Vuluable leadership is based on evidence
RESEARCH collaboration between Professor Andrew Kakabadse and Heidrick & Struggles, an executive search and leadership consulting company reveals how senior executives around the world can improve value in an era of unprecedented volatility.
In the book, The Success Formula: How Smart Leaders Deliver Outstanding Value (Bloomsbury Publishing), Kakabadse shows that the most successful organisations are not those led by charismatic and visionary leaders, but by leaders who create a culture of delivering outstanding value.
Kakabadse is professor of Governance and Leadership at Henley Business School in the UK and author of more than 45 business and leadership books.
Together with Heidrick & Struggles, he interviewed more than 100 CEOs, board directors, chief executives and senior executives in the public and private sectors in 14 countries.
“In today’s volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world, a business leader needs to build a culture that is driven to create value and to transform personal vision into the organisation's purpose,” said Steve Mullinjer, regional leader Asia Pacific, Heidrick & Struggles and coleader of The Success Formula research project.
“Our research clearly shows the importance of culture and purpose in an organisation that successfully delivers the leader’s strategy.”
Kakabadse shows that smart leaders who sustain success over a long period drive strategy in an evidencerather than a strategy-led manner.
“Even in the age of big data, many important decisions are still based on prejudices, preconceptions, entrenched beliefs, outdated worldviews, and ego,” Kakabadse said. “In contrast, smart leaders create an evidence-led culture in the organisation that generates sustainable value.”
According to The Success Formula, three qualities are essential for value-delivery leaders:
Diversity of thinking – Increasing the diversity of a leadership team in terms of gender, ethnicity and other demographic factors undoubtedly leads to more creative and broadminded thinking. High-performing organisations recognise that these benefits will not stick unless the organisation creates a process around diversity of thinking to instil a culture that welcomes wide-ranging experiences, viewpoints and interests.
Leadership through alignment and engagement – The effective implementation of a strategy requires top-down engagement and alignment, as well as bottom-up feedback within the organisation to test and modify the strategy.
During this process, leaders need to facilitate engagement so that people are willing to voluntarily invest their efforts to position the organisation to achieve its strategic objectives.
Evidence-led action – Effective leaders critically examine evidence and interrogate the issues through quality data. They recognise the importance of contextual (soft) evidence as well as intellectual (hard) evidence, and seek to test any strategy before it goes live. They debate the evidence with their teams to challenge their thinking.
Jon Foster-Pedley, dean of Henley Business School Africa, in Johannesburg, points out that good decisions by leaders come from experience, and experience comes from bad decisions.
“You may not want to hear this, but pilots, like most skilled professionals, learn to make good decisions from having made many mistakes. And that’s a good thing for us because they make the big ones repeatedly in safe simulated environments until their range of experience is vast.
“And in real life, their airmanship, alertness and discipline makes them brilliant at catching mistakes early, not late, and that’s what you want because late mistakes are big mistakes,” he said.
“Some things are hard to learn – and learnt the hard way. But clever and inventive learning design offers brilliant alternatives. We certainly wouldn’t want our pilots to be learning the hard way.”