strategy
the fourth age
Eldership This fourth and final age is when a leader manages to let go of responsibility and the need to control or be the leader. Instead they are focused on enabling the leadership of others. In this age, they may move into a portfolio career, taking on the role of mentoring younger leaders, being an adviser to industry bodies, and a non-executive to one or more companies. This last stage is less evident in western cultures, where many non-executives directors are backseat drivers, and many leaders take more and more responsibility until they retire or collapse. We have much to learn from indigenous peoples and eastern traditions of this last stage of development.
How to develop vertically through levels of leadership maturity
Over 40 years of studying individual and collective leadership, I have discovered, along with colleagues at Henley Business School, Bath Consultancy Group and Renewal Associates, that higher levels of leadership development cannot be taught, but they can be developed. If you try to teach an out-directed leader about progressing to a self-authoring or achiever style of leadership, they often reply: “Please tell me the seven steps that I have to follow to achieve that.” An attitude which demonstrably runs counter to self-authoring leadership. Similarly, if you try to teach a leader that is a self-authoring leader about higher levels of leadership maturity, they immediately want to know: “How do I get to be at the top level?” This attitude is the antithesis of reaching full leadership maturity, because fullymature elders have no emotional need to feel that they are leaders. Thus, the dominant mindset of the leader will instantly reduce the new teaching to fit their action logic.
Paradoxical seizure
THE RESEARCH At Henley Business School, I have been leading a major global research study to explore tomorrow’s leadership and how leadership development needs to radically transform today in order to develop the necessary leadership of tomorrow. This has involved carrying out interviews in 40 global companies with the chief executive, HR director and a Millennial future leader nominated by the organization; as well as interviews with thought-leaders, focus groups, and a survey of the best global surveys of chief executives, HR directors and Millennials.
Learning to move between the levels is fundamentally different to learning to develop greater horizontal skills, techniques and behaviours within a specific level of development. We have discovered that transiting from one level of development to another involves confounding the current mindset through experiencing what I call ‘paradoxical seizure’. This can be enabled by being in a situation where you want to succeed at achieving something, but are unable to do so within your current frame of thinking. In the research on tomorrow’s leadership, we have also been looking at what is necessary from today’s development to produce successful future leadership. To create leadership development that creates both vertical and horizontal development, it needs to be ‘challenge-based’. That means starting with not what we already know, but emergent organizational challenges – so called ‘wicked issues’ that no individual can solve by themselves. Even better to have challenges that everyone recognizes as important, but which cannot be resolved within our current way of thinking. Examples of applying such thinking to leadership development can be
found in our description of developing leadership training for the partners at Ernst & Young (Hawkins and Wright 2009), or in the work of Leaders’ Quest. Another organization asked me to help it develop its ‘leaders of tomorrow’. I asked its top team to shortlist the top organizational challenges to come over the next five years that it lacked the headspace or time to fully address. They then chose five from their shortlist as the core challenge for five cross-functional challenge teams, which were made up of ‘future leaders’, each mentored by a different member of the executive team, and supported by a change-team coach. The coach’s primary role was to facilitate the enabling condition that would hold the team in exploring the challenge. The coach would assist in bringing in different and varied systemic perspectives and expertise. They would then facilitate generative dialogue within the team in a way that avoided creating simplistic solutions within their current frame of thinking, and ensuring that the challenge and complexity created the necessary heat to forge new collective thinking. This coach would also introduce useful frameworks and tools as was helpful at various stages in the process.
The global challenge
We are not going to be able to address the complex ‘wicked issues’ of the hyper-connected and hyper-change world of the 21st century with 20thcentury thinking. The challenges of globalization, climate change, growing inequality, digitalization and robotics, and mass migration are just some of the main interconnected issues. Creating more effective vertical development, not just for executives but leaders at all levels, in organizations in the commercial, public and not-forprofit-sectors, as well as in communities globally, is an urgent task. We all have a responsibility to attend to our own adult maturity, and also to look at how we can parent our children and grandchildren to help them develop the leadership capacities that will be needed in the world of tomorrow. — Peter Hawkins is professor of leadership at Henley Business School, chairman of Renewal Associates, and emeritus chairman of Bath Consultancy Group. He is the author of a wide range of books on leadership and coaching Q1 2017 Dialogue
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