Leadership: Perspectives From the Front Line
Interview With Theo Veldsman and Andrew Johnson
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Theo Veldsman is a management and psychology of work thought leader in South Africa with a proven ability to move seamlessly between theory and practice, and vice versa. He holds a PhD in Industrial Psychology, and is a well-known speaker and consultant to leading South African companies and organizations overseas. He is the author of two books and nearly 200 articles, chapters, and technical/consulting reports. At present, he is Professor and Head of Department since 2008, of the Department of Industrial Psychology and People Management, Faculty of Management, University of Johannesburg. He is the recipient of several prestigious awards including Fellowship status by the Society of Industrial and Organisational Psychology of SA and Life Long Achievement by the SA Board for People Practices in 2012.
Andrew Johnson is the General Manager of Eskom’s Leadership Institute where he leads Eskom’s leadership strategy and its execution. With a career primarily in organizational effectiveness, he has held senior position in the private sector including at Edcon, MTN, Transnet, Anglovaal Mining and the JSE. He has also served in non-executive directorships at the National Empowerment Fund, Transparency South Africa, the National Student Financial Aid Scheme and the Department of Industrial Psychology & People Management at University of Johannesburg. He is past-president of the Society for Industrial & Organisational Psychology of South Africa and has received several prestigious awards pertaining to his achievements. He holds a PhD in Industrial Psychology from the University of Johannesburg and is a coach/mentor to many young professionals.
Lize (A.E.) Booysen is full professor of Leadership and Organizational Behavior at the Graduate School of Leadership and Change, Antioch University; Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Industrial Psychology and People Management at University of Johannesburg; and adjunct executive coaching faculty at the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL). Lize is also a fellow of the International Leadership Association (ILA), and past Chair of the ILA’s Business Leadership Member interest group. She holds a doctorate in Business Leadership from the University of South Africa, as well as master’s degrees in Clinical Psychology, Research Psychology, and Criminology, all with distinction. She is co-chair of ILA's Next Generation Leadership conference taking place the 30th-31st of May 2018. Learn more about the conference at: www.ila-net.org/Pretoria
LIZE BOOYSEN: Theo Veldsman and Andrew Johnson, thank you very much for making time for this interview with the International Leadership Association on your new book, Leadership: Perspectives From the Front Line. Good morning from my location in the U.S. and good afternoon to you in South Africa.
ANDREW JOHNSON: Thank you very much. Happy to be here!
THEO VELDSMAN: Good morning, Lize.
LIZE: Before I begin, let me disclose to the audience that I contributed a chapter to the volume so I know what a mammoth task it was to put this book together and get it published, and I want to commend you for that. It's a thick, thick book with lots of information — a wonderful addition to the scholarship and practice of leadership.
Leadership is a bit in the cross-fires these days. There are literally hundreds and thousands of books out there on many different aspects of leadership. Within that context, my first question has to be: Why another book on leadership? What is this book’s unique contribution?
THEO: Lize, you're quite right. There are thousands of books on leadership. You can classify the leadership literature into two broad groupings. One is the academic literature that is written, largely, for other academics. The other grouping contains books that focus on answering, “How can you become a better leader?” Here are ten things! And, if you improve on these, you will be an outstanding leader, etcetera! Books in that category are what you might call, how-to books. Andrew and I saw a gap in the middle. Where were the books that help organizations? If you accept that leadership is a strategic capability of organizations, then we need to guide organizations and their leadership on how to tackle this core capability and build it in their organization. So that's what we tried to do with the book. There are separate books on assessment or on development, for example, but nothing that puts it all together in an integrated way that can be used by the executives of an organization.
ANDREW: Just to add to Theo, one of the key principles we tried to tackle was: Leaders need practical advice about leadership in order to implement it, but there must also be a solid base of theory behind it. It's not one or the other; it's how you interpenetrate these two things. We wanted leaders reading the book to find good advice about leadership and be confident that there is good theory behind it.
THEO: After the contributors received an outline of the book, we had a workshop around the different chapters. We talked with each contributor about what we thought they should cover and then they came back with a draft and an outline that we looked at. We were explicit and told them that we were not looking for the old stuff just warmed up again in a different language. We told them to “stick out your neck... think about where you see leadership five to ten years out.” We also asked them to point out trends and provide a strategic perspective on leadership for organizations. They could theorize about the future and what they believe the trends are and, because of their expertise, it's a substantiated kind of speculation. That allowed us to bring forth a forward-looking perspective, informed by good theory. There are some amazing things that they think will happen to leadership, to organizations, and to our sector in the coming years.
LIZE: Wonderful. I also see the book as a solid contribution to both theory and practice. It actually bridges that scholar/practitioner divide. Thank you for that. The book is organized around the “strategic leadership value chain” as a meta-structure, which I really like. In this way, leadership is framed as a mission critical, strategic, organizational capability and intervention. Can you tell me more about the components of this value chain?
THEO: We arrived at this approach to address the gap in the literature we talked about earlier. You can see the strategic leadership value chain as an intervention process that organizations should consider when approaching leadership as a strategic organizational capability. It's a suggested route map, but, of course, it's not prescriptive. The front end of the value chain is about getting your thinking right. Before you act, you must think about leadership in a systematic fashion. You must think through your leadership, to first demarcate the territory of leadership correctly and develop an operational definition of what leadership is about.
Once you’ve demarcated the territory, you must develop a Google map, so to speak, of the territory. What are the components you have to consider when looking at leadership? What is the point of view or interpretive lens you’re using to look at it? In our book, we looked at positive psychology, but of course you can use other lenses such as complexity theory, for example. After that, you must get your toolbox of action tools ready: Is it neuroscience? Is it action science? What will you use to mine the Leadership territory? This is the last step in terms of your thinking framework and the thinking part of the value chain. Once that work is done, you can move to the action part and develop a strategic leadership framework. Andrew, do you want to talk about the action part?
ANDREW: Yes. To add to what Theo said, we tried to create a very extensive framework for looking at leadership. We took a very ambitious look to see how we could cover every single aspect of leadership. That was ambitious because inevitably there are only so many angles that you can take on it, but, in terms of the themes we tried to cover, we believe we created a very comprehensive outlook.
So, for example, we only used six or seven action lenses even though there are many more than that. We are not claiming to be comprehensive in that regard. What we claim, instead, is that within the framework, we have tackled a whole range of these different lenses so you can simply plug others in to see how you could look at leadership in an organization through that lens.
LIZE: Thank you. What are your intentions with and aspirations for Leadership: Perspectives from the Front Line? Who is your audience?
ANDREW: We are trying to target a number of very key people here, particularly executives within organizations. That's why practice is important but, as I said, it needs to be theory-informed practice. When an executive needs help on a particular issue, we’d like this to be the book they turn to for advice. It has never been our intention that a person would read this book from beginning to end in one sitting. It's not that kind of book. Rather it’s a book that an executive can pick up who is grappling with a particular element of leadership. They can open it up to see how we frame the particular issue and read the various perspectives of it.
For example, let’s say a leader is interested in knowing a new kind of perspective on managing or developing the talent in the organization. They could read that particular section within the book without having read any one of the previous ones. The sections of the book don't necessarily build consecutively on each other. The framework is there at the beginning to show a person how the different elements hang together, but you can hone in on a particular area without having to read the whole book. The purpose is to create a kind of a reference book for leaders on practical ways to deal with leadership challenges within their organization. It is clearly focused on giving that kind of practical advice to a leader within an organization. The book endeavors to address those challenges leaders find in the front line of their business as they lead people towards the objectives of their particular organization.
THEO: Building on what Andrew said, the strategic leadership value chain gives the framework for leadership and questions they have with respect to leadership. That framework works as a compass through these thousands of topics around leadership. As such, the book is an operating manual that should sit on the desk of every executive who needs to think about the leaders of the future and wonder what the context would be like. Then, based on going to that part of the value chain, they can see the kinds of things that could be in the context and that these are the kind of things they need to consider. It's not a book to go on the bookshelf. It should be on your desk at all times to use as a reference and, if you come across something new, so to speak, to hook that topic onto where it fits in the strategic value chain.
ANDREW: It is also intended to go beyond the executives to the academics who are interested in working with leadership and the student of leadership. You'll further see that most, if not all, of the authors are South African. So it brings this kind of South African, maybe African, perspective on leadership, giving a particular angle to it, but also learning from those global perspectives that we have had exposure to. Sometimes the theory might have been generated within that global context, and then what we have asked, what does it mean if you apply that in a South African context? What would potentially work in that situation? So a student or an academic would find useful information here in the very comprehensive framework that we've created around leadership written and interpreted by practitioners within the South African context.
LIZE: Great. You’ve given our readers the big picture, let’s dip more into the different sections of the book in greater detail? The book has 56 chapters, 10 sections, and is 964 pages long. Linking back to the strategic leadership value chain, on page three in your introductory chapter you cover the following seven themes: Thinking Frameworks for Leadership, Leadership in Context, Leadership Excellence, Building Leadership Talent, Leadership Dynamics and Well-being, Leadership Stories, and the Future of Leadership. Can you provide us a brief taste of what’s covered under each theme?
ANDREW: We’ve just spoken about the first one, Thinking Frameworks for Leadership. The second section, Leadership in Context, is where we go into the real practice pieces asking: How do we see leadership in different contexts? As you will see from the book, we cover an entire range of contexts. One context, for example, is looking at what would leadership would look like in a school setting. As you may know, schooling in South Africa is probably one of our biggest challenges, especially how do we prepare children better for future education. What kind of leadership would be necessary to help give the focus on education that can properly prepare students for post-school education? We even tackled the big challenges facing tertiary institutions, including the "fees-must-fall" and the decolonization of curricula. How do leaders deal with those kinds of challenges in a South Africa context?
We also tackled leadership in the public sector and in the sports community. With South Africa being so sports crazy, we asked, “What does leadership look like within the sports arena?” What does it mean to have leaders that can utilize the sports context as one of those critical unifying factors for us in South Africa? Other sectors we looked at were professional firms, ecologically-embedded type of leadership regarding environmental challenges in politics, in the public sector, and so forth. In this particular section of the book, we were looking to see what the critical challenges are emerging for a leader in those different contexts and the critical competencies leaders would need to step up effectively to the challenges that she or he faces in that particular context.
THEO: What opened insightful perspectives, Lize, is that we asked the contributors, each of whom is an authority on a particular sector, to end their sectorial review of the leadership demands with their perspectives on what they believe is going to happen in their sector in the future. So, each of the chapters ends with a perspective on the future. We used the professional firm, EY, as a case study. They foresee robotics taking over the auditing process; drones used to assess the mining reserves; virtual in-time, real-time, year-end financials — by just pressing a button, suddenly your income and expenses statement is downloaded and your balance sheet produced. Thinking about this future, professionals could be replaced by decision-making algorithms.
We also said it’s important that leaders understand the set of glasses they have on when looking and engaging with a particular context. We discussed different possible world views — for example, mechanistic, chaotic, and fatalistic ones — the different possible decision-making frameworks that the leader can apply, and the possible value orientations they adopt from survival to stewardship.
LIZE: Thank you. And then, of course, context is key in how you practice leadership. We know that.
ANDREW: Let me share a compelling insight with regard to context, Lize. We thought it would be interesting for the reader to look at these different contexts and see what they say to each other. For example, we have section on leading in South African higher education. So, what does that mean in the context of the type of political leadership we have? Once you begin to pull in the different contexts, a storyline may begin to emerge for the reader that could provide very useful insights. It enables the reader to look at context systemically in an integrative fashion.
LIZE: Exactly. And it allows the reader to look at the micro and the macro levels and see how societal issues and dynamics are impacting and spilling over into the organization. They cannot be divorced from each other.
ANDREW: Yeah.
LIZE: We covered themes one and two of the strategic leadership value chain, let’s look at theme three — leadership excellence. What is covered in that section?
THEO: In this part of the strategic value chain — which we call the organizational action process — we first make the argument that organizations must have a carefully crafted leadership excellence model. Again, it's relative to the context. So, what are the components of leadership excellence? Then, we asked the writers to bring it closer to the context. That's where your own chapter came in, Lize. It speaks to how leadership excellence can, because of cultural differences, look different across different countries in terms of desirable leadership attributes.
Of course, the challenge is, if you operate across different countries, how do you then arrive at a common leadership excellence model? That's the first part of the leadership excellence theme. The second part is, now that you've formulated your leadership excellence understanding, how do you keep it from becoming your best-kept secret? You must turn it into a leadership brand. You must put it out there and say this is what we stand for and this is what we promise as a leadership. This is our brand promise as a leadership. When you have a distinct, differentiating leadership brand very clear, then you market it and put it out there on the street, so to speak.
Following that, we said we want to look identify and look at the key attributes of future leadership. Under the attributes, we tackled, for example, authentic leadership, mindful leadership, and virtuous leadership. Wise leadership was also an interesting one. Spiritual leadership is, of course, an important one as well, as is ethical leadership. In all, we selected the 20 leadership attributes that we think are mission critical for the leadership of the future.
Then we moved on to look at different types of leadership. We tackle African leadership, women in leadership, multi-generational leadership, diversity leadership, and change leadership. For the final part of the leadership attributes, types and settings, we looked at team leadership because we know teams are coming through as critical building blocks of future organizations. We also looked at entrepreneurial leadership. The whole concept of destructive innovation is key to that. Board leadership as seen from a corporate governance perspective is also seen in some quarters as THE critical 21st-century topic faced by business.
So, with the leadership excellence model, you have a brand and you’ve got these attributes, now the question becomes, “How will you measure leadership in terms of its impact and its outcomes?” That’s where we deal with a leadership excellence measurement to be able to assess leadership impact.
LIZE: Next is theme four of the strategic leadership value chain — building leadership talent.
ANDREW: In this particular section, we make the argument that talent is critical as the primary source of competitive advantage. You need to be able to build in how you think about talent and how you build the sustainable supply of leadership within the organization by devising a good talent management process so that the different parts hang together.
Then we tackled a few other critical things. First, assuming you now have the right leadership talent framework, how do you think about and identify your talent and supply the future demand? Hence, we included a whole chapter on leadership assessment, which asks: What would be a good kind of assessment model to tackle that particular identification of talent? Additionally, what are the different elements in the development of that talent from the point of view of business schools as hubs of education? How can business schools begin to think about their development differently? What are the best principles, approaches, and processes with regard to developing talent within those specific schools?
Then we looked at leadership coaching as a critical individual type of development approach where you work more in depth at the personal, but also at an organizational, level with an individual executive. How can we begin to think about and utilize this kind of coaching more effectively? Finally, the whole concept of how Organizational Academies as corporate universities can contribute and facilitate the organization in building its present and future leadership talent pipeline.
THEO: To give a sense of the writing in this book, the authors of the chapter on leadership assessment are specialists in assessment, but they've written it from the point of view of a CEO. So, while this area can be very technical, they looked at it as a decision-making process and asked, “If an executive of an organization wants to look at leadership assessment, what are the bases they have to cover?” The book is very well founded in terms of specialists, but, again, it’s written for the CEO who is wondering, “What do I need to know and consider in making the right decisions in the assessment space?”
LIZE: Most valuable. Theme five on leadership dynamics and well-being really struck a chord for me. I think of our current leadership era and how few leadership books really look at the well-being of leaders. That section is a huge contribution in itself. I particularly liked how the authors wrote about resilience and the importance of well-being not only of leaders, but of all employees.
THEO: You're spot on, Lize. When we developed the value chain and we looked at the components, we thought there’s one big area that's missing. You've done all the good stuff up to this point. You've selected your leadership. You've assessed them. Now the action starts, so to speak: leadership as a collectivity has to work together and make a joint contribution. That's why this theme starts with the shift from individual leaders to shared leadership, expanding even further into the whole concept of the leadership community. Most challenges/issues/problems that organizations face are not functionally related, they're organizational. You need the full capability of the total leadership group being able to work together to address the issues. We still need hierarchy, we still need organizational levels and functions, but how do we move beyond those and work cross-functionally as a leadership group, turned into a leadership community?
ANDREW: I think in relation to that, Theo, it also has to do with the fact that the kind of challenges we have seen up to this point in the book are so complex that to expect one person to be able to clearly see what exactly it is that the organization is dealing with and begin to generate the solution is not realistic. Therefore, this idea of leadership as community — how we work together to diagnose, navigate, and find solutions to the problems that we are facing — emerges and becomes an important part of the decision-making process.
THEO: The next topic under this theme is one that's become very strong in this very turbulent — what we call VICCASS (Variety, Interdependency, Complexity, Change, Ambiguity, Seamlessness, and Sustainability) or the more well-known VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous) — world. This topic asks: How do you retain your identity under all of these changes as a leader? When everything is changing around you, how can you find your security or anchor in your own identity as a leader? How can you merge or infuse your work identity, your social identity, and your individual identity with your crystallized identity as a leader in this ever-changing world so that people know who you are, what you stand for, what you aspire to, and what drives you?
Leadership and leadership identity is at risk during leadership transitions. Leaders often move from one level of work to another or from one organization to another. We don't pay enough attention to these transitions. If a person’s been successful, we’re lulled into believing they’ll survive and thrive in their next role/job, so we don’t facilitate this person’s transition explicitly and formally. Leaders can derail at this point. We decided to bring all the issues and variables related to leadership transition in the public domain out to help organizations better plan and better prepare leaders for these transitions so that leaders have the strategies and the tactics to successfully navigate the transitions. It is actually quite disturbing how little literature there is on leadership transitions and how to carefully plan, manage, and navigate this increasingly frequent event, which is in its essence a process.
LIZE: Yes. The section furthermore deals with burnout and derailment and how organizations can help leaders to build resilience so that leadership can be sustainable.
ANDREW: Yes. But first, just to highlight to people that this VICCASS world creates a tremendous amount of stress, burnout for leaders, and potentially derailment. Without the tools to deal with all of this stress, leaders can become very toxic. You find them taking shortcuts for dealing with it, and how they manage people, manage the cost, and exhibit organizational leadership.
THEO: There's a really good chapter that looks, in an integrated fashion, at stress and burnout and the context, asking, “How do you build leadership resilience?” It discusses the indicators of stress, burnout, and derailment so you can pick up on when there's a leader that's starting to burn out or is stressed out. This whole issue of being aware of and concerned about toxic leadership and toxic organizations is huge. My own view is that anywhere between 30 and 40 percent of leadership is currently toxic. It's because of the pressures on leaders. It’s the dark side of leadership. Under stress, a leader’s weaknesses come to the fore and they don't have the energy to control it. Of course, the whole theme of self-love or narcissistic leadership also comes through, where you're only in the game for yourself and you become manipulative, aggressive, and abrasive. One of our goals in the chapter on toxicity was to try to assist organizations in recognizing the different toxic types of leadership and organizations, recognizing when leaders and organizations are becoming toxic, and then offering possible countermeasures to deal with that.
LIZE: One of the prominent insights that I got out of this section is that leaders do not have to do it on their own. There can be, or there needs to be, organizational structures and processes in place to help leaders before they burn out or derail so they do not drown. Again, it can be seen as part of this whole strategic leadership value chain that impacts the whole organization system, so it’s not just the leader solely on their own. It is a collective, distributed, leadership outcome.
ANDREW: We also make the point that in terms of building those tools and processes, the resources that help the leader to grow come very much from within themselves. It's almost like having to go and discover that the resources are there inside of you already, so the question becomes: How can you build that within? How can you build up the resilience to this very challenging environment? What leads to these kinds of toxic environments we find ourselves in? How does the organization, through the right processes and tools, help the leader begin to navigate and build a stronger maturity to deal with these challenges within the organization?
THEO: Johan Coetzee addresses this in the book. He has coached something in the order of 18,000 leaders at senior and executive leadership levels in South Africa and beyond. He has written what you might call a macro case study of how organizations go wrong in terms of toxicity. As he puts is, "Leaders are the custodians of the soul of the organization." They can either make organizations soulful or soulless. He, in a brilliant fashion, unpacks how organizations become toxic through inauthentic leaders, and how people allow themselves to become victims of these inauthentic leaders destroying the soul of the organization. As Shakespeare said, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” At the end of the chapter, he turns it around and asks the reader, “How do you then become a leader, an authentic leader, looking after and nurturing the soul of the organization?” A really brilliant chapter from the frontline of where leadership truly happens.
That leads into the last theme of the section with a chapter by Danie du Toit who took the latest thinking on Carl Jung's individuation theory of the journey towards psychological maturity and then did an amazing jump from clinical psychology into leadership behavior where he translated the stages and attributes of individuation into a discussion of immature and mature leadership at the different stages of psychosocial maturity. His chapter enables leaders to check where they are with respect to their psychosocial maturity, and identify the next stage in their journey to greater maturity.
LIZE: The book impressively integrates recent research into the chapters. Your second to last section deals with the leadership stories of 50 prominent South African leaders, which was really very interesting to read. My question to you is — and, of course, coming from South Africa myself, this is a question that I often ponder — what are the specific leadership challenges in South Africa and what are the leadership lessons the world can learn from South Africa?
THEO: Yes, in this part of the book we allowed prominent leadership to share their interpretation of their personal leadership journey. This is the process of transformation by leaders turning experiences into information, and information into knowledge, and knowledge into wisdom. In turn where the latter, for example wisdom then enriches an earlier element, for example knowledge. It's a kind of ongoing reflective learning and living to help an individual become a better leader. You put the mirror in front of yourself and tell a story about your understanding of leadership, how you are a leader, what you aspire to, your leadership philosophy. The mirror then becomes a window. Organizations need to understand and enable and empower their leaders to share their leadership stories, to say “This is how I have made/make leadership work for me.” Leaders are not only at the receiving end of what organizations are doing to them, they must be able to show how they can grow and deepen their leadership capability, experiences, information, knowledge and wisdom.
So, what can we learn from South African leaders? Firstly, that context matters. Leaders must understand the dynamics of their context. In South Africa, there is a beautiful African saying that “The power of the fish is in the water.” If the fish, the leadership, don't understand the context, the water, in which they have to swim and make a difference, they're figuratively and literally dead in the water. I think that's the first important thing.
ANDREW: What we have tried to do is take a cross-sample of leaders. It's not just about the leader telling his story and making sense of his journey in leadership within an organizational context or a business context. It's also about what happened when they were in a particular context. Quite a few of the stories are about leaders within the business context, but we mix it up a bit, with someone from a sports setting or a politician working in the public sector, and asked, “What is the story that is emerging there?” We recognize that the different contexts bring different challenges for a leader, so we ask: “How would the leader tell their story? What was their journey around leadership within these particular contexts?” There’s this richness in this section of the book where leaders have told the stories from different perspectives. You could even take what Thuli Madonsela, our world renowned Public Protector, wrote in the foreword of the book as her leadership story. How did she journey in that particular leadership context as the public protector? That’s the kind of richness that we have tried to create with the leadership telling their own story about their unique journey.
THEO: But then there are also the global lessons. Although the book focuses on South African managers and leaders, the country was recently ranked the 33rd largest economy in the world. For the size of its GDP, South Africa is the country in the world that has produced most global companies. South African leaders have a global orientation and there are a couple of stories where our leaders have embraced future global leadership. For example, they readily acknowledge that it's not only important to pay attention to the shareholders, but they accept that there is a range of stakeholders that they need to engage. They are very much driven by the concept of good corporate citizenship and corporate social investment. And, of course, that leads to the principle of inclusivity. Let the voices of the shareholders in all their diversity be heard. Let’s also open up the channels to our other stakeholders.
ANDREW: You will find, without us having planned it in that way, that this section picks up all the critical elements that we spoke about elsewhere in the book. You will find that they speak about the leadership community who have to jointly make the organization work and succeed. Or they speak about authentic leadership, unsolicited. They, on their own, write about the inward journey of finding their identify of a leader and needing to understand what was going on inside of them, expressing that authentically in relation to others in order to help people to move forward? They ask, how do we navigate a country that has a big challenge within the context of diversity?
They're picking up the themes covered in the book unsolicited, and telling the story in their own particular words, making sense for themselves, and also making sense for others. For me, that was the richness about what we saw here, having that particular leader telling their story, effectively reflecting on all the themes that we had already covered in the book elsewhere, from a much more in-depth perspective.
THEO: In their stories, there was also an acknowledgement of the diversity, the inclusivity that takes it to the next step of participative leadership. South African’s use the term, Ubuntu, to say that the voices of the people at the different levels — not only inside the organization but outside it as well — have to be included. More specifically, that a person becomes a person through others. Then, of course, due to the very dynamic situation, South African leaders are known for their resilience and agility. They are able to juggle a multitude of balls at the same time. They're also very responsive. If the context changes, they adapt to that in order to still obtain their ends. They're not fixated on a plan. They pursue the plan for the moment if it works, but if the playing field changes, if there's a new player or the conditions under which they have to lay the game have changed, or the climate has changed, they adapt.
We use an analogy in the last chapter of the book of not seeing the leadership of the future as the conductors of a symphony orchestra with a command and control leadership: here's the piece of music to played, and make your defined contribution by knowing and sticking to your place as musician. We believe the more future-fit analogy or metaphor for future leadership is more of a jazz band. There's a theme according to which the band has to play with each one contributing in real time as the music unfolds, and nobody making a “mistake”. It's very much a kind of learning organization approach where the music unfolds as we're working towards what we want to achieve and are inspired by, and adapt around what emerges in real time.
LIZE: And, of course, that also speaks to being in the moment, and tapping into the energy of the whole system.
THEO: Yeah.
LIZE: And really being aware of what is going on around you and following the contextual cues that are coming to you all the time. Making sure that everyone stays with you in the process, not losing people.
ANDREW: In fact, that is very much a theme that we pick up in the last chapter, linking it to what a lot of these leadership stories are about: How did they stand in their moment and make sense of it? How did they skillfully improvise in the situation at that moment? In other words, we're talking in the book about this long list of challenges, plus an even longer list of competencies a leader needs to develop, but a leader cannot master all that as a superwoman/man. You carry this heavy toolkit, but it's almost like having to decide and having the right judgment to know, what is the right thing that you must apply in moment because this moment is not the same as the last. To build on the metaphor that Theo just shared on a jazz band for future-fit: In a jazz band, they say the only mistake that is made by a player is the mistake by his co-player who was unable to build on (not correct) the “mistake” that was made in the first instance.
LIZE: [Laughs] And that goes down to teamwork and working together and helping each other.
ANDREW: Yeah.
LIZE: Also, picking up all the links. To not cut out those who you think are doing something wrong at that moment, but take the people further with you.
ANDREW: Exactly.
THEO: The leaders are very clear — you need a vision, and you need a philosophy. But thereafter you need to be quite flexible and improvise in the moment, understanding the dynamics of the context, how you're going to get there. I think that's what's so interesting about our South African leadership. They're not fixated on a strategy or the plan. They're fixated on the destination and the outcome.
ANDREW: Yeah.
LIZE: It's that flexibility and agility and adaptability and being able to read the context exceedingly well.
THEO: And achieving it jointly, not individually.
ANDREW: Have you ever read any of the work of Donald Schön and the reflective practitioner.
LIZE: Yes.
ANDREW: Schön speaks very strongly about one’s ability to deal with what he calls the "backtalk of the situation." In other words, backtalk are those elements for which you have not planned for as the situation evolves. It’s the interplay of new dynamics in the conversation. How do you create the ability to effectively deal with those things that you have no clue might emerge within that context?
THEO: It’s not only feedback, but feed forward as well.
LIZE: Yes. That actually brings me to the last question of this delightful interview. I specifically want to link back to what you said, Andrew, about Schön's work on being a reflective practitioner, and earlier on, Theo, what you said when you said that the mirror we need to use to for reflection needs to also become a window.
You, yourselves, have reflected upon the book many, many times. This is not the first interview you’re doing on it! Reflecting on what you have read in the book, all the contributions, the influence on you and your own thinking about leadership — because both of you individually, and as a very formidable team, are experts in scholarship and practice of leadership — if you use this window now and you gaze forward, what is the future for leadership? What are the future challenges? What's next?
THEO: Lize, here you want us to stick out our necks, and, of course, the further we stick them out, the higher the chance they will get chopped off. But we're willing to do that because that's in the spirit of the book. [Laughter]
When we first looked forward and reviewed everything, we got kind of despondent. With all of the different contexts and challenges, where would we get a super leader, one single person, having all of these abilities? Because in the future, we'll have to look at that leader in a holistic, integrated fashion. It's not only emotional intelligence that's going to save them or mindfulness. It's understanding the leader and the collectivity of the group of people that have to lead an institution and organization, which is why we prefer the term leadership rather than leader. It’s understanding all of the competencies that you need and making sure that you've got it in the collectivity. Then the music starts playing, returning to the jazz analogy. At this point, person A is the best to lead and gets complemented by the others. In another situation, person B is the best to lead. And there's no prestige attached to that. It’s a matter of discerning, who is the best person at this stage to lead us? If we need more transactional leadership, who's the best at that? If it's more transformational leadership, who's the best at that? If it's transcendental leadership, the purpose, the why, spiritual leadership, who's the best? We will support that person. In a sense, we flatten the organization. We draw out whoever the best person is to lead us at this point of our journey into the future.
ANDREW: Theo and I recently presented at a conference where some work that comes out of the latest work on the Enneagram measurement were also presented. They came up with about five key elements or themes that are important in leadership and this had great resonance with the work addressed in this book. There was great resonance on the domains within which those competencies would have to be developed are around whether leadership is able, whether it is intelligent, whether it's mature, whether it's ethical, and whether it's authentic. We also argued that it is more important for a leader to be agile with regard to their context, and we spoke very strongly about this concept of skillful improvisation. While we often come up with very long lists of competencies, the question is: What does the context demand of you to pull out of this toolkit in order to respond effectively to it? This is where the whole concept of skillful improvisation becomes so critical.
THEO: Leadership development of the future, Lize, must be deeper, much deeper. It needs to deal with world views, value orientation, and decision-making. We used to think we could just develop our future leadership by beating certain skills into leaders, but that doesn’t really work, because leaders are applying the competencies, the capabilities from the wrong base. They’re using the wrong world view, the wrong value orientation. What’s needed is to really go deep, to virtually reprogram the DNA of the leader of the future, because the world is changing so much.
LIZE: Thank you. Thank you so much. Of course, this is a beautiful segue for me to invite you to the ILA’s regional conference in Pretoria, South Africa on the 30th-31st of May, 2018. We will be talking about exactly this — the next generation of leadership. I would love to continue our conversation at that conference and I would like to thank you very much for a wonderful interview. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I have.
ANDREW: Thank you very much for the opportunity, Lize.
THEO: Indeed, thank you.
About Behind-the-Page-Interviews
Behind-the-Page-Interviews pull the cover off of today's most intriguing leadership books. Dive into the book writing process, the author's backstory, and their take on leadership.