Pathway to Leadership

It is never a bad idea to learn to lead.

Organisation leadership is the alignment of a social value chain, where interconnected relationships and interactions create, exchange, and amplify value. This is obviously not a luxury, but rather a prerequisite of any successful enterprise.

In this social chain, each participant serves as a link that contributes resources, knowledge, influence, or support, fostering mutual growth and collaboration. It sits alongside other leadership value chains – technical leadership (the organisation of knowledge into insights and then practices) and enterprise leadership (the transition of strategy into goals and plans) – but is the foundational element which anchors the why, how and what of an organisation.

To learn to lead is to understand how to efficiently bridge gaps, share opportunities, and enable the collective to achieve outcomes that surpass individual efforts.

To learn to lead is to create the conditions which embed resilience and responsiveness into your organisation. It ensures that the value proposition of the organisation is robust enough to flex in the face of change and disruption, and allows it to lean in when opportunity arises.

For the past three decades, the Møller Institute, part of Churchill College, in the University of Cambridge, has been developing leaders who make a difference to the world around them. That ‘world’ could be them individually, their team, their organisation or the society in which they operate.

We have hosted lawyers, bankers and politicians, civil servants, consultants and creatives, and what we have learned from each industry or profession is that there exists a common pathway to unleashing an individual’s leadership capacity, regardless of age, seniority or experience.

The Møller Institute has created a leadership value chain of its own, one that demonstrates the building blocks which must be in place for an individual to truly call themselves ‘leader’.

In the English language we have adopted a bad habit of naming anyone who is in charge, who sits on top of a hierarchy, or exercises authority as ‘leader’. This is highly inaccurate, as there are multiple ways to ‘be in charge’, and leadership is just one of them. Others which we are most familiar with might be management, command and rule. 

Leadership differentiates itself from these others through its nature of being plural in vision (drawing together multiple voices and seeking alignment of these) and aspiring to inspire deliberate, intentional and empowered participation.

The building blocks which provide a pathway to leadership excellence are simple to recognise, but hard to put in place. At the Møller Institute we believe our role is to provide the opportunity for authentic leadership to be discovered by each individual who comes through our doors. We don’t decree that one style over another is more valuable, that there is a ‘right’ way to lead, or that one type of leader is more successful than another. Leadership requires a full toolbox of habits which can be reached for as contexts and circumstances evolve.

To understand which habits should be developed and learned, the leader must first consider what it is they are reaching for. What is the impact that they are trying to create? A direction to head towards is the first demand of leadership.

Leadership impact is the outcome of the purpose which is being fulfilled. This is the ‘Why’ which drives us individually and collectively. This is, in turn, the outcome of the principles which we hold to be true – the ‘rights’ and ‘wrongs’ which create the boundaries of what we can and should do.

The pathway to effective leadership is to intentionally build from principles to purpose to impact. This is the core of any leadership practice – above and beyond the skills and capabilities which fill the leadership competency frameworks we use to measure our progress and abilities.

Any leader who has made a lasting difference to their context has invested time in reflection, thought and discovery of these aspects. From these foundations they have built the confidence and certainty to inspire alignment and action from others.

Of course, this is still slightly nebulous. How can we bring an actionable approach into this almost philosophical necessity? The spaces we have to work on are related to how we bring intentionality and deliberate focus to the ways in which we discover these core areas.

Our principles are constructed from the concepts which are embedded in our being –the things which we have been taught to be true, metaphorically speaking they are our core understandings, such as whether the Earth revolves around the Sun, or the Sun around the Earth – and the values which have been inculcated in us for as long as we have been conscious, from family, friends and faith.

The purpose we hold, the reason why we act, is shaped from the knowledge we have of the world, and the information this provides us with, coupled with our mindset: the way we individually process and respond to this data. This gives us our sense of what should be done from our recognition of the state of things and how we perceive it.

The impact we choose to create results from the vision we have coupled with our ability to achieve it – the habits that we can bring to bear. This is perhaps the most dynamic and constantly shifting layer in this pathway. All the inputs and products create feedback loops into each other, but the constant calibration of what we envision doing, our ability to do it, and what we actually do, is where the leader exists day-to-day.

For many years traditional leadership development has focused only on one section of this model. Firms invest in the habits, more commonly described as behaviours or skills, of leaders without taking time for a holistic view of how they are truly constructed.

At the Møller Institute we have had the privilege of experiencing how leaders are truly built. It is a journey that requires both training and reflection, an eye on the general and the specific, and a blend of the philosophical and pragmatic to make real.

To learn to lead to discover who you are and where you are heading, and in your confidence and rigour of discovery create the conditions in which others judge you trustworthy to follow.

 

Richard Hill, Leadership Development Professional, Møller Institute