Interview: Professor Kim Turnbull James
Leadership Learning: Knowledge into Action
TT
Hello, my name is Toby Thompson and I am here with Kim Turnbull
James, Professor of Executive Learning here at Cranfield. Kim has
edited a book called Leadership Learning: Knowledge into Action.
Kim, tell us about the book.
KTJ
OK! This is the second of two books. We have previously talked
about the first book Leadership Perspectives: Knowledge Into
Action, which looked at a number of new ways of thinking about and
conceiving leadership. The second book is much more focused on
leadership development – how do we create the right kind of
learning opportunities for leaders? – and there is a very clear link
between the theory that we have discussed in book 1 and the
practices which we are describing and elaborating on in book 2.
If you think about leadership in one particular way, that will shape
the way that you think about leadership development. What we are
saying in this book is that as we move into the 21st century, well into
the 21st century, we need new ways of both thinking about
leadership and creating leadership development opportunities.
Perhaps I can give you some examples.
TT
That would be good. The first book was more theoretically
oriented, this is more practically oriented. How do you put that into
practice?
KTJ
I think there is a very, very clear link between theorising and
practice. If, for example, one thinks of leadership as being a set of
personal attributes: competencies, behaviours, skills, attitudes and
that those are generic and are characteristics that can be
transplanted by the individual into any organisation in which they
work, that will give you a set of ideas about how to go away and
develop leaders. You work on programmes that develop that
specific set of attributes, and many organisations, having taken a
very personalised view of leadership, have indeed developed
competencies and so on against which they want to develop
leaders.
In the first book though we began to identify that there were lots of
other ways of constructing the idea of leadership and so we can see
that very often leadership is not about those practices in the
organisation in which many people are engaged which create a
sense of direction, motivation and collaboration in the organisation.
People need in their leadership roles to collaborate with each other,
to cooperate. Very often in new organisations we expect
leadership to be distributed to people in key positions on the front
Professor Kim Turnbull James
line, in geographically dispersed organisations and so leadership is
very much about the organisation, not just the individual
characteristics.
TT
So we should stop thinking about the heroic leader, the great leader,
and think more about the situation in which the leadership is taking
place?
KTJ
Indeed. So it’s not to say that personal attributes are thrown out
like the proverbial baby with the bath water and do you want to work
for somebody who is interpersonally skilled? Probably. But if we
think in a much more sophisticated way about leadership we are
going to connect it to the kind of organisation challenges that people
are working with. We are going to connect it to the teams that they
are working with. We are going to think about the ways in which the
organisation wants to create a particular kind of culture which will be
suited for the tasks of the organisation – and those are very
contextual. And we are going to think about leadership less as this
heroic notion, but about the kinds of ways that people can work
across boundaries, across different parts of the organisation – really
pull people into their ideas and their projects, rather than simply
managing their own team in a hierarchical kind of way. Therefore
we are going to be thinking about some broader skills and different
ways of learning. So, if leadership is about collaborative practices
in some organisations, then essentially one is going to be looking for
leadership learning opportunities, which establish how
collaborations can be made, how one negotiates across
organisations, how one works in different kinds of contexts and
cultures and so on, which may be rather different from simply
looking at personal competencies.
TT
So how is that not organisational development? It sounds very,
very broad. Where does it come down to the individual or
leadership?
KTJ
I think that is a very pertinent question and the link between
developing leadership in an organisation and organisation
development must be quite close. One may be looking at helping
leaders work together around specific challenges or specific projects
or specific tasks and taking that learning out into the organisation as
a way of developing leadership in that organisation, rather than
simply thinking about how this person can become a better
communicator. That is an individual characteristic which will benefit
the organisation, but maybe we are thinking about other ways of
developing leadership.
So, the individual approach – we have termed that more the deficit
approach. A lot of the traditional ways of thinking about leadership
learning, trying to put people through some kind of assessment
centre, identifying those characteristics or bits that they have
Knowledge Interchange Podcast
Page 2
Professor Kim Turnbull James
missing or bits that need shaping or altering or modifying in some
way – so they are lacking in something in some way. And then the
leadership development activity somehow fills in those gaps and
develops those missing pieces.
TT
Quite a remedial approach.
KTJ
So in one sense you could argue it’s remedial even though you are
taking your most high potential people through that process in
preparation for bigger leadership roles.
I think the second approach that we are proposing which is less
about a deficit model of leadership learning but more about and
embedded in the organisational context, is where much leadership
development needs to move to. And so this book is really helping
us address that and the chapters really look at various different
ways in which that might occur. So what I have just said might
sound rather mysterious. And what does this collaborative
approach, or what do these alternative approaches look like?
Really what the book is about is unpacking that in very practical
ways so that you can look to see how particular approaches, for
example to coaching, might focus much more on the dynamics of
the organisation and how those impact on people taking up
leadership roles, rather than this deficit approach. So some
coaching models still work with that deficit approach: what is wrong
with you and how can the coach help you fix it? Other approaches
to coaching such as those that are described in this book are much
more engaged with helping the individual understand themselves
and how they take up their role in the organisation as a whole. As
you go through this book you will see that there are a lot of chapters
that take that slightly broader approach to leadership development.
TT
You seem to be saying then that people are coming to – and we are
sitting here in a business school – coming to business schools with
the wrong question, the wrong answer, the wrong need? Is that
true?
KTJ
Well people come to business schools hoping that we do have
some answers and I think we do have some answers that can help
them. And it does help if they ask questions that enable us to find
the right solutions for them. That is always part of the negotiation
process. I would like our clients to be coming to us saying ‘these
are the problems that we have got, which we think leadership is the
answer to’. So if we then look at the organisational challenges and
the organisational problems, then we find out what kind of
leadership they are looking for and what the best approach to
developing leadership for them might be. I think that is a better
approach for an organisation than coming saying ‘what do you do
on leadership which is generic and that we can buy off the shelf’.
Knowledge Interchange Podcast
Page 3
Professor Kim Turnbull James
I think when it comes to programmes which are offered on an open
basis, you might say ‘Oh, well surely that is what we are doing?’, but
not if you look at what we are saying in this book. We are saying
that when you come to develop your capability as a leader within the
organisation, even if you are on an open programme, that must take
into account the context in which you are coming from, what you are
returning to. Your individual learning development journey is not
just about how you would like to be as an idealised leader, but how
you are going to take up the roles that you have in the organisation
and where you see yourself going in that organisation.
TT
But isn’t there no end to the context in which you would need to
involve that development process? Could you leave out of it an
important bit of the context which you didn’t know to investigate?
How do you know what to bring?
KTJ
Well I think you are working with people who do know something
about their own jobs and their own challenges. You are working
with the client organisation which has a broader perspective than
the individual and we are very much encouraging those kind of
iterative journeys. And of course we are encouraging people to
themselves look more broadly when they start to think about their
jobs through all the different things that you do in a business school.
So if you are on an MBA programme here, for example, you will be
expected to understand many broad aspects of organisational life
and the business environment and relate that to the kind of
leadership roles that you have, or will take up, as a result of coming
on the programme. But I think what we – and there is a chapter
here in this book on the MBA at Cranfield – I think what we are very
concerned to do as well is not just leave learning to be a leader at
that conceptual level of understanding the various different functions
and influences on business, but give people a real opportunity to
understand what insights they might need about themselves that will
enable them to operate most effectively in the context they find
themselves in and to begin to understand where they might have
preconceived notions about leadership that are unhelpful in the
current climate.
So I think we offer a range of different leadership solutions and the
leadership development solution. And that leadership development
solution depends on the learner’s needs, where they are in their
career, the organisation, the client and how that needs to be
tailored. So I think all leadership development has that contextual
relationship.
TT
So it is fair to say that the link you have seen between theory and
practice is in this context?
KTJ
Well I think that the interesting thing about leadership is that you can
talk about different kinds of leadership, describe different kinds of
Knowledge Interchange Podcast
Page 4
Professor Kim Turnbull James
leadership and in that sense that can be illuminating to people. So
if they read about new ideas about leadership or in the previous
book we had some really interesting chapters about leadership and
friendship – all sorts of things – those can be very important to
people’s development of themselves as a leader.
But if you come on a programme, you want something which offers
you a much, much more tailored experience, so I think that is really
what we are trying to focus on here. And if it is a company
programme, that would be somewhat different from an MBA
programme, it would be somewhat different from the coaching
experience. But what I think we are saying in this book is don’t just
look at leadership as if there is a generic set of leadership
competencies that you have to acquire. You have to work at
leadership throughout your career because it is related to the job,
the context, the challenges that you are actually facing, the people
you are working with, the culture you are working in.
TT
So if you want to know what questions to ask and have a broader
view of that context, read the book.
KTJ
Well, that would be helpful.
TT
Kim, thank you very much.
Knowledge Interchange Podcast
Page 5