Leaders In London

OK, not wanting to sound ‘Pollyanna-ish’ or hopelessly optimistic in turbulent times, but just a reminder to start your week, that stress - and for many of us, with the current market turbulence, these are the most stressful times we have faced in recent years - isn’t always a bad thing.

This is from Michael McKinney’s ever-readable Leading Blog over on his Leadership Now site:

“…not all stress is bad. We need to look for opportunities within our circumstances to expand our capacity. Loehr and Schwartz write in The Power of Full Engagement, that ‘Any form of stress that prompts discomfort has the potential to expand our capacity—physically, mentally, emotionally or spiritually—so long as it is followed by adequate recovery.’ It’s part of learning to manage yourself exceptionally well.”

‘Self-leadership’ or ‘personal leadership’ or ‘mastery of self’ is the jargon used in leadership development circles to describe what Loehr and Schwartz are talking about there. This is a great time to develop this core foundation of your leadership.

So, that did sound Pollyanna-ish after all. But, what would you rather: more bad news on a Monday morning? And it’s t-r-u-e, so that’s good.

The leadership guru Marshall Goldsmith has produced a list of 20 common failures in leadership behaviour. Spend a minute mentally ticking off which ones you are guilty of. Be honest. If you can’t be honest enough, ask someone else to do it for you:

• Winning Too Much: The need to win at all costs and in all situations—when it matters, when it doesn’t, and when it’s totally beside the point.
• Adding Too Much Value: The overwhelming desire to add our two cents to every discussion.
• Passing Judgment: The need to rate others and impose our standards on them.
• Making Destructive Comments: The needless sarcasms and cutting remarks that we think make us sound sharp and witty.
• Starting with “No,” “But,” or “However”: The overuse of these qualifiers, which secretly say to everyone, “I’m right. You’re wrong.”
• Telling the World How Smart We Are: The need to show people we’re smarter than they think we are.
• Speaking When Angry: Using emotional volatility as a management tool.
• Negativity: The need to share our negative thoughts, even when we weren’t asked.
• Withholding Information: The refusal to share information in order to maintain an advantage over others.
• Failing to Give Proper Recognition: The inability to praise and reward.
• Claiming Credit We Don’t Deserve: The most annoying way to overestimate our contribution to any success.
• Making Excuses: The need to reposition our annoying behavior as a permanent fixture so people excuse us for it.
• Clinging to the Past: The need to deflect blame away from ourselves and onto events and people from our past; a subset of blaming everyone else.
• Playing Favorites: Failing to see that we are treating someone unfairly.
• Refusing to Express Regret: The inability to take responsibility for our actions, admit we’re wrong, or recognize how our actions affect others.
• Not Listening: The most passive-aggressive form of disrespect for colleagues.
• Failing to Express Gratitude: The most basic form of bad manners.
• Punishing the Messenger: The misguided need to attack the innocent, who are usually only trying to protect us.
• Passing the Buck: The need to blame everyone but ourselves.
• An Excessive Need to Be “Me”: Exalting our faults as virtues simply because they exemplify who we are.

So, take the ONE thing that you know you do from that list…and stop doing it this week. If you are brave and disciplined enough, come back to the list next week and take another ‘habit’ and focus on undoing it. And so on…

Source: I spotted Marshall’s list on George Ambler’s excellent blog The Practice of Leadership:

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

Lead like Mandela

Over on The Practice of Leadership blog, George Ambler spots a piece in Time Magazine to coincide with Nelson Mandela’s birthday (I was on holiday, so you’re getting it a bit later). Richard Stengel , who worked with Nelson Mandela on his autobiography, “Long Walk to Freedom” has an article in Time titled “Mandela: His 8 Lessons of Leadership”, these 8 lessons of leadership are:

1. Courage is not the absence of fear — it’s inspiring others to move beyond it. “Mandela was often afraid during his time underground, during the Rivonia trial that led to his imprisonment, during his time on Robben Island. ‘Of course I was afraid!’ he would tell me later. It would have been irrational, he suggested, not to be. ‘I can’t pretend that I’m brave and that I can beat the whole world.’ But as a leader, you cannot let people know. ‘You must put up a front.’ And that’s precisely what he learned to do: pretend and, through the act of appearing fearless, inspire others. It was a pantomime Mandela perfected on Robben Island, where there was much to fear. Prisoners who were with him said watching Mandela walk across the courtyard, upright and proud, was enough to keep them going for days. He knew that he was a model for others, and that gave him the strength to triumph over his own fear.”
2. Lead from the front — but don’t leave your base behind. “For Mandela, refusing to negotiate was about tactics, not principles. Throughout his life, he has always made that distinction. His unwavering principle — the overthrow of apartheid and the achievement of one man, one vote — was immutable, but almost anything that helped him get to that goal he regarded as a tactic. He is the most pragmatic of idealists.”
3. Lead from the back — and let others believe they are in front. “Mandela loved to reminisce about his boyhood and his lazy afternoons herding cattle. ‘You know,” he would say, “you can only lead them from behind.’ He would then raise his eyebrows to make sure I got the analogy. As a boy, Mandela was greatly influenced by Jongintaba, the tribal king who raised him. When Jongintaba had meetings of his court, the men gathered in a circle, and only after all had spoken did the king begin to speak. The chief’s job, Mandela said, was not to tell people what to do but to form a consensus. “Don’t enter the debate too early,” he used to say. … The trick of leadership is allowing yourself to be led too. ‘It is wise,’ he said, ‘to persuade people to do things and make them think it was their own idea.’”
4. Know your enemy — and learn about his favorite sport. “As far back as the 1960s, mandela began studying Afrikaans, the language of the white South Africans who created apartheid. His comrades in the ANC teased him about it, but he wanted to understand the Afrikaner’s worldview; he knew that one day he would be fighting them or negotiating with them, and either way, his destiny was tied to theirs.”
5. Keep your friends close — and your rivals even closer. “Many of the guests mandela invited to the house he built in Qunu were people whom, he intimated to me, he did not wholly trust. He had them to dinner; he called to consult with them; he flattered them and gave them gifts. Mandela is a man of invincible charm — and he has often used that charm to even greater effect on his rivals than on his allies. On Robben Island, Mandela would always include in his brain trust men he neither liked nor relied on.… Mandela believed that embracing his rivals was a way of controlling them: they were more dangerous on their own than within his circle of influence. He cherished loyalty, but he was never obsessed by it. After all, he used to say, ‘people act in their own interest.’ It was simply a fact of human nature, not a flaw or a defect.”
6. Appearances matter — and remember to smile. “When Mandela was running for the presidency in 1994, he knew that symbols mattered as much as substance. He was never a great public speaker, and people often tuned out what he was saying after the first few minutes. But it was the iconography that people understood. When he was on a platform, he would always do the toyi-toyi, the township dance that was an emblem of the struggle. But more important was that dazzling, beatific, all-inclusive smile.”
7. Nothing is black or white. “Life is never either/or. Decisions are complex, and there are always competing factors. To look for simple explanations is the bias of the human brain, but it doesn’t correspond to reality. Nothing is ever as straightforward as it appears. Mandela is comfortable with contradiction. As a politician, he was a pragmatist who saw the world as infinitely nuanced. Much of this, I believe, came from living as a black man under an apartheid system that offered a daily regimen of excruciating and debilitating moral choices: Do I defer to the white boss to get the job I want and avoid a punishment? Do I carry my pass? …. Mandela’s calculus was always, What is the end that I seek, and what is the most practical way to get there?”
8. Quitting is leading too. “Knowing how to abandon a failed idea, task or relationship is often the most difficult kind of decision a leader has to make. In many ways, Mandela’s greatest legacy as President of South Africa is the way he chose to leave it. When he was elected in 1994, Mandela probably could have pressed to be President for life — and there were many who felt that in return for his years in prison, that was the least South Africa could do.…. ‘His job was to set the course,’ says Ramaphosa, ‘not to steer the ship.’ He knows that leaders lead as much by what they choose not to do as what they do.”