Glowinkowsi on leadership

The qualities that create a good leader are hard to define. We bandy about words like "charisma" and "vision" and "gravitas", but, when pressed, we find the definition of these qualities both elusive and highly subjective.


I was fortunate last week to attend a fascinating presentation by the highly experienced UK-based human resource consultant Steve Glowinkowski (pictured) on leadership. Glowinkowski was visiting Kampala to train and accredit a new East Africa-focused HR consultancy firm, The Leadership Team, in the use of a proprietary diagnostic tool for the assessment of the organisational climate within organisations.


Over many years, Glowinkowski has focused his attention on researching and understanding the factors that drive high-performance organisations, and to condense his theories into a few paragraphs would do them a great disservice. Suffice it to say that leader behaviour is a key element of determining organisational climate, and that the most effective organisational leaders are those who demonstrate behaviour which is at the same time "directive" (ie communicating a clear vision and set of priorities) and "concerned" (ie focused on understanding how best to motivate and reward staff at all levels of the organisation). In turn, this behaviour would help in the development of a organisational climate in which staff, inter alia, felt empowered to take responsibility and in which recognition and rewards were closely linked to performance

While listening to Glowinkowski's presentation, I was struck by how interesting it would be to apply this thesis to entire countries, rather to discrete organisations. I often read articles in the East African press lamenting failures in political leadership. These articles have often seemed to me to be craven efforts by the writers to attribute poor economic and social performance to deficiencies in political leadership, when actually many issues could be massively improved through individuals taking more direct responsibility for action, but, applying Glowinkowski's theories, it suggests that leader behaviour will disproportionately affect the national climate. Certainly, when looking at East Africa as a whole, it is clear that high-level corruption has a corrosive effect on national climate, and that tolerance of (and indeed participation in) corruption by political leaders has broken the links between individual effort, performance and reward which are so essential to a positive climate.

I recently heard the likely Republican presidential candidate in the USA, Mitt Romney, talking about his political values. He spoke powerfully, contrasting his belief in what he called the "culture of opportunity" with what he represented as President Obama's sympathy for the European "culture of entitlement". Sadly, in many countries which are substantial recipients of foreign aid, the sense of entitlement to assistance further corrodes the establishment of a climate in which performance and reward (ie opportunity) are strongly correlated.

Another of the key variables that Glowinkowski aims to measure is the individual tendency towards "incremental behaviour" (ie building on what has been done before) and "radical behaviour" (ie seeking new ways of doing things). To drive change and create Romney's culture of opportunity, we all need a healthy dose of radicalism.