Cranfield School of Management
Interview: Professor Andrew Kakabadse
The Essence of Leadership
AK
Andrew, can you tell me what made you and Nada write the
book?
AKakabadse First of all we had conducted probably one of the largest surveys
in the world on leaders. It encompasses probably something like
12,000-13,000 organisations and now has stretched to 21
countries and what emerged from the research contradicted a lot
of the research that really emanated from America and what the
Americans and many of the early British in the 1970s were trying
to do was find the characteristics of leaders. What the research
very clearly showed irrespective of gender or race or religion, was
it was not the characteristics of the leader, it was the
characteristics of the situation. So the switch intellectually was
from person, and great man or great woman, to context and what
were the key drivers of the context and so that was really the
essence of The Essence of Leadership.
AK
Right. Can you enlighten our listener on the question which is
frequently asked, and that is the paradox of managing and
leading? You mentioned the words transactional and
transformational – how do these words try to explain those?
AKakabadse This has been a debate for forty years and if you go back to the
60s and 70s people are in fact drawing continuum between when
does management start and finish and when does leadership start
and finish – and what the research showed is that neither starts nor
finishes, they are both intermingled. Essentially the transactional
part is the day to day tasks which are so necessary and the
attention to detail which is so vital to ensure that the organisation
is kept on track. The transformational part is really the vision, the
big time view, the long term perspective, the mission of the
organisation. What is interesting is that the most successful
leaders tend to have a workload balance of about 50 to 85%
transactional and only about 15 to 20% transformational.
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Professor Andrew Kakabadse
And when that balance is disturbed that is when you get problems.
So when you start getting a leader who is so involved with the day
to day routines that they can’t put their head up above the parapet
that is a problem, but when you equally get a leader who is
delegating too much and starts spending so much on the mission,
vision and networking externally and not sufficient attention to
detail, we tend to get problems with costs. So it’s a balance.
The balance varies by situation, but it is not an either/or and one
of the interesting things about the research which showed that it
was not an either/or and that again contradicted something like 30
years of work previously.
AK
Is that 80/20 split still current today?
AKakabadse It varies, but as a general rule, yes. The only real differentiation
has been when the organisation is reaching the end of its
economic life cycle and it's hardly differentiated, there is no real
competitive advantage left, except for price. So really the
organisations are competing on economies of scale, there in that
situation where you are just about ready to be taken over and
people are ready to introduce even greater economies of scale
that you have been able to introduce, the balance is almost
probably 95/5. But for the majority of organisations where there
is leverage left and they can grow in the market place – they may
have to change their brand, or the product array, or whatever
there happens to be – but they could still grow, it's about 80/20.
AK
The core theme of the book is what it takes to be a great leader –
can you summarise the attributes that are key to great leadership?
You talk about in the book, the seven capabilities, the seven
sides?
AKakabadse Those seven sides are really linked around that word that you use
– capability. Capability and the word competence in the technical
jargon are used interchangeably and unfortunately are used
misleadingly. Competence and skill are basically something you
learn and basically something you can take from place A to place
B. Capability is how well you use those competencies and skills
from one situation to the next and really what is required in top
leadership positions is capability. I remember one chief executive
telling me there is no point in going down the competencies route
because the critical question is, my dear friend, you may be skilled
and competent, but how capable are you of using these to make a
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Professor Andrew Kakabadse
difference to this place today? So we found that there were
seven characteristics of both situation and person and they range
from how do you identify the vision, and how do you create a
belief in the future? How do you structure an organisation so that
you have designed it to do well for the next period of time and you
also know when that next period of time has come to its end, and
you have to redesign it in many ways? How do you know how to
get what people really feel? And this seems a very shallow
comment to make, but one of the biggest blockages to visioning is
the sentiments that people hold privately about what happened in
the past and if they don’t like what is going to be happening now
and into the future, they resent the organisation and undermine it.
So one of the critical capabilities of a leader is to know how to
raise uncomfortable messages and have them talked. So the Al
Gore inconvenient truth has to become almost part of the culture
and surprisingly very few people can do that, largely because of
their own feelings of threat. So the capabilities range from the big
view of the future, right down to how do we in a detailed work
make this organisation work? And really the critical skills in all
that is how you intermingle each of those seven from one situation
to the next. As you will have seen in organisations like Marconi
where you had really a very top team that was talented, chairman,
chief executive and finance director, they all had a track record of
success in the past, but the problem was did they use that track
record of success in the past to determine how they were going to
work in Marconi and perhaps there is evidence that supports that.
So in a strange way those individuals had intermingled those
seven requirements well, but of a model that had worked some
time before instead of rethinking the whole formula and re-jigging
those seven to suit the Marconi situation of that day.
AK
How has leadership changed since you first wrote the book in
1999?
AKakabadse Not much really, not much. Same issues, different personalities.
If anything in the Western world we have stagnation – more and
more organisations are really competing on economies of scale,
life is more tougher, life is more competitive and it is more
competitive because there is less and less chance for innovation.
So we are not seeing from say 20 years ago, the real innovative
look – like we could take loads of people of different backgrounds
and bring them into the organisation and use that different skill
and expertise – we are tending now to look very focused on
particular individuals, their tasks, their roles, the organisations.
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Professor Andrew Kakabadse
What slice of extra added value can we get from both the person
and the organisation that we might want to hire or acquire? So
we are getting greater competition on price, but in essence, that is
the major difference. Unfortunately every new CEO or chairman
tends to position the challenge they face as almost a
new and unique challenge – it's not, you have seen it many times
before and in many ways the more honest ones will tell you that.
So it's much the same, not much has been solved, which is great
for us because we are needed in terms of consulting and
management development. But with a touch of greater attention
to price and costs.
AK
Andrew, thank you very much indeed.
Transcript prepared by Learning Services for the Knowledge Interchange
www.cranfield.ac.uk/som
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Produced by the Learning Services Team
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© Cranfield University 2007