WHAT IS LEADERSHIP?

We’ve been hearing a lot about leadership, that Corbyn is a weak leader, that Johnson is a decisive leader (albeit a bit of a rascal.) At Christmas we’re told about the burning need for a leader 2000 year ago. But I no longer think we really understand what a leader is.

Is it the command-and-control, “follow me” hero who storms the hill? Is it the charismatic,  inspiring thought-leader or is it anyone who has a title which automatically confers on them respect and deference?

The old fashioned concept of leader like Elizabeth 1st, Churchill and Thatcher is not what is needed today. Indeed different businesses in different conditions require different leadership skills.  It’s this that makes me loathe the absurd Alan Sugar’s depiction of leader.

We have too many examples of Attila the Hun in the boardroom and few leave businesses in good  shape. Martin Sorrell is rumoured to have called his Chief Executives on Christmas morning not, as they’d hoped, to wish them the season’s greetings but to ask them why their staff to turnover ratio had slipped by a % point in December.

Phil Green, Harriet Green and Steve Jobs were successful as leaders for a while but at what cost? Values take a kicking when the “number” is the only thing that counts.

Modern business is more like football than chess. The flow of play that a well organised team can achieve is what counts. My sense is that most businesses need to have executive teams where everyone knows their role and who are all aligned to achieve the same objective.

Winning with style and purpose. Author and academic Jim Collins defined “Level Five Leaders” as the holy grail. He describes it as comprising:-

“a powerful mixture of personal humility and indomitable will. They're incredibly ambitious, but their ambition is first and foremost for the cause, for the organization and its purpose, not themselves.”

The idea of selflessness has always been locked into the philosophy of the Civil Service where the importance of the role is rewarded in generous pension arrangements rather than big salaries. But in general Civil Servants are what it the title says “servants” not “leaders”.

The idea of employees – as obedient factotums not as people showing initiative and freedom of thought – is especially appealing to the old fashioned leaders with a military bent for command and control. But unfortunately for them we have spent a generation encouraging creativity.  The upside of this is the surge in new inventions and breakthroughs in all the tech sectors. Wouldn’t we rather have a bunch of wealth creating geniuses motivated with “concierge-management” - great food, services and a stress free lifestyle rather than a controlling leader?

Great leaders will leave great legacies or achieve the unexpected but above all they’ll get the best out of their people who’ll  be coached into being great, dedicated followers.

Followership matters more than leadership now. The task is to make them believe following is worthwhile. That’s what leaders do.

LOOK UP AT A BRAVE NEW WORLD

I’ve had three things on my mind in the last week:-

1. The richness of sights and thoughts that happen when you look up rather than down
2. The appeal of personal simplification enjoyed by Generation Zero
3. The madness of the “cuts masochism”

First of all, “looking up” which in a care-worn world too few of us do. Look up and the see the wonders of London like the amazing sculpture of Elizabeth 1 at St Dunstans in Fleet Street. It survived the Great Fire in Ludgate Circus and was moved here in 1760. Apparently it’s the only sculpture of her that was done in her lifetime. So given my refrain about creativity being enhanced by our having an acuity of observation, start looking up and looking around.

Secondly, after Generation Y we now have Generation Zero according to the Times. These “zero” guys keep all their worldly possessions in one suitcase and everything they know on a laptop (and in their brain) and all they want to read, no doubt, on a Kindle. Their life and contacts are on Facebook and the other social network sites. No office. No ties. No mortgage. No need to shop. An invitation to Brazil is suddenly so easy to say “yes” to. They are global citizens with little to screw up their minds.

Finally that 29% cut in the arts budget. “Inevitable”, we winced. “Necessary”, we squirmed. Meanwhile in France they managed a budget increase of 2% to their arts budget raising it to £6.4 billion whereas our budget is just £400 million. What the hell is going on? Can the French be thinking more clearly than we are?

 

This is all about priorities.

 

Priorities about what we look out for – like Commissario Brunelli in Donna Leon’s novels about Venice who spends his days looking for the next discovery in the architecture of the city.

 

Priorities about what we need. In other words it’s about reducing our dependence on “stuff”.

 

And priorities about what really, really matters in our lives. It’s about real cuts not about symbolic ones.

 

Have a great week and see if anything changes in your life by looking up, simplifying and prioritising.