Poor “Big Phil” Scolari - the impatient owners of Chelsea left him with the team his two predecessors built and expected wonders. Given his impressive record with Brazil you can see why their expectations were high. He has had precious little time to build his team, create a new culture and set new standards. He had more time than Tony Adams who also suffered from having some of his best players sold and a team that produced some good battling displays against the leagues top teams. Is there anything we can learn for leadership in organisations on the fate of “Big Phil” and Tony?

The first lesson is the impatience of people at the top for results. The second is that things could get better if you bring in a new leader. Does that make you feel a little uncomfortable if you are in a leadership/management role? It should do, because in both these cases I suspect both people gave the job everything they had - lots of experience, passion, energy, commitment - and it did not satisfy their Eastern European owners.

Let’s look at Martin O’Neill. I have to confess a bias here - I am a Villa fan but Martin has been given the time and the backing from his boss. Indeed the support has been wonderful and Martin has repaid it with thoughtful signings and attractive play. We use Jim Collins work on ‘Good to Great’ in Caret and he talks about getting the right people on the bus. O’Neill has done that - he has not gone for the highest of profiles but he has gone for people who are good team players. Combined together these team players become confident, committed, and happy. You see them out and about together in Birmingham - they support and value each other and Martin continually goes out of his way to praise their excellence. Villa is definitely a team where synergy is at work. They are better than the sum of their parts.

Chelsea are not better than the sum of their parts and the question is - was Scolari given enough time to make this happen? He certainly created a strong team spirit in Portugal and Brazil when he managed their national sides. But this is not a football blog - it’s about leadership. The challenge to us as we lead in challenging times is: have we got the right people on the bus? Is my team better than the sum of its part? Have I got the backing of my boss to keep improving this team? Are they aware of my standards? Do I regularly encourage them when I see good performances? The world of work needs more Martin O’ Neills who realise that a laser-like focus on team commitment can bring great results. How’s your team doing?

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.

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.

The best way for leaders to get better is to lead something besides their “main thing.”

When you use different muscles, you force your body to flex and develop in new ways. Leaders must invite the same type of cross training into their leadership development regimen.

The more varied the environments in which you exercise your leadership gift, the stronger that gift will become. Lead something besides your main thing. You will become a far more effective leader.

Bill Hybels in Axiom: Powerful Leadership Proverbs. Thanks to Michael McKinney.

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?

It seems so fluffy this thing called trust. Perhaps it is fluffy until such time as the P&L or the Reputation of a business takes a hit because of alleged or actual wrongdoing. Such has been the fate of Lee Kun-hee the Chairman of Samsung which is South Korea’s largest conglomerate turning over $150bn. So, Mr Lee and three other top executives suddenly resigned two days ago following a year of allegations of financial wrongdoing - he was indicted on charges of tax evasion and breach of trust.

Commenting on the resignations, the Financial Times said, “The move is unprecedented in corporate Korea, where tycoons usually continue to run business groups even after being convicted of serious white-collar crimes. It comes as Samsung faces rising competition from emerging Chinese rivals”.

Breach of trust? Mr Lee’s father established the company 70 years ago. He’s run it since the 1980’s.

This charge comes at a time when a number of elements are combining to create a possible perfect storm for South Korea:

• a global market turmoil
• a new government which only came into power two months ago
• rising competition from emerging Chinese rivals

Curious isn’t it that while good governance is never a guarantee of business success, bad governance can really be bad news with huge implications.

Back to the FT. “After months of investigating, a special prosecutor last week concluded that Mr Lee, the chairman, had breached his financial duty by letting his children buy bonds of Samsung’s affiliates through irregular financial transactions, incurring losses at the companies”.

Perhaps, even in hard-nosed business, trust is not such a fluffy thing after all. What do you think?

See also:

EnGadget

3gweek.net

RJ Koehler

I’m a fan of the RSA, not least for the breadth of conversations that take place through this rejuvenated 250 year old institution. Matthew Taylor writes in this blog post about one of this week’s events: Stan Cohen talking on his book States of Denial.

Stan uses his experience in South Africa for what Matthew describes as an:

“exploration of how it is people deny their responsibility for terrible things happening in the society around them. Stan’s analysis is based on a library of sociological and psychological research but also his own experiences as someone who was brought up in apartheid South Africa and lived for many years in Israel.

Stan sees denial as a necessary human capacity to enable us to cope with suffering in the world. The question is less why deny, but what shakes us out of this state: ‘Why people don’t shut out is more interesting than why they shut out’ he says.

Stan described four ways in which we deny responsibility; obedience to superiors, conformity with society, necessity and splitting of the personality.”

Stan is writing predominantly about denial of cruelty on a terrifying scale. But those reasons why we give ourself permission to deny apply at many levels. It is common for team members to deny that change is coming or perhaps that their approaches to work are flawed. So what Stan’s comment remind me of is that leaders need to think about how prone they are to remain obedient to superiors at the wrong time, or conform to the prevailing culture when it’s become a barrier to progress.

When the housing market is sliding, the banking business model is based on a lax understanding of risk, the businesses that are mature enough to spot denial early will be the ones that thrive.

Image courtesy of narek781.

“When there’s a gap between someone doing her job and doing the right thing, then management has failed”.

Seth Godin