An article by Jan Ketil Arnulf that was first published in Norwegian in the magazine “Dagens Perspektiv” november 2021, and now loosely translated into English. Pictures by Bergens Tidende and Henning Asklien.
I would like to let the reader in on a secret: There are many managers out there who do not believe in leadership. Not in theory, and certainly not in practice. Instead, they keep on hoping. And while they bet on hope, they go around checking numbers, KPIs and indicators, the same way old lighthouse keepers checked anemometers and barometers. Like old lighthouse keepers, many leaders think that they can’t do much with the storms, other than complaining in reports and at meetings. Or, in the worst case, to clamp down hard on deviations and deviants.
And how did I learn this secret? Before I tell you about it, I will highlight something that is not a secret, but common research findings: Anyone who looks closely at organizations will usually discover that only about half of the managers live up to the organization’s expectations. When I tell this on a course in leadership development, there is always some hesitant laughter in the course group. Then I ask: How many people have – ever – had a manager who hardly had the leadership skills up to minimum standard? Most people raise their hands in the air.
And how did I got the hang of this secret: For 32 years now, I’ve held courses on management and leadership development. Some weekends ago, I corrected 80 assignments on leadership development written by adults with many years of work and leadership experience. Many of them are insanely experienced and skilled. But unfortunately, many are also naive and intellectually weak on behalf of their own professional group, the managers. And I’m not even talking about the small group of dilly-dalliers that fails their exam.
I like to ask managers three questions at the start of a course on leadership development: “1. What is the average difference in expected leadership effectiveness between qualified managers? 2. How many managers in an organization fails with their leadership as a rule, if you look closely? 3. Is leadership learned or innate? Run the debate!”
On the first question, people are usually amazed that we should expect differences in leadership effectiveness between leaders. Aren’t they all equally effective? The same people would never answer like that if they were to bet on racing sailboats in a regatta. Some boats are driven faster and smarter than others. We know that a heat of racing sailboats never reaches the finish line at the same time. So, what differences should we expect among candidates we consider for a management position?
On the second question, people guess anywhere from five to 80 percent. But no one knows for sure and has never bother investigated it either. I shudder when adult managers do not realize that they hire and rely on middle managers who are on very different levels regarding leadership skills. They have no qualified idea of how much differences the organization must accept when it comes to managers way of performing leadership.
The answers to the third question always diverge in many ways, although everyone is looking for well-educated leaders with relevant experience, many people continue to believe in the born leader.
So here comes the bottom line: Even when you hire reasonably well-selected managers, the company’s financial performance such as income or the return to shareholders will vary by an average of 32-40% between them. It doesn’t matter who you hire. About half of middle managers, plus or minus a few percent, are not going to make it all the way. And yes, it certainly helps to have some innate talent, but ALL leaders become leaders by virtue of something they have learned, and most importantly: Leadership development works, on the condition that it is carried out by people with knowledge from an organization who stand behind the scheme.
My real point is not that people are often wrong. Professors and lecturers can quickly rant with the audience about many strange things in organisations. The really strange thing is all the managers who believe that you don’t need to know anything about management, or that you can’t know anything about management, because it’s all just innate anyway. If leadership had been innate, we could just sit back and wait for the ultimate talents. Leadership talents, like in musicality, are not rare. There are no great musicians who have reached the height without enormous amounts of practice and a good portion of knowledge of the subject. But with management, people apparently expect something different.
After all these years in the profession, and after thousands of managers on courses at home and abroad, it is sad to experience how it is allowed to recruit managers in organizations where neither the bosses nor their middle managers think through what it means to know something about leadership. Where almost everything else can be given the status as a profession, a subject, or even an art, it seems almost odd not to be able to place knowledge about and research on leadership in the context of organizational processes and training.
I’m not saying it’s completely chaos out there. There are many good managers and many organisations that are concerned with leadership. But there are still too many professionals that seem to think that leadership is a question of attitude, and if you can only show off something else, then leadership will probably fall into place by itself. Such knowledge-hostile cultures survive by turning a blind eye to something else we also know very well: Working life is teeming with people who are not only incompetent, but downright destructive managers.
After many decades of leadership research, I will be delighted the day when leadership is recognized as a subject, a profession, albeit with more to learn and to develop, with unknown spots. When it is no longer so special to drive a car with a seat belt on, surely the turn has come to the point where it should be for managers not so special to know anything about leadership?