Let's Be Successful Again!

Bitter-Sweet tragedy

My question today is "Would you like to be managed by you?"

I recall from my years as a BBC producer that some of my friends progressed to leadership roles quite quickly and found themselves at the age of 30 managing large teams of even less experienced producers than themselves.

Alongside this transition came a transition of personality from a friendly, considerate, patient style to a snide, dismissive and intimidatory style. I found that sad.

I suppose the thinking was that, if this is what other producers and editors did, then it must be the best way to lead. And if you managed to survive and even thrive under such leadership then so would real talent under you.

I never ascribed to this philosophy. I believed (and still do) that leadership isn't about power-play and manipulation but about guiding, developing and nurturing talent. I don't believe you get the best out of people by making it hard for them to succeed. I believe you get the best out of people by enabling them to do their best work.

That's why I come back to the initial question - Would you like to be managed by you?

Think carefully about the answer. I can certainly think about things I do when I manage other people that I wouldn't appreciate. I am too talkative and probably waste people's time. And I am not always as direct as I could be so people may be confused by my motivations (this is something I am working on though and recently some people might have experienced a more "conclusive" style from me!).

However, if you discover that you are basically emulating a style of leadership you experienced when you were just starting out which regularly left you feeling insecure, worthless, lacking in talent, boring, confused, disengaged or any other range of negative emotions, ask yourself whether this is because you have chosen this style or just fallen in to it because you have nothing better.

Leadership is a skill which requires practise. Read articles about leadership, read books, go to lectures, watch those around you and see how effective (or ineffective) their approach is, experiment, learn from your mistakes and understand your strengths.

Become sophisticated...as sophisticated as you are at your "day job" whether that be as a salesperson, a marketing expert, a lawyer or even a BBC producer.

And, by the way, treat youngsters on your staff with some respect. They are only ever going to be as good as you allow them to be.  

Be honest

I have just come back from a three day retreat with a business group I belong to, Executive Foundation. For me it was an opportunity to step back from my business and consider where my business goals are in (or out) or alignment with my values and life objectives.

What became clear during the three days was that we all know what is best for us. We don't need to be told. The very act of speaking about ourselves reveals some of the truth. But what was most useful as far as I was concerned was that we had to consider what questions we wanted the rest of the group to explore with us. I wanted to know, for instance, whether there were any gaps in my plans. Clearly, I wanted to ask this question because I suspected there were gaps. Had I had a different suspicion I would have asked a different question.

Of course, this only works in a group of trusted friends and colleagues. In a less safe forum one might not be willing to share ones fears honestly or even ask for feedback. What they receive as a result might be motivated by all sorts of underlying biases - politics, ambition, insecurity or the need to be liked.

I think in our group we have reached a level where we can speak and listen openly.

But finding a group (or even an individual) with whom it is safe to speak, whether that be a partner, a friend, a colleague, a mentor, a coach, a minister or anyone else, must be a fundamental for success.

Without anyone to share our deepest feelings with in a safe and secure way, not only would success be hard to achieve but any success we did achieve would be meaningless.    

Speaking of creativity...

Increasingly I am asked to speak to audiences, mainly business people but sometimes a wider population, about some of the subjects covered in my books. In particular, people seem interested to hear about creativity.

I think there is a belief that creativity is somewhat magical and difficult to do and therefore any clues as to how to be more creative are valued.

However, I believe that firstly, creativity is not magical and is, in fact a rather practical skill which can be learnt (and which most people already do with some considerable ability without even realising it) and secondly, that creativity is not difficult but simple and rather obvious.

You might say "Well, you would say that wouldn't you because you are creative and therefore it does seem obvious and simple to you".

But whenever I speak to audiences who, granted, are self selecting because they have chosen to go to a talk about creativity but who, also, are at the talk because they believe they can learn more about the subject, I discover there is a huge amount of creativity in the room.

Some find it easier to originate ideas in the moment. Others will generate their ideas in the days that follow the talk but very few leave feeling that they couldn't get anything from the presentation. 

The key is to see creativity, not as something to do with inspiration but as to do with problem solving. And the first step, therefore, is finding problems to solve. Most of us are very good at that! We see what is wrong much more easily than we see what is right. Tomorrow, why don't you start by seeing how much you can find which could be better. The solutions may not come to you immediately but the brain will be working on it while you sleep, eat and watch Strictly Come Dancing - It Takes Two (or is that just me?).

I would love to know what you come up with!   

Gladwell gets on my nerves!

The thing that really annoys me about Malcolm Gladwell is that he always says what I want to say but just a little bit better and a little bit before me!

In this great little film of Gladwell speaking at a Ted conference on the subject of "What Makes Us Happy" he explores the power of an "s". He looks at how thinking differently can dramatically transform a business. And he considers how, by asking the right question, you finally get the right answer. 

http://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell_on_spaghetti_sauce.html

Rights and wrongs

I came across a fascinating piece of work a week ago, a paper by philosopher and neuroscientist, Joshua Greene, who studies moral judgement.

The dilemmas he is known for are these:

The switch dilemma:  A runaway trolley is hurtling down the tracks toward five people who will be killed if it proceeds on its present course. You can save these five people by diverting the trolley onto a different set of tracks, one that has only one person on it, but if you do this that person will be killed. Is it morally permissible to turn the trolley and thus prevent five deaths at the cost of one?   Most people say "Yes."

Then we have the footbridge dilemma:  Once again, the trolley is headed for five people. You are standing next to a large man on a footbridge spanning the tracks. The only way to save the five people is to push this man off the footbridge and into the path of the trolley.  Is that morally permissible?  Most people say "No."

These two cases create a puzzle for moral philosophers:  What makes it okay to sacrifice one person to save five others in the switch case but not in the footbridge case?  There is also a psychological puzzle here:  How does everyone know (or "know") that it's okay to turn the trolley but not okay to push the man off the footbridge?

Having read a little more of Greene's paper and having pondered this for some days now I am still not sure there is an answer. The best I can come up with is that we are programmed to care more about people we have contact with than people we don't. This makes evolutionary sense because it bonds us to our "tribe" and helps us to make difficult decisions when we are facing conflicting situations.

From a business point of view this is an interesting concept. Firstly, we sometimes wonder why colleagues have made "poor" decisions when the right answer was so clear to us. Yet, when you understand how moral dilemmas are resolved it is easier to see why someone chose to protect themselves or their team mates even at the risk of the whole business.

Secondly, it shows how powerful human contact, even fleeting human contact, is...how much we respond to interactions with other people. There may be more earth shattering insights from Greene's work (you can read more here) but for me I feel affirmed. Today Portsmouth City Council has banned its employees from using facebook during working hours. I am not in favour of such bans as I think, in a healthy organisational culture, people can be trusted to do their best work and whether they are looking at facebook during the day becomes irrelevant. However, one reason to encourage real human contact as opposed to virtual human contact is that we actually need to be with people. Greene's example shows the power of face-to-face contact, even fleeting face-to-face contact.

Email, online communities, even blogging open us up to the wider world and that has huge advantages. But we are programmed for a world where we know a small group of people intimately. Our brains respond in a primal way to moral dilemmas which is one of the reasons we feel overwhelmed by the moral problems facing our civilisation today. They are simply too complex for the human brain to morally judge. And when we ignore the person sitting next to us in favour of a stranger sitting at a computer thousands of miles away, we also ignore our human needs.

Who survives? You decide.

No. I am not going to write about Big Brother. I am writing about true survival. Survival in life and death situations. I read an article recently in Easy Living (it's better than you think) about people who survive plane crashes and other disasters. A bit like my book on Success, the article explored what the differentiating personality traits were of those who succeed, only in this case it wasn't professional success but living itself which was the focus - who comes out alive and who doesn't.

It was interesting for me as I sometimes ponder whether I would keep my wits about me in such a situation or whether I would panic or become frozen to the ground. I am not known for my fast reaction time. But does this mean I would fight to stay alive or give in and die?

Of course, in some situations there is no choice. Death occurs because you are in the wrong place at the wrong time and there is absolutely nothing you can do about it. But in some cases a group of people survive the initial disaster but only a small number survive long enough to be rescued. What is the difference?

One quality that these people have is that they are able to remain in the moment and do the best thing they can do at that time with the information they have.

The optimists tend to fantasise about rescue being around the corner, consoling themselves that in just a few minutes or within the next hour, a rescue will occur. When it doesn't they become increasingly depressed and this can actually kill them. They give in to the elements.

Pessimists, of course, believe rescue will never come. Again, they can't sustain the long-haul because they believe nothing can be done to change the outcome. They give in too.

It is those who remain calm, who think "What do I need to do right now?" who survive (where survival is physically possible). One man who made it to a lifeboat when the ferry he was on capsized said that he knew he had to stay alert and awake. He was always looking out for the next thing that was going to save his life.

At the same time, he also had a life purpose which kept him going when death seemed like a welcoming option. He was freezing cold, many others around him had died and he had no idea if rescue would come. But he knew he hadn't achieved all he wanted in his life and was determined to survive.

This is an interesting contrast. He was in the moment yet he had a long-term purpose. He was able to manage these two simultaneously. I think this is very hard to do. When one starts thinking about the long term purpose one can get lost in the future - imagining all the things one wants to achieve, the things one hasn't achieved yet...it would be easy to become depressed rather than find this motivating.

At the same time, one needs to stay in the moment - what is the next thing I need to do?

But it seems clear that this isn't just a recipe for surviving a life or death situation. It is a recipe for life. Balancing that need to be in the present, to make good decisions every second of the day based on the information available at that time, whilst also seeing the long-term purpose and working towards that with every decision you make today is a pretty good recipe for success whatever the challenge.

Those businesses who are strong today have been making good decisions throughout this recession (and probably were in the habit of doing so before). They decided every day how to take a step forward. But they didn't do that from within a vacuum. They had the long term purpose very clearly in their mind.

Leader as teacher

I do a lot of work with leaders, helping them to shift from a manager's perspective to a leader's view. One of the assumptions behind the principle of leadership is that the best way to develop your people is through coaching.

I have always bought in to this, although as a coach myself it is inevitable that I will see the value of coaching as a powerful tool for bringing about excellence. This might be why I have barely questioned my assumption that coaching is preferable to teaching. I just accepted that teaching, as a largely one-way relationship based on the idea that one person has the information and the other person doesn't, was inferior to coaching.

The comment of a client last week caused me to reassess. He said "At this level of management you still crave to be taught. Why aren't our bosses teaching us?"

Middle managers like this client take the brunt of the blame for what is wrong with business. More senior leaders see this level as obstructing change. More junior colleagues see them as ambitious and self-serving. This is a generalisation, of course, but no one can deny that middle managers have a less than positive reputation.

Yet, here is a man who is probably quite typical, saying that he wants to learn. And the people he wants to learn from are his senior managers. The problem, of course, when he looks at them closely is that he realises they don't really know what they are doing either! They may know the theory but they don't walk the talk. They have managed to get ahead despite their behaviour rather than because of it in most cases.

This is frustrating to someone who is keen to develop themselves. Where is the motivation if you see that people are promoted who do not live up to the stated values of the company? Even the most dedicated individual would find it hard to maintain a commitment to best practise in these circumstances.

I am starting to love the idea of leaders including "teacher" in their range of responsibilities. I would love for them to become far more self-aware, far more analytical of their behaviour and far more honest about the challenges they face and share this wisdom with their more junior colleagues. Yes, there is a risk they will appear weak but the truth is that a weak manager doesn't fool anyone anyway, whether he admits it or tries to pretend he knows what he is doing. Weak leaders may believe they have put their more junior colleagues off the scent but they haven't. Instead they are not taken seriously because they are seen to be frauds.

I hope that a new generation of middle managers will rise through the ranks and challenge the mystique and dishonesty that exists at the top of so many businesses today. Let's hope they aren't corrupted on the way up instead and decide "If you can't beat em, you may as well join em".

(P.s. My next book will be on this very subject, advising middle managers how to change their business from the inside. What other ideas do you have for addressing this problem?)

Be more political

I heard a lovely Pause for Thought today on Radio 2 (towards the end of the programme for those wanting to fast forward the iplayer!). Rabbi Pete Tobias was saying the almost unsay-able - that politics and religion should be more closely linked. But his argument was more subtle than it seems.

He was saying that religion should be political in the sense that religious people should be fighting for justice, for the rights of the less fortunate and drawing attention to those who need help. And politics should be more religious in that it should be more about values and right and wrong rather than who did what to whom.

I do not consider myself a religious person but I do consider myself to be moral (as we all do, I suppose). There is a tendency today to be disparaging about politics and to believe that nothing can be achieved through our political system.

But politics isn't innately bad. It can be about getting things done, making a difference, changing society for the good of all who abide by its fair rules. We might not hear much about that in the headlines but that kind of behaviour isn't what makes news. It is the exceptionally bad, the shocking, the entertaining which makes headlines.

And the same is true in the workplace. Workplace politics has a bad name, but there is nothing inherently bad about it. It can be about influencing, using bonds to get the right result which benefits the business, the people who work in the business and hopefully society at large.

I have taken a little flak for my support of workplace politics (I argue in favour of it in my book The Recipe For Success) but I wish we could reclaim the word politics to mean what it should mean. Maybe then, politicians (in parliament or in the office) would have something to aspire to.

The Rules vs The Spirit

Much of the behaviour we have seen from MPs lately has been legal. They have put their claims through the Fees Office and had them either accepted or rejected. That is the process. And many are now confused, I am sure, about what exactly they have done wrong when they simply followed the process.

The problem is that when we tell people specifically what they can do they believe they have permission to do it. Rather than thinking about what is right, they simply think "If I am told it is OK, it must be OK".

The same is true in any walk of life. When you tell people what they are allowed to do, they do it to its maximum. You are "allowed" two drinks before you drive. That doesn't mean it is advisable. It doesn't mean it is a good idea. But people often treat this as if it is the rule - "Have two drinks before you drive"! In that sense the MPs are not so different to the rest of us. It is human nature to fight against stringent rules and other people's efforts to control us. We want to see how far we can push the limits.

However, when you deal in "values" and give people the space to decide how to behave within these values, you start to see some surprisingly positive behaviour. In companies with strong values, people are their best selves.

A young man came to repair my dishwasher a few days ago. This was a chap who took huge pride in his work. Because he had worked swiftly and found the source of the problems he had faced that day quickly, he was going home after fixing my machine (about 3pm). This was not someone who needed to be told specifically what to do. He had values around doing a good job, being professional and keeping customers happy. When we try to control other people by telling them exactly what to do and giving them very little room to manoeuvre, we actually encourage people to see how far they can stretch the rules. When we give people the opportunity to live by their values, most will behave well.

Don't under-estimate your people

I have just returned from working with a cross-section of employees from a large national company. They were brought together to share their ideas on improving the business.

These individuals were not generally leaders. Some were very young and had a fresh and uninhibited approach. Others had many years of experience under their belt at the front line of the business. Some had changed careers and brought all the wealth of their past to their new role. Others were involved in fascinating out-of-work activities like raising money for charity or pushing themselves to achieve challenging goals. Some were taking courses with the Open University and other providers in their free time, funded out of their own pocket.

There was not one person who came with a narrow mind and a selfish intent.

All of them understood that if the business did well, they would benefit. But not only financially. They felt that satisfaction and motivation would come when they were able to say they had done a job well, when they were proud of what the company stood for and when they felt appreciated for their contribution.

There was little talk of pay rises or bonuses (except in recognition of a good job) and no debate about lack of milk in the staff kitchen and what kind of biscuits were dealt out at meetings. 

The focus was on commercial advantage, competitive edge and delighting customers. 

Next time you wonder whether you can trust staff with the full picture, next time you are concerned that people only care about lining their own pockets, next time you hold back from asking for input, remember - don't under-estimate your people. They are smart, dedicated and hold the key to your business success.