Background
A pioneering British thinker in the theory and practice of leadership, and the first to occupy a chair in leadership studies in the UK. A Cambridge graduate, Adair worked as a deckhand on an Arctic trawler, and lecturer at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst. He has written more than 25 books on leadership and management development. He worked as a management consultant and ran his own publishing company.
Thinking
Adair's contribution to management thinking is threefold. First, he was the first to demonstrate that people can be trained for leadership as a transferable skill rather than a matter of innate aptitude. Second, he has expanded the concept of management to include the elements of leadership, decision-making, communication, and time management. Third, he defined leadership in terms of three overlapping circles - Task, Team and Individual, and used these as the basis for his teaching concept, Action-Centred Learning (ACL).
Adair says that the ACL model is "emerging in management studies, in effect, as something akin to Einstein's General Theory of Relativity". It does, he says, 'identify the main forces at work in working groups and organisations, and it charts ... their main interrelationships with a degree of predictive accuracy'.
ACL includes much of the teaching on individual human needs which itself originated in the thinking of Abraham Maslow and Frederick Herzberg. It was developed by Adair first at Sandhurst and later at The Industrial Society.
Adair's best-known books on leadership are Effective Leadership, Not Bosses But Leaders and Great Leaders, a study of the leadership qualities of figures from history. He says his 'mission' is to be 'in the forefront of long-term management thinking' and to integrate management concepts to better effect.
John Adair goes to etymological roots to explain the crucial difference between 'leading' and 'managing'. This was explained in his interview in Director magazine (November 1988). He said Leadership is about a sense of direction. The word 'lead' comes from an Anglo-Saxon word, common to north European languages, which means a road, a way, the path of a ship at sea. It is knowing what the next step is. Managing is a different idea. It is from the Latin manus, a hand. Historically, this referred to handling a sword, ship or animal. It tends to be closely linked with control, efficiency and optimisation. Managing had its origins in the 19th century with engineers and accountants who operated and controlled entrepreneurial units. They would describe the units they worked in in terms of systems.
While managing expresses the idea of controlling, particularly financial, and administration, Leaders are not necessarily good at administration or managing resources. Leaders are good at inspiring others. "That's tied in with the leader's own enthusiasm and commitment and with the ability to communicate and share that enthusiasm with others and to enthuse them. It's not quite the same as motivation, which is something that's learned about in the business schools, a rather mechanical thing. And leadership is about, teamwork, creating teams. Teams tend to have leaders, leaders tend to create teams. Finally, you can be appointed a manager, but you're not a leader until your appointment is ratified in the hearts and minds of those who work for you. There's got to be a degree of acceptance of you by followers that is not necessary if you're just holding an appointment".
The importance of the team is at the heart of Adair's leadership theories and his Action-Centred Learning model. He believes that working groups share three areas of common needs: the need to accomplish a common task, the need to be maintained as a cohesive social unit or team, and the sum of the group's individual needs. These form his overlapping three-circle model. Any failure in one area will have an effects on the other two. For example, failure to achieve the task (or lack of a task altogether) will both disrupt the sense of team and lower the level of individual satisfaction. The overlapping circles, maintains Adair, demonstrate "the essential unity of leadership; a single action can be multi-functional in that it touches all areas".
In his book 'Understanding Motivation' (1990), Adair lists the functions of leadership as originally worked out at Sandhurst:
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Planning (seeking all available information: defining group tasks or goals; making a workable plan)
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Initiating (briefing the group; allocating tasks; setting group standards)
Controlling (maintaining group standards; ensuring progress towards objectives; 'prodding' actions and decisions) -
Supporting (expressing acceptance of individual contributions; encouraging and disciplining; creating team spirit; relieving tension with humour; reconciling disagreements)
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Informing (clarifying task and plan; keeping group informed; receiving information from the group; summarizing ideas and suggestions)
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Evaluating (checking feasibility of ideas; testing consequences; evaluating group performance; helping group to evaluate itself)
The functions of leadership are a key component of Adair's integrated ACL theory. The originality of ACL, he says out, lies not in its parts, "none of which were actually brought into their first existence by me", but in their integration into a whole and the application of that whole to training. "By being brought into a new relation with one another, those parts have undergone varying degrees of transformation, which is inevitable in any creative work".
Readers of Adair will notice elements of Maslow's 'hierarchy of needs' and Henri Fayol's definitions of management. In 'Understanding Motivation', Adair proposes his 'Fifty-fifty rule,' a variation on the Pareto Principle, in which he contends that half an individual's motivation comes from within and the other half from external factors, including leadership. This idea contradicts most views on motivation in which the primary source of motivation is seen as coming from the individual themselves. See Maslow and Herzberg.
Adair has applied his Fifty-fifty rule in other contexts, for example in 'Effective Teambuilding' in which suggested that 50 per cent of success depends on the team and 50 per cent on the leader. The Fifty-Fifty Rule is useful to challenge each party to get its performance right before criticising the input or contribution of the other. Adair says it is "the ultimate cure to the 'Us and Them' disease of organisations".
Further research
Adair, J (1983) Effective Leadership, Aldershot: Gower.
Adair, J (1986) Effective Teambuilding, Aldershot: Gower.
Adair, J (1988) Not Bosses But Leaders, Guildford: Talbot Adair Press.
Adair, J (1988) Developing Leaders, Guildford: Talbot Adair Press.
Adair, J (1989) Great Leaders, Guildford: Talbot Adair Press.
Adair, J (1990) Understanding Motivation, Guildford: Talbot Adair.
