Defining Leadership for Turbulent Times: Leveraging the Global-Local Tension

• In Event: Processes and Practices of Leadership Development in Not-for-Profit Organizations

Short Description

An international non-governmental agency sought to create a common definition of leadership and identify key global leadership competencies, while being mindful of the fact that leadership in complex and globally diverse settings cannot be one-size-fits-all. The presenter will describe the phases and outputs of this approach, share insights gained and lessons learned, and suggest broader implications for the practice of leadership development in international organizations.

Detailed Abstract

Leadership competency models are typically the central element of an organization’s leader development system. Such models serve several useful functions. They promote a shared understanding of what characterizes effective leaders, provide a benchmark for assessing the performance of leaders, and integrate the various initiatives and tools aimed at developing leaders.

These competency models also have a number of shortcomings, particularly in relation to this context:
•Competency models portray “leading” as a universal set of behaviors and values that will produce leadership in any setting in the organization. Yet anyone who has worked in a global organization knows that on-the-ground effective leadership can look quite different across various cultures. And leadership processes in turbulent local settings often take on a different shape than those enacted in headquarter teams that are working to coordinate across sites.
•Competency models communicate that effective leaders need to be highly skilled in a wide range of competencies. Yet any given leader will have a mix of strengths and weaknesses. Because leaders in organizations are almost always working together to solve complex issues, how much a particular leader’s weaknesses matter depends on the competencies of those around him or her. Although encouraging leaders to expand their portfolio of skills is important, organizations also need to recognize that leading—particularly in turbulent times—is collective work, thus looking at the mix of capabilities in any setting is critical.
•Competency models focus on leadership inputs—the values and skills that individuals bring to leadership work. What they don’t provide is a way of evaluating whether leadership is actually happening in the organization. Identifying and assessing the outputs of leadership (i.e. the degree to which individuals are working together as a cohesive group to produce collective results) is an essential element if diagnosing leadership issues and improving leadership processes.

How then might a decentralized international organization create a shared understanding of leadership while at the same time encourage the operationalization of leadership in ways that best fit diverse local contexts? That is the question we (the GSCP-CCL Leadership Alliance) tackled in partnership with an international NGO that was crafting and executing a leadership development strategy to support their ambitious organizational strategy. The NGO was seeking a common definition of leadership while ensuring that leadership was not understood as a one-size-fits-all process.

Our approach focused on desired leadership outcomes as the potentially unifying element of the organization’s leadership framework. We used the Direction-Alignment-Commitment leadership ontology to guide our work (Drath et al., 2008). According to this ontology, a leadership process in a group is effective when it produces three crucial outcomes: (1) Direction (agreement in the group on overall goals); (2) Alignment (coordinated work within the group); and (3) Commitment (mutual responsibility for the success and well-being of the group). What varies across different groups is how these outcomes are achieved.

Our method was to first assess the organization’s current leadership capacity by examining the extent to which various groups had the direction, alignment, and commitment (DAC) needed to produce collective results. Such an assessment identifies (a) any outcomes that the organization as a whole struggles to produce, (b) whether some types of groups more readily produce DAC than others, and (c) difference among groups that have high vs. low levels of collective results. A quantitative assessment of capacity is complemented by workshops and interviews to identify practices needed to produce DAC, particularly as the organization strives to enact its strategy.

The phases of work included:
•Identifying groups at the bottom, middle, and top of the organization to participate in the leadership capacity assessment.
•Engaging those groups in the assessment process.
•Analyzing and making sense of the assessment data with key partners in the INGO.
•Conducting workshops and interviews to gain further insights about needed leadership for achieving strategic goals.
•Using the output of these data gathering processes to facilitate the development of a leadership definition, narrative and development strategy that engages the organization in a coherent way and aligns leadership development with organizational strategy.

In this presentation, we will describe these phases and their outputs in more detail, share insights gained and lessons learned, and suggest broader implications for the practice of leadership development in international organizations facing an increasingly turbulent world.

Participants

• Peter Cunningham, GCSP-CCL Leadership Alliance

• Patrick Sweet, Center for Creative Leadership

• Cynthia McCauley, Center for Creative Leadership