Effective Leaders know how well they lead their teams. If you don’t, here are 5 actions to find out.

A recent email from a client provides a great case study and highlights how we can be uncertain how well we lead and what we can do about it.

James founded his marketing business 10 years ago and it now turns over nearly £2m a year and has 15 employees…

Hi Mark

When we meet in a couple of days, I’d like to talk about my own leadership ability. How can I improve this, especially around motivating the teams and especially my two line managers as well as how to engage the whole team and stimulate them.

Best James

James cares about his products and services, his team and their well-being, his clients and suppliers. He has established robust systems in the business. For example, there are kpi’s to measure performance and all team members are appraised and have regular 1-2-1’s.

When I met with James I reminded him of this and then asked him whether he measured his performance as a leader. Here’s a checklist of actions that resulted from that session that could help you, especially if you are unsure how well you lead…

• Complete a self-assessment leadership profile to raise self-awareness. There are many profiling tools on the market. A simple, yet effective one can be found at http://www.johnadair.co.uk/

• Complete a 360 profile. Do this anonymously so that individual responses aren’t attributable. By asking team members to appraise your performance against a number of leadership behaviours, you will be able to build a picture of your strengths and weaknesses. Complete the same profile yourself, so you can contrast and compare how the team sees you and how you sees yourself. (Hopefully the results will be closely aligned!) Repeating the process further down the track will enable you to assess how your performance is improving. A search on google will help you find a suitable profile tool.

• Informal feedback with your direct line managers. By asking them what you need to do more of and just as importantly less of to bring out the very best in them will provide you with valuable insights into your leadership.

• Complete a team profile. As with the 360, by asking your team to complete this exercise, you will get valuable insights into how the team feels about itself and how you are leading it.

• Chat informally with your team members. Make it a routine to pull up a chair and sit with members of the team one on one and informally asking them what they’re working on and how it’s going for them and what more you can do to support them. This will help you connect and help them engage.

James is excited about what this will give him and the team. And how it will impact on performance. It takes some courage to take these actions, especially 360 appraisals. It means putting one’s ego to one side and facing the unvarnished truth. In James’ case, I think it will be a very pleasant surprise and will bolster his confidence and self-belief. What could it tell you? And how important is that for you? For your team? Your company?

What’s your experience? Post a reply. It will be great to hear from you.

Leadership lesson from the words of team GB chef de mission, Andy Hunt.

Team GB finished third in the medal table at the London2012 Olympics and enjoyed its most successful Olympiad since 1908 – even allowing for the uplift in medal haul from Beijing that home advantage brings:

• Historically, there’s an average increase in medals of 16% on the previous games for the host nation.
• Team GB increased its total by 38% and its number of gold medals by 53%.

Speaking to the BBC, Great Britain’s chef de mission, Andy Hunt acknowledged Team GB’s success and described the result as “our greatest performance of our greatest team at the greatest Olympics ever”. He then went on to say that “we’ll review what went right and what went wrong”.

That’s when alarm bells started ringing for me. Now on the face of it, Andy Hunt’s statement seems innocuous, but isn’t it loaded? When he talks in absolutes of right and wrong – or good and bad – he must pay attention to the words he uses and guard against engendering a climate of blame and entrenchment. Otherwise those officials, coaches and athletes on the receiving end are more likely to justify and defend their actions. In particular, caution is required in the review of high profile sports such as athletics – 6 medals against a target of 8 – and swimming – 3 medals against an official target of 5-7, compared with 6 at Beijing which were also of a higher denomination.

Isn’t the right/wrong approach less likely to unearth the underlying causes and lessons that can be learned and applied to the next round of Games in Rio in 2016 to ensure we achieve greater success? Especially as the stakes will be raised even higher when funding for 2016 is involved and the performance directors will want to retain their share of that funding?

Just changing the words he uses could achieve a more productive outcome. Mr Hunt can set a more positive tone by using expressions such as ‘what’s working and what can work even better’ instead of ‘what was right/wrong or good/bad?’ This reframing is more likely to:

• create an open and constructive atmosphere
• reduce likelihood of apportioning blame
• encourage innovative thinking with more positive actions resulting

Only time will tell whether Mr. Hunt will continue to set a judgemental tone, with all the associated defensiveness and finger-pointing. Or will he take heed and adopt a more forward looking approach?

In the meantime, when you review performance, how do you frame your discussions?

What do you notice about the behaviour of your colleagues? Is it confrontational with the apportioning of blame or is there innovative thinking that builds on what’s working well?

What’s your experience? What do you think? Post a reply. It will be great to hear from you.

The simple lesson business leaders can learn from Olympic gold medallists to improve performance.

It’s purely anecdotal – in tv and press interviews with medal winners at the London 2012 Olympic Games, almost all of them pay tribute to the team around them and in particular their coaching team. They couldn’t ‘do it on their own’.

Clearly the chemistry in the relationship is key and no matter how talented the athlete, they can’t see 360 degrees of themselves. And in order to win, they leave no stone unturned. Dave Brailsford, Performance Director of the successful GB Track Cycling team puts it very simply – success is all about ‘marginal gains’ on and off the track. So when a cyclist is in training, who is in the best position to give them objective feedback and guidance about where to make performance improvements? It’s a no-brainer: the coaching team.

So in the workplace, it’s surprising that many business people will avoid coaching and appraising their team members and will also avoid a 360 appraisal of themselves. Both would give great feedback on what’s working/not working in the way they perform in pursuit of their business objectives. So what stops them? Could it be ego? A recent meeting with a prospective client illustrates the point.

Jenny is the founder and CEO of a very successful IT consultancy. It’s highly profitable and has an impressive roster of blue-chip clients. There is an ambitious business plan in place to sustain growth over the next 3 years with a view to selling the business to a global player. Jenny is equally ambitious and wants to develop the capability of the leadership team in order to execute and deliver the business plan. When I asked her about what processes are in place to review her performance and that of her team, she explained:

‘We talk all the time. I don’t see the need of an appraisal process; the idea of a 360 is a complete anathema to me. I don’t need the feedback and they don’t need something like a bureaucratic process to inform them.’

It’s likely Jenny will achieve her business goals. In my experience, she is even more likely to achieve them with coaching and review and that her ego is getting in the way.

After all – if coaching and review are good enough for world leading athletes, why would business people be any different?

What do you think? Post a reply. It will be great to hear from you.

43% of UK managers rate their own line manager as ineffective. Make sure it’s not you!

In July 2012 the Department for Business, Innovation & Skills Leadership and Management Network Group (LMNG) published a paper – “Leadership & Management in the UK: The key to sustainable growth. A summary of the evidence for the value of investing in Leadership and Management Development. ”

One of the most alarming statistics quoted in the report is that 43% of UK managers rate their own line manager as ineffective – and only one in five are qualified.

So if you’re sitting round a meeting table today with your peers – statistically, either you or the colleague next to you is considered to be underperforming by your direct reports. It could be you!!! How can you be sure it isn’t?

Well, according to leadership experts Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner, the top 4 characteristics by a considerable margin that we look for in those we would willingly follow are…

• Honesty
• Forward-looking
• Inspiring
• Competent

Those that have these attributes have source credibility, according to Kouzes & Posner. How do you measure up?

• Does your appraisal process measure your performance on these characteristics?
• Have you conducted a 360 appraisal to get feedback on these characteristics?
• Have you informally asked those who report to you how you rate on these characteristics?
• Finally, be honest with yourself – give yourself a score out on scale of 1-10 for each characteristic.

What does this tell you? What actions will you take? What will be the benefits – to you, your team members and your organisation?

Post a reply. It will be great to hear from you.

5 minute leadership tune-up: Do you value Behaviour as well as Competence in your team members?

Imagine you’re Sir Alex Ferguson and you have a ‘must win’ soccer match coming up on Saturday. Here are the stats for the two contenders for the striker position:

	Mike	Jim
Goals v appearances  ratio this season	3 / 15	5 / 10
Goals v appearances  ratio last season	6 / 30	15 / 30

Who do you pick for the match on Saturday – Mike or Jim? Looking at the hard data, it’s a no brainer – it’s got to be Jim, hasn’t it?

Now let’s add an extra dimension or two:

•  Mike always turn up ahead of time for training sessions, he doesn’t smoke, drink or make the tabloids for ‘the wrong reasons’. He has an exemplary conduct record, with only 1 booking and no dismissals on the pitch this season.  He has played for the club for 3 seasons.

• Jim is occasionally late for training, has been snapped by the paparazzi smoking and drinking and has been on the front page as often as the back pages in the tabloid press over recent weeks and has been booked three times this season. He joined the club at the beginning of this season.

Would you still pick Jim? Or would you now select Mike?

I often ask this question when I’m facilitating teams on leadership and team building programmes. And the answers are very revealing.

Choosing Jim shows how results focussed we can be – winning at all costs. Sometimes this can be a strategy that can backfire in the longer term. After all, what signal does it send out to everyone else in the squad? And what may be the impact on team behaviour and levels of engagement? Choosing Mike may be a riskier strategy in terms of winning, but his selection sends out a different signal to the squad altogether – that values and behaviour matter as much as the ability to perform.

Former Chairman and CEO of GE, Jack Welch talks about this dilemma in his book ‘Winning’ in great detail (pp. 305-308). And in his experience, many organisations will keep technically competent performers whose values/behaviours are misaligned/poor, longer than they should.

Perhaps another option in the Sir Alex scenario is to mark Jim’s card and to select him this time only and make it clear to him and the rest of the squad that you will drop him for future games if he doesn’t mend his ways.

Now think about those performers in your organisation who are technically competent and who’s values/behaviours are questionable or inappropriate:

• Are you letting them off the hook?
• What signals are you sending out to everyone else if you are -about you? about the importance of values/behaviour?
• And what will this encourage you to do as a result?
• What impact will your actions have on the team and its performance?

Post a reply and let me know. It will be great to hear from you.

High performing leaders engender high levels of trust. Do you?

Earlier this week I emailed Callum, a former client. I got a reply within ten minutes saying ‘I’m away until Friday and I’ll get back to you then’.  Sure enough, he replied at 8:15am today, Friday.  I’m sure he had many more important matters to take care of on his return today and yet he was true to his word and I respect him greatly for that. And Callum’s action got me thinking about the importance of trust in our professional and personal relationships…

To start,  here’s a definition from google:

• Trust noun.  Firm belief in the reliability, truth, ability, or strength of someone or something
• Trust verb.  Believe in the reliability, truth, ability, or strength of.

Synonyms:

• noun.  confidence – faith – credit – reliance – belief
• verb.  believe – confide – rely – credit – hope – entrust

Leadership experts, Kouzes & Posner in their research spanning over 25 years consistently find that trust is the number 1 quality we look for in those we would willingly follow. *

They go on to say that trust is doing what we say we will do, when we say we will do it, consistently. When we demonstrate high levels of trust, it engenders higher levels of discretionary effort from our followers, leading to increased performance and improved outcomes.

So be honest with yourself. On a scale of 0-10 (0=never, 10=always) where would you put yourself, in terms of doing what you say you will do, when you say you will do it?

Now pinpoint where you may need to invest more time to engender higher levels of trust by scoring yourself against the following list, though you may also want to add other points:

• I attend meetings with my peers on time
• I attend meetings with my team members on time
• I attend meetings with my suppliers/customers/prospects on time
• I honour my commitment to 1-2-1 sesssions with my team members
• I honour my commitment to reviews/appraisal sessions with my team members
• I never cancel or postpone sessions in 4 and 5 above
• I answer emails when I say I will
• I call people when I say I will

What’s that telling you? If your scores are low or lower than you would like, what’s the underlying cause? What  actions, if any, will you take? And what will be the benefit to you/your team/your organisation?

If you found this helpful, please post a reply and pass on to a colleague. Looking forward to hearing back from you.

* source: The Leadership Challenge

Leaders who are sufficiently prepared switch off when they’re on holiday. Do you?

It’s summer holiday season and many CEOs/MDs/Directors up and down the country face a perennial problem in the weeks and days leading up to their well earned vacation:

• Shall I take my Blackberry on holiday?
• If I do, shall I leave it switched on?
• Shall I phone in to ‘check how things are going’?
• Shall I leave instructions for my team to contact me while I’m away?

And if the answer is ‘yes’ to any of these questions, will you incur the displeasure of your family/loved ones because you’re not switching off and spending time with them and recharging your batteries too?

It’s speculation, I know, but I would wager that Richard Branson isn’t contactable when on one of adventures and if he can manage it, why can’t we? What if it could be different this year? What if we could really switch off? Well the answer is we can! With advanced planning and reframing on our part and the desire to do so, we can switch off, recharge and spend time with our families.

Many of the clients I’ve coached down the years follow or play sports. Using a soccer analogy can help us reframe this holiday dilemma and change the outcome. When the England Captain is substituted, what’s the last thing he does before leaving the pitch? I’ve asked this question hundreds of times and in over 95% of cases whether my client does or doesn’t follow football, they give the correct answer – he passes the arm-band to his deputy.

To my knowledge, unless he is player-manager (which is now incredibly rare) the England Coach never comes onto the pitch to take over the responsibility. So if that’s the case, what’s different about us? The answer I believe is nothing!

So here’s the challenge for you: in your company, what needs to happen for you to pass the responsibility to the next in line when you are on vacation, ill or on jury service?  When I ask this question, it’s nearly always for the following two ‘reasons’:

• I can’t trust anyone enough to delegate the responsibility
• Nobody can ‘do it’ as well as me

If this the case for you, be honest with yourself – aren’t these really ‘excuses’?

I would encourage you to reframe the situation and give yourself sufficient advance notice to plan for your absences: because both these responses can be reframed…

•  What needs to happen so you can trust someone enough to delegate?
• What needs to happen so someone can ‘do it’ as well as you?

After all, nobody is indispensable – even Bob Diamond, ex-CEO of Barclays Bank! And if we believe we are, we’ve created a situation of over-dependency. And we can change it, if there’s sufficient appetite and willingness to do so.

So if you really want to take that well earned break this year and switch off, what are you going to do differently to make it happen?  Who’s going to step up and how will you prepare them? And when?

Post a reply. It will be great to hear from you.

High performing leaders pay attention to their intuition. Do you?

Have you ever met someone for the first time – a prospective client, team member or supplier – and walked away from that first encounter feeling uneasy?

Was there something about them that you couldn’t quite put your finger on or explain? Did they stack up, logically? And yet you still had a nagging feeling about them that caused doubt?

Admit it – if it’s a prospective client, it’s all too easy to be seduced ‘by the money’ and go ahead with them. I know I’ve done that and later regretted it. So as high performing leaders, what do we need to pay more attention to?

Here’s a method we can use to minimise the risk of embarking on a professional (or personal) relationship that is likely to come back and bite us later down the track, with all the associated waste of time and energy that ‘difficult’ relationships can cause, not to mention the likely negative impact on performance and results…

What we’re talking about here is using our intuition, which according to a search on google is:

• The ability to understand something immediately, without the need for conscious reasoning.
• A thing that one knows or considers likely from instinctive feeling rather than conscious reasoning.

Even Einstein commented on the value of intuition:

“The only real valuable thing is intuition.”

“There is no logical way to the discovery of these elemental laws. There is only the way of intuition, which is helped by a feeling for the order lying behind the appearance.”

So if intuition is a feeling, be clear about where you sense that feeling in your body – it’s likely to be in your heart or your gut. Almost certainly it’s not going to be in your head!

Let’s test out your intuition. Think of someone you have later come to regret working with and go back to that first encounter and ask yourself:

• Did I like this person? Yes or no?
• Did I trust this person? Yes or no?
• Did I respect this person? Yes or no?

Avoid the temptation to analyse, use logic or reasoning. Instead go with your instinctive feeling – your intuition – about them. Did you get three yes responses? I’ll wager that you didn’t. Even if you got two yes responses and one ‘not sure’ that’s not three affirmatives.

Next time you meet a prospective client, team member or supplier, use this method. Think of three yes responses as three cherries on a slot machine. If you get a ‘not sure’ or a ‘no’, proceed with caution. Ask more questions to get the assurance you need to go ahead. In either event, it’s likely that what they say, how they say it and their body language mismatch in someway. Avoid the temptation to let your head lead your heart or gut. Make sure that both your head and your heart or gut are aligned. It will maximise the likelihood of a productive relationship for both parties.

What’s your experience of using or not using your intuition to guide your decisions? Post a reply. It will be great to hear from you.

Leadership Case Study: MD’s mood is having a negative impact on the team. Is yours?

A coaching session with Laura, an experienced MD of a successful IT services consultancy highlighted makes for an interesting case study…

Laura had recently received this feedback in her 360 degree appraisal:

“her team don’t know who is going to show up for work each day: when Laura is ‘up’ the open-plan office is an energising place to be and when she is ‘down’ the atmosphere can be ‘cut with a knife’. It feels like her space is a ‘no-go area’ and ‘it’s best to tip-toe around her. Unfortunately, our performance and productivity suffers.”

None of this came as a surprise to Laura…

“I’m aware of my mood swings and the impact it has – their points are valid. The silly thing is I know exactly what to do about it: I need to calm down and take a few deep breaths or just go out for a coffee or a walk for 15 minutes to compose myself. I’ve done that before and it works, nearly all of the time.”

I asked what stops her from doing this. She was stuck for an answer, so I ventured: “are you just getting in your own way?”  She agreed that she was.

This example isn’t unique. Time and again we seem to know what to do when we repeat certain patterns of unwanted behaviour and emotion/feelings we just don’t do what we know. When behaviour is more deeply embedded, it’s harder to make the shift, even when the benefits are obvious at a logical level.

In Laura’s case, she decided to entrust and enrol her team. She explained “it’s an elephant in the room that everyone of us is aware of anyway – so it’s time to deal with it.” She called them together and explained that she knows she’s ‘moody’ and that ‘when she is ‘doing a bad mood’ they have her permission to  whisper in her ear and tell her.

Laura demonstrated her courage and humility in taking this step. It’s a work in progress, though already the atmosphere in the office is see-sawing less and performance and productivity are showing signs of improvement.

Do you exert a powerful influence on the atmosphere in your workplace? What impact does it have on those around you and their performance/interaction with you? Is it beneficial? Be honest? Do you know what to do and are you doing what you know? Is it time to get out of your own way?

Post a reply. It will be great to hear from you.

2 minute leadership tune-up: Are you a leader who’s too busy to lead?

You’re busy, right? Who isn’t? You’ve got too much to do – documents to read, spreadsheets to create, an email inbox to empty; reports to ‘correct’, meetings to attend, decisions to make. It’s likely you’re investing a disproportionate amount of time working on ‘things’, ‘tasks’, ‘programmes’.

You know you need and want to get out of your office more and engage with colleagues and team members, but all this ‘stuff just keeps getting in the way’. Or are you letting it?

And if you’re not out there, how can you possibly know what your people think, what they are doing and what’s really going on? Or are you just making assumptions…and do they see you as out of touch?

And that’s the key distinction:

• Leading is about people
• Managing is about things

In your functional role as CEO/Founder/Director/Owner isn’t it about balancing both?

Three quotes clarify:

• ‘Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.’ – George Patton
• ‘Pull the string, and it will follow wherever you wish. Push it, and it will go nowhere at all.’ – Dwight Eisenhower
• ‘The best executive is the one who has sense enough to pick good men to do what he wants done, and self-restraint to keep from meddling with them while they do it.’ – Theodore Roosevelt

So redress the balance – make a commitment to manage less and lead more. And that means delegating more to others. And if that’s a challenge for you, what’s the underlying cause? Is it your perfectionist streak? Is it your lack of trust and an unwillingness to let go?

If you’re not letting go, does that encourage the same behaviour in your direct reports?

The bottom line is your people will never grow and neither will your company if you are involved in every decision and doing their work for them. So let them do what you pay them to do and get out of their way…

• What will you take from this?
• What will you go away and do as a result?
• Post a reply and tell us.
• And please email this on to a colleague who you think could benefit from reading this.