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.

Caret Associate Tammy Tawadros considers the wider implications of stress on leadership and life in her latest article Manage Your Stress… Before it Manages You.

As business leaders we demand a lot from work but we often forget about what it demands of us. The impact of overreaching ourselves physically, emotionally and intellectually is huge, and is even greater if we fail to understand what is happening to us.

A timely piece of research from the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health adds a harsh perspective:  people who work 10 to 12 hours a day are almost 60% more likely to develop heart disease or have a heart attack than people who work less than 10 hours.

The study of over 6,000 British civil servants aged 39-61, with no history of heart problems, tracked the effects of long working hours on coronary health over an average of 11 years. Accounting for conventional risk factors such as smoking, excess weight, blood pressure and high cholesterol, the research revealed that the overtime group tended to be at the younger of the participants, were likely to be men rather than women and in a higher occupational grade.

The research suggested that working overtime could affect metabolism or mask depression, anxiety and cause sleeplessness - a major stress contributor. It also explored a phenomenon called “sickness presenteeism”, whereby employees who work overtime are likelier to work while ill, ignore symptoms and not seek medical health.

In contrast, job satisfaction has a significant impact on the effects of long working hours. Those who enjoy their jobs and have a degree of control over their decisions tend to work longer hours just for the pleasure, and generally have a lower rate of Coronary Heart Disease than their less satisfied counterparts. 

On that positive note I’ll leave the last words to Tammy:

It is the small realisations and sweet moments of reflection on genuine successes and achievements, on ‘what really matters’ in life and at work, that seem to ameliorate stress and build resilience.

The biggest threat to local government in the coming months is not around finding cuts, efficiencies and new ways of working. It is around implementing those changes.

A few years ago Harvard Business Review featured an article by Michael Watkins, based on a book he co-authored with Max H. Bazerman on Predictable Surprises: The Disasters You Should Have Seen Coming. It is imperative that we look at the ‘predictable surprises’ facing local government. Watkins points to many examples where disasters, mistakes and problems could have been avoided.

He cites three key areas for leaders to monitor:

Did you recognise the threat?

• Can your middle managers implement the changes you want?
• How will staff react to redundancies or change?
• Will all the politicians support the hard decisions?
• Have we got the skills and new ways of thinking to deliver Total Place?

We did some scenario planning around community cohesion with the leaders in one council. We asked: What happens if there is an India-Pakistan war (possibly nuclear)? Worried looks on everyone’s face, “Goodness, that would have a devastating impact and we have not thought about it at all.” It’s a good example of a predictable surprise!

Did the leader prioritise appropriately?

Every local government leader is under tremendous time pressure. Leaders will be judged by their ability to balance the strategic and the operational – and their capacity to initiate new ways of working.

• Is sufficient thought and time given to reducing the likelihood and impact of disaster?
• How did the leader react?
• Disasters do happen – are you ready?
• Are you confident you can engage people to respond quickly and effectively?
• Has your organisation got the capacity to stop a disaster from becoming a catastrophe?

Watkins rightly delivers this sombre message:

“If a damaging event happens that was foreseeable and preventable, no excuses should be brooked. The leader’s feet need to be held to the fire.”

How do you avoid the smell of burning toes? A few items from our leadership ‘checklist’ might help:

• Is there a danger of your being over-reliant on intuition? How do you ensure predictable surprises are rigorously reviewed?
• Is there a danger that you ignore the power of short term pain when you focus on long term gain? Psychological research shows immediate, certain negative consequences are a key driver of behaviour. In other words, short term pain mobilises people into action – whatever the longer term benefits may be.
• Does your organisation listen well? Will concerns, key pieces of information and fresh ideas reach the leadership team? If you are seen as a leader who goes his/her own way, or discourages bad news, you may be the last to know when a disaster looms.
• How effective is your risk management? Is it a mechanistic tick box exercise or will you be able to spot that Manager A is likely to handle change badly, or Department B is going to resist even the smallest change? Where might unexpected cost issues come from?
• How aligned are your leaders?  Silo working, too narrow a focus on targets and territorial behaviours can all stop ‘upstream thinking’, innovation and more effective working. Whose behav-iour can limit your capacity to succeed? Who is your predictable surprise?

In times of turbulent change, leaders will be judged more harshly and more quickly than in ‘normal times’.
Keeping a delicate eye on the predictable surprises is an important tactic to both survive and thrive in demanding times.

To download a pdf version of this article click here

A very good friend was trained at Sandhurst. He took a patrol out on night manoeuvres through a dense wood - trying to avoid being discovered by the enemy. His team came to a break in the woods and had to cross a road. This was a danger point threatening the patrol with discovery - and defeat - in the exercise. He gathered his men in a ditch by the side of the road, they synchronised watches and agreed that when he signalled them they would move quickly across the road, keeping low and throw themselves in the parallel ditch. The signal came, my friend kept low, crossed the road and flung himself in the ditch, only to find the rest of his patrol were still in place where he had left them. He was a leader without followers. However clear or urgent his instructions had been he was in one place and his team were in another.

Ira Challeff created the term “followership”. As my friend’s story illustrates, it is the actions of followers that determine the success of a leader.  We were fortunate enough to spend some time with Ira recently. He describes follower as a role not a personality type. We decide whether to take that role. As Ira points out people do not like to describe themselves as a follower.  We may be reluctant followers, we may be compliant followers - or we may be courageous followers. Ira points to the well-chronicled failures of followers - failure to pass on important information, failure to challenge wrong decisions, failure to respond to challenges. Followers were ineffective in Enron, Andersons, Lehman Brothers - but of course, the reason for that failure is strongly linked to the leadership culture. Effective leaders engage followers, they encourage and actively enable openness and challenge. they respond positively to the bad news or the reality checks that come from further down the organisation. In turn this leads to empowered followers who have the confidence to make decisions, be proactive, be innovative - and support the success of the organisation. 

In times of challenge and change it is so easy (and tempting) to revert to a command and control style of leadership. This creates compliant followers. The more courageous leader wants to tap into the passion and intelligence of their teams, to find the new and more effective ways of working, to have front line staff who can be powerful ambassadors for the organisation. Ira’s book ‘Courageous Followers’ gives a refreshing insight into the impact of leadership - it is an essential read whether you are on night manoeuvres or have bigger battles to fight in the day to day challenges of enabling organisation change.  

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.

Read more…

The Work Foundation has just published some work called Exceeding Expectations: the principles of outstanding leadership. It looked at outstanding leaders. Three key themes emerged that we believe help organisations move from Good to Great and are worth ‘benchmarking’ yourself against.

1. Reaction follows action: outstanding leaders understand their impact on others. They empower others to make a difference, they stretch people to unleash energy
2. Performance comes through people: organisational outcomes e.g. productivity, quality, innovation and great customer care are all achieved by engaging others, enthusing them, growing them, building confidence, creating trust and passing on power
3. Their impact comes through others: outstanding leaders are comfortable about acknowledging their own weaknesses, keen to empower others and have great self awareness

We like this ‘high impact leadership’ thinking! Very useful for 2010

WL Gore is an amazing company which seems to continue to thrive in times good and bad.  Many things help explain this striking achievement not least what has been dubbed (by Director Magazine) its guide to management:

1. Belief in the individual. If you trust individuals and believe in them, they will be motivated to do what’s right for the company.
2. Power of small teams. They encourage fast decision-making, diverse perspectives and collaboration.
3. All in the same boat. Associate stick plan means all staff share in the risks and rewards. It gives incentives to contribute to the organisation’s success.
4. Long-term view. Investments are made for long-term success and fundamental beliefs never sacrificed for short-term profit.

I don’t know about you but I find much that inspires and challenges me in equal measure in these easy to understand (if difficult to implement) principles.

These are times of tension and paradox.  I am thinking of the need every organisation has for a clear and compelling picture of the future on the one hand and stubborn unpredictability on the other.  In some cases leadership is frozen into inaction as a result.  Some leaders however, choose instead to play with a range of scenarios of alternative futures. Last week a senior manager told me she was finding it very difficult to plan.  That was understandable given her understanding of planning:  that it is about predicting the future.  Things got a bit easier when she started to build and juggle alternative, supplementary, or contradictory pictures of the future and then begin to tease out resource implications and impact assessment.  How does planning work in your organisation?