Nora Senior CBE on why leadership must never drown out management

Keep management in mind

Our persistent focus on ‘leadership’ risks drowning out discussion about the value of high-quality management practices, argues Nora Senior CBE

Is it heresy to write in the Drucker Forum Special Report that leadership itself is a ‘spent concept’ that should be jettisoned from debates? Bear with me.

I chair the Scottish Government’s

Strategic Board. Its job is to ensure that the enterprise and skills system contributes fully to boosting Scotland’s productivity. We know that workforce skills, business investment and innovation all matter greatly in that endeavour.

Yet in developing our strategic plan and our response to Covid-19, we have heard frequently about the importance of how businesses are run and the central role in that process of management practices. That comes home forcefully when we look at the following question: what do Sweden’s schools, Virgin Atlantic’s pilots, India’s retailers and England’s hospitals have in common?

Answer: in each case, there is concrete evidence that the quality of management practices directly affects outcomes.

Pupil attainment is higher in bettermanaged schools. Pilots who are set fuelefficiency targets consume less fuel. In India, better-managed stores have higher sales per employee. Heart attack patients are more likely to survive in English hospitals where management quality scores are higher.

Management quality scores? We are indebted to the World Management Survey (WMS), which has been running for 17 years, for generating most of this evidence.

Through thousands of interviews with managers across the world, the WMS has helped define and measure the types of practices that make a difference to performance.

Many of those practices are pretty simple. Which board would not set clear targets and then monitor and measure what happens, holding managers to account for what they deliver? Which chief executives would appoint family members as their successors without competition? The WMS asks managers questions about these and other practices, and their answers provide the basis of the scores.

When scores are lined up against performance the results are stark. Businesses that A 10% are better managed have higher productivity, profits, increase output growth and exports in a firm’s than their peers. They hold more patents and do more management research and development. score leads A 10% increase in a business’s management score to a 14% rise leads to a 14% rise in labour in labour productivity. Indeed, so striking are the relationships productivity that if I told you a firm’s management quality score, you could easily figure out where it stands on these important indicators.

The transparent importance and economic impact of basic management practices are among the reasons that we have asked Scotland’s enterprise and skills agencies to lead a mission to stimulate workplace innovation – including the adoption of first-rate management techniques.

Of course, success in these businesses will rely on effective leadership. It cannot really be jettisoned. But, by the same token, it’s time to put good old management practices back in the spotlight. They make a difference.

Nora Senior CBE is an award-winning businesswoman, former president of the British Chambers of Commerce and chair of the Scottish Government’s Strategic Board