Foreword

The hundreds of leaders I meet each year give voice to a wide range of issues and concerns about their businesses, their careers and effectiveness in their roles, and sometimes also about the impact that they and the businesses they lead have on society. They talk of the problems of responding to uncertainty and change, about finding, nurturing and retaining talent, and about the stress of managing organisations that are increasingly complex, even when they employ fewer people.

One of the reasons leaders find it so hard to lead is that our brains and the algorithms that describe how we interact with the world outside ourselves did not evolve to handle large enterprises. The maximum size of a group within which we can feel a high level of collaborative working or social identity appears to be about 150. Within their organisations, leaders have to manage groups of groups, with membership often overlapping. They also have to manage – or create the conditions where others can manage – the boundaries between these groups and between the organisation and the outside world.

Fortunately, some of the solutions are already there. Leadership is becoming increasingly distributed, with the three roles of defining the need for change, identifying how to make change happen and implementing change no longer needing to be confined within one person or one level of management. The intranet has opened up the possibility for anyone in an organisation who wishes to engage in any of these three roles to do so. All it needs is leaders who are able and willing to share those roles, by inviting participation. Those who participate most, we might argue, are potentially the most likely talent leaders of the future.

More than 20 years ago, I and my co-author Walter Goldsmith coined the term simplexity – the art of making complex issues simple, but not simplistic. For today’s leaders, the core challenge is being able to simultaneously understand the complexity of their operating environment and to recognise the simple patterns that drive that complexity. It is about being deeply engaged with the organisation and its environment, yet at the same time being able to step back from what is happening to achieve the understanding that comes from a longer, systemic perspective. It’s also about recognising the filters of their own experience and assumptions that distort their understanding, their openness to alternatives and willingness to question both others and themselves.

Connectedness describes this ability to be both in the system and able to observe it from outside. It’s a skill (or more accurately, a collection of skills) that becomes more and more essential as people rise through the levels of leadership. I don’t know who first coined the term ‘the connected leader’. It’s a meme that emerged less than a decade ago and I first used it in a book in 2012 (The Talent Wave, Kogan Page). Its essence was that connected leaders demonstrated a number of behaviours that made it more likely they would have high awareness of what was happening within their organisations and their external environments and would be able to use that awareness to ensure that they and people throughout the organisation made better, faster decisions in reacting to change. Among these behaviours and qualities were engaging with employees through coaching and mentoring, encouraging and facilitating constructive dissent, knowing their strengths and weaknesses, being role models for key values and for learning, having humility, being widely connected with the outside world, focusing more on asking the right questions than on having the right answers, and having a deep sense of ethicality.

In Connected Leadership, Simon Hayward has pulled together many threads that lie behind the concept of leader connectedness, giving context and depth to these behaviours. The practical models provide structure and a framework for turning an intellectually interesting and relevant concept into pragmatic tools and approaches, which organisations can use to develop their next generations of leaders and which today’s leaders can apply to their own development.

Professor David Clutterbuck, author and director of the David Clutterbuck Partnership