Learning and Leading with Head, Heart and Hands

Interview Jules Koster by Han van der Pool, partner at Van der Pool Consultancy

Interview in MD magazine for Talent and Management Development | winter 2018

At Pizzabakkers’ cosy new location in Willemsparkweg in Amsterdam, I interview Jules Koster. He has been Director of Innovation at De Baak for 10 years, and always had a great passion for learning and social innovation. After studying Andragogy, he worked at the University of Amsterdam and Nyenrode, among other jobs.

De Baak has been active in the development of managers and organisations in the Netherlands for some 70 years already, and must continually adapt to the changing demands of participants and companies. The training and organisational development sector has been in constant upheaval over the last few years, so high time for an interview with Jules over a pizza.

What sets you apart from agencies that provide advice, implementation and training?

De Baak is, above all, a place for learning. We really concentrate on people, and their aspirations are at the heart of everything we do; the human side of enterprise. We do use instruments and scientific insights, but they are not leading as in a regular MBA course. We help individual participants, teams and organisations take the next step in their development from a learning perspective. Our primary concern is the development of leadership, including personal leadership, and talent in organisations.

To lead and learn, you have to use your head, heart and hands; all three are essential. Universities and business schools are mainly concerned with what goes on in the head. They tend to offer cognitive programmes which rely on theories and models to look at reality from a different perspective. The programmes of training and consultancy agencies train participants according to measurable skills and on implementing theories (such as Lean) that could work in practice. These agencies focus primarily on the hands. We, however, focus on the integral development of people and organisations: Learning with the head (is it true?), the heart (is it right?), and the hands (does it work?).

Leadership is generally about emotions, values, beliefs, moral compasses and the formulation of inspiring visions (magnets), and how people relate to and behave with each other. In our vision, leadership is first and foremost about human relationships and the way in which those relationships take shape in and between roles in organisations. The spotlight is on the individual and on the authentic way in which people fulfil leadership roles in the organisation and are part of the organisation’s continuous innovation processes.

This integrated, holistic learning and development approach, in which we always include the work context, particularly in tailor- made programmes, is embedded in our DNA. It’s a complete learning experience, to which our special locations also make an important contribution. This decision to place people at the centre and respect the human dimension in our leadership puts us in a special position in a world where bureaucracy and technocracy are deeply entwined in our lives.

How do you deal with the dilemma of 'giving direction' and ‘giving space' when designing the programme?

Looking at the triangle of person-role- organisation, the emphasis in the open programmes is on the relationship between the person and the way in which someone fulfils their role at work. The way roles arise in the organisational context and become part of the organisational and leadership culture gets much less attention. These aspects are looked at more closely in tailor-made programmes. The dilemma between giving direction and offering space is even more of an issue with tailor-made programmes than with programmes with open registration. Clients, and even more so the purchasers, often want to know exactly what they’re getting, and are usually dissatisfied withsemi-finished programmes that still need to be spiced up according to participants’ learning needs (offering space).

What’s ironic is that companies often realise that they need to change the way they lead and organise, but the programmes intended to introduce new methodologies are organised inthe old way. For example, it’s often the casethat programmes are tightly-organised due to a need to maintain control, while the purpose of these same programmes is to teach participants to trust their employees and give them space. Or, that a Board of Directors decides that the organisation must become self- managing, in an ultimate authoritarian act. Designing and developing tailor-made programmes together (co-creation) is like putting together a complex puzzle with no image to guide you.

In the past, the commonest MD request was to design a leadership programme that all the managers of a company would have to complete. These programmes would last several years, and their implementation was standardised. The idea was to make sure that the participants all met the same profile, rather than being aware of their unique talent, as is usually the goal these days.

Now, there’s much more variety in the requests, and there is much more diversity in programme options and additional learning activities to meet these requests. It’s always a bit of a puzzle to figure out how, given the request, you can offer added value to the participants and the company or organisation.

Three related factors are important here:

1. Embedding the programme in the context 2. The involvement of all relevant stakeholders

3. The enthusiasm of the participants

Embedding is about linking the programme to an organisation’s strategic goals. Ideally, we design the programme as part of a more comprehensive L&D strategy that links learning to the organisation’s goals. Our programme hasto fit in well, otherwise it’s just a flash in the pan that’s quickly forgotten. Embedding aprogramme of this type is even more important ifit’s part of an organisational or cultural change. A substantial list of embedding issues is looked at during the development of a programme, dealing with aspects such as the role of managers and senior management in the programme, and whether professionals from the company can bedeployed as coaches in learning projects. It’s important that clear agreements are made in this respect.

There are many different perspectives in an organisation. Getting all relevant stakeholders involved is important, so that the range of perspectives can be taken into account when designing the programme. This way you can avoid some people from being disappointedbecause it doesn’t meet their expectations, andavoid that the programme merely serves the interests of one of the stakeholders. The involvement of all participants is particularly important. Their involvement not only cultivates ownership and responsibility for the programme, but also involvement in creating their ownlearning context. At the same time, there’s animportant leadership lesson at stake here: how do you create a context or framework within which you can be successful while learning together? In a sense, you build the bridge while crossing it. That means you not only learn about leadership, but you immediately experiment with each other in creating frameworks for leadership, self-management and learning. In well-designed tailor-made programmes, participants are given this space.

The advantage of this involvement is that it generates enthusiasm about the programmeamong participants, and they don’t need to be motivated for a programme which to them just dropped from the sky. In this way, you decide what to put into the programme with everyone involved, giving direction and determining the extent to which participants can shape learning together.

Learning actually begins right from when these perspectives are brought together in a joint design and development process. The great thing about such a joint approach is that you can develop some very creative, inspiring and innovative work forms for participants.

Does organisation & management agility have an impact on the development of managers?

The 21st century heralded the post-bureaucratic era. The call for agility and more variation shows that the command-and-control bureaucratic models, as envisaged by Taylor, which were created over the past 100 years are too inflexible for the degree of variation demanded today. The clear patterns of society of the 1950s have rapidly quickly given way to the colourful diversity of globalisation. We don’t live in one world but in a variety of worlds, and it requires lifelong learning to constantly make new connections.

Only variety can beat variety, as Ross Ashby already said in 1971. Managerial agility will become the new standard. A flexible, participatory style of leadership is necessary, and leadership through ownership, responsibility, and empowerment has to be distributed more intelligently in organisations. Companies possess a goldmine in the talent, knowledge and experience of their employees, and it always surprises me to see how little is done with this. People can do so much more than they are allowed to in organisations.

Companies and institutions that maximise use of available talent and stimulate learning in the organisation will provide better services and products than others who learn less quickly. We ask people to be agile, but at the same time limit their freedom in the workplace with protocols,procedures and rules. That’s a paradox. A traditional organisation is designed to counteract variation as much as possible, and wants to fix things as well as possible so it can produce predictable quality and quantity using established methods. The better the organisation succeeds at this, the more it loses in variety, diversity and innovative capacity.

Modern leadership needs to deal with this paradox, and find a way to connect exploitation and exploration creatively. Social innovation precedes other forms of innovation, and is also seen by leading government advisory bodies as the most important factor in increasing the earning capacity of the Netherlands.

These days, employees and professional specialists are generally well-trained, have all the information they need, and want space to do their job as well as possible. The old model, based on distrust and a hierarchical management philosophy, is breaking down on all sides. Everywhere around us, people are experimenting with different forms of leadership and organisation, including self-organisation, that better reflect the spirit of the times and meet the challenges faced by companies and institutions.

It’s a collective learning and developmentprocess, in which we want to play a key role together with customers and other knowledge institutions. In this learning process, managers will find other ways to add value to their organisations. Their role will increasingly be that of connector, integrator, facilitator and coach of teams that manage, organise and supervise themselves. As colleagues Hart and Verheggen say, it's not so much about letting go, but holding on differently. Power can be used to separate and divide, but it can also be used to create solidarity and empathy. Personal leadership looks at these major themes in detail.

You spoke earlier about leadership and the intersection of art and science. What did you mean?

The scientific perspective is very valuable, and helps us advance through research and knowledge creation. Art looks at the world in a very different way, and helps us to examine our relationship with the world from another angle. Being able to look and investigate in different ways, being curious about other perspectives, is a talent that modern leadership needs more than ever. The behavioural repertoire of modern professionals who fulfil a leadership role includes identifying new methodologies, having a compelling vision, being aware of their own, others and the organisation’s values, and alsoacknowledging once in while that you’restumped.

We regularly use different ordering principles for innovation projects, such as Design Thinking developed by IDEO, Stanford D-School and others. The methodology itself is the result of different ways of looking at things, and finally takes the customer's perspective seriously. Playing with diversity in observing and designing helps renew existing services.

The great thing about network organisations isthat you’re surrounded by a great diversity oftalent. Many modern organisations have minimised their own R&D departments, because innovation takes place all over the world and not necessarily in-house. Fortunately, we can count on a large, diverse network of professionals who are at the centre of this collective learning process, and who together with others form alearning ecosystem. In this way, we’re helping individuals, teams and organisations progress in their learning and development, but we’re also continuing to learn ourselves.

LEAD AND LEARN WITH HEAD, HEART AND HANDS