The Point of Leadership Development Is Not to Become Complete

I recently began the online, part-time MA Education Leadership at UWE Bristol, studying from Singapore. We are currently working through the opening Personal Leadership module, and three weeks in, I have already encountered an idea that has complicated one of the assumptions I brought into the programme.

One reason I enrolled was that I could see fairly clearly where the holes were. I have spent years developing as an educator, musician and researcher, and more recently across curriculum, assessment, supervision and other aspects of higher education. Leadership and management were less developed. The solution seemed obvious: learn them! This is more or less how I have approached professional development for years. Identify something I cannot do, or cannot do well enough; figure out how to learn it; work at it until it becomes another usable capability.

There is nothing necessarily wrong with that. Indeed, I suspect I will continue doing it for a very long time. But this week's material made me wonder what happens if that logic is applied indefinitely to leadership.

Pendleton, Furnham and Cowell's Primary Colours Framework divides the territory of leadership broadly across strategic, operational and interpersonal domains. One of its propositions is that leaders are generally incomplete: people have different configurations of strengths and limitations, and leadership may consequently be accomplished through more than one person. This connected particularly well with Ancona and colleagues' idea of the “incomplete leader”, which similarly rejects the rather heroic expectation that one individual should somehow possess every capability required to lead effectively.

This was slightly confronting because I realised that I had been approaching my own development with precisely that assumption. If I lack management knowledge, learn management. If I need to understand quality assurance better, learn QA. If interpersonal leadership is not as developed as some of my other capabilities, work on that. Strategy, operations, people, finance, governance, systems, policy: presumably, given enough courses, experience and determination, I can keep plugging the holes until eventually some indomitable version of myself emerges. Except, of course, there will always be another hole.

Perhaps the more interesting question is which holes actually need plugging. This makes intuitive sense to me as a musician. In a good jazz ensemble, nobody needs to be the best musician at everything. One player may have an extraordinary sense of time; another may hear harmony in ways the others do not; another may be particularly good at shaping the overall direction of the music. These are not fixed categories either. Leadership can move around an ensemble from moment to moment depending on what is happening and what the music needs.

That does not mean competence is irrelevant. A musician cannot announce that rhythm is somebody else's strength and therefore stop listening to the time. Everyone still needs sufficient shared musicianship to function. But the ensemble does not become better by somehow cloning the strongest attributes of every member into every other member. It becomes better partly because different people bring different things, and because they know how to listen and respond to them.

I am beginning to wonder whether my own leadership development needs a similar distinction. There will be things I genuinely need to become much better at. There will be other things where I need sufficient knowledge and experience to exercise sound judgement, even if they never become particular strengths. And there may be things where the more intelligent response is simply to recognise that somebody else is better at them than I am, and to know enough to work effectively with that person.

This is not an argument for using “incomplete leadership” as an excuse for incompetence. I would be deeply suspicious of that interpretation. Someone cannot meaningfully lead an educational organisation while understanding nothing about people, operations or learning on the grounds that somebody else can deal with all that. There must surely be some credible floor of capability across the areas for which a leader carries responsibility. What has changed for me is the assumption that everything above that floor must eventually become a personal strength.

It has also made me reconsider how readily I judge weaknesses in other leaders. I can be quite quick to notice something somebody does poorly and wonder why they have not fixed it. Perhaps that is sometimes the right question. But another question is whether they know the limitation exists, and whether the people and structures around them compensate for it. Someone may be visibly incomplete and nevertheless lead an effective system. Conversely, someone can be individually formidable and still be terrible at getting anything useful to happen through other people.

That latter distinction is probably the more personally significant one for me. Much of my career has rewarded individual capability. I can organise myself extremely well. I can construct a long-term professional strategy, manage a ridiculous number of simultaneous commitments, develop research projects and actually finish them, and generally find ways of making things happen. I have tended to regard this capacity to execute as a strength, and I still do.

But organisational leadership introduces a rather inconvenient variable: other humans. That sounds flippant, but I mean it seriously. Being able to create systems that allow me to execute does not automatically establish that I can create conditions through which people with different motivations, strengths, working methods and priorities can execute together. Some of those capabilities should transfer. Others probably will not. I will only really know by increasingly taking responsibility for work that depends on other people rather than principally on myself.

This is perhaps where the MA is already doing something useful for me. I entered wanting to acquire more leadership capability. I still do. But I am beginning to see a distinction between becoming a more capable individual and becoming more capable of leadership. The latter may require becoming better at people, systems and organisational judgement. It may require learning when to intervene and when not to. It may require knowing which weaknesses I genuinely need to work on, and which are simply reminders that no sensible organisation should depend upon one person being brilliant at everything. Perhaps leadership development is therefore not an endless project of becoming complete. Perhaps it is partly learning what needs developing, what needs to be understood, and what needs somebody else. Three weeks into the MA, I obviously do not know where that distinction will eventually settle for me. That is probably something worth watching over the next two years. For now, though, I find the idea strangely liberating. I still intend to plug quite a few holes. I am just no longer convinced that the objective is to plug all of them.

This article forms part of an ongoing series reflecting on my experience of studying the MA Education Leadership (online) at UWE Bristol, which I began part-time from Singapore in September 2026. The series documents selected ideas that meaningfully change or complicate how I understand higher-education leadership and professional practice.

References

Ancona, D., Malone, T. W., Orlikowski, W. J. and Senge, P. M. (2007). ‘In praise of the incomplete leader’. Harvard Business Review, 85(2), 92–100.

Pendleton, D., Furnham, A. and Cowell, J. (2020). Leadership: No More Heroes. 3rd ed. Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60437-0