Sometimes leadership means that either/or situations are merely a trap for the unsuspecting and the experienced alike. Prior to the overseas trip Senator McCain was justifiably inviting the American electorate to join him in having concerns about Senator Obama’s lack of international and military experience.

Many observers and commentators are of the view that Mr Obama’s overseas trip has been a success. But, there ends the either/or aspect of the gauntlet. For, as the New York Times puts it today:

The quandary for Mr. Obama is that while his trip clearly presented an opportunity for him — even many Republicans conceded that he seized it masterfully with eight days of appearances in troubled lands, meetings with foreign leaders and visits to soldiers — it also fuelled the questions his critics have used to try to undercut him: whether he is arrogant and taking his election for granted.

At a much smaller scale, as a leader you may find that some of your days are similarly dogged by paradox much like the senator’s European trip which ended today.  What  skills and approaches have worked particularly well for you?

The Governments Power of Information Taskforce has created a £20,000 prize fund for people who want to develop new ways to use publicly owned data for public benefit. You submit ideas through the website boldly called showusabetterway. They’ve also made a series of government data sets available for people to work with. This website though is important because its how the government is thinking in fresh ways about collaboration and its relationship with us:

We’re confident that you’ll have more and better ideas than we ever will. You don’t have to have any technical knowledge, nor any money, just a good idea, and 5 minutes spare to enter the competition.Go on, Show Us A Better Way.

The same task force has already looked for ways to make it easier or safer for civil servants to share in the ideas fest which often happens online. Openness generates better ideas. It helps people to innovate faster and work better. Yes it also means people can nick those ideas - but that doesn’t put the thieves ahead of those who habitually collaborate to progress.

(Thanks to Bill Thompson)

This extract on skating over ideas and invest in some deeper thinking comes from a speech to new graduates at The Pacific Northwest College of Art. Susan S Szenasy , editor of the Metropolis Magazine told the students:

As artists and communication designers you can choose to be the
outriders of society. Like the scouts in the old western films, you can
be in the position of surveying the horizon and alerting the rest of us
to the dangers and surprises ahead. But I worry about you. I worry that
while you have evolved the use of your thumbs to work at phenomenal
speeds, you are not as interested in developing the habits you need to
accumulate knowledge, knowledge that can inform your vision as artists.
I mean knowledge of the world—science, literature, and
history—knowledge of the great contributions others are making or have
made to our rich understanding of humanity and the earth which gives us
life.

It is not enough to find information instantly and use it
opportunistically to support your argument. To be able to analyze and
synthesize you need to delve deeply into a subject, build up your
understanding incrementally, and own that knowledge. Own it, so you can
call it up when you need it, without turning to your PDA, and use your
amazing brain-power to interpret what you know when critical analysis
is needed. What I’m asking of you is what I have always asked of
myself: To be endlessly curious about everything, to search for facts
when you need them, but more importantly, to search for ideas and
meaning. Read a book, look at a building or a landscape, drink it all
in—make it your own.

For more read here. Hat tip to Canufluck.

Julian Dobson runs Newstart, a magazine and website which has spent a good few years watching how cities and communities function and flourish, commune or collapse.

From time to time he blogs on the site Living with Rats. Today he writes on the enforced competition which can drive decisions by our city regions and how some are walking away from that approach:

In Newcastle and Gateshead, the two local authorities are already seizing those opportunities by setting aside old rivalries and are working on a combined city development company. They’ve realised there’s more to be won by collaborating than by fighting over resources. What’s impressive is not just that the civic leaders have grasped that vision, but that it’s being pursued at an operational level: instead of competing for business, the councils work together to give investors a consistent message and to provide employment for local people, whichever side of the Tyne they happen to live on.

That kind of leadership involves questioning and challenging familiar ways of working. It means continually asking what is appropriate and being ready to break old habits.

In a world where people are sometimes deliberately set against each other, it takes a twist of determination to turn your back on such a culture. This something I’ve found with the many stories I’ve recorded of active citizens and also is understood by Caret colleagues who work on community leadership. Leaders look for ways to collaborate.

We have watched, shouted, cajoled and advised as arm chair spectators - and at times we will have been incredulous at the antics of Sir Alan Sugar’s latest batch of would-be apprentices. Now we sit back and ask “did he make the right choice?”. 

I thought Lee had blown it; he lied on his CV and he repeated his lie in the interview with that nice (but obviously not dumb) Bordan on the interview panel. It begs the question about how much Sir Alan can trust Lee? And, maybe when things get difficult in his new role, will the new £100,000 apprentice suddenly find he has other memory lapses or moments of high career creativity?

I felt Claire was the one - she was enthusiastic, bright and had good ‘bouncebackability’. There has been some speculation that Sir Alan was intimidated by her direct style and confidence and is more comfortable with ‘blokes’. On reflection though, I think Sir Alan made the right choice (from a not very convincing group of people whose sole qualification for the programme seemed to be a high dose of self delusion). I baulk at the CV lies but what we did see in Lee was a much better leader than we saw in Claire.

There are two key things in Lee’s favour:

1.  What would he be like to work for - will he raise the contribution he gets from his team? He has the ability to get on with all (well, most) of his colleagues, whereas Claire was part of a group that took delight in hacking great chunks out of each other. He demonstrated great energy and enthusiasm and showed he could lead as well as be a hard-working team member. Claire is good on her own, especially in a sales situation, but that does not make a great £100,000 job applicant. Working for her could be like working for a very self-opinionated steam roller… woe betide someone who gets in the way! Working for Lee could be fun, energising and exciting (although you might want to check the veracity of any marketing materials he puts out!).
2. Lee’s second winning driver is who would you like to work for you? If the apprentice is to become a real asset to Sir Alan’s business empire he or she needs to be a strong team player and someone who will listen to and learn from the master. He needs to take instruction and deliver what is needed.  But he also needs to perform at a senior level - and be credible with Sir Alan’s clients.

Lee faced a fierce jury in the past three months - the general public has yet again been caught up with his antics and those of his colleagues. He now faces a smaller but more influential jury within Sir Alan’s organisation. He needs to prove himself worthy of his role in a demanding business. Too many of this years applicants were strutting egos “I am probably the best sales person in Europe”, “I get on with prince and pauper”, “I expect to be a billionaire within the next year” “I am the most accurate cross stitcher in my village” (perhaps I made the last one up). Lee was self assured with a touch of humanity, he supported and encouraged others, he enthused customers and colleagues. He is expected to operate at a senior level - I think the evidence says he is the one that can lead the best, that’s why he was chosen. Yes its back to leadership - as Lee might say, “C’mon, that’s what I’m talking about.”

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.

As my wife and I were buying a set of kitchen knives yesterday, I discovered something I had never realised before. In a quiet but authoritative voice, the woman behind the counter said, ‘You have to sharpen your knives after the first three uses and frequently thereafter’. Interesting advice, I thought,

I asked what made her suggestion important. And, her response? If you don’t sharpen your knives in the manner suggested, they are likely to lose their edge and require regrinding to retain them

This brief encounter had me thinking of kitchen knives (tools) as a metaphor for the unique strengths and talents each of us brings to the challenges, and opportunities we face every day. We really do owe it to ourselves, colleagues, and our employing organisations to keep on working on ourselves.

Unfortunately, as author Dave Anderson observes, “The leaders of successful organisations often think they’ve got it all figured out. So they continue to work hard on their jobs but stop working on themselves. They use their experience and track records as license to never read another book or attend another course in their field”.

Even if Dave Anderson’s observation is not an accurate description of your attitude and actual behaviour, could you benefit from sharpening your knives (unique strengths and talents) more intentionally?

Some Midlands based research for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation recently looked at ‘Routes and barriers to citizen governance‘. It discovered that many groups feel marginalised from the political process. Maybe no great surprise given the low voting in recent local government elections. But it comes at a time when, nationally, Government want citizens to be more engaged in their communities - to shape the services they receive and to help develop their neighbourhoods.

The research focused on the importance of strong community leadership to raise the level and impact of community governance. I was asked to address the issues of community leadership at the launch of the report and highlighted a few key themes:

1. Community leadership can be a battleground between councillors and local activists with different agendas and values. It has to be a partnership if the community is not to become paralysed.
2. Trust is at the heart of effective community leadership. Trust is about honesty, competence, accessibility, commitment and a good understanding of local needs.
3. Amazingly, many leaders do not know how they come across or how they impact others. The report recognised that many councillors provide excellent leadership, but others haven’t a clue about how to impact young people, different ethnic groups, council officers etc. Leaders without good self awareness will always struggle to make things happen.
4. Community leaders need followers (they can look rather foolish without them!). Followers come when the leader champions the community and champions the different talents within it - engaging people and listening to their ideas. At the heart of this is the leader’s ability to give power to others.
5. I would encourage leaders to reflect on their impact and to be much more deliberate in finding ways to maximise not just the number of followers, but also the quantity of their followers’ contribution.

Community leadership is something you work at with feedback from others, a generous attitude and a commitment to putting the community’s success above your own ego.

Since the summer of 2007 Citigroup has written down £10bn.  This development has led a business newspaper  to run a piece under the title, “Citi seeks finance-savvy directors“.  Writing about this and other crises in banks such as : Citigroup, Royal Bank of Scotland, and UBS, Paul Myners concludes,

“A typical board resembles a retirement home for the great and the good.  If such a selection was ever enough, it is not now”.

Four days earlier, a UBS senior executive had been quoted as having said,

“We had 20 people on the beach looking at grains of sand when the tsunami came along and wiped everybody out”.

Governance is as demanding as it it important.  What instructive stories are you aware of in respect of governance?

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?