Some clever leadership rules

Sandy Pepper, a partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers in London and global leader of the international firm's Human Resource Services practice, specialises in senior executive reward, employee share schemes, and the taxation of international executives.

He has worked on large international expatriate engagements, international share plan projects and executive remuneration strategies, in the UK, US, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, and has written about leadership and executive compensation in several journals.

His book, Senior Executive Reward- Key Models & Practices, was published earlier this month. Pepper speaks to Business Standard:

One of the findings of PwC's latest global human capital report is that very few companies' leadership development initiatives have succeeded. Why is that so?

Leadership is one of the things that differentiates between good companies and great companies, and it's been researched and written about extensively. But there continue to be differences about what constitutes good leadership.

A great deal of research implies that a 'humble servant' leadership approach is most effective in building companies up successfully over time. But it's far from being proven and accepted, and you have the other school which [believes] in a Jack Welch-style charismatic leadership.

I still think we don't know and understand much about leadership to be sure what's effective, and that makes devising effective leadership development programmes a difficult thing to do. That said, I think the most important thing to do is to get people in leadership positions to reflect on what they do and think about their style and the effect it has on people.

Robert Goffee of the London Business School, and Gareth Jones, an independent academic, have just published a book in the UK which reviews the different trends in leadership thinking.

They come to a conclusion that can be encapsulated in the phrase, 'Be who are you are, but with style.' If you wish to be an effective leader, don't try to be somebody that you're not. Reveal yourself to the people that you're trying to lead and show them that you're a genuine person, but do so with all the techniques and tools that you can be taught, and that help you to do so with style.

If leadership is difficult to define, how do you measure the effectiveness of a leadership development programme?

That again is an extremely difficult thing to do. You know when leadership ultimately is successful, because it's demonstrated in business performance, business results.

But I think we are still some way away from having effective metrics at a second or third tier level to help us decide who's effective, and who isn't.

How is leadership development different from succession planning or fast track programmes, where some managers are identified for taking on positions

I think what's happened in the last 10 years is that the focus in business has changed from developing managers -- from developing people to manage businesses -- to this concept of leadership that we're all struggling to discover.

I like to think of leadership ,as opposed to management, in four boxes. The first is about strategic vision -- being able to think strategically. The second is about being able to communicate effectively with a wide variety of people.

The third box is execution ability, and research has shown that some of the best strategists failed because they didn't have the ability to operationalise. And the last part is what I call personal mastery, which is being able to be genuinely yourself and communicate that to people.

If you unpack this complex subject in that way, you can see how much you start to get things that you can train. You can train people to think strategically, you can send them to business schools and give them an opportunity to stand back and think.

You can teach people to communicate. You can teach people to write in ways that are effective, or stand on a stage and communicate effectively. Execution ability is much closer to the kind of management development and management activity of old -- how to operationalise things.

The last, being genuinely yourself, is the most difficult, but through discussion groups you can bring that sort of thing out. So even though it's complicated, you start to see how companies can teach leadership in their organisations.

Why is the HR function unable to add value in companies at a timewhen managements expect more from them?

The HR function has fundamentally changed. Originally, when it was called personnel and administration, it was primarily an administrative function, and 90 per cent of what it did was administrative. Then we had a revolution in the concept of the HR function.

The great vision was that HR would create lots of time for itself by outsourcing activities to specialists and this new space would allow them to become strategic business partners of the CEO. We've found that with one or two notable exceptions we haven't found HR people who've been able to step into that space.

It's completely different from the kind of work that HR people were doing 15 years ago. It's not about administration, it's not about technical expertise, and it's not about soft psychological stuff.

It's about being able to engage with the strategic management of the company on its own terms and give a different perspective -- a non-financial perspective -- and add value in that way.

Sadly, the evidence at the moment is that not enough HR people have been able to step into that space. The best companies are those where HR has been able to step up to the plate and become a strategic business partner of the CEO. That's the challenge -- to see whether people can step up to the plate.