Is this the right room for an argument?

In the seminal Monty Python sketch, Palin’s character says that an argument is “…a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition” to which Cleese replies “No it isn’t”. Palin continues “Argument is an intellectual process. Contradiction is just the automatic gainsaying of any statement the other person makes.” “No it isn’t” Cleese again replies. Many observers of today’s political debates could be forgiven for thinking that far from being a humorous observation, the Python sketch was actually a fair summary of public discourse.

The twice-weekly session of Prime Minister’s Questions in the House of Commons may only draw a small audience but it does, without a doubt, set the tone. Arguments become binary: my Plan A is better than your Plan B. The protagonists raise their voices over the baying backbenchers, turning serious debate into something like a blood sport. This aggressive he-said-she-said attitude is too often replicated in other debates. Broadcast journalists love what they call the head-to-head interview, encouraging attacks, constantly trying to trip people up and to find differences of opinion.

Two events this week have, however, given me hope. The first was a panel discussion (held at PR consultancy, Fishburn Hedges) on the future of money. The panel had a number of things in common: firstly, they were all incredibly well briefed and knowledgeable about their subject; and secondly they were there to debate and share ideas rather than score points. The result was an engaging and thought-provoking evening.

The second event was a debate between two schools in the Debating Matters competition, supported by the Institute of Ideas, in which I was fortunate enough to be one of the judges. The subject for debate was whether the UK should follow other European countries and ban the Burka. The two teams, made up of 17-year old school children, were outstanding. They had done their research, mastered their brief, and synthesised the information in order to produce highly effective and compelling arguments which they both delivered well. But it didn’t end there. In addition to delivering a seemingly nerve-free argument (no mean feat for such young people) they also listened to what the other team were saying. Too frequently people see a debate as taking turns to get their message across. They use the time when the other side are speaking to silently rehearse what to say next. These two teams not only listened but also took notes and, in real time, judged what arguments to employ that best counteracted the points made by their opponents.

Very few things today are completely black and white. The complexity of modern life and the inter-dependency of so many issues mean that it is important to understand nuances of thought. Debates which are little more than shouting down opponents are of little value. Today’s politicians could do well to take a lesson from the young people taking part in Debating Matters. It isn’t just about who can shout loudest; it’s about listening effectively and choosing what to say and how to say it. Perhaps it’s time to debate debates.

Asking not telling

Giving advice is an art form in its own right. Knowing what to say requires a mixture of wisdom and diplomacy and a high degree of emotional intelligence. People ask others for advice everyday and few, whether consultants, counsellors or friends, are usually backward in coming forward with ideas and suggestions. In fact, telling people what they should do or how they ought to act seems to be a particularly compulsive human activity.

The problem with all this advice giving, however, is that it rarely works. Providing the ready-made solution frequently fails for a number of reasons. Firstly, ownership for the solution rests with the wrong party. If you are going to act differently then it needs to be for your own reasons rather than for someone else’s. Secondly, it is unsustainable. If every time we have a problem the solution is provided for us then we will never learn to think for ourselves.

When it comes to changing behaviour or thinking the trick is to let the other party arrive at their own solution. And the way to achieve that is through judicious questioning. By using incisive, open questions you can get them to reframe the issues, see through blockages and find their own way to solve the problem. That way they see the light in their own way and in their own time. The solution is theirs and the change will be all the more real because it comes from them.

A friend of mine recently spent the whole day on a trip in the company of his CEO. They were talking about internal communications when suddenly, the CEO said: “I know. I’ll write a monthly business newsletter that we can send to everybody. That would work, wouldn’t it?” My friend said nothing, but his silence said it all. “Why don’t you agree?” asked the CEO. “I’ll tell you at the end of the day” said my friend. Their day together continued, visiting an operational centre and meeting people far away from the corporate head office. At the end of the day the CEO said: “Actually, I’ve got it. What I should do is write a blog every few days saying who I’ve met, what I’ve found and ask people to let me know their thoughts.” “What a good idea.” said my friend.

That interaction could have gone two ways. My friend could have immediately knocked down the CEOs original idea and replaced it with his own. Instead what he did was effectively to make his boss think of what he’d like to receive as a communication rather than what he thought he ought to give. He came to his own solution. He owned it and the outcome will be far more effective and authentic as a result.

This approach, of course, goes against the grain. Since our schooldays we’ve become used to a top-down, didactic approach to problem solving and learning. We’re told to pay attention and learn how solutions are arrived at. Of course, absorbing information like a sponge and learning how to regurgitate it effectively is marvellous for achieving success on the treadmill of examinations, but rarely does it lead to insight or creative thought. Isn’t it surprising how the teachers we most remember tend to be the ones least bothered by exam results and most bothered by holding debates, asking good questions, and encouraging us to say what we really thought.

The truth is that we all need advisors. Much of life comes down to coaching; indeed, that is the true basis of leadership. Telling people what to do, in a command and control way, is increasingly counter-productive. Perhaps the coaching and consultancy industry can take a lead and stop trying to provide solutions and start by active questioning to allow the true change to emerge from within.

Time to find other ways to engage

As the conference season for UK political parties draws to a close some are beginning to wonder whether they have now passed their sell-by date. What was once a cross between rah-rah events for the faithful and serious policy-making forums has now become little more than made-for-tv events that take place in front of an audience of bused-in supporters and lobbyists. And to ensure that there is no chance of the politicians, and the London-based chatterati, actually bumping into real people these events take place behind a cordon sanitaire that makes airport security look free and easy.

Another event that has similarly failed to evolve is the Annual General Meeting. Each year hundreds of quoted companies spend enormous sums on events that, in most cases, have become pointless. There is no doubt that the leaders of publicly-quoted companies should be both accessible and accountable to their audiences. However, AGMs are not the place. Shareholder democracy has joined the ranks of top oxymorons. The meetings are typically attended by a mixture of former employees, axe grinders, professional shareholders, and the lost and bewildered. For most organisations they have ceased to serve any real purpose.

A good example of how pointless they have become would be the annual vote on directors’ remuneration. There is usually an acrimonious discussion during which ordinary shareholders complain about the directors of “their” company receiving the sort of sums of money that would make Croesus blush. This is normally followed by a vote. The small shareholders unanimously vote “no” on their handsets, wait while the computer works out how statistically insignificant they are, and then it is announced to the hall that thanks to the previously received votes from the absent institutional shareholders a total of 98% have voted in favour. It always reminds me of that great joke from the Two Ronnies: “Last night the Kremlin was broken into and next year’s election results were stolen.”

The two events could do with a face-lift. Both suffer from a lack of real understanding of their core purpose. They both take place because they’ve always taken place. In each case the organisers feel constrained by what they have to do and feel unable to focus on what they’d like to do. Attempts to re-purpose them often end up merely tinkering around the edges. In my experience, as much effort goes into deciding on the contents of the shareholder goody bag as into the content of the keynote speech.

Introducing a greater level of interactivity would be a good idea. At the party conferences, rather than the usual suspects lining up one after another to give set-piece presentations to a somnolent audience, perhaps they could get the delegates to split into groups to discuss specific issues. The same could work with AGMs. The formal business could be rattled through and then the senior executives - and there are normally plenty of them - could sit with small groups and hold discussions. And what’s more, these discussions could be webcast making them far more inclusive. Radical though it may be, in both instances it would be the delegates who would decide what they wanted to talk about rather than the leaders. Who knows, the leaders may even find it useful. But whatever happens, I just hope that those planning the next round of meetings don’t just start by saying: “Now, what did we do last year?”

The true nature of leadership

I recently took part in a discussion about leadership. A top research organisation was presenting some initial findings of whom members of the public considered to be leaders and what they thought the characteristics of leadership actually were. Many of the usual suspects, like Churchill, figured highly as well as a few less likely people such as Princess Diana. And given the public’s ideas of who most personified the idea of leadership it came as no great surprise that the top two characteristics identified were integrity and decisiveness.

The discussion itself was lively and centred mainly around whether true leadership was about dynamic, energetic decision-making or more about nurturing, empowering and team-building. It struck me that there is a consensus growing around the idea that leadership is less about doing per se and more about creating the climate in which things can be done. Slowly but surely the myth that leaders are born and that they a special breed is being debunked. The purposeful walkers and strategic decision-makers are becoming to be seen as less capable of true leadership.

Society today is increasingly complex. Issues rarely fit into nice neat boxes. Binary yes or no scenarios have given way to various shades of grey. It’s often all about context and all about nuance. Navigating through the various ‘what ifs’ requires a greater level of understanding and emotional maturity than the traditional, uncompromising, ‘just do it’ school of management. The leadership qualities required to succeed in such environments are often the softer ones including empathy, listening and, most importantly, team building.

One particular point was raised that I’ve been thinking about a great deal since. A participant said that in tough times what people wanted most was decisive leadership. I can understand that point: it is indeed what most people want. However, it is often not what they need. What they need most is vision, understanding and a sense of direction. They need to understand the context and what they need to do as a result. It was Kennedy who said that rather than asking what your country can do for you, one should ask “…what you can do for your country.” Too often we see that decisive leadership can create a dependency culture. In many organisations decisions are upwardly delegated leading to both paralysis and the creation of personality cults around the leader. Society and organisations need more people to recognise that true leadership is for everyone and not just for a clique of the ambitious. True leadership is about taking control of ones own life and surroundings and making a positive contribution. It is not about waiting for someone else to decide for you. And so for those who have risen to positions of influence and authority, their primary role must be to help create the right climate. Rather than being the telegenic, celebrity Chief Entertainment Officer, the true leaders are starting to see nurturing as their key role.

Adults at work

One of the most fulfilling of my many roles is mentoring. I act as a, often unofficial, mentor to a number of people and have done so throughout my career. Giving people the confidence to see issues differently is, I like to think, one of my key strengths.

A number of recent conversations have all had a common theme and have led me to relook at a book I first read 20 years ago. In the book, called “I’m ok – you’re ok”, Thomas Harris introduced the idea of Transactional Analysis. In a nutshell his point is that interactions based on adult to child, child to adult, and child to child approaches all lead to or result from dysfunctional behaviour, and that it is only when a relationship is on a proper adult to adult footing that true understanding can be found.

This came back to my mind because, listening to some recent stories of workplace issues, it was extraordinary how many were clearly the result of defective relationships. I heard examples of how the petulant attitude of one senior executive towards another had led to spiteful child to child reactions. So-called delegation and leadership was invariably of the adult to child sort (‘I don’t care what you think, I want this presentation ready by tonight’). Of course, this type of behaviour is neither new nor unusual, but it does demonstrate how despite small fortunes having been spent on training, development and talent management, so many workplace issues still come down to poor standards of human interaction.

One area where the interaction is still invariably child to adult is career counselling (‘please, Miss, can I have a promotion?’). Too many people seem content to delegate their work-life to someone else. There are paternalistic organisations that genuinely have their employees’ best interests at heart but many still see careers as being something linear, based on gaining experiences and progressing through an organisation that is based on hierarchies. However, I’m not sure whether this is still relevant. This struck me when one of my mentees said that their boss was recommending they take a job that they didn’t want and that they didn’t feel suited to because it would be seen by others to be a good thing. Their boss was suggesting two years of unfulfilment for the possibility of a better job in the future. Obviously it is important to invest in one’s career but this case made me wonder whether the paterfamilias model was more about creating a dependency model.

Nowadays the old management models of command and control are beginning to creak, under assault from both declining levels of trust and the increasing democratisation of information. Organisations of the future will be characterised by loose structures, collaborative working, and greater flexibility; status will be defined more by output than by hierarchically-imposed organisational charts. Perhaps then we will see the end of work relationships based solely on authority. Maybe it was hierarchical structures that led to the adult-child behaviour rather than the other way around, and so it is conceivable that as the formal structures start to erode, genuinely adult to adult workplace relationships, based on mutual respect and trust, will start to emerge in their place.

Today's CMO - Innovating or following?

That's the apt and challenging title of a publication produced today by the IBM Institute for Business Value in cooperation with the Economist Intelligence Unit. It's intended to provoke thought in the board room and it does just that.

The paper argues that there is an emerging distinction between two distinct groups of CMOs, labelled for this report as 'Innovators' and 'Adopters'. Not surprisingly, the 'Innovators' are characterised as leaders and all-round good guys while the majority 'Adopters' are simply playing catch-up when it comes to using data, insight and social media.

It's an international survey based on 299 executives, most of whom are called "Chief Marketing Officer" so its conclusions are well worth serious consideration. We warm to it because the findings closely match those from our own experience with top level marketers and their people.

The study suggests that, while most marketers have influence over production and promotion, comparatively few have much influence over price or place. In our experience this has less to do with marketer attitudes or competence than with organisational structures and the priority roles which Marketing is expected to fulfil.

We know from our work with leading companies how to help marketers up the scale from 'adopter' to 'innovator' but success requires a fresh approach across the organisation and from all members of the C-suite not just the CMO. Effective change has to come from within the whole organisation not just within Marketing.

Team work, leadership and the Rugby World Cup

It was Bill Shankly who famously said that football was not a matter of life and death. It was, he added, more important than that. I’ve never really understood the round ball game; I don’t see why they can’t just pick the ball up and run with it. Well, the arrival of the rugby world cup means that for the next five weeks we rugby fans will be fixated on events in New Zealand. For the day of the final I have rather optimistically pencilled in my diary Wales versus tbc. A classic case of the heart ruling the head. I also have a coffee mug emblazoned with the words: ‘I’d rather be watching Wales.’ In fact it should say, as any true rugby fan will agree, ‘I’d rather be watching France’. They play the game with a beguiling combination of éclat, insouciance, and brute force. Marvellous to watch.

Plenty of books have been written about what businesses can learn from sport, and many former sportsmen have made a living giving motivational speeches, talking of dedication, commitment, bonding, even thinking under pressure. This led to the creation of a whole industry around the idea of senior executives as corporate athletes. The modern interpretation of mens sana in corpore sano led to hundreds of CEOs swapping opera and golf for marathon running and personal trainers. Nutritionists devised special diets and Cartier watches were ditched in favour of heart monitors, all designed to ensure that these executives were in peak condition to run their organisations.

There is no doubt that the focus on the physical well-being of those who work under pressure has been a good thing. However, there are two areas where I feel more could be done. The first is mental health. That many people work too hard and experience high levels of stress is not in doubt. Physical exercise can help mitigate the worst symptoms but they don’t address the root cause. Proper relaxation, through techniques such as meditation, can help enormously to put things into context. Much activity in organisations is focused on doing things. Proper reflection can help bring a sense of perspective to issues that otherwise remain clouded by the haze of constant activity.

The second issue is the often misunderstood idea of leadership. The mythology of the leader as being a special person - a mythology perpetuated by business schools, talent managers and headhunters – has led to a dilution in the importance of the team. Leadership isn’t about doing; it is about creating the climate in which things can be done. The rugby world cup will be won by a squad of wholly inter-dependent players, supported by a host of professionals. It won’t be one player, not even the captain. It won’t be the coach, and it won’t be the fitness advisor. It will be the best team. A team of generalists and specialists; a team that comes in all shapes and sizes but that respect and complement each others skills. It is teams that win, teams that recognise that every member is, at any given time, the leader.

Not everyone, of course, agrees. And so the final word must surely go to the New Zealand schoolgirl who, in 1995 wrote to the All Blacks and said: “I want each of you to remember that rugby is a team game. And that means all 14 of you passing the ball to Jonah Lomu.”

‘Tis the season to be jolly

It’s been a funny old August. The weather has been cooler and the rain has been heavier. Not depressingly bad but neither spirit-raisingly good. And at the same time our usual silly season of a light-hearted news agenda has been replaced with economic doom and gloom, international conflict, and riots. It’s all been rather serious and has left some feeling short-changed. Whereas many of us normally look forward to September with its back-to-school feeling and fond memories of covering rugby boots with dubbin, this year I detect an early onset of SAD. And so it can’t be good for business if some are trudging back to work after their summer break with all the enthusiasm of the condemned man climbing the gallows.

Many people take work too seriously and work under huge pressure. They work long hours, grab sandwiches at their desk, stay late, work on the train, and check emails before going to bed. Work becomes a treadmill of constant tasks. The working environment may be different but the nature of the activity wouldn’t be out of place in a novel by Dickens or Gaskell, or a book by Engels. With pressure on resources and fear of redundancy many are hunkering down and getting on with what’s in front of them, fearful of upsetting the fragile apple cart. Shoulders are down, noses are at the grindstone, and humour seems in pretty short supply.

Work seems to have become more demanding and unproductive in direct correlation with the increase in technology designed to make it simpler. We have become slaves to our tools. Management seems reluctant to rid itself of legacy attitudes and hierarchical thinking. Just when technology is trying to liberate society, leaders are still trying to exert control. So we have a curious mix of a nine to five behaviour and working from home at the same time, leading to an always on culture. People are expected to embrace new ways of working without letting go of the old ways. New tasks and objectives arrive on top of, rather than instead of, previous goals. Work has become busier and less productive. And where’s the fun in that.

There are plenty of studies to show the effect of happiness on the workplace. Indeed, happiness gurus have been taking their messages to the highest levels in government. And yet each time something big happens seriousness returns to stifle the fun. The solution to all our woes is not, apparently, to refigure our values but to spend more. Economic prosperity leads to happiness, we’re told, despite the evidence which seems to show that it leads to debt. The trick, surely, is to start the other way round. Happiness leads to prosperity: emotional, physical and economic.

Until recently the received wisdom was that engaged employees were happy employees. Effort and resources were ploughed into expensive surveys designed to measure whether a workforce was content and, as the phrase went, prepared to go the extra mile. But happiness often remained elusive, perhaps because efforts to instil it were either contrived or missed the point.

Happiness comes from three main routes: having achievable goals; being of service to others; and having the time and space to be aware of and take pleasure in the moment and the environment. These three things are often absent in our daily work lives. Remuneration can be often divisive, with goals often creating competition between teams and individuals; goals are set in one moment of time but change and become muddled with other day-to-day priorities. And despite the best endeavours of office planners, the work environment is often noisy and frantic.

So rather than spend money on engagement surveys employers should start to liberate their employees and allow them to use to technology to be more agile, more productive and to work less hard. A less serious attitude to work coupled with the opportunity to challenge the received way of working can liberate people from the drudgery of work. After all, the closer ones nose is to the grindstone, the less one is able to see the bigger picture. Oh, and a few more jokes would be good.

Don’t panic!

Riots in London and the economic crisis have resulted in the predictable cry from opposition politicians for the leaders of the country to cut short their holidays and “get a grip”. Aside from the rather puerile nature of such demands (is it any wonder that so many people hold politicians in such low regard when politics seems to be nothing more than verbal ping-pong?), two issues come to mind. The first is just how many people seem to misunderstand what leadership actually is; and the second is the importance of holidays.

When I think of politicians “taking control” of incidents the picture that comes to mind is of a top-hatted Winston Churchill at the Sidney Street siege in 1911. The less said about his calling in of the Scots Guards and the firing of artillery guns the better. The image is important, however, because there are still politicians and business leaders who believe that their role, especially in a crisis, is that of decisive leadership. And that means doing things and making decisions. In fact, they are often the least qualified people to decide and their actions often prove disastrous. Perhaps they should abide by the maxim: “don’t just do something, stand there.”

It is a fallacy that leadership is about doing things. True leadership is about creating the environment in which things can happen. It is about building and nurturing teams of people who, in turn, use their skills and experience to solve complex issues. Returning to Churchill, he may well be venerated as a great war leader (which he undoubtedly was) but it was his team of specialists who won the war, as the war diaries of Lord Allenbrooke, inter alia, will testify.

One area where Churchill was ahead of the game was in his taking of holidays. He understood the need for the mind and the body to take the time necessary to relax. Even in the middle of the worst times of the war, senior politicians and military leaders were taking the sorts of lengthy holidays that today’s leaders can only dream of. Allenbrooke used to relax by going bird-watching. Occasionally he would return from a day alone deep in the countryside to find a telegram waiting. Today’s leaders, however, are rarely out of email contact for minutes, let alone hours. The idea of a relaxing holiday which includes an hour a day on email is a nonsense. The mind needs to switch off as much, if not more, than the body. So let people enjoy their breaks. Let them be with their family. And let the experts and deputies prove their worth.

Ozymandis and the hacking scandal

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away".

[Ozymandias – Percy Bysshe Shelley]

In the bars and restaurants of central London the hacking scandal dominates conversation. For the politically-minded there is only one subject worth tweeting about; and like all good soap operas, the drama is the more compelling for not knowing how the story will end. For me there are three distinct issues that emerge. But first, let’s remind ourselves of how we got to where we are.

Journalism, especially as practiced amongst the more populist titles, has never been for the faint-hearted. The profession didn’t earn its poor reputation overnight, but through a steady investment in dubious behaviour over many decades. From George Gissing to the present day, the journalist of popular culture has rarely been viewed as a paragon of virtue. The same goes for politicians. And so for the chattering classes to suddenly wake up to the imperfect relationship between the two is, to say the least, a bit rich. The fact is that this is unraveling for two reasons: the end of deference with the concomitant decline in trust, and the rise in transparency brought about by the explosion in electronic communications. Now there is nowhere to hide. We live in an age of fewer secrets, where all behaviours are subject to scrutiny. So what are the three issues that emerge from this?

The first is a reality check. For the vast majority of people this ‘scandal’ is of little interest. Outside the bubble of the great chatteratti, few people particularly care. They never held either journalists or politicians in high regard and so these latest shenanigans merely reinforce long-held prejudices. For them, what matters is their family, their economic position, and their immediate livelihood. This story serves to highlight the gap between the political class and the ordinary citizens (perhaps it is no surprise that so many have effectively opted out of the franchise).

The second is a more profound point. For those of us who have grown up believing that the cosy relationship between the media and the political class was how things were ordained, here is the wake-up call that life doesn’t actually have to be like this. The established hegemony only existed because we allowed it to, perhaps through supine fear, or because we felt it served our interests. But it is hugely important to remember what we always knew: that nothing lasts forever. Change is constant; things can improve; the current will give way to the future; the established order will be replaced. These are the lessons of history. With our new found confidence, and with the tools of electronic media, we can, like the citizens of the Middle East, say out loud that we think that society, as it is now constituted, is broken. Over-consumption and irrelevant consumption, together with poor values, has led us into a cul-de-sac. The pie throwing incident showed clearly that the emperor has no clothes. This should give us confidence to see things differently and to embrace change.

Thirdly, I sat back and tried guess which institution would be next to face the harsh reality of scrutiny under the spotlight of transparency. I have a feeling that it will be large corporations. Not because they harbour illegal activities, but because they are repositories of behaviours and attitudes that are increasingly questionable. There are fewer checks and balances on the actions of senior executives. The inter-connectedness between executives and non-executives is, to say the least, surprisingly incestuous; and the variance in pay and reward between senior executives and ordinary workers is of increasing concern. Annual meetings are a farce. The institutional investors are often absent, leaving the small, ordinary and utterly impotent shareholder to attempt to hold management to account. However, it may not be the outside world that starts to be more questioning of senior corporate management. The employees themselves have the social media tools and they are the ones that no longer automatically trust their seniors out of deference. They will increasingly start to want to refashion their organisations. Working practices need to become more relevant. Command and control management styles and hierarchies need to be replaced with collaborative models. And status and reward needs to be more equitable. After all, employees are becoming increasingly aware, like the traveller from an antique land, that nothing lasts for ever.

Rogue reporters and how to fix society

The furore over phone hacking in UK has produced much righteous indignation, much of it from journalists. Watching some of them pontificate with faux anger reminded me of Captain Renault as he closed down Rick’s bar in Casablanca: “I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here.” The truth, as one wag put it, is that it’s 95% of journalists who give the profession a bad name. Borrowing photographs from the mantelpieces of the deceased, misrepresenting, entrapment (including recently of a politician by reporters posing as constituents) are just of some the ruses employed by many journalists on publications and media outlets across the board. To blame one tabloid at the expense of the profession as a whole is to miss the point.

Some say that this is a watershed moment for the profession; that it is to journalists what the expenses scandal was to MPs. In truth, the general public were no more shocked to hear of the nefarious practices of some journalists than they were to find that some MPs were playing the system to feather their own nests. Such is the poor reputation of these two “professions”. The question now is what to do about it. For some it is about regulation. Clearly self-regulation (to which some media outlets have opted out anyway) is struggling with the reality of not wanting to point fingers for fear of having them pointed back. In any case, quis custodiet ipsos custodes, as they used to say in the forum. But surely a free press is the price that a healthy and robust democracy has to pay for being healthy and robust? After all, do we really want to be in a society where the establishment connives in covering up, for instance, the predatory behaviour of a senior politician?

Those who have worked in the pressure-cooker environment of a tabloid newspaper speak of the sole focus as that of getting the exclusive story. Nothing else seems to matter. But only in highly regimented command and control environments, such as the military, do rules and regulations dictate behaviour. Journalism is under real pressure from many angles. There are no longer any significant barriers to entry. Training budgets are being slashed, and the business model is having to re-invent itself in the face of disruptive technology and with competition now coming in all shapes and sizes. All this means that regulation is never likely to be the answer and would be unlikely to change behaviours.

So what is going to happen? The sheer complexity of the situation seems overwhelming. But the truth is that you tend to get the media that you deserve. To blame them for being salacious is to ignore our own prurient attitudes. It may sound naïve, but the solution lies within ourselves. It is we who need to reset our values. It is we who need to be reminded of what is and what isn’t really important. This may sound horribly naïve, but sustainable change really does come from within. If we are not happy with how society and its institutions have turned out then we have to change them through our own behaviour. Small actions do lead to big changes. And that change starts at home. As Ghandi said: “Be the change you want to see.”

Dante’s Inferno and change consultants

I’m currently crawling my way through Dante’s Inferno (in English, obviously) and have just met those souls doomed to walk forever with their heads facing the wrong way. Walking forward but facing backwards, these are the futurologists; those who were so presumptuous as to try and foresee and foretell the future. Considering that they’re in valley 4 of circle 8 and a long way further down than the heretics, gluttons, pimps and money lenders, I thought this was a bit harsh. Especially as I myself have spent a good deal of my work life trying to envision the future. And so I wondered what this meant for change consultants.

Traditional change consultants tend to impose change on organisations. They pre-cook their solutions off site and then heat them up before serving their often unpalatable offerings onto an unwilling workforce. It is often a case of replacing tried and tested but unfashionable systems with untried and untested fashionable systems. The result is like tipping the chess board over and trying to carry on the game with fewer players all of which are out of position.

The new breed approach change radically differently. For a start, they often have few processes. What they try to do is create a climate in which change happens naturally. By encouraging dialogue and co-creation they aim to make change evolutionary and thereby sustainable. So they are not trying to impose a future per se, but enabling an organisation and its people to see things differently.

I passionately believe that most organisations know that it doesn’t have to be like this. Surely if we had a chance to start again then we would never allow society and its institutions become what they’ve become. Current levels of consumption are unsustainable; risk and reward are out of kilter; people are working far too hard and under too much pressure. Within work people are often constrained by legacy processes, and ingrained behaviours and attitudes. The ratio between productive and unproductive work seems wrong, with so much time given over to internal meetings and endless powerpoint presentations. For many work is dominated by large amounts of input and output, and outcome, actually achieving something, remains a distant memory. Scratch the surface and many people will admit that they’re not happy with their work lives. But what to do about it?

There is also a new breed of leaders coming through who recognise that life doesn’t have to be like this. They are recognising the power of social media to help to change radically the way that their organisations function. Principally, they see that command and control is no longer effective. But they also see the enormous benefits of embracing the new communications technology to encourage co-creation and collaboration. They recognise that the new organisations will not be hide-bound by processes, silos, divisions and, most of all, by hierarchies or status. They know that empowered employees can help them create the organisations they wish they had.

So perhaps it is less about envisioning the future than in changing the present. What would Dante think of that? I’ll let you know when I reach Paradise. But before I get there I have to pass the corrupt advisors. Now I wonder who they might be?

Leadership without a title

At the church in the village where I live is a plaque which commemorates Thomas Howard Esquire, son of the Honourable Sir Robert Howard, and grandson of the Right Honourable Thomas, Earl of Berkshire, who died on the fourth day of April, 1701. I’ve often wondered why Thomas Howard (assuming that it was him who chose his own memorial, as was common in those days) felt it important that people knew him not as who he was himself, but rather as the son of an Honourable Baronet and, more importantly, the grandson of a Right Honourable Earl. To be fair, his father was a famous playwright but I’ve always felt curious that even in death Thomas Howard seemed to be conscious of titles. Perhaps he was grumpy that the principle of primogeniture had ennobled his cousins but left him to make his own way with no handle to hold onto.

The same is true in business with many organisations still stratified along hierarchical lines, meaning that titles and status have become very important. Reward packages, holiday entitlements, engagement survey’s, and even desk space, all seem to be determined by grade or a work level. To a certain extent some form of graduated authority is inevitable, but there are some big issues at play. Firstly, some people start to believe in their own status. They begin to define themselves by their job title and find it difficult to recognise their real self beyond what it says on their business card. These are the people most resistant to change. They have spent twenty years investing in their career, missing school plays and anniversaries as they make their way up the greasy pole. The last thing that they are going to do is to accept new ways of working that threaten their access to the executive washroom. These are the people who are being challenged by both the arrival of generation Y with their new views and values and also by social media which allows information (after all, knowledge used to be power) to flow horizontally across organisations rather than vertically through layers of management.

There is, however, one fundamental truth which many people in business today miss: you do not need a title to be a leader. Indeed, you don’t need people to be a leader. Leadership is not about telling people what to do. It is not about doing things, executing things, and generating things. It is about nurturing and creating the climate in which things can be done. True leadership doesn’t need titles or status. True leadership comes from being authentic and knowing who you are. With that comes a powerful sense of knowing what’s important and what, like titles, isn’t. And if you are true to yourself then people will gravitate towards you. And that really is leadership.

What’s your Clause IV?

Just been re-reading parts of Tony Blair’s autobiography.

Love him or loathe him, he was an exceptionally skilled agent of change. Within his party at least.

Blair took a massive gamble early in his leadership on campaigning to abolish Clause IV, a redundant Labour credo dating back to 1917 which called, amongst other things, for “the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange” and was hence incompatible with any embrace of the free market.

In Blair’s words:

“It was largely symbolic. No one except the far left ever really believed in Clause IV as it was written. In a sense that was my point: no-one believed in it, yet no-one dared remove it. What this symbolised, therefore, was not just something redundant in our constitution, but a refusal to  confront reality, to change profoundly, to embrace the modern world wholeheartedly. In other words, this symbol mattered. It was a graven image, an idol. Breaking it would also change the psychology in the party that was damaging and reactionary and which was precisely what had kept us in Opposition for long periods.”

The gamble paid off and, as Blair writes, “the battle over Clause IV more or less set the scene for the style and content of leadership in the years up to 1997” (when he became PM).

So my thought for other leaders is this:

What’s your Clause IV?

What outdated practice or belief within your organisation has the potential to be both a real and a symbolic platform for change. And can you take a leaf out of Tony’s book to tackle it head on?

Executive Pay

Most people would agree that something has gone wrong with the levels of pay enjoyed by senior executives. Certainly, it would seem that the remuneration for top people is not in line with public sentiment. Anyone who has ever been to the annual shareholders meeting of a large business will know just how vexed an issue it is. They do, of course, get a vote. The floor of the meeting unanimously votes against the directors pay resolution only to see that the, often absent, institutional shareholders have already voted in favour. So, where did it all go wrong and does it actually matter.

Ironically, it all went wrong for the right reasons. Institutional shareholders wanted to encourage two things in company leaders: shared ownership (called, rather unpleasantly, ‘skin in the game’) and long-term thinking. This is now the root of the real problem. Of course, the six figure basic packages are too high relative to the average employee, but it is the share scheme packages that create the real disparity, resulting in multi-million payouts over a number of years.

So why is pay so high? There are three main reasons, two of which are based on myths. Firstly, that there is a global market for leaders. The evidence would suggest that most people live and work in their home countries. There is, and always has been a small cadre of international CEOs, but most aren’t. It reminds me of the great Sir Thomas Beecham who once said “Why do we have to have all these third-rate foreign conductors around when we have so many second-rate ones of our own?”

The second myth is that leaders are special people who have unique skills that are transferable across both companies, countries and sectors. Well, I’ll leave you to ponder on that. But on the whole the solutions to issues and the people to solve them already exist in most organisations. Therefore, it is more effective and sustainable to create the climate in which change can flourish from within rather than in parachuting in superstars from outside.

The third reason why pay is so high is because of the rather incestuous relationship between remuneration committees aided and abetted by pay consultancies. Some business journalists in the past have mapped the network of who sits on whose board. The result has been an arms race of back-scratching where the down side of failure is irrelevant to people who have already built up multi-million shareholdings and pension funds.

But does any of this matter beyond a general feeling of unfairness? Well, it does serve to underline why the levels of trust towards leaders is so low and why so few employees actually listen to what their leaders are saying. Clearly whatever leaders say to their employees, they’re not all in it together. This is never more important than during times of change when the disproportionate nature of risk and reward is at is most acute.

And what to do about it? Well, as the old joke goes, I wouldn’t start from here.

“Social Media Will Replace Business Websites”

“Social Media Will Replace Business Websites”

This was the headline to a recent story in Forbes.com. A reader followed up by asking: “If this is really going to happen, how will it affect the practice of change management /organizational development?”

Here’s what I replied:

Whereas it is true that nothing lasts for ever, it is also the case that rumours of the death of any channel tend to be wildly exaggerated. Just as the DVD hasn’t killed off the cinema, which in turn hasn’t killed off the theatre, so too is there a place for every communication channel. It is, as with most things, a question of what is the most appropriate in any given context.

With regard to company websites, they are continuing to evolve from basically electronic brochures to interactive sites that can be used both for sales generation and as a media channel. Where they are becoming less successful, however, is for conversations. People are leaving web sites and gravitating either to web space (such as Facebook) or to similar special-interest groups where discussions are focused on specific topics.

And to answer your question specifically, what it means for change management and organisational development is that people will use social media techniques and tools (whether or not they have been sanctioned by senior management) to share information and collaborate on ideas.The result will be a new workplace paradigm based on flatter, non-hierarchical structures where status is less apparent. Today’s citizen is typically a sophisticated user of technology. Just as they are using such tools to topple undemocratic regimes they may soon use them to impact behaviour within traditional command and control businesses. It could be the start of a real workplace revolution.

Well. What do you think?

Trust, privacy, and control

The twitterisation of society continues apace. US covert action and super-injunctions have found themselves outed on the ubiquitous chatter blog. There seems no escape from it. Indeed, many of you will have come to this blog via that channel. It all seems very new, as if the foundations of traditional communications are being rocked. The reality is that society has always been pretty prurient, on the one hand, whilst on the other, many people have had plenty of reasons to want to keep certain things secret. There’s always been gossip, and there’s always been a need for privacy. In reality, I’m not sure that there is an answer that satisfies all parties. I certainly have no definitive view point. Actually, I’m quite enjoying watching the doyens of the media, legal profession and the blogosphere arguing the equivalent of the number of angels that can fit on a pin head.

Now I’m not intending to belittle the real harm that can be done to individuals and their families from private matters becoming public. Nor am under-estimating the real value that can come from transparency. But I do believe that it is all about context. I think that many people are looking at this matter from the wrong angle. It is a fact that the number of injunctions (super or otherwise) is pretty small. On the other hand the benefits of sharing information, of encouraging dialogue, and of collaborating and co-creating, whether by blog, micro-blogs or “traditional” methods is something so beneficial to society that we mustn’t throw the baby out with the bath water.

The prurient will always be with us. But in the end rather than focus on negative issues such as the shenanigans of here-today-gone-tomorrow sports stars we would be better served by talking about how to use new channels to encourage real dialogue that can help shape our society for the better.

Change and the art of golf part ll

After two weeks of hitting balls at the driving range, it became very clear that all was not well. Short irons were pretty good but long irons were frankly rubbish. And as for the big woods? Well, I simply couldn’t hit them for toffee. So I signed up for a lesson. What became clear was that my grip, and consequently my swing, were incorrect. My timing, eye for the ball and strength were excellent and so with the short clubs I was able to compensate for my bad grip and get the balls away. But with the longer clubs I had no chance. I now have to re-learn a completely new way of holding and swinging a golf club. And I’ve learnt two big lessons:

Firstly, change isn’t easy. Doing things differently goes against every instinct (and muscle). The body and mind fight against any imposed change and constantly try and revert to the familiar however wrong it knows it to be. Real change requires practice, a vision of the future and commitment.

Secondly, I rather belatedly realised that it often requires outside help to make the change effective. I was put off by the cost of the lesson (a false economy) and because I thought that I had all the answers. Indeed, I thought that perseverance would be enough. In fact, I was persevering in the wrong direction. Sometimes we need to listen to outside advice. Sometimes we need to accept that experts can bring wide experience to a situation. And sometimes we need to realise that we are blind to those things in front of us but that outsiders can see issues with greater clarity. It is not always a case of physician heal thyself. Second opinions are important.

Now it is back to the range, but this time with the knowledge that what feels wrong is in fact right.