Posts from — December 2009

A very good friend and ex-client of mine runs a highly successful information technology service in the South of England and his private-sector customers include many Times Top 100 companies.

We often exchange opinions and I recently asked his views on leadership, because I have always been impressed with his commitment to “people development”

He believes leadership is all about bringing out the best in the firm’s 1800 employees. “We have a very informal, non-hierarchical structure”, he says. “The task of our leaders is not simply to issue orders but to act as role models in providing our customers with what they want in terms of teamwork, friendliness, delivery and, in general, supplying a top-class service”.

I love to drive, and I always have. In fact, other than in a shuttle bus or a taxi, I am seldom a passenger. I probably got this from my Dad – he always loved to drive too. And, because driving is a skill that becomes subconscious for most of us, I typically drive on auto-pilot.

Recently, however, I became a passenger for an extended period of time as my son, Parker, took the wheel for a long drive on the interstate. He’s been driving for several months, but this was the first long drive on the freeway. I sat in the passenger seat as his coach, and suddenly my skills weren’t subconscious anymore.

Leadership was once about hard skills such as planning, finance and business analysis.

When command and control ruled the corporate world, the leaders were heroic rationalists who moved people around like pawns and fought like stags. When they spoke, the company employees jumped.

Now, if the gurus and experts are right, leadership is increasingly concerned with soft skills – teamwork, communication and motivation.

The trouble is that for many executives, the soft skills remain the hardest to understand, let alone master. After all, hard skills have traditionally been the ones which enabled you to climb to the top of the corporate ladder.

Recently someone asked what I thought about “servant leadership.”

My short answer was that using the word servant is redundant.

Don’t misunderstand, I believe in the concept of servant leadership, and what you read or learn about leadership from that prism is extremely valuable.

It’s just that I believe being of service is an underlying component of leadership.

Leaders, by definition, are trying to move towards a desired future – and hopefully a future that is desirable to those you are leading, Customers, and the community at large.

Your leadership style depends on what you are trying to do. There are at least three possibilities:

1. You are in charge of a team and you want to know how best to make decisions.

2. You want to know how to motivate your subordinates to work harder or change direction.

3. You want to show leadership to people who don’t report to you.

Let’s consider each of these situations in turn:

1. The question of how best to make decisions is the classic leadership style situation. The original 3 leadership styles were: autocratic, participative and laissez-faire.

All managers expected to carry out performance appraisal should have some training.

Ideally this should not just be on the skills of performance appraisal – the ‘how’ to do it, but also on the reasons for performance appraisal the ‘why’ we do it.

Managers should understand how it fits into the wider strategic process of performance management and how the information and data generated contributes to understanding of the capacity of the human capital of the organisation to contribution to business strategy and value.

Often on airplanes people ask me, in casual conversation, what I do for a living. After explaining it in a few sentences, they often knowingly smile, and say:

“Oh, you’re a motivational speaker.”

Well, honestly, I believe that is not true; nor is it even possible. So I cringe internally, and then generally say a little bit more about our work and then move on.

After all, they will be my seat mate for at least the next hour or more.

The reality that I typically don`t share, but will share with you, is that it is really impossible to “motivate” anyone to do anything (for very long).