Category: Uncategorized

The Magic of Authority

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

Authority comes when we are ready to lead and ready to deliver for others

Recently I was talking with a colleague in a mentoring conversation.  This individual was describing her surprise that she was being asked to lead a piece of collaborative work that she had initiated.  A group that she had brought together were deferring to her authority.  Because she had convened the group, chosen the individuals and had the compelling vision for the work, the group were ready to follow.  It was an adjustment for someone who saw themselves as simply as the coordinator to realise that they had earned the authority to lead others more senior.

At the heart of this moment, is a key insight.  The magic of authority is this – you have the authority because others judge you ready.  Others chose to follow because they trust in your vision, insight, capabilities, experience or approach.  Their trust and their followership means that you are ready to lead, whether you know that yet or not.

You can be thrust into a rank you are unfit to hold or where you are unsuitable to deliver on the expectations of the position.  We have all experienced the terror of those first moments of a new and challenging role. Rank is a gift and some times it is bestowed in error.

Authority doesn’t work that way.  Unlike rank, it doesn’t come as a gift from others.  Authority is earned.  If you have authority, you are ready to exercise it.

So next time you are wondering how you ended up in charge, remember that you earned it.  Go show your new followers that their instincts are right.  

That leadership is the least that they expect from you. 

Authority is earned

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

The best obstructionist question is ‘who gave you the authority to…?’ My answer is always the same ‘Nobody’

Authority is not given. Authority is earned. Rank & title might be given to you but authority comes from action.

Authority is purpose, capability, experience and leadership rolled into one. You don’t get that without work (& hard work at that). People allow you authority when they have confidence in your leadership to deliver. Authority comes when others chose to follow.

My experience is that when everyone is standing around the empty white space where a problem resides, the person who first steps in to solve it wins authority. Almost always people are relieved that someone did something. That initial authority will grow if you keep delivering on the work to solve the problem.

Don’t wait to be given a parchment & seal with formal authority to act as a leader should. Waiting around is the surest way to lose what authority you have earned.

You have the authority because you want or need to act. It’s up to you to convince others to let you continue. That’s what leaders do.

So do it.

Start today

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

It is never too late to be what you might have been – George Eliot.

Time isn’t waiting for you.  Start today.

We all have laundry lists of things that we want to do and want to become.   Those items will remain simply lists, if we don’t act.  

In life there is always something more urgent to distract us from what is important.  Meetings can wait.  Email can wait.  Coffee can wait.  Television can wait. Gossip can wait.  You may well even find today’s crisis can wait.  

Make time today to take a positive step towards your goal.  Turn your future life into a project and tackle it stepwise.  Small steps can come first.  Leaps will come later.

Regret is a wasted emotion.  Leave it behind along with the feeling of lost opportunity.  Turn those emotions into an impetus to act on your purpose.  With action comes progess, with progress comes confidence and we all know that’s essential to continued success.

Create accountability.  Promise the steps to the future you to someone who matters, someone who will hold you to account.  Publish your plans.  Share your future and you’ll enjoy the ride more.

If you are going to start-up the future you, get going today.

Decision review for leaders

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

Leaders decisions are reviewed in real time. Are you up for scrutiny?

Umpiring decisions are now subject to detailed review in many sports, often controversially. What we have learned in this process is that human decisions made in an instant are often unreliable. Importantly, review itself does not always lead to greater certainty or a better outcome.

Leaders are highly visible and subject to the same exacting review. Teams scrutinize their actions and comments. There is a permanent decision review system in place on the actions of leaders. Nothing is irrelevant to a team trying to understand the leader’s agenda and whether the leader is true to his or her word.

How can a leader manage this level of scrutiny?

Recognize your actions and decisions are all public & subject to review: everything is subject to review. Even private actions will be discussed if someone is aware of them. Be ready to explain yourself to the watching review system.

Share your thinking where the basis for your actions is uncertain: you are better to provide an explanation than to have the review system in your team construct one. If you were uncertain, but a confident decision was required say so. Help the team understand the difference between certainty and confidence.

If it is an anomaly or an error, wear it: pretense just leads people to question your competence.

Signal: people are watching so remember you can send signals with your actions and decisions, even the smallest ones.

Most of all be clear & repeat yourself: your team rarely has a video replay of your actions. They will compare their notes instead. Their perceptions might be unreliable. Repeat your actions to improve clarity.

Every decision of a leader is up for review. Expect and manage it.

The Purpose is in the Work

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

Leadership is work with others to fulfil a purpose. From where does purpose come?

The work.

Many people want to find their personal purpose to guide their leadership work. For some, purpose is quickly evident with a little reflection. Often reflection will only take you so far. For others drawing out any strong sense of purpose is more of a challenge.

Leadership is work, not a status. Purpose is a strong personal impetus to action, not an abstract & perfect idea. You don’t need purpose perfect to act. Just as leadership gets better with experience in the mess of the work, so does purpose evolving to a clearer expression through interaction with others.

The best guide is that purpose is what compels you to act, to lead and to have an impact on others. So ask these questions:

– What do I enjoy doing most in my work? What drives that?

– What work do I keep coming back to do? What drives that?

– What kind of impact do I have? What kind of impact do I want to have? What makes me choose these things?

– What do others call on me to do? What is it about me that makes them choose me?

– What do I want to do next?

There is little value in endless reflection to perfect a purpose. Purpose is refined in practice. Purpose in leadership necessarily involves others. Demonstrate leadership in work, learn from interactions with others and see where your purpose is strongest.

Do. Focus on the work. Purpose is there. Purpose comes.

Don’t confuse the tool with the result

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

We all use tools each day. Don’t let the tools takeover.

Many years ago I was lucky enough to experience on a sailing class on Sydney harbour. A spectacular location for sailing and we were all very excited by the opportunity to spend an afternoon on the water. Some of the men in the group were particularly excited that the yacht had grinders. Grinders winch the sheets that set the sails like on the yachts we had seen in the America’s Cup and Sydney to Hobart ocean races.

Our veteran instructor had seen that enthusiasm for grinders before. He had one simple piece of advice before we started. ‘Always remember’, he said placing a hand on the grinder ‘this is the tool.’ he then pointed to the great expanse of sail fluttering in the breeze and said ‘That is your result’. Suffice to say he had to gesture and shout ‘tool’ and ‘result’ more times that day before everyone got the message that the object was not to grind furiously. The purpose was to set the sharpest sail for best performance in the wind.

I have seen that experience many times. People can lose sight of their purpose and what generates performance. When that happens, they often furiously work their tools for their own sake. The role of leaders is to shift the focus from working on tools immediately at hand to the point of work.

Let me give you some examples of tools that commonly go awry:

– The power of a brand is to generate incremental sales and returns. It is not to have the best compliance with brand guidelines. Guidelines are the tool.
– The power of customer relationship management is to enhance the value of conversations with customers. It is not to have a CRM that has every feature and tracks every unit of data.
– The power of enterprise collaboration is to allow a community to achieve some valuable purpose. It is not to have the best solution with all the features or to prevent the community from acting in an unapproved way.
– The power of visual communication is to convey ideas more easily & effectively It is not to have the coolest or most complicated PowerPoint or infographic.
– The power of a meeting is to get buy-in to a collective decision when required. It is not to produce the best or longest stack of minutes.

Next time you see someone who is confusing the tool and the result take the lead. Like the yachtsman, give them a steer in a better direction.

We are all dead

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

“If the rate of change on the outside exceeds the rate of change on the inside, the end is near.” – Jack Welch

We are all dead.

The rate of change external to each of our organisations is now so great that no organisation can ensure it is changing faster than the external system. Global interconnectedness, the rapid speed of ideas in a digital economy & new means of working and collaborating means that change will only continue to accelerate.

So if we are all dead what do we do? Change the game.

Jack Welch’s quote assumed that the organisation needed to generate enough change internally to beat the system. If you are a massive diversified conglomerate like GE, then that is a real challenge

Don’t beat the system. Become the system instead. Organisations need to design their structure, boundaries and processes to integrate with opportunities going on around them in that external change. Instead of hunkering down to fight off the change, organisations need to rethink their defenses. The best defense may just be a welcome:

Have an outward facing culture: If your organisation is looking inwards for your ideas and opportunities, you are dead. If your organisation, only worries about its competitors, then don’t worry they are dead too. Open your organisation up to look globally (that really means globally including Asia, Middle East, Latin America and Africa)
– Focus on opportunities to create an ecosystem: Allowing the system to shape your products, services and customers will accelerate your change. This can be achieved in many ways such as partnership agreements, an API or a customer collaboration community. Once you start to see and think about the system in which you operate, new opportunities to change and innovate will present themselves.
– Create agile & open edges in their organisation with the freedom to interact with external changes: hackathons, experiments, partnership agreements and a handful of strategic investments can generate a lot of exposure to change externally that will help the organisation adapt. Make sure your permission and performance processes actually give your people the opportunity to interact. They need to be able to move at the speed of the system and that means trust.
– Speed the sharing of information and execution in your organisation: Copy the system where you can. Use enterprise social. Use agile. Use design. Use minimum viable products. Hack, experiment and test away.
– Kill yourself first: What business model do you most fear losing? What product are you too dependent on? What customer can’t you lose? Tackle these challenges now. Engineer a way to change them or innovate like crazy in these spaces before others realise your vulnerability.

Leaders need to pitch

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion it has taken place – George Bernard Shaw

Recently I was standing in a long coffee queue. Standing In front was what someone who sounded like they were interviewing for a job. All the way through our long wait to reach the front, this individual told the story of their career & achievements in rambling self-centered & quite dull stories that the entire queue could hear. The expression on the face of the listener told me that he was equally uninterested. I was quite surprised that someone who clearly had a lot of experience could do such a poor job of pitching himself.

At the front of the queue, the individual finally acknowledge it was a long story but added ‘I need to tell you all this so you understand my leadership approach’.

He didn’t need to tell us ‘all this’. His story summarised to a few adjectives and two sharp sentences. At that moment, I realized I had the situation backwards. The only reason his audience was listening was the speaker was the hiring manager (Probably also explains why he thought everyone else should hear too).

I believe leaders need to be able to communicate their point of view and leadership approach. However for it to have value it needs to be as concise and as impactful as a pitch. The power of putting forward your point of view is to allow others to engage with it. Your pitch must be engaging. Leaders need to efficiently sell themselves. You cannot abuse people’s respect for your position by wasting time or attention. That waste will only be counterproductive on the relationship and your authority as a leader.

If you want to refine your pitch, here’s some questions to get you started:
-What is your purpose? Why do you lead?
-What 3 adjectives would others use to best describe who you are?
-How do you want your team to feel?

Be concise. Be impactful. Focus on what others need to know.

In short, sell yourself like you are trying to get hired, because every day a leader need to re-earn their authority.