The Development of Management and Leadership Capability and its ...

may make the organisational benefit of capabilities much higher than the 'sum of the parts' of
individual managers.
• Day (2001), for example imports the concept of 'social capital' into management
learning, claiming that management and leadership development is potentially a
vehicle for increasing the social capital of the organisation (in the sense of managers
having extra collective value through their relationships) as well as its human capital
(in the sense of individual capability).
So if individuals perform well as a result of development, this may lie in their ability to have
improved networks and relationships with others in the organisation (and sometimes outside
it too). The organisational benefit may also lie to some extent in this social capital as well as
the simple addition of individual capability.
Holistic rather than mechanistic approaches to capability
Another tension present in seeking to examine the micro links between individual learning
and corporate performance concerns assumptions about the nature of individual capability.
Some adopt a very analytical approach to individual capability, seeking to find competencies
which are linked to particular aspects of individual performance, linked in turn to managerial
behaviours of corporate priority (see for example working paper by Beech, 2003, Burgoyne
1990).
However, there is an equally strong employer interest in much more personal start points for
management learning on the grounds that the learning itself will be more relevant and vivid
to the individual and therefore has the potential to bring about much greater changes in
performance. Much management and leadership development activity does not attempt
precise mappings between individual behaviours and corporate performance, although it may
well emphasise a small number of behaviours or attitudes believed to be of increasing
importance.
We see this more holistic approach in the rapid rise of coaching and mentoring, which
inevitably attend to each individual's perceived development needs, even when starting from
a competence-based analysis (Hirsh and Carter, 2002). Some leading employers have
invested in programmes which are intensely personal, hoping that they will feed through to
corporate performance through their deep emotional impact on the individuals concerned.
The BAe Strategic Leadership Programme, exposing participants to intense experiences of
culture in different countries, is an example of such a 'personal journey', not designed to have
a 'deliverable result in strict business terms.' (Davidson, 2001).
The holistic approach does not necessarily mean that it is not helpful to name and assess
specific areas of competence and capability, rather it means that we should not see them
contributing independently of other competences and capabilities to performance. Any
specific competence influences performance through its interaction in a network with other
competencies having a joint effect. It may still, none the less, be possible to identify areas of
weaknesses in the network of competencies that undermine the effectiveness of the whole –
as exemplified in the next section.
41