Positive Leadership and Elite Sport

Positive Leadership Limited helps leaders throughout an organisation excel under pressure. Our advice assists clients solve critical strategic issues, accelerate growth and enhance financial performance. We equip leaders at all levels with the values, confidence and practical skills necessary to succeed and win consistently in a highly competitive environment.  

The Values of Positive Leadership™ are the keys to unlocking the strategy for delivering high performance and optimum results under pressure. We draw extensively on thought leadership from international business and elite sport in our consulting work. 

For more information on how our advice might help you and your team excel under pressure, please contact: graham.watson@positiveleadership.co.uk

Positive Leadership and Elite Sport

Creating Meaningful Corporate Values

Andrew Cosslett has been Chief Executive of IHG since February 2005. IHG is the World’s largest hotel company operating over 4,100 hotels under brands such as Holiday Inn, Crowne Plaza and InterContinental. 

Here he talks about how to turn your front-line into raving fans of your corporate values and why bringing passion into the business is so important for all winning organisations. Don't just talk about your values, live them!

Creating Meaningful Corporate Values

Servant Leadership In the Workplace

An exceptional recent study of 815 employees and 123 supervisors published in the Journal of Applied Psychology makes a very strong argument for the value of servant leadership at work. 

The authors found that the practice of servant leadership had important implications for both individuals and the groups they worked in. The study found that servant leadership enhanced both the self-efficacy and the commitment to the supervisor of the individual employee. At the group level, servant leadership lead to employees’ perception that they were treated fairly (justice climate) and the shared perception customer service was expected, supported, and rewarded (positive service climate). These individual and group effects combined to produce a significant impact on the organisational citizenship behaviour of individual employees.

Employees that are good organisational citizens go above and beyond their formal job descriptions. If everyone in an organisation only did what was required of them, the organisation would be mediocre at best. Organisational excellence requires a critical mass of employees doing more than what is officially recognised and rewarded. The extant research has demonstrated organisational citizenship behaviour is strongly associated with employee task performance, organisational productivity, and customer satisfaction.

Servant Leadership In the Workplace

Asking the Right Questions

Today, we would like to suggest a way to ask questions that will help you change your focus from problems to solutions.

If you want to make your communications as effective as possible, and if you're interested in finding solutions to problems rather than becoming bogged down in them, we have a suggestion that will help. If you ask the right questions, you can direct your communications to get answers that are genuinely helpful.

For example, if you ask someone, “What's wrong?” you will get an answer - often a long one - which will focus on the problem. But if you ask, “What do you want?” or “How would you like to change things,” you have redirected the conversation from the problem to the solution.

In every situation, no matter how dark or dismal, there is a desirable outcome. You can convince people, including yourself, to focus on that outcome, by avoiding questions that ask “why” and choosing “how” or “what” questions instead.

So, instead of asking your boss why you didn’t get a raise, ask him, or her, what you need to do in order to justify a salary increase. And, instead of demanding from your employees why they didn’t make the sale, ask them what they can do differently so they will be certain to make the next one.

Asking the Right Questions

How Companies Can Develop Critical Thinkers and Creative Leaders

This article was written by Col. Bernard Banks, a faculty member in the Department of Behavioural Sciences & Leadership at West Point and a Colonel in the United States Army.

'Today's leaders are continually cajoled to act as "outside-the-box" thinkers. Such pronouncements give the impression the only sound solutions are ones never previously conceived. However, what industry and the military really strive to produce are leaders possessing strong critical and creative thinking skills. Both implicitly eschew the notion that a box even exists. What can industry learn from the military about how to advance the development of such leaders? One tangible example is how to construct and execute experiential training while continuing to meet the needs of customers and stakeholders.

Today's organisations operate in what the U.S. Army War College defines as a VUCA environment. Volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity are constant realities in the 21st century. The military seeks to prepare for the challenges it will inevitably face by crafting realistic training scenarios and routinely integrating such activities into its ongoing operations. The goal is not to teach them what to think, but to enhance their ability to think critically and creatively about the myriad of contingencies posed by a fluid environment — in essence to teach them how to think.

In industry, 90% of time is typically devoted to executing business actions, and less than 10% is allocated for increasing organisational and individual capabilities through training. The military, on the other hand, spends as much time training as it does executing — even in the midst of high stress/high risk operations. A unit in Afghanistan or Iraq will not suspend its experiential training program while involved in combat operations, because its ability to cogently and creatively address future challenges is enhanced by an enduring commitment to improving people's competence and adaptability through experiential exercises, as well as actual experiences. But the real lesson for industry leaders is not simply that training is important. What's really valuable is how the military crafts its training opportunities.

The Army defines leadership as both accomplishing the mission and improving the organisation. Permanently improving the organisation requires the development of its human capital. The military believes you substantively improve people by improving their ability to adroitly address challenges in their environment. Therefore, we do not seek to confine people's thinking by restricting the solutions available to them, unless the proposed action violates any of these criteria: is it immoral, unsafe, unethical, or illegal?

In order to have people wrestle with what it takes to conceive of action plans where the aforementioned criteria constitute their only boundaries, the military structures its experiential training activities with wide parameters. Events are constructed to reflect ambiguity in the operating environment (while also targeting specific organisation needs). Leaders are responsible for setting the conditions in every training event and resourcing them appropriately, as well as for reminding participants throughout the exercises that there are a myriad of potentially elegant solutions to each ill-defined challenge.

Two other things are important to take away from the military practice of engaging in routine experiential training. First, feedback is crucial. The military practice of conducting intermediate and final after-action reviews (AARs) — in which all participants examine the planning, preparation, execution, and follow-up of any significant organizational initiative — fosters a learning culture. Second, coaching is required to translate feedback into behavioural changes. Research has demonstrated that feedback without coaching  rarely results in behavioural changes. So, all leaders must develop their capacity to coach others. Reflection and dialog lie at the heart of development. Experiential training creates the impetus for both to occur.

If you wait for the right time to train it'll rarely occur. Today is the opportunity to prepare for tomorrow, regardless of how much else is going on.'

For more, see: http://blogs.hbr.org/frontline-leadership/2010/10/how-companies-can-develop-crit.html

How Companies Can Develop Critical Thinkers and Creative Leaders

Persistence Wins!

Persistence. 

You must have more than your fair share to succeed. There's plenty of advice out there about knowing when to give up!

Tom Peters' advice? Hold out longer than anyone thinks is wise.

Persistence Wins!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving to all followers of the Positive Leadership Blog and especially to all our friends in the USA. 

Please remember at this special time that everyone we interact with is a chance to create a remarkable experience.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Aligning Behaviour Around Values

Leaders intent on optimising performance and results need to recognise the importance of aligning everyone around a single set of core leadership values; defined as the behaviours and activities essential to the organisation's success. 

Here are four steps to align behaviours with core leadership values:

1) Start by listing your core leadership values and related performance measures.

2) Next brainstorm the associated behaviours that support these core leadership values.

3) Share this list with other people in the organszation and solicit their feedback.

4) Incorporate the core leadership behaviours into your performance appraisals and assessments.

This process can be done regularly and will result in an organisation whose behaviours are well aligned around its core leadership values.

For more on the Values of Positive Leadership™ and how our approach of building strategy around these values can help maximise profitability, please contact: graham.watson@positiveleadership.co.uk

Aligning Behaviour Around Values

What is an Authentic Organisation?

An organisation is authentic when its actions, its character, and its sense of purpose are aligned with and support each other. 

An organisation can be authentic only when: 

• The organisation knows ‘who it is” and what characteristics make it distinctive. 
• People in the organisation understand why these distinctive features are meaningful.
• The organisation knows what it is striving to create in this world. It has a sense of purpose that goes beyond the products and services it offers.
• The organisation knows how its distinctiveness fuels and adds unique insight to the pursuit of organisation’s purpose.
• The organisation has a few signature actions, behaviours and products that bring to life the organisation’s meaning, and move it towards its purpose.
• Both the purpose and the distinctive, meaningful characteristics of the organisation resonate with stakeholders and draw members, customers, and constituencies to the organisation.
• The organisation actively supports its members, customers, and constituencies in their own authenticity as they work with the organisation to achieve its purpose.

What is an Authentic Organisation?

Positive Leadership

A Positive Leadership strategy will help you optimise the profitability of your business.

For more information on how we can help your business succeed under pressure, please contact: gavin.hastings@positiveleadership.co.uk

Positive Leadership

It Is About You

When we think about the best bosses, we think of pride-builders. Pride-builders are experts at engaging the emotional commitment of employees. They do this with a laser-like focus on making their people feel good about the work they have to do — whatever it may be — and take pride in giving their personal best every day.

In the excerpt below, Robert Sutton, the author of  Good Boss, Bad Boss: How to Be the Best... and Learn from the Worst reminds us that there are important emotional and informal elements to leading people, and that some leadership qualities are more important than others in this regard. One of the more telling qualities, he says, is an acute sense of self-awareness. This is certainly true for pride-builders. If they didn’t understand how others perceived and responded to them, they could not hope to frame their actions in ways that motivate and energise their followers emotionally as well as rationally.

Excerpted from Chapter 9 of Good Boss, Bad Boss:

‘How to Be the Best…and Learn from the Worst

Last year, I led a workshop at Stanford on being a good boss during tough times. As we walked to lunch afterwards, a manager from the session told me about his boss. A few weeks earlier, a secretary in his office walked up to this vice-president and asked, “When are the layoffs coming?” The boss was stunned. He had no clue how she discovered big cuts were in the offing: the decision had just been made and extreme care had been taken to keep it under wraps. When the bewildered VP asked how she knew, the secretary answered that when bad news was coming, he couldn’t bring himself to look his people in the eye. This VP had what poker players call a “tell,” a habit or quirk that revealed when he was hiding something (bad news in this case). The codeword among his charges was, “The boss is wearing interesting shoes today.”

The “interesting shoes” story reflects a pervasive theme…that…distinguishes the best from the worst bosses: If you are a boss, your success depends on staying in tune with how others think, feel, and react to you. Bosses who persistently promote performance and humanity devote considerable energy to reading and responding to followers’ feelings and actions, and those of other key players like superiors, peers, and customers. Of course, there is no single magical or simple thing that defines a great boss…anyone who promises you an easy or instant pathway to success is ignorant or dishonest, or both. The moves that great bosses make are too complex, varied, messy, and unpredictable to be captured by any single theme, slogan, or set of steps.

Yet some skills and aspirations are more important than others. Developing and sustaining self-awareness ought to be at the top of the list for every boss. David Dunning of Cornell University shows that a hallmark of poor performers is they lack self-awareness, consistently overestimating their skills in just about any task that requires intellectual and social skills, such as debating, having a sense of humour, or interviewing others. In contrast, Dunning finds that self-awareness is a hallmark of the best performers — they are especially cognizant of their strengths and weaknesses, and fret about overcoming pitfalls that can undermine their performance. 

When it comes to bosses, one implication is the best might laugh at the VP in the “interesting shoes” story. But they also realise that they could easily be that guy — that every boss is prone to bouts of cluelessness and to forgetting how closely followers track every little thing they do. The best bosses reduce the risk of self-delusion by seeking and responding to hints and hard data about how others read their moods and moves. They urge followers to challenge them with enlightening — and disconcerting — questions, like when the VP’s secretary asked, “When are the layoffs coming?” They want their followers (and bosses, peers, and customers, too) to keep feeding them such information, no matter how unpleasant and unflattering, because they are obsessed with how their words and deeds are interpreted by others.

The upshot is, to be a great boss, you’ve got to think and act as if “it is all about you.” Your success depends on being fixated on yourself. On the surface, this conclusion clashes with advice from many gurus and experts. Former GE CEO Jack Welch and Stanford’s Robert Joss (dean of the Graduate School of Business for a decade), for example, implore managers, “It’s not about you.” I agree with the spirit of this advice, as the aim is to discourage bosses from falling prey to their most selfish and destructive instincts. Yet I question the words because most bosses, like most human beings, are remarkably self-obsessed — and that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Yes, the worst are selfish, are oblivious to their charges, and cling to dangerous delusions about their magnificent leadership skills. The best are equally self-obsessed, but have different motivations. Their obsession isn’t for egotistical or for selfish reasons. On the contrary, they focus on controlling their moods and moves, accurately interpreting their impact on others, and making adjustments on the fly because they want their people to produce work that others will admire — and to feel respect and dignity along the way.’

It Is About You

Use Failure to Grow Your Business

How can companies plan and pursue an aggressive growth agenda with confidence? By framing their strategic growth opportunities, testing assumptions, and creating a culture that acts on evidence and learning. (An interview with Rita McGrath, Professor, Columbia Business School.)

Use Failure to Grow Your Business

Dominating Leaders Make Worse Decisions

Powerful leaders make worse decisions by dominating their colleagues into silence, a new study from the London School of Economics (LSE) has found (http://gradworks.umi.com/33/53/3353459.html).

According to the LSE study, entitled The Downside of Looking Like a Leader, strong leaders may also be worse managers because they give off such an impression of power that their colleagues’ opinions are stifled.

The study suggests that while it is important for leaders to exude authority and competence, the evidence suggests that appearing too powerful will inhibit their team members from expressing an opinion. This harms the ability to make good decisions by excluding arguments and evidence from the decision-making process.

The study’s authors point out that to dominate the decision-making process may be damaging in a business world loaded with specialist and technical information, where team members often know more about a specific subject than their leader and where participative decision-making is accepted as more effective.

Dominating Leaders Make Worse Decisions

Doing What We Already Know

In the final round of the 2006 World Match Play Event, professional golfer Stephen Ames loses to Tiger Woods “nine and eight” (almost as badly as it’s possible to lose in match play). One month later, he surges six strokes ahead of his closest competitor (and fifteen strokes ahead of Tiger Woods), to win the Tournament Players Championship and take home the biggest check in golf history at the time ($1,440,000). How did he make it happen?

One answer may be the fact that the biggest obstacle in performance isn’t not knowing what to do; it’s not doing what we already know. 

So what keeps us from doing what we know? Typically, it’s interference—or more often, interFEARence—created by those external and internal factors that slow us down, immobilise us, and keep us from performing at our best. By shifting what you pay attention to and how you pay attention, the resulting performance improvement can be dramatic.

Doing What We Already Know

Positive Leadership Limited - The Power of Sound Advice™

For more information, please contact: graham.watson@positiveleadership.co.uk

Positive Leadership Limited - The Power of Sound Advice™

Building Power and Leadership

When Ann Moore was on her way to becoming CEO of Time Inc., before women were found in top management ranks, she won loyalty by, among other things, spreading a perquisite of her magazine publisher job to peers and subordinates: preferred seats at the best sporting events in New York. Across the Atlantic, Maurice Levy was appointed CEO of Publicis while still a junior employee, in part because of his fervent commitment when the headquarters in Paris caught on fire, and he ran into the offices to rescue client files.

High achievers don't turn into leaders, even if they seem to have the right skills, without the power that comes from going beyond the letter of the job and doing the 'Extras':

1. Colleagueship. Being a good colleague means helping the entire group achieve results even when you're not in charge — for example, by filling in for an absent colleague, turning up at a special event that's not required, or helping with ideas and information for someone else's project. Colleagueship is considered a sign of whether someone can take on bigger leadership responsibilities in a flat, decentralised organisation.

2. Opening doors. Power to the connectors! Those who rise to leadership keep their virtual Rolodex rolling. They know enough about others to spot something of interest to them and pass it on, opening doors or making key introductions. In the new networked companies, connectors are the go-to people, the must-haves at meetings. The effects are viral. The more they connect, the more connections come to them.

3. Extra resources. Being a giver is powerful, especially when the gift is unexpected. Sprinkling small amounts of money or opportunities around the organisation can build enormous goodwill, for example; funding dinners for a hard-working project team or providing seed money for expenses for promising innovations. Using personal resources can matter even more, such as donations to colleagues favourite charities.

4. Framing issues. Being the first to name an issue shows leadership. One big Extra in any endeavour is to identify new opportunities or unsolved problems, and then convene conversations around them. With self-organising now a major operating mode, the people who set the agenda also set themselves up as potential leaders. It's not necessary to ask anyone's permission to lead; the self-organisers just do it.

5. Strong commitment. Some people falsely equate commitment with hours worked. But commitment is about quality, not quantity. This Extra involves the verve or passion which potential leaders convey about the mission and the singular focus they exhibit when doing each piece of work. Other people want to be led by committed leaders, not those whose eyes are always on another project or who make it clear that other parts of their lives matter more to them.

6. External diplomacy. Civic boards or charitable causes can groom leaders, and even more so if one's own organisation has an interest in the cause. Joining professional associations or industry networks and carrying information back and forth to and from the home team can also build internal power. Being a good ambassador externally reverberates internally.

Extras serve as signs of whether a person can be entrusted with major decisions or control over assets that requires doing what needs to be done regardless of formal requirements. They show that the leader will take care of others and the organisation.

At the same time, Extras carry a tinge of unfairness. Extras can be tapped more readily from jobs with discretionary budgets, or that face outward, toward clients and customers. In contrast, people holding more routine, internally-facing jobs have fewer automatic chances to show leadership. That group often includes women, who are disproportionately concentrated in staff jobs such as the Ps of personnel, public relations, and purchasing. Moreover, women who might be time-constrained by family obligations don't always have the time for Extras.

But not every Extra is out of the reach of determined potential leaders. Commitment and colleagueship are largely under individuals' control, and they build a better work community for everyone.

If the why and how of Extras can be discussed more openly, perhaps they can become more universally attainable. So consider this list both a How-To guide and a manifesto for change.

Building Power and Leadership

Enduring Truths About Leadership

Here are ten enduring truths about leadership, backed by research carried out over the years:

You make a difference: Before you can lead, you have to believe you can make a positive impact on others. You have to believe in yourself.

Credibility is the foundation of leadership: As well as believing in yourself, you have to behave in a way that will spur belief in you. If people don’t believe in you, they won’t willingly follow you.

Values drive commitment: People want to know what you believe in and you need to know what others treasure if you are going to create the commitment needed to bring everyone together into a powerful force.

Focusing on the future sets leaders apart: Leaders need the capacity to imagine and articulate exciting future possibilities. They need a long-term perspective.

You can’t do it alone: Leadership is a team sport.

Trust is paramount: If you rely on others, you will need their trust. That will only come if you trust them first.

Challenge is the crucible for greatness: Exemplary leaders don’t maintain the status quo, they change it. Change invariably involves challenge, and challenge tests you. It introduces you to yourself. It brings you face-to-face with your level of commitment, your grittiness, and your values.

You either lead by example or you don’t lead at all: Leaders must keep their promises, and be role models for the values and actions they espouse.

The best leaders are the best learners: Learning is the master skill of leadership.

Leadership is an affair of the heart: Leaders respect their colleagues and their constituents. They make others feel important, and graciously show appreciation. And they love their work, or they wouldn’t be successful at it. 

Enduring Truths About Leadership

HP's New Leadership: A Vision for the Future?

New Hewlett-Packard CEO Leo Apotheker and non-executive board chairman Ray Lane took over the reins at the technology giant on 1st November and their to-do list was daunting. Apotheker, the former CEO of business software company SAP, needs to convince doubters he is the right leader for HP, do battle with rivals such as IBM, Oracle and Apple, and set the company's long-term strategy. In addition, Apotheker must maintain the efficiency the company enjoyed under former CEO Mark Hurd, while gaining the buy-in from employees that his embattled predecessor reportedly lacked.

HP's New Leadership: A Vision for the Future?

Be a Better Leader, Have a Richer Life

An interview with Stewart Friedman, Professor, University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School and author of Total Leadership: Be a Better Leader, Have a Richer Life. 

Traditional thinking pits work and the rest of our lives against each other. But taking smart steps to integrate work, home, community, and self will make you a more productive leader and a more fulfilled person.

Be a Better Leader, Have a Richer Life

Military Skill Sets Lead to Organisational Success

What value does the military have for an organisation? 

World class, combat honed, and expansive skill sets in strategic planning, wargaming (competitor-on-competitor role play), competitive intelligence, leader development, rigorous standard enforcement, and innovation in execution are only a few of the cutting edge managerial skill sets that the military brings. Additionally, military veteran-to-CEO success stories such as Ken Hicks (Foot Locker) and Bob McDonald (P&G) credit military ethical foundations, decision making skills, practical leadership, and teamwork, and the focus of life-or-death situations that quickly developed them into decisive leaders focused on excellence, execution, and best-in-class performance.

For the organisation, the value of the military-to-organisation skill set transition comes when military skills and methodologies are translated into the context that creates the greatest value for the organisation.  

The military has a wide range of skill sets and proficiencies that business needs:

Intelligence: The military excels at systematic and ongoing analysis of competitors as well as how the operating environment influences the outcome and potential success of an operation. Additionally, a uniform, frequent, and ongoing intelligence effort provides a common competitive assessment to an organisation. In an organisation's leadership, how many leaders have a common view of competitive threats? How often is the competitive analysis updated?

Planning and Preparation: The creation of a timely, comprehensive, and structured plan is the hallmark of military operational planning. Many organisations do this well. However, what most organisations lack is the creation of multiple contingency plans, the use of wargaming or competitor-on-competitor scenarios, and mission rehearsals to ensure a flawless execution.

Execution: This requires the ability to rapidly adjust and improvise when an operation does not go according to plan. 

Team Leadership: The value of good leadership goes beyond the team being led. Good team leadership extends into leadership by example and positive role models that can inspire throughout the organisation.

Subordinate Development: The military uses a process known as the performance counseling session employed by the immediate supervisor of a military member to address what the military member did well, what they need to improve, and the plan of action to make them a better overall contributor. This inherent subordinate development process is of extraordinary value for an organisation because it makes every employee in the organisation better.

Military veterans and military techniques, when applied properly to an organisation's culture and business processes, can bring value to corporations, charities, non-governmental organisations and educational institutions. All of these organisations can benefit in vast and immediate ways through the application of military skills to their operations.

Military Skill Sets Lead to Organisational Success

Go Beyond What You Think Is Possible

Go Beyond What You Think Is Possible

Getting the Whole Leadership Picture

Setting a leadership strategy first requires a comprehensive understanding of leadership in your organisation. This begins with individual talent and competencies, but it doesn't end there. The ability of formal and informal leaders to pull together ultimately makes the difference in whether you accomplish your goals.

To get a full picture of leadership, you should consider:

1. The quantity of leaders needed, as indicated by current and projected formal leadership positions depicted on an organisation chart (number, level, location, function, business unit, reporting relationships, etc.).
2. The qualities desired in selection (demographics, diversity, background, experience level).
3. The skills and behaviour that are needed to implement the business strategy and create the desired culture (skills, competencies, knowledge base).
4. The collective leadership capabilities of leaders acting together in groups and across boundaries to implement strategies, solve problems, respond to threats, adapt to change, support innovation, etc.
5. The desired leadership culture, including the leadership practices in use, such as collaboration across boundaries, engagement of employees, accepting responsibility for outcomes, creating opportunities for others to lead, developing other leaders, learning how to learn, etc.

A good leadership strategy takes all of these factors into account. Simply having all of the leadership positions on the organisation chart filled or talented individuals will not produce the leadership that is required to implement strategy, lead change and drive innovation. 
For more information, please contact: graham.watson@positiveleadership.co.uk

Getting the Whole Leadership Picture

An Understanding of 'Class'

Still a classic - a look at 'Society'!

An Understanding of 'Class'

Why Performance Reviews Should Be Abolished

Performance reviews, in which bosses look for weaknesses and pretend to speak objectively for the company, while subordinates grin and bear it, misapply the hierarchical structure that is necessary in any organisation. They ensure that the relationship is about power and subordination, making candor all but impossible, and defensiveness the behaviour of choice for stressed employees. They should be used sparingly and replaced by performance previews.

This would involve changing the internal politics so that boss and subordinate are a team, both accountable for getting results that the company needs. No longer will the subordinate alone stand accountable for arbitrary metrics that managers create. Now they're both on the hook, and it is in the interest of each of them to understand the way the other goes about his or her job, and to support that person's strengths.

If everybody starts by owning what they think, instead of arguing over the "truth," you can begin to have a trusting relationship that can tolerate each party hearing some things they don't want to hear. And then you can have honest improvement — in people, in practices, in results.

For more, see:  Get Rid of the Performance Review!: How Companies Can Stop Intimidating, Start Managing--and Focus on What Really Matters (Business Plus)

Why Performance Reviews Should Be Abolished