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.

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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.  

High Performance is clearly a key issue as organisations seek to make progress in challenging times. Patrick Lencioni has written wisely about High Performing teams, increasingly we are working on a business transformation programme with clients who want to create a ‘high performing organisation’, Sir John Whitmore writes on performance coaching. Mike Harris, founder of First Direct and Egg, takes this a step further into High Performance Coaching. Writing in People Management (22/04/10) he looks for three things from business coaching:

• to help people create motivating personal goals aligned with company goals
• to facilitate meetings that focus on developing plans and strategies - addressing problems and enabling innovation
• develop a high performing leadership teams capable of building an extraordinary business

Coaching a leadership team should enable it to invest good quality time, and intelligence, on shaping the strategic future. It should enable innovation and effectiveness, greater alignment in the organisation and increased clarity about the next steps. It enables the organisation to face the huge challenges of change and find new approaches. Our simple belief is ‘we need to think our way out of the recession’. Given the immense pressure on leaders to address the immediate quality time needed to shape direction and engage the organisation is vital to the organisation’s future. Our experience shows that a top team will really benefit from an external coach who is committed to their success and can challenge them to become high performing.

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

If you were a business leader in New York City in 1886, what to sort of things might you be paying special attention? As it turns out, (as reported by Roy Williams), according to Manufacturer and Builder, the leading monthly journal of innovation and change, the big news in New York was the scandal over the proliferation of overhead electric lines.  And, there’s more. One of the most important discoveries reported in the journal was a new way to colour bricks red!!  But, what else was going on in 1886?  How about this as a starter for ten? 

• Crates containing the Statue of Liberty were being unloaded by dock workers
• Richard Sears was launching a company that would bring catalogue shopping to America
• In Atlanta, John Pemberton was finalising the concoction that would become Coca-Cola
• Gottlieb Daimler was completing the world’s first car - across the pond

As a leader, how might you make sure you are not so fixated on the slightly unusual (overhead electric lines!!) that you are blinded to crucial changes such as the birth of what was to later become the giant company Sears?

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.

I started my “proper” working life at Longbridge - then a factory employing 20,000 workers, the UK’s biggest at the time. To join up I had to walk through a picket line of angry engineers - they were relatively polite and sympathetic to my need to reassure my employers that I was alive and well and reporting for duty. As time went on the striking got worse, the assembly workers came out and filled the nearby parks with mass meetings and angry placards. We faced a weekend when all of us in Personnel were told to go home and prepare to make thousands redundant if crucial talks between management and unions broke down. Fortunately there was a breakthrough but the knock on effect in terms of suspicion and lack of cooperation persisted for many years.

Move forward to the present day. I was facilitating a day long workshop for an excellent group of HR Managers working in local government. At one point we considered the key risks their organisation faced as it prepared for significant change. There were big issues: significant damage to service delivery, inability to simplify processes and bring in new ways of working with reduced resources, antagonistic staff, a new structure with fewer people working but with less commitment to support vulnerable people or children. We looked at the capacity of their middle managers to take their teams with them through difficult change. “Oh my goodness,” one of the managers sighed, “some of them will be great but some of our managers will be an absolute nightmare.” My Longbridge experience was partly driven by very militant unions but it also symbolised a vote of no confidence in the senior managers. It was as if the workforce all joined together to sing “You don’t know what you’re doing.” In change, the organisation as a whole may be able to take the workforce with them during economically difficult times. But some managers “won’t know what they are doing” and will lose the confidence of their teams. The result? At best poorly implemented change - at worst antagonism and tensions for years to come.

The job of senior managers during change is to find the middle managers who are most likely to destroy staff morale or commitment. Leaders need to be looking carefully at who gets their vote of confidence to take people with them through change - and who needs attention now before they create disproportionate damage.  

Implementation is so difficult for many organisations that we have dubbed this the Bermuda Triangle.  Indeed, recent research shows that only 10% of carefully formulated strategies achieve their full promise. Sounds like plenty of room for success through low-hanging fruit then.  That does not necessarily mean it is easy but performance in this area could certainly be improved given how tight finances and other resources are going to be for the foreseeable future.

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?