Here’s an inspired manifesto on leadership posted on YouTube that combines some of my favourite themes: thoughts about leadership, making a difference in the world and artful presentation. Created through collaboration between Harvard Business School faculty and students and a US design company XPLANE, at 6 minutes long it presents a powerful message in a visually appealling and impactful way. The message has great value, in and of itself, but I also love the way the message is delivered.  We can learn a lot about the art of communication through presentations by the design principles that are on display here. Don’t take my word for it, check it out for yourself:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpKJVvsSld0&feature=related

The results of a recent survey published by the UK’s Institute of Directors (IoD) reported that IoD members’ organisations see training as an investment rather than a cost to business. Their commitment to training has held firm during the downturn in the economy with 80% saying their organisations had either maintained (51%) or increased (29%) investment in training over the past six months. Further, 88% of directors reported their organisations were planning to maintain or increase training investment in the next six months.

Rather than viewing training as a drain on business, these figures suggest that with investment in building the capacity of their people, organisations are looking to reap rewards when the upturn comes.

Download the report from IoD (2.17mb)

http://www.iod.com/intershoproot/eCS/Store/en/pdfs/policy_paper_training_recession.pdf

Just been reading about Warren Bennis, the US industrial psychologist and former presidential adviser.  He is the man who coined the phrase:

“Managers do things right. Leaders do the right things.” 

I like that Bennis’s work  and research with major corporations and universities over the last 40 years has enabled his thinking to evolve.  In the mid-1980s he had a view of organisational leadership that suggested the ‘heroic individual’ took charge of an organisation and by sheer force of charisma or personality led people to achieving organisational goals and visions.  This had evolved by the late 1990s after extensive study of high performing, successful teams to the idea that the most successful leaders were in fact social architects and that there were four key attributes that great leaders need to master:

1. Providing direction & meaning, a sense of purpose

2. Generating & sustaining trust, creating authentic relationships

3. Displaying a bias towards action, risk-taking and curiosity

4. Generating hope, optimism and psychological resilience that expects success

Finally, he thought that true leaders have the humility to learn from the people they lead. 

My role models for leadership throughout my working life have demonstrated most of these attributes. Few that I admire and want to learn from exhibited the sheer force of personality hero-way of leadership. They got things done, but, in my experience, the collateral damage to too many people’s psyches was too high a price. Bring on the social architects I say! What do you think?

Source: Guide to the Management Gurus by Carol Kennedy. 4th Edition, 2002. Random House Business Books

The view from zero degrees in snow.

My partner was on a commuter train into central London the other week sitting opposite two business men discussing the UK economy and how they’d responded to downturns in their business. The first, sighing heavily with his head in his hands, related that he reluctantly just laid off a third of his workforce. The second calmly shrugged his shoulders and said that his company had less than half the orders they had a year ago. The conversation went something like this:

“Oh,” said Mr Sigh, “you’ll be firing half your people then?”

“No. We’re going to ride it out and the company will be fine.”

Mr Sigh stared at him with disbelief. And Mr Calm laid out his strategy for business survival and “thrival”:

- The knowledge that economies and businesses fluctuate and Gordon Brown could never guarantee doing away with ‘boom and bust’ markets.

- A planned ‘maintenance’ fund – tax efficient with reserves to cover a worst case scenario year of no new income at all.

- Putting the workforce onto all the ‘maintenance’ jobs that they never had time for when business was booming thus clearing the decks for V-shaped or U-shaped or whatever shaped recession it might be.

- Getting his talented people involved in taking stock of the business strategy and looking at core business efficiencies, maintaining and improving customer relationships and value, innovation, diversification, investment in talent and training.

He remarked that he’d been through recession before and had noticed that the businesses that survived and thrived didn’t go running for the bunkers and were prepared to respond to different market conditions. He also now saw newer businesses whose leaders have never experienced a recession and did not know how to respond. His summary of his own situation was that he’s pretty confident his business will thrive.

I was impressed by this man’s attitude of “thrival” when my husband related it to me. I was however left with an enduring image of my husband scribbling notes for me – how else did he remember the story in such vivid detail?

These books are full of ideas about how to take your business forward, innovate, develop your leadership talents and stand out from the crowd.

1. Seven Secrets of Inspired Leaders: How to achieve the extraordinary… by the leaders who have been there and done it. By Phil Dourado and Dr. Phil Blackburn.

2. Rules for Renegades: How to storm the boardroom, build power, harness your individuality and get stuff done! By Christine Comaford-Lynch.

3. Our Emperors Have No Clothes. Incredibly stupid things corporate executives have done while reengineering, restructuring, downsizing, TQM’ing, team-building, and empowering … in order to cover their ifs, ands or “buts”. By Alan Weiss.

4. Funky Business Forever: How to enjoy capitalism. By Jonas Ridderstrale and Kjell Nordstrom.

5. Re-imagine! By Tom Peters.

6. The 18 Challenges of Leadership. A practical, structured way to develop your leadership talent. By Trevor Waldock and Shenaz Kelly-Rawat.

7. Purple Cow: Transform your business by being remarkable. By Seth Godin.

8. Inspiring Women: 25 top female entrepreneurs reveal how real women succeed in business. By Michelle Rosenberg.

9. What the Best CEOs Know: 7 exceptional leaders and their lessons for transforming any business. By Jeffrey A. Krames.

10. The New Leaders: Transforming the art of leadership into the science of results. By Daniel Goleman.

11. Best-Laid Plans: Turning strategy into action throughout your organisation. By Alan Weiss.

These intelligent, creative authors write highly readable, thought-provoking books that are stuffed with ideas that can help inspire creativity and change. These times may be challenging, but they present a perfect opportunity for us to learn and grow, expand our thinking and take lessons from those who have been there before us. And why wouldn’t you?

The hype about our global financial crisis on the nightly news reaches fever pitch. We’re whipped into a sense of impending doom or barely contained hysteria. The “R” word is increasingly on pundits’ lips. Crash, slowdown, recession. Is there anything else out there?

I think there is. There’s a community of like-minded people, a tribe if you will, who think about being bold in these times, being courageous, about opportunity knocking and time to innovate. Rather than contracting, these entrepreneurs, leaders, creators are thinking strategically, scanning the horizon for how they can use this perfect time to create something new and remarkable.

Not every business is contracting. Take a look around. Read the business sections of papers (after the scary cover stories). Find out which businesses are thriving, which ones are innovating, consolidating market position, becoming dominant, inhabiting the fringe, creating a niche, reporting growth. Aston Martin may have only sold three cars in September this year compared to 150 in September last year, but believe me there are businesses out there doing amazing things. Cobblers, I hear you say! Well quite – cobblers are thriving as bankers bring their shoes to be resoled rather than stump up for new Italian jobs. Perhaps an erroneous comparison – Astons to cobblers – but my point is made.

Instead of pulling back, move forward, exercise leadership and exploit opportunities while your competition is too timid to do so. This is a leadership challenge, a mindset or attitude to inhabit as much as a strategy to implement.

What is your organisation for? What is its purpose? Why does it exist? Can you or your people describe the mission of your business or organisation in one easy sentence, or better, a few short words? 

I came across the work of Guy Kawasaki who wrote “The Art of the Start” who tells us to forget writing mission statements because they’re boring, not relevant to the people charged with doing the work and mostly forgettable.  He suggests we instead take the meaning or purpose for our businesses and create mission mantras - using few words, create something memorable that evokes exactly what it is your organisation is there for. He has some fun creating hypothetical mission mantras for well known companies in place of their wordy, boring mission statements. And he suggests using the Dilbert mission statement generator if you just can’t let go of the verbose and pointless. It’s a hoot.

The leadership challenge is to create a mission statement that captures the real essence of your company’s reason for being. Something that your people can remember and, most importantly, something that helps them be clear about why they do what they do in their jobs.

Engage. Perform. Sustain. My mantra for Meridian Prime. It works for the range of services we provide. It says something about the ‘doing’ aspect of our work, as well as something about how we’d like to be: engaged; performing our best; sustainable.

Last week I was in Cardiff, Wales where, with an extraordinary bunch of people, I co-facilitated conversations about harnessing the energy of the tides to create a renewable source of energy and maybe help the British government meet its emissions reduction targets. While the subject matter is fascinating and fraught with potential in its own right, this post is not about tides, it is about people. 

The power and energy of each individual who made up our facilitation team was harnessed in such a way as to tap into their potential and unleash it. We created an event that gave, in only half a day, over 170 people an opportunity to be heard and contribute to a dialogue on an issue of significance for them. The team members went about their jobs in their own unique ways, but what made it extraordinary was their drive, commitment and passion for what they were doing and why they were there.   We had a shared vision of what we were trying to achieve, clarity about who was doing what when and a collective sense that what we were doing was important. With quiet efficiency we all went about our tasks. Without having to acknowledge it overtly, we had tapped into a deep wellspring of purpose and meaning. 

Passion, purpose and meaning. Elements that can make a huge difference in the work performance of individuals. I imagine some saying “yeah, but it’s easy to get that when you’re doing important environmental work”. Perhaps it is more obvious, more overt than, say, a so-called normal office job. But I believe leaders can try to facilitate a sense of purpose and meaning for any person who works for them and try to help them connect with their passions regardless of the nature of the work. There are proven business benefits in doing this. 

Having a compelling vision about what you’re there to achieve, where you’re heading and helping your people share it – not by remote or by dictating it to them but by inspiring them, making the vision significant for them – means you could tap into extraordinary amounts of renewable power and energy. Ignite their passions by connecting what they do, even if it is routine, repetitive and not very exciting (on the surface), with something that gives them purpose and meaning. If they get something out of it, if they’re excited or passionate or inspired, they are happier, they stick around, they do more. That’s good for them. That’s good for business.

Remember the story (urban legend?) about John F Kennedy touring NASA during the space race? He is said to have encountered a janitor mopping the floors and asked him what his job was, to which he received this reply (or words to this effect): “I’m putting a man on the moon, sir!”  That’s what I’m talking about.  Harness it.