HOW NOT TO LEAD (CONCLUSION)

TREAT DIVERSITY AS A COSMETIC

The best way to make this happen is to either ignore diversity, preach it but don't reflect it at all, or else have countless international offices and claim that makes you 'global' automatically.

Diversity has to do with numerous facets. First, there is the issue of the ratio of men to women leaders. Men and women often reflect different perspectives, leadership tempos, and even social skills. I am not seeking to enter into a debate about whether any of this is innate or conditioned, however it's certainly palpable. We know women leaders are at least as capable as their male counterparts. So one checkpoint is are there women leaders at ALL levels of the organisation?

A second place to check out the diversity equation is the range of ages represented. Age often brings wisdom, but at least it should pack some experience in its hip pocket. Youth often brings enthusiasm and energy, but it should at least offer some constructive brashness and chutzpah. We need a sliding scale of ages and viewpoints and a range of experiences to make the diversity cocktail the creative brew it should be.

A third place has to do with ethnic diversity. If you look around the Board Room and it's a collection of guys from one background, your company could be represented in every country on the map and it's still not GLOBAL, it's just 'international' (which is more about an assortment of postal codes than it is about paradigms and outlooks). Different ethnic backgrounds also relay different intuitions, reflexes, drives and views. If we're going to be global, while unifying our leaders with a set of shared and synergising values, we want to tap them for all the innovative idiosyncracy they can offer.

And then the final checkpoint for diversity has to do with paradigms and viewpoints, leaving aside gender, age and ethnicity. It is still possible to undermine and defang diversity by getting people who 'cosmetically' look like a true 'rainbow coalition', but who have been put through the corporate meat grinder so that they all come out the same. Then we have truly, in the immortal words of the side-splittingly insightful British show YES MINISTER, 'clutched defeat from the jaws of victory'. We have numbed and dumbed our diverse collection, so that they essentially speak and emote by corporate rote.

To fail, go to war on diversity as being too threatening. To succeed, give diverse people a reason to come together, and allow them to interact vigorously but constructively, to ensure their diversity is a source of creativity and shared value.

FORGET THAT IT'S FINALLY ALL ABOUT RELATIONSHIPS

We've said before that the best vision or strategy needs people to implement it. However, even more accurately, it needs people collaborating TOGETHER to implement it. All leadership is finally about relationships -- with our team, with our customers, with our partners.

The best way to demolish this is to first refuse to coach and develop people, which is the primary job of any leader. Instead, just harangue, criticise, yell at, order, preach to, your people. Even better, when you 'bark' orders, just call it coaching, and that way we can kill multiple birds with the same proverbial stone. Coaching is primary relationship-building, because through it we become architects of the other person's success. We RELATE with them in a partnership whereby we develop them and they return the favour by expressing that very development in a way that adds increasing value to our organisation and team.

A companion way to destroy this relationship potential is to not empathise with, care for, support or encourage people either. That way we let them know they are as replaceable as piston rods, we consider them utilities, and they have no intrinsic interest, appeal or value to us at all. A team is a collection of (hopefully) talented people who trust each other, care for each other, and on that basis challenge each other to jointly produce outstanding results. Absent relationships, all we'll ever get is a 'group' (see our earlier newsletter on this topic), that we have to chase and bully as we can't possible then inspire and engage.

We can top this off by ensuring our customers feel they are only of 'transactional' value, and we want to profit from them, but not help them succeed or enhance the value of their lives. The old saw is that when we're trying to sell someone, we call them everyday. After we've sold them, and they want to actually get the service or value we were promising so vociferously, THEY call us every day! For shame! But it's a great way NOT to lead.

Equally if our suppliers can feel that ours is an adversarial relationship, then we can train them to think of us as 'commodities' in their lives, for which substitutes can be found at any time. Imagine the waste we can foster by NOT treating our suppliers as partners and by not seeking to optimise the success of the entire value chain by being outstanding customers our suppliers will be motivated to 'wow' and positively support and surprise.

Great leaders are great relationship builders and they find great people, teams, partners and customers to service, interact with, mutually benefit and support. When others are more than a utility for you, and vice-versa, then we have a stake in helping each other succeed. What could be a greater leadership aspiration than that?

OBSESS ABOUT METRICS RATHER THAN REAL IMPACT

This next failure tactic comes back to the 'technical fallacy' I spoke about in the first edition that addressed this subject. If we can continue to track technicalities, absurd indices, make endless calculations, and analyze everything to death, we can delay real decisions and ignore wake-up calls for a good while.

If you measure everything, you measure nothing. What are the 3-4 most critical economic indicators your company has to be aware of in real-time (or as close to it as is possible)? What is THE economic driver of the business? What key numbers let us know if our growth is vibrant, sustainable, and taking us towards our vision and strategy? This is the leadership clarity we need to make sure we're not drowning in a sea of numbers while the real story, the one we should be paying attention to, is hidden from view.

In the people and talent area, for example, we can measure the application of systems, or the impact produced by our practises. In the financial arena, we can always look at whether we are following procedure, or actually producing value. When it comes to supply chain, we can be utterly efficient and quite ineffective. Re customer relationship management, we can track and record everything, and yet understand nothing. Re customer service, we can fulfill our commitment of reading with a beaming smile the entire scripted checklist we've been given, and fail to connect with or emotionally satisfy the real concern our customer was trying to share with us.

A great way to fail, is to create lots of technical measurements, and have everyone chase around making sure they're done. That way, if challenged, the person can say, 'I followed the process'. But processes while hugely important, can't substitute for impact, sense, personal initiative and value. Absent processes, we have rampant indiscipline and confusion. But just wallowing in processes, means all we have is sterile, uninspired mechanics.

Impact matters. If a process is producing the impact we want -- ie. we really ARE understanding our customers better, we are reducing cycle times, our satisfaction and customer retention ratings are soaring, our turnover is down and our productivity is up, our EVA and ROCE are skyrocketing, hallelujah! Otherwise, we're really fiddling with knobs when the electricity is out. We have to focus on the power supply, not the instruments we use to allocate that power when it IS available and abundant.

Leaders have a great 'bullshit monitor' and they challenge each activity, meeting, metric, report, to justify its existence and survival. Impact is the Holy Grail of leadership.

IGNORE PASSION AS A REPORT CARD

Finally, just forget that passion is the ultimate report card for leadership success.

Essentially, how do you tell there's leadership in the air, that we are working towards a powerful vision and exciting strategy, that we have a culture that will get us there, and the necessary support and technology to make it happen? You can tell it, because there's a buzz, the place feels like opening night of a Broadway show, in short there's PASSION.

The absence of passion is unnatural. We are naturally passionate. When we meet our friends, there's no passion problem. When we play an impromptu game of catch with our friends, there's no passion problem. When we go to a movie with our family, there's passion there. When we hear music, we're passionate. When we laugh out loud, we are emitting passion. We are passionate it seems EVERYWHERE except in places that are fake, dehumanizing, insipid, incoherent and inconsistent. As Dilbert has proven to our collective dismay, that's an eeriely accurate description of far too many workplaces.

So if you want to fail with style, with a splash, expect this. Expect that sullen, morose, half-hearted people, who dash for the door the first moment they can, and slink into work with a defeated gait, are natural. Expect that coffee room gossip and meeting room invective are norms. Look forward to cynical snickers and rolling eyes at the announcement of every new initiative, and expect weary sighs to punctuate the silence throughout the day. Then, with such a cauldron of boredom, set 'breakthrough goals' and do another slide show about how we're going to bring our world-beating strategy to life.

Instead of the above, leaders know passion is a read-out either about the quality of people they've brought on board, the calibre of the vision we've given everyone to pursue, and/or the leadership we're offering them. Passion is natural when the right people are given an exciting dream, complete with credible, caring, leadership that coaches them to succeed.

Leaders ferret out 'passion killers' and with their teams, they eliminate them, until peak performance and focused excitement are in the air, in the ventilation shafts, until these permeate our entire corporate reality.

AFFIRMATIVE ACTIONS FLOWING FROM THE ABOVE:

Go for REAL diversity. Mine real variety in terms of gender, age, backgrounds, ethnicity, experiences, paradigms and outlooks, and get good at creating shared goals and bridges across differences, so we can and do creatively synergise.

Our first job as a leader is to build robust partnerships and relationships. Let your people know you are there to help them succeed. Coach them, encourage them, help them win, get them visibility, give them growth experiences, challenge them to create things they (and you) haven't dreamt of before. Partner with your colleagues to create a multiplier effect. Expect that you and your customers have a shared obsession: their success and increasing satisfaction. Finally, find ways to make sure your value chain doesn't waste energy on infighting -- make sure you're all equally committed to each other's growth and prosperity.

Measure what matters. Impact is all that counts. Today's success, and tomorrow's promise. That's what all our actions have to deliver on. For each initiative, ruthlessly ask 'why'. And having asked that, decide what the real 'critical success factors' are and track them without exception. Preserve creative and performance energies for what really matters, not for steps that proliferate bureaucracy rather than value.

Passion and commitment don't lie. You can't feign them, you can't fake them. When we have the right context, an exciting aspiration, a heartening culture, and a chance to all grow and develop together, passion will flow naturally. It's absence, is the ultimate leadership indictment. Every corporate culture has its passion killers. Collaboratively expose your own, and collectively go to war to eliminate them. The windfall in terms of energy and performance will be tremendous.

Now that you and I know how NOT to lead, by implication we're also clearer about how TO lead. Leadership is how we make possibility 'real'. It is an adaptive art, it is humanity working at the height of its potential. It is how you and I, become more together, than we could be apart. Leadership is ultimately about how we become more than our history and initiate real progress. We cannot let technical detours and emotional immaturities stop us. We, our organisations, our aspirations, our potential, demand and deserve so much better. If we're leaders, it's our job to make sure we deliver that better promise.

Happy growth everyone!

This list is used only to share information with current clients and friends, it is NOT in any way sold or given to other companies or third parties. If you wish NOT to be included in future mailings of this newsletter you may unsubscribe by emailing unsubscribe@sensei-international.com and including the word "unsubscribe" in the subject line.

If you have any comments, questions, or suggestions, please email info@sensei-international.com.