Transformative Leadership Training

Thomas Misslin, Project Manager of Custom Programs at emlyon business school, and doctoral student at Paris-Dauphine, explaining the approach: “What we do is connect leadership development with strategic level issues in organizations, and deliver training in the service of developing competitive advantage through organizational culture and leadership.” Anyone participating in an emlyon executive program is seen from the outset as a leader, he asserts, adding, “We take on board participants where they find themselves at the beginning of an initiative and support their growth from here on out. There is more than one way to skin a cat, as the saying goes. Well, the same is true for leadership.”

Leadership through relationships

This philosophy echoes the idea of leaders being ‘gardeners’ not ‘chess masters,’ a concept first suggested by US General Stanley McChrystal when his 714 Task Force in Iraq was forced to adopt a networked organizational structure to counter al-Qaeda between 2003 and 2008. If leaders act like chess players moving the pieces around themselves their organizations are more likely to fail—unable to adapt and respond effectively to complex rapidly changing challenges. Instead, to succeed leaders should empower their followers, and like gardeners focus on creating an environment in which every plant can thrive— applying care, patience, trust, fertilizers in the shape of feedback and feedforward, as well as challenging assignments.

“You can't make a flower grow by pulling on its stem.” Thierry Picq, professor of management and human resources at emlyon business school

In the dire situation McChrystal was in there was no point in relying on directives from above. “The only thing he had to ‘play with’ was the organization, meaning relationships, how we live together, how we make decisions, how we get over mistakes, how we manage conflicts, how we manage our emotions.” The leader as gardener must truly understand the environment they are in, and accept that he or she cannot control everything. Viewed from this enlightened but also pragmatic and sobering perspective, “leaders are defined as individuals who influence their environment through relationships.”

"Leadership doesn’t consist of igniting your own mind and heart by making decisions, but rather in inspiring the minds and hearts of your team members by empowering them to make their own decisions." Thierry Nadisic, professor of leadership at emlyon business school

“From a learning organization standpoint,” says Misslin, “faced with reinventing itself under fire, it’s important for the people at the top, to really buy into a joint understanding of the environment they're in, and define specifically what their role is in the picture.” With this they can then better decide how the organization should respond. For emlyon business school, engaging in conversation with the board—and not only with L&D and HR—is essential to facilitating this understanding.

Transformative change

Once the top people are on board, and there is an accepted understanding of the environment the organization is in, transformative organizational change can happen. Here, as Misslin suggests, “no single size fits all.” The transformation may be, for example, “to develop leadership across the organization horizontally, empowering others to act and take more initiative, accepting errors and mistakes, developing leadership within and across the organization.” Whatever helps the organization give coherent voice and consistent action to its renewed strategic positioning.

“We look at organizational change through three different lenses,” he explains. These three pillars of change are:

• The financial and business objectives of the organization, profitability, and return on investment.
• This is not just about the practical aspect of the job itself in terms of production, but also about the processes and the ways to get done that are encoded in the organization.
• Here the focus is on nurturing leadership capability, creating effective teams, ensuring internal alignment, and encouraging individuals to be self-motivated and self-directed.

The human side of change

“The Human Side of Enterprise, as Douglas MacGregor, [pioneering MIT management professor] would put it,” is where Misslin places most emphasis as the driver of change. “The human side has been ignored for a long time,” he argues, “not in terms of investment—billions have been spent—but in really understanding from the heart what makes people tick, not just as a resource, but as a means to create extraordinary organizations.”

Addressing the human side of change, Misslin describes his basis for leadership development: “We create the conditions for leaders to grow and develop and experiment in a safe environment. Psychological safety is critical, so that participants experience the emotional sense of liberation from being vulnerable in front of others; to say I don't know, to ask questions, to seek help and input from others.” Then to carry this over to their team members to go through a similar experience, encouraging them to speak up, take risks and make mistakes without fear of repercussions, reframing errors as a way to learn.

Training vs transformation

Returning to the idea of transformation rather than training, Misslin decries the term ‘training industry.’ “We're not an industry,” he declares. “Our place of work is the brain, and every brain is sacred, and every brain is secret too. We work with core change principles; some of which may sound antithetical in the corporate realm. We work with the principle of freedom—because it's the only way to really touch people at a deeper level—which is going to be the foundation for change.” Learning is about exploring new ways. There are two different concepts about learning, he states “learning cognitively, and learning to change our behaviors, and the brain is not too keen on that.” Therein lies the challenge: a better balance between cognition and behavior. Both are needed, just as man stands on two feet.

He believes it is wrong to think of leadership development in terms of ‘industry,’ or ‘produce,’ or ‘delivery.’ “We need to free ourselves of the shackles of this conceptual misconception. We take people where they are, and we work with them along their path at their own speed—with accountability, because we want to see progress. We encourage people to really stretch where they are, to step outside of their comfort zone.” This links back to the importance of learning being set to the specific context, that learners are “speaking to their environment.” This then touches the technical pillar of the organization, as participant-led development initiatives involve projects identified as being relevant to participants’ real-world environment.

“Leadership can't be learned in a classroom.” Thierry Picq

Developing leadership as a team

Leadership development may be about self-awareness, but it is far from being focused solely on the individual. Team and group dynamics are a crucial aspect. “As part of the core change principles, there's freedom, but there's also joint design,” offers Misslin. “People do things together, and there's community.” Relationships are one of the three levers of intrinsic motivation—along with competence and autonomy—and the group is very important, providing support and developing networks within an organization. The group offers support but is also there to “support and challenge.”

Team dynamics are key to organizational culture or infrastructure change. It is, for example, essential to develop leaders who are comfortable and effective in group situations, when an enterprise plans to move from a traditional hierarchical structure to a horizonal structure with distributed leadership.

Misslin points out that accountability can be strengthened in flatter structures where there is group responsibility. In top-down hierarchies there can be a tendency to ‘pass the buck’—a frequent failing in the public sector in France and the UK. Whereas with distributed leadership, “it's easier to pin the blame (or praise) to where things are happening on the ground.” He also references the local and variegated nature of team learning, proposed by Harvard professor Amy Edmondson. “Learning is very local, she argues, and group based—groups that develop, change, take initiatives, take risks, fail, then innovate and rise again.”

Leadership that can operate in this way, supported and challenged, accountable, agile, and firmly rooted in its environment is leadership that suits the spirit and organizational culture of our times. It is key to leading competitive enterprises in today’s uncertain, fast-changing, and volatile world. Crucially, it requires a form of leadership development that provides profound transformation rather than one-dimensional training—which is very much the aim of Misslin and his team at emlyon business school.

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