The paradox of power – giving leadership away

Today I have been thinking about how leaders get use power – both explicitly and also unwittingly – to get results they didn’t want.  Let me explain, one of the groups I have been working with is a pharma company talent pool. In exploring leadership with then they shared the company history and the fact that this is a family owned business where the family head is still the hands on leader of the firm. However, the Hr head says that the purpose of the workshops is to devolve leadership power into the lower levels of the organisation. So the will from the top is for others to do more leadership  and take initiative.  What also emerged in the discussion was that the family head longed to be challenged more by his team but that they rarely did so. This is not in any way  unique to this organisation, a similar issue exists in a couple  of my other clients organisations.

So how has this disconnect happened? The leadership talent are looking and shying away from the family head, who really wants to be challenged and give leadership away, but every time they discuss the idea of challenging, revert to their own  need to have strong leadership from the top. The real paradox is that real leadership comes from creating the empowering conditions that allows people to challenge, to feel comfortable in dissent, to take on responsibility and to step into the space that letting go creates.

Good intentions can get derailed by history and habits.  If this family head, a capable entrepreneurial leader, really wants to grow his leaders, he need to let them struggle with creating direction, in the absence of it from him. Jumping in too soon to solve the issues creates some level of dependency and challenging the saviour is not going to happen. Where strategies and directions have always come from the man on the mountain, there is little incentive to learn to climb – these leaders need to start to take actions themselves and discover that leadership comes with a responsibility to set agenda not just follow them and that at times that is uncomfortable.

Evolution in business – or are we Oxen?

Take a look at the evolution of thinking in business. Back in the 1920’s when management and business was becoming the subject of rigorous study the interface of man and machine was the focus. History has taught us that efficient management can reduce costs and has made operations in business lean and repeatable. We have Fredrick Winslow Taylor to thank for this in terms of ideas and Henry Ford, Arthur Sloan and McDonald’s to thank for the case studies in operational excellence. The essence of this approach to “scientific management “ is/was to take all the skill out of the operation and reduce the process to the simplest possible level of action. Result; people are treated like Oxen. At the time it was considered the epitome of business intelligence and lauded as progressive management. We now know better. The interface of man and man should be the real focus – leader and led.

The problem with repeatable processes, and anything that can be reduced to a documented process, is ultimately it’s also repeatable by someone else. Result: limited competitive advantage, short-term savings for short-term advantage – necessary but not sufficient. In business terms a good try but no

cigar for the winner.

We are now emerging into a new era where the demand on the organisation from talented knowledge workers is greater than at any other time in the history of mankind. Bright people, and let’s at least acknowledge that we are smart enough to hire bright people, ask better questions. They want to be engaged with their employer. There was a time when a job was a necessity. If you were good enough to employ people this was reason enough to gain their loyalty. Commitment was automatic. People were self-motivated. Fortunately, or unfortunately depending on where you stand, this does not compute now for the majority of knowledge workers or the corporate competents, as some would label them. For this group of talented individuals they want or more accurately demand a better deal. The psychological contract, that unspoken deal we all make with our employer, is getting more complex and more demanding to fulfil. Engaging them, really differentiating the employee value proposition to a level of the individual, is the way to get talent committed to your cause. 1-2-1 leadership is the case for Engagement.

It’s a global phenomenon not just a product of the west or the affluent northern hemisphere. Intelligent people need to know why and how they deliver their input to the greater organization. Whether you are from India, Indiana or Indonesia, talented employees want more than a just a pay packet. They want to be led, inspired to give their best and not just what you pay for. Discretionary effort is a worldwide untapped energy resource – there is no energy shortage, we are just looking in the wrong places.

Compliance is not enough to keep the best and brightest in your organisation. You need a compelling employment value proposition. Talented people have freedom of choice and you need to ensure for the best players in the game, that they chose to be on your team. Oxen you could beat into compliance, or at least reward with a suitable carrot. Taylorism was built on that simple principle. Times change, people change, expectations change, and management is no longer enough. What these demanding times require is exceptional leadership. 3^E Leadership captures the essence of what times now demand of us.

Challenges – great for developing leadership

We are probably all familiar with challenges at work. We have to get projects in on time, to budget and to specification. We have to integrate new team members into existing working methods and find ways to motivate the diverse staff we employ. Many of these are put upon us just by the day to day nature of our business lives. Research, in many good studies on biographical histories of outstanding leaders, show that going out and looking for a challenge is one of the hall marks of early leaders experience. People who seek to stretch themselves in early life, in junior roles, have it seems a higher probability of continuing that behaviour in later life and making a career out of leadership.

So we are talking here about shaping experiences, early challenges that impact on confidence, resilience and capability. Assuming not all challenges succeed, their is also implicit some learning taken from this process. Maybe as developers of leadership talent we should concentrate on trying to encourage our younger talents to stretch themselves and not wait for circumstances to do it later in life when the mind has already developed many habits and perceived barriers to taking risks.

What prompted this thinking and blog entry – well this time it’s my son and his friend, both 21 and interns with a technology company. They have without any intervention from family or employers decided to take on a significant challenge, that is both developmental in terms of character and also altruistic. Visit their site  and see if this is something you can support, or if it reminds you of things you did when you were forming your personal leadership style.

Leading across Cultures

Part of the work we do is helping teams at the more senior end of the organization work well together. An issue we often come across, and it’s not rare, is where the team is made up of multiple nationalities and cultures. What is interesting to us is how much they attribute poor team performance to this factor, rather than their own team working or leadership ability. We find that of course culture is an issue – people from Finland and Sweden for example do have a different outlook to life and work, just the same as French and English have a different attitude to cuisine – but it’s only another variable not an excuse for neglecting the core of leadership.

Whether you are Chinese, Croatian or Chilean there are fundamentals that you expect from your leaders. Envisioning – to allow you a picture of the future worth working for, Engagement – involvement in meaningful work, and Execution – enabling the process of success.

Credible Handicaps – standing out from the crowd

In our book we talk about credible handicaps – the few people / companies who stand out from the crowd and get things done, but seem to do so in spite of some handicap – maybe thier boss is a despot, maybe they have a terrible sales territory to work, or maybe they have something else that would hold back others.  These people are worth examining, studying and learning from. If they can sell in that region, what would they do in a good territory? If they can get great results with those students then what would they get with an A stream class?

 It’s sometimes the positve devients – the people who somehow buck the trend, do great things with some form of percieved handicap, where we could probably learn the most. Our guess is that one thing they do not suffer from is lack of confidence. Confidence – particularly the part of self belief that enables performance – is a key to leading change in any situation. Selecting for and building confidence in early hires, first level recruits in to your talent and leadership pipeline is one way to increase the quality of your pool. Look for people doing unusual things in term of results in places others would regard as a backwater or no hope ally. Fish in new streams to get the talent that will make change happen.

Talent Pipelines – developing leaders who can make change happen

  Given our counsil is to concentrate on the critical few who determine the direction and future of the business, then it seems unusual to also talk about a talent pipeline. But it’s a stream of talent that organizations need, not just a small pool at the top. We believe that talent is connected with leadership in most organizational definitions, and in ours, but that leadership does not miraculously appear just when the time is right. Talent needs to be grown in your organization, so the seeds need to be found and planted, nurtured, transplanted and fertilized at the right times in order to be strong examples  when its time to harvest.  

If you segment the  your talent pool in your organization , your developing leadership stream, then you can apply the right tactic at the right time, and thin out, transplant more in, add nutrients, or prune, as necessary to ensure healthy growth. This is not easy if all your efforts are applied at the senior level or just on the mid level high potentials.  In organizations we have worked with there seems to be at least four levels to consider. Entry level, usually graduate level talent, some form of high potentials, usually early management career post, executive successors, usually already high performance and experienced and ready for a big role, and then the ones most forget about the incumbents in the executive suite. You have not stopped being talent or stopped needing development or coaching just because you’ve reached the top of the hill. Think about your organization, does it have levels of talent, or just one definition? Does it think about developing leaders from entry or leave it to chance and serendipity?  Segmenting is not a magic wand, but it does focus you on the pipeline and not just the tap!! 

 The next tick in the box is to have some consistent processes, or approaches to all of the talent pools or segments, in this case, ( click on the picture to see it larger) you can see the three parallel processes are assessment, performance management and some form of coaching. In this way you can build a pipeline for the leadership of the buisness. No drips, just full flow leadership.

Talent Management- the Critcal Few

In recent conversations with some clients and peers we have been talking about the critical few model of engagement and talent management. What do we mean? Well some in the arena of developing leaders (now bundled into talent management in most books/ conferences) are questioning the logic of concentrating all of your development energies onto the elite who are considered talented. Many consider this unethical. People involved in leadership development and talent management seem to fall into two schools – the everyone has talent and we just need to grow it corner and the seemingly elitist corner that says concentrate the resources on those selected by the organization as having the right stuff.

It’s a fierce debate at times, revolving around whether there is enough return from the few and on the possible de moralizing effect of the majority not being labelled talent.  I have a strong view on this, based on practical experience and realism.  Most organizations have limited resources, so need to focus on the best ROI. The area of development and talent is no different, except for the issue of people’s perceptions and feelings at being labelled or not labelled. If you are talented     (using what ever definition the organization has agreed) you get preferential treatment. If you are not you don’t get as much opportunity for development. To me this seems as clear a business decision as investment in a new production line in a high profit product, rather than a low sales / profit product. However the debates counter argument is what about the majority who are not seen as talent – what is the organization missing if it doesn’t grow them –  low morale, discretionary effort and engagement will reduce.

Well my point is this, if a resource is scarce – $£€- then spend it on the leadership group, the people who manage the majority. Why  – because if your leadership development includes aspects like developing people, feedback, appraisal, goal setting, delegation, coaching and strategic planning, then their leadership of the majority will be more effective, more energizing, more humane and more engaging. Re energizing the organization requires a set of fire starters and these people need to lead from a position of strength. Some of that strength comes from them being given opportunity to lead, to take chances and use the organizations limited resources. The defence of this is if you have limited resources spread so thin that you do a limited job of developing everyone, equally badly, then the leadership starved of attention may not naturally blossom, will not thrive, will not energize others. 

So where do you stand on this?  Are you in the court of the critical few but with a responsibility for becoming developers and energizers of the majority – or do you support the corner of the equality in mediocrity and spread the development thin across the whole population and hope to nourish enough for leaders to blossom. 

Growing Leaders

How can organizations get ahead of the curve when it comes to having leadership talent? It critical to the healthy growth of any organization to have a bench, a reserve, a talent pool of budding future  CEO’s and division MD level talent. Going outside for talent subjects you to the vagaries of the market, at best just plain expensive, at worst a gamble on right fit that might ultimately damage your business. Remember what a bad signing can do to a successful soccer team – demoralise the squad they displace and create anger in the supporters – talent grown internally always gets the crowd support. Of course you could be lucky, and have the backing of Abramovich, so lessen the risk of paying too low in the market !! We wish.

  

We seem to find that the most successful of organizations grow their own, to a greater extent than their competitors. Not wanting to demoralize performers in the business by constant search and recruitment from outside, they find the time and spend the money , develop their own. However, it’s a long view that is needed. Getting a pipeline of potential in place requires faith in the future. For most of the bright young things that join you from college the time line before they hit the boardroom is at least 15years for the best, and 20 for the less ambitious. A sort of academy approach, but not just development programmes, more a development experience.

What an organization cannot do is effectively outsource it talent pools to the head hunters. Remember the problem with mercenaries is their allegiance is bought, not some bond based on shared values and loyalty. What they can sell to you they can sell to anyone else as well, wheres’ the competitive advantage in that.

Leaders in organizations that thrive in the future must spent time and money investing in the long term – talent pipelines not just pools. It’s not a one time investment, it’s not a one pool solution. Talent, leadership potentials, need to be in your organization at all levels gaining experience, building networks and doing business in the way that grows confidence.

Think of Crottenville the legendary boot camp for executive talent in GE. Jack Welch’s investment in time there allowed them to have a rack of possible replacements, groomed for the top ready to step in when he went. Nestle has been doing the same with it’s Reive Reine campus for decades. When it comes to the long terms both have invested in the talent pipeline, and both will promote from within for years to come without problems.

Growing talent is a long term investment, but one with a return that outstrips the short term gains from cashing in the development budget ten fold !!

Why and How to lead change – the two questions we answer

In the Internet you will find a few thousand references to books on Leadership. Search again and you will find many thousands articles in Management journals and academic journals on the same subject. Search the speaker’s networks and again you will find hundreds of international experts on aspects of Leadership. In this hyperspace, hypermarket of hyperbole, where do you start? How do you sort the useful from the useless? How do you find what works from what does not? We think there is a way – look at why and how. There are three steps to finding your path through this maze:Step one; focus on what is relevant to leadership and not just stories of people who have led. Many books are autobiographical accounts of what worked in one situation, for one person, at a specific time of their life. Interesting thought these can be they are often soaked in nostalgia and steeped in rosy anecdotal accounts of corporate heroics. No doubt there is learning hidden within but it can be hard to sort from the myths that surround the individual. No doubt Jack Welch was good within his tenure of GE but if you are not Jack Welch and your organisation is not GE in the 90’s then it might not apply. Find what works for you. If you cannot relate the ideas to you in your situation then perhaps it might not work for you. E3 Leadership, the model we use, starts from a position of business relevance. It focuses on what helps leaders deliver exceptional performance from their teams against business targets. Step two; find the rules that apply to more than one situation, one person and one time. Good theory is the precursor to good practice. What are the timeless principles that can apply across the spectrum of leadership situations? If there are genuine rules or habits or principles that can be applied across functions, with different people and in different situations they should easy to find and learn. In truth there are so many supposed truths that it’s difficult to chose and many of these truths are in conflict. E3 Leadership brings together and integrates the core of exceptional leadership. Apply this simple framework well and results flow. Honest – it works.  Step three; understand the nature of leadership at the level of the individual before applying it to the organisation. Leadership is a state of being and doing. Leadership is a participation sport. There are no armchair leaders. It’s a muck and bullets lifestyle not something that is watched from the stands. Its not something that is remote and non-personal and it takes courage therefore is not for the faint hearted. When you take on the mantle of leader, not manager, you step into a space that is quite different and that impacts on you in many ways. In most instances there will be doubt, there will be self-critique, there will be highs and there will be lows. It takes tenacity to complete what you start. It might be a slog at times but seldom will it be boring. However, focus on the success because getting it right is something special. No one really gets a buzz from managing efficiently, but there is a wow in leading exceptional success. In our approach to  leadership  we acknowledge that we are different people and may have different strengths – perhaps unique in some ways.  However there are attributes that seem to make a contribution to success and exploring these and mapping yourself against them is a means to developing your personal leadership style. The books final chapters show you how to self assess, peer assess, self diagnose and self develop your way to becoming a leader worth following.  Enjoy the journey – you only have one life to lead in – and it’s the one your living now!! 

From Ugly Ducklings…..

How often do you really think about what you are trying to achieve as a leader? What I mean is really think about your ambitions, both in your current role and position and then more long term – your career?Given a new project or challenge we often start the process by doing some analysis, SWOT is universally popular, as a way of getting our head round the issues. Well we have been using SWAN ANALYSIS on real people in the last few years to get to their issues, and do some realistic analysis of strengths, weakenesses, ambitions and needs. Look at the picture for a diagram to help and use the process below to find where you should focus your plans so you can change from the duckling of dubious looks to the graceful and elegant king of birds..

Take a break of at least 40 minutes to consider the SWAN analysis. To get a useful result you need to think about what it is that you are really good at. A strength is something that you do better than most people and something that contributes to your success. A weakness is something that you know from experience you could do better at  or at times have difficulty with. Everyone has areas of their work, skills or knowledge areas that are weaker than peers or other areas of their own aptitude. Ambitions say a lot about what people focus on and what is important to them. However we rarely share these private thoughts. Sometimes it’s modestly and sometimes its embarrassing to say what we want to achieve. If others don’t know then they can’t help. What do you need from others to succeed? Is it help with something? Is it just honest feedback? Advice? Space to get on a do the job? Think about what you need from  others to succeed and note it down.

Leaders need to understand their own profiles before they think about how to use them to best effect, take some time to do the exercise….. think about how each boxes answer changes how you feel about leading change.

Leadership is not management by another name

Welcome to the 21^st century. Welcome to the era of leadership. Its time has finally come and without exception the talented people who embrace it will flourish in a business environment that demands leaders of exceptional ability and determination. Gone are the days where compliance and control was king, welcome to the exciting era of engagement.Leadership is not management; just as driving to work is not formula one racing. There is a difference in the level of talent required and the level of excitement and challenge it generates. Read on the brave – because it does take courage to take the position of leader – at least in our experience.

Whilst not everyone can be Michael Schumacher most people can become talented drivers in the race we know as business today. Let’s not forget, today speed is critical in business and the decisions made by leaders affect the results of the race. In today’s business climate taking the right decision, taking the team with you and ultimately delivering the results expected of you, is what being a leader is all about.Leadership is not management. It’s too important to be left to people who just want to control the costs and operations in the business. Leadership is the emerging competence that distinguishes rostrum performance from ‘also rans’. It’s not a desirable in business, its part of being in the game in the future and the quality of leadership will determine more so than any technology or service proposition the winners of tomorrow. If you want to know how leaders are different, do different things, enable different levels of performance then keep coming back to this blog and for a more in depth view, get the book. 

Coming this month on the blog is a series of pieces on what makes leaders different. Not just the ideas about why they are different, but also some means to helping your leaders, or for that matter, yourself be different .  Organizational man today deserves to be led not managed more – we aim to be part of that process. Until next time ….