CMI 702 Assignment Example

CMI 702 Leading and Developing People to Optimise Performance teaches learners practical strategies to improve communication, collaboration, personal accountability, and problem-solving skills while fostering a positive workplace culture. It prepares aspiring leaders with essential skills to lead teams effectively and confidently, ensuring success in leadership roles.

Organisational context: Aldermere Infrastructure Services plc, a United Kingdom listed engineering and infrastructure services group employing 6,800 people across water, energy transmission and highways frameworks. The group operates through three divisions and a shared central function, and derives 78 per cent of revenue from long-term regulated-sector frameworks. The author is Group People Director, a member of the executive committee reporting to the Chief Executive, with accountability to the Remuneration Committee and to the board’s designated non-executive director for workforce engagement. Organisational detail is illustrative and anonymised.

Introduction

The claim that people are an organisation’s greatest asset is stated more often than it is tested. This assignment takes the claim seriously enough to interrogate it, examining what the evidence actually supports about the relationship between leadership, culture, development and performance, where the causal chain is weaker than commonly asserted, and what follows for strategy. It then proposes a leadership and development strategy for Aldermere that is defensible at board level, which means it must be costed, measured and honest about what it cannot deliver.

Learning Outcome 1: Understand the principles for leading and developing people

AC 1.1 Discuss the influence of leadership, culture and people development on performance

The three factors are frequently discussed as though they operated independently and additively. The more defensible position is that they are interdependent, and that their influence on performance is largely indirect, mediated through employee capability, motivation and opportunity to contribute.

Leadership. At the level relevant to a plc executive, the pertinent literature is strategic rather than supervisory. Upper echelons theory, originating with Hambrick and Mason, holds that organisational outcomes reflect the values, experience and cognitive frames of the dominant coalition, because strategic situations are too complex to be read objectively and are therefore filtered through the characteristics of those interpreting them. The implication for Aldermere is uncomfortable: the composition of the executive committee is itself a determinant of strategic performance, and a group whose members share sector background, professional formation and tenure will exhibit a predictable and shared blind spot. This is a stronger argument for executive diversity than the reputational one usually advanced.

At divisional and site level, the transformational and transactional distinction retains explanatory power, and the evidence associates transformational behaviours with engagement, discretionary effort and innovation (Northouse, 2025). The discussion should note, however, that the effect sizes reported in this literature are modest and that much of it relies on cross-sectional self-report designs vulnerable to common-method variance. Leadership matters; it matters less than the enthusiasm of the leadership development industry implies.

Culture. The Denison model provides a usable framework at group level, identifying four dimensions arranged across two tensions: mission and adaptability constitute external focus, involvement and consistency constitute internal focus; consistency and mission constitute stability, involvement and adaptability constitute flexibility. Its distinctive value for Aldermere is the diagnosis it produces. A business deriving most of its revenue from regulated frameworks develops strong consistency, expressed as procedural discipline and assurance culture, because regulators and clients demand it. That same strength suppresses adaptability, which is why the group has been slow to respond to the capability shift towards electrified and low-carbon infrastructure. Culture here is not a soft variable; it is the mechanism converting yesterday’s competitive requirement into today’s constraint.

People development. The resource-based view supplies the strategic argument. Barney’s proposition is that sustained advantage derives from resources that are valuable, rare, difficult to imitate and non-substitutable. Physical plant and technology fail the imitability test in this sector, since competitors can buy the same equipment. A workforce holding accumulated tacit knowledge of specific client assets, combined with a culture of collaborative problem solving, is considerably harder to replicate. The discussion point is that this argument applies only to development that builds firm-specific and socially complex capability; generic training that produces transferable certification creates value for the individual and little sustained advantage for the firm.

The interaction and the causal problem. The AMO framework, associated with Appelbaum and colleagues, holds that performance is a function of ability, motivation and opportunity to participate, and that people practices influence performance only through these three routes. This is the most useful integrating device available, because it explains why practices adopted in isolation disappoint: developing ability while withholding opportunity produces frustration and turnover rather than performance.

The discussion must nonetheless acknowledge what Purcell and colleagues termed the black box problem. The correlation between bundles of people practices and organisational performance is well established; the causal mechanism, direction and lag are not. Reverse causation is plausible, since profitable firms can afford better people practices. This is not a reason to abandon the argument, but it is a reason for a People Director to be careful about the claims made to a board, because overstated causal claims are eventually tested and found wanting.