Traditional Leadership Model is Obsolete

Traditionally, leadership was seen as something done from the top of organisations. We used to trot out the old definitions that leadership was about effectiveness and management about efficient use of resources. Leadership was seen as giving direction to the organisation ( then people jumped on the vision, mission and values bandwagon and overcomplicated things!)

Leadership Applies to Everyone

However, if we take a simple definition of leadership as being about choosing the right things to do, everyone in an organisation, and in their private lives, is a leader. Everyday, in work and out, we have to make decisions: shall I do this, or shall I do that? What’s the right thing to do?

Leadership Means Accepting Responsibility

With leadership comes responsibility and this is where we start to run into difficulty: many people don’t want to take on responsibility. They’re quite happy sitting back, doing the minimum required, blaming everyone else (school, parents, environment grew up in, lack of opportunities, illness, the boss, the company policies, the spouse, the kids etc. etc) for the state of their lives.

In addition, there’s pressure to conform, to fit in. It starts at school with not wanting to be called a “keener” for succeeding. Then it’s get a job, get a flat/house, get married, get kids, get a few promotions, get retired etc. It’s what most people expect to do and expect everyone else to do. If you deviate from the norm, people are quick to criticise you, so you conform, sheepwalking. And you can’t be a leader and take responsibility for your life while sheepwalking – that’s an oxymoron.

Leadership Means Many Things

Leadership for me is about being committed to first, getting the best out of yourself and second, helping those around you get the best out of themselves. It’s about a commitment to excellence and to daily, incremental improvement. Leadership is about not becoming discouraged when times get tough but about keeping moving forward.

We live in turbulent times and if we are to move through them, we need many people demonstrating strong leadership, people prepared to take responsibility – we can’t, and shouldn’t, rely on those at the very top. Heaven know the main political parties have very few genuine leaders among them!

What do you think? Should we commit to helping each other to develop as leaders? If so, how should we go about developing leadership for all?

For the last 25 years, I have been paid to run training courses, for 20 of those as a self-employed consultant. You don’t prosper as a training consultant for that length of time unless participants and course sponsors are happy with your work! In this article, I’m taking a brief respite from writing about added value marketing to deliver an unlikely conclusion: most training courses are a waste of time and money!

Training Courses Can Add Value

No, I’m not shooting myself in the foot – properly delivered, training courses can certainly add value. However, in many cases it is initiated so that senior managers can compliment each other that they are doing something. That something, all too often, is to use training courses as a substitute for senior managers having to look at, and change, their own behaviours.

Any experienced trainer will have plenty of examples of delivering training courses and being asked by participants whether “senior managers will be doing this training course too?” If participants ever feel there is a mismatch between what they are being taught on the training courses and how their managers behave, little if any of the content will be implemented.

Training Courses Have to Match the Prevailing Culture

Equally futile are training courses that don’t reflect the reality of participants’ jobs, whether their individual roles, or the organisations’s culture. Cultures tend to evolve and then promote and reward specific behavioural styles. If what’s being taught on the training courses contradicts the prevailing culture, the training will fail to deliver it’s wished for outcomes. And if the training course is part of a change management programme, it will just add another failure to the long list of them, that prompted Chris Agyris to assert that 80% of change projects fail to deliver their desired outcomes!

Managers Must Go First

Which means that before embarking on a series of training courses designed to bring about any kind of change, the new ways of working have to be bought into by all managers above the grades being trained. Furthermore, buy in is not enough; they have to consistently behave in the new ways. And this is where many change programmes fall down – managers, particularly those at the top, are unwilling to examine and change their behaviour.

Management Training Courses

At  various times over the years I have been asked to run courses for new managers. Most of the time, while participants have gone way happy with the course, I’ve had serious misgivings. This was usually based on concern about the way those individuals were selected for and promoted to their new roles:

• Most were chosen because of their ability in their current role, or their length of service, rather than for their potential as managers.
• Nobody ever considered whether those selected had demonstrated any initiative or leadership in their pre-managerial roles.
• Nobody ever considered whether those selected had the necessary communication, motivation and interpersonal skills before promoting them. While training courses can refine those skills, they can’t develop them from nothing.
• Post-course evaluation was never considered or carried out. It’s easy to get good reviews from the happy sheets circulated at the end of training courses. However, meaningful evaluation can only really be carried out three, six or nine months down the line. This is done by asking participants “what have you done differently as a result of the training course you attended X months ago?

Training Courses Cannot Deliver Miracles.

The above are just a few of the tings that need to be worked through before even thinking about bringing in a trainer; training courses can deliver great results but not in isolation! What other reason(s) can you think of that explain how so many training courses can be a waste of resources?

1. Leaders come in different flavors.

There are different types of leaders and you will probably encounter more than one type in your lifetime. Formal leaders are those we elect into positions or offices such as members of parliament, committee leaders, and presidents of the local clubs. Informal leaders or those we look up to because of their wisdom and experience such as in the case of the elders of a tribe, or our grandparents; or by virtue of their expertise and contribution on a given field such as Albert Einstein in the field of Theoretical Physics and Leonardo da Vinci in the field of the Arts. Both formal and informal leaders practice a combination of leadership styles.

2. Leadership is a process of personal development.

Although certain people seem to be born with innate leadership qualities, without the right environment and exposure, they may fail to develop their full potential. So like learning how to drive a car, you can also learn how to become a leader and hone your leadership abilities. You can also improve your knowledge of leadership theories and skills through attending leadership seminars, workshops, and conferences or by reading books on the subject.

Daily interaction with people provides the opportunity to observe and practice leadership theories. Together, formal and informal learning will help you gain leadership attitudes, gain leadership insights, and thus furthering the cycle of learning. You do not become a leader in one day and just stop. Life-long learning is important in becoming a good leader for each day brings new experiences that put your knowledge, skills, and attitude to a test.

3. Leadership starts with you.

The best way to develop leadership qualities is to apply it to your own life. As the saying goes “action speaks louder than words.” Leaders are always in the limelight. Keep in mind that your credibility as a leader depends much on your actions: your interaction with your family, friends, and co-workers; your way of managing your personal and organizational responsibilities; and even the way you talk with the newspaper vendor across the street. Repeated actions become habits. Habits in turn form a person’s character.

One question to might like to ask yourself is “On what Issue(s) am I prepared to make a stand?” Making a stand might be verbalising an issue in writing or through other media avenues, it might mean taking a more direct, hands on approach to campaigning. It’s in finding these issues and making a stand that we first show leadership.

4. Leadership is shared.

Leadership is not the sole responsibility of one person, but rather a shared responsibility among members of an emerging team. A leader belongs to a group. Each member has responsibilities to fulfill. Formal leadership positions are merely added responsibilities aside from their responsibilities as members of the team.

Effective leadership requires members to do their share of work. Starting as a mere group of individuals, members and leaders work towards the formation of an effective team. In this light, social interaction plays a major role in leadership. To learn how to work together requires a great deal of trust between and among leaders and members of an emerging team. Trust is built upon actions and not merely on words. When mutual respect exists, trust is fostered and confidence is built.

5. Leadership styles depend on the situation.

Why is dictatorship successful in Singapore but in very few other countries? Aside from culture, beliefs, value system, and form of government, the current situation of a nation also affects the leadership styles used by its formal leaders. There is no rule that only one style can be used. Most of the time, leaders employ a combination of leadership styles depending on the situation. In emergency situations such as periods of war and calamity, decision-making is a matter of life and death. Thus, a nation’s leader cannot afford to consult with all departments to arrive at crucial decisions.

The case is of course different in times of peace and order—different sectors and other branches of government can freely interact and participate in governance. Winston Churchill, for example, was an extremely successful wartime leader, excelling at rallying people to a cause. However, as a peacetime prime minister, he was just as spectacularly unsuccessful, as he found the mundane tasks of day to day leadership in peacetime to be tiresome.

Another case in point is in leading organisations. When the staff are highly motivated and competent, a combination of high delegation and moderate participative styles of leadership is most appropriate. But if the staffs have low competence and low commitment, a combination of high coaching, high supporting, and high directing behavior from organizational leaders is required.

6. Find a Leadership Role Model

Whilst there is no “One Size Fits All” approach to leadership, you can benefit greatly by identifying a leader whose values and style match your own and look at how they approached situations. It may be someone alive today, or a figure from history. If you are involved in a number of different activities, you might want to adopt a different leader for different activities – one for writing, another for public speaking and yet another for coaching 1 to 1. Or you might take just one leader, study them in detail and then, in any given situation, ask yourself what that person might do. his is particularly useful if your chosen leader is a spiritual figure such as Jesus, or Buddha etc. When faced with a difficult situation, pause for a moment and ask yourself, “What would Jesus do?” (or whoever you have chosen as your role model).

7. The Title of Leader is Bestowed on Us.

I am always wary when I read somebody’s social networking profile to find that they describe themselves as a “leader”. I believe that it is a title that should be bestowed on you by others, not one you should adopt for yourself!

What do you have to add on the issue of personal leadership? What have I missed out?

One of a leader’s roles is to decide on the vision for their organisation and to decide upon the right things to do to achieve that vision. One of a leader’s challenges is to decide when a vision needs revisiting, to check if it is still appropriate, needs some fine-tuning or needs changing completely. This is particularly difficult if you are required to challenge some fundamental and long-held assumptions and organizational barriers to implementing change.

Organisations Resist Change

It can be challenging to force oneself to ask these questions; it can be even more difficult to encourage/cajole/force organizations to do so. Most organizations, particularly large ones, have a built-in resistance to change. In fact, most have well-constructed barriers that enable them to deflect, challenge or directly undermine change.

Case Study – Gordon Brown and Defence.

Let’s look at a current example. Last week, the UK Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, announced a significant increase in defence expenditure. Assuming that this is a genuine policy and not a sound bite for the forthcoming election, it raises some interesting questions about leadership and the assumptions upon which the announcement is based.

A throw back to Britain’s colonial past, her defence policy has been based for a long time on having a large, modern, high-tech military that can be deployed quickly, wherever it is needed around the world. Mr. Brown’s recent announcement announces a continuation of that policy. For keeping with the same policy it means either that he firmly believes that the cost, and the underlying philosophy are more important than making cutbacks in a time of economic difficulty or that it’s a knee-jerk reaction to try to give the impression that strong defence is a cornerstone of Labour policy. (I’m being lenient and dismissing the suggestion that it may be a move to hand the Conservatives a poisoned chalice should the Tories win the next election!)

Our current defence policy as described above is based on the belief that we should still be a world power. Indeed, there are very few countries who have a large, modern high-tech military that can be deployed anywhere at very short notice. What would be the alternative? The role of the military could be changed to one much closer to home, focusing on defending the country and its people from the threat of invasion and local terrorist attack.  This would of course need to be accompanied by a change in foreign policy as Britain would then cease to have a global role.

There would be nothing wrong with making such a change: many European countries have defence and foreign policies that are confined to their own region. It would free up a lot of money for education, health and the welfare state.

However, such changes require courageous leadership and a determination to overcome resistance from the armed forces, security services, the foreign office and quite probably from the USA and France, the only other nations with the capability, experience and well-resourced military to deploy worldwide. The change is unlikely to happen.

Sometimes there is a clash between what you want to achieve and what you can achieve. As Labour party leader, presumably Mr Brown embraces the party’s commitment to excellence in education, health and welfare. To achieve that means some serious reallocation of funds in the public purse, at a time when there is huge pressure because of our national debt. Much could be achieved to achieve his vision in those areas were we to even halve our current defence budget, which stands at approximately £35 billion a year.

But as Prime Minister he knows that such changes would require winning a public debate on the issue to then give him the confidence to overcome the organisational barriers  described above.

Conclusion

Whilst the case study is a high profile one, it illustrates some key points that apply to leaders everywhere. Leaders need to have a clear vision, courage in the face of resistance and a sense of when it is sensible to attempt change, and when it isn’t. As Don Quixote failed to learn, there are some windmills that are not worth tilting at!

A lot of people confuse leadership with management, thinking that the two are synonymous. Nothing could be further from the truth and in this article we are going to draw clear distinctions between the two before looking at the specifics of servant leadership.

Putting it simply, leadership is about deciding the right things to do whilst management is about doing things in the right way. Management is particularly concerned with the efficient use of resources. Peter Drucker once wrote that most organisations are over-managed and under-led and this can be seen when examining bankruptcies. The courts are full of companies that were highly efficient at doing the wrong things!

This can also be seen in the uptake, or lack of uptake, of Social Media in organisations. Many managers prefer to optimise current work practices rather than embrace change. If those same organisations lack leadership with the vision to see that the game is changing, then they are unlikely to successfully integrate Social Media into their culture. They will be highly efficient players in a game that no longer exists – they may dislike change, but eventually they will come to realise that they will like being increasingly irrelevant even less!

Leadership is about doing the right things and this has two dimensions to it. Choosing the right activities to be involved in and also ‘doing the right thing’, in other words, choosing the morally right thing to do. And this is where servant leadership comes in. The title of ‘Leader’ is not something that someone awards to themselves. It is something that is recognised in the individual by other people. In the increasingly transparent world that is a result of Web 2.0 and 3.0, self-proclaimed leaders without the track record to back it up will have a very short shelf-life.

And other than with senior appointments in organisations (and even then I’d argue that most are managers rather than leaders), leadership will be something one does with people, not to them. In fact I’d go a stage further and suggest that Servant Leadership will often be characterised by what the Leader can do for her/his people. The very name suggests that servant leadership is concerned with issues such as “How can I Serve my Team?”

What are the qualities, skills and behaviours of Servant Leaders? To adapt one of my favourite pieces of writing, I suggest that in practical terms, Servant Leaders:

Are patient
Are kind.
Do not envy,
Do not boast,
Are not proud.
Are not rude,
Are not self-seeking,
Are not easily angered,
Do not keep no of wrongs.
Do not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.
Will do the morally right thing rather than hide behind what is legal or expedient
Always protect, always trust, always hope, always persevere.

What are the characteristics of an entrepreneur? I suggest that, amongst other things, an entrepreneur is:

1. A Risk taker – this is critical. At some stage you will have to take one or more risks, the first of which will be the decision to set up your own business. If you’re not willing to take any risk, then you will not succeed as a businessperson. In the everyday course of the business, you will encounter a lot of problems and challenges which you need to decide the soonest.

Some risks are worth taking after careful evaluation especially if it’s for the good of the business. If you’re not a risk taker, then you’re not an effective entrepreneur and you’re bound to fail in your business undertaking.

2. Smart – being smart is another characteristic of an entrepreneur. You have to be clever, keen, honest and consistent in all your business dealings in order to win the respect and trust of customers and other clients. However, being smart is not the same as possessing an MBA. You don’t need high level academic qualifications to succeed in business. But you do need to be street smart, wise in the ways of people and of your chosen industry.

3. A leader – leadership is a characteristic that is hard to find among individuals. Not many individuals have the nerve to take the lead. You need to develop the confidence to be able to guide, influence, and direct people. Above all, leadership is about being effective, being able to choose the right activities to do, as well as being able to perform those activities efficiently.

To put it another way, being efficient is not enough; the bankruptcy courts are full of organisations that were efficient, but they were not doing the right things. The game had moved on and they hadn’t.

The other aspect is being prepared to take the lead, to innovate. Entrepreneurs are innovators, seeing opportunities that others don’t see, making connections that others don’t make.

4. A passion for your business – if you are not passionate about what you do, why should others be? And there’s a difference between motivation and passion – I am motivated to fill out my tax return but I’m certainly not passionate about it!

5. Honest and trustworthy – if you are not honest and trustworthy, you will develop very little repeat business which will then mean you are forever chasing new clients. And as word about you spreads, you will find it harder and harder to survive.

6. Be Able to Cope with Stress and Uncertainty – I know very few successful business people who didn’t wake up in the middle of the night in their early years, wondering if they can pay the mortgage. Most of us have had to chase payments from clients and deal with letters from concerned bank managers. And in the service industries, including consultancy, it’s easy to get into a situation where you are busy for 3 months and then have nothing; you were busy doing the work and had no time to sell.

7. Inquisitive – most successful business people I know are inquisitive about life, people, business, the world around them. They know their limits, so for example may choose to use a website designer, but often they are keen to learn new skills, to stretch themselves, especially in emerging areas. How many entrepreneurs who now blog quite happily and construct micro sites etc would have believed 5 years ago that they would have been doing it?

8. Have the ability to reduce complexity – the business world is full of people who like to complicate issues so that they can then sell their products and services as the solution to that complexity. As an example, look at the volume of sites selling reports, e-books and courses on how to make money from your website. They talk a lot of jargon; that way, if you don’t understand their language, they hope you will feel inadequate and buy from them.

In fact, the solution is simple: provide a quality product or service from a site with quality content. Attract a high volume of traffic and convert as much of that traffic as you can into business. Anything else is either merely ways of achieving those 4 things, or an irrelevance.

I’m sure that there are other characteristics, but these are the 8 that spring to my mind. What would you add to the list?

In many organisations, people are promoted to positions of leadership based upon their ability and expertise in their current job. Once promoted, they end up telling people what to do, staying within the comfort zone of their job knowledge. Effective leaders learn that the best way is to empower and develop their staff by asking questions.