BIC Moose Club

 

LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT PROCESSES AND ENABLERS: mission and vision

Our mission

We believe in the development potential of people and organizations. And that we can help accelerate these developments. But we also believe that the only way to make this happen lies within the people themselves.
We believe that real development comes from reflections and interactions by and between people and in teams.
And we believe that we can stimulate learning and development in a systematic, irrevocable way.
We believe that measurement is a good starting point, but that nothing can be achieved without motivation, a sense of direction, dialogue and good guidance.
Our services, in the form of 'process formats', 'enabling information' and 'focused feedback', stimulate the effectiveness and growth of individual participants, teams and organizations.
And we are pleased with the leverage of the leadership behaviour and professional quality we observe in our clients.

Leadership Development processes and enablers (LDpe) was established to assist client organizations in developing and improving the quality of leadership. Based on our vision that the quality of leadership is the most crucial condition for the success of a company, LDpe organizes (intervention) processes that help develop leadership quality and invests in tools (enablers) to achieve these processes effectively. LDpe has proven competencies to support client organizations with:

Individual leaders
 - Encourage individual leaders to reflect on the effectiveness of their own leadership behavior and
 - Providing leaders with a roadmap for the development of their own unique leadership style portfolio.

Teams of leaders
 -  Designing and assembling successful teams to support and
 -  to help the teams achieve their 'Team effectiveness'.

For organisational units or departments
 -  Provide insight into the fit-for-role status;
 -  Quickly improve the fit-for-role by realizing quick-wins;
 - Support leaders and professionals with an instrumentalized personal development process.

At organizational level
 - Establish a corporate leadership language;
 - Gain a deeper insight into the leadership culture of the organization;
 - Establish a dialogue about the desired leadership culture and establish a healthy development of the leadership
   pipeline.
 - Mobilize Innovation & Change by creating the right enabling environment for outside-the-box thinking, inspiration,
   imagination and idea development, design of new products and services and reorientation of the organization.

OUR VISION ON LEADERSHIP IN A CHANGING WORLD

A changing world

We can conclude that our current economic-human behavior is causing a meta-crisis. There is no question of either an ecological crisis, or an individual crisis, or an economic crisis. It's and, and, and, and. The crises are intertwined, influence each other and add up. They represent a systemic crisis. In fact, they form the basis of an existential crisis, an all-encompassing crisis that collapses our worldview and self-image and calls our entire existence into question. Meta interventions are needed, ideological interventions; other ways of looking at the world of which the economy is a part. People are central to this transition. Every individual faces mental and ethical choices. But the complexity of the problem is great and the visible effect of changed personal actions is hardly visible. More than ever, the role of leaders can be instrumental in realizing the necessary changes.

Leadership

Leadership and the quality of leadership
Leadership does not just refer to the person or persons at the top of the organisation.
Leadership is much broader and more widespread, and it is multi-dimensional.
The quality of leadership demonstrates itself in different ways:

  •  At the individual level through the behaviour of every individual leader;
  • At the team level through the successfulness of management teams;
  • At the organisational level by the leadership culture and the core values of the organisation.

Professional leaders
Leaders are not just the people with a formal leader's role.
Also leading professionals (for instance leaders in sales, account development, organisational change, program- and project management, leading consultants, etc.) have a strong influence in shaping the leadership culture. This happens in a natural way when leaders personally set the standard, being followed by the people around them, by setting the living example and by the way in which they inspire people, both inside and outside the organisation. These leaders create the professional image of the organisation in its markets.

Good leadership
Recent developments that have led to a global economic crisis have caused a lot of doubt about the honesty and integrity of leaders and suspiciousness about what drives them, their greed or their passion for the good of the organisation and the society. Only when their cause is sound, we should call them true leaders. Besides leaders should:

  •  inspire the people in the organization.
  • ensure that the organization is sensitive to its surroundings, adaptive and cohesive.
  • ensure that those concerned have a strong feeling of identity, an identity they are proud of.
  • ensure that the organization is tolerant: there is room for variety, expressiveness, creativity and entrepreneurship.
  • create preconditions for effective communication within the organisation and ensure that the 'language spoken within the organization' is consistent and coherent.
  • develop and implement clear criteria for identifying, assessing, deploying, developing and supporting talent. 

But also this: leaders are human, also good leaders make mistakes and can judge wrongly, but they are eager to learn from mistakes and appreciate the help from their colleagues and subordinates.

Management focus versus Strategy focus
Leaders have to manage, i.e. control the organisational processes. Management is an integral part of leadership.

In his publication about Strategic Management*) Ralph Stacey makes a difference between Ordinary Management and Extraordinary Management. With Ordinary Management he means the management focus on the ongoing production and delivery process,  and with Extraordinary Management he means the Strategy cycle of adopting the changing environment and reshaping the enterprise.
One of the effects of the revolutionary impact of the internet society is that the frequency of the strategy cycle has increased from once every 5 year 20 years ago, until a continuous occurrence in today’s evolving developments.

*) Ralph D Stacey, Strategic Management & Organisational Dynamics, Financial Times Management 1993, 1996,  ISBN: 0 273 61375 8

Brains versus Heart, Rational versus Emotional
In their struggle to survive, organisations and their managers have become more result focused.
The pursue, to measure and quantify progress and results creates a tendency to accentuate the measurable, material part, while short term considerations tend to overshadow the immaterial, visionary, emotional and long term topics of leadership.
Leaders have become more rational and ‘brains tend to dominate the heart’. 
Many executive training programs try to emphasize the need for the brains-heart balance, while stressing for more reflection about the leader’s role, his interaction with the people around him, and his anticipation on the organisational change in its rapidly developing environment.
The good thing about such training programs is that they take the individual apart, separated from the hectic of the operations and by that create an environment that promotes reflection, but the bad thing is that when the training program is over, the leader gets immersed again in the stir of the day-to-day’s business and many times forget about the lessons (to be) learned.

Leadership in a world of disruption
In her book A Different Kind of Leader, Accelerating Progress in a World of Disruption, Janet Poot summarizes the dynamic changes, organisations see themselves confronted with:

  • The changing landscape of talent;
  • The speed of things in an interconnected world;
  • The new world of work;
  • Geopolitical developments and changes in society.

For sure, organisations face quite a lot of new challenges. 
But also, we need to reinvent both the organisation and leadership!
Many of the trusted paradigms, about the context organisations operate in, will hardly cope with handling the current situation, let alone that they give answers about the future strategies to adopt.

Operating models for organisations are often inadequate
The word 'organisation' as a synonym for enterprise/company, or institution, has become so ingrained in our language that it is difficult to think 'bigger', because such an organisation is already a coherent complex set of goals, functions, relationships, rules, processes, etc. etc. And the fact that we often experience organisations as entities with an external boundary, naturally has to do with the fact that specific goals are being pursued with that organisation. Goals that are not shared by many others who do not feel connected to that organisation, such as its competitors.
Let us therefore define the concept of 'organisation'/company/institution, as intended here, as 'a social system that aims to realise a number of goals based on a certain mission and vision'. The management models used within an organisation are often mainly economic models, while every person in our changing world is also encouraged to think about interests and goals in life outside the context of the organisation. That is why the financial incentives from the company alone (such as salary/service fees/bonuses) are often too limited to achieve long-term commitment. Leaders must pay more attention to the other dimensions in people's experiences, such as intrinsic motivation, personal development and cooperation climate, but also the social relevance of the company's mission. And above all, they must recognise the relativity of the management models used.

Blurring organisational boundaries: the networked ecosystem

In the diagram on the right you can see how, over the decades, IT entered organizations and eventually penetrated into all facets of the company.
You can see this process, per decade, colored in the diagram, starting at the bottom right, against the background of the McKinsey 7-S model that represents the different 'resources': Strategy, Style, Structure, Employees, Competencies and Systems.
While the use of IT in the 1970s was limited to a few simple systems (e.g. accounting and payroll administration), in the years 2000-2010 IT had fully penetrated all functions of the company.  In the previous decade, organisations changed even further. Many functions of the organisation were outsourced to other parties, and the organisation became increasingly dependent on other parties to deliver its products and services. Not just suppliers, but also many specialised service providers. The organisation's production chain changed into a chain of involved producers and service providers. The boundaries of the organisation are blurring. The interdependence of organisations is increasing, and organisations are therefore becoming increasingly vulnerable to disruptions that may arise in the chain (for example due to a lack of raw materials, a lack of personnel, problems in distribution, energy supply and communication, internet, telephony, obstructions and 'cyber war', etc.). 
This can take place anywhere, at a local or national level, but especially globally.

The changing context of leadership

Leadership and Followership
Before we attempt to delve deeper into leadership in order to contribute to the development of individual leaders and professionals and to the effectiveness of teams and organisations, we want to take into account the current trend in which leadership is changing, including through the emancipation and even takeover of power by followers. Leadership, in democratic countries1), actually only functions when followers want to follow. And those followers who don't want that can make it quite difficult for the leaders.
At the very least, leaders are expected to earn their roles and subordinate their personal interests to the greater common good. The quote from Barbara Keller's The End of Leadership, a 2012 book, already gives us a foreshadowing of this (see quote above right).

Why do we as a Follower follow a Leader?
There are actually only two reasons:
1 because we think we have to, for example, because we might lose our jobs.
2 because we want to, for example, because we agree with the leader's ideas and because we consider him/her able to implement them. 
Characteristic of the relationship between Leaders and Followers is the power relationship. The leader exercises power on the environment and on the followers, in order to achieve the goals he/she has in mind. Power can be abused (dysfunctional leadership), but without a guiding exercise of power, the set of ambitions and goals often does not achieve much.

Barbara Keller, The end of Leadership, page 98
Dysfunctional leadership
In an ideal world, we would be blessed with transforming leaders and servant leaders, who live and breathe for the benefit of their followers. In a somewhat less perfect world, we would have leaders, who mirrored their followers, who represented them honestly and authentically. In relatively incorrupt democracies, political life generally produces ‘intrinsic motivated’ leaders, with objectives between voters and their representatives largely aligned, and voters able to easily engage in a reasonable selection process. But in the world we actually live, leaders tend to put self-interest ahead of public interest. In such a circumstance, no one assumes that leaders are morally superior, or that they care fervently about their followers. Rather, we know on some level that leaders and followers are more or less alike – both plain people, no less or no more beneficent than the rest.
We tend towards optimism: to expect that those we elect, select to attend to the national business, will make things better and not worse, will move the nation forward, if only slowly and slightly. But more than before, this hope seems misplaced.

1) The relationship between leaders and followers certainly depends on the culture in which we live (in a country or organization).
We suspect that the development trend is taking place all over the world, and that this trend is developing more in an evolutionary manner in low power distance countries2) and more abruptly in high power distance countries. 

2) see Hofstede culture dimensions to the right