Many leaders have their plate full with the BAU stuff, you know the simple things like running the company, so it is hardly a surprise that this monopolises a leaders thoughts and thus a teams focus. In my role as an executive coach and leadership developer I have come to witness the leaders that are able to focus on the centre (BAU), whilst at the same time keeping an eye to the outer regions, the edges of the company.

I don’t mean the geographical edge, but the edge of peoples thoughts and thinking, the stuff that people think is not ’board room’ compatible, and thus in that moment many great ideas get lost and nullified, I agree that not everything needs to be a presentation to the board, but the proposition I put to you is:

• Scenario
  Presume that there are a huge amount of great ideas out there, that are lost in the ‘filtering’ that occurs to get to your heady heights.
• Challenge
  What are you go to do to find the one that you should know about?

I am a great believer in the hidden talent that never gets spotted, forget the 9 box talent grid in this context, still use it, but what about the people that never make it onto the grid, the ones that perhaps have been there a little too long, have lost the faith, the ones that if approached could ‘tell you how things really are’, the ones that if given a new line manager would flourish…..How are you going to find them? Or are you only after the talent that can make it up in the template. Nothing wrong with that, there is much excellence there.

But I wonder if there are enough weirdo’s in your company? Not trouble makers, but the people that might see the next curve, the ones that have a sense of the market and it’s direction from a perspective that you might never see in the often ‘soften and rounded’ data that is presented to you.

A few years ago I was facilitating an away day for a very successful company that had a strong focus on direct mail and cold calling and had built a very successful business. They had a researcher come in from a well known organisations that went onto the explain that if people kept signing up to Telephone Preference (I centralised site that makes it illegal to call that number), then within 6-8 years the pool of people to call would be minuscule.

The reaction, “well there wasn’t one, it was ignored completely”, what became apparent very quickly was that there was no room for ‘left of centre’ thinking, one person actually said, “why did we get someone in that doesn’t understand our model” (I don’t have to explain the blinkers on that statement do I?). Of course as you then looked at their Talent Process, it existed, but it only found and developed people that “understood their model”.

So what is the thinking? For me as an Executive Coach, it is to challenge the habits that we get into, the fact that we put in the process to find the talent and then years later we are in a ‘happy rut’. Sir John Harvey Jones was reported as having listened to his HRD on the topic of talent management, Sir Harvey (with his only qualification being a ‘signalling’ qualification from when he was in the Navy), asked (paraphrased), “would this programme have found me, if I was applying now”…..apparently not! So that was the end of that!

More importantly when you look to the fringe of peoples thinking and ideas, as a leader you are seen as being a very different animal to the ones that don’t (which will be nearly everyone else!)

Look to the edge!

I recentlty watched the BBC news and saw Dr.Robert Holden being interviewed and frankly was transfixed by this man. Recognising the experience I was having was due to seeing true leadership in front of me. This isn’t a sportsman, all 6ft 6inches of muscle, or some on screen Adonis of who we often refer to as Hero figures, this was a man who as a doctor lead a normal life of hard work and being ‘normal’ in the context of a professional man who was about his daily business and then something happened.   

For on that day four suicide bombers killed 52 people and injured nearly 800; on that day the No.30 bus in London Tavistock Square (07.07.2005) was blown up outside the Headquarters of the British Medical Association and to quote Dr.Holden, “I thought ‘I am really in it now’”, he then goes on to say that he thought to himself, “You have been trained for this…come on”.   

He goes went onto explain that he’d been trained to take control of disaster situations, though he had never done it before, “people knew I had had the training and they all looked to me, one person said, “Robert what do you want us to do?”. He goes to say how he said he needed a moment, sat down and on a piece of paper jotted down the things he needed to do.   

Dr.Du Feu was quoted  as saying, “the scene was chaotic until Dr.Holden stepped in….he just assumed responsibility for everything…so people knew what to do and they knew who to ask…the scene was transformed into something resembling sense”.   

When on the couch the interviewer kept saying, “so what did you do?” wanting to hear about how he was running around being heroic Dr. Holden seemed unsure about answering this until he came out with something that will stick with me forever, he said, “my job was to keep my hands in my pockets”.   

And there it is, “keep your hands in your pockets.” He said that he knew that that would be the hardest thing to do as he would want to jump in there and do what he was best at, but he knew that once he did that all would be lost .   

This is something I experience in many senior leaders, they are often heroic in terms of the late hours, the getting stuck in, taking on huge workloads and feeling a huge responsibility for everything; but unfortunately they fail to see how impornt the second part of this story is, they don’t know how to and/or can’t ‘Keep their hands in their pockets’.   

There are lessons for leaders from this story:   

• How often do I rob others of their capacity to learn by me telling them the answer?
• How often do I assume control, when I could actually not?
• How do I develop my people to the point I can & do keep my ‘hands in my pockets’?
• How do I learn to change my fear of doing this into a leadership skill?
• Where do I receive honest ‘support & challenge’ as to how I do this?

Dr. Robert Holden

Conflict exists! And it is pretty well everywhere. Max Lucado the prodigious author (some 50+ books) said that, “Conflict is inevitable, combat is optional” and that’s a pretty good place to start, especially as a leader. It’s a farce to presume that we should all be at one with the universe, as most of us are (when I last checked) pretty well struggling with being human.

People irate people and that is a fact. Let’s face it, if I introduced you to 10 people at a party, how many would you like? Then what if I told you that regardless of your thoughts, you were now going to know then for then next 5 years and have to have them in your life for around  7 hours a day, sound familiar? Well if not welcome to the workplace and generally its a lot more than 10 people.

As an executive coach I get to work with people who are constantly trying to navigate the emotional map that is ‘other people’, I get asked how do I manage my relationship with X or Y? And over the years I have come to understand that of course there are processes to managing a relationship, you could do a lot worse than the Covey approach of the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People in understanding the habit of ‘Seek first to understand, before you seek to be understood’ and the philosophy of ‘win/win’ outcomes; these are googleable and easily accessible.

However there is something that sits in front of the process of managing the ‘situation’ or the ‘person’ that is identified with the conflict and that is in asking your self this simple question: “In handling this conflict, how much of what I am doing is focused on the other person and not on me?”. It’s an important point, for as a leader you are not just judged by the size of the stick you brought to the party, or simply the way you ‘soughted’ the situation, I’d say that generally you are judged, after the fact, on reflection about the ‘experience of you’ whilst you were handling it.

As you approach conflict situations, consider the following:

• When this is done, what do I want the commentary from others to be?
• If I was able to watch myself on a TV documentary, handling this situation, what would I be shouting at the screen?
• If the people involved were my own children (even if you don’t have any) how would I approach this?
• How much of what I am doing is to ‘sort this in the short term’ or ‘healing it for the long term?”
• Is your presence relieving those in conflict of their responsibility to own the answer and way forward?

However these individuals seemed to be getting negative feedback that indicated career limiting reactions, from senior players. Why? Well on review and observation it became clear, that the choice to be ‘authentic’ and ‘true to yourself” is a powerful position to live from, however the ‘choice’ to do these things doesn’t necessarily mean that you are thus automatically good at it. As an executive coach I see this quite a bit, the good intentions of a course, workshop, book etc….leading to the desire to be a ‘better’ leader and thus new actions. What I also see is that we are not always able to ‘self calibrate’ how effective we are with this new behaviour; and rather like the participants on the X Factor, who don’t seem to have a real friends to tell them “Stop!”, as leaders we can easily fall into this trap of believing just because it is the right thing to do, then we are automatically good at it.

So the learning seems to be:

• Yes move ahead with new actions
• Whilst seeking counsel and feedback as to your effectiveness
• Be overt about your new intentions so others don’t have to guess
• Be seen to adjust your behaviour, after seeking feedback, so others feel connected to your behaviour

Business I have always felt has an identity all of its own, it’s difficult to understand it untill you get to work with many different people in many different organisations; in the guise of the Executive Coaching Guru, I have been privileged to work with hundreds of senior managers and leaders on leadership development programmes and executive coaching interventions; and one thing keeps coming up and that’s that the business makes demands!

Now the business is of course made up of managers who are in essence ‘making the demands’ but even they end up saying, “the business makes demands”, as if the business is in itself bestowed with its own identity, as if the business itself is sentient and calculating and maybe it is, maybe in some ways when groups of individuals come together there is an agreed group consciousness that bestows ‘personality to the business’ rather like owners of pets who anthropomorthise  (the attribution of human characteristics to non-human animal or non-living things, phenomena, material states and objects or abstract concepts) their dogs and cats, then perhaps the same thing can be done for business as an entity.

What does this mean? Well if we allow ourselves to create an entity that doesn’t actually exist, if we empower the story of a ‘They’ and ‘It’, then we as leaders are weakened by the fact that we acknowledge a power over ourselves that doesn’t in fact exist. This is very important stuff! It goes to the heart of enabling people to be themselves, to have their own characters, characteristics, foibles and in some respects their own oddities.

When we as leaders seek to stifle the individual quirkiness, to knock out the ‘human being, from the human doing’ I know it is from the fear of the what ‘They’ will think, when in reality what is really happening is the personal fear of loosing ones own personality as people are over whelmed by the workload of email, project management, people management and politic.

 I work with people who are excellent at their jobs, who generally speaking are good people, who care about others, though often this circle of care has shrunk to a very small circle with family and sometimes line reports in it, this is the ever-growing pressure that many feel to conform and as one executive put it, “I have become beige!”

Leaders enable not just the intellectual and business skills growth, but true leaders, the ones that are reveried, remembered and referenced enable the people within the business to grow as people, to learn how to operate in a commercial context whilst not ‘hiding’ their identity, but overtly bringing it to the work place to add even greater value.

1. Do I welcome character in the interactions in the team/business?
2. Do I show my own?
3. Do I give room to my character and others in conversation?
4. Do I create space for the growth of character with work and factor that into development?
5. Do I understand the difference between character and personality? (“Just because you are a character, doesn’t mean you have character” – Mr Wolf.Film-”Pulp Fiction”)
6. Do I blame the business for defining the culture in my own environment?

• Support becomes suffocating and creates dependency
• Challenge dominates and subjugates free will
• No support or challenge leads to apathy and indifference

All of these though can and often do, lead to varying degrees of disconnection; interestingly though teams can benefit from a kind of ill-fated connection of “we’re all in this together”, which is not a strategy I suggest. Working with senior teams gives me the privilege of observing behaviours and interactions in real time scenarios around the board table and one of the biggest indicators of the health of a team is the ability to calibrate the level of support and challenge that is given to each other.

Think of how your team poses questions, ideas, thoughts, questions, praise and conflict, when these things are placed into the conversation do they receive high levels of support and challenge as appropriate, people sit there not participating or are they overly supported and challenged. When teams get the balance right, which usually takes frequent review to calibrate impact, then people are given a license to operate that stretches the capacity of the team to handle issues, tasks and thoughts in a truly adult and productive way.

Consider this like throwing a Frisbee into the middle of the group, the right level of support and challenge keeps the Frisbee afloat, the wrong level sees it falling to the ground.

Consider the dynamics of your leadership community and how they catch the Frisbee.

But he pulled it off with just the right balance of humility, wit, intelligence, commercial awareness and humanity (his board on the other hand, probably due to editing, looked less alert to the whole concept of the programme).

To quote Steve, “I think every boss really needs to do something like this, but I’m not convinced they want to hear the truth”, how completely true that is, the true ability as Gerry Roche of Heidrick & Struggles would say, is for the executive to be able to ‘feel the clothe and have the merchants touch’ in regards to the human sensitivities of managing human beings.

What was fabulous about this 60 minute programme was the sheer humanity of the people that work within a very hard industry, they may not have MBA’s but by god they can tell the truth through the eyes of those that live the reality of their industry on a daily basis.

• Les Parker the 20 year old temporary worker, still living at home and saving for a deposit. All he wants, is to learn and work hard, this kid just shows the true gumption that exists out there.
• Dick the site manager who’s worked for the business for 36 years, loves the job, the company and the industry. The first time in his life he’s met the boss, just sitting across the table from the ‘boss’ was almost an overwhelming experience for the man.

Steve was touched by all the people he met, in fact you could really sense he’d made a human connection to the numbers on the spreadsheet and as he was touched by them, in turn they were touched by him. Steve isn’t overly polished, he’s no ‘city slicker’, but what he does have as well as the obvious intelligence to run a company was a sense that out there within his business was a human story that went from an intellectual exercise to an emotional connection. Neither he or his business will be quite the same again.

1. Steve realised very quickly that you’ll never get the truth, from people in fear of their job or the position of the person asking them, so in his own way he created a way of connecting to the workforce .
2. He really listened, there was no PR exercise in his actions with the business, he experienced, listen, observed.
3. He quickly translated his observation into tangible changes, that he saw through himself, rather than delegated.
4. Steve quickly aligned his experience of the show, his gut instinct to strategic business drivers.

The Executive Coaching Guru knows a smart cookie when he sees one.

The brightest and the best leaders often fail, strangely (for them) not because of a technical inability but because of behavours that detract from their capacity to deliver.

Timothy Galleway author of the Innergame of Work came up with a simple equation P=p-i (Performance=Potential-Interference) and it this interference that often dilutes a leaders capacity to succeed.