Developing Leadership Culture: Who Leads Leadership?
Most leadership teams lead the business skilfully. Fewer lead how leadership is practised in the organisation. Yet leadership culture is shaped every day – the only question is whether this happens consciously or by chance.
Leading leadership is missing from the agenda of many leadership teams. That is no wonder, as there doesn’t seem to be a shared understanding of the concept itself. It is typically perceived as skills development, with responsibility assigned to HR. Leading leadership, however, is much more than developing skills, and it really should be on the leadership team’s agenda: the leader themself is the most important developer of leadership and its action logic in their own organisation. This is what we explored at the Netco Club #10 event.
Leadership culture is built in everyday work, not in programmes
An organisation’s way of leading is not created in development programmes. It is created by what leaders repeatedly ask about, monitor and reward, what the leadership team makes time for, and what kind of leadership gets people promoted in the organisation. Every level learns to lead from how the level above it leads.
Let’s take an everyday example. A regional director brings a difficult decision to their director. The director can offer a solution – or help the regional director see why the question ended up on their desk and what they should resolve themselves. The first solves the problem; the second develops leadership and the quality of thinking.
Chris Argyris called this difference single-loop and double-loop learning. In single-loop learning, actions are corrected within existing assumptions; in double-loop learning, the assumptions themselves are also questioned. A leadership team that only solves problems learns to handle the same problems ever more skilfully, but not to change what produces them.
Leadership roles are the playing field of Experts and Achievers
David Rooke and William Torbert describe leaders’ thinking through seven action logics. Here we focus on three of them: the ways of perceiving and thinking at the Expert, Achiever and Strategist levels.
A manager leading with the Expert action logic makes decisions based on their own knowledge – this is the very way of operating that brought them into a leadership role. The team can always lean on the manager, because they know the right solution and stay on top of the work at a detailed level too. Under an Expert’s leadership, the team’s solutions can be as progressive and innovative as the solutions the manager is able to conceive themself. The challenge is that the manager may find it difficult to receive criticism or differing views and to think about things in new ways. Expert leaders can also be found in top management and among CEOs.
A thinker at the Achiever level no longer believes they hold all the wisdom; instead, they involve the people they lead and draw on their capabilities in identifying ideas and solutions. A leader who perceives the world at this level takes the playing field and its constraints as given, focusing on achieving goals and managing performance within them. Perceiving the world through a given frame helps focus on performance, but it does not encourage new kinds of thinking or reshaping the playing field – a need that almost every organisation faces due to the enormous upheaval in the operating environment. Most leadership teams operate with the logic of Achiever thinking.
The Strategist, in turn, is a leader who also pays attention to prevailing beliefs and constraints – and treats them as open to discussion and change.
Where the Achiever asks how the goal will be achieved, the Strategist asks whether the goal and the assumptions behind it, are the right ones. They recognise that the way things are framed – structures, metrics and established ways of talking – guides what people see and do. The Strategist’s aim is to understand – not to correct others’ thinking or win the argument. They build a shared vision with people who think with different action logics, and see contradictions and resistance to change as a natural part of change rather than an obstacle to it. The Strategist invites others into alertness, vulnerability and joint exploration: they encourage others to challenge their own thinking and are also ready to change it.
For the Strategist, developing the organisation and its people at the same time is a high priority. They create situations in which the people they lead have to look at things from a new angle and help them find ever better choices in an increasingly complex environment. Only a few percent of leaders operate with the Strategist logic, but in the research, it was precisely they who got their organisations to renew – and the people they led to grow.
Leaders’ action logic is also a question of culture. A leadership culture can be
dependent, where leadership is expected to come from the top
independent, where leaders succeed in their own areas, or
interdependent, where leadership is built together across boundaries.
Leaders’ own thinking sets a ceiling on the kind of culture they are able to build.
This brings a challenge: as a leader’s thinking expands, they give fewer ready-made answers and ask more questions. In an organisation accustomed to efficiency, this can easily look like uncertainty, and in many organisations it is seen as an inability to lead – which ends up blunting the capacity for renewal.
What keeps the current way of leading in place
If you want to change leadership culture, you first need to understand what sustains the current way. At Netco Club, we examined this from four interconnected perspectives.
History.
Organisations learn their way of leading from experience. Certain phases of an organisation’s history often still live on, unconsciously, in its leadership practices, even though circumstances and the people are no longer the same.
Identity.
Every leader has learned what they are rewarded for. Many still rely on strengths that served them in an expert role and lifted them into a managerial role, but that prevent them from leading at the right level in their current role.
Competence and quality of thinking.
Leadership drifts into the operational because of both competence gaps and the quality of thinking. This may be due to gaps in the competence of the people being led, which the manager fills, or to the manager’s own competence gap: the team’s work ends up on the manager’s desk if they don’t know how to delegate, set expectations or hold others accountable. Quality of thinking refers to how an individual perceives the operating environment, their own agency and the possibilities available. A competence gap can be fixed with training – a qualitative change in thinking requires something else.
Structures.
How clear roles and responsibilities are, and how things are agreed and followed up, affect the leading of leadership. When responsibilities and their interfaces are unclear, balls get dropped and catches overlap.
How leaders’ thinking develops
According to Nick Petrie, thinking develops through three mechanisms. Development programmes often fail because they only address one or two of them.
Stretch roles.
Thinking grows from responsibility that doesn’t fit within the current frame. Job rotations, cross-functional projects and roles in which you have to lead without formal authority force you to see the organisation from a new angle. Leaders say their most significant development experiences came from demanding assignments, not from training.
Colliding perspectives.
Thinking expands when you encounter a genuinely different worldview: in peer groups, in external forums or in a deliberately diverse leadership team. This is the structure that is most often missing entirely.
Making sense of experiences.
Experience and feedback only turn into learning when they are processed: in coaching, in guided reflection or in debriefing feedback together. Without this, a feedback round is a ritual.
The CEO’s role
Leading leadership cannot be outsourced to HR, even though HR plays an important role in supporting it. The CEO and the leadership team decide where attention is focused, who is given stretch roles, whose perspectives get to collide, and whether anything follows from feedback.
It’s not about the CEO getting more involved in leadership. It’s about them consciously leading how leadership is practised in the organisation – and helping each level strengthen the next level’s ability to lead.
Good leadership produces results. Leading leadership builds the ability to produce them tomorrow too, in increasingly complex situations.
What does your leadership culture learn from how you lead your people?
