leadership | change-effect

Let the lawmakers make law

I hesitated before writing this post, there are some topics that I’ve seen over the years tend to draw the wrong kind of audience, the ones that want winners and losers, the ones that want to blame and point fingers, the ones that – no matter how many caveats or waivers you include – want to read hidden meaning into the words that you write. But on the flip side, there are more people in the world that want to reflect, consider and discuss than there are those that want to provoke.

So perhaps unsurprisingly, for a UK audience, my thoughts are on the Supreme Court ruling in the last week on the legal definition of a “woman”. But, (and here come the waivers) I don’t want to talk about the decision, the opposing arguments, the rights or the wrongs. I want to talk about the role of leadership and organisations and how they organise themselves for their employees and customers in a broader ecosystem.

One of our primary responsibilities is to act within the law. Over the thirty years I’ve been running businesses I’ve seen a whole host of legal decisions, some that I’ve agreed with, some that I haven’t. But that doesn’t really matter, because my role is not to make law, but to run my business. The simple fact is that the ruling last week has brought clarity on an area that was previously driven by opinion and belief (often in conflict with others) and so any leader should welcome that clarity, even if they may not personally agree with it.

Organisations get into trouble when they are led not by the law but the beliefs of a few senior people and I’ve written before about the dangers of business moving into social policy. My guess is that some organisations who’ve been doing that will be left scratching their heads at the ruling and trying to figure out how they reconcile the approach that they’ve previously taken, based on some half complete advice, with the direction they’ve just been given, based on the law.

Of course there will be those that don’t agree with the judgment, like there will be those that don’t agree with the outcomes of elections, referendums or the actions of government or the authorities. But ultimately, the reason we have these mechanisms in our society is to make these decisions for us and to give us the clarity to operate within the parameters we are set. In the same way there is no point in calling the electorate stupid for voting for a different outcome than the one you want, there is no point in suggesting the Supreme Court judges made a poor decision unless you have the knowledge, understanding, means and wherewithal to challenge the technical legal points. We should remember, that the judges were faced with a specific question, not given an open opportunity to opine.

The politicisation of business over the last decade or so hasn’t, in my opinion, been a positive step forward. There are very few founder led businesses who can essentially do their bidding, the rest of us should focus on our stakeholders, customers, shareholders and employees and knuckle down to deliver. If we’d been doing that, rather than making statements, the ruling of the Supreme Court would have been significantly less sensational, regardless of the decision they landed on. And we would have spent more time, focusing on those things that we truly had under our control – which is what we all need to do right now.

Mistakes are the things that make us

Posted on March 24 by Blog

One of the questions I often ask in interview is around mistakes in the past that have made people who they are. The way in which people talk about them, the way in which they react and the learning they take from them is often fascinating. Of course, I’m not really interested in the mistake in itself, what I’m really interested in is firstly the sincerity with which they talk about the issue and the way in which they incorporate it into their leadership and management style.

How you handle mistakes can be fundamental to how you develop as a leader. There are two clear mistakes that I see people make;

Applying a kind of cognitive dissonance that seeks to apportion blame to others and absolve yourself of personal responsibility. Whilst this can be a useful tool in certain circumstances, there are very few situations that we can’t learn something from if we are willing to hold our own actions and decisions up for assessment.
Dwelling on a decision or issues to the point that it prevents us from being able to move onwards. People get stuck on a particular situation or moment and that makes them act differently or inhibits them without having really processed the learning.

It can be hard in the moment to get the right balance of reflection and self assessment without becoming stuck in the moment, so here’s how I think about it for myself.

Deal with the issue at hand first. When things go wrong the first thing is to try and rectify the issue and provide a way forward for whatever it is you’re facing into. There is zero benefit to be gained from over analysing whilst there is still an outstanding issue or problem to be solved.
Give yourself time to properly assess what happened. Our brains can make simplified versions of past events pretty quickly and sometimes that skips details or moments that we genuinely learn from. The shorthand is useful to get us through the immediate issue, but when we have time we need to unpack the full unadulterated version.
Be ok with identifying things you both could and couldn’t do differently. As with any action planning, you need to be able to own and take those steps, so be equally clear with the things that you wouldn’t be able to change in the future as those that you want to build into your leadership going forward.
Put it in a box. Once you’ve kicked it around and figured out the learning, put the experience into a box, put it at the back of the mental cupboard and close the door. Only hold on to the learning not the event or moment itself, it won’t serve you well.
But, hold onto the feeling. Remembering how you felt when you made a mistake is a great way of using your whole body to help you to achieve better outcomes in the future. When I ask people the question in interview, I can immediately see those that held onto the feeling.

One thing we can all be sure of is that mistakes happen, they will happen to all of us throughout our working lives. What we do with the experience, how we use it to drive us forward is the thing that makes the biggest difference. And sometimes that also means moving on.

It isn’t a game of two halves

Posted on March 10 by Blog

I’ve written before about my dislike for sporting analogies in business. I’d argue that hiring ex sports people to come and speak to your management teams is the prime example of leadership development as a placebo. Very few are prepared or experienced enough to make the translation of their knowledge into the world of work, mainly because very few have lived in that world. Think of it the other way around, how many of you would suggest drafting in a CEO to speak to your favourite sporting team on the eve of their most important contest? If the knowledge and experience was that transferable, it would make absolute sense. And yet it doesn’t, because it isn’t.

Most sporting contests have a clear beginning, middle and end. Whether it is a triathlon, a football game, the pole vault, sailing around the world, or ice skating. There is a defined structure to it that includes a start, an end and an expected period of time. If you have a shocking race, match, tournament or competition, you get to go again at the next one and in most cases the slate is entirely wiped clean when you do so. You get to train, research and perfect your performance in a non-competition environment before you enter the live environment and perfect any set pieces, moves or manoeuvres time and time again.

By contrast, business never stops and is always live. As a business leader your practice is pretty much wholly in the live environment and your mistakes aren’t mostly behind closed doors but in front of the people that you will come in and be with every day of the working week – time and time again. You don’t get to go again, unless you leave the organisation – but even then your reputation will often follow you – and there is no resetting of the time, the score or the points.

My intention isn’t to make a qualitative assessment of one against the other, merely to say that they’re different and require different approaches, a different mindset and a different focus. Sport can learn from business as business can learn from sport but neither is a panacea for the other. But recognising the differences can also help us focus on the things that we need to do better as leaders.

If we recognise we are always on, then we need to recognise that people will see us falter and fall and we need to embrace that as a strength not a weakness. If we recognise that every day is the real thing, that there is no rehearsal, then we can forgive ourselves when we aren’t our best, learn from it and move on. And if we recognise that there is no beginning or end, we can view our leadership as a journey rather than a competition – one that will have highs and lows and many bits in between.

If you want fairness, you might need to give something up

Posted on March 3 by Blog

I came into business on the back of studying Psychology many light years ago before it became such a hot topic for undergraduates. Fortunately for me, back then you didn’t need three straight As to get anywhere near the hallowed halls of university. The course that I took, and the modules I chose, focused a lot on child development something that I’ve light heartedly (and sometimes seriously) suggested prepared me well for dealing with fellow execs and the world of work.

Let’s take the concept of fairness. There are countless studies that show that a quite a young age, around three or four, children understand the principles of fairness. They understand that if you have three toys and two friends, then the fair thing is for every child to have a toy to play with. But there is often a gap between understanding and behaviour depending on the context being observed – whether there is a level of collaboration, whether rewards are given separately, whether there is a windfall.

Fast forward into the world of work and whilst we aren’t necessarily talking about toys anymore (unless you work for Hasbro or Lego), the concept of fairness is something that we talk about a lot. For example, we’ve all seen the various cartoons and explanations of the difference between, equality and equity. Similarly, studies have shown that employees view fairness at work as being one of the fundamental pillars of “a good work place”.

But similarly to the kids in the experiments who understand the concept of fairness but don’t want to share their toys, there is often a gap between our desire for a fair outcome and our willingness to accept that this might mean we, ourselves, need to give something up. Let’s go back to where we started this post, in getting into university. Unless university places increase exponentially (and there’s another post in here somewhere about whether they have tried to do this at great cost to young people) then by increasing access and widening participation it is likely to mean that the children of people who might previously attended without batting an eyelid, might not be getting into the university or course of their choice.

The whole concept of WFH (yes I am going to mention this again) is another example of us not factoring fairness into our own decision making. The proponents of WFH will often say, “I am more productive”, or “I can work like this, so why shouldn’t I?”. And of course they’re entirely correct and in some organisations where everyone can do the same, say a digital marketing agency, that might be a fair direction of travel. But in those where that isn’t the case, let’s say a retail bank, how many would give up their own freedoms in order to create a fairer workplace for those that can’t?

Why is this important? Is this just another opportunity for Neil to have a pop at working from home? Well no, not on this occasion, it is important because as leaders, as people professionals, it is fundamentally our responsibility to shape workplaces that are as fair as possible. And to do that we need to do a number of things; we need to make decisions that won’t be popular with some and not be lured by the idea that fairness and approval are the same thing; we need to be very aware of our own perceptions of fair and what we personally might need to give up; and we need to recognise that it will never be perfect and that not being perfect is ok as long as we are constantly checking in on our decisions and our approach and how we can make them fairer, little by little, bit by bit.