Learning Leaders, Leading Learning: achieving the Holy Grail of Manager and Leadership Development?

Dr Russell WarhurstUniversity of Chester, UK

r.warhurst@chester.ac.uk

Russell Warhurst is a Senior Lecturer in Management with the Chester Business School, University of Chester, UK and Visiting Professor with Aalto University in Finland. Russell researches and teaches in the areas of change management, management development, manager and leadership learning and qualitative research methodologies using critically reflective and action-learning pedagogies. Russell is Director of The Chester MBA programme. The MBA programme is offered in corporate mode to major public sector organisations including the two city councils upon which the research reported in this paper is based.

ABSTRACTPurpose: The articles examines the extent and types of workplace learning engendered by a group of middle managers in two case-study organisations which exemplify contemporary learning challenges. A typology of learning which differentiates between individual and social processes and specified and emergent outcomes is used to analyse the learning engendered. Design/methodology/approach: A case-study design was used with qualitative photo-elicitation interviews generating a rich data set. An inductive, grounded-theory, approach to analysis was adopted.Findings: Considerable workplace learning was engendered by the actions and attitudes of the line-manager respondents. It is shown how various, mainly informal, learning interventions both enabled individuals to work more efficiently and teams to learn and generate new forms of practice and knowledge. Research limitations/implications: Certain limitations of the research are identified such as the reliance on self-report data of the extent and nature of learning interventions made by the respondent managers. The article suggests specific research directions to further extend the impact of the research. Practical implications: Practical methods for improving management education for learning are suggested; methods to enhance individual leaders’ capabilities for life-long learning and for leading the learning of others. Originality/value: The article fills an important gap in the literature in providing rich empirical evidence of the extent and nature of line-managers’ use of direct and indirect methods to enhance workplace learning for individuals and teams. It is shown how certain of the methods used engendered expansive learning outcomes and improve organisational learning capacity.

Key WordsManagers-as-Educators; Informal-learning; Coaching; Mentoring; Communities-of-

Practice.

Introduction and Context

Continuous learning by individuals, teams and organisations is a prerequisite for organisational survival and success in the contemporary world. The aim of this paper is to provide strong evidence of the empirical reality of organisational learning capability (Camps, and Luna-Arocas, 2012: 1) and specifically of workplace learning in the context of key current environmental challenges, notably the challenge of austerity. It is commonly asserted that in recession, “training budgets are the first to be cut” and Illeris (2011: 34) noted that financial restraints shifted the focus of development to engendering learning that costs little and which, ‘in a manner of speaking, comes “by itself”’. The paper seeks to evidence the extent and nature of such informal learning and specifically to critically examine the role of leaders and managers as enablers of this learning.

The research comprises a key element of a broader, exploratory inquiry inquiry that simply posed two interrelated questions to an exemplifying group of middle manager respondents. The two questions were “what does being a leader or manager mean to you” and “how have you become the leader or manager you are today”? The specific research questions which are addressed in this paper are to what extent and how do leaders engender or enhance learning in the workplace. This focus emerged from the data itself and was affirmed by assertions found within the literature that line-managers were crucial facilitators of labour processes and social relations for workplace learning (see Eraut, 2011; Fuller and Unwin, 2011; Gold, Holden, Griggs and Kyriakidou, 2010: 196; Hyman and Cunningham 1998: 100). Thus, Ellinger and Cseh (2007: 445) noted that the ‘overarching’ factor that ‘positively influenced’ employees learning at work was ‘learning committed leadership / management’.

In evidencing the extent and nature of this influence on learning, the paper completes a significant gap in the literature identified by Fuller and Unwin (2011: 54) among others. Fuller and Unwin felt that ‘much more research is needed on the workplace context’ and ‘forms of management’ that engendered learning outcomes and Ellstrom (2011: 19) similarly noted a continued ‘lack of knowledge’ about ‘conditions of learning’ within organisations.

The focus of the research is on learning within two case-study English city councils. Examining the role of leaders and managers in English local government in facilitating learning is particularly apposite as the sector exemplifies broader emerging trajectories in developed economies. Betts and Holden (2003: 287) noted that local government was traditional a slow moving sector and, moreover, a sector delivering standardised services tightly specified in national policy and thereby hardly worthy of research. However, with radical reforms to service delivery associated with the “new public management” movement reaching local government in England in the 2000s and with recession setting in from the late 2000s, the sector has come to exemplify a more general paradox. Rising demand for service standards and quality is occurring in a context of decreasing resources (Ellström, Ekholm and Ellström, 2008: 84). As recession has deepened, the national government response has been to impose ‘brutal cuts’ to local government (Burnham, 2012) making issues of change more fiercely urgent than ever and creating significant learning challenges. The learning challenges are, in particular, requiring not merely more cost effective forms of replicative learning but expansive, generative learning to deal

with wholly new agendas such as multi-agency working. English local government further exemplifies a general organisational trend in developed economies in comprising, in essence, knowledge based organisation. As much routine operational work of English local government has been privatised and contracted-out, a high proportion of remaining staff are professional, knowledge workers, specifying services and managing complex contracts. Knowledge is both a key constituent of most contemporary local government services and a key output of those services. A reliance on knowledge requires that learning for all must become an inherent feature of organisational structures and work processes. Finally, the respondent local government managers were MBA educated and therefore an ancillary objective of the research is to explore the MBA influence on leaders as enablers of learning. In sum, local government is an ideal test-bed for investigating workplace learning processes and particularly the roles of leaders or line-managers in influencing workforce learning and organisational performance in a context of significant change.

Analytical Framework

The extent of workplace learning, particularly that which occurs informally and often implicitly through the processes of engaging in everyday work tasks is now well recognised. For example, Eraut’s (2011: 207) empirical studies consistently reveal that over eighty per-cent of professionals’ vocation learning can be attributed to ‘work processes with learning as a bi-product’. Such learning is increasingly well understood thanks largely to the prominence of practice theorising emanating from the seminal work of Lave and Wenger (1991). While drawing upon certain insights of such theorising, the aim of this paper is not to deepen theoretical understanding but is, rather, to analyse the ways in which informal learning is realised in the settings of work practice through the more or less purposeful actions and the attitudes of line-managers. However, to best comprehend such processes a critical consideration of established analytical frameworks at the macro and micro levels is required.

At the macro-level, Gold, Thorpe and Mumford (2010: 144) deploy a typology of learning interventions originally formulated by Rodgers et al. (2003). The authors differentiate interventions on two key dimensions as illustrated in figure one. The vertical dimension distinguishes interventions where the outcomes can be specified in advance from those where the outcomes emerge from the learning itself in the form of new practice or knowledge. The horizontal dimension differentiates interventions aimed at building human capital from those aimed at building social capital.

The four quadrants are characterised by distinct formal or informal learning interventions or development methods. Thus, for example, development methods within quadrant one would include off-the-job training courses attended by individuals and methods in quadrant two would include support for individual experimentation. Methods in quadrant three would include off-the-job training courses attended by groups and methods in quadrant four would include action-learning sets. The typology raises awareness that most formal learning and much informal learning in organisations occurs in quadrant one whereas what is perhaps needed more than ever in contemporary environments are learning methods in quadrant four. However, an organisation experiencing a normal degree of labour turnover and facing challenges of working in new ways to deliver innovative products or services, requires learning in all four quadrants of the typology.

At the micro-level, a range of researchers have investigated the characteristics of learning-rich workplaces in which learning occurs for individuals and groups and delivers both predetermined and expansive outcomes (see for example, Billett, 2004; Eraut, 2011; Fuller and Unwin, 2011; Illeris, 2011). A number of conditions or enablers of such learning are consistently identified. For example, Fuller and Unwin (2011: 51) suggested ‘two broad categories’ of workplace features which aid learning and which result an expansive learning environment. Firstly, ‘context and culture’, including job design and the organisation of work, and secondly, ‘forms of participation’. In the first area, Illeris (2011: 46) specifically emphasises job design as a key source of learning noting the educative power of work activities involving variety, task complexity and requiring problem solving (see also, Billett, 2006; Ellstrom, 2011).

The second of Fuller and Unwin’s meta-categories of enablers of workplace learning includes team-working, opportunities to participate and ‘high involvement work practices’. For instance, Sambrook and Stewart (2000: 209) who found that the introduction of team-working in their case-study firms created ‘new learning opportunities’ and Eraut (2004: 207) emphasised the importance of new professionals learning from established professionals and support staff within work teams. However, learning within teams not only serves to distribute knowledge or to develop the knowledge of newcomers but can also, through dialogue, ensure that

Figure 1: A typology of learning interventions [adapted from Rodgers et al. (2003)]

Quadrant 3

Quadrant 4Quadrant 2

Quadrant 1

Individual Collective

Emergent

Specified

teams come to know more than the sum of their individual members’ knowledge. In other words, work teams characterised by good, open relationships, can, if unencumbered by egos and power conflicts, generate new forms of knowledge, knowing and practice (Engestrom, 2011).

The leader or line-manager can be instrumental in creating such productive team relations, a climate or culture for learning and, in turn, in ensuring expansive learning within the workgroup. A number of researchers comment on how leaders and managers specifically enable learning of various types. Ashton (2004: 52) for instance, noted how it is within the remit of most managers to re-organise individuals’ work to provide variety and challenge with the specific objective of aiding skills formation. Eraut (2011: 187) felt that managers could have an impact simply by enabling staff to recognise the learning potential in everyday work activities such that they come to see these as learning opportunities in themselves. However, the manager can significantly extend and deepen such learning through purposefully working with staff to reflect critically on their experiences and to thereby draw out key lessons for practice. Researchers have also pointed to the role of leaders and managers as role models of learning for their staff (Ellinger and Cseh, 2007: 445; Sambrook, 2005: 104). A manager who is obviously continuously learning should be an inspiration for the learning of reports. More directly, managers contribute to learning through sensitivity to individual subjectivities in learning priorities and style, through being approachable, using a supportive style and through coaching and mentoring activities. Perhaps of most significance, individual leaders create a culture for learning (Marsick, 2009: 271) if they are tolerant of appropriate risk taking and encourage experimentation. To enable truly expansive learning environments where new knowledge is systematically generated by teams, managers need to facilitate team working ensuring the right mix of ability and experience in the team and open, dialogical communication among members (Eraut, 2011: 196). While there is therefore, considerable commentary on the roles of leaders and line managers in enabling and facilitating informal learning in the workplace there is, as noted in the introduction, only limited empirical evidence of managers’ influences on learning. The paper turns now to explain how the empirical evidence, which is the key contribution of the current research, was generated.

Methodology and Research Setting

The empirical investigation adopted a qualitative, interpretivist stance in line with the exploratory aims of the inquiry, to gain deep understanding of leadership and management in action. While this methodology precludes establishing a cause-effect relationship, it has had the benefit of engendering rich and nuanced data. The research involved photo-elicitation interviews with managers within two specific local authorities as detailed below and can therefore be classified as having facets of both a case-study and cross-sectional survey design. Respondents were asked to compile a portfolio of ten images ahead of the interviews around the themes of “being and becoming the manager or leader you are today”. Photo-elicitation enabled more considered and reflective responses to the research themes than typically occurs in interviews alone. Interviews were conducted once respondents reported that their portfolios were complete. A draft interview schedule had been prepared, fleshing out the theme question of the research. However, this schedule

proved largely redundant because of the extent and quality of the dialogue engendered by respondents’ images.

Analysis of the data was largely inductive and borrowed elements from the grounded theory approach (Reissner, 2010: 288) and, as Parry (1991: 134) noted, ‘grounded theory is a research methodology in which theory emerges from, and is grounded in, the data’. The first stage of data analysis began after the initial interviews had been conducted, with descriptive codes being devised inductively from a close reading of respondents’ narratives. New descriptive codes were added and existing codes refined as more transcripts were analysed and transcripts that had already been coded were revisited. At the next analytical stage descriptive codes were compared and contrasted with themes from the literature which allowed more interpretive, theoretically informed, codes to be established. The third and final stage of analysis involved exploring certain relationships through compiling matrix displays.

The research setting comprised two local-authorities in England’s north-west region who had both established a management education partnership with a local university. Corporate MBAs were the key elements of these education partnerships. The MBAs were distinct from generic MBAs in comprising foundation modules covering the public sector policy context and individual and organisational learning methods. The two local-authorities were similar in being more progressive than the norm and both were characterised by positive member-officer relations such that the CEOs and senior officers had a clear mandate from their political masters to engender organisational transformation through strong, individualised, leadership.

A purposive or theoretical sampling approach was adopted and all manager-students and recent graduates of the corporate MBA programmes were approached to participate in this research study. Of these ninety four manager-students and graduates approached, twenty nine volunteered to participate. The respondents were mostly in middle management roles reporting to directors or assistant directors of service and with managerial staff reporting to them. The average age of respondents was forty-one years and the average length of management experience was nine and a half years. That the respondents were self-selecting might be of concern, although the participant group broadly reflected the composition of the cohorts suggesting that the findings have some more general relevance. While, no claim is made as to the “representativeness” of the respondents, the group did reflect the diversity of local authority middle management roles across the spectrum of services provided by large, single-tier, local authorities in England. Interview data was analysed on an on-going basis and category ‘saturation’ became evident as the interviews progressed (Crescentini and Mainardi, 2009: 436). Therefore, it can be asserted that the number of respondents was sufficient to provide good validity.

The researcher was programme director for the MBA degree which the respondents were studying or had recently completed. However, few of the respondents had been taught by the researcher and no respondent was either a student of the researcher during the time of the research or was scheduled to be taught by the researcher. Therefore, the data is unlikely to have been significantly contaminated by the researcher’s practitioner role.

Findings

The case-study enables a picture to be developed of the diverse ways in which the respondent leaders were typically developing both individuals and teams and this picture is developed below. Firstly, however, the data enables an assessment of the contribution of MBA study in prompting respondents to prioritise learning and development for themselves and their reporting staff. Comparison with readily available data from the outset of the programme suggests that MBA study had enabled respondents to re-conceptualise their roles, prioritising people over processes. At the outset of the MBA programme all delegates were set an exploratory exercise to prioritise their management activities and tasks. Invariably, the highest priorities were operational and process focussed. “Meeting deadlines”, “achieving results” and “performance management” were typically prioritised by delegates. For instance, one delegate was not untypical in emphasising that in her work “you have to be very task focussed”. However, the respondents in the current research, who had, as noted, mostly graduated from the MBA, overwhelmingly emphasised the relative importance of people over process with fully eighty per-cent of the data pertaining to issues of leading and developing people. One senior environment manager thus reflected that understanding and developing people;

“Wasn’t something that I could do easily before the MBA; that is in the early days, because I was a bit task orientated”.

Moreover, the MBA had prompted respondents to reflect upon the distinction between being managers and being leaders. Specifically, respondents acknowledged that defining facets of leadership were initiating and implementing change towards a clear shared vision. Moreover, it was recognised that leadership so defined required more than anything the ability to engender change through enabling the learning of individuals and teams. For instance, a senior highways manager remarked, “empowerment is now my priority”.

Leading the learning of others requires managers to be learners themselves and MBA study had enabled respondents to become more proactive learners themselves. A social work manager was typical in asserting that the MBA had raised her awareness of the need for;

“Always keeping up with what’s happening and learning new things … continuous learning and organisational learning have become my passion”.

The MBA particularly contributed to this open attitude to learning through preparing delegates to be lifelong learners through purposeful and extensive critical-reflection on experience and action learning in the generation of new knowledge. Certain respondents noted directly that this attitude was the key differentiator between the small but growing cadre of MBA educated managers within their authority and the rest of the management group. The research interviews revealed respondents’ ability for rigorous, honest and critical reflection and the construction of far-reaching lessons from their experiences of management.

In being proactive learners themselves, there is evidence that the leaders were role-modelling learning for their teams just as many respondents reported that their own managers had role-modelled learning for them. For instance, one respondent reflected a range of opinion in remarking;

“I’m fairly fortunate in that I’ve always had supportive managers who’ve wanted to develop me and who have seen my potential … one in particular, really set me off on my current career”.

Another respondent reflected that, as a leader;“It’s not just about my own learning; I want the team to be continuously learning too and there is no better way to achieve this than them seeing me as a learner myself”.

A senior HR manager in one of the authorities remarked on how she now attempted to disseminate her own learning directly among her team. However, this manager also reflected that as a busy professional with a family, the “ lively” interest in learning among her team was attributable to an attitude that “if she can do it, so can I”.

Many respondents acknowledged the limited availability of formal training within local government noting that the only training available was that which was, “directly related to the existing requirements of your job”. Therefore, the respondents overwhelmingly accepted that the onus was on them to ensure that development occurred for their teams and as a result of the MBA and most enabled learning through a range of workplace learning interventions within their personal control. The data summary table, table 1, that follows summarises the evidence of the interventions of respondent leaders in the current study to enabling and facilitating workplace learning using the typology devised by Rodgers et al. (2003).

Table 1: Data Summary Table – Learning Interventions and Incidents in each quadrant

Learning Interventions Incidents & Respondents Reporting

Quadrant 1(Individual–Specified)

Formal training: available coursesSupporting experiential learningRe-structuring work: Broadening job responsibilities (job enlargement)

Re-structuring work: Delegating or deepening job responsibilities (job enrichment)

Coaching / Role modelling

6 & 68 & 56 & 5

12 & 12

18 & 15

Quadrant 2(Individual-Emergent)

Coaching / Role modelling Experimentation and risk takingRe-structuring work: Delegating or deepening job responsibilities

Mentoring for career development

18 & 15 8 & 68 & 8

16 & 11Quadrant 3(Collective-Specified)

Formal training: commissioning courses

Re-structuring work to team basis

3 & 3

19 & 18

Quadrant 4(Collective-Emergent)

Re-structuring work to team basis

Autonomy to teams for problem solving

Sharing teams’ solutions more widely in the organisation and beyond

19 & 18 12 & 10

6 & 6

Overall, an average of three of the learning interventions detailed in the above table were evident in each respondent’s narrative with, as will be discussed, more of the Quadrant 2 and 4 interventions evident in the narrative of respondents whose operations were facing the most substantial change. As might be expected the leaders whose accounts evidence the strongest developmental orientation were those leading people professions such as social work and education. Nonetheless, certain individuals in highly technical areas such as engineering or legal services and at the most strategic of levels also evidenced numerous interventions to ensure individual and team learning.

Beattie’s (2006) work reveals a wide range of line-manager motivations for prioritising staff development interventions. The findings in the current study show how austerity had focussed leader’s motivation for staff development which aimed to ensure flexibility and effectiveness to ensure change and survival. Much of the leaders’ activity located within Quadrants 2 and 4 of the typology. An adult social services manager encapsulated feeling in her remark;

“With all the cuts we’ve got to make, we can’t be carrying people and we have more than ever to do with less and less resource”.

A widespread belief was evident that learning was vital for organisational survival, change and growth. Another social work manager was typical in noting;

“If we are not constantly learning, we will not be able to make the continuous service improvements that are needed here … we have to learn to be flexible and agile”.

Numerous respondents spoke of staff development in terms of “an investment” and of the positive “rate of return” on this investment not least in terms of “service survival”. However, in light of the threat of redundancies or redeployment, several leaders spoke of using development to ensure the employability of their staff. Moreover, there was a general feeling that specific learning interventions needed to prompt self-sustaining learning with individuals taking responsibility for their own learning. Achieving this outcome would, it was believed, build staff commitment and engagement and thereby enhance the participation of all staff in service developments. A more instrumental motivation pertained to the use of development opportunities to re-motivate staff experiencing a central government imposed pay-freeze. However, as noted, in view of the constrained resources, many respondents recognised that learning and development would need to engendered informally and that they themselves would have to assume an important role in this process.

Staff development and providing support for individuals and teams were strongly expressed priorities and accepted as personal responsibilities by virtually all respondents even those operating at a wholly strategic level. Indeed, many respondents contrasted a “directing” and a “coaching” style using this distinction to differentiate themselves from non-MBA educated managers in their workplaces. However, many felt a tension between the pressures of their day-to-day responsibility for the delivery of results and the need for people development. For instance, an environmental services manager emphasised how, for her, leadership “should” be about;

“Getting the most out of the team through developing them for our long-term success”.

This respondent regretted, though, that in reality she was “pulled away” from such activity by the routine pressures of her job.

The above manager was also typical in proceeding to reflect that while emphasising development for all, she was nonetheless sensitive to individual differences. It was widely acknowledged that what would be development for one person would be a burden for another. There was a strong sense shared by many respondents that development needed to be closely tailored not only to individuals’ learning priorities but also to their capabilities and motivations within a supportive context. Supporting individuals was widely interpreted as involving, more than anything else, “caring” for staff and “understanding” their feelings and what was happening in their lives and such sentiments are almost universal throughout the data. Nonetheless, many respondents emphasised that a real leadership challenge lay in enabling staff who were defined by one as “hard cases”, to grow and develop through having “those difficult conversations”. Whereas some respondents felt that in such cases their role was to “open doors” and “not push staff through”, others felt a need to be more active. Perhaps reflecting his professional background, a senior educational manager thus noted;

“I put a little bit of extra work into people who are perhaps reluctant to change so as to build their confidence, turn them around and bring them gradually up to speed”.

Turning to examine the ways in which the respondent managers enabled staff development. Reflecting the diagnosis of learning style preferences that had occurred on the MBA, there was a strong awareness of the need to match both the particular learning outcomes required and individuals’ learning styles with specific learning mechanisms. A range of learning mechanisms were typically identified and many respondents were disparaging of the tradition of course “delivery” by central development units in local government. A senior IT manager was critical that;

“Too many people in this council think of staff development just in terms of training. We have to think more broadly about getting learning into the workplace”.

Certain respondents reported that they had commissioned formal training for particular groups of staff facing a shared challenge such as implementing a new policy directive or that they had “persuaded” individual staff to participate in corporate training programmes. However, these respondents were keen to emphasise that they gave attention to ensure learning transfer by, for example, holding de-briefing meetings with staff after the training event.

While half the respondents asserted that “coaching” was a key facet of their leadership, activities, evidence the use of coaching were evident in all respondents’ accounts. Thus, for example, most respondents illustrated or spoke of working one-to-one with staff and assisting them in reflecting upon and learning from their experiences, providing both positive and constructively developmental feedback, giving guidance and enabling staff to set realistic goals, targets and timescales for improvement. A finance manager was typical in remarking how he attempted to enable individuals to;

“Get under the skin of what happened, figure out why and do something about it within a realistic timescale for them”.

This manager captured certain attitudinal prerequisites to coaching that were evident in several accounts, in stressing that he tried to ensure “honesty” and make staff feel “accepted and valued”.

While much of the respondents’ coaching effort was directed towards enabling staff to become more effective in existing ways of working such as enabling their learning of established procedures, certain respondents were keen to encourage individuals’ expansive, or generative, learning. Such leaders encouraged experimentation through creating a “no blame culture”. A health manager was representative in remarking;

“You want to encourage people to try new things, have a go, stretch themselves … to feel safe and supported about taking a few, calculated risks”.

Similarly, a HR manager reflected the views of many in noting that she was prepared to support staff doing what they thought was right;

“I might be telling somebody to go left but they might be wanting to go right. If they make a good case for going right, I’ll support them with going right”.

Also with a view to enabling individuals to learn expansively, one third of respondents’ accounts reveal their mentoring of reporting staff. These managers demonstrated their sensitivity to “potential” and “talent”. “Pushing”, or at least “prodding”, were words that frequently occurred as respondents described working one-to-one with staff to enable them to “get the best out of themselves” and achieve the same high standards that the leaders typically set for themselves. Respondents typically took action to raise individuals’ awareness of career options and build the confidence of particular individuals enabling them to map their capability and potential against the requirements of promoted posts. In certain cases respondents were able to create career openings for staff with potential and thereby retain the talent and “grow the business”. Many respondents recognised that seeing reporting staff move onwards an upwards in the organisation beyond their own leadership positions, could be perceived as a threat. However, such respondents typically saw these moves as reflecting their own success as leaders. In this vein, a regeneration manager remarked that his job was to;

“Make sure that everyone who works for me now doesn’t in the future … that’s the biggest kick I can get from my work”.

Such views extended both to staff moving up within the existing authority or outside of the council and many respondents told stories with pride of staff they had “brought on” and who were now the most senior of leaders. Similarly, it was widely remarked, that the need to recruit externally into promoted posts was a sign of the failure of leaders to develop talent.

While it was acknowledged that local government organisations were both strongly hierarchical and silo-ed, the respondents generally showed ingenuity in working within these structures to re-design the work of individuals and teams to ensure learning and development. Certain of the respondents thus contrived a ‘workplace curriculum’ (Thornton Moore, 2004), breaking with traditional divisions of labour and involving the careful re-ordering of work experiences to give staff exposure to activities and practices that enabled the social construction of knowledge-in-use. For example, staff were either informally re-deployed or the remit of their jobs expanded horizontally or vertically depending on the learning needs and priorities of the individual concerned. Through ensuring that staff interacted with a wider range of stakeholders, a broader perspective could be developed and such job-enlargement was evident in a number of accounts. However, job-enrichment, through delegation, was a more widely occurring development tactic involving, not untypically, staff being entrusted with responsibility and autonomy for particular projects that the respondent leader themselves would normally have led. In this way, the learners were moving much deeper into the body of knowledge of practice than their designated role would normally allow and can be seen to have been progressing through a process of legitimate, peripheral participation (Lave and Wenger, 1991). A social care manager was typical in remarking;

“I’ve built this department up through giving those people who can take it, lots of autonomy, authority and trust and letting people find the right way of doing things for themselves. But it is not simply about letting go; it is about being around to provide support and advice as and when they need it”.

Respondent managers were conscious that in the environments they all faced demands for improved efficiency through cuts and for improved effectiveness

through new ways of working were pervasive. Therefore, the survival of their services depended upon change as never before. Many respondents spoke specifically of their setting ever higher and “demanding” targets not so much for individuals but for teams and of encouraging innovation to meet these moving targets. Therefore, learning in the fourth quadrant, that is, socially expansive learning, was being prioritised. However, as noted, local government was traditionally characterised by hierarchical relationships and entrenched power structures with decisions made and imposed from senior levels. Nonetheless, the manager-respondents in the current study indicated that public sector reforms over the last decade combined with austerity had created some scope for local initiative in the interpretation and implementation of policy if not in actual policy formulation. A high proportion of the respondents recognised their role in providing direction or vision but also spoke strongly of their efforts to involve staff at all levels in driving innovation. Such respondents spoke of fostering distributed leadership, a leadership style that was “inclusive, collaborative” and “egalitarian”. Typically, these respondents were keen to nurture teams with several respondents explicitly asserting their desire to build “communities of practice” around particular emerging challenges that their services faced. Thornton-Moore (2004) noted how the ‘articulation’ of individuals’ tasks and an ‘open labour process’ served to expose knowledge-use and prompted the expansion of the collective knowledge base (335-336).

Many of the managers in this study were concerned not only to foster individual expertise as has been shown but to promote the sharing of expertise and the collective development of new ideas. For example, a social work manager was typical of the more experienced respondents in emphasising;

“I have ensured that they are all experts in their own areas and I strongly believe that the most significant innovations in this department have emerged from the team themselves”.

In a similar vein, an environment manager asserted;“I try to position myself not as someone who leads from the front but, rather, as someone who leads from within. My role is not to be telling the team what to do and taking them there but getting them to tell me what they think is best and then enabling them to achieve their solution. That's the way we learn. My role is simply to make sure that the job gets done”.

Respondents were particularly concerned to foster team interaction and encourage “frequent conversations about the work itself”. Several respondents referred specifically to their promotion of “genuine dialogue”. As one respondent noted, dialogue was quite different from discussion in that;

“Through dialogue, asking fundamental questions and challenging assumptions, we are more likely to reach genuinely new solutions than through the ‘axe-grinding’ discussions that typify this council”.

Several distinct service innovations and process improvements were apparent in respondents’ narratives, indicative of such socially expansive learning through dialogue. Thus, for instance, a youth social-work manager’s portfolio contained an image of an ice-cream van with two of her social-worker colleagues distributing ice-cream cones. Reflecting on this image, the respondent noted how her staff had participated in a multi-agency team with police, education and health professional colleagues with delegated authority to consider how deliver various “messages” to

early teenage kids during the schools’ long summer holidays. From a series of “open, no holes barred” meetings which the respondent-manager had “facilitated”, the team had distilled out for themselves from various national and local policy guidance both the elements of advice which they felt were most needed by young teenagers in their area and the approach to channelling that advice through ice-cream sales.

Discussion and Conclusions

The research questions driving this inquiry were to reveal to what extent and how leaders engender or enhance learning in the workplace particularly during a time of austerity using a small, in-depth, case-study approach. The findings enable strong conclusions to be drawn on these research questions and the closely related question which was also considered of the leaders’ own learning. Turning first, to conclude briefly on this latter question of the leaders’ own learning, the findings show that the design of the MBA which the respondents had all studied, with its foundation module covering individual and organisational learning, prompted the respondents to prioritise and actively manage their own learning and not just that of their teams. It was seen that the respondents were proactive lifelong learners and the findings themselves evidence a particular degree of critical reflexivity. Whereas at the outset of their MBA study, the respondents might have positioned themselves as the font of all knowledge in their operation, they had come to recognise that the most worthwhile leadership capability was that of being a capable learner. The much criticised MBA contribution (see for example Mintzberg, 2004) therefore needs questioning in the light of this first conclusion.

The current study has then served to affirm assertions such as those of Eraut (2011: 207) that substantial vocational learning occurs within the workplace as a bi-product of normal work processes. However, the findings refine and extend this understanding. It can be concluded that in a time of austerity leaders go out of their way to engender workplace learning both recognising the need for learning to ensure organisational performance and survival and acknowledging the limited availability of formal training or its relevance for these goals. Leaders have therefore been prompted to accept personal responsibility for staff development perhaps more than ever before. Moreover, the leader must show particular sensitivity to individual diffences and ensure that learning is targeted and tailored appropriately.

As noted, considerable learning occurs as a by-product of working. However, as was discussed, a number of researchers find that firstly, workplaces differ significantly in the affordances for and constraints upon naturally occurring learning (see for example, Billett, 2004; Fuller and Unwin, 2011; Illeris, 2011) and secondly, that line-managers have a significant role in engendering or inhibiting workplace learning (Ashton, 2004: Eraut, 2011). Learning rich workplaces result from the right affordances and from learning aware and capable leadership. Such workplaces are characterised by learning occurring widely for individuals and groups and by the achievement of both predetermined and expansive outcomes.

The typologies of learning interventions model (Rodgers et al., 2003) proved highly useful in analysing the purposes and forms of formal and informal learning methods

used by leaders in ensuring particular types of workplace learning outcomes. The established literature focuses mainly on explicating line-managers’ actions in support of individual learning (Quadrants One and Three) and it can be concluded that considerable activity was occurring in local government in this way. Thus, the local government leaders were role modelling learning for their staff (Ellinger and Cseh, 2007: 445; Sambrook, 2005: 104), were re-designing work to provide variety and challenge and to aid skills formation (Ashton, 2004: 52) and were enabling staff, through coaching, to recognise and fully realise the learning potential in dynamically evolving everyday work activities (Eraut, 2011: 187). In short, it can be concluded that the sort of leaders in question were capable of engendering a culture of workplace learning for individuals (Marsick, 2009: 271) to more efficiently conduct existing operations in a context of resource pressures.

A further, more far reaching conclusion pertains to the work of the case-study leaders in enabling generative learning for their orgnanisational units and such learning capability has, as yet, received only limited attention in the literature. Many of the leaders were seen to be fostering 'high involvement work practices' (Fuller and Unwin, 2011) such as non-hierarchical, autonomous team working, involvement and participation practices including ensuring open and honest dialogue. The leaders were fostering the emergence of solutions from teams which contrasted significantly with the hierarchical, top-down norm of problem solving in their organisations. It can be concluded that a certain leadership identity had been adopted, and the leaders were perceiving themselves not so much as omnipotent fixers but more as enablers of the capability and potential within others.

While qualitative research such as that reported here is exploratory in intent and cannot provide verifiable explanations, certain relationships are strongly evident in the data. Thus, for example, those respondents who were facing relatively stable environments and had predominantly inexperienced teams were generally most likely to emphasise coaching and job enlargement to get staff “up to speed”. By contrast, those respondents working in similar environments but with well established staff were giving more attention to job enrichment and mentoring for career development to enable staff to best achieve their potential and maintain their motivation. Thornton-Moore (2004: 338) suggested that high intensity and fast paced change might not be conducive to workplace learning. By contrast, the findings in the current study show a correlation between the extent or degree of strategic change facing particular respondents’ service areas and the expansive learning interventions, interventions in quadrants two and four, most evident in respondents’ accounts. For example, those leaders whose teams were required to work across agencies, gave considerable attention to the structuring of work around autonomous teams to ensure expansive learning. In sum, the leaders were central in building Organisational Learning Capability through managing their own learning, through understanding and motivating individuals and teams for learning and through creating environments for learning through both direct learning interventions such as coaching and through indirect actions, such as job re-design and team working, where learning was a significant coincidental outcome.

However, certain limitations of the current study must be acknowledged as a basis for further research. Firstly, although the data was generated from just two broad, general questions and did not prompt specifically about leaders’ role as developers

of staff, the respondents were aware of the researcher as an educationalist and this awareness may well have steered the composition of respondents’ portfolios and their interview narrative. Secondly, as discussed, the respondents’ MBA study had clearly alerted them to their roles as lifelong learners and as leaders of learning. However, the majority of managers in UK organisations have not received formal management education. Thirdly, the staff who were the subjects of the manager respondents’ development activities, were themselves typically either managers or professionals and might, therefore, be regard as atypical of the UK workforce, not least in their undoubted readiness for learning. Fourthly, the perspectives of these recipients of learning needs some consideration to balance the partial, and inevitably benign “view from above” that has been at the heart of this study. Therefore, future research will require methods to discover a range of perspectives on leaders and managers’ influences on workplace learning and methods such as diary keeping or blogging which are more neutral. Moreover, a longitudinal study involving a range of non-MBA educated managers would be particularly revelatory of the realities of leaders’ leading workplace learning.

Nonetheless, certain implications for development policy and practice can be asserted on the basis of the current findings. It has long been recognised that organisational HRD specialists need to be concerned less with offering training and more with enabling learning (Sambrook and Stewart, 2000: 217; Ashton, 2004: 47). The conclusions of this study indicate that this trend needs to continue but with HRD specialists working more directly with managers to leverage the learning in everyday working and work settings. However, it is still the case as a number of researchers have found over the years (Ellinger and Cseh, 2007: 449; Heraty and Morley, 1995; Hyman and Cunningham 1998: 105) that most managers, even MBA educated managers, are not specifically educated to consciously take control of their own learning or to lead the learning of others. Therefore, manager education for learning is needed. Ellström, Ekholm and Ellström (2008: 84) asserted the need to ‘to initiate programmes for leadership development with a main focus on how to organise and lead workplace learning’. Such programmes would need to raise awareness of the relative importance of informal workplace learning and of the various actions ancillary to everyday management that can promote or suppress learning. Specifically, more emphasis is needed in manager education on understanding individuals as learners. Understanding is needed of learning motivation, learning concerns and learning styles. Instruction is needed in developing in others the skills of reflective practice and experiential learning and in appreciating how job re-design can fulfil diverse learning needs. Coaching skills development is now a typical feature of manager education programmes. However, further development of the related mentoring capabilities and assisting staff with career development would be appropriate. Finally, the importance of socially expansive learning occurring within workplace communities of practice must be acknowledged and actions to seed communities of practice considered (Allix, 2011: 145). Finally and most importantly, manager education must strive to cultivate a form of leadership identity wherein leadership is synonymous with the leadership of learning and the construction of organisational learning capability.

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