Interview: Professor Andrew Kakabadse
Leading for Success: The Seven Sides to Great Leaders
SM
I’m Steve Macaulay and I am interviewing Professor Andrew
Kakabadse about his book that he co-authored, Leading for
Success: The Seven Sides to Great Leaders. Now Andrew, how
did you arrive at the seven sides to great leaders?
AK
It was extensive research and consulting experience. The research
now stands at 14,000 organisations and top teams, across 21
countries, which include Russia, China, South Africa, US, UK,
Germany, Scandinavia and the States. The research then became
consulting practice, in a sense we are trying to see whether the
principles identified in research would work in application. And as a
result of that the same patterns of successful behaviour emerged
with some difference which is the context or the culture of the
company.
But repeatedly managers were fundamentally trying to do seven
different things to take an aspiration into a successful outcome.
How long did it take? Over a decade to get to those seven sides.
SM
Now, from reading the book you seem to be suggesting that these
are transferable skills, which if applied in the right context, and in the
right quantities, can work in different settings. Have I understood
that correctly?
AK
That is correct, very much transferrable skills – where the downfall
could come is misreading the context. So you will find in those
seven sides the contextual understanding, what is really unique and
different about you as a company, what your colleagues on the top
teams really think, have you got alignment between you and others?
Which are all elements of different ways of working from one
organisation to the next. Those are very critical questions.
So are the skills transferable? Yes. Do most people’s contextual
understanding, is that good enough to help transfer the skills? That
is where the question mark really is.
SM
Now that, I guess, is a good deal of the element of one of these
sides being great, where you can combine these sides in the right
quantities and the right aspects and read the situation correctly to
apply those. Is that true?
AK
Very true, very true. With one in terms of top team and CEO, the
seven sides really have far less to do with board to middle
management – these are strategic levers. Alignment is the critical
question. Are the top team aligned with the CEO? Are they
Professor Andrew Kakabadse
aligned with each other? And in fact, what does alignment mean?
And the issue of alignment probably is the most thorny question of
the lot.
SM
Now one of the key issues about alignment is looking ahead
successfully and crafting a future. Now that is one of the sides
that you talked about. Can you say a bit more about that? I am
always conscious how short term managers can be, and yet here
you are saying if you don’t craft the future, you are going to fall
down.
AK
How short term managers in my experience are forced to be. With
most of the managers we have talked to, their understanding of the
long term scenarios is actually quite good. What they are then
forced to do is meet quarterly reporting.
Quarterly reporting as a public statement is an American
experience. Quarterly reporting within the company is an Anglo
American experience, including Australia. You don’t actually have
to publicly report anything until the end of the year as a British
company. But the reality is that so many managers are being
driven by three month deadlines. Now how you can both then
integrate a longer term future with meeting those deadlines on
costs, profitability, incomes, is a very challenging question. And
that in many ways, combining those two forces which we found
good managers very able to do, leads to an issue of alignment
because the way you would like to combine meeting short term
targets with where this organisation should be may not be my view.
So, on the alignment issue, especially when you are dealing with
cost revenue versus visioning and positioning in the future, we
found that something like 33 to 34% of all top teams in the world
were almost permanently split on vision. So people go to meetings,
come to an agreement, leave the meeting and then go and
undermine each other, because they really don’t agree.
SM
So servicing sentiments, which is another of these sides, is really
important. Actually getting out on the table what people really think.
I am conscious that the stereotypical leader is the autocratic one,
the kind of Alan Sugars of this world are seen as that, as the kind of
leader that you need to be aiming to be really. Now you are saying
very positively that you have got to surface sentiments, you have
not got to be this autocrat that won’t truck anybody disagreeing?
AK
Absolutely. We have found that the autocratic leader manager
simply does not work on any sustainable basis. They do work on a
short term basis and I suspect that they do work when they are
intellectually highly capable and they are also the owner manager of
their business. Of course, it doesn’t help if you are owner manager
of your business and intellectually not so capable. So there are
certain individuals who have shown themselves to be autocratically
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highly able. What does not hit the headlines so much is those
range of managers who don’t necessarily cause a catastrophe, but
over a period of time continuously erode the platform and foundation
of the organisation by not being able to either listen, comprehend,
take on board a different view, or surface the negativities that exist
which continuously erode the enterprise. Those are the people that
are problematic; those are the people that never hit the headlines
because they are not doing anything dramatically bad or
dramatically good. All you can say is that over the last four years
they have had a nasty effect on the organisation.
So the surfacing of sentiments – where does our team really stand
and think? What are we trying to do and are we all on board? Do
we have meetings and then go into our own departments and make
sure that our people do the exact opposite of what was agreed at
the meeting? Funnily enough the surfacing of sentiments, I have
come to conclude, is even more important than crafting the future
because you and I can intend to do something, but unless we have
really sat down and discussed it as mature colleagues who may
have different points of view, who may find it difficult to talk, we will
end up fighting each other and damaging the place. So the
surfacing of sentiments, although it is some way down in the list of
transactional skills, probably is this most critical bridge to overcome.
SM
Once you have got these views out on the table, inevitably you are
going to find a whole set of differing views of conflicting sentiments
and so on. One of the sides is about finding ways through; I bet that
is easier said than done, isn’t it?
AK
Very much so because when you look at the strategic alternatives
that exist, discussing those alternatives does not mean that we find
a comfortable compromise. You are not. You are going to find a
way forward that may be distinctly uncomfortable for most and one
of the most difficult compromises to deal with is when the
businesses – or the heads of the businesses – have to have the
mindset of corporate centre directors, only looking at what is best for
the group, but not their business. So that could mean that your
loyalties are to the centre and not to your own team colleagues.
And in that sense you may be making strategic decisions that
undermine the operation of your own business, with which you are
charged, but actually add to the corporate centre. Now that is a
very difficult mindset switch and probably something like 60-70% of
corporations have not managed to do that with their business
heads.
So the compromise is how you make do with something for the
greater good, when in fact what you are making do with is of no
good to you whatsoever.
SM
A key element in all of this is another side, which is engaging –
actually getting people motivated, hooked into the task in the right
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direction. How do you go about that? Again, lots of people talk
about it, not so easy to put into practice.
AK
Equally not so easy to put into practice. The engagement literature
by and large is emotional in the sense that if I can get you
motivated, on board, with me, you like me – whatever it is, it’s an
emotional experience. We will have engagement. So if we sit
together, talk, there is no table between us, there are no protocols
between us, I come round and visit you, I remember your first name,
your wife’s names, your kids’ names – all these techniques of
engagement. We will have a much better understanding between
us.
I have found the exact opposite. Engagement takes place when we
have a strategic understanding and then the emotional part can kick
in. So there are two sides to this. So if we were to talk of our own
School, what is the essence of our own School? Is it a School of
Management, is it an international brand where we can undertake a
number of activities under this brand, but we have got to preserve
the brand? If you are a pharmaceutical company what are you
now, in comparison to what you were before? You may have been
the best R&D company in the world, but is it now brand strength that
is the most important bit? And if that is the case, could we get rid of
half the corporation and just simply buy and sell other peoples’
products under our brand?
Now how can we personally become engaged, if I feel that the
research and development part of a corporation is the fundamental
part, and you feel it is a brand strength for buying and selling
products no matter who manufactures them? So until we can have
an agreement on the prime strategic platform on which this
organisation sits, we cannot have emotional engagement. And that
is why engagement is difficult. How can you get me to change my
mind? You can do it by statistics, you can do it by showing what all
the market trends are, you can do it by showing me what has been
happening in the market in its maturity, you can do it by sacking me.
But it’s challenging.
SM
So if you get these things right, there is still an element, if you like,
of impetus of energy, of driving for success which is the next
seventh side. How do you actually get there then, to this drive, this
energy, this pushing to be successful?
AK
I think one thing we found that many successful managers must
have is – apart from the energy and the resilience, which can all be
developed – they also need a mindset which has two aspects to it.
The first is to continually understand the bigger picture, because
that is dynamic and it changes. But the other is a continuous
attention to detail.
So it’s both being strategic and very operational and transactional.
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It’s understanding the bigger circumstances and then drilling down
to a level of detail, so that you are so much in touch with what is
happening in the organisation you can continuously make changes
and make adjustments almost on an everyday basis. And
unfortunately what we have found is that quite naturally only about
15-16% of our executive population has both skills together.
So it’s a matter of developing people to have that understanding in
detail with what is happening, without losing sight of the bigger
picture, or being so engrossed by the bigger picture you get bored
with the details. And that is what most people do, we find. Very
bright guys get fed up after a while doing the same sort of thing.
People who drive down most of the time find change very difficult
because they can’t see the bigger picture and object to it when it is
told them.
So it is balancing those two. And I think when those two are
balanced, then the personal development bit about your energy,
your resilience, your people skills, makes better sense and you will
be more open to that being developed.
SM
So the last one is this whole issue of developing leaders, not, if you
like, just expecting people to emerge. I mean have you any
thoughts on how successfully to do that? There are a whole lot of
structures in most organisations about succession planning, talent
management, sending people to business schools and so on, but
are there some things that work better than others?
AK
All of those. We are quite sophisticated now in the development of
people. I think the one principle that stands out ultimately is don’t
look to what anybody else is doing, make sure what is unique and
different about you and what you will make more unique and
different so that you have competitive advantage. And once you do
have that contextual understanding – I think there are so many
different techniques – then the question is about being advised or
going round the various providers and seeing what they can do for
you. It’s unfortunate that we still find so many organisations trying
to benchmark themselves against others and saying ‘What is best
practice?’ Let’s go and identify best practice and do not drill down
into their organisation to find out what are the blockages in their own
enterprise that are preventing the application of the best practice.
And in that sense, that last part of which is contextualism, is also
riddled with power and politics because you are going to bring up a
dissenting voice, an unwelcome opinion, a trend that has been there
which has been neglected and nobody really wants to touch
because it is sensitive. That is what you have to deal with and that
bit is unfortunately for about 60% of the corporations that I deal with;
that is the Achilles heel. I have even been asked to go into
companies to introduce training and development exercises almost
to gloss over that Achilles heel on the basis that we are now good
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managers, we don’t talk about politics.
So we found some of the better developmental practices being
misused and until that contextualism bit has been addressed, we
find the rest is gloss.
SM
Andrew, you have given us some very useful insights into what
constitutes great leadership, so thank you very much.
AK
Thank you.
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