Multi-Level Leadership
What makes a good leader? While it is often common in business to think of individuals as being a good leader, it is rarer to think of leadership as a skill that can be developed. The approach is often to identify individuals that show ‘leadership qualities’ and promote them into managerial positions. But the individual aspects of leadership; the cognitive processes of decision making, the interpersonal skills used to manage human resources, the understanding of a firm’s capacity and priorities, are all skills that can be developed through training and reflection. Even if some individuals show greater aptitude for these elements of leadership, these skills are all capable of being honed and improved through reflective experience.
One of the most important skills of a leader, the ability to transfer knowledge from an individual (the leader) to a team or organisation is particularly influenced by this process of active reflection. Past research has highlighted how structured feedback supports a leader to greatly improve their ability to transfer their knowledge within their project, as they discover what techniques work best for their team and how to avoid repeating past mistakes.
However, the demands of business make it difficult to pause and reflect, to dedicate time to collective learning and leadership development. The extreme time pressures on firms to deliver products or services just don’t allow for that luxury. This is particularly difficult given how hard it is to quantify leadership. There are a lot of disagreements around what are the elements of leadership, let alone which elements are most important.
This research seeks to address this, focusing on the ability of leaders to support the transfer of knowledge within a project. Resulting in the developing a quantifiable measurement scale that captures project members’ experiences of how their leaders support the identification and integration of project member’s different ways of thinking, help resolve differences in these ways of thinking, and create opportunities to network and interact with individuals both within and outside of the project group.
Method
This study draws on existing research to develop a scale that reflects existing best practice. This scale was then assessed by experts to confirm its validity. This scale was then applied to a sample of participants from personal networks and the Project Management Institute. These participants (N=94) were currently involved in project-based work, with 56% involved in these projects in a leadership capacity. The results of these participants were then assessed through exploratory factor analysis, confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modelling to evaluate the validity of the scale.
Key findings
Literature review and expert consultation highlighted that a critical role of leadership is to facilitate a supportive environment and provide the structure for learning and improvement. As the central provider of social structures, leaders influence culture, the way things are done in their project teams and allocate the resources to provide tangible support for learning initiatives.
Leaders assists in making individuals’ mental model, their way of thinking, clear to the rest of the project. Different people have different skills and perspectives, and a good leader will be able to identify these differences and help communicate these to the group. This is reflected in the scale with questions such as: “My project leader encourages me to explain the way I understand various project aspects.”
Another key function of leadership is to help resolve conflicting mental models among team members. While diversity of thought brings innovative thinking that more homogenous groups struggle to achieve, it can also be the catalyst of inter-group conflict. A good leader will help to integrate these different ways of thinking to prevent division. This is reflected in the scale with questions such as: “My project leader encourages discussion to continue until conflicting opinions are resolved.”
The third critical function of leadership this research identifies is their ability to create the opportunity and time for collaboration and communication, both inside the project and outside the project. Collaboration provides opportunities to increase diversity of though, helping to incubate ideas and share knowledge. A good leader creates social architecture, providing physical and digital spaces for communication, adequate time for conversations and informal networking opportunities. This is reflected in the scale with questions such as: “My project leader ensures that communication channels are opened between different members of the team.”
Analysis confirmed the reliability and validity of these three dimensions of leadership, supporting its use in assessment and reflection.
Recommendations
Successful businesses are ones that innovate, that test new ideas and challenge old ones. However, the factors that contribute to novel thinking; diversity and open communication, can also undermine unity and promote conflict. A good leader is one that can both support and integrate diversity of thought within their project team. The scale developed by this research (the Leading a Learning Project Team Scale, LLPT) describes the aspects of leadership that research shows are best capable of this. The scale assesses how well a leader can identify and support diverse thinking, promote unity and resolve conflict, and provides the time and opportunity for collaboration.
This research highlights the importance for leaders to provide a safe environment and motivate project team members to freely speak up about any issues they encounter in their projects, express their personal opinions without fear of being punished or judged, exchange diverse views, and constructively resolve any conflicting perspectives. Such an environment will provide a safe space for exchanging knowledge and generating novel ideas.
In particular, the scale developed by this research is an excellent quantitative tool for assessing the ability of leadership to support the conditions for innovative ideas to emerge. These quantitative tools are vital to speeding up the reflective learning required to support the development of better leadership. Rather than being seen as a KPI or fail condition for leadership, the LLPT scale can be used as a reflective practice to identify the strengths and weaknesses of leadership to help support their development.
Researcher
More information
The research article is also available on eprints.