Friday 17 June 2016

Uplifting Leadership

Book Review: Uplifting Leadership

by Andy Hargreaves, Alan Boyle, & Alma Harris


The stated purpose of Hargreaves, Boyle, & Harris’ Uplifting Leadership is “to explain and exemplify the actual practice of …uplifting leadership from our seventeen year study of fifteen organizations in business, sports, and public education in eight countries across four continents.” (6)  The authors’ analysis of high performing organizations has led them to identify 6 factors of uplifting leadership.

However, before describing and providing examples of the 6 factors, the authors list 5 factors that are not features of organizations with uplifting leadership
  • These organizations didn’t make it a goal to be at the top;
  • They didn’t simply imitate other organizations;
  • They didn’t focus on hitting every milestone to the top;
  •  They didn’t stretch people to the limit; and,
  • They didn’t race to the top as quickly as possible. (8-9)
The first factor of uplifting leadership is outlined in Chapter 1 “Dreaming with Determination”.  To be effective, an organization’s vision must be collectively held.  By way of illustration of this point, the authors share the anecdote of President John F. Kennedy’s asking a NASA cleaner what his job was, to which the cleaner replied, “To put a man on the moon.” (24)  A compelling vision must also “extend beyond numerical targets [and strive] …to change people’s lives for the better.” (18)  Lastly, it must clearly articulate the connections between the organization’s “valued heritage and needed progress”. (19)  The authors use the example of Fiat’s recent commitment to making and marketing small, energy-efficient cars as an example of an organization that has succeeded in connecting its present “…to the best of its past while also linking its future to higher moral purposes of ecological responsibility and human rights.” (23)


The second part of this factor is the determination.  The story of the rise of the Burnley Football Club is shared to illustrate the “persistence, perseverance, and relentless hard work” required to realize a vision. (33)  Although it is situated in a small Northern England mill town and possessed a modest budget, it rose in just 3 years from mediocrity in the Championship Division to qualifying for membership in the elite Premier League.  It did so by adopting the slogan “Dare to Dream”, leveraging its tradition of David-vs-Goliath success, and mobilizing the entire community through its Walk Up for Burnley campaign by which many people donated money to the soccer club and even more committed to buying game-day tickets.      

In Chapter 2, “Creativity and Counter-Flow”, the authors state that uplifting leaders must be prepared to move “against or around” the flow.  “Uplifting leadership is courageous, creative, and fundamentally intuitive. It welcomes argument and disagreement.” (46)  However, uplifting leadership is not about rampant pursuit of flights of fancy and quixotic causes; rather, it is grounded in careful consideration of facts and attention to detail.  It   combines “soft processes of imaginative creation …with the hard data of rigorous research.” (51)
A case in point that illustrates this mix of creative counter-flow and planning is Dogfish Head Craft Brewery.  According to the authors, at the centre of this independent brewer’s extraordinary success is its “passion for innovation [combined with] …an ability to temper this out-of-the-box thinking and behavior with enough – but not too much – organization and discipline.” (49)  While its founder, Sam Calagione, and his brewing team developed a quirky strategy of combining exotic ingredients in unusual ways to create new types of beer, there was nothing “wild and chaotic” in their methodology. (50)  Dogfish bases its new types of beer on “…research and prior knowledge, and employs a disciplined and calculated brewing process.” (50)


The other example offered is from the education sector.  To maintain a competitive edge, Singapore, in the late 1990s, dramatically reversed its hitherto successful centralized approach to teaching and learning (ie. common curriculum, standardized testing) and adopted a seemingly paradoxical teach less, learn more approach that features far less centralized control or curriculum and permits teachers to design their own lessons and leverages digital technologies to promote greater student agency and autonomy in learning.     
The third factor in uplifting leadership is combining collaboration and competition.  The authors maintain that, although counterintuitive, blending these opposites – what they dub as co-opetition - can produce great results for organizations and benefits for the wider community.  They offer as an example the strategy used by Malcolm Speed when he was CEO of Cricket Australia.  Despite leading the cricket world for a decade, Australia was slipping in the first few years of the 21st century due to declining revenues and resulting player dissatisfaction.  Speed’s response was to collaborate with Australia’s greatest cricket rival – by “…investing in India’s community and cricketing development” (74), including supplying India with Australia’s coaching expertise.  The result was stiff competition on the international cricket pitch, forcing Australia’s team to perform at an even better standard and generating greater revenue for Cricket Australia from more fans willing to watch fiercely competitive international matches.   

Andy Hargreaves
Similar to the previous factor, the fourth factor of uplifting leadership involves the combining of opposites – pushing and pulling.  The pull of uplifting leadership is the strong allegiance that evolves among employees through the organization’s appealing “purposes and principles” and the leaders’ “passions and enthusiasms for their products, their work, and each other.” (98)  The push comes from peer pressure, not pressure from the top down.
The main example provided by the authors of the effective use of both push and pull is the story of the British chemicals company Scott Bader Multinational.  Convinced that “…a world where capital employed labour was unsustainable”, and committed to “…balancing doing well with doing good”, Scott Bader, in 1951, formed an alliance with his workers, making them partners in his newly crafted Scott Bader Commonwealth.  (96-97) The organization’s constitution established altruistic purposes that created strong employee allegiance:

·          A set proportion of company profits given to charity;

·         “A commitment that no products made by the company would be sold or used for  
       making war.” (97)

Further pulling power resulted from profit sharing among employees and “a board of directors that was responsible to the partners.” (97)

Company reforms after the year 2000, introduced by managing director Philip Bruce, balanced the pull with push.  Bruce moved the firm’s culture from straight benevolence and declining profit margins to one of collective responsibility and accountability (peer pressure).
An illustration from the education sector of the uplift created by an effective balancing of push and pull is the rise of Tower Hamlets in east London from worst performing school district in England to top-half performer.  Its leaders “combined the pull of identity and community with the push of ambitious targets and unyielding expectations.” (110)   By leveraging the rich history and culture of the East End, district directors created such a high level of camaraderie amongst its teachers that they readily supported each other in and between schools.  One teacher noted, “When one of the borough’s thirteen secondary schools fell into failure, all the other twelve schools rallied round to help it.” (110)  However, despite the collegiality, push came in the form of pressure among schools to keep a competitive edge with each other in terms of student achievement.  When the school down the road from School A made gains in a particular area, teachers at School A took the position that “If they can do it, why can’t we?” (111)


In summary, the authors state “This is the essence of uplifting leadership: schools pull together and share their best ideas, while simultaneously employing peer pressure to achieve more for the sake of all students.” (111)

Chapter 5 focuses on the 5th factor for uplifting leadership – measuring with meaning.  According to the authors, the distinguishing feature of uplifting organizations and leaders “…is not the fact that they are data-driven, but how they define and draw on the data that are important to them.” (113)  The chapter begins with a discussion of harmful uses of data.  Data should not be used to undermine employee judgments and never as a leverage to intimidate or threaten people.  The result of the latter “dark” use of data is sometimes a process called gaming the system, whereby workers engage in “…taking lots of extra unnecessary steps just to comply with the required target.” (119)  Examples from the education sector of this phenomenon include:

  • Spending more time on test preparation than authentic instruction;
  • Deferring or excluding under-performing students from test taking; and,
  • Devoting excessive attention to students who are just below the passing threshold (to the neglect of more sub-standard students) – in order to inflate the number of students who meet standard. (121)
Campbell’s Law succinctly summarizes how abuse of data as a means of top-down control can corrupt worker actions:

The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor. (122)

A final misuse of data that the authors identify is “Misreading short-term blips as long-term dips” and falling victim to the bullwhip effect, whereby “leaders overreact to a temporary shortfall in performance or demand…” by taking unnecessary negative action, such as firing leaders or shutting down parts of the organization. (123)

With a clever bit of word play, the authors advocate for an intelligent, balanced, and fair use of data: “Instead of merely mining all the data we can gather, we should be minding data with diligence and care so that they help rather than harm the people they are meant to serve.” (124)  They use the Finnish educational system as an example of proper use of data: The work of teachers there is not over-shadowed by the results of high-stakes tests; rather, a broad range of data (including teacher-designed tests and observations) is used to strengthen teachers’ professional judgments.  “The data contribute rather than dictate what they should do.” (132)

The last factor of uplifting leadership that is identified by the authors is sustainable success.  The authors identify 3 elements that produce sustainable success.

The first element is firm foundations for change (as opposed to false starts and recoveries).  The authors, once again, point to the Finnish educational system as an example of an organization that has anchored its educational reforms in its traditional culture.

Feasible growth, instead of complacency born of hubris, is the second factor for sustainable growth.  Organizations that enjoy steady growth  “…show practical and prudent attention to growth rates that do not compromise the future by improving or expanding too quickly in the present – or by making excessive investments, over-relying on imported stars, or pushing staff to the point of burnout.” (153)


Finally, successful organizations demonstrate “…ability to connect short-term gains to long-term success.” (155)  The leaders of these organizations do not focus on isolated and dramatic short-term victories or successes; instead, they celebrate small steps forward and ensure that they articulate for all workers how these small victories are connected to the organization’s long-term goals.