An organisation’s success depends on its middle! In changing times greater effectiveness, raised productivity, stronger focus and high impact innovation are essential – and each of these depends on middle managers. However brilliant senior manager’s plans, visions and aspirations are they flounder or succeed on the implementation skills of their middle managers. Middle Managers are critical –and they are under incredible pressure –do they get the leadership support they need?

I was working with the Police who were struggling with change. The Area Commander was a visionary, energetic, change agent – wanting to take a force lead in delivering greater effectiveness. He described his Inspectors as the people who stand on the bridge between the future and the present. They interpret his vision and translate into a language the Sergeants and PCs can understand, they reinforce his messages and challenges, they change the culture. But the Inspectors did not buy into the role. They were not tackling poor performance, they were not engaging their teams to find improved ways of working at a local level and they were not challenging back upwards when there was a need for greater clarity around the key areas of focus.

One writer describes the problem facing leaders as “Meeting new demands with insufficient resources”. Staff are overworked – and yet talent, ideas and expertise are often under utilised as we struggle to meet the day to day demands.

Great leaders understand that they can only deliver great performance through others. They depend on others – especially middle managers – and invest time in stretching and challenging those managers. Liz Wiseman and Greg McKeown in their book “Multipliers – how the best leaders make everyone smarter” describe two types of leader. Those who kill ideas, suck all the energy out of a team and lead hard working, driven and compliant teams. They want to be in control, to have the credit and ensure no one else has a voice. In contrast multipliers are brilliant at doing more with less. They cultivate ideas, they find ways of doing things more effectively, they give people responsibility and credit, and they energise their teams.

Samsung faced an enormous challenge in the 1990’s – they were way behind their international rivals like Sony. They wanted to develop an international company but had a 100% Korean workforce with very limited understanding of the global market and cultures. They invested in a cadre of middle managers – sending them all over the world to better understand how to shape and engage with the potential markets. It was a phenomenal success. By changing the middle managers mind-set and understanding they built a dramatically different future.

I was with the Chief Executive of a national charity recently – his style is to push and challenge those people with talent and potential. We have seen significant improvements in the contribution his leadership team make to the organisation – and he will continue to raise their game. They recently led a national campaign when middle managers had to step right out of their comfort zone and engage local politicians in some key changes. The end result was outstanding and gave middle managers huge confidence. Many would not have taken this risk – would have argued it was beyond the middle managers capability. But the CEO believed that with the right understanding, the right tools and on-going support that enabled learning from every political encounter the middle managers could significantly raise their game.

Middle managers take the a leader’s vision, focus and change and interpret it. Senior managers will have a long time scale, they see the bigger picture, and have a broad understanding of the consequences of their decisions. Middle managers work to shorter times scales – they look a week or month ahead and ask – “How does this new initiative work alongside my operational priorities? How do I make best use of my resources? What pace can I go at given the other requirements of my team? He/she will set direction – if they are good at their job they will ensure their team members clearly know what is expected of them.

Middle Managers are under enormous pressure and wrestle daily with the challenges of making best use of diminished resources. Their organisations want them to think differently, to find more effective ways of working, to raise performance. How many have the capacity to do so? Many leaders need to give more time and support to the struggling middle – all too often things break down because there is not a shared understanding. The questions below enable you to review your middle managers and identify areas for change.

Is your organisation stuck in the middle?

1. Can strategy implementation be improved in your organisation?

2. How often do your change projects fail to deliver on time and to budget?

3. Could more ideas, improvements, opportunities come from middle managers and their teams?

4. Do you know how well middle managers understand and are committed to your key priorities?

5. What do your best middle managers do to engage, energise and develop talent? How is this “best practice” spread?

6. Does the organisation do enough to tackle managers who demotivate, have high staff turnover, disengagement, or poor innovation?

7. Could you middle managers improve their problem solving skills?

8. What is the most important contribution your middle managers should be making at the moment?

Using this list where are there opportunities to raise the contribution of your middle managers? What could you do differently to strengthen your managers and ensure you do not become stuck in the middle?

Steve Botham, Chief Executive Caret Consulting Group

Leading through the pain barrier in 2013

Steve Botham is Chief Executive of Caret Consulting Group and Chairman of the Chamberlain Forum

I was talking to a senior Housing person recently who told me how they had invited 3000 tenants to a briefing on the benefits changes. “Only one person turned up – clearly people are in denial about the issues,” he said “mind you many of us managers and leaders are in denial as well.”

Changing your leadership approach – it is madness to lead in the same way whatever the circumstances. We believe the context housing is moving into is so changed that our approach to leadership needs to change as well.

There are four fundamental adjustments Housing leaders need to take in 2013

1. Be prepared

2. Monitor the changes closely and respond quickly

3. Create simple, cost effective, consistent responses

4. Support the front line

1. Be prepared this may sound like the boy scouts but this is a massive issue. The better prepared you are the less likely it is that your organisation is critically damaged by the housing changes. We are working with a range of clients on scenarios and asking – “if 50% of your clients default on payments how will you respond?” “If your staff find it increasingly difficult to handle stressed and traumatised clients how will you support them?” Etc. etc. This brings in all the key players – financial, legal, front line, customer service and asks – “how can we respond in a consistent, joined up and simple way to the challenges that lie ahead?”

2. Monitor the changes closely and respond quickly Senior managers and board members in Housing will be judged on how well they manage risk in 2013. It should be integral to the way you lead the business. It needs to be given enough time, energy –and cross company involvement so you can anticipate many of the issues and prepare.

There may be large scale risks to finance, cash flow, your reputation, vulnerable tenants, and your capacity to respond at certain key dates when changes are being implemented. Alongside this will be the many smaller but very challenging customer service issues - individual problems around payments, personal circumstances, emotional flare ups, conflict, distress that will impact all staff with customer contact.

You need a very deliberate and focused monitoring strategy. What is the key data and information at this time? How current and reliable is it? How are the changes affecting the business? What is staff morale like? Do staff have the guidance and support they need? What responses are working well? What is working less well? Can we improve our response?

Management needs to change – investing more time in reviewing the current situation. There needs to be clear and objective feedback from the front line, and the capacity to spot trends, manage and control risks and a continuous awareness of what is working well and what is not with clients and staff.  Good leadership in 2013 is going to depend on outstanding awareness of what is going on.

3. Create simple, cost effective and consistent responses. Some HAs will find their costs escalating at this time. One of the key drivers will be inconsistent working practices. If you are unprepared for problems and address each one as it arises this will take up large portions of management time – and may not pick up some of the broader perspectives e.g.financial, legal, customer service. The best way to deal with issues is to keep the response simple, to give staff the authority to act and to ensure guidelines/processes are clear and accessible. This needs preparation – and it is preparation that can save a lot of cost and angst.  Leaders need to provide clarity to the whole organisation - balancing the need to protect the organisation financially, keep your values and social purpose and being able to respond quickly and clearly too difficult situations.

Disciplines, good practices, simple procedures are critical in reducing costs. But they are unlikely to be fully fit for purpose – they need to be reviewed and updated as you get more information from the front line. I would recommend that some senior staff need to devote a lot of time to managing and improving your responses and guidelines for key issues and problems.

4. Support the front line – some of your front line will cope magnificently and become your 2013 heroes. Others will struggle. Some will face customers with complex emotional problems and extreme reactions – others may have an easier experience. Some may be working with tenants suffering mental health issues, an imploding family situation and a real inability to see a way forward. Others may be working with resilient communities where there is a good local support framework.

The front line needs the capacity to respond to a vast range of situations and reactions. They need to know they are being well supported by colleagues in other parts of the business and by their managers. Ideally they want simple processes and responses that enable them to deal consistently with different situations.

There are many challenges ahead – staff may have behaved reasonably and fairly but customers have misinterpreted their actions. Some staff may have avoided difficult issues and made things more complex. Managers will need to have strong focus on the front line. There needs to be a lot of learning going on. This is a new situation for many organisations – what does your emerging good practice look like? How can you spread good practice further? What mistakes are made and how can you avoid them being repeated?

Finally many staff work in Housing because they care, they want clients to have good houses, and they want families to flourish. This could be a distressing time for front line staff – they need lots of support. They need people with listening ears and they need to be allowed to try some things and get them wrong as they find the right way forward.

The bottom line is that 2013 is a year when Managers need to be more hands on, planning well, responding quickly and managing risks. They need to invest more time in managing the business and keeping it safe.

Caret Consulting Group bring specialist leadership support to Housing in challenging times.

The old wartime song - “We’ll meet again” can seem like a demotivating threat in many current organisations –“if you don’t behave I’ll call another meeting!” In these cost and time conscious days meetings are – quite rightly – coming under more scrutiny. Let’s face it – meetings can be a great way to frustrate people and waste time.

I was in an organisation recently which said the first fifteen minutes of every meeting are a waste of time because senior management are late so everyone who has made it on time (a diminishing number) wastes their time. How much unproductive downtime does that create? Are senior management complicit in driving organisational inefficiency? There’s plenty of evidence of poorly prepared, poorly facilitated, unfocused meetings that lead to poor decisions, actions that are not followed through and the disappointing decision to meet again!

Becoming sharper, faster, fitter – just as Olympic athletes continually have to increase their personal best so do leaders in challenging times. A focus on improving your meetings culture can make a significant impact on the organisation.

Meetings Focus – the first question is what is the purpose of your meeting? Some meetings lost their purpose a long time ago – they keep on meeting because no one has the courage to end its existence. Most organisations can reduce their meetings by at least 10 – 20%. The impact and usefulness of your meetings is directly related to the focus and clarity within your organisation. A colleague works on a quarterly basis with a client’s leadership team to ensure they have five clear priorities for the coming quarter. From this they plan their weekly operational meetings ensuring they focus on the priorities and they have quarterly strategic meetings to ensure they are planning for a shaping the future. The leaders ensure the entire organisation and its meetings are aligned to work together at the same pace to deliver the priorities.

We often quote Jim Collins and say – organisational success depends on the deliberate actions you take. So much of that deliberate action is around meetings. Being deliberate in setting time aside for high quality innovation, being deliberate about focusing attention on making the organisation more effective, being deliberate about horizon scanning- looking longer term at risks and opportunities and ensuring the organisation is well prepared.

Be prepared - arguably one of the most important task a leader has is to sort out the agenda for his/her meetings. To many supporting papers are written to impress not enable decision making, going into uneccessary technical detail. Sometimes this is in response to one technically detailed committee member who makes life a misery for all their colleagues. This is all poor time management.

Another time management issue is around selecting people to be at the meeting. Some don’t need to be there all the time, some don’t need to be there at all. A timed agenda helps bring focus to the most important issues and bring advisors in and out of the meeting effectively.

Facilitate well – a meeting should be about collecting a wide range of perspectives and making the best possible decision. Some Chairs think it is about an opportunity to ramble and rubber stamp the decision they wanted the meeting to agree. Great Chairs recognise that a meeting is a collection of loud people with lots of ideas and enthusiasm and quiet people with important nuggets of insight. Great Chairs encourage the quiet and the reluctant to contribute and build up their confidence and they tackle counter productive behaviours – a dominant voice, tensions, lack of engagement etc. head on.

It’s rude – organisations slip into ineffective and often just plain rude behaviours. I worked with a large organisation where a senior manager annoyed everybody he came into contact with by arriving late, fiddling with his emails during the meeting, taking calls, and then criticising decisions when he himself had not been engaged in shaping them. People felt he was communicating real lack of respect for them and the subject under discussion. Others tell us – our CEO fiddles with his emails all the time. What’s the message? This meeting and you people in it are not as important as what is going on elsewhere. In todays environment blackberries and IPads mean that people are not fully engaged in the meetings – and the meeting and relationships suffer as a result.

Performance Management – Chairs need to take responsibility for performance managing their meetings. They need to ensure actions are followed up and staff are challenged when inaction occurs. If the actions don’t happen however good the quality of your debate this was an unsuccessful meeting.

I came across a situation where one willing meeting attender had 50 incomplete actions against his name. He makes unrealistic commitments to act and the Chair has not challenged his unreliability.

A meeting is measured by its impact. Increasingly good teams finalise their decisions at the end of the meeting – reviewing what was agreed, sharpening their actions, ensuring the timescales are challenging but realistic and it is clear who is doing what.

Staff morale – you won’t please everybody with your Chairing skills. Some may accuse of being to task oriented and not investing enough time in the team – others will say we are to pink and fluffy and should just concentrate on task. Some will say the meeting is to structured, others not structured enough.  What you must aim for is a consensus that your meetings are outcome focused, that everyone makes a strong contribution and the meetings are real value for money – and we really do want to meet again!

Steve Botham is Chief Executive of Caret Consulting Group

LEADING TO A NEW CUSTOMER FUTURE – FOR HOUSING

Meeting Customer Needs in Challenging Times

Any Housing leader who loves a good worry will be in their element at the moment – there are worries galore. “I am really concerned that we are going to lose our credibility with our customers” one CEO from a very highly regarded HA told me recently. “Our customers are going through horrendous situations at the moment” said another, “and we hardly dare tell them that it is going to get worse.”

The recent NHF report Building Future reports that Housing Associations provide services to eight million people.  Many of them in trouble, hurting, and stressed.  People will complain bitterly as your staff provide unpalatable options for them as benefit issues hit, people will question why your team are so well paid when they and all their friends are out of work, people will damage your properties when they feel over charged – or they simply cannot afford your prices.

We use the phrase “predictable surprises” – the things we should think about before they come up and bite us. It’s predictable that we will see more stressed customers, customers with increased mental health problems and customers who begin to see you as part of the “establishment” working against them. This in turn leads to stressed staff that become more reluctant to engage the majority of customers because of their negative experiences with a few.

Housing Associations are naturally customer and community focused – they have mission statements such as “Our aim is to deliver excellent customer care services to all our customers” “We will work to the highest possible standards of service and professionalism.” No problem with that – the question is what does excellent customer service look like in 2012? Who determines the standards?

It’s time to revisit customer service. We start by asking – what does our customer want in 2012? 2013? 2014? Some of the basics remain – they want a decent home, to be treated as human beings, to be able to access information and support easily. But new issues exist – how do we communicate in the social media age? How do we handle those who are downsizing from the home you told them was “ideal”? How do we support people under added stress? How do we streamline and simplify our processes to reduce errors, take out costs and save time? Do we need to provide more choice – what some Councils are calling the Easy Jet approach with a more basic core service and a choice of additional support?

But in Housing the customer relationship is two way – Has have always wanted to encourage “good citizenship”, proactive tenants” “community volunteers”. Again in a changing environment – what do good customers look like in 2012 – how do you reward and encourage them? How might this link to an increased number of social enterprises, community “companies” and trusts – people who contribute to the value of your assets.

One Housing Association claims it has got its customer service right because it has supplied training, got the processes in place and monitors its performance regularly. This seems very limited to us. We need People and Community Leadership strategies in place – and they need to be at the heart of your organisation. Key things to look at include

· Review your purpose – is it to provide “excellence” – what does that mean in cash strapped times? Do customers want excellence or value for money? What’s most important to a family on reduced income? Or an elderly person with reduced social care support?

· Scenario planning – what are the predictable surprises for your customers? The difficult challenges your staff will face? The challenges that your processes and standards need to be able to respond to. What will you need to monitor in coming months

· What customer service skills are needed – a ready smile and a telephone friendly voice may not be enough for a customer with a mental health problem, a host of clients resisting eviction or a Council asking you to do stock transfer within very tight timescales.

· What are your values? What will give you a firm reference point in challenging times

· Is your leadership fit for purpose (“of course we are” you cry – but we are entering unchartered waters). Do you work together robustly to ensure the organisation is focused, effective, and aligned. What behaviours will get rewarded and encouraged in the future?

· Will your managers provide coaching and support to enable front line staff to deal well with the challenges they face? Will you ensure that you are learning from the new challenges you face and constantly getting better at what you do?

· What will you stop doing? How will you get rid of processes that are to long? How will you stop inefficient working in your organisation? How might you create more standardisation to reduce costs

The secret? - High impact leaders who work effectively together to shape and deliver a new customer strategy and develop the organisation capacity to deliver that strategy. Leaders who understand the future risks for their customers and staff.  Leaders who bring real focus and clarity in order to energise and align the organisation. Leaders who ensure that customer service training or development is not treated like fairy dust sprinkled on children to make them play better but is linked with “what we reward, what we role model as leaders, what we talk about.”  Leaders who can innovate and improve their organisation and the services it provides with changes that will be well implemented. Leaders with the humility to recognise they have not got all the answers but make best use of the expertise, talent and energy within their organisation.

Steve Botham

Caret Consulting Group are experts in delivering change, enabling leaders and shaping and empowering leadership teams within Housing. We work in partnership to help HAs shape the future

“She was in the middle of a magic show, inside a magic box. And then all the lights went out so she struggled to get out of the box.” Or so tells the mother of Rosalyn Rincon, from Blackpool, England. Training and precision are essential for pulling off a good magic trick but this counts for little when something dramatic suddenly occurs like a power cut. Unfortunately this was only the beginning of a nightmare evening for Ms Rincon and her colleagues who were working on the now infamous cruise-liner, Costa Concordia.

The £372m cruise-liner with state-of-the-art navigation equipment, an experienced crew, repeating the same voyage it makes 52 times per year, ran aground just metres off the Italian coastline. The ship capsized so quickly that the lifeboats and safety rafts on the port side became unusable. It meant that many of the ship’s emergency procedures no longer functioned or were invalid. For a time staff tried to help stranded passengers or colleagues without being clear if rescue was possible. 

I think the plight of Costa Concordia’s crew bears some similarities to the challenges facing many leaders today: Leadership is in crisis. The world is now nowhere nearly as predictable as it has been for the last fifty years. Consequently we are unable to rely on what has guided us in the past to steer us safely into the future. We are therefore left with a challenge few leaders have grappled with before: managing the no longer and the not yet. What we relied on no longer exists or is uncertain (e.g. the euro) and a new operating blueprint has not yet emerged. No wonder businesses and governments, let alone cruise-liners, are capsizing!

So what should leaders be doing? Whilst the world around us is uncertain I remain convinced that the principles of leadership have not changed. We still need to, for example:

• Clarify purpose & values
• Articulate a picture of the future that is better than today
• Design and execute a plan to arrive at that future (including the deployment of systems & processes to help keep on track)
• Implement numerous ways to engage customers, staff, shareholders, communities, and other interested parties into that plan

Frameworks, models, principles and even luck will certainly help leaders to become significantly more effective. Yet even these are insufficient.  For me one of the richest qualities of a leader is having the courage to unashamedly lead and not to give up.  I like how Mary Lou Anderson puts it:
 
Leaders are called to stand
in that lonely place
between the no longer and the not yet
and intentionally make decisions
that will bind, forge, move
and create history.

We are not called to be popular,
we are not called to be safe,
we are not called to follow,
we are the ones called to take risks,
we are the ones called to change attitudes;
to risk displeasures,
we are the ones called to gamble our lives,
for a better world.
 
 

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.

Apparently 2012 could be a bit tricky. Germany’s Chancellor Merkel said in her recent TV address “next year [2012] will no doubt be more difficult than 2011.” A BBC poll of leading economists finds them predicting a recession in Europe during the first half of 2012. Leaders everywhere are clearly facing tough conditions and yet they are tasked to press on and pursue a path that successfully takes people somewhere better. It reminds me of the challenges faced by the great explorers and pioneers.
 
Ben Macintyre’s delightful article in the Times on 27th December tells of one of the great pioneer explorers – Dr David Livingstone: “The intrepid explorer was suffering from pneumonia, malaria, foot ulcers and piles so savage he could barely walk. The roasting heat was punctuated by sudden torrential downpours. Many of his porters had run away and he had been forced to pull out most of his rotting teeth. He had been attacked by leeches, slavers and hostile African tribesmen. Lurking in his gut was a blood clot the size of a cricket ball that would shortly kill him.
 
“In his tent, by the light of a candle, Livingstone picked up his pen and, using berry juice because he had run out of ink, he wrote these magnificent words: ‘It is not all pleasure, this exploration.’”
 
There will be so many reasons in 2012 for leaders to stop, give up, and take cover. There will be a number of occasions when you’ll feel you can barely walk and that that the way forward is even harder than the tough route you’ve just travelled. But perseverance is a hallmark of great leaders. General Eisenhower said, “What counts is not necessarily the size of the dog in the fight - it’s the size of the fight in the dog.” So here are five things to help put fight or grizzle in your dog in 2012:

• Be crystal clear to yourself and others of your specific goals for the year and why they are achievable
• Do one thing every day that moves forward one of these goals
• Be a champion of hope AND brutally honest about your circumstances
• Find someone who thinks you can be better than you actually are. Listen to them for all you are worth
• Never, ever give up!

Christmas is nearly upon us and workplaces across the land are beginning to look forward to the staff Christmas party and other shared festivities. It’s usually an occasion of great fun and team bonding but it’s also the time when leaders and managers can be at their most vulnerable.

Most leaders are wise enough not to drink too much and end up doing something inappropriate or embarrassing. Yet managers can also get ambushed at parties once the alcohol has begun to flow with colleagues. Sober judgement can be suspended and words said to the boss that are later deeply regretted. In other words, it’s not just about what you do or don’t do; it’s also being aware of what others may do because you are there.  One seasoned chief executive I work with has a principle for these occasions of being the first to the bar and the first to leave the party.

I think the boss should always go to the party. It’s important to party with your people. But go with a plan.

Merry Christmas!

 I think Mitt Romney has taken up voodoo. I don’t know this for sure but I am suspicious about the way his Republican opponents for the presidency are so spectacularly bombing. From Governor Perry’s catastrophic “Oops” moment in a televised debate (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTNjhcyx7dM) to Herman Cain’s delightful Libyan disaster (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAGGpK7bSWc) and trail of sexual misconduct allegations, Mr Romney’s prospects just keep on getting better.

Interestingly, has anyone noticed what Romney is saying? Because he isn’t saying much of significance. And that’s probably a great strategy! Being (relatively) quiet is proving to be a useful asset for him as he seeks to impress voters.

Sometimes being quiet is a powerful tool for leaders in tackling challenges and managing people. For example you don’t need to always have the last word in meetings or to fill the uneasy gaps after you’ve asked a difficult question. Being quiet can mean choosing not to be openly critical or grumble about others; or even to defend yourself (which as a strategy worked well for Jesus, Wilberforce and Gandhi).

Obviously being quiet is a device to be used carefully lest you be thought of as ‘light’ or creating a vacuum of leadership. Nevertheless silence can be powerful.

Today there will be situations in which you can tackle challenges and difficult people by choosing to be quiet. Have a go and see what the results are. And if all else fails, buy some pins!