10 Oct Under New Management – Leadership

Launching your leadership agenda is the third step in your 100-day plan and starts in month three. By that time, you will have worked through steps one and two (reviewed the make-up of your senior team and your competitive strategy).

Leadership is the most exciting and challenging prospect for the newly appointed M.D.

Leadership is the first point on the job description and defines success. Great leadership inspires and sets direction. It energises. It creates possibilities and belief, injects pace, defines the culture of organisations and is the cornerstone of high performing teams. For the Managing Director, leadership is the day job. Leadership comes naturally to few. For the rest of us it requires continuous conscious effort, practice, self-enquiry and stretch. And the leadership challenge starts on day one in post.

Here are some thoughts to help you on your leadership journey. They are based upon personal experience, observation, and the help of some great mentors.

Your Leadership Agenda

Leaders always have an agenda. Great leaders have a sense of purpose which is borne out of what is genuinely important to them. They speak from that place, and their audience responds to their authenticity. Leadership is not to be confused with management: the cold logic of budget, project plans and initiatives. Leadership is only in small part an intellectual exercise. It is mainly visceral – hearts and minds stuff.

The process of recruiting an M.D. is a form of courtship. Prospective employer and employee need to satisfy themselves that they are well matched. Deep and searching conversations about values, shared ambitions, leadership style and your leadership agenda (what you want to lead for) are central to ensuring that you are both in synch, that the things you feel strongly about resonate with each other and that you have shared views on the future direction of the business. You need to be entirely confident that your employer is fully supportive and engaged with the direction of travel you have in mind and the culture you want to create. You should also have become aware of who the other stakeholders and influencers in (and sometimes outside) the business are and have had similar conversations and positive outcomes there. Leadership can be utterly exhausting. It is full of small triumphs and minor set-backs. You need face into it wholeheartedly without worrying about who is at your back. Without their support, you will face an up-hill battle.

Engaging Board Colleagues & Creating a High Performing Team

Before you can engage a broader network of colleagues, suppliers and customers in what you want to achieve, you need to engage the Board.

There are lots of Boards performing at levels which are less than the sum of their parts. In these Boards, individual members operate in functional silos, protecting their fiefdoms, and sharing stale, rehearsed set piece opinions around the Boardroom table. Dynamic, high performing boards are not like that; when they work together, little bits of magic happen. They generate new thinking and achieve breakthroughs, right there in real time in front of your eyes. They achieve things which they would not achieve on their own. And like any great team, they are constantly reviewing their performance as a leadership group. They ask for feedback and genuinely want it. They work hard, consciously and into discomfort, to improve. You’ll know one when you see feel it. They are exciting,  and a little bit “whoah!” at the same time.

Beyond understanding the remit set by stakeholders, dynamic boards are motivated by shared aspirations. As the Managing Director it is your job to uncover these common aspirations and tap into them as you lead the process of creating a vision for the future and engage everyone in the business to contribute to it, adding detail, rendering it in technicolour, and delivering upon it.

Your leadership of the vision of the future is the starting pistol for your collective journey to high performance as a Board.

Time Out

As you set out to engage the Board in your leadership journey, think deeply about what is important to you personally. What do you care about and what kind of business do you want to build? If your vision for the business draws upon deeply held values and a sense of purpose, your authenticity will show through and draw people who share your aspirations to you.

Start from a future perspective 3, 5 or 10 years hence, and describe what the business looks like ‘now’ at that time. What is it doing? Who are its community of customers and employees and what is its purpose and contribution to them? What kind of product and services does it provide? What is its reputation and what is that reputation built upon (strengths, competencies, technologies)?  What are its values and culture? How does it demonstrate them? What does it take pride in? What does working here feel like? What kind of employees are drawn to it? What values and behaviours do they share?

Once you have done some of this thinking yourself, it is time to share it. Make sure you create sufficient time (put the whole day aside, ideally off-site), without distractions or interruptions. Consider sending a personalised request to each Board member ahead of the day, asking each of them to give some thought to the same questions you have been asking yourself, and bringing with them on the day a willingness to share their thoughts with the team. The conversations you are engaging in here are about creating and discussing possibilities and oxygenating new ideas. Giving them time to breathe. Avoid rushing to judgement.

Once you start to talk about the future together you will discover common ground and establish a shared platform on which to build. Remember to start from the perspective of the future and work on the big picture. If you were planning to build a house you would talk to an architect and describe what you want to achieve in outline. Not just the number and type of rooms but the materials you want to use, the views and how you want the light to fall; the mood and look and feel you want to create, as well as key features of the architecture. The details of the wiring plan and the choice of wallpaper comes later.

Once you have described the ‘house’ as a team you can go on to discuss the order of the build. Questions like these might prove helpful: Again, stay out of the detail.  You are not ready for it yet.

• If this is what we are trying to achieve, what are key headings or topics we need to work on?
• From across these topics, what are our first priorities?
• What would be the most sensible first step in each case? (The answer may be some preliminary investigation, scoping and identification of resource requirements (knowledge, people and funds).

Club House Rules and Table Stakes

In parallel with co-inventing the future, dedicate some time to discussing and agreeing how you want to conduct yourselves as a Board team as you progress to becoming high performing.

There is room for agreeing and noting some important housekeeping points (telephone calls policy, punctuality, record keeping and deadlines for action etc.) but the more important points talk to the strength and nature of working relationships between you all. The strength of those relationships will determine how much you achieve and how quickly you achieve it.

Start by asking your colleagues to describe what they would like their experience of being on this team to be. Share your own thoughts and build on each other’s thinking. Common themes will emerge.

You might follow this by asking how we all need to ‘be’ to have that experience.

Do you need any support from outside the team? If so, who can help you and what do you want to ask for?

Here are some of the house rules and ways of being which have emerged from discussions I have participated in.

• We have high expectations of ourselves and each other.
• We oxygenate each others ideas, explore them and build upon them before seeking to judge them.
  (you can practice this by requiring each other to respond to a new idea by suspending judgement and instead finding something positive in the idea and building upon it. Try “What I like about that idea is…and it would be even better for me if ….”  )
• We hold each other to our commitments and responsibilities.
• We are each committed to the success of our own leadership journey.
• We are each committed to the success of every other member of the team and to the team as a whole.
• We challenge and stretch each other and in being challenged are confident that the challenge comes from a commitment to our success and that of the team.
• We speak our truth safely within the team. We are on home ground here.
• We ask for what we really want from each other.
• When any one of us is wrestling with a problem and struggling to see a route through it we meet together to work on it as a team.
  (Coaching Impact refer to this as a “Charlie-Charlie” call sign. In response to a “Charlie-Charlie” the whole team convene on the same day and spend 30 minutes working with energy on a practical plan to solve the problem and get their colleague out of a hole. They disband when, having owned the problem together, they’ve found a way through)
• Asking for help is a sign of character and personal growth as a leader.
• We may disagree with each other in the privacy of the Board room but once a decision is made we unite behind it and own it as the team.
• “Only the team fails.” (ref. Coaching Impact).

Tips, Tricks and Hacks

Here are a few suggestions to support you in your Leadership.

• Run a quick HuWuMu.
  At the end of each meeting run a “HuWuMu” (ref. Coaching Impact). Spend 2 minutes on it. No more.
  Ask each person round the table to score the meeting on a scale of 1-10 for how useful (the ‘Hu’) it was. Shut down any further comment. You just want their score.
  Go around again asking each person in turn what was the most useful part of the meeting for them (the ‘Wu’). Brief answers only.

Go around the attendees again, and ask them what would have made the meeting even more useful (the ‘Mu’). Again, keep it brief.

• Find your Merlin.
  If you are serious about developing as a leader you need to be prepared to face discomfort on the journey. Find someone in the business who is committed to helping you on the way. You need someone who is unrelenting (irritatingly so on occasion) in their commitment to helping you be the best leader you can be for more of the time. This involves a willingness to give you unflinching feedback on the impact you had on others in each leadership opportunity you encounter (that’s pretty much everybody, all the time I’m afraid), and push you to step beyond your comfort zone even on the days when you think you can afford to have a day off from the ‘leadership thing’ (guess what?, you can’t). If you have an HR Director on the Board, that’s a good place to start your search. And the worst of it is, you have to actively seek feedback and your Merlin has to have licence to keep telling it to you like it is, even when you tell them to stop picking on you and go away because you just want to hide in your office with a coffee and a donut!
• Back Channels.
  Every business has someone with their finger on the mood in the business. Find yours. You are looking for someone insightful. A keen observer who understands human behaviour and joins the dots. They will be able to give you feedback on what is working and what is missing for your audience beyond the Board, deeper into the business. You will know them when you find them. They have no hang-ups about speaking truth to power.

Broadening Engagement beyond the Board

You do not need to wait until your Board is a buffed and polished leadership machine before you start to engage a broader audience. You cannot afford to wait until then, and this leadership thing is all about learning by doing. You may stumble a bit but as long as you fall forwards, learning and improving as you go, that is progress, right? And leadership is not the sole preserve of the Board. As you engage with colleagues across the business other leaders who want to carry the torch with you will emerge. Some may surprise you.

Theatre and the Power of Storytelling

You need to plan and think carefully about the best way of sharing the work you have been doing as a Board with more colleagues (whether that is the next tier of management, or everybody).

In the process of planning you need to address a few questions:

• How are we going to create the space for colleagues to add colour and texture to the picture.? You cannot expect others to be engaged if you do not encourage them to be involved.
• What are we going to ask of them when we have shared our thinking?. What do we want them to do right there and then and what do we want them to do thereafter?
• What framework are we going to give them to organise themselves around and channel their energy?
• How are we going to maintain the engagement and momentum we are about to create?
• How are we going to discuss and monitor our progress as we undertake the journey together?
• How are we going to land this first step of sharing our thinking with them?

If your first instinct in response to this last question is to bludgeon your colleagues with powerpoint, think again. A PowerPoint presentation never launched a thousand ships.

However you choose to do this, here are some considerations:

• Each of you on the Board needs to be seen to be committed to making this journey. You each need to have a voice in communicating it. If your audience feels how important this is to you and can connect to the beliefs which are driving it, they will respond in kind.
  If you are thinking about standing behind a lectern with an autocue, do not. Resist the temptation to work from notes. Learn your lines. You need to put a big chunk of yourself into it.
• You might want to be seated in the round, sitting amongst your audience.
• Your delivery needs to be polished. There is some theatre and storytelling involved here. You are creating a sense of possibility. There is a reason why actors rehearse (alone and together) before they take to the stage.
• This is the start of a dialogue, it is not an information download. You need to invite your audience’s voice into the room. Get them talking to you early before they assume that they are just expected to be in ‘receive’ mode.

A last word

If this article prompts you to investigate the subject of leadership further, I can thoroughly recommend Steve Radcliffe’s book on Leadership, “Leadership Plain And Simple” and it you ever get the opportunity to work with the great man himself, take it.

A number of the suggestions in the article are drawn from my experience of working with Sara Milne Rowe and Simon Scott of Coaching Impact. The section titled Theatre and the Power of Storytelling reflects a small part of their thinking. Where I have drawn upon their techniques elsewhere, I have referenced them. For more information, visit www.coaching impact.co.uk

And finally, we all have times when our leadership mojo needs a shot in the arm. If you are casting around for inspiration, I find that a few episodes of West Wing (the first three series) works for me. If you would prefer something lighter, try Ted Lasso. Just saying.