Leadership Development Archives

Passion and Patience

I spent a very restful week last week, walking in the sunshine of the Amalfi coast, staying with an Italian farming family. Like many Italian farmers, Pasquale, the head of the household, is finding the going tough at the moment. However he’s a man with a quiet passion … making his own wine from his own grapes. He only makes a 1000 bottles a year … not enough to be commercially viable… but definitely enough to treat family, friends, and the odd visitor, as well as keeping his dreams of becoming a niche producer alive.

Whilst his passion for his vines is obvious, this is also a patient man who is prepared to wait. Fine wine can’t be made overnight, and it will be years, if not decades, before he sees the end product of his labours.

Pasquale got me thinking about ‘passion and patience’ in the context of leadership. Sadly, I meet too many without either quality, who neither stir the heart nor stay the course. The patient but passionless leader resigns themselves to a life time of work they feel nothing for, while the passionate impatient goes off like a firework, leaving a trail of destruction in their wake often as not.

So let’s hear it for the passionate patient leaders, those willing to stay the long course to deliver the things they really care about. As they say ‘good things come to he (or she) who waits.’

Finding your Mojo

I’ve just finished speaking to Philip (not his real name) -he’s a manager in his late 50’s and you might be forgiven for assuming that he was more worried about retirement at his stage of his working life than putting his energies into his job. For years he has been ‘banging on’ about staff morale and the importance of listening to staff and, guess what, nobody had been listening to him. Net result – a demotivated Philip with little engagement in the business he is supposed to be part of leading. He’s been counting down the days until he can collect his pension.

That all changed last week, somebody listened to Philip and what is more, tasked him with finding some solutions. Someone took him seriously. Philip couldn’t be more excited, his enthusiasm for his new project was palpable. Philip has just found his ‘mojo’ again and is unstoppable.

Something amazing happens when people connect back with what they really care about. Instead of settling for things, Philip is now on the path to shaping a significant part of his organisation. Philip has just remembered what leadership is all about.

Out growing the boss

At some point along the way, I remember being told by a very sage person that “Ultimately, charismatic leaders are disempowering”. I remember this being quite a shocking thought – I’d had a few charismatic bosses I’d happily have walked on hot coals for, and the idea of them being disempowering was at the time something I wasn’t ready to take on board.

Over the years, however this thought has stuck with me and increasingly strikes me as true. It’s not just the charismatic types though. I’ve been working with a coaching client over the course of the year, bridging a period when a much loved boss moved on to pastures new. What has been striking is the growth in my client since her apparently nurturing and supportive boss left the organisation. She has been forced to stand on her own two feet, fight her own battles, rather than fall back on the all too available ‘mother hen’. Her confidence has blossomed, and she is performing beyond recognition.

I am quite convinced that one of the prime role of leaders is to grow others as leaders. And this means letting them out grow us if necessary, and being comfortable with that. Tough one!

Managing the gap between intent and impact

Giving negative feedback is never easy for most of us. It takes a big man (or woman) to hear bad news about ourselves and take it on the chin. The fact is most of us find negative feedback a subtle form of attack and up go the defences. It doesn’t make any difference if the feedback is right or wrong – our primordial selves are programmed for fight or flight if we perceive incoming.

One of the most common defences is the ‘Intent Defence’, for example “I didn’t mean to upset the team”, or “Its not what I was trying to do…” or even “I was trying to help her”. All these are defences of intent vs impact. We didn’t mean to upset someone else but somehow we ended up doing so. Most (all?) of us have hugely positive intent but somehow our impact was different on our off days.

When we are giving feedback therefore, the territory to operate on is impact rather than intent. While we can acknowledge and even understand the positive intent in someone’s actions, its the gap between this and their actual impact that we need to focus on. Otherwise we are setting up our feedback sessions for stalemate and stand-off’s.

Objections to Growth

I spent 3 days this week with a leadership group looking at how they could show up as even better leaders. While the conversation for the first 2.5 days had been flowing and open, as soon as we started on the conversation of how they needed to change the conversation ran aground.

Three objections were bandied around:

Objection no 1: “It is them that has to do the changing. “ These folk clung to the idea that change is for other people – usually their bosses or their subordinates …obviously they were not required to change and had no responsibility to do so.

Objection no 2: “I’m not that sort of leader”. This group carried a notion that leaders are some sort of mythic heroic figure, blessed with extraordinary characteristics and abilities that they weren’t lucky enough to have. Leadership was therefore something remote and extraordinary rather than the everyday stuff of getting people to follow you.

Objection no 3: “I can’t help it – this is the way I’ve always been” This group believed that behaviour was not a choice, and that their behaviour was a fixed part of their personality which they obviously couldn’t change or address.

Net result … the status quo unless these beliefs are challenged. Anyone else seen these in action?

Delegation and the art of kite flying

I met a man a couple of weeks ago who just didn’t get delegation. While he understood the need to push work down into his teams he was very reluctant to do so – “After all I am responsible and accountable – if anything goes wrong it is me that is going to get kicked, isn’t it!” However his reluctance was more than this – he saw delegation as synonymous with abdication, and, I suspect, at the heart of it wasn’t sure what value he added if he wasn’t doing all the work. Unfortunately, he’s not alone in this, I meet many leaders who fail to tap into the full capacities of their teams and whilst simultaneously bemoaning their overloaded schedules.

I think reluctance to delegate is partly to do with how we talk about. The language of delegation is often all about ‘turning over’ and ‘letting go’, empowerment of teams sounds a lot like a loss of control. What sane leader would want to ‘let go’ of something mission critical? A refreshing alternative metaphor – suggested by an inspired course delegate – is kite flying. As a leader you learn to pay out more ‘string’ to your team as they get more adept and confident, reeling it back in if needs be. The kite never flies entirely freely, even if it is on a long, long line. The leader always retains a level of control even if it rarely applied.

I wonder if that thought would help my reluctant delegator…

Here’s a link to a useful Harvard Business Review article “Why aren’t you delegating ?”

Blackberry frenzy

I’ve just spent a very happy week running a 5 day leadership programme. It’s one of my favourite programme to run and always gets great feedback. It is also one of the most full on, and delegates and tutors alike are kept pretty busy.

As with many companies the use of blackberries is rife, no sooner do we have a break then they are out and dealing with stuff back at the office/plant. Some of the tutors get most indignant about this – others wearily shake their heads saddened that our delegates can’t abstract themselves from work sufficiently to get most value from what we are doing together. I am worried when I find many of the attendees will be working the weekend to catch up from a week away from work.

Organisations make huge investments in learning and it is more than a shame if attendees are distracted by work pressures. However organisations also expect the wheels to keep turning and it is the rare delegate that can free their diary completely. How do we help participants on our programme to be fully in the ‘here and now’ when we have them with us, and avoid the email back log they dread on their return?

Playing your own game or someone else’s?

I had the pleasure of talking to a highly successful project leader today – the sort of guy who takes multi-million pound projects of frightening complexity in his stride and still looks around for a challenge. He’d found exactly that in his new appointment – taking over the leadership of a global transformation team – but to his surprise was finding it harder going than he expected and not a lot of fun.

Inventing your own game?

“I’m so used to playing on my own pitch” he mused ” I was so familiar with how things were with my old team but now I’m having to fit in with this new lot”. He was right at the start of his own change process, feeling the discomfort and uncertainty of change.

This got me thinking about what it takes to be playing your own game rather than someone else’s. For some it is about picking their own team, for others it is about throwing out the existing agenda and bringing in their own. Others never get there and are forever dancing to someone else’s tune… never a great place to operate from.

Talking strengths

I came across an amazing statistic yesterday – it was hidden in a paper by the Corporate Leadership Council on what drives individual performance… a subject dear to the heart of most learning and development professionals. The 2006 CLC’s survey of 28,000 people, had distilled out what organisational ‘levers’ impact individual performance and found that the vast majority of performance management practices make minimal positive difference. Shocking indeed!

However, stunningly, what did make a big difference was talking performance strengths – that’s the conversation that helps employees to know what their strengths are in the first place and and secondly help them figure out how to use them. Conversations that emphasized performance strengths drove a 36.4% improvement in performance, a particularly amazing figure when the same data showed that conversations that emphasized weaknesses lead to a 26.8% decline in employee performance.

Now I think this is big news for all of us involved in learning and growth in organisations and real affirmation for the positive psychology movement. Many managers and leaders I meet seem to have an assumption that development = fixing our weaknesses, and therefore performance management conversations must be about identifying our gaps and plugging them. This data would suggest that this approach is not only unhelpful but potentially detrimental. So are we teaching managers how to have strengths-based conversations or are we perpetuating the ‘fix the fault’ approach to development?

Corporate Leadership Council (2006) From Performance Management to Performance Improvement: leveraging key drivers of individual performance. For a copy of the paper click here.

Abdication, delegation, interference

How do leaders know if what they are giving their people is right?

This was the question that was exercising a leader I met last week. He was very aware of the strengths and weaknesses of his team and the challenges they had on . He was also very clear about his own management style and was well aware that he loved ‘doing the doing’ and was in danger of getting overly involved and potentially becoming an interference and a nuisance to his team

He’d also experimented with more delegation and talked fondly of a happy couple of weeks when he’d been able to go home at 5pm after off loading his project backlog. This had backfired slightly when he discovered his team straining to complete tasks and he’d concluded that his ‘delegation’ had actually become abdication.

This delicate balance is of course the stuff of ‘situational leadership’ – the fine art of judging the right degree of empowerment and autonomy. And art is is … if there was rule book on how to do this perfectly it would be a best seller. My leader was more than half way there as he understood that getting it wrong was normal and was willing to have conversations with his team about what he needed to provide them. How refreshing!