Musings on place leadership

We spent some time this week, while I was studying at MMU’s Institute of Place Management, about place leadership.

The more we talked, the more I realised that there were questions in my head about the ethical boundaries place managers have to negotiate as they try to effect the change the stakeholders and partners who want to shape their place desire.

Now, all of this comes with a huge caveat. These are my reflections, not anyone else’s teachings, and mainly, they’re only evidence for my state of mind and my practice. This week was the first time I’ve actually thought in this way about the difference between being a place manager who enables a system of place leadership, and being a place leader. Part of this reflection was based on musing about Gary Verity and whether he was a place manager or a place leader in his role at Visit Yorkshire; I have an unresolved suspicion that a confusion about his role was at the heart of the ethical confusion around his management style, expenses and pay package.

This emphatically doesn’t mean place managers aren’t leaders. They’re leaders in a different sphere, enablers and facilitators who manage the delivery mechanisms and the organizational infrastructure that enables great place leadership. I’m going to throw down a challenge here; you can’t be an effective place manager unless you are complemented by an effective place leadership team. So if you don’t have an effective leadership system you are bound to fail.

I know sometimes I can appear to my peers as something of a pedant. I constantly insist on good governance and good leadership being referred to as practices not attributes or outcomes. If the practice is right, then the possibility of good outcomes is enhanced (but not guaranteed). I’m aware I appear as ultra old fashioned; I think doing the right thing, demonstrating good governance and good leadership is a good thing in itself.

I think that if you blur the lines between being place manager and place leader, as Gary Verity did, you’re not just making a mistake, you’re ethically compromising yourself. Good managers should always ensure that its the leaders they enable who are seen as the figureheads of the project, not themselves. The responsibility of a manager is to ensure the place is shaped by the people who live there and the stakeholders who have an interest in the place; or as I’ve told every new council officer I’ve ever encountered, officers advise, councillors decide.

I made the joke a few times this week about some of my approach to leadership and to the practice of leadership being heretical. Not heretical in the performative, nailing my theses to a church door kind of way, but heretical in the sense that my scepticism, my experiences and my belief system lead me to test ideas, and to be willing to give voice to doubts, to be a critical friend.

There is an industry of leadership development and coaching which has a vested interest in maintaining the idea that leadership is a cadre activity that is separate to mainstream work or community activity. The first task of any organization that has a cadre system is to select recruits for the cadre. Incidentally, that’s not an insight I developed working in industry — when you’ve grown up on the left in British politics, the selection rituals of left groups, especially vanguardist groups, is entirely analogous to the way in which the traditional branches of the armed forces or many business organizations select the staff taking the first step towards future leadership, or chosen to bypass the lower ranks and enter straight into junior leadership.

Sure enough, the issue of the Myers Briggs test came up this week. There isn’t a scientific base to Myers Briggs, (since it’s based on Jung’s ideas, which are philosophical theories, not evidence tested by experiment) but it is an artefact of a belief system that prizes innate leadership qualities as being personality traits performed externally.

It’s an easy way to start a heated debate if you put it out in public that you think, as I do, that there’s no scientific reason for using Myers Briggs as opposed to a pack of tarot cards or a ouija board. However, I don’t think that’s controversial; you don’t have to read much of the literature praising MB or describing studies of its coherence to get a pungent whiff of confirmation bias in service of a belief system that dare not speak its name

The first time I took a Myers Briggs test was in 2004, at a local government leadership academy. I sat in the room the next day as the facilitators gave us a summary of the scores, which were remarkably similar across the room (15 out of 16 presented as EN types). This was evidence apparently that we were showing traits similar to many other leaders or future leaders. I suspect I wasn’t the only one in the room who had sensed themselves thinking about how an answer would be perceived before ticking the box on the answer sheet; there are precious few tests or checks for this behaviour in any MB test I’ve ever seen.

Quality psychological tests like MMPI (which unlike MB is used by real psychologists) have hundreds of questions, and a range of scales designed to test the validity of responses. Myers Briggs has none. However, I have a bigger issue with Myers Briggs than the slightly cavalier approach to the validity of response of the test designers. To quote Dean Burnett “the most obvious flaw is that the MBTI seems to rely exclusively on binary choices”. Now, to quote Meg-John Barker, who unlike the authors of MB, actually was an academic, real life isn’t binary. (BTW, if, when critiquing MB, you mention that the authors were housewives as if that’s a valid criticism, your misogyny is showing.)

If you think requiring people to choose between binaries that you have selected as proxies for elements of spectrums of emotions or behaviours is a reliable guide to the complexities of everyday life you’re rejecting the existence of all those for whom complexity is an accepted part of their life, not a complication.

In my experience as a coach who was particularly open to working with GSRD clients, the most common analogy that clients used, to the point where it assumed metaphorical significance, was the Russian matryoshka doll. Now, my experience was that as clients explored that analogy, they began to test whether their life was a series of nested identities, or whether the reality was that the identities were in different places, even different rooms (labelled home, work, leisure, bedroom and more besides), including, sometimes, the closet, and that their emerging goal was to have a career or work experiences that helped to bring them closer together, or even to integrate them.

Test that idea out for yourself. Think about how often you hear people talk about getting their work head on, or all that pandemic era advice for home working that starts with the idea of dressing for work even though you’re in the spare bedroom and the only person who will see you is the Amazon delivery man.

If it’s true, as endless dreary badly written professional dress policies I’ve read assert, that wearing the right clothes makes us feel professional (or in the case of school kids, helps them concentrate and study) then we’re accepting that behaviour and personality are situational and performative, not fixed and rooted in archetypes clumsily distilled out of the mists of Jung’s tortured prose.

It’s thinking about these ideas that has led me increasingly to the idea that if leadership is a set of behaviours, those behaviours can be systematized, and the key task of enabling leadership is not to refine the cadre selection process but to continually improve the behavioural system.

Two ideas from Japanese Lean management have loomed large in my head over the last ten years. The first is the A3 plan; graphic, easy to understand, it exemplifies the behaviour of communicating effectively in a way everyone can understand. The second is the idea that managers, in order to solve problems, must go to where the work is done (sometimes jargonized as ‘going to the gemba’) and learn from the people who do the work.

You can constantly improve these ideas, constantly refine them, and convey them to anyone and everyone who you expect to be a leader (and in the process convey to everyone that you expect all of them to be a leader whenever the need arises).

A final thought on that. A staple observation from surveys of community development programmes is that investment in community leadership often leads to the leadership cadre in whom much has been invested simply moving on because their lives change, or their new found leadership skills open up economic opportunities. The key goal of a leadership system is to enable succession planning, not by yet more cadre selection and recruitment, but by enabling anyone to slot into the system, to understand how the system responds to any problem.

I suspect these ideas need more work, but as a first reaction I’ll put them out there and see what feedback comes back.