Vanilla Leadership

Not too long ago I wrote about how much I hate competency models, quoting a CEO who pointed out that applying a competency model to a cracked cultural foundation won’t work. The next week I posted a quote from John Kotter about the role of culture in leadership development.

This month in HBR there is an article that brings some of this together that talks about developing a “leadership brand.” In short, authors Ulrich and Smallwood argue that you need to connect your leadership development activities with the culture and daily operations of the organization.

At the root of this unfortunate problem is a persistent focus on developing the individual leader. HR and succession-planning teams tend to concentrate on finding and developing the ideal candidate, who they hope will raise corporate fortunes. In our experience, many firms rely on a competency model that identifies a set of generic traits—vision, direction, energy, and so on—and then try to find and build next-generation leaders that fit that model. [The authors actually showed reps from nine big companies the competencies that the companies said were “unique” to their company—but they hid the name of the companies. Of course, the reps couldn’t pick out their own “unique” competencies.] The conclusion was obvious: By focusing on the desirable traits of individual leaders, the firms ended up creating generic models. And vanilla competency models generate vanilla leadership.

And vanilla competency models are based on the assumption that leadership is all about developing individual leaders, and it’s not. Leadership is a system capacity. It involves individual leaders and people in positions of authority, but if you focus only on developing those people, you will probably not develop your overall capacity effectively (result: vanilla leadership).

Comments

[Virgil Carter]

Though-provoking comments, Jamie. Most of our associations (certainly mine), needs as much investment in volunteer (and staff) leadership as possible. There may be no more important investment than an IMO can make than in its leadership (volunteer & staff) foodchain. These are the "right people" we want and need on the bus.

Developing and attempting to use a generic list of ideal leadership "competencies", however, may be a wasted effort for many reasons, as you point out.

I'm coming to believe that IMOs may benefit from early, "pre" leadership training and development for aspiring volunteer leaders and staff, which would raise the awareness and knowledge levels of volunteers before they enter the foodchain. Like many organizations, we have programs for those already in the foodchain, ie, training conferences, electronic resources, assessment procedures, careful use of agendas, etc. But we currently do little to raise the level of volunteer knowledge before they become leaders. My impression is that there are a few organizations doing a good job with such a pre-leader activity, but most organizations do as we do--work with whatever leaders we get, after we get them.

Perhaps the biggest leadership challenge is understanding that non-profit (particularly IMO) leadership is most often in teams, ie, project teams, functional committees and governance teams. This is often challenging because the leadership experiences many volunteers bring to an IMO, from their day job, may often be based on strong, energetic individual leadership energies. Leading through teams, particularly volunteer-composed teams, is often an wholly new (often frustrating) experience for some volunteers.

Governance is just another term for leadership--leadership by the governance team to set direction, montior progress and communicate with key constituencies. Governance teams are empowered for organizational decision-making and usually carry fiduciary accountability. This is why an intriguing phrase like "ungovernance" may be a conundrum, since no non-profit (or other similar institution) can exist without governance and those who are accountable to exercise it successfully and enjoyably.