Tag: leadership

5 Ghosts of Leadership Past

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

Halloween is a time to remember those no longer with us and to laugh at those shades who have not left us. In leadership some ghosts of past leadership styles still haunt us.  They are too real and too enduring.

Here are 5 ghosts of past leadership that should be allowed their rest:

1 The General

Military command and control and military hierarchy have inspired much of our thinking in both leadership and management. For some, being a general in command of troops is the model of leadership.

Except the military no longer sees it this way. The military knows good leadership that empowers and enables teams to perform at their peak makes a life or death difference. Their approach has evolved well before business. Military leaders think of empowering agile teams to outpace their opponents in decision making and change to achieve a purpose. Military leaders fight a network with a network. The modern general is far less a commander than our perception of the napoleonic era ghosts of leadership.

2 The Decision Maker

Big leaders making big decisions is the second ghost of leadership past. These ghostly apparitions believe that if the ‘buck stops here’ then it makes you a leader.  

We know hierarchy is usually a terrible way to make a decision.  Decision making by remote hierarchical leaders lacks context, impedes agility and frustrates the engagement necessary to implement decisions. Nobody loves a dictatorship. Organisations need to make decisions in responsive ways and leverage experiments to help them to learn.

3 Egotist

If Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain” is the sound track to your leadership, you might be living a ghostly legacy of the days when leadership was about charisma, big profile and a way to express your ego. These ghosts live on with leaders who think that the bigger the ego boost the more influence they have.

Leadership is not about you. Leadership is how we realise the potential of others and how we achieve purposes that benefit others. Check your ego and exorcise that ghost.

4 Know it All

It is said of John Stuart Mill that he was the last person to have been taught everything there was to know in his era. Mill was exceptionally bright, but the pressure of knowing everything led to a nervous breakdown and he has been dead for over 140 years. The legacy of the all-knowing leader lives on as a ghost.

Only leadership ghosts think in our increasingly complex and fast moving age that leaders must have all the answers. Leaders must enable their organisation to know more and use it better. They do not need to be the expert. They need to know how to better leverage expertise and to enable their teams to do the same.

5 The Invisible Leader

If there are oak panelled doors between you and your team, you might as well be a ghost. Nobody is led by pronouncements from the boardroom or one-way communications. Leadership takes relationships and engagement.

These ghostly leaders need to get out and engage with their teams. Turn leadership transactions into relationships and create some real influence and accountability.

Let the Ghosts of Leadership Past Rest

Let the ghosts of leadership past rest.  Like other human interactions leadership is constantly evolving and adapting to suit the challenges of our times.  Leaders need to let go of the old models and experiment with newer and more effective ways of engaging teams, particularly in networks.

Accountability, Rank and Authority

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

We assume people who hold rank in a hierarchy are accountable. Rank is rarely the measure of accountability. Accountability in networks is more likely to be found with social constructed authority.

Accountability in hierarchy can be attenuated by the distance of people in positions of power from customers, employees or others stakeholders. Our expectation that the buck stops with those with highest rank increasingly disappoints us. Without trust, those in hierarchical positions can continue to operate and exercise power.

Authority is earned and lost in networks

However, authority is earned in networks. Authority is not given or imposed.  The status of authority as a social construct means accountability to the network is built in.  

Importantly, in a network authority will often attach to the most authoritative figure who is a part of the conversation, whether they seek it or not.  Nilofer Merchant described this phenomenon well recently highlighting that leaders who step up to engage in social conversations will be expected to act. The reach of this expectation will run to their supposed authority, well beyond their power or their rank. In a societal conversation, leaders may be expected to act on their own power and influence their industry or society. By chosing to bring their rank to the conversation, they start with an expectation and an authority. The challenge is what they do next.

An authority who fails to exercise their status will lose it. Any authority that becomes unreliable, malicious or inauthentic will quickly lose their status. Losing the authority that is the underpinning of influence and action, is the swift form of accountability found in network relationships that depend on trust.

As we lose our trust in hierarchies, we will go looking for trusted authorities in networks. Should they fail us, we will change them rapidly.

This post is the second in a five part series on managing accountability in the network era. The posts deal with:

Step lightly

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams. – WB Yeats

Every day those around us spread out their dreams like Aedh from Yeats’ poem. Then we begin work to make the cloth of our personal purpose richer and larger. We must spread the cloth into an overlapping network because each of our purposes involves others. The realisation of our dreams and purposes are interconnected.

Many people don’t see the network spread before them. They focus only on their cloth. They don’t understand the power of interaction and the connected nature of our dreams. They shoo away others who must cross their cloth.

Others don’t see the impact of their interactions. Unaware, they tromp on the dreams of others in their self-centred focus on their own dreams. By design or by accident, they discourage others and damage their dreams. Hierarchal position doesn’t mean your dreams go on top or that you are arbiter of what will and won’t be realised.

Leaders step lightly. Knowing that all footsteps have consequences, leaders also enable others to walk with a lighter step.

Leaders work to realise the potential of others, connecting them, helping them solve challenges and extending their dreams. Leaders help people to stretch their dreams as far as they can go. The right coaching interactions help people learn how to bring dreams about and to invite others in to make more action possible.

Tread lightly. There is a dream beneath each footfall. How you walk in your daily interactions might make a critical difference to another’s dream.

Celebrate Outcomes

Posted on by simongterry in Collaboration, Leadership

The process is just a process. Often the process is one of many competing paths. Outcomes matter more.

In a recent conversation about customer experience, we were discussing the way people fixate on processes. Processes appeal to our industrial management mindsets. Processes are an engineering challenge of neat inputs and defined steps delivering an outcome in a mechanical fashion. Processes are so easy and alluring.

As a result we see troubling signs:

  • people compete for the beauty of their customer journey map. Have a look at Pinterest there are hundreds that are so gorgeous they reflect no real customer experience ever
  • organisations obsess about adoption over value creation because adoption is far more susceptible to a process
  • change management becomes an exercise of templates and measures rather than a series of changes in human relationships and mindsets
  • leadership is discussed an exercise in steps or processes to be managed rather than work to realise of the potential people in real complex circumstances 
  • measures, averages and other abstractions of the process mindset take precedence over human considerations.

Raising process to an exalted state devalues the complexity of humanity. The computer does not need to say no. Putting process over outcome leads to the outrage economy as people try to fight their way out of a narrow industrial mindset.

We need to focus on real human relationships. We need to allow for the mess and power of human emotions. We need to consider networks with learning, change and feedback, not just linear processes. Importantly, we can allow for human scales, learning and flexibility. Most importantly, we can allow for human conversations. That is the path to achieving the real messy and complex outcomes that we need.

Our organisations, our customer experiences and our relationships will be better for a broader more human approach.

Leaders Aren’t Painkillers

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

No team wants to hear they need pain. We wish for less anxiety, pain and challenge at work from time to time. We can wish our leaders would take the pain away. However, leaders aren’t there to be painkillers. Nobody says:

‘Sounds like a problem. Take two leaders and call me in the morning.’

Leadership is the technology of realising human potential. Effort, challenges, pain and anxiety are a key part of that process. Leaders who remove all pain underperform.

– in a complex fast changing world obstacles are the work. There is no steady painless state. Relief is illusory and temporary.
– pain is feedback: the pain we want leaders to remove is a signal we need to change.
– the right challenge is productive: human potential is realised against a growing challenge and developed through effort. We learn by doing not by being led.
– tension and conflict is a reason to examine our thinking, create new approaches, explore the broader system and collaborate better
– painkilling creates dependence where the leader is expected to solve greater and greater levels of challenge and the team just rests until things are painless .

We tell ourselves we need pain in many polite ways when we talk about the importance of flow, tension, mastery, practice, learning, empowerment and effort. Nobody likes to endorse pain. No team wants to hear that they need it. Sugar coating just leaves teams unready for the effort and change involved.

Great leaders don’t remove all pain. They engage teams in solving their own challenges. They work with others to remove the unbearable but maintain the productive pain.

So What Now?

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

Leadership is always a fallible hypothesis.

Leaders must be capable of being wrong to be engaged in leadership. If you are telling people what they want to hear, it isn’t leadership. If you are speaking in platitudes, then you aren’t leading anyone.

Leaders engage others in the hard work of change.

A testable hypothesis

The surest way to test the hypothesis of your leadership is to engage others and ask them to work with you. They will either follow or they won’t. Nobody can be forced to follow you. Your views aren’t always going to be right.

A leader must take a position that is specific enough to be potentially wrong and specific enough to be actionable in hard work. The change needs to be something detailed enough that others can fight for it or fight with it. Remember being proved wrong or working through opposition can be the critical learning experience in any change.

‘So What Now?’

Avoiding the risk of failure through management speak and motherhood statements only accelerates leadership failure. Any attempt to deceive or avoid simply delays the inevitable.

Too many leaders never discover the failure of their leadership. They leave the room confident but all that remains is question echoing in the minds of the audience:

“So what now?" 

Start small. Start now.

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

Each journey of a thousand miles, begins with a single step – Lao Tsu

If you have time to email, then you have time to work out loud. Find one email to reply out loud instead. Repeat.

If you have time to talk, then you have time to lead. Find one person to influence. Repeat.

If you have time to do, then you have time to experiment. Find one hypothesis to test in action. Repeat.

If you have time for a meeting, then you have time to start a movement. Find a group to engage in a purpose and action. Repeat

If you have time for a coffee, then you have time to learn. Find one moment to reflect on how to do better. Repeat.

If you have time to fix, then you have time to make change. Find one way to make the system better. Repeat.

Small scale changes accumulate given the time. Small interactions reinforce change and build community.

You have the time and the work. Start now. Start small. Repeat.

No Fine Print in Leadership

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

image

Stuck at the lights next to this car insurance billboard I had occasion to read the fine print. The fine print, which is illegible in the photo, explained:

  • That the actor in the photo is not the identified customer
  • That the saving may not be replicated in another customer situation
  • That standard underwriting terms and conditions apply i.e. the insurance may not be available to a customer
  • That the car insurance is not provided by Coles but by Wesfarmers Insurance, the underwriter
  • That a customer should read the product disclosure statement to determine whether the insurance is right for them.

Lawyers will have demanded these disclaimers to make the messages safe and to rule out risk. No marketer ever wanted a disclaimer on an ad. As a result of this legally required list of disclaimers the proposition of the billboard is solidly undermined, if anyone ever reads them. No wonder the print is hard to read from a distance.

Don’t Rely on Fine Print in Leadership

Noble intentions in leadership are often undermined by the safety of fine print. Some leaders communicate with hidden disclaimers:

  • I want this team to be open and honest* (*until there is uncomfortable conflict, particularly with me)
  • I am not hierarchical* (*until it involves my status)
  • My focus is success of the team* (*until I’m told otherwise)
  • We need to be more innovative* (*as long as it is guaranteed to succeed)
  • We need to engage all our stakeholders* (*until I have a view)
  • We need to move faster and be more agile* (*until it is my decision)

Like the ad above, these disclaimers undermine if not subvert the message of the leader. Many of these leaders genuinely mean these statements when they are made. Their intentions and desire to change are noble. For others, these are just the kinds of statements that leaders make. They are leadership platitudes.

However change takes more than the safety of good intentions or platitudes. Change needs people to stick out the hard times. Leaders who opt for disclaimers take the safe route.  Often, they just failed to think their comments through and were surprised by the hard decisions that they entail.  By failing to reconcile their statements with likely eventualities or their own personal reactions when particular situations arise, they end up escaping through the silent disclaimer when things get tough.

Leaders need to understand that their public statements are seen by their teams as commitments. There is no division of ‘core and non-core’ promises. These are not indications of present intent subject to disclaimers. They are commitments to other people who need to rely on them to manage their uncertainty, trust & support to go through change. With this focus, it pays to think through the commitments and to accept that delivering against those commitments made will be hard and involve challenges.

If you are going to say it, be prepared to back it up. Leadership is hard work and means taking risk. Leave the safety of disclaimers to the lawyers.

Talent is not an Asset. Talent needs a Community

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

Reading Austin Kleon’s Show Your Work for insight into working out loud, I came across the concept of a scenius coined by Brian Eno.  The idea of a scenius is that great talents arise from scenes that foster them. Great talent arises from interactions in an ecology of talent.

What really happened was that there was sometimes very fertile scenes involving lots and lots of people – some of them artists, some of them collectors, some of them curators, thinkers, theorists, people who were fashionable and knew what the hip things were – all sorts of people who created a kind of ecology of talent. And out of that ecology arose some wonderful work. – Brian Eno

There isn’t a War for Talent

Talent isn’t oil. We haven’t yet reached peak talent. There is plenty of untapped wells of talent left.

The concept of a War for Talent has motivated organisational HR departments and executives ever since a McKinsey Quarterly article coined the phrase in 1998. The article related to changing demographics of people entering the workforce that lasts to 2015.

McKinsey’s original war has almost run its race (& even been made more redundant by the forces of a changing economy). We might have arguments about new Wars for Talent now, but the competitive and hoarding nature of the concept has inspired managers ever since. Why wouldn’t you want to hoard the largest stock of talent? Why wouldn’t you want to win in the competition for a scarce resource?

The War for Talent also had another unintended consequence in organisations. Because acquisition was easy to measure, it focused organisations on the battle for talent external to the organisation. Internal talent was often inadvertently devalued in comparison to the battle to win new talent. Internal talent was rated on potential and regularly decimated. The focus on those rated high potential talent was retention. For the middle range there was little focus on deployment, development or growth in potential.

The scenius idea highlights why so many organisations that have pursued a stock oriented approach to talent have discovered that it fails to deliver.  Talent is not a stock to be possessed. It is a flow that grows through connection, purposeful work and community.

Talent needs a Community 

Organisations that have tried to hoard talented people generally find that their talent decays or departs quickly. The half-life of a stock hoarded talent is short. 

The surest way to lose talented people is to disconnect them from inspirations, deprive them of purpose and underemploy their skills and expertise. The hoarding mindset encouraged organisations to do exactly this. Organisations wanted to disconnect their talent from others who might poach them. They wanted to have more talent than they needed ‘just in case’ and sought to deploy talented people in roles that weren’t stretching them to have a pipeline of future talent ready.

In contrast, a community of talented people grows in number and skills. Talented people grow through the interactions in a scenius, their networks or other learning communities. They grow by reaching out to the example of others, by stretching the use of their skills and by learning against great challenges, not by sitting on a shelf waiting to be deployed.

Once you see the flow of network interactions within which talented people operate it becomes clearer that all the talent need not be inside your organisation. Organisations need to foster value in their talented people by purposefully networking your organisation.  

Organisations need to recognise that talent will be active participants in the flow of knowledge and learning experiences outside the organisation too. All employees should be encouraged to reach out into networks because it develops the talent of everyone in the organisation and gives your organisation greater access to the real strategic benefit of those networks.

Talents grow when they are deployed against challenges. Make sure your people have the opportunity to realise their potential in the flow of interactions around them. Give all your employees the chance to grow and leverage their talents in networks.