Interview: Professor Kim Turnbull James
Leadership Perspectives
TT
Welcome to this Cranfield School of Management podcast. My
name is Toby Thompson and I am in conversation with Kim Turnbull
James, Professor of Executive Learning at Cranfield School of
Management. Kim, this book Leadership Perspectives where has
that come from?
KTJ
A couple of years ago we ran the Fifth International Studying
Leadership Conference here at Cranfield and I think when coming
out of that Conference we realised that a couple of things were
happening.
First of all we had a fantastic set of papers offered at the
Conference and we wanted to capture some of the really good
thinking that had been discussed and contributed at that
Conference. And secondly, I think, that we decided that to do that
in the form of a book would make it much more accessible to a wide
range of readers as compared with putting these papers into
journals where mainly academics would read them.
So I am very much hoping that this book will appeal to people in all
sorts of walks of life who are interested in leadership.
TT
If you look on Amazon there are thousands, literally thousands of
titles – why do we need this book now?
KTJ
I think there are seismic changes in the way that we are thinking
about leadership and one of the things that was exciting about that
conference is that we had a lot of papers that began to capture the
differences between how we thought about leadership and how we
are now beginning to construct the idea of leadership.
So let me just explain a little bit what I mean by that. If you go back
fifty years or so, the predominant thinking on leadership was about
people’s personal attributes. It began to be quite clear that that
was an insufficient way of describing leaders and certainly the whole
process of leadership in organisations. Gradually we began to look
at leaders and followers, and the relationship between leaders and
followers. But as we move to this new century with all the new
challenges that are going on, I am very conscious that we are doing
this interview in the middle of a credit crunch, certainly a very
difficult financial situation for many companies, we begin to see that
leadership has to be thought of in alternative ways. There are a
number of ways – there are a number of reasons for this.
Firstly people have to lead, not just within their own organisation,
but they are often trying to exercise leadership across very
Professor Kim Turnbull James
interesting boundaries between organisations, in whole industries,
across the globe, with partners, in joint ventures – all sorts of things
where we wouldn’t really just think of it typically as leadership and
followers.
I think another reason is that we are beginning to realise that
strategy and leadership can’t be thought of as completely separate
boxes – so strategy over here and leadership over here. And so
what we are beginning to see is much more attention paid to the
tasks of leadership – what are the leaders there to do? What are
the leadership processes in the organisation trying to achieve?
And so the link between leadership tasks, strategy, what the
organisation is actually doing is really important and that takes us
very quickly on to looking at context. In what context is leadership
exercised? So we are beginning to think in a very different way
about how it is impossible to think of leadership in an organisation or
of a system without thinking of the context and the place and the
time in which leadership is exercised. Now you might say there is
nothing new in that – Shakespeare said something about taking on
the tide and I think that leadership is very different depending on the
circumstances. So my guess is that leadership in some of the big
banks today might look slightly different from how it did six months
ago, they are actually differently challenged.
So context is important, and where in the organisation you are
exercising leadership is important. So there is a real understanding
that there is front line leadership – leadership in many places in
organisations and not just at the top of the organisation. But at the
same time we are not asking for leadership in a kind of free for all
situation, there has to be some link between strategy of the
organisation and those people who are exercising leadership. So
distributed leadership is something that is really interesting and
important, but needs really understanding and exploring.
I hope I have given an idea in just that sort of very quick pen picture
that we are seeing leadership as a very complex issue, lots of
different facets, lots of new things to explore and it’s really those
sorts of things that this book addresses.
TT
As a user of a business school, the new constructions that you are
talking about, isn’t that academic and of relatively unimportant
interest to the practitioner? How does the practitioner consume
that? What relevance is that to them?
KTJ
Well I think this theorising about leadership is absolutely crucial to
the consumers of business school products and services. The way
that we think about leadership informs how we develop leaders and
in the latter part of the last century we saw an increased interest in
competencies, for example, and that thinking really led through into
new ways of developing behaviours that leaders should be
engaging with. So that was a really clear link between thinking of
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Professor Kim Turnbull James
the ways we think about leadership and what happens when you go
for leadership development programmes for example. And I think
that the ways that we are thinking about leadership now have very
clear implications for developing leaders, so we are asking people to
think very much about the context, about the culture, about how
they interpret strategy and this is much more complicated than
simply looking at the best styles of leadership.
Now that is not to say that I might not want to work for somebody
who was inspirational and charismatic, and that might be fantastic
and it might be appropriate in some situations, but that is not
sufficient. And, if we actually look very closely at how leaders
behave, it is also quite clear that not every good leader has an ideal
set of interpersonal skills. So we are looking at it in the context of
some things to do with leaders’ behaviour, but also understanding
their interpretation of strategy – the sense they make of what they
are trying to do in the organisation and therefore the changes that
they are trying to bring about in the organisation. These are all very
closely interlinked.
TT
You are heading up the Centre for Executive Leadership and
Learning – it would seem that there is maybe intent there to
professionalise leadership. Is it something that can be
professionalised? I mention that because Rakesh Khurana
recently, October 2008 Harvard Business Review, was talking about
professionalising management – the need for that. Is that
something that you think you can do for leadership?
KTJ
That is a really hard question, Toby. I think management has with it
a number of skills about organising, requires certain understandings
– financial management and so on. Leadership is much harder to
pin down in that sense because it does depend very much on the
situation that you are in and it is quite clear that if what you need is
decisive action – and we have been hearing a lot about the need for
decisive action recently. That might be very different from the
situation where you are taking people through a huge change
process where decisive action could precipitate things that you
didn’t want, for example. So I don’t know that professionalising
leadership will be the way I would describe it.
I think people taking leadership seriously when they get a senior
executive job and trying to understand what is required of them as a
leader and constructing their leadership roles very carefully is
crucial.
TT
I know Keith Grint talks about, in terms of problems anyway, tame,
wicked and crucial or critical problems. Does your book in any way
relate to those sorts of problems areas? You talk about context a lot
– as how you define a problem area – is that relevant?
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Professor Kim Turnbull James
KTJ
Well the question I am asking people who come on programmes
that we are doing leadership development for different companies
with, the question I am asking is what is the problem to which your
leadership is a solution? And I think if you begin to build your
notion of your leadership, either collectively in the organisation, the
leadership of the organisation, your leadership practices, the
behaviours that you want to see throughout the organisation – if you
build those around what are the problems and challenges that we
are facing, as well as the opportunities that we are trying to exploit,
then I think you are beginning to get to grips with what I mean by the
context and the situations in which people are leading. So that
doesn’t mean to say that personal insight and awareness and
interpersonal skills and all those things aren’t important – they are.
But in what context are they to be exercised? And that is really the
crucial thing.
TT
You mention a lot about emotion, the value of emotion, perhaps that
has not been looked at enough. Can you talk a little bit about why
you are having that emotional angle on leadership?
KTJ
Well, I think the connection for people within organisations is not
simple, although it is important to know that you have got a job at
the end of the day and you have got pay at the end of the week, the
connection that people feel with the organisation has a lot to do with
their identifying with the organisation. So people feel passionate
about their work because they feel they are engaged in important
tasks, whether it’s humanitarian aid or helping people to produce
some product which will be sold and that will help GDP, or whatever
it may be. People need to feel that what they are doing is
meaningful and the leadership of the organisation has a real part to
play in creating that sense of identity and meaning for people.
So the ideas and the strategies of the organisation can’t remain a
kind of a cold, impersonal document that people can open their desk
drawers and get out and see what their targets are. It has to be
lived and embodied by people who take up leadership roles in the
organisation and then there becomes an emotional connection
between people and the organisation’s purpose as embodied by
leaders. And I think what is important is that this is not just a
personal identification that I like this person, it’s actually about the
whole enterprise and what we are trying to do that might be
channelled through and embodied in people’s leadership.
TT
This is the first of two books from that same Conference. How
does this one relate to the second book?
KTJ
The first one is called Leadership Perspectives, so we are trying in
the first book to get a handle on different ways of thinking about
leadership. So we are trying to think about new ways of
constructing leadership, the importance of context, the importance
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Professor Kim Turnbull James
of the kinds of relationships that leaders need to build, leadership in
new kinds of organisations, political leadership in the sense of how
do you lead in the political management space. So all of these
things are perspectives on leadership and there are some really
interesting chapters there thinking about leadership and friendship,
leadership and spirituality, global leadership, strategic leadership –
so different ways, different angles of thinking about this very
complex idea, because I think leadership is an umbrella idea for lots
and lots of different things. We will never pin leadership down as if
we have got the butterfly and are able to actually put it in the
specimen case. So it’s really trying to think about leadership in
interesting ways.
The second book really builds on that and says so if we are thinking
about leadership in new ways, what are the implications for
learning? So the second book is called Leadership Learning –
Leadership Perspectives, Leadership Learning. And the second
book then takes us into the territory of rethinking some of the ways
that we develop our leaders and we develop leadership practices in
organisations.
Now we are not trying to throw babies out with bath water here – so
a lot of the things we do already know about leadership and
leadership development are still important. But we are trying to add
to that lexicon and trying to really think about some of the different
ways in which we might approach leadership development with our
clients and things that our clients might expect of us. So if you are
thinking about leadership in context, which is one of the things I
have been talking a great deal about in this interview, then that
might take you into a different kind of training and development
perspective where you might be looking first of all at their context,
rather than just their personal styles.
TT
Kim Turnbull James, thank you very much indeed.
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Cranfield School of Management
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Cranfield School of Management
© Cranfield University 2009