The Council for Excellence in Management and Leadership commissioned the Centre for
Business Performance at Cranfield School of Management to produce for them a report
investigating the case for corporate reporting and disclosure in the field of organisational
management and leadership. Clearly there are pros and cons for such reporting, especially if it
is made compulsory through the forthcoming Company Law review, but on balance the authors
are of the opinion that:
1. Greater corporate reporting and disclosure in the field of organisational management and
leadership is not only desirable, but also inevitable.
2. Legislation may result in organisations reporting more in the field of organisational
management and leadership sooner than they would otherwise, but in the longer term
market forces will force them to report this information.
3. The steps that organisations are taking to adopt measurement frameworks that balance
financial and non-financial issues mean that they are already building the infrastructure
necessary to enable this reporting.
4. It is impractical to expect that a generic set of reporting standards applicable to all
organisations can be developed for this area. It is widely believed that performance
measures are context and strategy specific. Hence requiring organisations to report against
a standard set of measures will simply result in additional bureaucratic burdens being
placed on them.
5. An alternative, and much more pragmatic approach, however, is to accept that the role of
measurement is to provide insight. What investors, and other external stakeholders, want
is insight into the management and leadership talent pool that exists within organisations.
As a result it should be possible to encourage and/or require organisations to release
information in their annual reports which provides fact based insights into their
management and leadership talent pool.
6. To provide a structure for such disclosure the authors recommend that a portfolio of
critical questions about the management and leadership talent pool be developed and that
organisations be encouraged and/or required to provide answers to these questions
through fact based evidence of their own choosing.
7. Many organisations would benefit from the rigour provided by this approach. Far too
often the performance measures that organisations have in place in the arena of
organisational management and leadership are poorly developed and deployed.A Report Commissioned by the
Council for Excellence in Management and Leadership
from the Centre for Business Performance at Cranfield School of ManagementCouncil for Excellence in Management and Leadershi