First, we always encourage officers to take up private studies on their own time if they can afford to. We emphasise lifelong learning. And then we have different management development programmes for officers at different stages of development. We also use P Wing (personnel wing) as the centre for our HR planning to move those identified potential officers around and develop their different attributes and skills. As I
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said, we put them into suitable secondment and training programmes. […]
By using different methods to develop officers coupled with suitable encouragement and guidance, we hope we can find the right people to do the right job. That said, we want to play on a levelled playing field and not exclude anybody from the programme. Once somebody shows that they have the potential, commitment and willingness to do it, we try to get them into the Force system. (pp. 20-21)
The findings of this study, which are supported by illustrative example narratives with enough detail and sufficient depth, can help organisations review and identify the real issues in their own leadership development programmes.
In terms of the practical implications of this study for leadership training/education institutes, the 18 participants had attended a total of 75 formal leadership training/education programmes in different parts of the world, most of which took place in the two decades before and after the change of sovereignty. The programmes they attended included command courses for senior officers run by internationally reputable law enforcement agencies such as the Australian Federal Police, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, UK police forces and the US Federal Bureau of Investigation; public administration courses provided by top universities such as Harvard, Oxford and UC Berkeley; and senior executive management courses offered by renowned management institutes such as Stanford Graduate School of Business, Harvard Business School, Henley and the Royal College of Defence Studies.
Hence, their lived experience participating in various leadership development programmes worldwide represents a large reservoir of knowledge that could help clarify the unique role of formal leadership training/education in the leadership development process and provide much-needed feedback to leadership developers/trainers based on their many years of practical post-course leadership
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experience.
The findings of this study reaffirm the significance of formal training/education in an individual’s leadership development. Based on these findings, leadership developers and trainers may review their current approaches and make use of the participants’ experience to enable them to support one another in their learning;
develop appropriate teaching strategies to reach the participants at personal and emotional levels to facilitate critical self-reflection; design curricula in such a way that theoretical material is situated in actual practice; provide goal-setting and reflective opportunities to explore the application of theories in context; and combine the two bodies of theories on transformational learning and leadership to make formal training/education more effective at achieving its objectives.
6.3.2 Theoretical implications
Integrating the participants’ lived experiences with the leadership literature reveals that there are certain grey areas in the literature, the clarification of which may help develop more effective leadership development theories. For the sake of easy discussion, these grey areas are divided into two categories: those relating to the notion of leadership itself and those relating to leadership development.
6.3.2.1 Grey areas relating to the notion of leadership
This study reveals at least three grey areas relating to the notion of leadership that must be explored further before means to develop leadership with confidence can be discussed. These three grey areas are a) the role of ethics in leadership, b) the effect of cultural diversity on leadership practices and outcomes and c) the effect of shared/distributed leadership on organisational performance.
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6.3.2.1a The role of ethics in leadership
Successive instances of large-scale organisational failure with a global effect in recent decades have drawn the attention of leadership researchers to the role of ethics in leadership (e.g., Derr, 2012; Klenke, 2007). As such, there are many situations where the line between a sharp business decision and an unethical leadership practice is difficult to draw. The following is an illustrative example from Participant 10, because he had his suppliers by the balls. He would say [to them], ‘This year I’ll pay you this much’. [So he got them working for him.] But then next year he’d say, ‘I’m going to pay 10% less [or] I’ll go somewhere else. I don’t care myself’. ‘But I have just tooled up my entire factory.
I’ve got 5,000 employees who all have wives, and the children. They’ve got…’ ‘10% less!’ That’s how he built up the company. And then he did this deal with the bank where basically he formed a holding company from the company. The bank bought out the entire value of the holding company, so he left the company. And he got that sum of money that he could then use for other things. And it was so close [to theft]. First of all, it was unethical. Although there was nothing actually illegal in it, it was so close to… not obtaining property by deception, but it was almost theft. This was outrageous. And the guys said, ‘Oh, it’s a great move’.
[I said,] ‘What? No, no! It’s outrageous! This is not how you should run a company’. ‘But he is a great man’. ‘No, he is not a great man.
He may be a great entrepreneur. He may be a great businessman, and he may be a very good father, you know, his own father, his own kid, because he is making millions and things like that. But he is not a great man’.