Warren Bennis (one of the world’s leading authorities on leadership) recently said:

‘In discussing various approaches to leadership, I often note a distinction made between two nineteenth-century British prime ministers. It was observed that when you had dinner with William Gladstone, you left thinking, “That Gladstone is the wittiest, the most intelligent, the most charming person around.”  But when you had dinner with Benjamin Disraeli, you left thinking, “I’m the wittiest, the most intelligent, the most charming person around!” Gladstone shone, but Disraeli created an environment in which others could shine.  The latter is a more powerful form of leadership, an adventure in which the leader us privileged to find treasure within others and put it to good use.’

When you think of the really effective leaders you have known, how many could be characterised as Gladstones and how many as Disraelis? What made them warrant the label you have given these leaders?

Can you teach Authentic Leadership? from Caret on Vimeo.

A quick video we shot this morning after two colleagues, Rob Sykes and Steve Botham,  had spoken at a really enjoyable Caret breakfast event in Birmingham.   Rob was outlining some of their shared work on the Power of Authentic Leadership, followed by searching and astute questions from the 20 or so city leaders who joined us.

An article by Steve and Rob expanding on the issue of Authentic Leadership appeared in a recent issue of Municipal Journal.

We are in unchartered waters. Very few leaders in organisations have experienced the huge uncertainty and pressures facing us in these current times and their leadership may well be defined by how they respond.  Staff, clients, stakeholders will judge leaders by the quality of decisions they make in these circumstances. But decisions alone will not deliver success – success will come from the commitment, confidence and belief you generate. Leaders will need to manage communication with great wisdom.

Churchill led the British people in a time of great crisis – one that makes the current economic problems seems very mild in comparison. As the newly appointed premier at a time when the nation was reeling from the fall of France and the traumas of Dunkirk, and before the United States entered the war, he decided not to make peace with Germany – which many people, including senior cabinet members, wanted. He took the difficult message to the British people that “we shall fight them on the beaches …. we shall never surrender”. He persuaded a reluctant audience to carry on – despite the high personal cost.

In using his great communication skills to shape his leadership he followed in the steps of his mentor and friend the famous Welsh orator David Lloyd George who became Prime minister in the middle of World War One and used his great communication capacity to give confidence and hope to a nation that was traumatised by the heavy losses of life on the Western Front.

Sir Ernest Shackleton was a man with a plan – he aimed to cross the Antarctic with his crew supported by the ship Endeavour. The plan needed to be abandoned and re formed when his ship and crew became trapped on the ice floes for almost two years. Remarkably by great leadership and personal courage Shackleton brought everyone home. He describes his approach to communication –

“When crisis strikes, immediately address your staff. Take charge of the situation, offer a plan of action, ask for support, and show absolute confidence in a positive outcome.”

“Give your staff an occasional reality check to keep them on course. After time people will start to treat a crisis situation as business as usual and lose their focus.”

“Ask for advice and information from a variety of sources, but ultimately make decisions based on your best judgement”

You do not need to have the eloquence of Churchill or the driving bravery of a Shackleton to lead in times of crisis – but you do need to be clear, to listen well, to engage everyone who is affected and install confidence. How you do it is down to you. Those who put their heads down and hope the problems, stress and uncertainty will go away give a poor lead. We have seen in the stock market that support goes up and down dependent on confidence in the market. You need to deliberately install confidence in your team – based on realities and clear decisions – when they have that confidence your staff and stakeholders will invest in you.

If you want people on side and working together, less is always more.

Tom Steinberg knows that. He runs MySociety, the very successful charity which punches above it weight using the internet to help people collaborate to improve civil society. Among tips on how to build websites for social good he includes this one:

Take whatever your first website plan is and remove 90% of the features you want. Then build it and launch it and your users will tell you which features they actually wanted instead. Build them and bask in the warm glow of appreciation.

It is easier for people to add than take away. Provide a solid platform and others can innovate on it. Not only that, they all have a clear sense of shared aims. Offer endless choice or demands and we get confused and wonder off to pastures more edifying.

Bob Sutton also knows this. Here he describes in some detail how a small charity again used clarity and simplicity to achieve far beyond what we might expect of them. I’ll quote at length.

We analyze an astounding effort by a small non-profit in Boston called The Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) to lead a campaign to reduce medical errors in U.S. hospitals. Their goal was to stop over 100,000 preventable deaths in hospitals over a one year period. And, although there is some controversy about the campaign’s effects, it appears that they ultimately involved hospitals that included over 75% of the beds in the U.S. and exceed their goal by about 20,000 lives.

You can get the article here at the McKinsey website (it is free, you just have to register) or here is the pdf:

Download the_ergonomics_of_innovation.pdf

Even if you get the pdf here, I suggest poking around the McKinsey site as they have lots of great free stuff.

We call this article “the ergonomics of innovation” because the IHI staff did such a brilliant job of designing the campaign so that it reduced the cognitive and emotional load on their tiny staff (about 100 people) and, especially, on the thousands of hospital staff members who participated in the campaign. For example, IHI focused everyone’s efforts on six relatively simple behaviors that had been shown to be big causes of preventable deaths in prior research. They developed very concrete guidelines that hospitals could use to stop these causes — which reduced load on everyone because, although the list could have contained hundreds of evidence-based practices, instead, it helped people focus their efforts and also made it more efficient for hospitals to share what they had learned because they were working on a limited numbers of problems.

Complexity is a reality of life, which is why clarity is a pre-requisite for good leadership.  Put in effort early to make good decisions about what is needed. The rest is a combination of clear communication and, naturally enough, stripping.

Image courtesy of Dr Craig. Hat Tip for thoughts on MySociety and also the wonderful neologism of decrementalism Public Strategy.

Yesterday, I posted this about the importance of better managing how you panic. It turns out that the Democratic Party is in something of a panic because Obama appears too relaxed. When interviewed for an article in the September 18th 2008 issue of Time magazine Obama provided a lucid rationale for not being too hot under the collar. He argues that he knows the history, current situation, and propensities of his opponent and the party he represents.

The article in Time puts it thus:

“…but Obama doesn’t do spontaneous combustion.  And he’s keenly away of the deeper danger of fire for America’s first black presidential nominee.  Over the past 19 months, he’s been attacked as a naive novice, an empty suit, a tax-and-spend liberal, an arugula-grazing elitist and a corrupt ward heeler, but the attacks that nearly derailed him involved the Rev. Jeremiah Wright - attacks designed to portray Obama as an angry black man.  White America has embraced unthreatening African Americans like Tiger Woods, Oprah Winfrey, Will Smith, and Colin Powell, but this is still a majority-white country, and Obama does not want to be stereotyped as a race man like Malcolm X”.

As you learn to panic more effectively, chose your stereotype well.

Image courtesy of Beth Can.

It has been my joy to executive coach a senior partner in a rapidly growing law firm. 

Key beneficial outcomes for her include increased self awareness and more effective listening.  As a leader, she feels (and behaves) with greater confidence and more of a strategic focus in what she does and how she goes about it.

Whereas she used to view non fee earning work as a huge distraction, she now experiences it as an asset to the business since she is leveraging her individual earning potential through helping others use their skills and talents to generate ever more business than before.

This is a leader to whom strengths-based working is not a soft option but a mission-critical business challenge.

In some businesses you have to wonder whether leaders are human. Indeed, it could be asked whether the leaders themselves are treated in a humane manner. I am reminded of the now arcane quip by General George C. Marshall when he said:

“Enlisted men may be entitled to morale problems, but officers are not. I expect all officers in this department to take care of their own morale. No one is taking care of my morale”

Not the height of emotional intelligence you might say.  It would appear that people want their leaders to model courage and confidence - with a human face.

In the Second World War a ‘collaborator’ was a negative phrase – it meant someone who was actively working with the occupying forces. As countries were liberated the collaborators faced savage beatings, ostracism and sometimes worse.

Now the message is we need more collaborators. It has always been the case that organisations wanted people to follow their vision and deliver their goals. But there is a deeper demand now – silo mentalities are breaking down and corporate working is becoming increasingly important. We are more dependent on each other for shared information, insights and the effective delivery of outcomes.

So what happens to ‘independent minded people’? There are a lot of them about in all organisations – people who are not team players. They can be likeable people; they can be hard working people; they can bring important perspectives – but in challenging times the questions for leaders has to be,’are they delivering what we need? Are they meeting our expectations?’

Sometimes they are introverted people who find maintaining relationships and exchanging information difficult – they like to be left alone to get on with things. Often it is the departmental maverick who likes to be difficult, questions everything, and is cynical. It can also be some values-driven people who are driving their own agendas – often with good intentions. It can be the aloof person, the technical expert, comfortable in a superior sort of way that they see things differently from the rest of us. They can be competitive, hard working, driven people who are shaping their reputations but put their ego before the need to work with others (who are, after all, the competition!)
The challenge to leaders is ‘what do I do with the non collaborators?’

I’ve been coaching someone recently who is a technically brilliant, capable person leading a specialist department. The individual continually fails to deliver what is asked, some of which is key to the organisations agenda. He is not belligerent or awkward, he is just busy on the agenda he thinks is important. But he is not collaborating with the corporate agenda. It is one of those many times when non collaboration is a significant corporate issue. Another example was a manager in the caring professions who had specialists who were spending hours doing wonderful things that were a long way out from the job’s requirements and not concentrating on what was. They were not collaborating with the main agenda. They thought they knew best – and were emotional in their desire to protect what they were doing – but they were letting the organisation down.

The leadership challenges here are:

• How strong is the level of collaboration in your work group? What are the signs that people are collaborating? What are the signs of lack of collaboration?
• Are we really clear about our purpose and therefore what we expect from each other?
• How can you make the non collaborators more aware of their impact – and help them change
• What are the steps and actions that lead to more collaboration – how do we involve people in this so they become more committed to it?
• Are there some people who cannot change – and are they blocking the organisations ability to succeed?

David Maister in his book ‘Strategy and the Fat Smoker’ writes: “It may be that members of the organisation have insufficient commitment to each other [and the purpose of the organisation] to implement any strategy”. Finding the collaborators can be really vital for success.

Dave Snowden has written this strong blog post about coherence, leadership and communications:

Not all great leaders are good communicators, fewer still are, or will ever be gifted story tellers. Ironically some of the worst leaders are only too good at telling stories and excel at communication. What really matters is the degree of coherence and integrity that is evident in the lived life of the leader as perceived by their employees and colleagues.

As a journalist I would sometimes have the argument with colleagues about the line between truth and honesty.

A fact may be strictly true and can be set alongside other strictly true facts, but as we know the whole can be totally dishonest. Naturally enough whenever we fell near that trap the package was all brilliantly communicated, regardless of how much integrity it had. After all that’s what we were trained to do.

The end result though was never satisfying. It lacked integrity and often it was really hard work. Why? Because creating a semblance of coherence from something that is fundamentally flawed is devilishly difficult to do. But doing just that has become a staple technique for half hearted journalism and probably for a similar style of management. Disguising the lie has become a professional skill - acquired over years of experience.

So how do you build in checks and balances to ensure you’re spending time on the stuff that really makes sense? As Dave goes on to argue: “If nothing else leaders generally come as teams, the good ones take people with them over the years who compliment their skills. Training leadership crews rather than leaders may be one way to build more resilience into organisations”.

In my mind one of the core strengths of a great team is to know what is honest and have a reflex action to communicate that. The pleasure of nailing something when you’ve also worked hard to do the right thing is enormous. Of course from time to time managers feel they can’t do that - but the wisest will never buy their own deceit. Make a habit of doing that and you’re most likely to end up being dismissed as, at best, incoherent.

Hat Tip Johnnie Moore. Image thanks to Unhindered by Talent.

I don’t know about you, but I find listening in on other people’s conversations interesting - intriguing even. A few days ago I witnessed one of these conversations (sort of a conversation!) during a train journey. It was a table of four and the guy sitting directly opposite me was buried in a door-stopper of a novel.

Sitting next to the novel-reading passenger was a business type whose fellow traveller sat next to me. The one next to me made a lethal mistake; he asked the other guy how things were going. The response was a range of almost involuntary statements and explanations which altogether lasted for nearly ninety minutes. Had this been a telephone conversation, the listener (hostage really!) could conceivably have gone away to do some gardening and then rejoined the pretend dialogue.

If I could have talked to the out-of-control speaker, I might have suggested ‘Always stop speaking before you feel ready’. To keep it really practical and measurable, I might have added some wise advice given to me many years ago. The person said,

“Try to double your impact by: (a) reducing your interventions by two thirds and then (b) reducing the duration of each ’speech’ or intervention by two thirds”.

What practical advice have you come across for passing on to someone like the ‘talker’ on the train?