Leaders In London

For most of us your company story has to change right now.

I’m reading Christopher Booker’s ‘The Seven Basic Plots: Why we tell stories’. He says there are, as you can tell from the title, just seven basic plots to all stories. While you look at his list of the seven plots, think of your ‘company story’ and which of these it fits most clearly into. (What do you mean ‘we haven’t got one?’ Every organization that wants to go somewhere, that wants its people to be engaged and motivated, has to have a story it tells about itself - who we are, where we are going, why we come into work each morning). Here are Booker’s seven plots:

1. Overcoming the Monster

2. Rags to Riches

3. The Quest

4. Voyage and Return

5. Comedy

6. Tragedy

7. Rebirth

Your corporate story might have been ‘Rags to Riches’ or the pursuit of power (traders and investment bankers), it might have been ‘The Quest’ or the mission, like Harley-Davidson’s “motorcycles by the people for the people”. It might have been ‘Rebirth’ if you are going through a merger or acquisition. But, whatever your story was, you need to adjust it now. Not lose it completely, just adjust it.

For all of us now, the primary story is ‘Overcoming the Monster’.

Now, some would say ‘the Monster’ is the tough trading climate, the impending (or for some, the actual) recession. That’s the story you need to unite people behind, because they are feeling unsettled and powerless in the face of it.

I’d say that’s part of it. But, as we all know, the danger is that in fighting the monster, you become the monster too. How you behave and act as a leader in tough times dictates whether you will engage your people (and I am aware that part of what some of you have to do is let people go, so your ‘remaining’ people, perhaps) to fight the monster.

Or, you can treat people as expendable, put on your hard face, slip into ‘tough times demand tough leadership’ cliche mode, and wield the axe where you can - Cutting what’s easy to cut rather than involving people in working out what’s smart to cut. Once you start doing that, for many on the outside, you’ll be looking monsterish yourself.

What do you think? How should you lead through the current downturn?

It’s quite likely that you have spent the past couple of weeks furiously adjusting corporate priorities to take account of the drying up of credit. It’s quite likely that your focus over the past couple of weeks is cost-cutting measures. So, how do you lead in a way that focuses people sharply on these new priorities?

Core strategic purpose

One proven approach you can try is to sharpen the focus of individuals and of teams, to ensure everybody is pulling hard in the same direction. This helps people re-prioritise, putting to the back burner ‘nice to haves’ that they may have been working on, and redoubling efforts on core strategic purpose.

Here’s a quick exercise to help you achieve this sharpened focus. Joseph Weintraub, a professor of management at Babson College, suggests you review performance by writing down the three most important things a manager or other individual gets paid to do, obviously focussing on the things that the organization needs to do to execute your current strategy.

Reality check

Then you ask that individual to compile their own list of three most important things that they do. And you sit down and compare the lists. “In the majority of cases, the lists look dramatically different, with a ‘hit rate’ of about one out of three expectations in common,” Weintraub says in the Harvard Management Review Update. You can then align expectations more clearly, with the individual themselves, to sharpen the focus on ‘doing the right things’ and help eliminate or reduce work that isn’t sharply focussed on delivering the strategy.

You can try the same exercise with a team: get the team to come up with the three most important things they do to deliver value to the company, then analyze that with them and, with their input, adjust as necessary.

Scale up

Finally, you can scale this approach up if you run a large organization, with a leadership memo reminding everyone of the three core objectives of your current strategy, and how vital it is that everyone focuses on delivering these objectives in their work every day.

Don’t forget yourself

I’d add one thing to Weintraub’s advice: people feel ‘done to’ in an economic downturn; that their span of control is eroded. To ensure this is a collaborative approach that they buy into, don’t forget to ask in your one-to-one interviews for their view on what the three most important things are that you, personally, and the company should be focussing on at the moment.

Then you tell them what the three most important things are that you are ACTUALLY focussing on at the moment. Then, have a discussion to find common ground. You may get useful feedback to focus current strategy on what needs to be done. Or you may get the opportunity to explain why the three priorities you have at the moment are critical, which helps to show that you are going through the same focusing exercise as them.

How long does it take to sharpen focus?

Psychologists reckon it takes around seven weeks to break old working habits and establish new patterns, so assume that you need to get the individuals and teams and their managers to monitor any changes in focus for two months, to ensure direction is being maintained without slipping back to pet projects or other distractions.

Posted by

Phil Dourado

on behalf of

Leaders in London

This is a provocative post just to get you thinking differently on a Tuesday morning…

There’s a new economics of capitalism. It’s been emerging for a while, but the clearing away of the weird world of financial derivatives that looked like the new capitalism - but has turned out not to be - has cleared the air.

Investment banks are almost no more (their financial model, it seems, doesn’t work…yet was seen as the engine of capitalism until a year or so ago).

So, let’s do what leaders are supposed to do, and look away from the slow motion car crash that is transfixing us all, and look to the edges to see what’s emerging.

And here it is. Here’s the one surprising thing that is moving to the heart of economic thinking. Here’s what Kofi Annan, who spoke at Leaders in London last year, calls “the single highest returning social investment in the world today”.

It’s what drives the success of GrameenBank and the other pioneers of the multi-billion dollar microlending form of new banking that is thriving while largescale investment banking is disappearing as a business model. Muhammad Yunus, founder of GrameenBank, who was granted the Nobel Prize for making it work, is coming to Leaders in London to help us define the new economics.

‘ It’ could be the mythical lever big enough to move the world (”Give me a lever big enough and…”) out of poverty. And, as economists have noted resoundingly recently, move Africa in particular out of poverty to become self-sustaining and capitalism has a Continent-sized new engine.

Tom Peters, another of our past Leaders in London speakers, has for long plugged away on a variant of this insight, pointing out that the second biggest economy in the world by size of purchasing power after the US isn’t China, it’s….women. (See what he did there? ‘Reframing’, our NLP-er friends call it: leaders see differently; that’s where insight comes from).
The actual lever, that is most likely to have the most positive effect on the world economy, according to Annan and economists who back him up on this, is educating women.

The Financial Times says today that women’s education has moved from ’sandal-wearing’ fringe issue to the heart of economic thinking.

GrameenBank only lends to women, because they pay back, whereas their husbands don’t. Female education is the variable most highly correlated with improvements in social factors. Women typically spend their income on food and healthcare for their children, leading to an upward spiral of health and wealth.

Move on to the wider issue of women as consumers and Tom Peters has an eye-opening set of slides he goes through that shows that in the US, women are the decision-makers on buying almost everything, including ride-on mowers, the ultimate in boys’ toys.

In what way is this mainstream or linked to your leadership agenda? Well, it takes an investment bank to notice it first, oddly. In March, Goldman Sachs said it would invest $100m in 10,000 women from developing countries to improve their access to entrepreneurial education. They can see a return on investment by thinking differently. Can you? (PS Interesting to see if they are still making that investment or if they have changed their minds as $100 m suddenly became real money that they might not have available…)

There’s more here:
FT on the impact of developing developing women on world economics

And here’s Tom Peters $5 booklet ‘Women Roar’, which starts off with this rant from Tom: “The evidence is clear!
(1) WOMEN ARE BETTER LEADERS THAN MEN (under the conditions of the New Economy).
(2) WOMEN ARE THE WORLD’S BIGGEST MARKET OPPORTUNITY (BY FAR) … and are wildly underserved. The stakes amount to TRILLIONS of dollars. Our story: WOMEN ROAR. WOMEN RULE. Believe it!”

Harvard Management Review have a short video clip from Vijay Govindarajan of Tuck Business School, who is currently seconded as GE’s chief innovation guru, and who is coming to Leaders in London later this year to tell us how to lead innovation. The former boss of his current workplace, Jack Welch, will also be sharing leadership lessons with us, live by satellite.

You can find the short clip on the link at the end of this post, where you’ll also find a link to Daniel Goleman’s latest work on social intelligence and leadership. Goleman is leading a workshop for us on this very subject at Leaders in London. Reminder: save up to £500 if you book your place for Leaders in London by September 26th. Once you click the link below, scroll down to find the video clip.

Vijay Govindarajan, over at Harvard Business Online, on how to lead for innovation

So, to state the obvious, we’re still here, then. But, it did generate a wave of human energy, didn’t it, all the media coverage about what might happen when the particle accelerator at CERN was turned on this morning. Did you notice how much more ‘alive’ and animated people were/are when talking about it? There was a thrill attached to the minutely possible (or, as most scientists were saying, vanishingly impossible) chance that the mundane would suddenly .

(That’s a writer’s conceit - using the . as a sudden ’stop’ for impact. First used in the book 1066 And All That, which ends with the words “…and history came to a complete . “)

Apparently the first high speed clashes between particles won’t happen till October 25th or something, so we’ll go through it all again then. But, what interests me from our leadership perspective here is…What can you, as a leader, do to generate that frisson of energy about your organization; that sense of ‘buzz’, sense of aliveness? Leaders generate and channel energy in people; that’s your main job description.

There’s a line of thinking that says we sleepwalk through most of what we do; that the ‘highs’ people seek are a seeking after a sense of aliveness and alertness that the Hadron collider inadvertently generated today. Most organizations are like this, according to some organizational behaviourists. The routine, the process, the familiarity of the working day, dull our senses and our sense of the possibility.

What’s the alternative? The ‘conscious company’ is the phrase that has emerged in recent years to describe organizations with a sense of buzz, purpose, nimbleness, aliveness about them. So, let the Hadron collider human energy emission that took place this morning (European time) be a ‘wake up call’ for your leadership: what can you do as a leader to help generate the alertness, agility and buzz of energy that will turn your organization into a conscious company?

You could Google ‘conscious company’ for starters. And book your place at Leaders in London 2008, to soak up the learning there on how to make your organization more alive, focussed, purposeful and energetic. ‘Cos. here’s a clue: the world may not have ended today; but in an overcrowded world marketplace, with far too many suppliers, and tough trading conditions for the next year or more, organizations that haven’t woken up and injected some energy and ‘aliveness’ about them - become ‘conscious companies’ - won’t be around anyway.

Tim Clark sent me his book, Epic Change: How to Lead Change in the Global Age. I like it a lot. He points out what a lot of leaders and commentators fail to notice: that the leaders’ (plural on purpose) ability to draw out people’s discretionary efforts is more important in success than strategy or other issues that are usually assumed to be primary success factors.

I also like his other central point - that the role of leader(s) is largely one of energy management within an organization; generating, releasing and channeling people’s energy.

This brief extract is particularly relevant to leadership today:

Great results over time isn’t a mark of a great leader, it’s often a sign of a ‘Teflon’ leader

“I was more than a bit startled to hear a quartet of prominent leadership scholars recently declare that ’superior results over a sustained period of time is the ultimate mark of an authentic leader.’ My own research comes to a very different conclusion. What I find instead is a pattern in which capable leaders at every level are struggling with unremarkable results and are often checkered with failure. The leader who is able to move through a career with sustained results and uninterrupted success is the rare exception indeed.

“Often these are the leaders who are either not playing hard enough or gaming the system to select low-risk opportunities that are likely to return professional success. So-called Teflon leaders are more often those who have ridden market waves but successfully avoided down cycles.”

I guess now’s the time we find out.

Early Bird Deadline Reminder:

Register for Leaders in London

by 26th September to save

up to £500

Allan Leighton on Theory E and Theory O

Some sectors of the economy have been hit harder by the downturn than others. This is always the way. Leaders in those sectors are possibly, for the first time in their career, looking at how to avoid failure big time. It’s easy to ride the wave of a buoyant economy and look successful. It’s only when the tide goes out, as Warren Buffett likes to say, that you find out who’s swimming naked.Also, to be fair, you can be a very good leader and also fail. Failure isn’t a sign of bad leadership. A long, glittering, successful career, likewise, can just be a sign of adeptness at avoiding trouble rather than brilliance as a leader. But, that’s for another post.

So, if you are looking to make big change in response to changed economic conditions, what framework of change to choose? Past Leaders in London speaker Allan Leighton tells us you have two paths to choose:

Failure, he says, comes to CEOs who rely almost exclusively on Theory E. Here’s how it works:

“CEOs who believe in Theory E (the Economic theory of firms) focus their energies on achieving economic value through restructuring. They believe that change should be driven from the top and that people, culture and organizational arrangements are not a priority.

“CEOs who employ Theory O (Organizational) strategies for change, on the other hand, believe in the development of the organization’s human potential. Rather than change driven from the top, Theory O strategies for change involve employees in identifying barriers and creating better ways to run the business.”

Source: Allan Leighton, explaining Harvard Professor Michael Beer’s theory of the need for balance between the two theories, and how Leighton uses this approach in his companies, from his book Allan Leighton on Leadership. You can watch clips of Allan Leighton and other 2007 speakers, to give you a taste of what to expect from Jack Welch, Carly Fiorina, Daniel Goleman and our other 2008 speakers, on Leaders in London TV.

“The job of a leader today is not to create followers.
It’s to create more leaders.”
- Ralph Nader

From the free leadership e-book The Little Book of Leadership

You can download your free e-book on this link (I think you have to register if you aren’t already registered) The Leaders in London Little Book of Leadership

New book from John Kotter

We’re all struggling as leaders with ‘busyness’ - being overcome with busy work that gets in the way of urgent priorities, but seems vital to do at the time it presents itself to us. How do we shake off the ‘busy’ and focus on the ‘urgent’, and help the people we lead to do the same? In tough trading conditions, as we are all experiencing at the moment, nothing could be more important, so it’s time to make it front and centre of your priorities; helping yourself and others focus on the urgent and not be sidetracked by the ‘busy’ demands.

One of our past speakers, Professor John Kotter, most famous perhaps for Kotter’s Eight Step Change Model (or Kotter’s 8 Step Change Model - he seems to prefer the number to the word) has produced a new book to help you do exactly that - focus on the urgent. How timely. It’s called ‘A Sense of Urgency’ and it’s out in the autumn. Here’s the blurb from the back cover:

Does your organization have a true sense of urgency

“True urgency is a gut-level determination to move and win, now.

Its practitioners are unusually alert. They come to work each day determined to achieve something important, and they shed irrelevant activities to move faster and smarter. Those with a sense of true urgency are the opposite of complacent—but they are not stressed-out, anxious, generating great activity without much productivity. Instead, they are moving boldly toward the future—sharply on the lookout for both hazards and opportunities that change brings.

Bestselling author and business guru John Kotter shows what a true sense of urgency really is, why it is becoming an exceptionally important asset, and how you can create and sustain it within your organization—starting today.” There’s more on Professor Kotter’s work and his latest book here: John Kotter