A SUMMARY OF BLOG POSTS ON NEELABETTRIDGE.COM ON THE TOPIC OF LEADERSHIP

LEADERSHIP – BLOG POSTS NOV-DEC 2015

• As many coaches will testify, leaders can be highly resistant to making the kind of behavioural change in themselves that they expect to see in others. Indeed, in a recent article, Mark Thompson revealed: “A year before his death, Steve Jobs told me, with intentional irony, that one of the only things that ever got him to consider a behaviour change was facing his own mortality”.

• As leadership development specialist Marshall Goldsmith has said: “When it comes to embracing change, it’s very easy to see what we don’t like about ourselves in other people. It’s harder to see what we don’t like about ourselves.”

• Why should this be so? In large part, it is simply a facet of human nature. We are creatures of habit and it takes a lot to shift us away from ingrained patterns of behaviour. But there may be a further reinforcing mechanism where people in leadership positions are concerned.

• They are leaders, after all. They have an understandable sense of achievement and (in most cases) that sense will be reflected in the attitudes of those around them. So it is, perhaps, unsurprising if they are inclined to believe that there’s nothing much wrong with how they are and how they behave. A prima facie case, one might say, for complacency.

• Except … the world is changing. And change is happening so fast and in such significant ways that we’ve gone beyond the need to accept it, beyond the need to manage it even. Today, if businesses aren’t driving change, they’re likely to be driven over by it.

• So leaders need to learn a very important lesson. As Thompson points out in his article, we don’t achieve success because of our weaknesses, we achieve it (when we do) despite them.

• Combine that self-awareness with an understanding of the seriousness of the challenge from ever evolving competitors and even the most self-satisfied of leaders will find they have a potent motivation to overcome their inbuilt resistance to changing themselves.

Victims of their own success? Why leaders can be highly resistant to change.

• Mindfulness seems to be everywhere at the moment. Self-help courses are proliferating and even the NHS recommends it as a way to achieve mental wellbeing. It’s also becoming the latest thing in leadership development programmes. And there seems to be no doubt that it can be highly beneficial. Learning to focus on the present moment - on your thoughts and feelings and the world around you in the now - can be both a relaxing and an energising experience.

• But as psychologists Robert Biswas-Diener and Todd B. Kashdan pointed out in a recent article, “the human brain isn’t wired to be constantly attentive”.

• So perhaps we should pause to consider if mindfulness, however helpful in its own way, has its limits. Is there no place for those ‘Eureka!’ moments that can strike us when our minds are freewheeling? That ‘aha’ realisation that comes, seemingly out of nowhere, when we’re doing something quite unrelated to the problem for which we now have such a creative solution?

• Yes, of course there is. Even if Archimedes didn’t really come up with a way to measure the volume of irregularly shaped objects by immersing himself in his bath, we all know that some of our best ideas arrive unbidden when we least expect it, when we’re not really consciously thinking or concentrating, let alone focusing, at all.

• However, these flashes of inspiration also have their limits. Who hasn’t had the dispiriting experience of watching a ‘brilliant’ insight lose some of its lustre when subjected to a bit of hard-nosed scrutiny?

• So can we have the best of both worlds? Biswas-Diener and Kashdan suggest that perhaps we can. As they say: “Mindfulness and mindlessness should coexist. You benefit from the lightning-strike of creativity, but then you want to be able to analyse the potential and drawbacks of your spontaneous ideas.”

Is there a case for leaders being mindless as well as mindful?

• As reported in a recent article by Shellie Karabell, no less than 86% of 2,000 experts surveyed at last year’s World Economic Forum said that “a crisis of leadership” was one of the most serious problems facing the world today.

• And yet, throughout the business world, academia and beyond, more resources than probably ever before are being devoted to leadership development. Is there a fundamental flaw in the way in which we are approaching this critical task?

• In the view of two Professors of Organisational Behaviour at INSEAD, Gianpiero and Jennifer Petriglieri, yes there is - at least, there is in our business schools. And that fundamental flaw, they say, is that we have dehumanised the whole concept of leadership.

• By that, they mean that we have reduced leadership training to a set of teachable and gradable skills. Study each module, pass the exams and you will be fully equipped to lead. But if we define a leader as someone who can inspire others to follow then clearly we are talking about a range of qualities and attributes that can’t simply be transferred from teacher to student in a classroom.

• Even if they could, it would still leave a yawning ethical and moral gap. The sad litany of boardroom-level irresponsibility and misdemeanour that has scarred the reputation of capitalism in the last couple of decades should make us all painfully aware of the vital need to foster a values-led approach to business.

• There is, of course, still an important place for business schools in disseminating the groundwork skills that any future leader will need. But the insights of the Petriglieris are an important reminder that effective leadership - the kind of leadership that the Davos delegates believe the world is lacking - has more to do with a leader’s personality, values, experience and ongoing development than with lessons once learned from a textbook.

• Time to rethink the leadership training paradigm?

Time to rethink the leadership training paradigm?

• Martin Winterkorn may have resigned as CEO of Volkswagen but the sheer scale of the emissions manipulation scandal - including the $multi-billion financial implications - means that it could be several years before we know exactly who knew what and when, and who authorised what and when.

• Does that mean there’s nothing we can yet learn from this dismal affair? No. There is already one very clear, very important lesson staring us in the face.

• Responding to Winterkorn’s comment that he “was not aware of any wrongdoing on my part”, Gerard Seijts, Professor of Organizational Behaviour at the Ivey Business School, observed in a recent article: “Nothing wrong, sir? What about failing to lead in a way that ensured the decisions made on your watch were ethical?”

• Indeed.

What leadership lessons can we take from VW?

• “Thriving as an executive in 2015 is no easy task. Emails, texts, meetings, red-eye flights, around-the-clock conference calls …” So say Geoff Smart, Randy Street, and Alan Foster, authors of "Power Score: Your Formula for Leadership Success", in a recent article.

• Here’s a similar take on the same problem from Allison Sutter, founder of Living 360 Coaching: “Have you ever noticed when you finally clear the "do to" list, more stuff gets put on the list? It's never-ending.”

• Clearly there’s a burning question for all of you who feel yourselves identifying with such sentiments - what to do about it?

• Modern technology has, of course, equipped us with a plethora of new ways to communicate and collaborate instantly and without mediation. Is that at the root of the problem? After all, whilst it has made us immeasurably more productive in some ways, in others it seems to have reduced us to hapless victims of an unending torrent of insistent, intrusive demands on our time.

• It might be nice to think so. But not so, according to Smart, Street and Foster. Having conducted in-depth interviews with more than 15,000 leaders across every major industry, they concluded that far from the problem being a 21st century phenomenon, the “leaders we see are making the same three mistakes that their bosses and their bosses’ bosses made a generation ago”.

• They overcommit, taking on more than they can really cope with. They recruit the wrong people to help them. And feeling overburdened, their judgement becomes skewed. They fail to talk to the right people about the right things at the right time.

• The fact is, as Sutter points out, productivity is not really about time management. It’s about making our actions - even down to answering an email (or not) - meaningful and not simply reactive.

Struggling to remain resilient in the face of unending demands?