Leaders In London

From our Leaders in London chairman, Rene Carayol:

LEADERSHIP ESSENTIALS

• No leader is flawless, if we always fire them when they fail, who will want to be a leader?

• Everybody in the team must be made to feel important and their contribution valued otherwise necessary tasks may appear trivial or unimportant and performed without enthusiasm

• When addressing your team ensure you take the time to mention the individual contributions that have stood out. Remember it is from success that we discover what to do and this helps shape culture

• For generations we have been told what cannot be done, and far too little time has been spent on encouraging us to ‘go for it’. Muhammad Yunus would have achieved very little if he had listened to the ‘experts’

• Optimism is a force multiplier and so much more galvanising than cynicism and pessimism

Rene drew those conclusions from analyzing how Nobel Prize winner Muhammad Yunus, who will be on-stage at Leaders in London in a few weeks turned GreammenBank into a major success story. You can read Rene’s analysis of Yunus’s leadership at Grameen in Rene’s latest online newsletter here

How many lists of ‘attributes of a leader’ have you seen? Bill George of Harvard Business School sent one of his research assistants to look into it and discovered 1,400 ‘attributes’ of leadership compiled in hundreds of lists produced over the previous fifty years.

George himself says that when he was running Medtronic, a colleague said “We’ve discovered what makes a great leader at Medtronic!” and presented him with a list of fifty-one characteristics or attributes.

“You forgot one,” said George, as he read through the list. “Walks on water.”

The truth is, says George, there is no list. You don’t create a culture of great leadership by checking people’s attributes against a list of ‘What makes a good leader’. Leaders have different voices. They have some things in common, yes. But, don’t look for a list.

If your organization has or is developing a list of ‘leadership competencies’ against which your people are measured, bear that in mind. We’ve mentioned this here before, but it’s worth saying again. Rene Carayol, our Leaders in London Chairman, says that the market teaches us that sameness doesn’t work: it leads to commoditisation. Difference works. That applies to leadership too.

You can learn in person from both Bill George and Rene Carayol at Leaders in London 2008. But, it’s only a couple of weeks away, so be quick if you haven’t reserved your place already.

I was reminded again yesterday, when working with a large company on their leadership development, that a lot of managers have never been through a downturn and simply don’t know what to do in the face of one. A lot of the sales managers at the company I was visiting yesterday have only ever sold into a booming market, where customers snatched what they were selling from their hands; marketing likewise, operations the same.

Managers simply don’t know what to do

They simply haven’t experienced a tough market before, and don’t have the skillset or the experience to handle it, I was told. They are confused, don’t know what to do for the best. They don’t know what to do or say to their direct reports who, like them, are worried about mortgages, savings, whether they will be laid off or kept on. So, they struggle to maintain morale - their own and their colleagues. And, as morale dips, so does performance. In many ways, this is their first real, big challenge.

This is our crucible

Then I remembered Warren Bennis, the leadership guru, saying the tough times, when you look back on them, are where you learn your leadership. It may not be pleasant, but it’s necessary. He calls it ‘the crucible’ in which you are forged. So, this is the ideal time to help your people strengthen their skillset, get them back to motivated, for those of them who are now demoralized and feeling powerless in the face of the global financial juggernaut. The downturn in other words, is your ideal training ground to develop your people’s skills, harden their resilience, nurture future leaders.

So, where do you start?

So, where to start? This is from Alan Zimmerman’s Tuesday Tip:

“I have learned … to get through great loss and great tragedy … you must believe in something bigger than yourself and your circumstances. You must believe in something so good, so grand, and so powerful, that no matter what, you won’t be brought down…Whatever it is, you need a belief or a purpose that will get you through these tough times.

I learned that from Dr. Vicktor Frankl, who was shipped off to the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II. There … in the worst of conditions, with little food, inadequate shelter, and horrendous torture, thousands of Jewish prisoners were forced into labor that went on month after month.

What amazed Dr. Frankl was the fact that some of the laborers survived … while others, in the same conditions … did not. Dr. Frankl found that the ones who made it through those terrible times had a purpose. They had a purpose that said, “I will do whatever it takes to get out of this place, to find my wife, to find my kids, to reunite my family.” It was that kind of belief that got them through the crisis.

After the war, Dr. Frankl wrote a fascinating book about his experience. In essence, he said, “If you know your ‘why,’ any ‘how’ is possible.”

In other words, if you believe in something bigger than yourself, bigger than the times, bigger than Wall Street, bigger than your circumstances, you can make it through almost anything.”

What do you stand for?

Now, you don’t have to go all religious. Rene Carayol, our Leaders in London chairman and facilitator, has always said the test of a leader is the one question “What do you stand for?” If you have an answer to that and are passionate and sincere about it, there’s your higher purpose. And if you can inspire people to feel the same, you’ve begun your own upturn at work.

Hmmm, ‘It’s a time for leaders’ I pompously posted below. I believe it is. But, what is the best kind of leadership for the current turbulence? In the UK, the leadership at the bank Lloyds TSB was, over the past few years, characterized as boring and unadventurous. That’s how other financial institutions viewed its reluctance to gorge on the new financial instruments that have emerged in recent years, making fat short-term profits from repackaging and selling on loans, for example.

The media joined in and contributed to this version of Lloyds TSB - that it was too cautious, not a place to invest in if you want big returns fast, that it was somehow getting left behind by the more adventurous financial institutions at a time when money (credit) was virtually free.

Well-run, safe but boring. That was the general consensus. So, yesterday, Lloyds TSB turns out to be the only bank in a sound enough position to say ‘yes’ to the UK government’s attempt to broker a takeover of HBOS (Halifax Bank of Scotland), the UK’s largest mortgage lender, to head off the possible need for yet another government bailout akin to Fanny & Freddie in the US, and Northern Rock (in the UK).

Sir Brian Pitman’s tenure leading Lloyds TSB helped start off the ’safe but boring’ cliche, because his sound, unflamboyant leadership set the tone for the bank. Eric Daniels, Lloyds TSB’s chief executive of five years, is similarly known, says the FT today

“as the Quiet American because of his low profile and cautious approach…Under his stewardship Lloyds TSB has been cautious about expanding into more exotic business such as credit products rooted in subprime mortgages”.

Both Brian Pitman and Eric Daniels strike me as what Jim Collins calls Level Five leaders - longterm thinkers who are guided by an inner conviction rather than following the current trend, who are usually ego-lite and happy to stay out of the limelight, and who have a clear view on the horizon as well as the short-term. Unflappable, sometimes mild-mannered, but with the courage of their convictions.

Rene Carayol, our Leaders in London chairman, has said in the past that what characterizes great leadership is a mix of two apparent contradictions: great courage and great humility. That sounds close to Collins’ characterization of ‘the quiet leader’, the Level Five leader.

There’s some research that shows charismatic leaders who make big bold swooping decisions and adopt high risk strategies win bigger than Level 5 leaders when they are winning, but (obviously) lose bigger too. I’ll dig it out and post it here when I find it.

That research, and the contrast between those two types of leader, seem to me to be reflected in the choice of leadership we have before us now. And it seems as if the market is making the decisions for us. In a game of ‘last man standing’, or at least, of consolidation in which the genuinely strong players take over and consolidate the ones that appeared strong but turned out not to be, my suspicion is we’ll see a lot more ‘quiet leaders’ running things once the smoke clears.

Is that what we need? What kind of leadership do you want to see in your organization at the moment? And are you getting it? How about your own leadership? Where do you fall between the two ends of the spectrum mentioned above - the quiet leader at one end and the charismatic risk-taker at the other? Yes, it’s a time for leaders. But, what kind of leadership do we need?

In leadership, the Obama experience seems to remind us, the speech is the thing. There is something about a great leadership speech - from Kennedy in Berlin way back to Lincoln and the Gettysburg address - that can define a moment, inspire a generation.

On a more mundane level, the leadership speech is a powerful mechanism, if you are any good at it, for reaching all of the people you need to reach - from employees to stockholders - and connecting with them, influencing them. The problem is most leaders are not very good at it. Most leaders are excruciatingly bad at it; yes, even you, who have been through all that expensive presentation training.

Most leaders are bad at it because they use speeches to pronounce, not to speak intimately about themselves and the people they are talking to. A stage or a camera are seen as a cue to speak ‘publicly’ rather than intimately. But, it’s the intimate, the personal, the real, that connects with people. The best leadership speeches tell a personal story about yourself that resonates with the people in the audience - It’s not about ego, about ‘me’ stories; it’s about stories that touch people and illuminate something about shared values and shared purpose.

OK, that means nothing without an example, so our Leaders in London Chairman and Facilitator Rene Carayol has a stunning one over on his website, from Steve Jobs of Apple. You need to earmark at least five minutes to read it.

Quick extract to give you a flavour:

“Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

My second story is about love and loss.

My third story is about death.”

Steve Jobs Commencement Speech to Stanford Students, on Rene Carayol’s website

So, how do you motivate people in uncertain times?

” The consultants McKinsey asked people ‘What makes for a fantastic work environment?’ The three top answers were:

1. It’s honest and open: ‘I can trust my boss.’
2. I’m stretched and valued: ‘If I’m not there, I know I’ll be missed.’
3. Permission to take risks by making decisions: ‘Don’t give me tasks. Let me make decisions.’

Inspiring and motivating people in a downturn is tougher than when times are good. So, take a look at the three things people want and spend a minute mentally assessing your own leadership practice and that of your organization against these three things. What can you change to inspire, engage and motivate people at this time?

Heard Rene Carayol, Visiting Professor at Cass Business School, on Radio 4 on Sunday, reviewing the newspapers for the Broadcasting House programme. Rene, who chairs and facilitates Leaders in London, reminded us that what underpins markets is confidence, and that the ‘R’ word is being overused. Yes, we might be heading that way. Yes, some sectors, notably construction, have been hit hard and fast. But, we haven’t hit that technical two quarters of negative growth yet. Rene wasn’t wearing rosy specs. He was rightly pointing out that how leaders react to current market conditions and how leaders anticipate what comes next can contribute to accelerating external market trends…or slowing them. So, the clear message for leaders is ‘don’t panic’. And don’t resort to kneejerk across the board cost-cutting, as that’s never a successful way of dealing with a downturn in the longterm.

Posted on behalf of
Leaders in London
by
Phil Dourado