Ten truths of leadership

Of course there’d have to be ten, not nine or 13 or a Tom-Peters list of around 37. Ten is nice and neat; makes a tidy package; one tattoo for the back of each finger to remind us as we type our emails.

A recent LinkedIn Group update featuring Ten Truths of Leadership  got me going. James Kouzes and Barry Posner have published another book on leadership. I guess they have to make a living. Their ten truths are true all right. No doubt about that. And yes they’re almost as old as the hills; Biblical even.

A leader who consistently achieved all of them would doubtless be absolutely inspiring.

But I doubt “Ten Truths” will change anything much. They will be tweeted and quoted and everything will go on pretty much as normal.

It’d be interesting to see how many leaders do consistently achieve even half of them, in the eyes of their supposed followers that is.

I’ve worked with many leaders who truly believed that they behaved or at least earnestly, consistently tried to behave like that. I used a very simple method to show them very clearly that they were dreaming.

I got them to record a work conversation with a peer or report, transcribe ten minutes from that tape into the right hand column of a page with their corresponding thoughts on the left hand column (an approach devised by Chris Argyris for his seminal work back in the 70s). Then we’d take a look at the variation between what they were thinking and what they actually said at that time. We invariably found significant contradiction, betraying that they were manipulative, controlling, closed minded, distrusting, and their ‘values’ conveniently flexible.

They were predictably aghast and embarrassed. I assured them that they were normal but that that norm isn’t acceptable in a successful contemporary learning organisation.

As we began the process of change, the biggest obstacle was that they knew, from hard experience,  that actually behaving as “Ten Truths” suggest is very risky because the first one to do it risks being done over by “the others”.

I assured them that unless the leader takes that risk, then no one else will. Then tentatively I coached them to risk new communication behaviours then reflect on the process and the results. Slowly they became more confident to break the mould; to become conscious of the gap between their espoused behaviour and their behaviour-in-action and with the help of their peers and reports, close the gap through changed communication behaviour.

It’s a slow process, but it consistently works where lists of truths consistently fail to make a difference.

Impatient? Go get a new leader. Tempt him with an obscenely high salary and benefits. He’ll likely screw you over just the same.

Business Friday: Grand Brand Bang.

Instead of dressing down on Fridays the creatives at a large successful advertising agency amuse themselves by dressing up and behaving as Business people: they call it Business Friday. An essential element of Business Friday is PowerPoint presentations with bullets, words flying in, fades, sound effects: the whole palaver.

It’s true! PowerPoint is absurd Business uniform!

Since I last blogged, conversation streams about Brand; Ideas that Stick; and Targeting the Message were brought into comic relief by a single PowerPointed seminar failure.

Mark Gallagher’s compilation “Brand is . . . .”

Verne Harnish quoting his Uncle Wally and Chip Heath on Ideas That Stick.

Stephen Lynch quoting Bob Eckert, featured in Fortune magazine, on Targeting the Message.

The seminar, about business planning and implementation, packaged in PowerPoint to standardise delivery in various locations by various presenters, was a tool for building relationships with prospective clients to help sell professional service.

This particular seminar failed because the ideas that stuck - the impression communicated were predominantly though not overwhelmingly negative. It failed to achieve purpose. Yet the seminar had worked fine for the guy who produced the slides.

I’d experienced similar failed attempts to control seminar quality while teaching General Management at the University of Auckland: the course, part of a new innovative degree in Business and Information Management, was delivered on 3 different campuses. The course seminars were packaged as PowerPoint presentations and printed copies of the slides were included in course-books for students.

The presenters and students believed that the knowledge was the PowerPoint slides: linear, hierarchical, shallow, un-provocative, boring. Learning was stumped not stimulated. Read Edward Tufte The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint (now in 2^nd edition) to learn how PowerPoint regiments and limits thought, kills presentations and stops learning.

The thing is, content doesn’t make a seminar and regimenting content, especially by PowerPoint, reduces seminar quality. The message, which is bigger than the content, and hence the brand is blunted and distorted by the medium. It becomes Business-like, boring, uniform, more of the same.

Jack Daly doesn’t use PowerPoint in his seminars. People complain about Tom Peters’ slides because they can’t understand them: nothing boring, uniform about those guys.

Never be upstaged by your slides or your other props.

Sugar Party Hangover

I’ve had it with the barrage of packaged advice from business gurus, icons and stars – axioms and aphorisms on how to be successful: summary lists that pretend to make simple the complexities of human collaboration. It clearly sells business books, newspapers, seminars and fills the e-waves. But to little tangible effect that I’ve seen.

It’s not that the advice is bad. It’s more the way it’s communicated and consumed like candy for sugar hungry kid’s at a party: a lolly scramble, a sugar rush, a burst of high excitement, energy and frantic bonhomie, then back to normal.

The main learning’s how to scramble to win the most lollies; that the most lollies equals the most fun.

This was highlighted for me over the last couple of weeks beginning with a whole day of Jack Daly, the sales phenomenon extraordinaire (see my last week’s blog ). Then there was my colleague Stephen Lynch’s RESULTS.com Business Growth Tip summarising New York Times 4th April “Corner Office” interview with John Donahoe, president and chief executive of eBay .

For me the key learning to be had from Jack Daly and John Donahoe isn’t in how they made themselves successful but in how others enabled them to be successful and how they in turn enabled others.

For instance, half of jack Daly’s seminar was about how to create a climate in which others can excel.

The main theme of John Donahoe’s reflection and the key to his leadership is what he communicates and the way he communicates it so that others can learn, and how he learned to do that.

He says that feedback from six monthly performance reviews was powerfully effective in his formation and development. He espouses and practices candid communication. He enables people to discover and play to their strengths and passions.

Jack and John didn’t make themselves, overnight. They didn’t just swallow the magic lollies that their audiences crave. Sure, they had a big hand in their own development but they were hugely fortunate to have wise others who guided, enabled and facilitated that slow learning process.

John Donahoe recalls that every six months or so he’d get a rigorous performance review (in latter years 20 pages thick) that included everything he could possibly do better. He came to regard the feedback as liberating; a gift, and wasn’t afraid of it.

He found that a third of the feedback would be no surprise: for his long-term attention and change - still an issue the next year and the year after.

A third of it would be insight into his blind spots for himself and others – new awareness of areas for change .

A third of it he would ignore ignore and keep doing what he wanted to do.

From that experience he learned to “try to do the same for the people around me, and give them open, objective feedback offered in a constructive way.”

The focus here is on manager/leader communication behaviour. There is no magic pill. These guys learned to communicate the hard way. Yet how many firms who heard Tom Peters’ fervent exhortation six months ago in Auckland to implement communication training, if nothing else, have done that? I’ll wager <3%. The audience craved sugar pills.

What do they hear?

I gotta wonder what others heard when Tom Peters spoke to NZ SME owners at an Auckland seminar on Thur 19 Feb 2009 and to a conference of Results.com (NZ) partners, coaches, administrators and BDMs the next day.

If Voxy (American Business Guru Tom Peters Offers Hope to Kiwi Companies During Visit on Voxy) and the NZ Herald (Tom Peters Top tips: To pull through the recession) are a good indication then what seemed to me to be Tom's key message seems to have been lost in the panic. It's all the usual managerial stuff.

Tom's emphasis on interrelationships between people seems to have been lost in translation and selective listening.

My take on what he said is that interpersonal communication and relationships are the key: upstream and downstream of the business and particularly inside it. For instance, he emphasised several times that he would be very disappointed if there was as a single firm in the room (350 people) that didn’t, as a result of his seminar, implement a programme to develop listening and talking skills and behaviours of its people. (I'd put money on no more than a hand-full doing anything more than a token action).

That’s how fundamental he thinks effective communication is to business survival and growth. He even ventured that business strategy isn’t the prime issue - communication and relationships are: if the relationships and communication are effective then effective strategy will emerge and be implemented; that learning and change will happen and that ability to learn, change and innovate is the crucial competitive advantage in this economic climate.

In other words, the interrelationships within and around the owner and his firm are perhaps his greatest asset. . But the interrelationships probably receive the least direct attention, certainly aren’t on the balance sheet, and probably aren’t measured! (If Tom's right, then maybe it'd be a different story if the owner is a woman)

As Tom said, effective communication can be learned and interrelationships made more effective.

Trouble is that the usual managerial actions to send the people to a course on “Effective Presentations” and/or “Handling Difficult People” won’t do it. Making it a KPI won’t do it. Making it someone else’s responsibility won’t do it.

It’s a slow process that begins by the boss by changing his/her behaviour. They have to work with others to do it. They have to learn to communicate better to do it. They have to learn new communication habits. They have to be personal, emotional, and intimate: messy qualities and behaviours typically avoided in “business”.

There are some “obvious” things that can be done to begin to improve the quality of communication like revisit your BHAG (Jim Collins) and building emotion and passion into those Rockefeller habits (Verne Harnish). They can recruit communicators. They can create opportunities for themselves and their people to be ‘real’.

They can pay attention to the little thoughtful things that Tom demonstrated achieve apparently miraculous effect. And there are many other important, focused strategies they can implement to develop and get the best return on their relational asset.

Will they get it? I reckon that some will, with some excellent coaching.