Interview with Sebastian Reiche
The Prometheus Project Interview with Sebastian Reiche, IESE Business School, Barcelona
Sebastian Reiche is the distinguished professor and career-long researcher on the high-order construct of leading in a global context. He is a professor and Department Head at the top-ranked IESE business school and an active contributor in IESE’s executive and post-degree education. Prof Reiche has been a key advisor and contributor in Prometheus’ original research around its leadership framework.
Prometheus: Dr. Reiche, Sebastian, tell us about your background. What brought you to the subject of leadership?
Reiche: I started working in quite a different area, consulting in the financial re-engineering of business organizations. That work was rewarding but often in difficult circumstances. I realized that the technical difficulties were rarely the toughest problems, and that the key issues were always people issues. It was one of those insights that I had very early on. More than this, my interest was drawn to the global dimensions of people and relationships, people issues in complex organizations … and how do you make-sense, connect with people across distances, and in different cultures and contexts.
The second thing that brought me to this point and perspective is my academic career here at IESE, where I have been a professor for the last 13 years, and now head the Department of Managing People in Organizations, doing research on the global aspects of leadership, teaching in our degree programs and executive education[end note 1], and working with companies on these issues.
Especially in our executive programs, I am always engaging with senior people who have to lead in a volatile, global and culturally diverse context. These experiences give me continuous insights into their experience, testing ideas and learn with executives to meet the more complex challenges of a global, distant context.
Prometheus: What is the subject around leading that you most focus on?
Reiche: Over the last five years, one of my main lines of research has been specifically focused on the roles and attributes of a global leader, those high-order capacities and skills that are critical to leading in these extremes. That work spans research, degree and executive education and professional collaborations.
In this focus there is a continuous experience around the leadership competency literature – it is very messy!
There is a lot of reference in the press and discussion in conferences to global leadership, but it does not seem there is sufficient clarity. If you ask for clarification, people hesitate. Everyone has a very different idea of what global leaders are. It makes it very difficult, very challenging to actually understand what we can do to help lead more effectively. This challenge of clarity extends to a lot of research.
Prometheus: Tell me more about the messiness that you mention.
Reiche: In a nutshell, as researchers, we tend to add more competencies where we already have more than most of us can process or apply. I think that what we forget is to bring them together into something that is more manageable but also more adaptable to the context we are leading in (or will be).
This makes it very difficult for people to understand, to apply across challenges and transfer over job changes and across contexts. For leadership development, there is a difficulty clearly differentiating between capacities (which have a longer development) and skills (which are more easily learned). Yes, it becomes very difficult for people to understand but also to understand each other. It becomes very difficult for people to apply in a systemic and cohesive way.
Prometheus: That certainly leads to the conversation around the Prometheus Leadership Commons framework. You have been one of the people who has advised that process and the framework. How does it relate to better addressing these challenges of so much disarray and detail?
Reiche: The framework certainly does exactly that: a manageable core set of items that are generalizable. Having the framework’s meta-structures is a key factor for agility. The design of its structure allows you to navigate between subjects and level of detail with some confidence that you are maintaining consistency. Communication and understanding can be designated at a much clearer and at a specific level.
The framework does not include all of the details. It intends to provide a structure to think and collaborate about more specific details and to think and collaborate at meta-levels. However, it is comprehensive. For example, it frames this differentiation between capacities and skills, which I mentioned. It frames both early developmental capabilities as well as complex ones, such as I find exposed in global leading.
I very much like the features of personal capacities that are included. Just earlier today, I was running a workshop on helping leaders be more self-aware. I introduced the idea of core qualities or capacities that can be developed. They are companions to intellectual knowledge and skills. In the context of leading, these capacities are used side by side with skills.
We are sometimes guilty of holding too much separation, in most mindsets and even our management programs, between developing leaders or managers and developing us as human beings. The reality of our experience is that there is not a separation between our strengths and our struggles individually and in our family lives and what we do at work. It is necessary that we identify the parts of who we are and where we need to grow in this way, too.
So the Prometheus framework captures these dimensions, The Capacity to BE, to KNOW and to LOVE, that are about developing who we are on the one side of the framework, balanced by the skills that we use in Engaging task and relationship and results.
Prometheus: The framework has six broad domains that are further defined in twenty-nine sub-domains. Is there some of the twenty-nine sub-domains that are of most interest to you?
Reiche: In general, if you look back at the history of leadership theory and development, we have undervalued the capacities to be self-aware, the Capacity to BE. It is the case of the metaphor of the oxygen mask in an in-flight emergency. On a flight, the attendant will go through this. We should put on our own masks first before we help those in need. Similarly, we need to understand ourselves as leaders, as persons, as human beings, before we can aspire to coach, develop, lead, and relate to others.
This goes for all leadership, but in a global context where there is so much layered interpersonal complexity, you are presented with even more differences between your self-experience and the wider context. Even more, things are reduced to a human level as the common equalizer, where connections are made and communication is opened. I think that, for me, this is a very fundamental, foundational capacity. Leading in the global context brings a high-demand and a high consciousness for personal self-awareness and capacities.
Prometheus: Is there something else?
The combinations of the skills to Engage PEOPLE and the Capacity to LOVE are two areas of the Prometheus framework that I really appreciate. They bring attention to how you connect with others, from that strength of self-awareness.
I think that in many cases, we try to cut out personal connections from our work relationships. We tend to put this aside.
I think we’ve also seen this over the months of this crisis, that engagement (over Zoom) is very task-focused. We perceive we are getting things done, being efficient. However, is this task focus sustainable?
It is part of the job of leading to make the inner and emotional side acceptable, to make people comfortable with these subjects and experience, and to demonstrate the strength of these capacities in an effective way.
Prometheus: It is gratifying, actually, that the framework seems to resonate for you and seems to be an easy way for you to do that navigation.
Prometheus: I want to pivot a bit from the Prometheus framework to the kinds of settings that it would be used in. What is your perspective on where the framework could be used?
Reiche: I think part of its usefulness is that is a tool that can be applicable to anyone, for executives, but not only executives. It can apply in any context where you have some kind of leadership responsibility.
In start-ups, you have leadership as well as technical responsibilities. In organizations, we are pushing responsibilities much much further down the hierarchy. So, a higher number of people are taking (or need to take) leadership responsibility. This ties to the whole idea around agile practices and more pockets of leadership.
Because we want to have leadership capacities more broadly, that means that we have to develop earlier. The framework can achieve that and open (even just) thinking about leadership, in another way that we can in business school where people tend to have more experience.
The framework might also support this focus much earlier—even in secondary schools, some of the meta-competencies are relevant.
These early kinds of development, well before executive and management challenges, have immediate value in those bounded contexts as well as for better preparing executives. Keeping a focus on later career stages only – I think this is a mistake.
For example, I do a lot of work with professionals in research and development units and often receive feedback that they have hardly any leadership training. So, there is a need for having a framework that is broad, that is united across roles and dimensions.
There is certainly attention to these competencies in business school but that attention could—it should—be started much earlier and more broadly. We prepare those we expect to be in executive positions, but we need a broader approach. The framework will support this.
Prometheus: You are saying that you see a framework as a key factor for broader and earlier development that is not fragmented but part of a whole. In addition, you are saying that the Prometheus Leadership Commons is a very compelling framework with a useful and credible design. What do you see as the necessary strategies to adopt the framework?
Reiche: Of course, to achieve this you need broad visibility and engagement with intention in the professional community. There needs to be some center, or organizing structure for this.
So yes, the forum of the Prometheus Project is also an important component [end note 2].
The intention for the forum to be an open network and inclusive of disciplines and perspectives, and independent or with balanced interests, this is setting a high bar – in a good way. The moment you close it, or narrow it, you are lowering the bar and creating walls to contributors who could be useful. Your goal is to knit the fragmentation, so all of the parts have to be in the network. This presents opportunities as well as challenges.
It is important that the framework that you introduce now needs to stay in this form and at the current level of abstraction for some period. Let the lower detail levels work-through from different perspectives, with the contrasts, comparisons and integrations that can occur with some fixed or semi-stable reference. Then, as people use the framework in their own context, as they apply it, they come back to the community.
Prometheus: So you think the framework and the community should work together to support the application of the framework?
Reiche: For the Prometheus Project to reach the effect of its purpose, to reach its promise, it will have to grow constituents to be adopted widely, and for that, yes there has to be a community.
The community will be able to show case studies, success and learnings. Realistically, there is also an expectation of further insights brought from that community to sustain and improve any framework. The more diverse this community and experience the better.
Case studies can be quite a range of applied experiences. Higher-order learning often involves making comparisons, contrasts and synthesis. It also involves application and learning in action.
Right now, most exchanges around theory, for example between the ideas of Authentic Leadership vs Transformational Leadership, are not very rewarding. There is often the kind of non-productive tit-for-tat and effort to dominate one theory over another, which we would call-out in an organization. With the framework, there is an independent, safe ground for participants to use in the discussion; to open ideas and provide a way to learn more and understand each other more. For example, to what extent does Authentic Leadership focus differently on the skills of Engage Challenges than Transformational Leadership; or, to what extent does Authentic Leadership define leadership as more of a set of personal capacities (without skills)?
I would be very interested in a larger organization using the framework to design or acquire leadership support at every level, earlier in a career, suited to the person and the job, and leveraging its culture for learning. It is common to see larger organizations drawing on business schools or consultancies for their executive development and on internal learning and development teams for the larger group of employees, maybe through a high-potential program. While a multi-pronged approach makes complete sense, the reality is that there is a lot of friction in this approach that limits flow and efficacy. The Prometheus framework is an example of a unifying set of meta-structures that can integrate and open more flow across these approaches.
The forum will bring in a bigger range of organizations, from global corporate to start-ups and nonprofits, to social and economic justice, and faith, each with very different leadership contexts. The components of the framework are very well structured to fit all of those contexts. Having some case examples in the communities would be very helpful for both recognizing and then applying the meta-structures.
For example, having cases that apply the framework and that address diverse areas such as: LEAN and Agile practice, customer service, technical product development, community organizing, or social service could quickly open a realization of common elements of leadership across what are now groups that are foreign to each other.
In business schools, we tend to, legitimately, focus on the business context for leading, and this is the domain of who we are serving. Many smaller companies, and other non-business communities, would never have that opportunity. Therefore, we sometimes lose our awareness that these leadership capacities, at least at the meta-level, should be universal.
As experience grows, we begin to see common ground, instead of difference. This is a big part of the promise of the framework as it is exposed and influenced in the community.
I think that what we live with now is a bit of an illusion—one that feeds the fragmentation that we spoke of at the start—that all of these communities have different fragments or versions of what is ultimately a common story that is simply hidden.
The framework should open discussion, learning and exploration—because it provides a boundary for inquiry where integration within sub-domains and domains, and the distinction between related details can be clarified. The Prometheus forum is an excellent place for that discussion, learning and exploration.
Prometheus: What are the possibilities that you see for using the framework in the field? What case examples do you imagine?
Reiche: As I had mentioned earlier, the framework conceives leadership as a set of meta-competencies and at that level, those competencies would be more transferable across any context, but also be excellent receptors for more skills and more personal development over time.
In business school programs, a meta-competency is something we might introduce more deliberately. Because of limited time and short program design, we often jump into more narrow blocks of leading. So, there is a focus on shorter modules rather than looking at the whole breadth. Relating them at the sub-domain or meta-domain level would lead to more sense of confidence and efficacy, more resilience when individuals come across the next context or topic. Instead of the inevitable details creating that sense of fragmentation, the resilient response that you want is something like “ah, that fits in”.
As cases become visible in the community, showing those as examples, maybe from the perspective of the Chief Learning Officer, educator, trainer or coach would be useful. I could see roundtables with people who share perspectives, say a round table of Chief Learning Officers; but also across perspectives, for example, adult development, psychotherapy, positive psychology, skills and practices, etc. I think you could open quite a good discussion, moving through these different categories and dimensions. That would be useful.
Prometheus: We really appreciate your engagement, both your challenges and encouragement in The Prometheus Project and its framework and forum.
Reiche: I think we’ve covered a lot, and you have triggered even more thinking about the potential that a common framework can have – a missing catalyst. I think it is very helpful, interesting, and encouraging. Thank you, as well.
IESE’s executive programs have been ranked #1 in the world for six consecutive years by the Financial Times.
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The Prometheus Project
The Prometheus Project is an initiative of executives, researchers, educators and practitioners to bring leadership and leadership development to its potential through collective intelligence, collective influence and collective ambition.
The Prometheus Leadership Commons is a framework to navigate the complex subjects of leading and is available for commercial, educational or personal use free of charge through The Prometheus Project.
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