuefor the future

Valuesystem

© Bioss based on thework of Luc Hoebeke

Figure 1Domains of work

Spring 2003

that it has never been more difficult to recruiteffective chief executives.

Figure 3 shows the concept of “flow” – that satisfying,energised state where the challenges we face feel likea good fit with the capability we have at the time.Most of us have languished below the “flow” lineduring periods of our careers, frustrated at beingunder-stretched. More critical to the organisation,however, is to have a senior leader appointed to arole well above his or her natural flow point. Theimpact on decision making, on costs and wastedopportunities, on team morale (and not least on thepersonal health and happiness of the leadersconcerned) can be very serious.

It may be that age has been much more of a factorthan recognised in the past, not for any altruisticageism reason but simply because many search andappointment policies, by setting an arbitrarily youngage limit, have excluded most of the managers whosecapability has grown to the requisite level for the job.

In France, a culture with a different outlook on theage of its leaders, the 70-year-old president JacquesChirac looks out on business chiefs of significantlyolder average age. When Jean-Marie Messier failedwith some public humiliation in 2002 as CEO ofVivendi, a common reaction on the Bourse was a Gallicshrug and the comment: “C’est évident qu’ il était tropjeune, c’est sur….” Messier was 45.

Figure 4 illustrates the integrating role of capability.It is recognised that this is the requisite but not sufficientcondition for leadership. All of the elements are neededfor the successful completion of the leadership task butwith shifting emphases. For example, the skills andknowledge elements for an IBM programming teamleader would be substantial. On the other hand, LouGerstner, who took IBM from $8bn loss to $8bn profit,had, in his words, “absolutely no knowledge of oraptitude for IT when I joined as CEO”.

It is sobering to look at the jigsaw diagram in Figure4 – and indeed at many lists of alleged “leadership

The leadership jigsaw - finding the missing piece 63

Age

Chart © BIOSS, Growth Curves © E. Jaques

Key: = Estimated Level of Work

= Current Capability

= Capability Growth

Career path appreciation – an example of a development curve

X

= Transition between Levels

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Current role

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Quality

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Strategicintent

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Corporatecitizenship

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Previewing

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Figure 2Growth of capability

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competencies” – and then consider Nelson Mandela.External factors savagely reduced his opportunitiesto develop the knowledge, skills and experiencesegments of his jigsaw, yet he emerged to succeed in aleadership challenge of Herculean proportions. Thiswas fairly powerful evidence that, in spite of the worstefforts of his captors, one key element - his intrinsiccapability – had continued to grow strongly during27 lost years.

Judgement and leadershipCapability is demonstrated when people havediscretionary space. This space is where the solutionsdo not fall out of the data and people are called uponto make judgements. It is in this discretionary aspectof work that the balance between analysis andintuition is brought into play in the continuing processof sensing a potential opportunity, defining a problemand constructing a solution.

In looking at the judgements people make, it is usefulto consider the following areas in addition to thecomplexity of the decision itself.

● The level of self-awareness underpinning thejudgement

● Making provision for others

Self-awarenessSelf-awareness means having a deep understandingof one’s emotions as well as one’s strengths andlimitations and one’s values and motives. Manyauthors have written about how awareness ofemotions is critical to leadership success. There are,however, two further, crucial elements. One is relatedto the awareness of the psychological “weight” ofwork, which is generated by not knowing the outcomeof judgements. The other relates to the awareness thatthere are a number of life journeys that are being madesimultaneously. An awareness of these is crucial tohaving a sense of balance.

It is the exercise of discretion and judgement that givespsychological weight to work. The discretionaryaspects are personal and consist of judgements madeabout priorities, pace of work and the pursuit of onealternative rather than another. The exercise ofdiscretion is characterised by doing things withoutbeing certain that they are the right or appropriatethings to be done at that moment. In work, a managermust tolerate anxiety and uncertainty about the futureoutcome of the present commitment of personal andmaterial resources. This is the aspect that gives workits “weight” in a psychological sense.

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Figure 3The concept of flow

Effecti

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RANGE OF CAPABILITIES

Inappropriate orno decisions

Hasty/delayeddecisions

Indecisiveness

Vacillation

Levity i.e. lackof serious thought

Effective decision-making

Automatic solutions

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Anxiety

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© BIOSS

The experience of work

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Adapted from Csikszentmihalyi, M. Optimal ExperienceCambridge University Press 1988

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Leaders need to be in tune with the psychologicalweight of work and be aware of the level of uneasethat “not knowing” generates. Unease can soon slipinto worry and anxiety and leaders need to be awareof an increase in their emotional state.

Leaders need to be able to reflect on how they feelabout change and its underpinning – impermanence,transience. Strategic leaders acknowledge thatuncertainty is part of their world. It is not just toleratedor minimised but accepted and welcomed as a resourceand, paradoxically, as the only certainty. They needto be able to develop a relationship with uncertaintywhere there is a clear awareness of the level of concernbut not such that it impedes decision making eitherthrough analysis paralysis or over- hasty actiondesigned to reduce tension.

Some common traits have been observed amongleaders of the highest capability, those whoserelationship with uncertainty and complexity has beenexceptional. Their self-awareness frequently includesan increasing sense of what they do not know, of whattheir experience does not teach them, of how muchthey still have to learn and, without any false modesty,how little they have yet achieved. The final sectionsof Winston Churchill’s and Mandela’s autobiographies,where one might expect a mature summary of all thathas gone before, are entirely focused on the future, onhow much there is still to be done.

Sir John Harvey-Jones, as CEO of ICI, took thecompany from a £200m loss to £1bn profit in fiveyears in the 1980s, following this with extensivecontributions to broadcasting and presentations. But

in a recent interview at age 78 he said: “I don’t thinkI have really achieved very much… you look aroundand there are so many things that need doing. I wouldstill like to make a difference”.

Gerstner, the turnaround king of IBM, when asked ofhis retirement plans, said: “I’m going back to school.Not to get a degree but to read and to enjoy the processof learning.”

And the final pages in the diary of Leonardo da Vinci,whose achievements in a dozen branches of both artsand sciences still leave people breathless five centurieslater, are increasingly punctuated with the cry: “Wasthere anything ever done?”

Leadership often places huge demands on theshoulders of a person. A helpful framework forunderstanding how this weight can best be carried hasbeen developed by Gillian Stamp. She puts forward theidea that each of us is on four journeys through our lives:

● The underlying journey. The journey of the self andin particular the growth in capability

● The public journey in the world of work. Thiswhere our capability is expressed

● The private journey that is shared with family andfriends and community in which we are close toothers’ journeys

● The personal journey through which we do or donot care for ourselves and weave together the otherjourneys

Being a leader throws a spotlight on the public journey.Leaders need to be particularly aware of each journeyand the work of keeping them in balance.

Making provision for othersIn traditional and more stable business environments,the work involved in creating meaning and valuesystems was rarely considered. In today’s more organicand dynamic business environments the intangibledimension – that is, the domain of human interactionand relationships – is moving from the periphery tocentre stage. The core leadership activity has movedfrom working with the more tangible to the moreintangible variables of social behaviour andmanagerial action. What follows from this is thatleaders, in order to do well, have to learn to payattention to a different set of variables: variables that

The leadership jigsaw - finding the missing piece 65

Skills Knowledge

Capability&

judgement

Motivationand personal

qualitiesExperience

Figure 4The jigsaw of potential

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Russell Connor and Peter Mackenzie-Smith(both contactable on Post@bioss.com) areassociates of Bioss International and qualifiedpractitioners of the diagnostic anddevelopmental processes referred to in thisarticle. They have many years of internationalexperience in the manufacturing, utilities andtelecommunications sectors.

Bioss focuses on understanding individual, teamand organisational capability and potentialthrough a range of processes based on theconcepts touched on in this article, includingCareer Path Appreciation (CPA), developed byProfessor Gillian Stamp. The emphasis is tolook at the discretionary space that is availablefor the making of decisions, the extent to whichpeople have the ability or the potential to tacklethose challenges, and the extent to whichleaders give appropriate discretionary space tothose around and below them.

66 Russell Connor and Peter Mackenzie-Smith

used to be referred to as “soft”, such as intentions,interpretations and identity.

Due to the higher levels of uncertainty in the businessenvironment individuals have to use their ownjudgement. Accordingly, it is necessary to treat peopleas people. Not surprisingly, in the world of workwhere human beings are seen as resources, this is anapproach that is not as evident as it might be. Thetemptation to forget that people are people and totreat them as things – to be switched on and off –becomes great. In these commercially turbulent times,that tired corporate mantra “people are our mostimportant asset” is cynically received as true. Peopleare indeed important as the asset that is easiest toshed, cut, reshape or replace.

In treating people as people it is useful to considerthe four Ms also identified by Stamp: people aremakers of meaning and of decisions; members oftechnical/professional groups, communities,families; each person is an irreducible mystery; andtreating people as people is messy.

None of the four Ms is particularly attractive to asenior decision maker; they reinforce the truism thatmanaging people as individuals is hard work. Weakleaders see it as optional; high-capability leadersrecognise it as essential.

As leaders it is necessary to create the conditions underwhich people can be treated as people. Theseconditions include: coherence to address the need forpeople to make meaning and decisions; an expectationthat each will use his or her judgement to the best oftheir ability; the capacity to review, learn, grow andset blame aside.

This requirement, like all leadership aspects, is full ofcontradictions and tensions that can be summed upin the paradox between controlling costs/creatingvalue on the one hand and managing relationshipson the other.

Managers at all levels are exhorted to control costsand at the same time provide leadership, create trustand treat people – customers, joint-venture partners,stakeholders, competitors – with care and respect. Themanager’s own position may be vulnerable and yethe or she is expected to provide conditions for others

to work effectively, to trust and remain committed tothe organisation.

Filling the gapThe challenge of being a leader at a time whentowering corporations can come down overnight is tobring into being new opportunities through sensingand discerning emerging patterns, quickly toappreciate the range of future possibilities and howevents are intertwined and make judgements basedon this.

The judgements made by a leader reveal the perceptualskills and level of intuition used to identify problemslong before evidence of them can be found by eventhe most advanced management information system.Through focusing on the judgements that are made itis possible to explore the way leaders make decisions,manage the tensions related to this and make provisionfor others.

By considering the challenge of work and theindividual capability to undertake this as two sides ofthe same coin real insight can be gained into leadership;this can help meet the challenge of having the rightpeople at the right time to lead organisations inturbulence.