Performance

When is your leadership rehearsal?

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If you play an instrument, dance or play a sport you’ll understand the importance of rehearsal and practice. The essence of producing the required performance at the time that matters is based on preparation and investment.

Yet how often do you spend rehearsing your performance as a leader? It is a curious peculiarity of leadership and management that are we expected to be always on and yet always perform.

Imagine a football player only ever having game time, or a musician always being on stage. Common sense and experience tells us that in these circumstances they’re unlikely to improve the quality of their delivery. Sure they might have natural talent or ability, but what is the likelihood they’d progress?

Even those at the top of their games spend time to practice, analyse and focus on improvement. Daily.

The natural rhythm of business life is counterproductive to the concept of leadership rehearsal. We move from one meeting to the next, from one decision to another. Rarely stopping to pause or reflect. And even at the end of the day, the structure of modern life is such that the emails, the papers and presentations continue.

The lucky few might find have a coach that they can spend time with and create a space for important focus and reflection, but what about the rest of us, what can we do?

Rehearsal is a mindset, it is about wanting to improve, deliver and perform. It is about being curious about the elements of your personal leadership performance that could or should be done better. What do you want to improve?

Rehearsal is about buying yourself time. It is about identifying the important moments in your day or week and ensuring that you’re prepared – not just intellectually, but behaviourally and emotionally. How do you want to be?

Rehearsal is about analysis. It is about reviewing and reflecting and seeking to understand the elements that went well and not so well. How did you do?

Rehearsal is about learning. It is about seeking out different sources of information, watching others, reading, seeking out inspiration and provocation. What could you learn?

The secret of performing, isn’t much of a secret – it is simply about practice and rehearsal. That applies to leadership as much as anything else. When is your leadership rehearsal?

Fads, fashions and the self-confident leader

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Hands up if you’ve never looked at a photo from your past and thought, “what was I doing wearing that?”, or looked in the dark recesses of your wardrobe and seen the unworn, unloved item that at the time of purchasing, you were convinced would make you look swathe, sophisticated and downright sexy.

My guess is there’s not many hands in the air (not least because that sort of thing gets you thrown off the train or bus).

The point is that we are all susceptible to following along with a trend, a fashion or fad that we later realise wasn’t perhaps in our best interest. We do this in work and in business all the time – it is no different to any other aspect of life.

The corporate corridors are littered with the failed and reversed decisions made by leaders at all levels, because they read, heard or were advised that “everyone else is doing x”. It happens in HR, it happens across business and it is entirely and completely natural.

But that doesn’t make it right.

Its not hard to understand why we make these decisions, we’re often proposed something that feels simple, easy to implement, is recommended by “experts”, has some sort of resonance with a broader meta-trend within the world and will lead to tangible, measurable improvement.

We’ve seen this with mass outsourcing, TQM, holacracy, management by consensus, management by objective, the Ulrich model. I could go on.

None of these practices are in themselves bad, what is questionable is the wholesale implementation of these across the corporate spectrum without consideration of the best way of implementing change for the specific organisational context.

And that’s where the self confident leader comes in. In the same way that the phrase goes, “no-one ever got fired for hiring Deloitte/McKinsey/IBM” (delete as appropriate to your age and era), there is often reassurance in moving with the homogenous mass. That is part of our psychological makeup.

The role of the leader is to have the confidence, the willingness and the space to be able to call out when this isn’t in the best interests of their organisation, function or team. It is  to push the thinking, the creation of ideas and the solutions beyond the realms of accepted wisdom, to test whether it is really the right way forward.

No-one ever said being a leader is easy, in fact the better you want to be, the harder it can feel. Standing up and not doing the things that others are, can be harder than following. But sometimes the most fertile soil is found in the least worked ground.

Is your organisation aligned?

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How much of your work really makes a difference? How much is about achieving your organisation’s purpose and how much about organisational goals? And are they even the same?

One of the biggest drivers of organisational performance is alignment, an area less talked about than two other “A terms” – agility and adaptability. But I’d argue that in many ways, the key to being a truly agile organisation starts with alignment.

So what do we mean when we talk about organisational alignment? One of my favourite explanations is this one from Jonathan Trevor and Barry Varcoe via Harvard Business Review.

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Ultimately it s the way in which we organise ourselves to fulfil our organisational purpose. Are the goals we are working to helping to deliver this, do we have the organisational capability and are our resources organised and supported to achieve these aims?

It also asks us to challenge ourselves about the things that we do that aren’t helpful to this aim. Every act that we do that isn’t aligned to our purpose takes resource and time away from activities that could be.

The meetings that we have that aren’t productive
The processes we create that take disproportionate time versus outcome
The activities that are only self-fulfilling
The vanity projects that we struggle to end

Alignment is a great way of thinking not only about the overall organisational context, but as an individual functional head, or department lead. We can easily look at the work of others and talk about the shortcomings and the lack of necessity, but how about we take the same time to really consider our own work and efforts. What could we stop, start, do better?

Finally, back to the other A word. Agility is best achieved through clear purpose. When we know what and why were trying to achieve something, it helps us to adapt quickly and realign in changing circumstances.

But ultimately, it is exactly that alignment that gets things delivered.

Are you an HR snowflake?

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Life is full of debate and discussion about issues and events. One of the joys of being social animals is the ability to express, challenge and build on the opinions of others. But always respectfully, thoughtfully and decently – no matter how robustly.

And business, like life, can be tough. There are a lot of great professionals working in-house that know how to navigate through their environments and to ultimately be successful. But the spectrum goes from some of the most inspiring colleagues I’ve worked with to those that frankly weren’t renowned for their thick skins.

Wherever you work in the broader HR family, you live and die each day based on your ability to perform in the environment in which you work. We know that we will be challenged daily and have to be robust in our pursuit of success. It isn’t a place for the weak-willed or the fragile. Not if you want to succeed.

Being robust, being willing to express a point of view, but also remaining open to challenge and being willing to listen, learn and amend your perspective is crucial. Closing off contrary viewpoints, becoming entrenched in blinding self conviction is a critical failure.

I particularly find it interesting that in areas of the profession that will talk about learning, growth mindsets, curiosity and development we so often see the opposite. If we are to be credible and valuable, then we should always stand up and practice what we preach. Not run away.

Don’t be an HR snowflake. If someone challenges your world view, take time to consider, question yourself and their perspective, recognise it as a chance to learn, grow and adapt. You have a choice, to listen, or to disengage. The successful will never, ever choose the latter path.