The greatest gift a leader can give to their organisation in these current challenging times is the gift of clarity. So many people are rushing around trying to achieve the impossible - with too many goals and too many actions and too many people dependent on their delivering within the cost, quality and time targets. A visitor from another planet would describe it as foolishness but many people carry a great burden of responsibility, they do not want to let others down, and they are often so busy that it is hard to bring control and order to things.

Enter the leader! Clarity starts with prioritising – a simple question like “what are our five priorities for the next year?” can create a challenging and energetic discussion. We get more focus when we ask “what are our five priorities for the coming three months?”  I have worked with many teams that have too many goals and no discussion on priorities. In effect each individual decides their priorities and confusion and angst follows in its path with tired and exhausted people wondering if they will ever achieve anything of substance.

There are many tired and exhausted people in the NHS – and tired people miss things. It’s a delight to work with some of our clients in coaching sessions where we work together on issues around clarity and direction – or in team sessions where we try to shape focus and create joined up working. But with uncertain direction, uncertain futures and uncertain priorities people become stressed – and the poor patient becomes bewildered!

Great leaders are insistent on priorities. This creates alignment – a shared commitment to ensure certain things happen with a robust ongoing conversation in the team to track progress. New initiatives and issues don’t create a crisis – they are reviewed against the priorities. Resources and time are allocated around the priorities. The leader reinforces this constantly talking about the priorities and encouraging people to focus on results. As time passes lots of things get in the way – people issues, resource issues, resistance to change but the leader creates a determination to get things done.

This is no easy task. This is one of those clear cases where you can’t please all of the people all of the time. But it creates much more effective working. It stops people’s energy being drained by the unimportant and enables you to focus on what makes the biggest impact. A wise man once said “without a vision the people perish” – the health service desperately needs those leaders who can bring clarity, reduce the stress and bring focus. It could be you?

The recently published second set of reports from the Future Forum sets out a series of recommendations to improve the quality of patient care and achieve better outcomes. It uses some case studies to demonstrate best practice. One of them is very familiar territory for Caret – bringing together three PCTs and the City Council. In March 2010 the key stakeholders signed a section 75 agreement establishing the largest pooled budget in the country of £313 million (per year). The joint commissioning board has an independent chair (a Caret associate) and co‐located health and social care commissioning staff in order to share intelligence, use single contracts and to take advantage of different styles of commissioning.

“Through a joint approach using a care cost calculator, market development and single contracts, the team was able to balance the pooled budget for the first time in many years at the end of 2010/11 and is on balance for 2011/12, as they were able to find efficiency savings of £4 million (per year).  The percentage spent on residential care has fallen, with more people receiving support in different housing options. A programme of quality assistance visits, including assessments by non‐professionals, is underway.“ (Future Focus – Integration report 10.1.12)

Caret has contributed strongly to the success in Birmingham. We ran a range of workshops to address the differences in cultures and identify shared hopes and aspirations. We identified an effective way of joint working and helped build trust and openness between all the parties. The independent Chair role has been central to the success of this programme. Our colleague Rob Sykes the former CEO of Worcester CC engaged all sides, helped shape the strategic vision and ensure there was a clear direction rather than a paralysis around different agendas. He handled tensions and issues behind the scenes and helped bring GPs on board quickly and successfully. He used his independent status to cut across conflicts, adapt to the tensions that each stakeholder was feeling due to internal pressures and changes, incorporate new members and build respect and co-operation.

The service won the regional ‘Good Commissioner’ Award at the Great British Care Awards.

Much has been said and written about the Big Society – some of it sceptical, some seeing the positive benefits, but most adopting a “when we see it we will take it seriously” approach. It is alive and well and living amongst us! The big society can be seen in many neighbourhoods up and down the country where citizens provide support to each other.

Demos have just launched a national report “Civic Streets – the Big Society in Action”. It looks at what the ‘Big Society’ means for struggling communities in need of regeneration and learns lessons from places and communities that have come together and have trail-blazed this approach. It chooses two neighbourhoods in Birmingham – Castle Vale and Balsall Heath – places we in Caret know very well and work closely with.

As a leadership consultancy we are interested in types of leaders that help create not just any old transformation, but transformation that is long term, generous, and inclusive.

It is clear there are four key leadership building blocks:

• A leader with a clear sense of purpose – community change is generally long term  -successful leaders need to have the drive and determination that enables them to stick at their vision despite the barriers they face.
• A facilitative leader – someone who engages others, encourages broad participation in their street, block or wider neighbourhood. Generally these leaders are able to put the good of the community to the forefront and leave their egos and status behind.
• A collaborative leader who forges effective partnerships, with Police, the local authority, housing providers, health, community groups etc.
• An innovative leader who can help find new and more effective ways of understanding and addressing the community’s needs

The jury is out on whether the Big Society will work, or whether its success remains limited to a few exceptional neighbourhoods. But the potential of a Big Society approach - to reduce the number of people with mental health problems, address health inequalities, raise access for isolated people to key services and support, generate new community focused employment and to enable public services to raise their impact - is very high. What is more Balsall Heath and Castle Vale are thriving, supportive and energetic places to live.

If the Big Society is to succeed it will require big hearted, determined and generous leaders – can volunteers for the role raise their hands?

‘Gung ho’ managers in times of crisis say “failure is not an option”. 

Sadly, failure is more likely than success. It is an option and some organisations have it built into their DNA. Esteemed author Ron Heifitz argues we need to adapt. Our context, morale, resources, opportunities, risks are all changing – so must we.

“..mobilising people to tackle tough challenges is what defines the new job of a leader”

Adaptive leaders know the need to listen more, communicate more and invest heavily in earning trust and credibility.  They know that they need to facilitate some real brain-stretching thinking and generous listening if they are to shape the future. 

Equally, they need to be more visible, accessible and focused during change. They need sensitive performance management that paces change and recognises that some resistance is inevitable but prolonged resistance is destructive. As change moves forward they need their ‘failure radar’ at full alert: It can happen, it is likely to happen. Let me reduce the chances of it hitting us.

Good leaders face failure full on, they do not hide from it, but adapt their style to deal with it.

Leadership does not happen in a vacuum – good leaders in one situation can be terrible leaders in another and different situations demand different leadership qualities from us. In Caret’s recent Catalyst publication, Professor Prabhu Guptara looked at how it is not only our qualities as leaders that is important; but also the fit between those qualities and the environment that we are in.

Environmental scanning is an essential part of any strategy development but a global economic shift is largely out of our control as organisations and individuals. What we can do is manage our teams. As we try to fix an uncertain future, how do we keep our teams motivated?

It’s partly a matter of communication and reassurance, but I suggest it has a dimension we don’t always consider - in strategy discussions do we look only to our own wisdom or that of our top colleagues and professional advisors, or do we take into account in an active and deliberate way the advice we can get from customers and political leaders?

The more diverse perspectives you can get into your strategy process the more likely you are to come up with a range of possibilities that makes sense. Teams will be much more reassured by the actions you take to ensure this wide and diverse input into decision making because that will demonstrate that you are doing things in a way that takes political and economic uncertainties into account.

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“In the seven seconds it takes to complete an average Grand Prix pit stop, a driver will get four fresh tyres, a tank of fuel, an inspection to remove debris from nooks and crannies, and maybe some shiny new parts to replace any track casualties…115.8 man-seconds of work are completed in just 7 seconds” reports Tony Borroz in the November ‘09 edition of Wired Magazine.

The achievements of Formula 1 pit stop crews are amazing whichever way one looks at it.  Consider for example the fact that some of these jobs would take an afternoon at your local garage. I can’t help but wonder the looks and verbal abuse suffered by the person who first suggested this was all possible. In terms of what you and your team have recently achieved, what has constituted your equivalent of F1’s longest seven seconds?

Fad words seem to enter the language on an almost daily basis - and there are many to choose from in the world of management speak. A current favourite is “collaboration” and we can understand why it has risen up the “fad words hit parade”. Collaboration is about bringing different agendas and experiences together to produce shared outcomes. We can see it at many levels; from collaboration within different departments through to collaboration between departments and directorates. There is clearly a growing focus on collaboration between different parts of the public sector - not forgetting collaboration with the wider public themselves. In the commercial field strategic alliances are growing.

Collaboration makes a lot of sense. Within departments teams need to be proactive in sharing information, ensuring colleagues are aware of risks and emerging issues, and working together to achieve results for the team whilst protecting its credibility with clients. At leadership level collaboration is a central element of a high performing team. Dysfunctional teams do not collaborate, they hide information from each other, they do not follow up on decisions they agreed together, they reach compromises rather than commitment. A truly collaborative team shares accountability and is therefore proactive in supporting each other so that they can create a high level of focus on delivery. 

Collaboration will be a key element in surviving turbulent times. Leaders will need the input, the ideas, the challenges, the support and the energy of colleagues. Marshall Goldsmith commented that in today’s world as we progress in our organisations, what got us into our role - our technical ability - will not be what moves us forward. Leaders technical ability is assumed, he argues, it is their relationship building ability that makes all the difference.

Many organisational leaders are sociable and outgoing and can network well. But it is not universally true. What is true is that every leader needs to be a key player in the brave new world of collaboration. So is this the sound of a heavy door closing on the career aspirations of introvert but ambitious managers and leaders? Not necessarily so. We work with a lot of organisations and individuals in the field of change. It is clear that change comes to a halt when individuals fail to turn good intentions and good plans into specific actions. As the Chinese famously say “Each journey of a thousand miles begins with one step”.

What are the deliberate actions you can take to ensure you are seen as a contributor to greater collaboration?

I suggest there are five key steps to getting you started.

 1. Draw up a list of your key network or main stakeholders (you may wish to construct a table)

2. Against each one ask: what do I know about their key priorities and concerns - what do I need to know?

3. Then ask: how well do they understand my priorities and concerns - how can I improve their understanding and (more importantly) gain their support?

4. What can I do proactively to develop collaboration - how can I ensure this is seen as open, supportive and relationship building (avoiding impersonal emails and circulars)?

5. What do I need to do to my time to ensure I give enough attention to collaborative working?

Collaboration will be key. As has been said “change works in units of one” - it starts with the leaders in organisations acting as role models of collaboration and moves to their whole team being seen as integral to future success.

Image: ’ants carrying a fly’ by adelle roux on flickr.com

“People are always for change in general and then they begin to worry about particulars“.  Those were the words of Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton, in an interview about the health bill currently being debated in Congress.  She is right, both Republicans and Democrats agree something needs to be done but vehemently disagree on what should be done, how it should be done, and who should pay.  This seemed illustrative of the dynamics of recession-triggered change and transformation taking place in many organisations.  People tend to agree to something needs to happen but….

Leaders in organisations could benefit from taking a leaf out of the book of Dupont’s CEO, Ellen Kullman, who advocates four principles for moving ahead during turbulent times:

• Focus on what you can control
• Adopt a new trajectory by re-thinking your business model
• Communicate, communicate, communicate
• Maintain pride around your organisation’s mission

Kullman’s organisation employs 60,000 people in 70 countries so she decided to adopt the idea that:

“If you try to change everybody at once, you are changing nobody, so you really have to start in one area, or a couple of areas and show success”. 

The impact of her disciplined implementation of these principles can be measured in many ways, not least of which are employee engagement and financial metrics.  If you were to take a leaf out of her book what might that look like?  Or, maybe you are already doing so - in which case, tell us some of your stories.

One of the key characteristics of these times is an increase in uncertainty. Not surprisingly, the key thing that staff and other stakeholders are looking for from their leaders is an antidote to this uncertainty. The response of most leaders to this very human need is to put on their ‘superperson’ vests and gallop like the cavalry to the rescue, finding ways to reassure everyone that things will be fine and there is no need to worry. The unspoken assumption is that the leader should know all the answers and thereby be able to reduce the anxiety.

The problem is, not only that leaders do not have all the answers to the current crisis, but also that the very idea that they should creates an unhealthily dependent relationship. Blanket assurances from the leader either seem to lack credibility or merely pass anxiety from the staff back to the leader. Only the most confident leaders have the strength to be truly authentic and admit that they do not have all the answers, showing their vulnerability, their not knowing. In the words of Mother Theresa:

“Honesty and transparency make you vulnerable. Be honest and transparent anyway.”

Those that do show their vulnerability create a whole different psychological contract with their staff. Instead of a parent-to-child relationship - “Don’t worry you can depend on me, I’ll sort it out” - you get an adult-to-adult relationship where the leader says, “I don’t have all the answers and we are in this together to make sense of these changes”.

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Making the right decision can be a tricky balance. Speed may be of the essence in these challenging times, but judgement can be severely impaired by haste – in the words of author and mountaineer Jim Collins, “Those who panic die on the mountain.”

So, strike whilst the iron is too hot and you may end up burning your fingers! On the other hand, a protracted delay can be equally damaging. Aside from the risk of missing the boat altogether, a key negative factor in the decision making paradox is too much information.

In a recent presentation, Malcolm Gladwell – celebrated author and story teller extraordinaire – described the work of psychologist Stuart Oskamp, an expert in the field of attitudes research.

Oskamp studied the attitudes of a panel of clinical psychologists and psychology students in their assessment of a 29-year-old subject, Joseph Kidd. Participants were given a brief extract of Kidd’s case study and then asked to complete a questionnaire and estimate the accuracy of their responses. They were then given a second extract and asked to repeat the questionnaire and again estimate their success. This was followed by a third and fourth extract, building a series of actual scores and accuracy estimates. The results were quite illuminating. Despite the accuracy of their answers increasing by only 2% after 3 additional extracts, the panel’s assessment of their judgement had grown by a further 20% - a disturbing level of over-confidence!

With the weight of a fragile economy pressing down on organisations, it is tempting for some decision makers to be seen to act quickly - often at the expense of careful reflection and logical thought. Conversely, as our work with senior leaders often reveals, there is often a level of over-caution that stifles opportunities. Fortunately, poor judgement is a leadership sickness that can be remedied with effective coaching support and intentional strategic reflection.

As Oskamp’s research demonstrates, sometimes it is unwise to agonise. Make your decision and organise!