4 Ways of Thinking and Doing

© 2019 David Denyer. All rights reserved.
PROFESSOR SPEAKER ADVISOR
Leadership
Change
Resilience
www.cranfield.ac.uk/oracl
www.daviddenyer.com
www.linkedin.com/in/daviddenyer/
What is leadership?
4 ways of thinking
and doing
Professor David Denyer

What is leadership?
4 ways of thinking and doing
The purpose of this article is to sketch out a QSNC (qualities, styles, networks, challenges)
framework for understanding what leadership is. Almost all leadership development is based on
one or more of these four basic perspectives (or paradigms). When I listen to people talk about
leadership, 99% of conversations stay exclusively within a single paradigm. Worse, many people
and organizations are permanently stuck in their favorite paradigm and simply cannot understand
leadership from other perspectives. I argue that many failures of leadership that we see today stem
from the application of 19th and 20th Century models of leadership to 21st Century challenges. If
you want to practice leadership or develop leadership capability in your organization: first, know
what leadership is.

What is leadership?
Paradigm 1: Qualities
The oldest and most profoundly rooted leadership paradigm treats leadership as the property of
the person, focusing on the qualities, traits, and attributes of leaders. In 1840, Thomas Carlyle
wrote Heroes, Hero-Worship, and The Heroic in History, in which he states,
“…all things that we see standing accomplished in the world are properly the outer material result,
the practical realization and embodiment, of thoughts that dwelt in the Great Men sent into the
world.”

What is leadership?
The idea that leadership is about the qualities of leaders is still so deeply ingrained as to be
virtually unquestioned. When we think about leadership today, we still think leader. We tend to
think about leaders from the worlds of business, politics, and sport. We focus on the individuals
whom we identify with, and we all hold strong beliefs about the values, qualities, and styles that
make for “good” leaders. This perspective is a legacy of the ‘great man thesis’ and trait theories.

What is leadership?

What is leadership?
The leader-centered literature has been widely criticized for romanticizing leaders as heroic figures
and for placing unrealistic expectations on leaders to make a difference. Yet, the leader qualities
perspective remains in the public consciousness and much leadership development.

What is leadership?
Vignette 1: A manufacturing firm wedded to the great man paradigm
A manufacturing firm had been struggling for some time to engage employees in a strategically
important change initiative. We listened to the metaphors used in their organizational language.
We heard many words borrowed from the military organizations of previous centuries: e.g. leaders
must “lead from the front,” display “courage,” “spend time in the trenches,” “fight uphill battles” and
“cop the flak.” The company documents portrayed leadership as an individual leader, who was
usually a male working in the head office in the United States. Leader qualities, e.g. visionary,
courageous, prudent, resilient, influential, were ingrained in the firm’s leadership competency
framework.

What is leadership?
Existing leadership development initiatives focused on personal histories and stories of people
perceived as leaders. These programs attempted to help leaders access their leadership potential
through personal insight and awareness and how leaders can work with their values and integrity
in leader roles. We worked with the company to explore the leadership capability required for the
future, which included recognizing individual strengths and acknowledging the diversity, originality,
and distinctiveness of all their employees.

What is leadership?
Paradigm 2: Styles
Our second distinctive paradigm emerged in the 1960s and 70s. In the wake of World War II, full
employment, the emergence of the welfare state, and changed social attitudes, the emphasis of
leadership thinking shifted to followers and team members. Developing leadership style through
studying behavioral dimensions was the next phase of new thinking. The idea emerged that
leadership/management has a dual focus. Firstly, leaders have to pay attention to the tasks people
have to do (if you get a new job someone has to explain it to you). On the other hand, you need to
feel happy enough at work to stick in the job. Therefore, leaders also need to pay attention to
emotions and relationships. The result was a proliferation of studies that focus on the values,
qualities, and behavioral styles that make for “good” leadership. Much leadership theory and
development (LMX – leader-member exchange, contingency theory, situational leadership, using
personality-based assessments) are based on the idea that the leader should adapt their preferred
style to who are they trying to lead.

What is leadership?
Bennis, coined this the ‘leadership tripod’ (leaders, followers, goals) paradigm dominated
leadership thinking for almost half a century:

What is leadership?
Paradigm 2: Styles
Transactional and transformational leadership theories both sit squarely within the styles paradigm.
The transactional perspective holds that leaders help followers understand role and task
requirements to reach the desired objectives. Transactional leaders clarify work to be completed,
use rewards as reinforcement, and intervene when standards are not met. In contrast,
transformational leaders shape their followers’ attitudes and commitment to the organization’s
mission. Transformational leaders motivate and influence followers to work for collective goals by
going beyond current norms and inspiring subordinates to transcend their self-interest for the sake
of the organization.

What is leadership?
Paradigm 2: Styles
The leadership tripod has extended into cross-cultural and global leadership theory, which is
typically leadership style (transformational) with cultural sensitivity and local adaptation. Implicit
leadership theory (ILT) shows how archetypes play a role in leader/follower relationships Leaders
whose behaviors match those ILTs or archetypes held by particular followers are more likely to be
seen as leaders and evoke followership. This has clear implications in cross-cultural leadership
and understanding gender and leadership.

What is leadership?
Paradigm 2: Styles
Vignette 2: An oil and gas and petrochemicals company stuck in the leadership tripod
A corporate academy in an oil and gas and petrochemical company was failing to develop talent,
resulting in shortage of leadership in relevant functional domains. A group of HR and L&D
professionals and a large group of senior executives produced a comprehensive set of
competencies, which they believed individuals needed to adopt if they are to be a leader. The
result was an astonishing 172-item competency framework (e.g. have a genuine concern for
others’ well-being; develop staff; demonstrate they value people; empower others; are personally
accessible and approachable; have integrity, openness, charisma, and intellectual versatility, etc.)
A 360-degree feedback tool measured individuals shortlisted for the program.

What is leadership?
Paradigm 2: Styles
The shortfall between the desired competencies and the manager’s current knowledge, skills,
abilities, and attitudes were determined. The chosen few were then sent away on a leader
development program to fix their leadership. The first question that we asked what was the
problem that the company thinks leadership development is the solution to? Addressing this
question led to a realization that the company needed to build collective leadership capability to
resolve organizational challenges, which was not being addressed by focusing solely on individual
leader competencies and styles.

What is leadership?
Paradigm 3: Networks
During the 1990s, notions of leadership as shared or distributed across networks of people led to
one of the most fundamental and potentially controversial debates within leadership thinking –
whether leadership is best understood as the actions of a formally appointed leader or a shared
influence process. The achievement of collective action to build ownership, group identity and
change often start in informal coalitions, which abound in organizations. From this perspective,
desirable organizational outcomes are more likely to be the product of the relationships within and
across these networks than the result of individual leaders. The work of leadership in this new era
is thus marked by greater cross-functional collaboration and highly participative environments in
which people at all levels take, and feel, personal responsibility for collective output, in which they
are deeply committed.

What is leadership?
There are core two strands of work in this paradigm. Firstly, leadership can be seen as a team
process, where leadership is carried out by the leadership team as a whole, rather than solely by a
single designated individual. This work tends to use the term ‘shared leadership.’ Secondly,
distributed leadership acknowledges that ‘followers’ – those not designated as holders of formal
leadership roles – also contribute to leadership and multiple individuals can be involved in
leadership. Discovering how leadership practice is distributed and enacted in organizations can be
addressed by asking ‘who takes responsibility for leadership work’?

What is leadership?
Vignette 3: A telecommunications company with a dysfunctional leadership network
We worked with a telecommunications company to improve information sharing across silos. The
senior management team (8 people) had an inaccurate perception of the informal network in the
organizations. We used social network methods to study the SMTs position in the more extensive
network of 50 senior managers. We asked everyone in the network questions about the work of
leadership. We asked 15 questions in total, 5 each relating to direction (e.g. Who provides clarity
on strategy and goals?), alignment (e.g. Who coordinates activities and allocates resources?), and
commitment (Who inspires and engages you to ‘go the extra mile’?). We identified that two
members of the SMT were not doing any direction, alignment and commitment work. We also
found unrecognized information brokers, marginalized voices, overloaded bottlenecks, and
network fragmentation. The analysis provided a snapshot/x-ray of the organization's invisible
networks and enabled us to target the most cost-effective interventions.

What is leadership?
Paradigm 4: Challenges
There is a growing concern in the leadership literature that existing models of leadership conceived
in the past century may not fully capture the leadership dynamics operating in today’s complex
environments. Recently, the focus has shifted to thinking about complexity leadership and the
nature of the challenges organizations are dealing with. Issues such climate change, urbanization,
social and political change, financial crises, and disruptive technologies, like AI, are inherently
complex problems.
These problems are very different from complicated issues:

What is leadership?
Organizations always face a mixture complicated and complex challenges. Therefore, on the one
hand, they need to maintain sufficient stability to coordinate, structure and control activity
(administrative function) to manage complicated problems and on the other hand they need to
generate the conditions for innovation, improvisation, and change (adaptive capacity) to deal with
complex issues. Complex issues require multi-agency responses, people working collaboratively
across boundaries and borders, involving everyone in the process, and creating safe spaces
where people can learn, innovate and generate new solutions. Complex problems require the
adopting of new assumptions, development of new strategies and re-thinking of ‘the way we do our
business.’ As noted by Heifetz and Linsky, (2002),
‘The single most common source of leadership failure we’ve been able to identify… is that people,
especially those in positions of authority, treat adaptive (complex) challenges like technical
(complicated) problems.’

What is leadership?
Vignette 4: a professional services firm that refused to change a winning formula
A professional services firm faced declining revenues and impending financial disaster. The
economic, political and social environment in which the organization worked was changing very
rapidly putting a premium on the ability of the organization to adapt and innovate. It became clear
to everyone involved that the organization was failing to meet this challenge and had been for
many years, if not decades. The situation created anxiety. Hiring a credible consultancy alleviated
this in three ways (i) it provided a sense of control - ‘phew the experts have arrived and they will
have the answer’ (ii) it demonstrated action - ‘we are doing something’ (iii) it outsourced
accountability - ‘we tried to avoid this by hiring the big brand consultancy.’ The consultancy
defined the problem, outlined the solution and implemented the solution.

What is leadership?
However, the consultancy was trying to resolve the wicked problems with commoditized, off the
shelf solutions. Wicked problems are unique, so what worked before really will not work now. The
organization suffered financial losses unprecedented in its fifty-year history and almost 20% of the
workforce suffered redundancy. We worked with the company to facilitate the conditions for
collaborative learning groups to experience, reveal, create and discover alternative approaches to
collective leadership work. We also coached leaders to manage the tension between expectation
that they had to be strong leaders with answers and encouraging leadership at many levels,
empowering people and creating an environment where people felt safe to create new products
and processes that would sustain the organization in a complex context.

What is leadership?
Summary
• If you do not know what leadership is, how can you expect to develop leadership capability in
your organization?
• The QSNC (qualities, styles, networks, challenges) framework can help you to understand the
main four leadership paradigms.
• Most people and organizations are permanently stuck in their favorite paradigm and simply
cannot understand leadership from other perspectives.
• Many of the challenges that we see today are complex challenges, but we often try to resolve
them using 19th and 20th Century models of leadership. This inevitably leads to failed
leadership. Brexit would be a good example, but that will need to wait for a future article!

David runs the Organizational Resilience and Change
Leadership (ORaCL) Group at Cranfield University, which
works in three areas of expertise: developing leadership
capability, designing organizational change and building
organizational resilience. We are world-renowned
researchers, impactful educators, engaging speakers, and
trusted advisors to organizations across all sectors.
We are an experienced group of academics and
practitioners from different disciplines and backgrounds
who share a passion for ideas, problem-solving, and
translating knowledge into action.
We act as an information hub and community builder,
connecting an extensive network of external experts,
industry leaders, public officials, and researchers with
interest in organizational resilience, change, and
leadership who want to share experiences, exchange
ideas and collaborate to work through complex
challenges.
Visit The
Website

Be the FIRST to receive news,
articles, insights and event
updates from the
Organizational Resilience and
Change Leadership (ORaCL)
Group.
Signing up is EASY! Simply fill
out the online form and we’ll be
in touch!
ORaCL Bulletin

daviddenyer@cranfield.ac.uk

4 Ways of Thinking and Doing

Recommended

Recommended

More Related Content

What's hot

What's hot (20)

Similar to 4 Ways of Thinking and Doing

Similar to 4 Ways of Thinking and Doing (20)

More from David Denyer

More from David Denyer (6)

Recently uploaded

Recently uploaded (17)

4 Ways of Thinking and Doing