It occurs to me a lot of us are leading through a downturn - tough trading conditions, whatever you want to call it - for the first time. So, Douglas Adams' advice from The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, is the best of all. It's on the button below.



Those of us who are old enough to have been through previous downturns are still here. You will be too. And so will your organization if you lead it right (no pressure, then). Hint: part of your leadership job now is helping others not to panic, too. People panic when they feel things are out of their control. You help fix that by clearly setting out what's happening, consulting with them on how the organization should respond to emerging trading conditions, and doing what you say. 'Consulting' doesn't mean a long drawn-out consultation process. It means using the rapport and open communications channels you have established with individuals and people en masse to let people know where things are going, and involve them in adjusting to get there: you need their agreement and buy-in, as always, and then they'll help you get there.

Labels: leading in a downturn

More from Alper Utku's Open Heart Leadership blog. He and I have a weekly dialog/ue where I challenge Alper's ideas and the ones that survive being hit with a hammer go through to form Alper's blog posts. Please feel free to comment on them yourself to help Alper sharpen his definition of a form of leadership fit for the 21st century. He's posting on Courage this week and next. Here's an excerpt from his second post:

I was talking with a friend, Stuart Turnbull, who is particularly interested in love in organizations, and we realized that the word ‘courage’ has its root in ‘heart’. ‘Cour’ = ‘coeur’ (’heart’ in French). That explains why Courage seems to sit at the core of Open Heart Leadership, as it is about acting from the heart.

In Turkish, we have the same connection as the Latin root: being courageous almost translates directly to being ‘heartful’. That brings us to the word ‘encouraging’, which also has ‘heart’ at its core, and is about nurturing courage in others to do the right thing - an essential part of leadership.

If we follow this ‘heart’ link, it is a vital topic in different philosophies. In Sufi-ism, the heart is the ‘house of the divine’ and you are promised a state of no fears, no worries if you connect completely with the heart.

Manfred Clynes, the psychologist (see the MindMap jpeg in the post below) has a basic construct of emotional rhythms he calls ‘Sentic States’. He says they are universal, shared across cultures by all humanity. The seven Sentic States have been linked to the seven chakras of the body by Peter Hawkins of the Bath Consultancy Group, who has used the model in training.

The seven Sentic States are:

Post continues here (August 26th)

Labels: 21st century leadership, Alper Utku, Bath Consultancy Group, courage and leadership, Manfred Clynes, Open Heart Leadership, Peter Hawkins, Sentic States, Stuart Turnbull

More on John Kotter's new book

Over in Leadership Now's Leading Blog, Michael McKinney summarizes the four essential things you need to do to inject urgency into the organization, according to Professor John Kotter's new book, which we previewed below. Michael says:

1. Bring The Outside In
"Kotter offers four tactics to establish a sense of urgency in any environment:

First, bring the outside in. A “we know best” culture reduces urgency. “When people do not see external opportunities or hazards, complacency grows…. With an insufficient sense of urgency, people don’t tend to look hard enough or can’t seem to find the time to look hard enough. Or they look and do not believe their eyes, or do not wish to believe their eyes. Even if seen correctly, and in time, external change demands internal change.”

2. Model it every day
The second tactic is to behave with urgency every day. “Increasingly changing environments create a need for alertness and agility, which demands a sense of urgency that must be modeled by the boss all the time.” A few of the behaviors he details: purge and delegate, speak with passion, walk the talk.

3. Find opportunity in crisis
Third, find opportunity in crises. A problem with a damage control mind-set is often eliminates an opportunity. A properly leveraged crisis can be a valuable tool to break through complacency.

4. Deal with the 'NoNos'
And fourth, deal with the NoNos – those people that are “always ready with ten reasons why the current situation is fine, why the problems and challenges others see don’t exist, or why you need more data before acting.”

I think 4. is the same as 1. and can be summarized as 'Challenge denial'. What's the most powerful force in the Universe? I once heard James Taylor say (no, not THAT James Taylor. This one's the former CEO of Gateway and co-author, with Watts Wacker of the Five Hundred Year Delta).

Love? Hate? Gravity? Compound interest, as Einstein is supposed to have said? Nope. The most powerful force in the Universe is denial. When I say that in workshops I always expect someone at the back to stick their hand up and say "Oh no, it's not..." (Think about it).

I'm working with Alper Utku to help him define a kind of leadership that matches what we need as individuals and organizations in the 21st Century. Alper dubs it Open Heart Leadership and has started a blog to try and define it in theory and in practice.

Here's his first post on the subject, which I worked with him to create:

Courage and Open Heart Leadership

"OK, so we’ll use these posts to chip away at the definition of Open Heart Leadership, like a sculptor, by working through some critical elements - Courage, Realness, Intimacy and so on.

Let’s start with a few posts on Courage. Below is link to a MindMap on the Open Heart Leadership blog that I created to help me think this through. If you want to take a look, click on the jpeg of the MindMap a couple of times to get your ‘magnifier’ to work, so you can read it. Or, download the jpeg and use your viewer to magnify it so you can read it.

I’ll then blog further this week on some of the elements in the MindMap to pull together how Courage is part of Open Heart Leadership.

Here's the link (It's posted on August 25th): The Open Heart Leadership Blog: Courage; The MindMap

Labels: 21st century leadership, courage and leadership, Open Heart Leadership

Tim Clark sent me his book on change,

EPIC CHANGE: HOW TO LEAD CHANGE IN THE GLOBAL AGE BY TIMOTHY R. CLARK.

Two particular points are at the core of his book and I find them compelling. They are:

1. The leaders' ability to draw out people's discretionary efforts is more important in success than strategy or other issues that are usually assumed to be primary success factors.

2. The leader's role is largely one of energy management within an organization; generating, releasing and channeling people's energy:

From the flyleaf
"The EPIC (Evaluate, Prepare, Implement and Consolidate) approach for change management draws on the research-based “power curve of change.” As Clark explains, change fails less often for poor strategy or technical difficulty. Rather, it is a leader’s inability to draw out the discretionary efforts of people that usually signals failure. The EPIC approach teaches leaders the critical points of leverage for energy management within an organization and offers a comprehensive guide to change leadership – arguably the most critical competency of the twenty-first century".

Labels: Leadership book, leading change, managing change

Remember the Four Ps of Marketing? As part of his 100 Ways To Succeed series of occasional posts, past Leaders in London speakerTom Peters lists The Boss's 6 Ps as:

Passion!
Persistence!
Partners!
Performance!
Painstaking!
Presence!

The actual Boss he is talking about, from whom he suggests all bosses should learn, is Bruce Springsteen, whom Peters had just seen in concert, which is what inspired him to pull together his Six Ps.

Labels: Bruce Springsteen, leadership lessons, Tom Peters

Leadership is a hard-nosed thing, right? Especially in a downturn. If you're too soft, people will take advantage, won't strive to hit their targets (aka to please you, in these days of evaporating bonuses) and you won't be a strong leader, right? Well, it's not really as simple as that, is it.

Being a 'hard but fair' leader, a disciplinarian who keeps on top of people to ensure they do what they are supposed to do, and that they constantly report back to you for a pat on the head and try hard to avoid your temper if they did wrong...It's all a bit old-fashioned and uninspiring, isn't it; both for you and the people you lead. Yes, you need some of the elements of a 'hard but fair leader' - setting expectations for yourselves and others and ensuring you and others strive for high performance - but all the baggage that goes with it is increasingly outmoded.

If you're anything like me, you want people to perform to a high level and do the right thing regardless of whether you are there or not, whether you will know about it or not, whether you will shout about it or not. You want them to do it because they are inspired to do it, not because they are afraid of the boss if they don't do it.

Over on his Leadership Now blog, Michael McKinney re-visits this whole 'tough leader or kind leader' thing and says it's not a case of opposites, not a case of hard or soft leadership. Michael looks at the book LEading With Kindness, to ask if it's possible and to break the idea that tough/hard/demanding leadership is the opposite of kind/soft/undemanding leadership. Michael says:

Bill Baker and Michael O’Malley have done a service with their book, Leading With Kindness. As awkward as that title might seem at first blush, the authors aren’t suggesting that kind leaders have a soft personality, or are sissies, or are well liked at all times. (“You can be hard-nosed and kind.”) Leading with kindness is not a hot-tub leadership where the participants pass the torch singing Kumbaya. In fact they write, “They muddle through life much like the rest of us, mostly unnoticed except by those around them who are keenly aware that they are in the presence of someone special.”

(That last sentence reminds me that great leaders are not great because they are super-human. Instead, they are ordinary but growth-oriented people with character that have chosen to make a commitment to a bold course of action that is in the best interest of those they serve despite the odds.)

Gets my vote. Click on the blog link, above, to read more. Just because trading conditions get hard, doesn't mean your leadership style has to.

Labels: high performance leadership, Leadership Now blog, leading in a downturn, Leading with Kindness book

Paris Hilton for President

I've wondered about the connection between celebrity and leadership for some time. People increasingly 'follow' the lives of celebrities - 'follow' as in read about them, watch news items about them, live their own life vicariously through the life of the celebrity. There is something of the 'uber-you' about celebrity culture (projecting your own life onto the more glamorous life of someone else) which mirrors some less desirable elements of 'followership' in leadership theory - the tendency to give up on 'self' and instead follow the will of the leader.

So, when John McCain's people created an attack ad last week claiming Barrack Obama's whole persona was more celebrity than leader - likening him to Paris Hilton and Britney Spears - they opened a whole can of worms. Here's Paris Hilton taking up the challenge by saying to "that white haired dude" that she is, like, totally ready to lead, and that she is busy looking for a vice-presidential running mate. Worryingly, her energy policy (towards the end of the clip) sounds like it's worth a second listen.

Labels: Barrack Obama, celebrity, followership, John McCain, Paris Hilton, Presidential campaign

Emotional Intelligence and Leadership

'The Dean of Leadership', according to the FT, Warren Bennis, on emotions, leadership and good judgement. In this two minute clip Bennis references Carly Fiorina, who is coming to talk to Leaders in London. Daniel Goleman will also be helping us become better at this critical area of leadership with his one day optional workshop on Emotional Intelligence for Leaders. Click on the small triangle bottom left if clicking on the big 'play' triangle in the middle does nothing.

Labels: Carly Fiorina, Daniel Goleman, Decision-making, Emotional Intelligence, Warren Bennis

Motivation and High Performance

Harvard Business Review's 'summer reading' (their big summer edition) has a big piece on motivation. Timely, as motivation can dip drastically in a downturn, with employees worried about their finances, their job and the future.The piece draws on the trendy 'neuroscience of leadership' - using MRI scanners to see which areas of the brain light up to show activity and engagement - and says that there are four key drivers of motivation:

1. The drive to acquire - rewards and experiences
2. The drive to bond - building a sense of belonging
3. The drive to comprehend - work must be meaningful
4. The drive to defend - fair play for all

Stefan Stern, in the FT today, points out that motivation remains a big headache for managers and leaders, regardless of the economic climate. A recent Hay Group survey of more than 3,100 organizations found that 41% of employees felt demotivated by their managers.

This reminds me of a true story my friend Henry Stewart, founder of Happy Computers, likes to begin his presentations with: a manufacturing company noted that its productivity figures went up on the weekend. It couldn't figure out why, till it dug a little deeper and realized the obvious: the managers didn't go in on the weekend.

Stern says that the 'powerful new model' trumpeted in the HBR doesn't actually add anything to what we know already which, he says, can be summed up in this paragraph from Frederick Herzberg, author, ironically, of one of the HBR's most widely-read articles, the 1968 piece "One more time: how do you motivate employees".

Herzberg's seminal paragraph is this:

"If I kick my dog...he will move. And when I want him to move again what must I do? I must kick him again. Similarly, I can change a person's battery, and then recharge it, and then recharge it again. But it is only when one has a generator of one's own that we can talk about motivation. One then needs no outside stimulation. One wants to do it."

PS So what's your role in motivating? Providing inspiration and getting out of the way (apart from stepping in to support and ensure people have the resources they need). Inspired leadership is the piece that is missing in most organizations.

Labels: Harvard Business Review, Herzberg, leading in a downturn, motivation, neuroscience of leadership

So, holiday/vacation time? Are you taking any? Did you/Will you take the Blackberry and check in by phone or get the office to call you if they really need you? Ah, me, how essential leaders think they are. Actually, as I learnt from the co-founder of Pret a Manger, Sinclair Beecham, great leaders make themselves inessential.

Sinclair said that he used to welcome the phone ringing with store managers and others bringing him problems to solve. It made him feel essential. As Pret grew, his phone didn't stop ringing and he realized his idea of leadership doesn't work. It's not scalable. He changed his attitude. Instead of seeing himself as chief firefighter and problem-solver, he stepped back and gave people space, permission, indeed insisted, that they find their own solutions.

His phone didn't ring so much. He felt less essential. At first, this was a bother. But, leadership isn't about ego and how important you are. It's about the high performance organization, and that comes from, paradoxically, making yourself inessential as a firefighter and problem-solver. A recent report says true leaders free up 50% or more of their time - they don't schedule in half their week in their diary. They use that time to lead rather than firefighting. How do you do that? By creating more leaders, of course.

It may make you feel indispensable to be on call when on vacation. But, it actually shows you have a long way to go to be a great leader. If your deputies and the system aren't coping and leading themselves in your absence, you aren't doing your leadership job properly.

Nick McCormick, who runs the Be Good leadership blog, has a nice post on this in The Leadership Hub

Labels: leaders create leaders, Vacation and leadership

Lead like Mandela

Over on The Practice of Leadership blog, George Ambler spots a piece in Time Magazine to coincide with Nelson Mandela's birthday (I was on holiday, so you're getting it a bit later). Richard Stengel , who worked with Nelson Mandela on his autobiography, “Long Walk to Freedom” has an article in Time titled “Mandela: His 8 Lessons of Leadership”, these 8 lessons of leadership are:

1. Courage is not the absence of fear — it’s inspiring others to move beyond it. “Mandela was often afraid during his time underground, during the Rivonia trial that led to his imprisonment, during his time on Robben Island. ‘Of course I was afraid!’ he would tell me later. It would have been irrational, he suggested, not to be. ‘I can’t pretend that I’m brave and that I can beat the whole world.’ But as a leader, you cannot let people know. ‘You must put up a front.’ And that’s precisely what he learned to do: pretend and, through the act of appearing fearless, inspire others. It was a pantomime Mandela perfected on Robben Island, where there was much to fear. Prisoners who were with him said watching Mandela walk across the courtyard, upright and proud, was enough to keep them going for days. He knew that he was a model for others, and that gave him the strength to triumph over his own fear.”
2. Lead from the front — but don’t leave your base behind. “For Mandela, refusing to negotiate was about tactics, not principles. Throughout his life, he has always made that distinction. His unwavering principle — the overthrow of apartheid and the achievement of one man, one vote — was immutable, but almost anything that helped him get to that goal he regarded as a tactic. He is the most pragmatic of idealists.”
3. Lead from the back — and let others believe they are in front. “Mandela loved to reminisce about his boyhood and his lazy afternoons herding cattle. ‘You know," he would say, "you can only lead them from behind.’ He would then raise his eyebrows to make sure I got the analogy. As a boy, Mandela was greatly influenced by Jongintaba, the tribal king who raised him. When Jongintaba had meetings of his court, the men gathered in a circle, and only after all had spoken did the king begin to speak. The chief’s job, Mandela said, was not to tell people what to do but to form a consensus. "Don’t enter the debate too early," he used to say. … The trick of leadership is allowing yourself to be led too. ‘It is wise,’ he said, ‘to persuade people to do things and make them think it was their own idea.’”
4. Know your enemy — and learn about his favorite sport. “As far back as the 1960s, mandela began studying Afrikaans, the language of the white South Africans who created apartheid. His comrades in the ANC teased him about it, but he wanted to understand the Afrikaner’s worldview; he knew that one day he would be fighting them or negotiating with them, and either way, his destiny was tied to theirs.”
5. Keep your friends close — and your rivals even closer. “Many of the guests mandela invited to the house he built in Qunu were people whom, he intimated to me, he did not wholly trust. He had them to dinner; he called to consult with them; he flattered them and gave them gifts. Mandela is a man of invincible charm — and he has often used that charm to even greater effect on his rivals than on his allies. On Robben Island, Mandela would always include in his brain trust men he neither liked nor relied on.… Mandela believed that embracing his rivals was a way of controlling them: they were more dangerous on their own than within his circle of influence. He cherished loyalty, but he was never obsessed by it. After all, he used to say, ‘people act in their own interest.’ It was simply a fact of human nature, not a flaw or a defect.”
6. Appearances matter — and remember to smile. “When Mandela was running for the presidency in 1994, he knew that symbols mattered as much as substance. He was never a great public speaker, and people often tuned out what he was saying after the first few minutes. But it was the iconography that people understood. When he was on a platform, he would always do the toyi-toyi, the township dance that was an emblem of the struggle. But more important was that dazzling, beatific, all-inclusive smile.”
7. Nothing is black or white. “Life is never either/or. Decisions are complex, and there are always competing factors. To look for simple explanations is the bias of the human brain, but it doesn’t correspond to reality. Nothing is ever as straightforward as it appears. Mandela is comfortable with contradiction. As a politician, he was a pragmatist who saw the world as infinitely nuanced. Much of this, I believe, came from living as a black man under an apartheid system that offered a daily regimen of excruciating and debilitating moral choices: Do I defer to the white boss to get the job I want and avoid a punishment? Do I carry my pass? …. Mandela’s calculus was always, What is the end that I seek, and what is the most practical way to get there?”
8. Quitting is leading too. “Knowing how to abandon a failed idea, task or relationship is often the most difficult kind of decision a leader has to make. In many ways, Mandela’s greatest legacy as President of South Africa is the way he chose to leave it. When he was elected in 1994, Mandela probably could have pressed to be President for life — and there were many who felt that in return for his years in prison, that was the least South Africa could do.…. ‘His job was to set the course,’ says Ramaphosa, ‘not to steer the ship.’ He knows that leaders lead as much by what they choose not to do as what they do.”

Labels: Nelson Mandela, What Great Leaders Do