Are You a Leader?

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Test yourself against these contemporary definitions of leadership and see if you fit the bill

Ask 10 professors and business gurus for a definition of leadership and you’ll get at least 20 different answers. These will range from the gnomic:

The pessimist complains about the wind. The optimist expects it to change. The leader adjusts the sails.
John Maxwell
(that’s great John, will be useful next time I’m out sailing)

… to the prosaic:

 The ability to influence a group toward the achievement of a vision or a set of goals.
Robbins & Judge
(see ‘Organizational Behavior’, pub Pearson – really useful book though)

I’m such a simpleton and always so keen to get on and actually do things, that I need something a little easier to remember, straightforward to apply and easy to share. So here’s my definition. A leader is:

Anybody who wants to do something important
and needs other people to help.

How do you frame your own brand of leadership, and what does it mean to you?

Three Leadership Lessons Inspired by Long Walk to Freedom

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How do we apply the kind of strength and courage that we know is inside us, and lead other people to victory, when it’s not clear at all who or what the enemy is?

I watched “Mandela – Long Walk to Freedom” recently (great film and book) and thought about Mr Mandela’s early decision to stop being a lawyer, join the ANC and take the fight to the enemy.

For some men, including me, fighting against something is a very energising and satisfying thing to throw yourself into. But for most of us, not living under oppressive regimes and in a time of peace – who is the enemy?

What do you fight against? Who do you resist with the kind of positive intention that Mr Mandela found? How do you gather and lead other people in that kind of selfless resistance when things aren’t so ‘black and white’? How do we apply our full strengths in the workplace?

I think it begins with three relatively small steps, which together are a real leadership tipping-point:

1. What do we stand for?
It’s not enough to resist for the sake of resisting. Find what it is that you believe is worth defending or fighting for. It might be a belief in the way that things should be done or a situation that needs correcting. These are perfectly valid things to tackle in the workplace or outside it.

2. Define the battleground
We may not live under something as malign as the apartheid regime, but injustice, wasted opportunities and distress are around us, if we choose to look. Your battleground need not be a whole nation, but we do need strong people to raise their gaze and see where the fight is.

3. Be like a magnet: Resistance + Attraction
I loved how Mr Mandela used his charm and personality to draw people to him, and it was this charisma that the ANC knew they needed. He made the decision to join an armed resistance and to fight against the regime. But it was his force of attraction that gave the movement its strength and which ultimately enabled him to win over guards at Robin Island and the ruling National Party.

Manifesto

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Here’s one of my personal posts which friends really seemed to like. Thought I’d share for everyone to see – a new manifesto:

1. Stop buying rubbish stuff that you don’t really need
It won’t make you happy and it will cost the Earth

2. Make more cool stuff ourselves
Music, sculptures, DIY, you name it; just get yourself involved in the production

3. Be the change you want to see
Want people to be kinder? – be kind; want more boldness in the world? – be bold

 

NB: “We need to be the change we wish to see in the world” is a quote supposedly from Mahatma Gandhi, although there is some dispute as to whether he did actually say it. I think he would have, if he’d thought of it. Click here for the Wikipedia entry.

Men and Organisational Politics

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The three kinds of men who fall foul of organisational politics and why

I’m sometimes asked to work with a man who has got on the wrong end of the small-p politics in an organisation. These men are often one of three types:

1. A direct, action-oriented type
This kind of man often has a great straight-forwardness about him and a high-level of intuitive, natural leadership. Sometimes these strengths make him frustrated and ineffective in dealing with what he sees as the cowardly caution and game-playing of people with different styles of behaviour;

2. A highly-principled, morally-astute type
This kind of man has a strong sense of right, wrong and justice; often combined with an ability to ‘see’ the outcome of complex decisions and chains of events. Organisations often seem to him to have ambiguous values – to say one thing and then do another, or to take the easiest, most expedient route, rather than the ‘right’ one;

3. A focused, do-the-job-right type
This kind of man has a gift for making things work well, for knowing how to tinker and fix his specific part of the organisation until it is running like a well-oiled machine. He might feel particularly lost when the bigger-picture objectives of the organisation are inefficient, or at cross-purposes or put the smooth-running of his territory at a lower-priority than something else – as they often do!

In these situations, I’ve found it crucial to remember that these are strengths that have got things to this point, not weaknesses. It’s just that they may not be the most appropriate strengths for him to apply right now. We need to step away from: “You’re doing something wrong”, which is what the organisation or the system seems to be telling him – just when he is trying very hard to apply what he knows. Then we can head towards new ways of looking at how other people behave and how to relate to that, or to new capabilities that broaden the range of strengths he can apply.

Adventure

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How’s your adventure-level? It’s about feeling the rapture of being alive. Without it, we get risky and aggressive leadership.

I woke-up today with a yearning for adventure – which will likely turn into my next long-distance bike ride or something similar.

Adventure training in the British Army is defined as “Activities where the outcome is uncertain” and that seems right to me on an emotional and practical level. I truly believe that until you’ve had some physical experience that involves risk (even if that is a “managed risk”) and venturing into the unknown in some way, then it’s very difficult to feel satisfyingly alive. And it’s not just a once-only experience. It needs regular top-ups.

There have been times when I’ve experienced adventure at work, when there’s been the right combination of challenge and risk and uncertainty and even some physical challenge. But to be honest, adventure for me needs to feel the weather on my face, for my muscles to be challenged and not just my mind – and I just don’t see that happening in an office.

It’s important to consider men’s need for adventure in a work context because I’m sure that some aspects of male leadership – unmanaged risk-taking and aggressively-competitive behaviour – is a by-product of NOT being able to have physical adventure at work.

Joseph Campbell talked about the need to have physical experiences which match what we already know on the inside about how it feels to be really alive.
As he put it: “so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.”

Adventure is also a great way to let out our inner Wildman. Modern life has a tendency to suppress this and yet, as Robert Bly writes, unless we can release the Wildman to remind us of how resourceful and many-sided our masculinity is, it becomes harder and harder to mature as a man and act with responsibility as a leader.

Motivation: Towards Pleasure and Away From Pain

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Keep an eye out over the next few days to observe and discover something new about your own motivations and those of the people around you. Here’s how.

Did you know that people tend to operate either a Towards or an Away-From motivation pattern? And that this can change from one context to another?

Motivation Towards tends to show up as positive, goal-seeking reward-based behaviour; focusing on what could go right.
Motivation Away-From tends to focus on avoiding problems and pain; on what might go wrong.

Both are useful in different contexts. When I’m chairing the audit committee in a hospital, it really helps to have people around who can focus on what can go wrong, or on what’s not working. When I’m looking to win a new contract, it really helps that my associates are positive, can-do people.

It used to be thought that these “Meta-programmes” (thought processes that guide and direct the sorting of our perceptions) were fixed and unchangeable. We now know that this isn’t true and that it is possible to choose.

As with almost everything, being aware is what counts. Being aware of what habits we are operating ourselves and of whether other people are in Towards or Away-From mode. Only then can we choose which is actually most helpful for ourselves and for our influence with others.

Give some recognition today

International Recognition Day

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Some people are just waiting to hear, straight from you, what a difference they make. Don’t let them wait

As I write this, it was recently Blue Monday – officially the most depressing day of the year. Despite that, you and I are still here and still going strong – well done us!

In response and opposition to the whole Blue Monday thing that the news jumps on every year, I’m declaring every day my official International Recognition Day, and I invite you to try it too:

  • Who do you know who would benefit from being reminded how great they are?
  • Who’s been kind, caring or just a good listener?
  • Who has had the kind of attitude towards life, work and other people that made a difference?

When I was a young manager in a big organisation somebody I really valued gave me a great piece of advice. He told me: “Some people are just waiting to hear, straight from you, what a difference they make. And they’ll wait forever if you let them. Telling them now, while you can, is the act of a great leader”.

I haven’t always lived up to that, because of my doubts and fears. Often because I don’t want people to think I’m joking, or because I don’t always believe that I’ve got the ‘right’ to say anything. And sometimes I haven’t done it because that person isn’t always great like that or because the behaviour they showed might not seem like that big a deal. And I wish I’d done it more.

None of those doubts or fears matters on International Recognition Day though, just tell people what an impact they’ve had – I dare you.

where is your leadership absent?

The Truant Shadow

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Why some men are absent from their leadership at work and in families – and what to do about it

Sometimes we do and say stuff that comes out wrong – but we do it with good intentions. These behaviours are a kind of distortion of our true strengths, and one of the distortions that you might notice around you, is the Truant.

The Truant is a distortion of a someone’s strengths in being a nourishing and responsible leader who looks after the growth potential in the people and things around him. What happens is that our fear and shame gets in the way of being able to use our real strengths to lead and take care of people.

The Truant is what happens when we have a flight or freeze response to that fear and shame. We’re afraid of not being able to live up to our potential, of falling short of what people need or expect from us. And we’re ashamed that we’ve already not been ‘good enough’ in some way. Overloaded by the pressure of that fear and shame, we run or hide.

You’ll see the Truant response often in men when it comes to fatherhood. In the West, half of all children will spend time in a fatherless home. And similar issues arise at work, where men may absent themselves from taking long-term responsibility, or be dismissive of the day-to-day drudge work that makes organisations secure and prosperous.

The first step in helping men who have been Truant in some way, and are ready to return, is to stop being absent from the fear and the shame. After all, that’s what we’re really running from or frozen into inaction by. The good news is that fear and shame won’t destroy us, even if it feels like they might.

Here’s some questions that will turn people face-about to the hard issues:

  • What responsibilities have you ducked?
  • What have you failed to provide for?
  • Which people have you let down?
  • What has been the impact on other people of your ‘absence’?
  • What does the above say about you as a man?

My advice is to write down the answers to these questions often enough to be able to face the truth and to just ‘be with’ them for as much as they can, no matter how tough or bad it feels. Only then are people ready to come out the other side.

And remember, to some extent, everybody shares these experiences – it’s part of being human. You are not your behaviour and your behaviour can change.

Re-Thinking Male Leadership

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Masculinity; it’s always better to light a candle than to curse the darkness

Helping my son with his homework this weekend, we found the Amnesty International motto:

It is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness

[Click here for more on Amnesty and the source of that motto]

That motto says something about how I’d like to approach my work with men.

You could talk about how men are often outperformed by women in leadership studies or in educational achievement; or about how nearly 95% of the prison population in the UK is male (making crime very much a ‘male issue’) or how men in some demographics are up to four times more likely to take their own lives than women; or the incidence of bullying at work. And there are plenty of other ‘negative’ examples.
It is definitely time to start having more open discussion of issues like these, and to encourage more men to be actively involved in doing so. But for me the darkness is only a part of the picture – and a potentially dis-empowering one at that.

If you look for them, there are examples of men leading with very positive impact in all kinds of areas – at work, in large and small commercial businesses, in the charitable sector and in the public sector. Men who have had to make difficult choices (perhaps unconsciously) to behave in ways that actually go against some expectations about what it means to do things “…like a man” but which are genuinely masculine. That’s where the answers are and where the inspiration is for the rest of us.

I think we need to know where the darkness is – and then light a candle to show that there is more to it than that.