During this episode, we discuss how leadership development is experienced.
We reference the paper Six Ways of Understanding Leadership Development in order to frame our study.
Tune in to hear our discussion and more about this paper.
Topics:
Quotes:
“...And in some sense, they’re almost like stages that leaders go through in their evolution of thinking about themselves like a leader.”
“People didn’t fall in a category. THe researchers were just trying to see how far they could stretch people’s views of what leadership [is] and where they stopped.”
“Unless you can have an aligned and good understanding of those things, the researchers suggest...there’s not much point in getting started with leadership development activities.”
Resources:
Six Ways of Understanding Leadership Development
David: You're listening to the Safety of Work podcast episode 43. Today, we're asking the question, how is leadership development experienced? Let's get started.
Hey, everybody. My name's David Provan. I'm here with Drew Rae. We're from the Safety Science Innovation Lab at Griffith University. For us, the Safety of Work podcast isn't a commercial project. What we're trying to do is read more high-quality safety research ourselves and then share it with you to help create more evidence-based safety practice, which is something we're really both passionate about in our individual research.
If you know other people who might benefit from this podcast, please help us and them by sharing it around. It also really helps encourage us when we get emails responding to this show or suggesting topics for future episodes.
Drew, in this episode, we're going to follow on from last week in response to the poll we asked our listeners what they like to hear more about. The answer was safety leadership. Drew, what's today's question in relation to safety leadership?
Drew: When we were searching around trying to find a couple of more papers talking about leadership, there really are only two big practical questions that the research tries to answer. For individuals, how can I be a better leader? For people in an organization, how can my organization encourage or create better leadership? It's that second one that we're going to talk about more today. The common term for creating better leadership is leadership development.
Lots of organizations have specific programs for this. Some organizations even have safety specific leadership programs. But even though there's lots of research about leadership that feeds into these programs, there's very little research on safety leadership development. When there is, it tends to get mixed up with attempts to improve safety culture or more general attempts to improve leadership. There isn't research we can focus on how to develop safety leaders. We're going to focus instead on research about general leadership development, and try to draw some links from that to the safety world.
David, you've spent more time in a large organization than I have. Can you talk a little bit about your own experience? Did you ever get formally trained as a leader?
David: Yeah. Look, Drew. I've been in a whole raft of leadership development programs internal to organizations. When I think of those specific programs that organizations have developed themselves, generally with the support of consulting organizations or learning development types of institutions. These are anything from a five-day frontline supervisor leadership program that I've been part of through safety specific leadership development workshops. I’ve also been involved in programs that had been collaborations between, say, for example, an organization that I was working for and the university, which was developing leadership development skills that you might get through an MBA or something like that.
Drew, organizations do this a lot. As I read the paper, I really learned a lot about the position of these development programs in the context of the leaders within that organization.
Drew: Thanks for that, David. The paper we've chosen is called Six ways of understanding leadership development: An exploration of increasing complexity. It's published in a journal called Just Leadership. It's a fairly small journal. It doesn't have a high impact factor, but it publishes a lot of interesting stuff. Around half of its papers, including the one we're talking about today, are open access.
If you're interested in leadership or interested in reading about leadership research, I recommend just going to the journal webpage and having a browse through recent issues focusing on the ones they've made open access.
The authors of the paper—David, you're much better with pronouncing Swedish names than I am.
David: Oh, Wow. Sofia Kjellström, Kristian Stålne, and Oskar Törnblom.
Drew: Thanks, David. As you might imagine, they're from two different Swedish universities—Jönköping and Malmö.
The first author is really a fascinating multidisciplinary researcher. The way she puts it in her profile, her specialty is adult development theories that show how people have qualitatively different complex ways to interpret and manage life experiences. The way I translate that is just like when we're studying complex topics like safety, we should focus on describing work as our basic unit of analysis.
Kjellström thinks that when we study topics like leadership, we should focus on understanding how individuals interpret and manage their life experiences rather than on abstract concepts. That really comes through in the paper we're going to look at.
David: Drew, if listeners recall in episode 30 where we talked about professional identity research that I conducted during my Ph.D. on safety professional identity, I think that paper does conclude that it's the life experiences of safety professionals go the most way towards shaping how they view their role in the safety profession within their organization.
When I was reading this, I hadn't thought about leadership in that way. I just hadn't thought about it like that. I can understand why when we’re thinking about going into those individual roles, and the development of individuals’ in those individual roles. Thinking about the activities that we want leaders to do is going to be less important, potentially, than thinking about what experience leaders have had that has shaped the way they think about their own leadership.
Drew: That topic of identity keeps coming up throughout the paper. Included in this idea of people taking on the mantle of a leader as identity and how leadership development feeds into that. David, we'll talk a little bit about the research method.
David: Yes. Drew, the method was interesting in the sense of not a bad way of going about it with three large organizations. They took organizations in different industries and technologies. A metal cutting and fabrication organization. More of construction and an infrastructure organization. Then, a software development organization. That was a good way of getting different types of industries, different types of organizational cultures, and obviously, different leadership programs in place. They could give us a sense of where we're getting our results in three different organizations or the 21 different participants that they interviewed.
They’re all in Sweden, as you've said. There was a broader context here in relation to the Swedish management style, Drew, where the research is characterized this as a style of management in Swedish organizations that has an emphasis on trust, on team building, on avoiding conflict and confrontation, more seeking consensus, and one that is more liberal and anti-hierarchical.
Drew, I suppose situating in the geopolitical context and cultural context of where these companies operate, and the people inside, three basic questions in their interviews: what is leadership development? What promotes leadership development? And what hinders leadership development? The three questions they asked those 21 interviewees.
Drew: The way that they went about analyzing is something that I don't think we've talked about in the podcast before. Remember when we talked about interview studies, we talked about doing thematic analysis. We’re usually referring to an approach called a grounded theory or something that is at least affiliated with grounded theory. Where the central thing we're concerned about is some sort of action or change. The technique we're using here is called phenomenography, which is much more focused on studying variations in human experience rather than studying behaviors and actions.
The researchers are asking people for specific examples under each of those broad questions about leadership development. They are pressing people for their individual things that have happened to them or that they've done. They're trying to get how people understand and experience leadership development rather than a more direct question like, "How do leaders develop?" or, "How should we develop leaders?"
David: Drew, the title of the paper is Six ways of understanding leadership development. It shouldn't come as a surprise to our listeners that the analysis—the phenomenological analysis landed on six different ways of understanding leadership. We'll go through all those six in order, Drew. We’ll get to introduce all those six, and maybe I'll comment on each one if I want to add a little bit more.
Drew: Sure. The first thing I should say is—and this is sort of a spoiler for the end of the paper—the researchers conclude that these six things are almost like a hierarchy of complexities or sophistication. In some sense, they're almost like stages that leaders go through in their evolution of thinking about themselves like a leader.
We'll start off with number one, which is thinking about one's own development. Leadership development is about developing myself. It doesn't even necessarily have a strong tie to leadership per se. It's where people start taking up the responsibility to move more towards leadership. When they start seeking feedback on their own leadership from other people. When they start putting more conscious effort into managing oneself in the workspace.
David: Drew, I took out of the quotes that we're referenced from in the interviews in here that participants who conceptualize their leadership as their own immediate personal development talked about not being able to read or learn about leadership in a book. The organization should just look at what they have to do, and if necessary, get critical feedback from their team. But really, it was just about them going through their life and incrementally trying to understand ways they could be more effective.
Drew: Yup. The second level is labeled as filling a leader role. This applies to people who are obviously currently in some sort of a formal role. But it's interesting that of all the people they've interviewed, some of them were in what they called leadership positions. I think 8 out of the 23. The rest they call professional positions, but a lot of them did have some leadership. They were, for example, the leader of a small team or a leader of a project.
That's largely what they’re talking here about filling some formal role as your position as a team leader or has a management designation. They talk about two ways in filling the role. One of them is horizontally, which is getting the competencies you need to do your current role effectively. The other is vertically, which is about using this role to get ready for the next role up in the hierarchy or in the organization.
It's interesting what they said about what things could and couldn't be taught here. The participants were generally saying that there are some things for which you need training. The key example there is they said someone who is in a formal leadership role needs training about what's legal and what's not legal as a team leader. Or less formally, what are you allowed to do and not allowed to do as a manager. They said, okay, we need training for that.
But other things need daily practice and support. One of the participants said, there's no point in sending me off on a three-day workshop about something. I need to be doing it all the time and having the support to do it all the time. For that, it needs to be developed through networking with other managers and being able to go for advice when I need it.
David: Yeah, Drew. With filling a leadership position—either filling my current leadership position, thinking of leadership in terms of the role that I play and then thinking of the next role I might play in a different or a more senior leadership role. There was this view that most leaders already had the right competence and the motivation for their role. Some of these developments, like you said, was about preparing people for the next role, or just understanding the nuances and the ongoing continuous improvement (if you like) of what they are currently doing in their present leadership position.
Drew: The third level is personal development. The previous level was very much about stuff specific to the role. This is the stuff that goes outside or beyond the formal role. They're talking about things like self-awareness, reflection, and self-development. The other ones that got mentioned more, this is the one that surprised me most, is talking about developing confidence and self-esteem. Which may seem obvious when you think about it. I hadn't thought about that as something to deliberately develop in a leader. Just that feeling of self-confidence, secured, and knowing that you're good at your job.
David: Yeah, Drew. I was just listening to you, then. It's something that you take for granted the confidence required to be effective in a leadership position or just to be comfortable personally in a leadership position in an organization. This was the first (I suppose) level of thinking about leadership where the participants were talking about constantly challenging themselves around how they act and deliver results. Not just in work, but in all aspects of their life. This leadership is more of a personal quality that extended beyond that formal role like you mentioned.
Drew: The fourth level gets beyond personal development—to talk about integrating the leader and organizational development. We’re not quite at the point about getting away completely from individuals. But we're talking about the idea of strategically developing individuals as part of trying to achieve the organization’s aims and its operations.
We're talking about leadership attributes here like consistency. Having all of your leaders in the organization behave in the same way and exhibiting the same behaviors and values. Talking about leaders becoming part of the organizational culture, and being able to gently shape that culture where the organization wants it to go.
David: Yeah, Drew. It's a very structural view of leadership. If I reflect on this way, the primary objective of leadership development in an organization is to deliver organizational results. First, we need to align all of our leaders in our organization and then create change collectively to get in the pursuit of those organizational objectives.
We'll talk about this in a minute to spoil it. I think this is like a dominant collective view of how organizations might think of leadership development.
Drew: David, I've had an interest in your thoughts. When we talked about safety leadership, this is often what we mean. Often, I find, when people are saying, We want to do more safety leadership in our organization. That's almost code for the fact that they feel the organization is not quite aligned with where, maybe, some visionaries within the organization would like it to be pointing.
Actually, by talking about developing leaders, what they're talking about is sort of aligning people with a slightly new direction in managing their safety.
David: I'd also probably go—whether it's a bit further or a bit back than that alignment. I think some of it arises from the observation of behaviors or activities that leaders are or aren't performing. Particularly in hindsight, following incidents, nonconformances, or situations.
There's a common at the end of this paper in the conclusions about, let's stop thinking about leadership in terms of the activities we want leaders to do. That's some of the challenges for safety leadership, Drew.
If we think of safety leadership in terms of the activity to what leaders do, then we think about our common set of activities for the whole organization. And then we go and we try to train people in the consistency of those behaviors and developing the culture. I think you're actually right. This level of thinking about leadership where we want all leaders to lead in the same way to deliver organizational outcomes including safety outcomes is the thinking that generates all about current safety leadership development programs or most of them anyway. I won’t say all of them.
Drew: Level five then is what they've called collective leadership development. Then having given a big warning about this being focused on Sweden and Swedish management, I didn't really get much of a sense of that through the first four. But I think this one definitely matches up particularly with what they think is a Swedish version of leadership. This is thinking about leadership as a collective endeavor where leadership is done by teams rather than individuals.
If you have a team, that team itself is self-governing. Individual small teams don't need leaders, but together, they do leadership. Leadership includes things like building trust, social capital, and maybe releasing some control.
David: Drew, this combining of perspectives where everyone evolves into leadership and then together, the organization gets collaboratively-led. This is the idea that I took out of this rightly or wrongly that thinking about organizational leadership as more than the sum of its parts. It's not just about individual leadership. It's how leadership, and it's not just even about people in leadership positions. It's how the organization leads together.
Without going into a huge safety culture discussion now, I read this as a little bit similar to, say, for example, the DuPont Bradley Curve with its interdependent level of culture, and even Hudson’s Generative level of culture. I've got the impression that this was the type of leadership thinking that was trying to be described in those very upper ends of those safety culture maturity ladders. Would you see it like that? Or, have I just drawn too long about...?
Drew: They're certainly talking about it. It's something which they considered to be beyond and above a very hierarchy or transactional style of leadership and culture. Probably, we're talking about this before we go on to level six, which is a little bit odd.
The reason why the authors think of this as a scale or as a ladder, almost like a maturity level is they said that if people talk about this collective leadership development—level five—they also already talked about all of the other four levels. Whereas if someone talks about level four, they'll talk about their lower levels—one, two, and three—but not level five. If someone talks about level three, they'll talk about levels one and two. Then, some people are just talking about level one or just talking about levels one and two.
That's the justification why they treat this as increasing complexity and increasing sophistication.
David: Drew, just to recap because you talked about one, two, three, four, and five; just to make it easy for our listeners how we build on these levels of complexities. People would say, I need to manage myself and improve myself. The next one is, I'm filling a leadership position, so I need to think about myself as a leader, think deliberately how I'd do that, and start to think about my leadership career. They'll also be thinking about their own development as part of that.
Then there's this personal development which is, my role is a leader, but then my role throughout the organization was broader than the organization. Then, they start to think about the collective delivery of the organizational objectives as a collective leadership grows. Then, we're on to these five, which is this organization delivering results in terms of self-governing and teams of leaders.
I just thought it's worth a quid of a 1-5 recap just to reinforce that point you said, which is that people didn't fall into a category. The researchers were just trying to see how far they could stretch people's views of what leadership was and see where they started.
Drew: Yeah. That's a good way of putting it. Some people sort of stretch all the way up to the thinking of leadership in the context of how an organization is a collaborative endeavor. Some people don't stretch any further than, this is what I do. This is how I manage myself.
In level six, the authors were less clear that this definitely sits above the rest of the hierarchy. To be honest, David, I was a little bit confused about exactly what they were getting at. The idea here, they've labeled it as human development. They said, this isn't an open-ended view of leadership, which is bigger than the organization. It's more about leadership on values rather than the leadership of an organization.
David: Yeah, Drew. What I took out in this, we didn't know so much about it, but obviously, this is probably some 21 or so interviewees, and a number of those were in functional roles. I suppose maybe even leadership development or learning and development practitioners. This struck me as a couple of people who had these really holistic maybe or transformational views of leadership. It's almost like when they got asked the question, what is leadership? They answered a bit of these, what is the meaning of life type of question.
I could think of a couple of people in that cohort who had a very, very, expansive view of a leader and what it meant to be a leader. Nelson Mandela’s type of view of leadership.
Drew: David, just as you were saying that, I was realizing that given their argument that different people get to different levels, and we've only interviewed 23 people, by the time we get to level six, we can only be down to one or two people who are expressing these views.
David: Yeah. Those researches would have had some wide-ranging conversations with a couple of people. It is fair to say that there is that view if we look at other ideas about leadership more broadly than organizational leadership. There will be people who view leadership as a thing that’s bigger than themselves and much bigger than their organization as a very open-ended personal transformation journey.
Some people see that as the role of leadership development in organizations too to make everyone down to the supervisor this transformational leader.
Drew: That's a fair way of looking at it. From a research method's point of view, I guess I should point out that one of the boons but also challenges of this phenomenographic approach is you can't contradict the people who are telling you their experiences. You can ask them for examples and you can get them to elaborate. But their view of their own experience is equally valid to anyone else's. You ask someone about leadership in an organization, they want to talk about Nelson Mandela. That's what the conversation is about.
David: Yeah. Drew, look, what the authors are researching here is how people experience leadership and leadership development as a starting point of understanding what you might do in an organization to further develop your leadership. They've come up with these six different ways of thinking about leadership and therefore, ways of how an organization should think about in doing their leadership development. That didn't go on in this paper because that wasn't the purpose of this paper to talk about how to develop leaders.
But I think, Drew, if we start talking about some of the conclusions that the paper drew in and then some specific conclusions for safety leadership development, I think what their first practical conclusion (if you like) is before an organization even starts doing leadership development, it should conduct a critical analysis or a sense-making process in relation to trying to understand the underlying assumptions about leaderships in an organization.
Drew, they proposed three questions to start the critical analysis within your own organization. I might just run through this, and then we can talk a little bit more about why we might be doing this.
They sort of suggested, and unless you can answer these types of questions, then there's no point in even getting started with leadership development. Question number one, "Which way of understanding leadership do I and my organization currently have?” I, probably being the practitioner who's trying to design the leadership development program.
Number two, what are the assumptions of leadership development in my organization, and how are these assumptions articulated in our existing policies, training programs, and leadership behaviors in the organization?
Number three, "What is the historical and future focus of our organization regarding leadership development, investment, and leadership activities?"
Drew, unless you can have it aligned and a good understanding of those things, the researchers suggest or the author of this paper suggests there's not much point in getting started with leadership development activities.
Drew: That's a really practical insight for safety leadership development. I know the authors didn't intend this simplistically, but I think it is reasonable, at least, as a starting point to think, okay, we've got these five or six really quite different understandings of what leadership development is. When we tell each other, hey, we need two more to develop safety leadership, and we all agree that's important, we could be talking about really very, very, different things.
Right down at level one, we could talk about just encouraging junior staff in the organization to start thinking of themselves as leaders in the organization of safety. Or equipping our safety advisors with a bit more confidence to start taking on more responsibility.
Looking up at level five, we can be talking about managing to align expectations of our leadership teams where we'd like the organization to go in terms of safety. That's what we mean by enhancing safety leadership. Somewhere in the middle, we're talking about getting clearer definitions of what we expect of mid-level leaders when it comes to safety responsibilities and making sure they're appropriately equipped with training and networking to achieve those roles.
David: Yeah. Drew, the author says that without doing this sort of analysis, without doing this reflection, you won't have that understanding of where your leaders are coming from. Are your ideas about leadership in your organization consistent or widely different? Therefore, you're unlikely to have a leadership development program that actually matches the current needs, assumptions, beliefs, identity, of leaders in your business.
From a functional perspective, the authors (I suppose) hypothesized that level four is where most organizations start, which is just we need to align all of our leaders to deliver on organizational goals. This study will show you that there's a number of people in the organizations in leadership positions who probably don't think of leadership in that kind of way. Hitting them with a program that's going to try to deliver that is not meeting where they're at. And it's not probably helping them to take the next step in their own leadership development.
Drew: Another thing to point out there is it's clear from this analysis that even within these organizations, there were people that are at totally different levels. It's not just about designing a leadership program that's going to meet your organization where it's at. It’s that not every individual is going to be able to meet you at a leadership program, if you pictured it at any particular level.
David: Yeah. Drew, even with what I was just saying before about that level where most organizational programs are pitched. That's where we paused and suggested that most safety leadership programs are pitched. In this very small study, only half of the interviewees actually expressed this idea or leadership as being at the level of that idea.
Now, that might surprise a lot of our listeners and surprise a lot of our senior leaders that half the people in my organization in the leadership position don't think of their role as aligning with other leaders and delivering the organization's objectives. But hey, you might not be a supervisor, a frontline leader, or someone else in a leadership position. 50% of people don't see leadership like that.
Like you said, Drew, at best, hitting your organization with a program like that will probably hit the mark for a quarter of your people. Probably not hit the mark for the other quarter that thinks leadership is beyond that, and not hit the mark for the 50% of the people who don't think about leadership like that.
Drew: David, I don't know if you noticed this or if it's something that I missed. But I didn't see anywhere in the paper where they try to align these levels up either with current rank on the organization or with experience. I didn't see any indication that the more sophisticated understandings came with the more senior leadership.
David: No, you're right, Drew. I suppose that was my advice then thinking about how I think practitioners and maybe some senior leaders might think about leadership. Just through having what this paper talks about, these views on leadership and leadership development are formed by experiences. My assumption, which again, not reflected from the paper, was that people with longer leadership years and more leadership experiences inside of an organization might think of leadership in a more complex way.
Drew: Yes. That's a reasonable assumption, but possibly not a safe one to make universally. Sometimes we get quite simplistic in saying, oh, we need junior leadership development programs that focus at this level and mid-career programs that focus at this level.
David: Yeah. Not advocating for that, but not advocating for that either because I think there are different leadership needs at different levels of leadership just based on the activities and the decisions that happen at different levels. You're right, Drew. Just forming an assumption around the complexity in which people think about the leadership at different levels is not a good thing for me to have done.
Drew: Just before we move on from this space, the other thing that they say is they think just by having that conversation within your organization is a positive thing. That's actually part of leadership development in your organization is to have this conversation about what we understand leadership to be, what we want leadership to be. Even if it doesn't lead on to changes to your formal leadership development program it’s a conversation worth having.
David: Drew, from a reflective practice point of view—and we haven't done a podcast on reflective practice, but it might be one that we dig at. There's enough research on that space to suggest that there are parts of it that are quite useful.
You might actually find that just going through your organization and asking those questions is in itself probably the most effective, might be a more effective leadership development process than anything else. Because asking people individually to reflect on what good leadership looks like or what leadership looks like, how they fulfill their roles as a leader, and how they develop themselves as a leader is for nothing else, at least going to have them reflect on their own practices. That's a good thing.
That might be better than a standard program that you run across your whole organization like a three-day workshop, which was mentioned by one of the participants. This is something not to do.
Drew: This links back to some of the comments about leadership identity. There's an interesting statement in the paper that people participating in leadership development programs, they're not doing it cynically, but they are trying to align their own identity as a leader with what the organization thanks that a leader is. I think the term they used is organizationally sanctioned identities that people are trying to mold and fit themselves into.
If people are trying to do that, then we really want to have a conversation about what we’d like those identities to look like.
David: Yeah. Look, we could spend a lot of time on this because I think it's really a fascinating point, but what I took out of that part of the paper was they said that, say a safety manager and a learning and development manager have a view of what leadership looks like from all of the leadership textbooks they've read and all of the safety leadership models they've read. They form a program on that, and then they deliver that to their organization.
The leaders within their organization adopt, like you say, that sanctioned identity and do this stuff. But it actually possibly doesn't really match how they think they should be leading. You create this sort of artificial cycle. I might as well say it now because I'm going to say it later, they're basically saying that's not only a non-sustainable thing to do but a potentially unethical thing to do inside organizations by not matching leadership development programs with an individual's leadership identity.
Drew: Yeah. I've been thinking about that ethical side of it ever since they brought it up in the paper. In a sense, when we talk about leadership development, we are trying to transform people, but all of our descriptions of what a good leader is have all of these value-laden statements in them. We need to be careful that we are enhancing leadership. We're not trying to mold people to fit values that aren't fit.
David: Yeah. I supposed that may just become a hearts and minds program for leaders or something like that.
Drew, I wanted to do practical takeaways for safety leadership development a little bit, but I think we've actually woven some of that through the takeaways conversations that we just had. Just to reinforce, if I was going to approach a safety leadership development program within an organization based on this research, I'd actually start by asking all of my leaders in the organization the following questions, what does good safety look like? What do good safety leaders do?
Drew, do you want to add a few more questions as to what you'd ask to try to understand where your organization was at in relation to leadership conceptualization of safety and leadership?
Drew: To be honest, David, I like having a couple of clear, simple questions, and just letting people speak. I'd love those two you’ve suggested there. They're some great conversations that would come just out of those two questions.
David: Here's a perfect opportunity. Challenge questions for our listeners to test out their ethnographic interviewing skills from episode 41. If you are thinking about safety leadership improvement and development in your organization, or you do have an existing safety leadership program or something existing, you want to speak to your whole cross-section of safety leaders within an organization and ask them those two questions, what does good safety look like? And what do good safety leaders do?
If you got an existing program and all of your people could give the same answers, that will really test out your ethnographic interviewing skills to see whether you can actually start getting some underlying different answers from all of your people.
Drew, I thought in terms of an invitation to listeners, number one is if you actually do go out and do that, then I'd love to hear what you find. Please come back and tell us about that. If you’ve developed internal leadership development programs and you actually did something to specifically try to understand your leadership needs and beliefs prior to designing that program, I'd also really like to know how you went about understanding those needs and how you ended up designing your programs to match those beliefs and needs in your organization.
Drew: That's it for this week. We hope you found this episode thought-provoking. We hope you enjoyed the fact—I think this is the first episode where we've deliberately sent you some quite explicit homework to check-in before our next episode.
Send any comments, questions, or ideas for future episodes to feedback@safetyofwork.com.