Leaders In London

(This is an extract from September’s Taking The Lead, the monthly email newsletter from Leaders in London, published today).  

Carly Fiorina led the merger of HP and Compaq before being given the order of the golden boot, but has since had her reputation re-built by results: Thanks to her HP strategy, Hewlett-Packard overtook IBM last year as the world’s largest technology company. Tom Peters, the business guru and a past Leaders in London speaker, now refers to her as his “CEO Hero”. Fiorina likes to quote Lao Tsu:

“A good leader is he whom people revere.
An evil leader is he whom people despise.
A great leader is he of whom the people say
‘We did it ourselves’ “

(Or she, of course). Yes, we’ve used that before here, as it’s my favourite leadership quote.

Fiorina is talking about embedding leadership within the system. At the moment, a lot of companies are dealing with the downturn by pulling leadership – as in decision-making about the future of others – back behind closed doors. Those outside the doors wait to learn their fate; who will be cut, who will stay.

The lesson of every downturn is lost on subsequent managers going through this same process; the approach destroys morale and lowers performance, the very attributes that will get you through the downturn. Smart leaders have open conversations with the workforce and enroll them in helping to find efficiency savings, cut costs, abandon inefficient old ways of working and move to new ones.

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From past Leaders in London speaker General Colin Powell (rtd)

These 13 rules are from the back of Colin Powell’s book My American Journey, and are in Powell’s own words:

So, holiday/vacation time? Are you taking any? Did you/Will you take the Blackberry and check in by phone or get the office to call you if they really need you? Ah, me, how essential leaders think they are. Actually, as I learnt from the co-founder of Pret a Manger, Sinclair Beecham, great leaders make themselves inessential.

Sinclair said that he used to welcome the phone ringing with store managers and others bringing him problems to solve. It made him feel essential. As Pret grew, his phone didn’t stop ringing and he realized his idea of leadership doesn’t work. It’s not scalable. He changed his attitude. Instead of seeing himself as chief firefighter and problem-solver, he stepped back and gave people space, permission, indeed insisted, that they find their own solutions.

His phone didn’t ring so much. He felt less essential. At first, this was a bother. But, leadership isn’t about ego and how important you are. It’s about the high performance organization, and that comes from, paradoxically, making yourself inessential as a firefighter and problem-solver. A recent report says true leaders free up 50% or more of their time - they don’t schedule in half their week in their diary. They use that time to lead rather than firefighting. How do you do that? By creating more leaders, of course.

It may make you feel indispensable to be on call when on holiday. But, it actually shows you have a long way to go to be a great leader. If your deputies and the system aren’t coping and leading themselves in your absence, you aren’t doing your leadership job properly.

Nick McCormick, who runs the Be Good leadership blog, has a nice post on this in The Leadership Hub

As we are trading through difficult times at the moment, here’s a reminder from the slightly abrasive (I think he was in a bad mood that day; you can hear it in his voice) Allan Leighton, on what you should STOP doing or watch out for in fellow leaders in your organization. Leighton was speaking at Leaders in London 2007. This is a less forgiving economic environment than we have had for a few years and, as Warren Buffet said, you never know who is swimming naked till the tide goes out. Make sure it isn’t you or other leaders in your organization.

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

I’ve been reading Bill George’s book, True North, his follow-up to Authentic Leadership. George is the ex-CEO of Medtronic, inventor of the pacemaker, which he grew in ten years from a $1.1 billion to a $40 billion company.

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.

It occurs to me, then, that great leadership doesn’t always feel like that when you are in the middle of it. Mulcahey knew Xerox could go either way - off the edge of the cliff to bankruptcy or be pulled up out of its long dive just in time. You don’t know if you are going to win when you are in the middle of it. And you often doubt yourself. It’s only in retrospect you realize that whatever you did was the right thing to do and the best you could do. When it works, you become a hero. When it doesn’t, if you can get up and learn from it and go again, you’re still a great leader. Worse, when it works, but you are ousted or not given the credit anyway (think Carly Fiorina) you have to realize that doing the right thing doesn’t always mean career advancement.

Both Bill George and Carly Fiorina are coming to Leaders in London 2008 to share their recipes for great leadership, and for leading through and after adversity. George is now an academic at Harvard, running the MBA he created in ‘Authentic Leadership’. Fiorina, famously ousted from the HP CEO position by a boardroom coup, has since watched HP follow her strategy to become the world’s first $100 billion tech company, passing IBM to the number 1 slot in the process. She’ll be talking about sticking to the vision and taking the long view…and the tough decisions that get you there.

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