Leaders In London

An interesting little story on Reuter’s ‘Oddly Enough’ news site: Though Vladimir Putin is no longer officially President of Russia, he kept his chair at the first Kremlin meeting in which his protoge, Medvedev, replaced him as President. Putin went to sit in the presidential chair, paused, and said to Medvedev, “This is your place, now”. Medvedev refused to sit in it, sitting as usual on Putin’s right hand side and saying “Oh, what’s the difference.” Interesting…

Reminds me of a story about Mikhail Gorbachev and Stalin’s chair that Gorbachev told the Sunday Times when he came to talk at Leaders in London a few years ago. When Gorbachev took over the Kremlin, he was faced with the prospect of sitting in Stalin’s chair. He replaced it with another one. “I preferred to have a different perspective,” he said.

A final thought on chairs and leadership and the importance of where you sit (this is a mix of the metaphorical and the literal). I heard the Managing Director of National Express Coaches explain once how he was leading a workshop on change. All the managers in the workshop had spent the morning focussing on how the biggest enemy of change is habit, and how we need to become conscious of our habits if we are to be able to break the ones we need to break, to make space to bring in new ones.

The MD noticed, during the coffee break, that the participants had done what people usually do at conferences and workshops - hang their jackets and bags on the back of their chair, surround it with their paperwork and bottled water and so on, to mark out their territory. When they came back after the coffee break, as an experiment, he suggested they change seats to get a different perspective. No-one took him up on the suggestion. They had, in just an hour, already created a comfort zone, defensible territory, and they didn’t want to change to somewhere unfamiliar.

He then had to point out the irony of it to them, that they had just displayed resistance to change in a workshop meant to help them identify and remove (where necessary) resistance to change in themselves and others.

Posted on behalf of
Leaders in London
by
Phil Dourado of
The Leadership Hub

This entry was posted on Friday, June 6th, 2008 at 5:11 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.