Heard a great leadership lesson from the unlikely world of ballet today. Wayne Sleep, the former Royal Ballet dancer, described how Ninette de Valois, founder and then director of The Royal Ballet, brought together Dame Margot Fonteyn, then 41 and on the verge of retiring, with the virtually unknown 21-year-old Rudolf Nureyev, to dance Romeo and Juliet in 1963.

There was nervousness and apprehension on all sides: from the two principals themselves and from the ballet world in general. De Valois could have been setting everyone's reputation up for a spectacular fall, including her own.

But, her instincts told her that this pairing could create something great, accelerate Nureyev's development by pairing him with the greatest dancer of her generation, and revive Fonteyn's career. In effect, it lifted the latter to even new heights, and she continued dancing, astonishingly, until she was 61.

By breaking convention and seeing the possibility that others couldn't see, de Valois created possibly the greatest pairing in modern ballet. They went on to dance twenty roles together in the next decades.

I am personally completely unmoved by ballet; it leaves me cold. But, there are so many leadership lessons in that story that I lost count. The three that stuck, for me, are:

1. Tom Peters is fond of quoting Warren Bennis - "Great leaders revel in the talent of others". Absolutely. Bringing other people together and watching them reach heights no-one had dreamt of is an act of leadership.

2. Great leaders are prepared to look foolish, as Sir John Hoskyns said. Any of us who step up, in any situation, and say or do what needs to be said or done, regardless of ridicule, regardless of established convention, is performing a powerfully creative act of leadership.

3. The myth of individual creativity and of the individual as leader: It can take two, or more, to unleash incredible creativity. The same with leadership - from Hewlett and Packard to Pret a Manger founders Sinclair Beecham and Julian Metcalfe, it often takes two or more to lead creatively and some of the best leadership acts and the most creative cultures are formed by a partnership...or even by a mass of people all leading and following each other simultaneously (flash mobs, for example).

Wayne Sleep was talking on Radio 4's Woman's Hour.

I'm a bit late on this, and thanks to Leadership Hub member Annalie Killian for drawing it to my attention:

"A study claims that between the ages of 20 and 40 people lose about one friend every year. Writer Theodore Zeldin, who has spent a lifetime studying friendships, wants to celebrate his 74th birthday with everyone - but only if you promise to have a proper conversation with a stranger."

Zeldin wants us all to have deeper and richer conversations:

"...the Zeldin Method is a rather exacting solution.

His menu of conversation usually takes around two hours to complete and took up to four when the strangers were French.

However, he claims 99% of the participants found it enlightening and enjoyable, and a reflection that while we may be talking all the time we avoid discussing things in any depth.

He is also not a fan of small talk and gossip. It is, he says, like apes grooming one another.

It helps bond us but it fails to help us understand one another."

More of the above article here: The Birthday of Strangers
And more on Zeldin's 'Muse Conversations' approach to deepening our communication here: Muse Conversations

...how some people interpret what he is saying. I have a lot of time for Marcus Buckingham. But, I think there is a BIG problem with how he and Gallup (the company whose 'strengths-based' research provides the foundation for his current work) have been interpreted.

Clifton's Strengthsfinder, the basis of the 'play to your strengths' argument, did and does, help leaders identify areas they are naturally weak at and then think team-wide to plug their own weaknesses with other members of the team who have strengths in that area.

But, what we really need to identify is not areas that we are naturally bad at and will never be good at. We need to identify areas that we may not be paying enough attention to or may not realize are important.

There's a whole realm of 'what we don't know' that the 'play to your strengths' argument can encourage us (unintentionally) to ignore.

Yes, play to your strengths. But weaknesses in performance can be down to a lack of awareness that a particular area of leadership is indeed important and could improve our overall performance (rather than something that we have tried and know we aren't good at and never will be good at).

Donald Rumsfeld once clumsily tried to divide the world's dangers into things we know, things we don't know and things we don't know we don't know, and to say that the last is the most dangerous.

This was a clumsy rendering (ahem: excuse that word) of Fernando Flores's taxonomy in which he splits the world into things we know we know, things we know we don't know and things we don't know that we don't know. The last is the area for growth that concentrating exclusively on what you already do well can lead you to miss.

So, I feel there is a problem with how Buckingham's work is interpreted, in my view (though I applaud much of it), in that it can be interpreted in a way that stifles our own growth as leaders, and the growth of others.

As a footnote, the puritan in me also sees a bit of 1960s hippy culture in Buckingham's "Play to your strengths and stop focussing on weaknesses" mantra that appeals to the Boomer generation that is now in senior and mid-manager positions (I'm at the tail end of it, so count myself in and have to work against this tendency myself). It's a self-indulgent "Life's short. I'm at the stage of my career where If I don't like it, I shouldn't have to do it," Boomer tendency.

I agree with a vast part of the Gallup work. But, I think a lot of its enthusiastic takeup is based on that last point, above: a justification for "Wow, at last I have a big business consultancy giving me permission and a rationale for not doing the things I don't like doing any more."

And if you ask Buckingham and Gallup, they'll tell you that's not what they mean at all.




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