Phil's Leadership Blog

Tom Peters on Authentic Leadership

2008-04-28T12:06:00.001+01:00

"It's up to each of us alone to figure out who we are, who we are not, and to act more or less consistently with those conclusions." - Tom Peters

I like that. It's from Tom Peters' 'Thought For The Day', which you can sign up to as a daily email here: Tom Peters site

17th April 1970: Houston, we no longer have a problem. Leadership and improvisation

2008-04-17T14:14:00.003+01:00

A lot of leadership lessons have come out of NASA over the years.

Teamwork and innovation: Leadership and innovation consultants often remind their clients that NASA would get two teams to compete on coming up with an innovative solution to a problem and that the competitive element accelerated the innovation process, for example.

Connecting everybody's job with the overall mission, vision and purpose: And then there's the probably apocryphal story of JFK visiting NASA HQ at Houston and stopping to talk to a man with a mop in the corridor and asking "And what do you do at NASA?" to be answered by the janitor with "I'm helping put a man on the moon sir" - often used as an example of connecting people's everyday jobs with the overall purpose of the organization and how critical it is for leaders to do that.

Set the vision even if you don't have all the answers already: And, of course, there's the famous promise by President Kennedy to 'put a man on the moon before the end of the decade' when the technology didn't exist to do that.

I heard once from Mike Harris, who was founding CEO of the UK bank First Direct, and who was originally a scientist specialising in boron chemistry (and who is a brilliant organizational leader in the mould of Jim Collins' Level 5 leadership) that Kennedy's scientists said, among other things "But, we don't even have a fuel that can take us to the moon and back!" And the answer was "Go and invent one, then", which led to the creation of a whole new field of chemistry - boron chemistry - which led to the creation of the right fuel. Now, I'm not a scientist so I hope I've remembered that right and not garbled the science.

But, we also learnt from NASA about crisis leadership: If you've seen the film/movie Apollo 13, you know what I mean. If we leave aside for the moment the tragic subsequent deaths in the space shuttle years later, the way that the NASA team at Houston was led to save the lives of the astronauts in Apollo 13 after an explosion in the oxygen tank - using duct tape, plastic hose and cardboard to rig up a contraption to increase the oxygen (or decrease the carbon dioxide - can't remember) in the Lunar module so they didn't run out before landing - was inspiring crisis leadership at its best - with everyone in the project team taking the lead at different times under the guidance of the overall team leaders to do what seemed impossible.

It was April 17th 1970 - 38 years ago today - that the Apollo 13 lunar module splashed down safely.

Great reminder of the dramatic story in Wired here (including the fact that no-one said "Houston, we have a problem." That was the movie version.)

We spend so much time planning, writing procedures, training people in competencies and so on for leadership. We forget how leadership in the field, in real life, often comes down to improvising with the resources you have available. And we forget just how powerful the ability to improvise can be in leaders at all levels during a crisis.

Leadership lessons from Humphrey Bogart

2008-04-15T17:31:00.003+01:00

I was just thinking about this, this morning for some reason: There's a scene in the film Casablanca that is an example of Jim Collins' Level 5 leadership (modest, courageous, ego-lite leadership).

When a group of German soldiers start singing about the Fatherland in Rick's nightclub, around the piano, the French people in the club, their homeland occupied, look downcast.

Victor Lazlo, the resistance leader husband (Paul Heinreid?) of Ingrid Bergman, walks up to the band and tells them to play the Marseillaise. The band leader glances across at Humphrey Bogart (Rick), sitting at a corner table. Bogart nods imperceptibly (well, it's perceptible to the band leader; stop being so picky).

It's his nightclub. This is a big risk for him to take. It's a hidden act of leadership. The band starts playing the Marseillaise, gradually drowning out the German soldiers as, led by the resistance leader, the audience stand up one by one and noisily sing along. The German soldiers give up. For now.

This has always been one of my favourite scenes in a film and I have always thought that the grandstanding leadership of the resistance leader - admirable though it was - inspired me less than the little nod given by the hidden leader in the corner, who let it all happen, taking on a risk to himself and his livelihood, and took none of the credit for it.

The end of hierarchy

2008-04-09T11:58:00.002+01:00

I don't completely get all the slides in this pecha kucha from Jurriaan Mous, but enough of the images ring true to me, and I love slide 14 on Workplace 2.0 with the guy sitting on top of the filing cabinet. Order from apparent chaos, self-organising systems (his weather slide), bottom up versus top down...there is enough in here to help us realise we need to think differently about what leadership is. So, I like it a lot...

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It was forty years ago today...

2008-04-04T10:48:00.002+01:00

Just a reminder that it was 40 years ago today that the world lost a great leader, at just 39 years old, in Martin Luther King. If you haven't yet viewed the moving and inspirational speech Robert Kennedy made on that night, it will be on The Leadership Hub home page for a few days more (top left on the Hub Home Page). After that you can find it by joining The Hub and clicking on 'view a video' in your profile page in The Hub, or by clicking on the little TV icon in the panel of icons down the right hand side of your profile page.

A little story I heard Rene Carayol tell, he having heard it from Rudy Giuliani, two-time Mayor of New Yorl: Giuliani's dad took him to see Dr. King speak, saying in advance something like "I want you to see what a dangerous man sounds like. America has to be careful of people like this." After they'd both listened to Dr. King speak for a little while, Giuliani's father leant down to him and said something like "Forget what I said. You are listening to a great, great man." Giuliani says there were tears in his dad's eyes.

True North: 60 Second Summary

2008-03-20T10:51:00.002Z

60 Second summary of Bill George's latest book on how to be an authentic leader:

1. Leadership is about what makes you different; there is no perfect model of a leader
2. Stop trying to act like a leader; think ‘leadership’ not ‘leader’
3. There are five dimensions of authentic leadership: Purpose; Practising solid values; Heart; Relationships; Self-discipline
4. Engage people’s hearts and minds behind the organization’s purpose, rather than behind an individual leader
5. You can use authentic leadership to become a market leading organization; it's about high performance, not about being 'nice' for the sake of it

Longer summary (and a critique) here: Leadership books

Bill George is speaking at Leaders in London later this year

No Leaders, No Top Down, No Bottom Up: Lessons from flocking

2008-03-14T16:38:00.003Z

There's a fascinating talk from Iain Couzin over at Edge, that helps us realize how inadequate are most of our thoughts about large scale change in people behaviour and whether you can achieve it through 'leadership'. Couzins is an Assistant Professor at Princeton who studies self-organized pattern formation in a wide range of biological systems, including ants, fish schools, bird flocks, locust/cricket swarms and human crowds. His work is relevant to how companies are run. Here are some extracts:

NO TOP DOWN, NO BOTTOM UP

"A fundamental question in biology is how the functioning of collective systems works—whether you are dealing with the function of a tissue and how the cells within a tissue interact, or whether you're dealing with ecologies or even ecosystems. We really need to build a new understanding and new tools that allow us to integrate across these scales. People refer to top-down and bottom-up; in some sense we have to take both approaches to try to understand these systems."

YOU DON'T NEED A LEADER

"We have been extending these types of flocking models to understand information transfer within groups. What these models initially did, and what was very important to show in the '80s and '90s is that you don't need a leader. You do not need a commander to tell individuals what to do. Previously when people looked at, say, ant colony raiding patterns—and this was in the '40s and '50s—they thought they had to be pre-concerted, there had to be a word of command, there had to be a commander. We then learned that that is not the case. We also now know that there are differences among individuals, that information differs, that individuals are moving around interacting relatively locally with their environment."

BIG CHANGE COMES FROM RELATIVELY SMALL LOCAL INTERACTIONS

From ants to fish:

"And yet the individuals' functioning is entirely within the context of these schools; you can see the integration of the behavior when they are attacked by predators, you can see why in the '40s people thought there must be thought transference, must be telekinesis, because of these remarkable maneuvers. We now know that these maneuvers are created by the relatively local interactions among the individuals."

Carlos Santana: What's Your Calling?

2008-03-14T09:50:00.003Z

Great quote from David Zinger over at Slacker Manager, linked to a neat short piece on the five keys of mastering management:

"Most people live and die and they don’t even know what their calling was. Maybe they didn’t take the time to push the pause button. What happens when you find your calling – everything stops and you just see what you’re supposed to do and why you’re supposed to do it". ~ Carlos Santana

So, what is authentic leadership?

2008-03-13T11:34:00.003Z

I've been reading Bill George's True North, the follow-up to his book Authentic Leadership. So, what is an ‘authentic leader?’ According to George, an authentic leader has found his or her inner voice and remains true to it. This is Warren Bennis stuff, for anyone who's read Bennis. And it's no surprise True North is part of the 'Warren Bennis Signature Series' imprint. George echoes the Dean of Leadership (as the FT calls Bennis), when he says that true authentic leaders have often (but not always) been through an extremely tough experience that reveals their true nature to themselves – the death of a loved one, bankruptcy, overcoming serious illness.

Bennis observed that authentic leaders are often forged in the crucible of overcoming adversity, whether as a child or later in their career. This echoes Hemingway’s “The world breaks all of us. But some are strong at the broken places.” And it plays to the heroic, romantic leadership model, even if unintentionally.

We tend to have an archetype in our head of leaders as infallible, certain of where they are going, moving from success to success. Even George’s phrase ‘True North’ reinforces that image. But, great leaders – authentic leaders – often don’t feel that way when they are in the middle of achieving great things.

Anne Mulcahy, the CEO credited with rescuing Xerox from its downward spiral, is a case in point. The emotional roller coaster of trying to keep people at Xerox motivated and pull the company back from the brink was so draining that, at one point, Mulcahy described to George, she was on the way home, drained, and had to pull over to the side of the road. She sat there, temporarily unable to move, and said to herself, "I don't know where to go. I don't want to go home. There's just no place to go."

The boxer Jack Dempsey once supposedly said champions get up when they can't. Dempsey would have said, Mulcahey ‘got up when she couldn’t’. And she is now widely praised as the woman who saved Xerox (a claim she would herself deny, as she credits a lot of people at Xerox with saving the company). That’s the test of an authentic leader, says George.

And, of course it applies to people at all levels, not just the top of an organisation. You lead your own life by refusing to be knocked out of shape and by getting up when you are knocked down.

The over-riding impression of an 'authentic leader' from True North is of a leader in George's own image: he was a brilliant, empathetic leader at Medtronic (inventor of the pacemaker), which he grew by encouraging leadership at all levels, driven by the higher purpose of saving lives. The 125 leaders he profiled for his research into authentic leaders tend to be like that, too, kind of tough but fair benevolent teacher/leader figures.

Which raises the question: is an apparently autocratic, empathy-lite leader such as the UK's Alan Sugar or Rupert Murdoch an authentic leader? Of course they are, in the sense that they are honest and true to themselves. What you see is what you get. But, I'm not sure either of them have been through the deep inner journey of enlightenment and understanding self and others that Bill George says is necessary to be an authentic leader.

Ten leadership tips from Jack Welch

2008-03-05T09:09:00.002Z

A large number of credible commentators call him the most successful CEO of modern times. He turned Edison's company, General Electric, from a $13 billion to a $400+ billion turnover company. His gruff way of expressing himself and his early reputation as 'Neutron Jack' when he began leading GE by slashing jobs ('Neutron' as in the bomb that kills people but leaves buildings standing), plus GE's performance development structure of 'culling' the bottom 10% of performers, has meant people think of Welch as the archetypal tough guy, take no prisoners, ruthless leader.

This reputation is, at best, 50% of the picture. It has blinded a lot of people to the fact that Welch pioneered enlightened leadership practices such as: 'bossless leadership', sharing new ideas across units, techniques for bringing people together to challenge bosses with solutions to problems that had to be implemented to a deadline (GE's famous 'Workout' technique), the learning organization (he set up GE's learning centre at Crotonville and taught classes there himself), putting 'living the values' behaviour above 'making the numbers', moving from 'command and control' to giving away control...and a whole lot else besides.

I've put together ten quick lessons from him. Here they are:

1. WHAT TO MEASURE?
“If I had to run a company on three measures, those measures would be customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction and cash flow.”

2. BUILD CONFIDENCE. THAT’S YOUR JOB DESCRIPTION
“If you’re not simple, you can’t be fast. And, if you’re not fast, you’re dead. So, everything we do (at GE) focuses on building self-confidence in people so they can be simple.”

3. SET YOUR PEOPLE FREE
“You’ve got to balance freedom with some control, but you’ve got to have more freedom than you’ve ever dreamed of.”

4. SHOUT WHEN YOU WIN
"People feel guilty about stopping to celebrate a little victory ... but it lets people know they've won. It's so critical to an institution. It brings it alive, gives it character."

5. NUMBERS AREN’T ENOUGH
“Numbers aren’t the vision. Numbers are the product. I never talk about numbers.”

6. SPEND MORE TIME ON TALENT DEVELOPMENT
“In most companies, the talent review process is a farce. At GE, Jack Welch and his top two Human Resources people visited each division for a day. They reviewed the top 20 to 50 people by name. The talent review process…at GE…has the intensity and importance of the budget process at most companies.”
McKinsey’s Ed Michaels, in his book The War For Talent.

7. FAIR DOESN’T MEAN ‘THE SAME’
“Every person should be treated fairly in an organization, but every person should be treated differently in an organization."

8. MAKE PEOPLE SHARE GOOD IDEAS
“What makes a company flourish is transferring ideas.” At quarterly meetings, Welch insisted that GE bring together the leaders of all of its businesses to share best practice ideas. “We take the best of diversity and use it,” said Welch.

9. MEET CUSTOMERS MORE OFTEN
Welch made a point of personally meeting GE’s major customers in the spring and fall of every year. He put much of his and GE’s customer insights down to these twice-a-year reality checks with customers.

10 DON’T DITHER. JUMP.
“I’ve learned in a hundred ways that I rarely regretted acting but often regretted NOT acting fast enough.”

Where in the world are you?

2008-03-05T08:54:00.002Z

The world is in our heads. And mostly the world in our heads is wrong. That's partly because our references are wrong. See the Gall-Peters Projection to see a map of what the world really looks like, in terms of country and continent size. The world maps on our walls are nearly all based on the Mercator Projection, which began a navigation aid for sailors and unintentionally shrinks some countries and enlarges others.

But, how you see the world also comes down to power and where you are when you look at it. This was brought home to me over the past week: I regularly trawl through new members of The Leadership Hub to see what parts of the world people are joining from.

While noting a lot of new sign-ups from India, and that most of Action Aid's workers in Ethiopia seem to have joined over the last couple of weeks, I also noticed these two answers to the sign-up question "Where in the world are you?"

1. The North-East*
2. DC

*North-East USA, it turned out to be, of course.

What was that question again? Oh yeah, "Where in the world are you?" The world is in our heads. Since the second answer - DC - came from someone working for the International Monetary Fund, 'the world ends at our borders' perspective is particularly telling.

Do or done to? Subject & object.

2008-02-28T19:08:00.001Z

Is leadership something you do to other people? Grammar suggests it is. Remember 'subject and object' from English lessons? "I (subject) do something to you (the object)". "I lead you" = the active subject is the leader and the passive recipient (the object), the 'done to', is the person being led.

This is wholly wrong and we need to eradicate that language-based deep assumption - which we absorbed very young - and realise that today's leadership is a partnership in which people agree to coalesce around a common purpose. It's a networked world. There is less deference to hierarchy. The best leadership is no longer about telling, about exercising power. It's about helping shape meaning, purpose, direction and method of getting to the goal. It's an agreement between people. And, as Byron said, leaders are led as much as leading.

Professor Jonathan Gosling of Exeter University in the UK, a colleague of Henry Mintzberg at Canada's McGill, has contributed a paper to The Leadership Hub on how new-style leadership development has to acknowledge the network effect in which we learn from each other, rather than dividing into those who do (teach) and those who are done to (passive learners). He calls his paper 'Wiki schools or ATMs'. The Hub, I'm glad to say, is emerging as a 'wiki school' for leadership. If you're not sure what that is, Jonathan's paper explains it. You can find a link to it on the home page of The Hub.

Gary Hamel on the OTHER hierarchy

2008-02-09T13:19:00.000Z

I'm on a bit of a Hamel kick at the moment, so here's more from him:

Professor Gary Hamel says Maslow's well-known hierarchy of needs is not enough to analyse how we work anymore. In a recent podcast for the Times Online, strategist and author of The Future of Management, Professor Gary Hamel, explains how we need a hierarchy of human capability.

Here's the existing stack of human capability that Hamel says most management is based on:

Intellect

Diligence

Obedience

You can see how this hierarchy fits in with the old needs of scientific management (Fordism, industrialism, a hierarchy in which people at the bottom do what they are told to do by people who supposedly know more at the top).

Now, says Hamel, you can buy Obedience, Diligence and Intellect from anywhere for almost nothing. With a global workforce to draw on, millions of them highly educated and motivated, these three levels are no longer enough to create a high-performing organization.

The three higher levels we need to add to the stack, to move on from old-style management and define 'the future of management' (the title of his latest book, which Amazon editors ranked as the best business book of 2007) , says Hamel, are:

Calling/Passion

Creativity

Initiative

Without adding those three levels, you are not going to create any value whatsoever, he argues.

This is a 20 minute podcast that starts off talking about the internet but quickly moves away from the internet to the more wide-ranging future of management.

Don't be put off by Prof. Hamel's slightly shrill voice (he's shouting a bit and has a curious accent that seems to be a combination of Louisiana Bayoux and East Coast academic). Give yourself a minute to adjust to it, as he's the best strategy thinker of his generation, in my opinion, and comes out with some inspiring insights that will help you think differently.

I particularly like this podcast, because his riff on 'the democracy of ideas' about halfway in , exactly describes how The Leadership Hub works. And he says this is critical to the new model for management and leadership that we all need to move towards.

Here's the link to the podcast:
Gary Hamel on The Future of Management

DON’T PREDICT THE FUTURE; SEE THE PRESENT

2008-02-03T21:36:00.000Z

Too much writing about leadership and innovation says it is about predicting, forecasting, inventing the future. No, it's not. It's about understanding the present more deeply than your competitors do. Gary Hamel explained it to me in an interview once:

"People who innovate successfully are not forecasters. They are in touch with what’s happening, whereas the competition simply haven’t noticed. People who innovate successfully don’t see the future. They see beneath the surface of the present. And they pull together what they see into a proposition that has instant appeal for customers, but which customers didn’t even know they wanted until it appeared.

"How do you do this? Nokia are a great example. Twenty years ago the top people at Nokia got together in a cold room just outside the Arctic Circle and decided they were going to beat Motorola. Very funny. Motorola was and still is one of the most respected companies in the world, up there with GE.

Nokia succeeded because they saw what was changing and exploited it. There are three steps to doing this:

1. Find the fringe
2. Look for the pattern
3. Data is not enough: Experience, feel and understand what’s happening.

It’s at the margin that you notice change happening first. Nokia sent its engineers from Finland and told them to live in places where exciting things were happening. They sent them to spend time in nightclubs in Tokyo, in the King’s Road in London, on Venice Beach in southern California.

Their brief was to observe marginal trend-setting lifestyles and blend in, then report back. It was that experiential learning, getting under the skin of the ‘now’ by actually living it rather than conducting a questionnaire, that brought Nokia’s engineers back to Finland with an emphasis on aesthetics and design and on more elegant, user-friendly interfaces. And that was how they did, indeed, beat Motorola in the phone handset market.”

Source: My notes from an interview I did with Gary Hamel a while back.

I'm a Curator. Don't get me out of here.

2008-01-23T09:39:00.000Z

I've been learning what works and what doesn't in new-style Communities of Practice, using Facebook-type tools where the members write the content. More precisely, the content kind of falls out of conversations they have with each other. They ask each other questions, compare their practices, and hundreds of other community members feed off the answers.

These 'feeders' are commonly called 'lurkers', which is as disparaging as well, er, 'feeders', I suppose, so I have to stop using 'feeders' and think of....'learners', There. That's better.

The most effective form of learning is in fact teaching what we think we know and then learning from people who are the formal learners - adapting our thoughts with the help of their feedback - or who are our peers...in fact, anyone.

But, most 'learners' think of it as a passive Hoovering up process. Conversations generate insights and share practices, but the outcome isn't knowable in advance: it emerges.

Anyway, I digress. I thought my role with the community of practice I have built, www.TheLeadershipHub.com , was to pump prime it, bring people together, throw in some themes, then get out of the way to see what emerges from their conversations.

The danger of blog-type communities (and the underlying technology is basically blog technology) is that they can revolve too much around one person. I wanted to keep out of the way where possible and let weak ties between other members grow into strong ties (some of them) rather than me being the Hub of a network...which isn't scalable, sustainable or even desirable in this context. (I'm not criticising bloggers here. This is different, in a community context).

My role has turned out to be a kind of party host, which I enjoy: spotting people who have common interests and putting them in touch with each other, helping a member broadcast a problem or question to the rest of the community and then channeling answers and solutions back to them.

It's a bit like sitting people next to each other at dinner whom you know will get on and then watching their faces light up as they discover common interests and passions: it's a delight.

But then what to do with the often fascinating (sometimes not so) content that comes out of their conversations. I was listening to a curator at the Natural History Museum today and it suddenly occurred to me, this is as important a part of the role (the role of a community administrator, I mean) as introducing people and helping people get used to sometimes clunky Web 2.0 tools ('community literacy'), and occasionally coaxing people to find their voice (encouraging people with brilliant things to say, who say them to me, to say them to the rest of the community).

And now I know that (as I spotted over at Ted, I think, where they and other community sites spotted this before me) there is a Curator role here: grouping together interesting content that is generated by conversations between members, 'archiving' it to some extent (but not in a dusty room, just in easy-access, easy-label areas where it becomes a useful and constantly referred to store of knowledge and ideas and practice).

It's 'sensemaking' I suppose. So, I have a role beyond party host. Editing, sensemaking, labelling, spotting patterns and connections and then highlighting the bigger themes that bring the different content together.

This I like: Curators are behind the scenes people - like stage managers or something - that create the stage on which the creative stuff is played out, with an added light Directorial role in teasing out the theme and making it explicit and entertaining.

Anyway, just needed to get that down: I'm a Curator. All community hosts in these new-style communities of practice have a curator role that can help the sense of the community to emerge, Wisdom of Crowds-style. I like it.

CAN PEOPLE CHANGE? CAN YOU?

2008-01-21T19:04:00.000Z

There's a fight going on at the moment in leadership theory. It's a quiet one. You might not have noticed it.

On one side are the determinists, who say we are hardwired from birth and can't change - Robert Hogan and Marcus Buckingham, for example. "We all love tales of personal transformation," says Buckingham. "But, in truth, we don't change as we grow older. We just become more of who we already are."

On the other side is the personal change lobby: Stephen Covey (Seven Habits of Highly Effective People), Anthony Robbins (the 'change yourself and change your life' guru) and the canon of personal improvement books that just grows and grows. You can throw in the Neuro-Linguistic Programmers, probably, on this side of the scale.

Who you are is just an accumulation of how you behave. If you don't like who you are, act differently and become someone better, is the rallying call on this side. Personality, for the personal change gurus, is something to be bent to your will.

I gave a talk a couple of weeks ago to the UK's Northern Leadership Forum that brought these two sides clashing together, which wasn't my intention. The subject I was asked to talk on was how great leaders behave.

The group had spent some time in the morning studying Robert Hogan's work on how personality drives what we do. Hogan is the psychologist behind the Hogan Assessment Systems that are grounded in the assumption that the primary driver of behaviour is personality. I argued in the afternoon that it (personality) is not the primary driver of how we behave; at least not to the extent Hogan claims.

I was heckled a lot by a Hogan fan. A bit cultlike some of these Hoganites.

The assumption that some people are hardwired to lead just doesn't stand up for me, and is a lingering whiff of the old 'great man' school of leadership. I find the idea of 'acts of leadership throughout the system' as being where leadership lives, as Max Weber put it sixty years ago, far more compelling than the usual notion that leadership lives in select individuals labelled 'leaders'.

The former is an idea whose time has come, it seems to me. And as for 'can people change?' I'm with George Eliot:

"It's never too late to be the person you could have been."

Depressives and Delusives

2008-01-16T11:56:00.000Z

"Some people are deluded about what they are best at. But delusion doesn’t matter (up to a point). If you think you are best at something, it improves your performance. In 360 assessments, there is one group that is the most accurate about assessing their own performance versus how other people assess them. And that’s depressives. The most highly productive people, by contrast, are slightly positively deluded about how good they are. So, self-awareness isn’t all it’s cracked up to be."

Marcus Buckingham, speaking at Leaders in London 2007*.

Shame, because part of my schtick about the problems with leadership is that leaders don't 'confront reality' enough (as Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan put it). According to Buckingham, it's not as simple as that. I still think there are more downsides than upsides with self-delusion. And that most managers and leaders being deluded about their own performance causes a dissonance between them and their colleagues that outweighs the boost to their own performance that a slight blindness to their own deficiencies might create.

What's the most powerful force in the Universe? Denial.

*That's my paraphrasing based on my shorthand notes, rather than a direct quote from Buckingham.

What can we learn from Facebook?

2008-01-03T12:28:00.000Z

Budd UK asked me to come and talk to them and some of their clients and friends in December on the subject of 'Where's the working in social networking?'

At the end of October, Thomas Davenport posted into his Harvard blog that there is none (work value, that is) and spending time in Facebook and the like is pointless.

My presentation was supposed to rebuff that suprisingly Neanderthal view from such a clever man. Not that he'd have seen my presentation ;0) .

But, you can. This is a vital issue for 2008. I've written up the presentation as a paper and attached it as a Word document. Hope you find it useful. UPDATE: OK, so the Blogger link doesn't work. Email me if you want a copy of the paper (use the contact me link over on the left to email me).
PDPresentationWhere%u2019s%20the%20work.doc

Trust more. Blame less. New Year's Resolutions for Leaders.

2008-01-02T19:53:00.000Z

I just wrote these as part of a 'Start The Year' email newsletter for a client and thought you might like them, too. And, as a Leadership Hub member has just emailed me saying she wants some inspiration on 'Core Purpose' for a front-line training module she is writing on that subject, I've included a couple of snippets on bringing your organization's core purpose to life, too, particularly for front-line people. See below. Happy New Year! Phil.

* * *

THINGS TO DO IN 2008 TO BE A BETTER LEADER (AND PERSON)

1. THINK ‘PURPOSE’ NOT ‘FUNCTION’

“The front-desk’s purpose is not to check people in. That’s its function. The purpose is to welcome the customer.”

“Purpose is too often ignored in favor of function. Functional competence can be commoditized – you’re just as good at checking people in (or whatever the process is) as your competitor.”

“But, purpose is something that frees people up to contribute with imagination and even passion. You can’t impose a purpose, though. Leaders set the purpose of an organization. But, employees make the decision to buy into it. So it’s a compact or agreement rather than simply following instructions or fulfilling a function.”

- Theo Gilbert-Jamison, V-P. Training & Organizational Effectiveness, The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company

* * *

2. THE PURPOSE OF A HOUSEKEEPER

This is what happens when, say, a hotel housekeeper, sees her purpose as ‘enlivening the senses’ (the Ritz-Carlton purpose) rather than simply clearing up a room. It’s a story I heard Tom Peters tell:

A customer wrote to the Ritz-Carlton expressing his astonishment at the behavior of the housekeeper during a stay in New York with his wife and daughter. After a day sight-seeing in the city, they returned to their room, only for the daughter to complain that her teddy bear was missing.

After a quick search, they found it hidden in the towel cupboard, with a foil-wrapped chocolate clasped in its paws. The next day, the bear had disappeared again; the daughter found it under the bed with another chocolate in its paws.

At the end of each day, for the duration of their stay, the daughter couldn’t wait to get back to the room to play ‘find the teddy’ with a housekeeping maid she never actually met. “It was the best part of her stay,” wrote the customer.

What can you do to help bring your organization’s purpose to life in 2008, so your people deliver an exceptional customer experience like this housekeeper did?

* * *

3. STOP TAKING DECISIONS. START MAKING THINGS HAPPEN

‘Too many managers mistake decisions for action. A decision is not the same as action. Use plans, analysis, meetings & presentations to INSPIRE deeds, not as a substitute for action.’

- Stanford Professor Robert Sutton

* * *

4. TRUST MORE

‘Do you trust enough to be trusted?’

- Lao Tzu, from ‘Understanding The Mysteries’. The more trust you give in 2008, the more you’ll get.

* * *

5. BLAME LESS

‘Blame or finger-pointing and lack of personal responsibility
Keep the gloomy game going.
They keep stealing your hidden genius and potential wealth,
Giving them to a dimwit on the sidelines with
No leadership, heart or financial skills.
Dear one,
Wise
Up!’

- Hafiz, 14th century Sufi poet. The less blame you mete out in 2008, the more personal responsibility your people will take.

* * *

6. MORE RESOLUTIONS

From Robert K. Cooper’s great book, ‘The Other 90 Percent’…

‘In my family it is a tradition that each New Year, someone will say a few words about what we have learned from the past or hope for the future. On the eve of the millennium…I wrote a short poem…and read it to them:

To lead by example…
Love as if you will live forever
Work as if you have no need for money
Dream as if no-one can say no
Have fun as if you never have to grow up
Sing as if no-one else if listening
Care as if everything depends on your caring
And raise a banner where a banner never flew.’

I’m not sure if Cooper did actually originate that, but we’ve all seen versions of it doing the rounds by email, with extra lines added such as

‘Love like you’ve never been hurt’
and my favorite
‘Dance like nobody’s watching’

* * *

7. EVEN MORE RESOLUTIONS

This one first surfaced in 2000. I know we’ve all seen it and I’m pretty sure it didn’t come from the Dalai Lama, but it’s the right time of year for a reminder. It’s supposedly the Dalai Lama’s recipe for starting your year afresh…

1. Take into account that great love and great achievements involve great risk.
2. When you lose, don't lose the lesson.
3. Follow the three Rs: Respect for self, respect for others, responsibility for all your actions.
4. Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck.
5. Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
6. Don't let a little dispute injure a great friendship.
7. When you realize you've made a mistake, take immediate steps to correct it.
8. Spend some time alone every day.
9. Open your arms to change, but don't let go of your values.
10. Remember that silence is sometimes the best answer.

11. Live a good, honourable life. Then when you get older and think back, you'll be able to enjoy it a second time.
12. A loving atmosphere in your home is the foundation for your life.
13. In disagreements with loved ones, deal only with the current situation. Don't bring up the past.
14. Share your knowledge. It's a way to achieve immortality.
15. Be gentle with the earth.
16. Once a year, go someplace you've never been before.
17. Remember that the best relationship is one in which your love for each other exceeds your need for each other.
18. Judge your success by what you had to give up in order to get it.
19. Approach love and cooking with reckless abandon.

* * *

8. AND A SHORT ONE FROM EINSTEIN: BREAK YOUR HABITS

‘How many people are trapped in their everyday habits; part numb, part frightened, part indifferent?

To have a better life we must keep choosing how we are living’.

- Albert Einstein. Challenge inertia and your own habits, and the habits your organization practices towards customers, to change ‘the way we do things around here’ at work in 2008. Your customers will be the happier for it.

* * *

AND, FINALLY…THE TEN-SECOND FUNNY: TOP TEN NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTIONS

1. I resolve to work with neglected children (my own).
2. I will answer my snail mail with the same enthusiasm with which I answer my e-mail.
3. When I hear a funny joke I will not reply, "LOL... LOL!"
4. I will not ring the steward/stewardess button on airplanes just to get his/her phone number.
5. I will balance my checkbook (on my nose).
6. I will think of a password for my computer other than "password."
7. I will try to figure out why I "really" need 11 e-mail addresses.
8. I will go into McDonald's and order a McSpreader
9. I will go into McDonald's and order a McSlurry
10. I will find out why the correspondence course on "Mail Fraud" that I purchased never showed up.

* * *

THAT’S ENOUGH RESOLUTIONS!

Why we cry out for creative leadership

2007-12-11T12:24:00.000Z

"A Harvard Business School study looked at job satisfaction. Orchestra players came just below prison guards. Chamber musicians came in at number 1. What’s the difference? The presence of a conductor."
Boston Philharmonic Conductor Ben Zander, speaking at Leaders in London 2007

Rosamund Zander, Benjamin’s wife, wrote: “There is no guiding institution that speaks compellingly to people. Markets have replaced institutions and markets do not speak in a human tongue. This radical shift cries out for creativity. Art is about rearranging us.”

The leader, according to Zander, is the one who is masterful at creating and holding distinctions. Learning and leading is not about the transference of information, from conductor to orchestra or leader to employee. It is about the opening up of new categories to help people make sense of and thrive in a fast-changing world in which existing categories are not creative enough. "Framemakers create new frames. There is no problem that can’t be solved if you are willing to make a new frame, a new category.”

More from Zander at the Leaders in London blog, which I write weekly.

When it takes two to be great

2007-11-22T14:06:00.001Z

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.

Bill Clinton on how to deal with strategic decay

2007-11-16T13:34:00.000Z

The Birthday of Strangers

2007-11-08T11:27:00.000Z

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

The problem with Marcus Buckingham is...

2007-11-06T11:14:00.001Z

...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.

»

How to think like a detective

2007-10-31T16:09:00.000Z

I like the distinction in this slideshare between the 'Wizard Merlin' approach to insight - the Feynmanesque brilliance that allows a few 'magicians' to spot patterns the rest of us can't see until they are pointed out to us - and the 'Prepared Mind' approach that Columbo is credited with, and that us plebs can cultivate in ourselves.

Leading innovation depends on cultivating a 'prepared mind' (see the post on happy accidents), though I'm pretty sure it was Pasteur who coined the phrase 'the prepared mind', not Posner, as credited in this slideshow. I'm looking forward to Harry Palmer on strategy...

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