P-P-P
Any view of the terms leadership, teaching or learning must holistically consider the Person, Process and Product
In response to a blog post on the definition of learning by Daniel Willingham, Professor Dylan Wiliam stated "I think the problem with the word "learning" is that it is used to describe both the process of acquiring new capabilities (verb) and the resulting new capabilities (noun). Finding a definition that adequately describes both the process, and the resulting status, is in my view going to be extremely difficult".
This got me thinking about my current view of leadership and how it too may be limited and one dimensional.
A Limited Lens?
Up to this point, when I have used the word leadership, either in terms of looking for it during performance review or trying to develop it during professional development I have tended to see it as a set of capabilities or tasks.
An example of this can be found in the leadership inventory that I used for my doctoral research into leadership self-efficacy. The premise is with such lists that in order to be an effective leader, one must be proficient in all of the capabilities and that professional development should centre around the correction of deficits in these items.
My thoughts are not moving towards the dismissal of such inventories, just a widening of my view towards the terms leadership and even learning.
Splitting The Term
Drawing from Wiliam's separation of the term 'learning' into its verb and noun, I started thinking about the possible ways I could split the term 'leadership' and settled initially on the following:
Should we be focusing more on the person involved in the construct, the leader or the learner? What attributes do they need to possess in order to make the subsequent process successful and the product a reality? Should performance review and professional development focus more on the person?
This is where my previous focus on task capability would have landed with the lens being WHAT leadership is in the moment. This view creates some issues around the need to seek out demonstrable signs of leadership and the danger that the proxies we use are inaccurate. Are we currently overly-focused on the process of leadership and learning?
Maybe we should look for the products of leadership as a sign of its effectiveness and focus more on the impact? What is created by leaders both organisationally and inter-personally? Should performance review focus more on this element of leadership and what even are are the products of leadership?
Re-framing Performance Review & Professional Development
If we were to have a fresh look at leadership review and professional development through the lenses of Person, Process and Product what would we need to focus on? Would this look different to the processes we currently have in place? Below are my current thoughts on how these may be affected by a P-P-P mindset.
Person Lens
The existing Information for this lens typically comes from individual and organisational attempts to describe the characteristics of effective leaders. As is common within the leadership literature, there is only moderate congruence between opinions and inventories. Below are a small range of personal attributes thought to be associated with effective leaders.
Process Lens
Information for this lens typically comes from role descriptions or leadership development curricula and contains an almost infinite level of variation. This variation is created in part by difference in the following:
Leadership sector (business, education, health care ...)
Leadership level (middle, senior, executive...)
Leadership role (finance, HR, sales, training ...)
Leadership type (transformational, instructional, structural...)
There is however some agreement within the literature with the view that most leadership skills and attributes fall within the broad categories of conceptual, technical and interpersonal (Dhar and Mishra, 2001).
Below are a small range of capabilities thought to be associated with the process of effective leadership.
Product Lens
Information for this lens typically comes from the literature on leadership effectiveness and centres around the impact that they have. This is again very complex and differs between the aforementioned variances in leadership sector, level and role. Measures of impact seem to centre around the following key themes:
The demonstration of leadership skills / capabilities
Subordinate related measures
Group / team related measures
Stakeholder feedback / assessment of leader.
Some of the acknowledged outcomes of effective leadership within the above themes can be seen below:
Reflective questions
I will continue to explore the value of this three dimensional view of leadership and to reflect further on how it may influence my thinking about performance review and professional development. Below is a visual representation of how these may interact and below that, some of the questions still on my mind.
What are the personal qualities of an effective leader?
What does the process of effective leadership look like?
What are the products of effective leadership?
What do our current leadership review systems focus on?
What do our current leadership development programmes focus on?
Do we need to consider both the person and the process during leadership development?
Do we need to consider the person, process and products of leadership during performance reviews?
Could the P-P-P separation be used for other terms like learning, teaching etc?