Leadership is about questions

A colleague who attended the recent Frankfurt Book Fair told me about a conversation she had about leadership books that made me smile and prompted me to start this post. It was one of those “not another book on leadership!” comments, which is in fact, the title of the introduction of my book and to which my answer is “ Well, yes, another one!” And I suspect it won’t be the last one either. But I want to believe that The Leader with 7 Faces stands out as different, written mainly as a long conversation with yourself, with me, perhaps with others. It is also based upon a novel idea: let’s explore what the questions are before we start giving answers. A second unusual idea: I used plain English as much as I could! This is a long explanation to tell you that you will not find comprehensive bibliographies and many references to theories of leadership in this book. When I do some of the above, it will be minimal and relevant to the conversation.

My subjective world
When I decided to write The Leader with 7 Faces, I had many choices in front of me. Let me explain why I chose this one. I am a psychiatrist through background and professional experience. I practiced Medicine for about fifteen years and then I joined senior management ranks in the pharmaceutical industry on both sides of the Atlantic. I spent another fifteen years or so working for three different companies until I founded The Chalfont Project Ltd, an organisational consulting firm that I lead. Like any other life - yours perhaps - it has been a rollercoaster ride. But I feel privileged.

It would not make sense to summarise my ‘learning’ in bullet-points like a report sent to your manager. But some things - semi-connected themes - have struck me time and time again along the way:

1) Human behaviour is incredibly complex. What a statement! Psychology and Psychiatry are trying hard to find clues for every ‘why’. But each time they think they have achieved something, they come up with a label that frames the issue (abnormal behaviour, for example) and gives some sense of comfort. Practitioners then know what to do or not to do. This is good news for their comfort and often good news as well for the individual who needs help. But it is far from providing a deep insight and understanding of the individual. Management (sciences, studies and education) is no different, but it is usually more superficial. We fabricate an enormous amount of things (frameworks, classifications, competence sets, checklists…) that help us navigate. But again, this is far from giving us a deep understanding of what is really going on inside the organisation! Leadership as a concept is the same. We can put all the studies together, all the theories and classifications and all the lists of ‘qualities’ and who knows, we might have some sort of language. Less good news: we may still not get to the bottom of what leadership is.

2) Early in my business life - which I found fascinating at first and a world apart from medical practice - I began to wonder why some organisations seemed to succeed, attract people and mobilise internal energy and why others - very often similar in size and culture - looked pretty pathetic and hopeless. In hindsight, the question now seems less grandiose or original, but at the time it kept coming to my mind. It didn’t take me long to realize that the quality of characters in the organisational zoo didn’t seem to correlate with anything. I found uninspiring leaders running entire departments extremely well and inspirational leaders in charge of a mess, which made one wonder if it had been created by them. The complexity and sophistication of processes and systems didn’t ensure success either. Compared with the world I was coming from - clinical and academia - the ‘industry’ was a Rolls Royce in information management, for example. But exciting as this was, it didn’t ensure success either.

3) Leadership was progressively climbing the ladder of my list of interests as a ‘place to find the clue’. Throughout my working history, I have made some evolving observations:

a) Over all these years, I have found very few good leaders. I have found many people in top positions for whom the single, recurrent, nagging question I have had is: “How on earth did they get there?” The worst, most dangerous leaders I have found are the ones who appeared honest, ethical, people-oriented, compassionate, value-driven and even overtly religious, and who turned out behaving like little bastards. Their danger lies in their unexpected behaviour. Some of these ‘leaders’ used what I will describe later on in this book as the ‘It’s-the-system-not-me’ argument to justify their - in some cases plainly inhumane – actions.

b) I am now convinced that leadership is a practice that benefits from repetitive action and may even inversely correlate with how much we talk about it or how we use the label!

c) I am also convinced that all of us have the potential to be a leader, possibly in different degrees, and that we can ‘go for it’, armed with some convictions and the desire to achieve things.

Over the last seven odd years, I have led leadership executive development programmes with my clients and have constantly learned from them. This book represents a ‘stop-and-capture-it’ and will no doubt evolve with further editions. But, as I said, I had choices. I could use a significant amount of bibliography and references for the great and good of academia and consulting and give my book a pseudo-scientific-experienced-academic-management-consulting validation. I could quote and re-quote the gurus. I could contrast frameworks and theories. I could ‘critically analyse’ positions and premises. I could propose trends and mega-trends. I could do any or all of the above or I could simply bypass all of this and get straight into sharing some thoughts and experiences, bringing all insights together and providing you with lots of questions for which - very often - I haven’t found answers myself. And in the process invite you to come along to find the answers.

So this book is mainly ‘a book of questions’. My years of leadership experience, my three professional qualifications in both science and business, my three careers and my (greying) hair loss have taught me that there is one single, overriding, most important management question. Everything else is totally secondary. That question is: “What’s the question?”

The ability to ask questions is a sign of leadership maturity. The ability to provide answers is not. If each time we were about to jump into action - analyse a 1,000-page market research report, draw a product development plan, create a recruitment and retaining HR strategy, produce the PowerPoint package for the retreat or sign that big capital expenditure - we stopped and thought and asked the question: “What’s the question I am trying to answer?”…if we could do that, we would jump a few years in our collective leadership evolution… If I were to propose one single management education recipe, this would be the one.