Good leadership is more than a sum of its parts
Defining what makes a great leader as opposed to a good leader was one of the questions at last month’s talent management conference in London, organised by The Economist.
Throughout the conference, entitled ’Raising great leaders’, the audience of HR directors, talent managers and business leaders heard examples of strategic talent management from a range of speakers. Many of their organisations had undergone a change in the way leadership talent and training was perceived.
Janey Smith, director of group organisational effectiveness at the Royal Bank of Scotland, said that there was new training for its leaders in value creation and risk management and that the company had reviewed more than 600 leadership appointments over the past 18 months. “Creativity and flexible thinking are now the most important factors for leaders,” Smith said.
Chris Johnson, partner, UK human capital leader at global HR consultancy Mercer, agreed. “Leaders need to embrace complexity better and deal with the unexpected,” he said. He also said that authenticity rather than exuberance was what was required from a great leader.
Stephen Kelly, chief people officer for Logica, emphasised that trust and a “back to basics approach from leaders” was needed, post-recession. Logica, he said, was looking in from the outside. “We’re asking: what do our clients want from us? And then: what do our employees want from us?”
Katherine Thomas, group talent director at BT, agreed with this approach. “At BT we want leaders who can work with external partners. For example, Vodafone is our client, our customer but also our competitor,” she said.
Most of the speakers agreed that there was no such thing as a ’superman leader’, bringing the many aspects of great leadership together into one person. RBS’s Smith told the conference: “It’s not about a single leader. It’s about bringing a number of leaders to work together to combine the different talents.”
The final presentation from chief operating officer and co-founder of innocent drinks, Jon Wright, said that great leadership involved drawing on many skills and experiences, as he and his fellow two co-founders had when combined at the helm. “Getting the right people in the business was paramount,” he said. The best thing, he said, was “bringing far more capable people than yourself into the business”.
