A Manager’s Guide to
Leadership
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A Manager’s Guide to
Leadership
An action learning approach
SECOND EDITION
Mike Pedler, John Burgoyne, Tom Boydell
London Boston Burr Ridge, IL Dubuque, IA Madison, WI New York San Francisco St. Louis
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Copyright © 2010 Pedler, Burgoyne and Boydell. All rights reserved. Except as permitted
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There are many people who have contributed to this book. Thanks to all of
these, including our reviewers, who freely gave of their ideas, helped us to get
stories straight and gave permission to use them.
Two people merit special mention for their contributions to this extensively
revised second edition:
■ Phil Radcliff for his championing of the importance of context in
leadership.
■ Tony Roycroft for his pioneering work with the 7 leadership practices.
Acknowledgements
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This book is an active guide to leadership rather than a stock of knowledge. It
has a simple message: if you wish to contribute to leadership …
… discover the most significant challenges facing your organisation, decide
what needs to be done, and do something that leads to a useful outcome.
If asked to think of times when we were proud of ourselves, most of us can give
examples of when we took the lead. These stories may come from work, or
family life or outside work activities, but they all tend to be about times when
we did something useful in difficult or testing situations.
Leadership is a doing thing; a performance art. It is not defined by any set of
personal qualities or competencies, but by what we actually do when faced
with a challenge. Challenges come from life and work, from the wider world
and from our own questions about ourselves. Leadership is what we do when
we acknowledge and respond to these challenges.
Why is leadership so important now?
If your organisation has only one leader, then it is
almost certainly short of leadership.

The talents of the many are ignored because of a strongly entrenched view
that leadership is the preserve of the few. The potential for leadership is widely
distributed among people. Organisations and communities are full of talented
individuals, but they do not always work well together.
The challenges we face demand the concerted efforts of everyone in the
situation. Enabling talented people to work better together is a critical
leadership task in itself. To achieve the collective capacity to create useful
things, we need a different image of leadership: one that emphasises the
individual as connected to others in a collective effort. The unit of analysis for
leadership is not the heroic individual, nor the undifferentiated community: it
is the connected individual creating a better world in good company.
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An action learning approach
This book is based on the assumption that leadership is about acting on the
challenges facing us in our organisations and communities and learning from
that experience.
Our perspective on leadership is strongly influenced by Revans’ idea of
action learning (1982; 1998). As good leadership has become more important,
the need for this approach has become clearer. Action learning encourages
us to resolve our own problems, by cautioning against reliance on experts or
saviours and stressing the importance of allies, colleagues and friends.
Leadership means moving towards difficult and challenging situations, and
not avoiding them, even when we have no clear idea of how to proceed.
Without action there is no leadership, and, without learning, leadership will
soon falter. Action learning proceeds via “questioning insight” – fresh
questions bring different understandings that can prompt new actions. This
book will help you to prioritise your leadership challenges and help you to get
started on them by providing tools and resources for action and learning.

who are able to learn in that process of change.
Outline of content
The book is in three parts. Part 1 introduces the Challenges, Context and
Characteristics or the “3 Cs” model of leadership, the 14 challenges of leadership
and provides the argument around which the book is structured. Part 2
develops the 7 leadership practices that enable any leadership challenge to be
successfully tackled. Part 3 focuses on leadership development and with how
best to enhance the leadership capacity of individuals and organisations.
Part 1 introduces the “3 Cs” of leadership: Challenges, Context and
Characteristics. The first of these is the 14 key challenges of leadership:
■ Challenge 1: Finding direction and strategy
■ Challenge 2: Creating a learning organisation
■ Challenge 3: New organisational structures
■ Challenge 4: Powerful teams
■ Challenge 5: Crafting cultures of innovation
■ Challenge 6: Fostering diversity and inclusion
■ Challenge 7: Promoting partnerships
■ Challenge 8: Improving work processes
■ Challenge 9: Streamlining
■ Challenge 10: Encouraging social responsibility
■ Challenge 11: Mobilising knowledge
■ Challenge 12: Leading in networks
■ Challenge 13: Managing mergers
■ Challenge 14: Making major change.
Part 1 also includes the “challenge check” – a diagnostic framework to help
you to prioritise your most important leadership challenges, together with an
action learning process to help you to address any challenge.
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Leadership: what is it and are you
part of it?
1
Leadership is … “the activity of a citizen from any walk of life mobilising people
to do something”.
Ronald Heifetz
This chapter outlines our ideas about leadership, but before reading on, what
do you think …
■ … leadership is? How does it differ from management?
■ And what would you say is the best way to learn about leadership?
Hold your thoughts in mind as you read on.
Are you part of leadership?
If you are a professional or a technical expert, perhaps an engineer, a
pharmacist or an accountant, you may find yourself handling a lot of people
and projects in your work. Perhaps you grumble about this; after all it is not
what you were trained for – but perhaps it means that you are becoming a
leader. You probably had a long period of education, training and development
to acquire your professional expertise – what help can you get with becoming a
leader?
The BBC had a slogan: “Manage well; lead more”. What’s the difference?
Many people have the word manager in their job title, only to find that
leadership is talked about as something more desirable. Whilst leadership and
management link and overlap, we can say that leading is more concerned with
finding direction and purpose in the face of critical challenges, whilst
managing is about organising to achieve desired purposes: efficiently,
effectively and creatively. Leadership also has a more moral aspect because it
involves making choices and judgements between what is right and what is
wrong.
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A leadership model
There is no single accepted definition of leadership. It is a contested topic,
much discussed and debated. It is commonly associated with positions of
authority, but whilst some top people have good leadership qualities, many do
not. There is no single, defining set of personal qualities or competencies that
fits all leadership situations and yet most leadership development programmes
are based on specified competency models.
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Leadership is best understood not as a position or a set of competencies but
as an activity that generates socially useful outcomes. As a social activity,
leadership can be described by its Domains, Challenges and Practices; the where,
what and how of leadership:
■ Where? 3 Domains that mark out the territory of leadership.
■ What? 14 Challenges that signify the focus and raison d’etre of
leadership.
■ How? 7 Practices that define how leadership happens.
The 3 domains of leadership
Figure 1.1 shows the three domains that make up the province of leadership:
■ CHALLENGES are the critical tasks, problems and issues requiring
leadership action.
■ CONTEXT is the “on-site” conditions found in the challenge situation.
■ CHARACTERISTICS are the qualities, competencies and skills of all the
people in the situation that can contribute to leadership.
CHALLENGES
CONTEXTCONTEXTCHARACTERISTICS
Figure 1.1 The 3 domains of leadership
Leadership: what is it and are you part of it? 5
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people in the situation are important. Personal qualities are essential to
leadership, but their value is shown as and when a particular person is able
to make a contribution. Challenging situations frequently reveal hitherto
hidden talents and call forth surprising qualities from unexpected quarters.
What will be useful, when and from whom, is at best only partially
predictable. Specifying certain fixed qualities in advance closes off
possibilities and limits the “gene pool”.
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Leadership: what is it and are you part of it? 7
Realising the collective capacity to create value
Challenges define the need for leadership. In tough situations, we look for
outstanding people to take the lead and carry the burden. We tend to think
that we only make progress when we have a “leader with vision”, and this
tendency persists in many walks of life, from politics to business and, perhaps
above all, in sport. Programmes of leadership development are consequently
modelled on heroes with futuristic visions leading a mass of “followers”. But, is
this what is needed in your situation?
A critical view of this heroic tradition, where the leader stands out in front,
apart and isolated, is that it infantilises the rest of us, and condemns us to
dependency. Neither is it a very sustainable view of leadership, for heroes are
often in short supply, partly because they are sacrificed as soon as they are seen
to fail. It is obvious that, whilst some people are obviously better “players” than
the rest of us, few organisational challenges are met by one person acting
alone. A variety of talents abound in most situations, and the trick is to draw
them together in a powerful collective force. Once a challenge is identified,
the need is to mobilise everyone in the situation, enrolling colleagues,
networks, communities and even whole organisations in the effort.
It is a puzzle of leadership that it is very personal, unique to each person, and
yet to succeed it must become a collective endeavour. Culturally we have

the first place and then when things don’t work out you have to own up, stand
up and learn to do better next time.
The 14 challenges of leadership
The 14 challenges of leadership are those organisational problems and
opportunities of the day requiring our best efforts at leadership (see
Figure 1.2).
These challenges are representative, but not exhaustive, of the most
important leadership challenges of the current era. They are chosen on the
basis of our combined reading, research and consultancy experiences and from
empirical research such as that conducted by the Council for Excellence in
Management and Leadership (CEML), where one of the authors was Research
Director.
Whilst the challengers are typical and representative of what we know, this
does not mean that these are the right ones for you. You may be facing
something different, and any challenge will certainly vary in specifics and
context. What will hold is the principle on which this whole book is based:
that leadership is defined by moving towards the challenges that face you and
your colleagues, and not by moving away or trying to avoid them.
Chapter 2 details each of these 14 challenges of leadership with cases, models
and resources that will help you and your colleagues get started. This chapter
also contains a “challenge check” to help you prioritise, and an action learning
process to help you get started on any challenge. So, if your particular
challenge of the moment is not listed here, you will still find materials that will
help you move towards it. This is not a book to be read respectfully from front
to back, but a guide to action. So use it to pick and choose, pick and mix, and
to take from it whatever you want and can apply.
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Developing
DIRECTION

MERGERS
Making
MAJOR
CHANGEFostering
DIVERSITY
AND
INCLUSION
Figure 1.2 The 14 challenges of leadership
Leadership: what is it and are you part of it? 9
The 7 practices of leadership
… leadership is essentially a social activity and … may best be learned within a
Community of Practice.
(Keith Grint)
The 7 practices of leadership make up the “How” of leadership. Because
leadership is an everyday social activity, we can see it as something we all do or
practise. Just as builders apply their skills to the building of a house, or doctors
practise medicine to promote health, the 7 practices of leadership are the means
for tackling the organisational challenges (see Figure 1.3).
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LEADING
YOURSELF
On
PURPOSE
Living
with
RISK

YOURSELF
On
PURPOSE
Living
with
RISK
POWER
FACILITATION
NETWORKING
Challenging
QUESTIONS
Developing
DIRECTION
AND
STRATEGY
Creating a
LEARNING
ORGANISATION
New
ORGANISATIONAL
STRUCTURES
POWERFUL TEAMS
Crafting
CULTURES OF
INNOVATION
Promoting
PARTNERSHIPS
Improving
WORK
PROCESSES

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