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My ramblings today have been prompted by the latest ‘cash for something’ scandal emerging from Whitehall.  I must say, the ‘scandal’ part has put a smile on my face.  Why on earth is anyone surprised?  There is always a tory / liberal / labourite (and all the other flavours I can’t fit in here…) willing to take some cash for a question, for an honour, or in this case, for a spot of lunch.  I make light of it, but it is such an old and hackneyed situation.  The breaking ‘news’ over the weekend is frankly not news.  Imagine the headline ‘Government runs full term with no scandals’.  Now that would be news!  Mind you, in reality, it would have to end with the word ‘allegedly’.

Then this morning I heard Baz Luhrmann’s 1999 ditty ‘Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen).  This of course was based on Mary Schmich’s 1997 column in the Chicago Tribune titled  ‘Advice, like youth is probably just wasted on the young’.  But Baz is more famous, so he seems to get the credit.  The song contains the wonderful lyric ‘Accept certain inalienable truths, prices will rise, politicians will philander, you too will get old, and when you do you’ll fantasise that when you were young prices were reasonable, politicians were noble and children respected their elders’.  Now I’m not old, but how true that is!  Add to that the facts that it was all once made of wood, everything cost a penny, and the summer holidays were long…

My point?  Leadership and learning are my two points.  We know enough, we have enough experience, enough people have made enough mistakes that we don’t need stories like this anymore.  In ‘The Fifth Discipline’, Peter Senge describes The Delusion of Learning From Experience.  Misguided actions and outbursts from people in positions of leadership need not happen.  I think it was Winston Churchill who said it is best to do the right thing. Firstly because it is the right thing. Secondly, because the buggers will find out anyway.  Whoever said it, they are right.  Businesses, communities, political parties and governments need leaders who learn.

Back to the lyrics – as Edwyn Collins and Orange Juice said in 1983 – Rip It Up And Start Again.  Or am I just showing my age?

We’ve been using this word a lot recently, probably all triggered by the forthcoming talk by the Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership at the Cambridge Strategic HR Forum on 8^th February.  In their words, sustainability is concerned with meeting the needs of people today without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. Sustainable development therefore involves:

• A broad view of social, environmental and economic outcomes
• A long-term perspective, concerned with the interests and rights of future generations as well as of people today
• An inclusive approach to action, which recognises the need for all people to be involved in the decisions that affect their lives

We’ve been using the word ‘sustainable’ in other ways – our own business needs to be sustainable, and we, like many other businesses have been looking to secure a client base to make us sustainable. When we are doing well, we create pressure that we have to deal with.  Our physical and mental well-being is important if we want to remain healthy whilst dealing with this pressure, and sustain activity levels. Then our children come home from school and add another dimension to that pressure, and nothing should get in the way of making that sustainable! We would like our clients to have sustainable businesses, and our leadership and management development programmes are designed to help their leaders and managers to achieve this.

All in all, sustainability is a pretty important thing, so I hope the word doesn’t get degraded by over-use like others do.  ‘Authentic’ for example.  Or ‘fantastic’.  I recently heard two television presenters squeeze ‘fantastic’ into a two minute slot 17 times. But then as Vic Reeves says "88.2% of statistics are made up on the spot”.  It may well have been 21 times…

So, to keep this blog sustainable – I’ll stop right now, but please do add your comments on the subject.  

Happy new year everybody.

So, now we’ve left the season to be jolly, and we’ve entered the season of good intentions.  I do find it intriguing how we compartmentalise our lives.  For a while, the gyms will be busier, the healthy cookbooks will be off the shelves and shopping lists will be defined by them.  People will be doing good things around the home, being more tidy, more polite, managing behaviour, and resolutely following resolutions.

But for how long?

The new year trigger for making resolutions and doing these things is great, but not many of us are good at sticking to them long-term.  We associate them with the new year, and by the end of February, the year doesn’t seem so new anymore, so we go back to more familiar ways of working.

We adopt this sort of behaviour pattern at work too.  Appraisals might be the trigger, or the office move, or the signing of a new deal.  In ‘The Fifth Discipline’ Peter Senge calls this the fixation on events. We lose sight of the gradual progression of things, and focus on the obvious events – share price dropping, quarter 4 results, Interest rates etc.  We even use these events to explain things (business is quiet because it is Christmas), and whilst the essence of this might be true, we lose sight of the bigger picture incremental changes that are happening.  For example the quality of our product or service delivery will change over time, especially in relation to our competitors.  If we lose sight of this and focus on each individual transaction, we won’t be able to react appropriately.

Our leadership development strategies need to take this into account. We need to train our people to think strategically and, concurrently, to manage the shorter-term events. And importantly, our managers and leaders need to look at the relationship between the events and the gradual and incremental change that will happen regardless of what we do.

So, heads up. Christmas is over, so is new year. And it doesn’t really matter. Time ticks on…

And now I’ll wait for the emails correcting me on that point.  Clocks tick.  Time is the fourth dimension and space is curved.  I know, I know….

On the first day of Christmas my true love sent to me a demand that I address her properly, and that calling her my ‘true love’ was perhaps a little out-dated.

On the second day of Christmas my true… erm, colleague sent to me two emails. Yep. Just two. I know my place.

On the third day of Christmas my business partner sent to me  three circles. ACL… get it?

On the fourth day of Christmas a spammer living somewhere in Asia sent me the price list for bulk rice shipments. Four times.

On the fifth day of Christmas I went out for a Christmas lunch, and I can’t remember the rest of that day.

On the sixth day of Christmas one of our associates sent us a voucher for lunch at Hotel Du Vin. We said thank you six times each. He’s a lovely man!

On the seventh day of Christmas our Marketing Director sent to me seven swans-a-swimming. Only joking, but I’m running out of ideas.

On the eighth day of Christmas Rachel sent me to make eight cups of coffee. At least eight.

On the ninth day of Christmas my accountant sent to me a reminder to sort out all my information so he can process my personal tax return in time for the January deadline.

On the tenth day of Christmas John Lewis sent to me the ten parcels that I was beginning to worry about.

On the eleventh day of Christmas Amazon sent me the one I’d completely forgotten about. How cool is that?

On the twelfth day of Christmas my true love sent to me another demand that I revert to ‘true love’ as she quite likes it really…

Happy Christmas everybody.

I had great fun in London on Tuesday this week at a networking event. I was sharing the speaker slot with Michael Jenkins, CEO at Roffey Park and the event was titled ‘Future Proofing HR: Ulrich and Beyond’. The audience were all senior HR practitioners, the debate was lively, and I learned plenty. Amongst the learning points was that Dave Ulrich’s surname is pronounced Ulrich, not Ulrick. Now there’s a thing.

Michael introduced some of Roffey Park’s research into the differing outlooks of the currently employed generations (Boomers, Gen x, Gen Y etc), and I put forward some of our observations from working with our clients.

What struck me was our need to give things labels, call them ‘models’, create ‘initiatives’ and ‘roll them out’ into the business. Dave Ulrich’s ‘Business Partner Model’ is a case in point.  What Ulrich says is all good stuff and makes absolute sense. The four key roles described by Ulrich – Strategic partner, Administrative Expert (Shared Services), Employee Champion and  Change Agent sound to me like the roles of modern HR function.

When I hear HR professionals talking about Business Partnering, or the ‘HRBP’ model, I sometimes wince. I really believe that the rest of the business (I say rest of the business because I believe HR is a part of the business, not a partner to it) doesn’t care about a model devised by Dave Ulrich.  They want to see their colleagues in HR being strategic, providing excellent administrative frameworks and advice, championing the needs of employees, and helping the business to change.

I beleive Dave Ulrich makes a useful contribution to the world of HR, but let’s not get hung up on titles.  HR professionals need to get out there and do it.

And I hope I haven’t offended Dave Ulrich or any of my colleagues in HR functions who call themselves Business Partners!

Giving feedback is a key skill for managers. Giving positive feedback for a job well done is relatively easy (although most us could do more of it more often). Much more tricky is giving ‘developmental’ feedback following poor performance, poor attendance, failure to do things that have been promised, behavioural issues, and so on. It’s all too easy to put this off because it can seem awkward or confrontational.

On both our leadership programmes and our public training courses individuals tell us how useful they find the following tool.  It’s a simple, structured approach and gives people the confidence to have that difficult conversation, to give people a ‘BIFF’; a timely challenge which is both justified and fair, and will lead the way to performance improvement:

Behaviour:  When you do x it has the

Impact of y  Which makes me / us

Feel… frustrated… let down… and in

Future I would like you to do z

Try it with other members of your team, your boss and your kids too…

Read more on the art of giving good feedback or call us for a chat. 

We are all ‘of a type’.  We have preferences, which psychologists are good at describing and grouping.  They have developed plenty of tools which are immensely useful in our line of work.  Our leadership and management development programmes invariably use of one of the main psychometric tools (Myers Briggs and the like), which really helps each individual understand themselves, and their interactions with others. What fascinates me is the varying degrees to which people are able to behave ‘out of type’, and do something other than their automatic, preferred behaviour. I have recently seen examples of people demonstrating a clear ability to operate out of type and a seeming inability to do so. 

The first example involves Fred who has a liking for detail.  She enjoys spread-sheets.  She has a tendency to take them to meetings and show people the contents, whether they are interested or not.  I recently heard one of Fred’s colleagues (we’ll call him George) muttering to himself, about what he would do if Fred brought one of her spreadsheets to the next meeting. Sure enough, Fred did, and took delight in showing all her colleagues it’s functions, layout, attributes and colour coded cells.  George behaved true to type and told Fred exactly what he thought of her spread-sheet.  Fred behaved true to type and told George that he “simply didn’t understand…”  The resulting altercation wasn’t pretty, and was completely pointless and unproductive.  George’s preference for the big picture and Fred’s love of detail are equally valuable, but neither of them were giving any leeway.

The second concerns Alex who has a strong tendency for introversion (using the Myers Briggs Type Indicator).  Alex works with a team who all have a preference for extroversion. Alex gets good results, and interestingly, his colleagues are unaware of his introversion.  This is because of his ability to operate ‘out of type’ and take steps towards extrovert behaviours (for example forcing himself to join in the lively discussions and debates that develop during meetings).  Alex describes this as “absolutely knackering, but necessary if I want to influence my colleagues”.  He makes time for his introversion preference though, to reflect, internalise and organise his thoughts.  The results of this he brings back to the team, which would be less effective without it.

Teams need difference, but difference creates the possibility for tension and misunderstanding.  When we learn to be flexible, to understand the needs and preferences of others, and to behave ‘out of type’,  we can often achieve even more than when we use our automatic, preferred behaviours. People like Alex impress me, and as a result, I’m going to use more spread-sheets.  Completely out of type.

Are leaders born or made?  What are the key behaviours shared by great leaders?  Find out what Steve Read thinks in a recent interview for the Institute of Clinical Research. Download the podcast here.  We'd love to hear about leaders you've been inspired by - leave us a comment below. If you'd like to know more about Action Centred Leadership, give us a call and take a look at the Mitsui Case Study to read about ACL in action.