Professor Jackie Ford - Importance of upskilling in today's climate

As we remain in the midst of the recession, media reports continue to list the challenges facing individuals, teams and organisations. These challenges include redundancies, short-time working, wholesale closures and tumultuous change. These continue to dominate the business press.

My research interests and achievements broadly relate to engagement with and critical exploration of the ways in which management and leadership are conceptualised and practiced in organisational life. My career and experiences to date lead me to argue the need for more critical, relational and reflexive accounts of what is happening in the employment relationship. The specific focus of much of my research is on those individuals who are managers and leaders, who are often deemed to be in privileged positions in organisations. The stories and experiences that they share do not always reflect this perceived advantage and I continue to explore managers' biographical accounts of their lives and encounters to develop new approaches to the study and practice of leaders and leadership in organisations. This led, six years, ago, to the development of a narrative 360% approach on which I am continuing to build through my research and development work.

Given this contemporary climate of uncertainty and financial turmoil, greater pressures abound to secure customers, meet demands for higher quality, and at the same time retain and motivate our remaining workforce. It is even more important that we keep staff involved in the decision-making processes, keep them up-to-date with changes in the business that are likely to affect them, and also remain receptive to feedback from them. These are just a few of the challenges faced by organisational leaders. There are numerous dilemmas and tensions facing organisations in the current climate that call for new, more insightful leadership understandings, not least of which include:

• The need to respond effectively to the current financial climate at the same time as seeking more creative ways of supporting staff into the economic recovery
• The requirement to deliver increasingly demanding performance targets within the workforce at the same time as ensuring that our staff feel valued and supported
• The ability to attract, retain, nurture and develop good staff at a time of considerable disorder
• The importance of ensuring that we are responsive to changing situations at a time when we are struggling to restore stability within the workplace

Many organisational settings are still drawing on models and approaches to leadership and management that are outmoded and much more suited to bygone eras. Leaders are still portrayed in the media and popular press as individuals who surpass all known limits and many organisations seem to continue to adopt such approaches. Leaders are presented as heroic and distant beings almost completely disconnected from everyday human experience and interaction. These so-called heroic leaders (some of whom have led their organisations to failure) have created a legacy of suspicion and distrust in leaders and this is well earned. New approaches to leadership need to depart from this lone hero who single-handedly was deemed to have inspired the organisation and created its success. Contemporary leaders need to tap the creativity and potential of their workforce by active conversations, building relationships and shared understandings, and greater levels of involvement. This means not only knowing the skills and talents of the workforce, but also being able to appreciate that new ways of thinking about leadership recognise the contribution of diverse groups and individuals. Irrespective of individual roles and job tasks, employees can participate in organisational problem-solving, they can work independently without close supervision, and they can create new ideas and solutions to improve their work and the ultimate success of the organisation.

Insights generated through such new research approaches identify an imperative to generate more dialogue (i.e. constructive conversations) and relationship-building in our organisational settings, to ensure we are equipping managers and leaders to cope with the opportunities that will emerge out of the recession and into the future. This will require a commitment to the ongoing education, training and development of our staff to ensure that their potential is achieved and that they are signed up to a secure future. The current economic climate has increased the stakes on honing the skills of leaders, managers and staff to meet the challenges faced by the recession and to survive the ongoing pressures for change. At the same time, many organisations are beginning to shift their focus beyond the recession and towards exploring ways in which to take advantage of the new opportunities that are already beginning to emerge. Those more forward-looking entrepreneurs are already turning their attention to addressing the development potential and talents of the workforce to secure a healthy future. Traditional approaches of bygone eras still focus on the very short term agenda which has led to measures to decimate education and training expenditure when budgets are under pressure at the very time that strong investment in the development of our staff is required.

Furthermore, our research indicates that more creative ways of working need to be encouraged, exemplified by collaborative organisational forms where knowledge and skills are distributed across individuals, divisions, firms, regions and possibly countries, and where leadership can emerge from any part of the collaboration. What remains of concern is that this approach is in scant supply, featuring more as rhetoric than as established practice.

Schools of Management are well placed to work with organisations in the public, private and the voluntary sectors to translate this rhetoric into established practice. Our experiences at the School of Management of developing leaders both through leadership development programmes and other interventions, as well as through the postgraduate Master's programmes that we teach, encourage us to shy away from the prescriptive and closed models and approaches of yesteryear and towards more context-specific and customised activities. Our aims have been to encourage participants to challenge some of the taken-for-granted, dominate concepts of leadership and to introduce them to other ways of seeing, interpreting and understanding themselves and their work organisations. The aspiration is that they can explore alternative (more complex) approaches that use more critical perspectives in a practice-oriented way. Our rationale is that through offering a range of possible interpretations, notably more reflexive, conversational understandings, we aim to avoid the explicit fixing of identities and positions found in much mainstream leadership thinking. This all chimes with a better understanding of the changing nature of leadership and the new challenges facing leaders in the 21st century.

The research approach that underpins this work is one which argues that context, individual biographies and perceptions of the managerial self cannot be ignored as leadership, indeed work in general, involves interpersonal relationships (Ford et al, 2008). Much current research into leadership is located in a very narrow perspective and is based on large, quantitative surveys, which are frequently uncritical and can, at best, report statistical information. Although statistics can be useful, they tell us little about people's subjective experiences or about their beliefs and ideas. As leadership's focus is very much upon subjectively located interactions, there is a need for more studies that tell us something about the subjective and the personal, about ideas and beliefs, about how people talk and dream about leadership, and the stories and narratives they construct in their talking and dreaming and life experiences. We bring our multi-faceted selves, our psyches, our histories, our idiosyncrasies, our ways of talking and thinking and acting, to these workplace relationships. If we present all those aspects of the self uncritically to the workplace, and are then encouraged to behave as if we are transcendental, homogeneous beings whose impact on others is justified by our positions as leaders or managers, then we may do untold harm to others. Indeed, stories of organisations are littered with the harm done to the majority by the minority who occupy powerful positions. So, being reflective on the part of managers is important if they are to know how they interact with others and with themselves, why they interact with others in the ways they do, and the impact this has on self and others.

More relational and local approaches through building relationships and recognising more distributive forms of leadership within and across work groups present the opportunity of moving away from universal understandings to examine the unique elements which unfold in personal exchanges. This enables people to surpass the idea that the leader is a leader and a follower a follower, and to explore how these prescribed roles are enacted jointly, as well as recognising the active participation of many others in our working lives. The intention is to build on joint conversations between leaders and their staff, peers, boss and others in the employment relationship as well as taking account of the particular institutional contexts in which the relationships take place and the multiple and shifting narratives of the self that are produced in these relationships.

In conclusion, new and more critical understandings of leadership encourage much more attention to be given to the performing of leadership and to a recognition that leadership is not an individualistic and heroic quest, but a shared performance delivered within the social and organisational context; a performance that is also connected to personal history and character of the individual and others in the working context. Organisations need to engage with the latest thinking in researching leaders and leadership to become more creative and experimental by encouraging individuals, groups and teams to interconnect in new ways and to draw upon new paradigms and behaviours to discover more meaningful and constructive ways of relating and working together.