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Introduction
Social housing in the UK has changed radically over recent decades, and the provision of social housing is now delivered by organisations which are very different from the huge housing departments in the era of mass "council housing". These changes would represent a significant leadership challenge for any public service organisation, but other parts of the public sector had a long history of recruiting and developing managers to run large and complex organisations. What is unusual about social housing is that historically the managers within this field, "housing managers", were not managers as we would generally recognise them. Housing management as a profession was much more akin to social work ([32] Franklin and Clapham, 1997) - the "management" undertaken by housing managers was of property and tenants, not organisations and staff. Since social housing was typically provided by a department of a much larger organisation (i.e. a local authority), there was no imperative for housing managers to develop the same skills in leadership and management as their counterparts in hospitals or police forces. The shift away from local government control, and subsequent processes of growth and merger within the sector, has led to a situation in which social housing providers are increasingly large and complex organisations. There are very few individuals who have expertise both in the leadership of complex organisations and in the complexities of the housing sector, and this has created a difficult choice for social housing providers - should they appoint housing experts and develop them into senior management roles or go with experienced senior managers from other sectors, recognising that it may take them time to get to grips with the social housing scene? Anecdotal evidence suggests that most social housing providers have opted for the latter approach, indeed some appear to have an active preference for bringing in private sector expertise. Nevertheless, there is a recognition with the sector that social housing faces a significant leadership development challenge, and there have been calls for significant investment in leadership development.
Leadership development activities need an evidence base that provides clarity about the type(s) of leadership which would be appropriate to the situation in question, and an insight into how such leadership could be developed. Such development would ideally be based...