THE LEADER AS HERO – AN ALTERNATIVE – The Executive’s Trinity

In the past, executives were seen as managers, but today they are seen as leaders. The distinction has become an opposition, and leadership has turned into a cult of celebrity-heroes. It exaggerates their impact and encourages narcissistic behaviour, with dire consequences. A longer view suggests that we should stop denigrating management and distinguish leadership from what the military call ‘command’, the art of directing. Each element of the executive’s trinity of leadership, management and directing requires different skills and behaviour. Most of them can be learned, and executives should develop a level of competence in all three. However, most people are more suited to one or the other, and top teams need to provide all three. As individuals, we need to be more self-aware about which mode we are operating in. In selecting people, we need to give more weight to directing skills in senior roles. And in developing people, we need to inculcate each skill in different ways, paying more attention to what is required to set clear direction.
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Categories: Why Leadership Teams Matter.

Why are Leadership Team meetings so ineffective?

In my career as a leader, and latterly as a consultant, I have sat in on a huge number of Leadership Team meetings. Some are better and others worse but, overall, the standard of them is surprisingly poor. Over ambitious agendas, rambling updates, visibly disengaged participants and, most importantly, superficial discussion that don’t seem to be getting to the heart of the issue are the norm.  Given the calibre of the people in the room, how can this be? Why do we put up with such poor meetings – and how can we change them? The evils of the ‘Update’ Leadership Teams are comprised of human beings and are just as susceptible to falling into bad habits. These habits are a big part of the reason why groups of talented and experienced people keep doing things that clearly aren’t working. They just aren’t getting the most out of the enormous resources of knowledge and experience in the room when the Leadership Team gets together. The most pernicious of these habits
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Categories: Changing Your Team and Why Leadership Teams Matter.

Creating new options for making faster and easier progress.

  In the last issue we discussed how each of us has an invisible ‘operating system’ of beliefs and assumptions. Our ‘OS’ interprets, and so distorts, every piece of information we receive before we ever have a chance to consider it consciously. Whilst this is extremely useful, it also means that we all get stuck in patterns and traps of our own making. Every problem we face has two parts – what’s going on ‘out there’ in the world (e.g. the markets or our organisation) and what’s going on ‘in here’ – in the form of the assumptions we make about both the problem and the solution. When we’re stuck, or struggling with something, it’s often because we’re failing to examine those aspects of the problem that lie within us. The good news is that, if we can learn to do so, these aspects are completely within our control and so can give us many useful options for moving forward. This is just as true for teams as it is
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Categories: Learning Conversations and Why Leadership Teams Matter.

New Year, same old delusions

  I’ve resolved to take 2013 just a little less seriously. In this spirit, here are a few thoughts on the discussion that seems to be everywhere around now – making changes because it’s the start of a New Year. Regardless of what you have resolved to do, whether it’s to improve a less than functional leadership team, deal with a work challenge or lose some weight, there are a number of reasons why we fail to grasp and address the bigger issues facing us. Here then, are three limiting beliefs we tell ourselves when we fail to do things that we know we should, or fail to deal effectively with them – together with an antidote that can free us to act.   Limiting belief  1 – “People don’t change” “Anyone who has ever been to a school reunion knows that everyone is much like they were when you first knew them decades ago. They may be a little rounder, have a few more wrinkles and a little less hair but
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Categories: Why Leadership Teams Matter.

Would you like to have unlimited help on tap?

Recently, I was sitting in a small compound in the heart of southern Kenya. A short distance to my left was this hut. Mama Kakuta was serving hot, sweet milky tea and I started wondering why the hut had fallen into disrepair – and what they did when the time came to build a new one. Everyday life in Merrueshi is full. Mama Kakuta gets up at 6.00 with the dawn and starts the daily routine by reuniting the baby goats (which are kept separately overnight) with the correct mothers. There is then milking, cooking and getting the children ready for school. After they’ve gone, the day is spent taking the goats and cattle to pasture, collecting water and checking on other members of the community as well as seeing to her duties as a community midwife. Later in the day, the livestock have to be gathered once more, checked over and returned to the safety of the compound for the night before food is cooked for the children when they get
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Categories: Why Leadership Teams Matter.

Conversations as the process of leadership

Daddy, what do you do all day? A question to strike fear into the heart of any parent whose job is leadership!  Just how do you explain what you do to an inquisitive child? Some, perhaps, might be able to fall back to describing what they are trying to achieve – the marketing director might say that he tries to get more people to buy a product name that the child might recognise. This doesn’t, however, say anything about what you actually do. Others might say, probably wearily, that they sit in meetings all day. Whilst the intention of this might be to end the line of questioning, it’s actually a lot closer to the truth. When you think about it, this is exactly what leaders do all day; 1:1’s, team meetings, workshops, conferences. The people you meet with change, but at least 80% of most leaders’ lives is taken up with talking to people. If you extend the definition to include the conversations held by email, the proportion is probably well over 90%.  
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Categories: Why Leadership Teams Matter.

Is your team supporting you?

When is a team not a team? Members of leadership teams consistently tell us that their biggest area of ineffectiveness lies in their inability to have open, constructive debate. Rather than challenging one another and  working together on organisational goals, they retreat into promoting and defending their own area of responsibility.  Even in teams that work well, only 60% of respondents feel that they can constructively challenge one another without fear of a destructive reaction. In underperforming teams this falls to just 33%. When you dig under the surface of this depressing picture, what invariably lies behind these symptoms is a lack of trust between team members. They simply don’t have enough confidence in their colleagues to open up difficult discussions – or to ask for support. Everyone in the team knows which subjects are likely to provoke defensiveness or destructive arguments – so these simply get avoided. Unfortunately, these are frequently the very issues that the team really need to get to grips with in order to break out
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Categories: Relationship Conversations and Why Leadership Teams Matter.

The 7 Illusions of leadership Why top teams settle for ordinary results – despite extraordinary efforts

The leaders we meet, in organisations of all types, are all telling us the same things. “I’m incredibly busy”. “My days start early and end late, my inbox gets filled with hundreds of emails a week, I have back to back meetings every day and I’m having to work evenings and weekends just to keep up.” “I’m frustrated”. “I can see the potential of this organisation but progress is incredibly slow. We’re finding it hard to make the few percentage points of growth in our annual plans – let alone the transformational changes that we need to breakthrough to the next level” “I’m not enjoying it”. “I worked hard to be in a leadership position because I wanted to make a difference. I wanted to help this organisation, and the people in it, reach their potential. I thought leadership would help me learn and be the best I can be. Most of the time it feels like a treadmill – just to keep afloat and to keep paying the mortgages
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Categories: Why Leadership Teams Matter.