PSI Tutor:Mentor

Kylie Prince, an organisational psychologist with The Collective Leadership Organization presents a rich description of Authentic Leadership Development, for you as a practitioner in psychology.

The concept of leadership

In today’s global market leadership development is big business. Leadership is demanding more today than ever before, as organisations realise that this invaluable investment is the key to gaining competitive market edge. Traditionally, organisational competitive edge has been associated with economic and financial capital, advanced technology and proprietary information.

However, traditional practices result in market capitalism. This means that all organisational goals and objectives link to the balance sheet ‘bottom line’, such as ‘how to gain return on investment; how to account for it; budget it; leverage it; and raise it’.

In terms of business development, economic and financial capitals are necessary building blocks for business success. Research, experience and observation indicate that while economic and financial capitals are necessary for business performance, they are not strong predictors of outstanding organisational development when considered alone.

Outstanding organisations leverage ‘in-tangible’ non-traditional types of organisational resources to leverage competitive edge. Organisational Psychologists understand and plan organisational growth and development through a science-practice benchmarking approach to leadership development.

We examine the benefit of investing in human capital; social capital; and psychological capital; we measure knowledge, skills, abilities and potential capability (performance); we design innovative interventions that develop performance needs; and we strategically plan for tomorrow’s workforce challenges, climate, and culture.
Today’s leaders are managing complex organisations with challenging people issues and therefore planning for tomorrow’s challenges is about leading with change. Therefore today’s best practice leadership requires people to be highly adaptive, flexible and able to act with a variety of capacities to meet the changing dynamics of jobs, teams, departments, and business demands. This raises competence levels, subjective well-being and the ability to cope well with stress.

Competencies of a leader

Generically, the twelve core competencies of a high performing leader are grouped into these four clusters: Thinking, Leading, Engaging, and Delivering.

Competencies underlie characteristics, behaviours or thinking patterns and can be measured and developed. These competencies are defined by behavioural steps, behavioural indicators and contra-indicators for each organisational level and department. The Collective Leadership Organization works with an additional higher order conceptual framework that works well with competencies. This framework is used to develop leaders who are more authentic.

Authentic leaders

Authentic leaders are primarily capable of motivating and developing their followers through encouraging reciprocity of integrity, trust and transparency; and offer an organisational culture of openness, sharing and ongoing training and development.

Authentic leaders are more in touch with their softer emotional side and understand that emotional climate is contagious. In simplistic terms, emotional climate can perpetuate in a positive or negative spiralling effect. Therefore the Authentic leader who can moderate the temperature of the climate actualises a resilient and confident organisational culture, high in optimism and hope for the future.
Consequently an organisation with a resilient and confident culture, high in optimism and hope, holds leadership development as their organisations’ most valuable asset; even in terms of the traditional bottom line figure.

Paradoxically as a business investment, leadership development can be measured using traditional tangible benefits-to-costs calculations, is low-risk, low-cost and delivers a potentially high return on investment.

In what ways are you an authentic leader as an undergraduate? How can authentic leadership provide stable and sustainable business practices in a global village? In what ways can organisational psychology contribute to the observation, measurement and communication of trends amongst authentic experiences and consequences?