The wrong question
| posted by steven sonsinoA tall, bookish man with little round spectacles sidled up
to me during the Wednesday morning coffee break. We were halfway
through a week-long leadership workshop at London Business School and I
could see him slowly making his way over. He introduced himself and we
chatted for a while.
And then he asked me The Question. You know, the one people always want to ask but it takes a while to mosey up the courage.
“So tell me,” he said, half joking, but half in deadly earnest, “what do I have to do to become an inspirational leader?”
I paused, looking straight at him over the top of my coffee cup.
“I’m beginning to think that’s the wrong question,” I said. “It’s
better to ask ‘what do I have to stop doing?’”’
After three years of studying the profiles of inspirational leaders
and, at the same time, studying managers in the real world of work, I now hold somewhat provocative views.
I now believe that it’s easier
and quicker to STOP doing the seven things that are demotivating our
people than it is suddenly to pretend to be Jack Welch, Mother Teresa
and Martin Luther King rolled into one.
What started out as a
light-hearted pun on the Stephen Covey title The Seven Habits of Highly
Effective People has become a serious call for action, because the
impact of change is dramatic: you CAN inspire people to higher levels
of performance, productivity and profitability as long as you just stop
doing some or all of seven things.
How have I reached this conclusion? Well, in that coffee break about
three years ago I unwittingly put my finger on something that had
been bothering me for a while.
It seems to me that leadership development is increasingly being dominated by models of
successful leaders, by case studies and stories of high-achievers, and
by shining examples of great leadership. Don't you think so?
I've written countless
papers and have taught workshops round these themes many times. In fact my last book, 'Leadership Unplugged', also written with my journalist wife Jacqueline Moore, was threaded through with case studies on
the great leaders.
But I began to wonder how realistic it is to expect all the managers
on our leadership development workshops to be able to emulate the great
leaders?
If I was genuinely interested in helping people to become
authentic leaders, true to themselves and their beliefs, how could I ask them to copy other people, no matter how inspirational those role
models were?
I also began to wonder if some of the case studies and examples
of leaders we were using in business schools were simply too extreme,
too ‘inspirational’, or simply too naive, for managers to consider
seriously. This is especially true today when the mantra of the moment
is the obsession with ‘execution’, ‘JFDI’, and ‘boost this quarter’s
sales results’.
Unfortunately some managers are too short-sighted to see that
people-focused leadership strategies DO deliver performance,
productivity and profitability. They choose to see people-focused
strategies as too soft and not at all commercial.
This is an enormous
mistake and creates a huge self-fulfilling prophecy.
‘Focusing on
people,’ goes the myth, ‘means I can’t be focusing on productivity and
profitability. Therefore I shouldn’t focus on people.’
But by focusing
on profit and a relentless drive towards sales these executives miss
the essential intervening step – that it is people that deliver our
profitability. Profit and performance are merely the outcomes of
people-focused strategies, not a replacement for them.
What many middle, junior and senior managers have told us in recent years is that, because of the short-term pressures they are under, they actually see the effort involved in becoming a better leader as either too unrealistic for their business situation or too much like hard work.
‘Better to keep the head down and just look busy,’ one cynical manager told us.
Yes, even after a huge investment of effort and money in leadership seminars, a significant number of people say they actually will not follow up at all. They will not undertake any of their so-called personal development plans, or indeed take any action at all.
After many encounters like this, we’ve begun to worry whether leadership development programmes that highlight only exemplary leaders may actually be causing harm to the goals of leadership development.
Perhaps we are actually demotivating participants and sapping their confidence by setting aspirations that are far beyond what people are capable of achieving – through no fault of their own – because a kind of organizational leadenness weighs so heavy on them.
And this is another aspect of the great leader perspective that worries us. The rose-tinted view of most leadership research seems hugely at odds with the growing body of work on real life in companies.
The real world of business has been captured with growing clarity, for instance, by the extensive work of the Gallup organisation. Gallup’s research – described so vividly by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman in First, break all the rules – clearly shows that people the world over are more likely to be disaffected, disengaged or demotivated by their managers than motivated or inspired.
So all of this together has prompted us to explore what actually CAN be achieved in practical and tangible terms by managers in their day-to-day roles? What could they do that would not involve major upheavals?
Well, this blog has some powerful suggestions for you. So we urge you to bookmark this page now and come back from time to time to tackle some of the practical suggestions.
If you really mean to become an even better leader, you owe it to yourself.