Book Review: Uplifting Leadership
by Andy Hargreaves, Alan Boyle, & Alma
Harris
The stated
purpose of Hargreaves, Boyle, & Harris’ Uplifting
Leadership is “to explain and exemplify the actual practice of …uplifting leadership from our seventeen
year study of fifteen organizations in business, sports, and public education
in eight countries across four continents.” (6)
The authors’ analysis of high performing organizations has led them to
identify 6 factors of uplifting leadership.
However,
before describing and providing examples of the 6 factors, the authors list 5
factors that are not features of organizations with uplifting leadership
- These organizations didn’t make it a goal to be at the
top;
- They didn’t simply imitate other organizations;
- They didn’t focus on hitting every milestone to the top;
- They didn’t stretch
people to the limit; and,
- They didn’t race to the top as quickly as possible.
(8-9)
The first
factor of uplifting leadership is outlined in Chapter 1 “Dreaming with
Determination”. To be effective, an organization’s
vision must be collectively held. By way
of illustration of this point, the authors share the anecdote of President John
F. Kennedy’s asking a NASA cleaner what his job was, to which the cleaner
replied, “To put a man on the moon.” (24) A compelling vision must also “extend beyond
numerical targets [and strive] …to change
people’s lives for the better.” (18)
Lastly, it must clearly articulate the connections between the
organization’s “valued heritage and needed progress”. (19) The authors use the example of Fiat’s recent
commitment to making and marketing small, energy-efficient cars as an example
of an organization that has succeeded in connecting its present “…to the best
of its past while also linking its future to higher moral purposes of
ecological responsibility and human rights.” (23)
The second part of this factor is the
determination. The story of the rise of
the Burnley Football Club is shared to illustrate the “persistence,
perseverance, and relentless hard work” required to realize a vision. (33) Although it is situated in a small Northern
England mill town and possessed a modest budget, it rose in just 3 years from
mediocrity in the Championship Division to qualifying for membership in the
elite Premier League. It did so by
adopting the slogan “Dare to Dream”, leveraging its tradition of
David-vs-Goliath success, and mobilizing the entire community through its Walk Up for Burnley campaign by which
many people donated money to the soccer club and even more committed to buying
game-day tickets.
In Chapter 2,
“Creativity and Counter-Flow”, the authors state that uplifting leaders must be
prepared to move “against or around” the flow.
“Uplifting leadership is courageous, creative, and fundamentally
intuitive. It welcomes argument and disagreement.” (46) However, uplifting leadership is not about
rampant pursuit of flights of fancy and quixotic causes; rather, it is grounded
in careful consideration of facts and attention to detail. It
combines “soft processes of imaginative creation …with the hard data of
rigorous research.” (51)
A case in
point that illustrates this mix of creative counter-flow and planning is
Dogfish Head Craft Brewery. According to
the authors, at the centre of this independent brewer’s extraordinary success
is its “passion for innovation [combined with] …an ability to temper this
out-of-the-box thinking and behavior with enough – but not too much – organization and discipline.” (49) While its founder, Sam Calagione, and his
brewing team developed a quirky strategy of combining exotic ingredients in
unusual ways to create new types of beer, there was nothing “wild and chaotic”
in their methodology. (50) Dogfish bases
its new types of beer on “…research and prior knowledge, and employs a
disciplined and calculated brewing process.” (50)
The other
example offered is from the education sector.
To maintain a competitive edge, Singapore, in the late 1990s,
dramatically reversed its hitherto successful centralized approach to teaching
and learning (ie. common curriculum, standardized testing) and adopted a
seemingly paradoxical teach less, learn
more approach that features far less centralized control or curriculum and permits
teachers to design their own lessons and leverages digital technologies to
promote greater student agency and autonomy in learning.
The third
factor in uplifting leadership is combining collaboration and competition. The authors maintain that, although
counterintuitive, blending these opposites
– what they dub as co-opetition - can
produce great results for organizations and benefits for the wider community. They offer as an example the strategy used by
Malcolm Speed when he was CEO of Cricket Australia. Despite leading the cricket world for a
decade, Australia was slipping in the first few years of the 21st
century due to declining revenues and resulting player dissatisfaction. Speed’s response was to collaborate with Australia’s
greatest cricket rival – by “…investing in India’s community and cricketing
development” (74), including supplying India with Australia’s coaching
expertise. The result was stiff
competition on the international cricket pitch, forcing Australia’s team to
perform at an even better standard and generating greater revenue for Cricket
Australia from more fans willing to watch fiercely competitive international
matches.
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| Andy Hargreaves |
Similar to the
previous factor, the fourth factor of uplifting leadership involves the
combining of opposites – pushing and
pulling. The pull of uplifting leadership is the strong allegiance that evolves
among employees through the organization’s appealing “purposes and principles”
and the leaders’ “passions and enthusiasms for their products, their work, and
each other.” (98) The push comes from peer pressure, not pressure
from the top down.
The main
example provided by the authors of the effective use of both push and pull is
the story of the British chemicals company Scott Bader Multinational. Convinced that “…a world where capital
employed labour was unsustainable”, and committed to “…balancing doing well
with doing good”, Scott Bader, in
1951, formed an alliance with his workers, making them partners in his newly
crafted Scott Bader Commonwealth. (96-97) The organization’s constitution
established altruistic purposes that created strong employee allegiance:
· A set proportion of company profits given to charity;
·
“A commitment that no products made by the company would be sold or used
for
making war.” (97)
making war.” (97)
Further pulling power resulted from profit
sharing among employees and “a board of directors that was responsible to the
partners.” (97)
Company
reforms after the year 2000, introduced by managing director Philip Bruce,
balanced the pull with push.
Bruce moved the firm’s culture from straight benevolence and
declining profit margins to one of collective responsibility and accountability
(peer pressure).
An
illustration from the education sector of the uplift created by an effective balancing
of push and pull is the rise of Tower Hamlets in east London from worst performing
school district in England to top-half performer. Its leaders “combined the pull of identity
and community with the push of ambitious targets and unyielding expectations.”
(110) By leveraging the rich history
and culture of the East End, district directors created such a high level of camaraderie
amongst its teachers that they readily supported each other in and between
schools. One teacher noted, “When one of
the borough’s thirteen secondary schools fell into failure, all the other
twelve schools rallied round to help it.” (110)
However, despite the collegiality, push
came in the form of pressure among schools to keep a competitive edge with
each other in terms of student achievement.
When the school down the road from School A made gains in a particular
area, teachers at School A took the position that “If they can do it, why can’t
we?” (111)
In summary,
the authors state “This is the essence of uplifting leadership: schools pull
together and share their best ideas, while simultaneously employing peer
pressure to achieve more for the sake of all students.” (111)
Chapter 5
focuses on the 5th factor for uplifting leadership – measuring with meaning. According to the authors, the
distinguishing feature of uplifting organizations and leaders “…is not the fact
that they are data-driven, but how they define
and draw on the data that are
important to them.” (113) The chapter
begins with a discussion of harmful uses of data. Data should not be used to undermine employee
judgments and never as a leverage to intimidate or threaten people. The result of the latter “dark” use of data
is sometimes a process called gaming the
system, whereby workers engage in “…taking lots of extra unnecessary steps
just to comply with the required target.” (119)
Examples from the education sector of this phenomenon include:
- Spending more time on test preparation than authentic
instruction;
- Deferring or excluding under-performing students from
test taking; and,
- Devoting excessive attention to students who are just
below the passing threshold (to the neglect of more sub-standard students)
– in order to inflate the number of students who meet standard. (121)
Campbell’s Law succinctly summarizes how abuse of data as a means
of top-down control can corrupt worker actions:
The more
any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more
subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to
distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor. (122)
A final misuse of data that the authors
identify is “Misreading short-term blips as long-term dips” and falling victim
to the bullwhip effect, whereby “leaders overreact to a temporary
shortfall in performance or demand…” by taking unnecessary negative action,
such as firing leaders or shutting down parts of the organization. (123)
With a clever
bit of word play, the authors advocate for an intelligent, balanced, and fair
use of data: “Instead of merely mining all
the data we can gather, we should be minding
data with diligence and care so that they help rather than harm the people
they are meant to serve.” (124) They use
the Finnish educational system as an example of proper use of data: The work of
teachers there is not over-shadowed by the results of high-stakes
tests; rather, a broad range of data (including teacher-designed tests and
observations) is used to strengthen teachers’
professional judgments. “The data contribute rather than dictate what they should do.” (132)
The last
factor of uplifting leadership that is identified by the authors is sustainable success. The authors identify 3 elements that
produce sustainable success.
The first
element is firm foundations for change (as
opposed to false starts and recoveries). The authors, once again, point to the Finnish
educational system as an example of an organization that has anchored its
educational reforms in its traditional culture.
Feasible growth, instead of complacency
born of hubris, is the second factor for sustainable growth. Organizations that enjoy steady growth “…show practical and prudent attention to
growth rates that do not compromise the future by improving or expanding too
quickly in the present – or by making excessive investments, over-relying on
imported stars, or pushing staff to the point of burnout.” (153)
Finally,
successful organizations demonstrate “…ability to connect short-term gains to
long-term success.” (155) The leaders of
these organizations do not focus on isolated and dramatic short-term victories
or successes; instead, they celebrate small steps forward and ensure that they
articulate for all workers how these
small victories are connected to the organization’s long-term goals.
