Narendra Laljani - Making Strategic Leaders

Narendra Laljani

Narendra Laljani 2009

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First published 2009 by

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ISBN-13: 978-0-230-57749-7 hardback

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by
CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

For
Mangho and Shanta Laljani
and with an eye to the future,
for Milan

Figures

Tables

A large number of people gave generously with their time and ideas while I was developing the thinking that underpins this work. I would particularly like to express my gratitude to Prof. Cliff Bowman, Dr. Catherine Bailey, and Dr. Veronique Ambrosini all at Cranfield University for their guidance and support.

I am also thankful to Prof. Joe Nellis, Prof. Mark Jenkins, and Prof. Kim James at Cranfield, Prof. Veronica Hope-Hailey at City University, Dr. Eddie Blass at the University of Hertfordshire, and Prof. Henry Mintzberg at McGill University, for their encouragement and always insightful comments.

At Ashridge, I am indebted to Bob Stilliard, Fiona Dent, Kai Peters, James Moncrieff, Steve Watson, Albert Zandvoort, Phil Hodgson, Stefan Wills, Elaine Stedman, Gabriele Silver, Peter Silver, and Sarah Graves for their support and assistance.

I would also like to acknowledge the contribution of the various interviewees at different stages of the research who offered their candid reflections on their roles, the leadership challenges they faced, and their formative development experiences. For obvious reasons, their identities have been anonymized.

This study also builds on the work of numerous distinguished scholars. Every effort has been made to cite them appropriately and secure copyright permission where required. If any inadvertent omissions have occurred I will be happy to remedy these at the earliest opportunity.

On a more personal note, this book evolved over several years. The start of the research that informs it coincided with the arrival of my son, Milan, and frequently competed with his needs and interests. This balancing act which I hope Milan will agree some day that I got mostly right would not have been possible without the support of my wife, Karin. Thank you.

Following 15 years in managerial roles in industry, I took to an academic and consulting career in 1995. In this incarnation, my early work was anchored in the teaching of strategy, and strategic analysis in particular. Both the content and style of my teaching were greatly influenced by my own educational experience as an MBA student in the late 1970s. I had been taught to believe that managers planned, organized, directed, and controlled: a seemingly elegant and linear process. Curiously, leadership did not get much attention in that curriculum.

At Ashridge, my audiences were mainly made up of executives on short management development programmes. Although they had a bias for action and practice, they appeared to find analytical frameworks seductive. I often wondered if I was colluding with their needs for simplicity in a complex world. At the back of my mind was the Bill Gates question, posed to me by an MBA student: are you suggesting that Bill Gates did a strategic analysis of the software industry when he was building Microsoft?

For some time, then, I nursed a sense of unease about my professional practice. Perhaps there was more to strategy than analysis, more to leader effectiveness than a vision and self-awareness, and more to development than a high-impact classroom experience. I perceived a gap between the reality of the world of the strategic leader and common leadership development interventions, and as I inquired further I realized that I was not alone. This gap became the primary motivation for this research.

This study unites the domains of strategy and leadership, and offers an integrated perspective on the dimensions, development, and deployment of strategic leader capability. The research was carried out in three phases. In the first, a conceptual framework was developed based on four key dimensions of capability: judgement, the strategic conversation, contextual mastery, and behavioural complexity. In the second phase, empirical findings from in-depth qualitative interviews with individuals in strategic leadership roles corroborated and enriched the framework; highlighted the importance of informal learning; and emphasized the role of mentors and stretch assignments as formative development processes. In addition, critical reflection, through either informal or formal processes, was found to play an important sense-making and developmental role. In the third phase, action research involving two formal leader development interventions was undertaken with the objective of developing strategic leader capability while deliberately managing the influential development processes identified.

The results indicated that while strategic leader capability can be learned, and that key development processes can be simulated with varying degrees of success, positive performance outcomes also require high self-efficacy. Based on these findings, this study presents a model which links together strategic leadership capability, major development processes, self-efficacy, context, and performance outcomes. These insights into strategic leader performance and development have significant practical implications for individuals, organizations, and the leader development industry. I believe the research also raises numerous interesting questions that merit further inquiry.

This book documents a journey of discovery based on three thematically linked research projects. While the details of these are reported in the following chapters, the background on the issue or problem that motivated this study, an overview of the research questions, and the accompanying research methodology are discussed here.