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University of Bedfordshire
Park Square
Luton
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To apply for a research degree, please make sure you fulfill the entry requirements and then complete the online research degree application form and upload your supporting documents.
You should have a good honours degree (2:1 or above) or masters degree or equivalent in the relevant subject area.
International applicants should be aware of our research degree English language requirements
Bill is a leadership strategist, consultant, writer, researcher, teacher, and speaker on systemic leadership. This approach challenges conventional wisdom about where to search for leadership improvement in organisations. Bill’s model suggests that improving leadership in organisations is best undertaken by viewing the subject from the organisation's end of the telescope. Leadership is thus seen as a property of the organisation, and not simply individual leaders. The organisation itself (rather than individual managers, HR, or trainers and developers) is seen to hold most of the cards when it comes to locating and achieving leadership improvement.
Bill is a prolific author, having written 40 books, articles, papers, case studies and toolkits. Of eight books of his own and several book chapters, his latest work on ‘Linking Development with Business’ appears in Leadership in Organizations (ed. John Storey, Routledge, 2010), and his The Search for Leadership: An Organisational Perspective (Triarchy Press, 2009) advances the systemic paradigm. He has written extensively on the shadow dynamics of organisational life.
He uses the fishtank as a metaphor to explain systemic leadership. The fishtank expresses 'the system' that managers experience everyday; that is, everything that is going on around them and between them in their organisational surroundings that impacts (often perceived negatively) on their ability to exercise leadership, opening some doors and closing others. Managers' daily encounters and frustration highlights to what they need to apply their leadership in order to improve the way the system works – for others as well as for themselves. But to do this, they need to be able to ‘see’ the system, understand that they are part of it, and have permission for such a leadership role in relation to it. In this symbiotic relationship, the system affects their leadership, but their leadership also affects the system. Whereas 'delivering today' is managers' goal when managing within the present paradigm and its constraints, 'making tomorrow better than today' (challenging the current paradigm to improve the way the system works) becomes their goal when they are in leadership mode.
Major institutional systemic failures (policing, banking, child protection, etc.) imply failures of systemic leadership. Whereas an individual leader perspective and post mortem results in blame and pressure for compliance, a systemic perspective results in double-loop learning and reform. Only the latter approach results in corporate improvement and the organisation as a whole becoming better led. Most of his Bill’s work is undertaken in the public sector.
Bill’s background was first as an engineer with ICI. He then moved to British Airways, where he held many senior HR positions, leaving in 1991 when he was Head of HR Strategy. Since then he has run his own specialist consultancy, Prometheus Consulting. He spent seven years as part-time faculty at City University’s Cass Business School, teaching HRM on the Executive MBA programme. He was elected a local councilor for several years in the London Borough of Richmond Upon Thames.
Bill is a Doctor in Professional Studies (DProf.) from Middlesex University. The subject of his thesis was systemic leadership. He holds an MA from Loyola University of Chicago, is a Fellow of the RSA, Fellow of Cass Business School’s Centre for Leadership, Learning and Change, Fellow of the University of Bedfordshire’s Centre for Leadership Innovation, Chartered Fellow of the CIPD, Member of the Chartered Management Institute where he serves on their expert panel of advisers. He is an Associate of St George’s House Windsor Castle, where for many years he has been involved in the Annual Leadership Dialogue.
E: bill.tate@prometheus-consulting.com
