What got me into Fair Process Leadership?

So the question is « what got me into Fair Process Leadership, into developing this concept? » and the first motivation for this was my own sort of sensitivity to fairness or actually unfairness which was either in the family setting or in a larger business or social settings.

And perhaps my development of Fair Process Leadership may be rooted in the desire to merge what I learned in engineering and applied mathematics with my original intention which never materialised to study justice.

So the 2nd inspiration to my work and the development of Fair Process Leadership was 7 years of factory visits on the Best Factory Award at INSEAD with my colleagues where we looked at the best factories in France and Germany.

We wrote a book about these factories and what was remarkable about these factories and one of the things that were remarkable was the spirit of continuous improvement and a key notion came out suddenly in the 80s was the development of Japanese production methods: continuous improvement known under the name of Kaizen.

And when I became co-dean of INSEAD or when I looked at sort-of senior managers, the idea of continuous improvement was OK for the shop floor, for the workers but not necessarily a practice commonly adopted amongst senior management circles or even board circles. So Kaizen was sort of a second inspiration.

The third one was the work of my colleagues Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne who actually formulated what was wrong with the lack of fair-play especially between headquarters and multinationals and that lead them to develop a whole series of papers in the 90s and early 2000 about a lack of fair-play in companies and also multinationals and the key notion was that multinationals’ headquarters make decisions and these decisions are not looked upon, perceived as « fair play » by the people who have to execute them, the actors and these are the local affiliates, the people managing local affiliates and also the middle management.

I also being in operations management and decision sciences I was exposed to the work by Russo and Schoemaker which came out in the early 2000s about how to make decisions well and that work also influenced me. When you took all the things together, the fair play, the Kaizen the process notion, Russo and Schoemaker and the importance of framing in evaluation and revising about how you go about making decisions. That actually lead to the assembly of various notions which I coined « Fair Process Leadership ».

I think two notions that are distinct in my approach is the importance of leadership.

Fair Process does not exist if the leaders are not fair.

And the second one is in the process. But in all the work of Russo and Schoemaker you only see decision making but you don’t see execution and that lead me to develop and add 1 more step to what was existing in the literature which was a step specifically devoted to execution and the unfairness that might arise in execution.

So the first and easiest way to motivate Fair Process Leadership is to move away from the examination of problems which are very often symptoms, to the examination of more what we would call root cause. So when there is a problem, which is typically a symptom, the root cause of these problems actually go to 3 different kinds of causes.

First cause is a lack of fairness or fair play.

The second cause is bad process.

Third cause is bad leadership.

To have good results, says Fair Process Leadership, you need to have a combination of all 3, not just 2 of the 3, which is fair play, great process, great leadership.

If you have a combination of the 3, you are going to have good sustainable results.

And that leads to the final conclusion… that was actually the words of one of my students who I think summarised it beautifully, who basically said « oh professor, I see, Fair Process Leadership is actually common sense it just isn’t common practice. »

Ludo Van der Heyden is the founding Director of INSEAD’s Governance Initiative and is co-Director of the International Directors Program and the Value Creation for Owners and Directors. He lectures as well on leadership, team dynamics and business model innovation.