The big issue
Writing
Peter Crush
I
n 2015, aged just 34, Angela Joyce suddenly found herself in a place she’d never been before. Not long out from being a ‘regular’ schoolteacher, Joyce was suddenly Peterborough Regional College’s youngestever female CEO. And she vividly remembers her first day: “It suddenly hit me – I was ‘the’ leader now; there was no backing out.” Joyce is now CEO of Capital City College (London’s largest further education provider), and the epitome of what calm and confident leadership looks like. Her first taste of leadership was something she actually anticipated, by putting herself up for the role when it became available. But if even she had the collywobbles when she first parked herself behind the top table, then spare a thought for the route many leaders take – the unexpected one. Data suggests that the majority of leaders are ‘accidental’ or ‘unexpected’ – often becoming so because of unplanned departures or by virtue of being good in their everyday job. Research from the Chartered Management Institute (CMI) and YouGov suggests as many as 82% of new leaders in the UK receive no formal leadership training before assuming their leadership role.1 But when 60% of leaders globally have not received any leadership development (according to the Center for Creative Leadership)² , yet leadership quality is resoundingly known to correlate with better employee engagement and productivity, the inference is always that this lack of preparedness must be a bad thing. As Joyce argues: “You have to feel ‘ready’ for leadership. It’s a skill, but also a mentality.” But is this really the case? The multi-million-pound leadership training sector will have you believe that preleadership learning is essential, but is there not an argument for saying that just-as-effective (if not better) leadership is gained by learning on the job – growing skills gradually – rather than needing to be pre-prepped and primed?
Passionate views
“Being a technical expert is a discipline; being a leader is a discipline, but the two things are very different still,” says Julia Payne, ex-CEO at the Centre for High Performance, now a fractional CMO [chief marketing officer]. “Unexpected leadership is common, but this only makes leadership training ‘more’ essential because leadership skills need developing intentionally.” Payne’s view (which she shares with many others), is that leadership is itself a whole different kettle of fish – what Rebecca Sutherland, entrepreneur and founder of accelerator firm HarbarSix, describes as “being skilled in allowing others to speak up, taking people with you and bringing out the best in people”. Technical specialists, says Payne, typically succeed by “being individualistic and by surrounding themselves with people similar to them, while leadership is creating teams”. As Paul Vanderbroeck, executive coach and author of Lead Like Julius Caesar, argues: “Leaders need to learn leadership, by unlearning what they did before, because what they did before will no longer be relevant to how they must behave now. Yes, leadership is a competency that benefits from ‘learning by doing’, but learning by doing is not 21