Category Archives: Developing as a leader

Lost your temper with your staff? Time to “own up”

Developing as a leader, Emotional Intelligence, ,

This week I have been writing about anger in a series of postings, recognising that the “amygdala hijack” – the sudden and extreme loss of temper – is one that we all have from time to time.  It’s an experience which can lead us to alienate those we lead or which, equally, can lead us to new insights.  New insights do not, however, happen by accident.  They happen because we are ready and willing to have them.  Sometimes they come years down the line.  Sometimes, days or weeks or months.

When we are angry, the immediate barrier to new insight is our own way of thinking about the stimulus to our anger.  It’s for this reason that I’ve given this posting the title “Time to own up”.  For it is our thoughts rather than any external stimulus that lead us to feel angry.  These thoughts usually include some confusion between the external stimulus to our anger (“I’m angry because you…”) and our thoughts about the external stimulus (“I’m angry because I’m thinking that you…”).  What’s more, our anger is also often accompanied by the firm belief that we are “right” to feel angry.

A first step towards owning our anger is to notice the way we are thinking and feeling and to talk about it.  Compare the following sentences:


“I told John weeks ago that he needed to contact the US and he still hasn’t done it and now they think we’re completely incompetent.  I could kill him!  He should have followed my instruction – if he had, we wouldn’t have been in this mess!”


This time, I’ve added mention of the emotions involved and used the phrases “I’m telling myself that…” and “I’m thinking that…”:

“I’m so angry!  I told John weeks ago that he needed to contact the US and he still hasn’t done it and now I’m telling myself they think we’re completely incompetent.  I could kill him!  I’m thinking that he should have followed my instruction – and that, if he had, we wouldn’t have been in this mess!”

Before we can claim our anger in this way, it helps to have compassion for ourselves and others – because when something goes wrong there is often shame involved.  Heaping our judgements on others can be a way to protect ourselves from self-judgements and from the feelings of shame that come with them.  At the same time, when we can accept the way things are (that people make mistakes, that we get angry…) we open up the opportunity to process and transform our anger.  If you’d like to know how, keep reading.  I’ll be writing about some techniques for transforming anger next week.

Lost your temper with your staff? The surprising purpose of anger

Developing as a leader, Emotional Intelligence, ,

On Monday, I published a posting under the heading Lost your temper with your staff?  You may have lost more besides.  But I don’t want to dismiss anger as a negative force.  Today, I want to say a few words about the role that anger plays in our lives – and particularly to highlight the role anger plays for those of us who find ourselves in positions of leadership.

Recently, I watched as the youngest of my nephew and nieces lost his temper in the midst of a game of frisbee.  “Nobody throws the frisbee to me!” was his desperate cry.  He was so full of emotion that it was hard for him to hear anything that anyone might say – even to show they were listening and trying to understand.  This is what Goleman describes as the “amygdala hijack” in his books on emotional intelligence (such as Working with Emotional Intelligence).  This is the body’s full-blown crisis response – a primitive flight or flight response – which is accompanied by all sorts of biochemical processes, beginning with the release of a hormone known as CRF and ending with a flood of stress hormones which then stay in the body for hours.

Adults also experience the amygdala hijack and the leader is no more immune than any other member of the population.  Goleman says of the stresses that lead to the amygdala hijack:

When stresses pile one on top of the other, they are more than additive – they seem to multiply the sense of stress, so that as we near breaking point, each additional burden seems all the more unbearable, the last straw.  This is so even for small hassles that ordinarily wouldn’t faze us but suddenly can seem overwhelming.

So, when Maestro Papadopoulos lost his temper with members of the London Symphony Chorus, it seems likely that he was feeling the burden of any number of stresses.  Whilst many conductors understand and accept the absence of a few chorus members who can’t get away from work for a 5pm rehearsal, Papadopoulos “saw red”.  For another leader it might be yet another error by a team member who is taking up disproportionate time, or the failure of another team member to meet a deadline on which a key contract depends.  No doubt you can think of your own examples.

Goleman’s description of the amygdala hijack, whilst it helps us to understand the processes involved in losing our temper, carries a risk:  by identifying the historic origins of our own or others’ responses, we may dismiss them as “merely” a primitive response – a response developed millennia ago which has now outlived its usefulness.  But there are other ways of viewing this.  One of my favourite thinkers and authors, Marshall Rosenberg (author of The Surprising Purpose of Anger, subtitled Beyond Anger Management:  Finding the Gift) sees anger as an alarm signal, signalling that we have unmet needs.  It also signals that we are disconnected from those needs – thinking about them by suppressing our feelings or blasting someone with our judgements.

When we apply Rosenberg’s thinking to our anger, we have an opportunity to really get under the skin of our  anger to understand what unmet needs we have.  I’ll be talking about ways to do this in a future posting.  First though, it helps to own our anger – and hold it with compassion.  

Lost your temper with your staff? You may have lost more besides

About Dorothy, Developing as a leader, Emotional Intelligence, ,

Without fail, singing with the London Symphony Chorus inspires me – and often to write a blog posting.  Sometimes, the inspiration is “not in a good way”. This is the way it was last Tuesday.

It started well for me – I arrived early and listened to young pianist Benjamin Grosvenor rehearsing Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A Minor for half an hour before rehearsal began.  He was playing some stretches and some brief extracts – repeating phrases over and over as part of his preparation.  It was a reminder of the many years of practice that lead to concert standard.  Several days later I found myself singing Grieg in my head as I went to sleep.  What a beautiful piece!

Then our 5pm tutti rehearsal started.  A touch of Grieg and onto Carmina Burana.  How quickly things went down hill!  Within minutes Maestro Papadopoulos was expressing his dissatisfaction that members of the Choir were missing and in a manner I found rather unpleasant.  I was having such thoughts as “Don’t take it out on me that some people aren’t here – I’ve made the effort to turn up!” and “If you want me to sing well for you, try treating me with respect”.  I was also having other thoughts I prefer not to share online.  Later, when the raggazi (children) rehearsed their contribution, the Maestro told them how well they’d done – better perhaps than the “famous London Symphony Chorus”.  It was clear he was angry.  So were members of the chorus – as people left the platform after rehearsal everyone’s backs were up.

We had a few minutes with Roger Sayer, in the role of Chorus Director, who was quick to acknowledge our feelings of anger – and also to remind us to sing well for the sake of the chorus if not for the Maestro himself.  Afterwards, as I ate my supper, I reflected on the fears that often lie behind anger – was the Maestro feeling nervous, perhaps?  And I took time to use a well-honed technique to let go of the anger I felt before going on stage.  It was enough to help me to focus my energies on singing well and still, I noticed that I took a little pleasure when the Maestro made a rather obvious mistake during the concert and also that I didn’t warm to those after-the-concert didn’t-you-do-well signs from the Maestro.  Not for me the cycle of punishment and reward!

The trouble is this:  that anger begets anger.  Not anger per se but the expression of our angry thoughts as if they are some inviolable and objective truth. (They’re not).  As a leader we lose our authority and the respect of those we lead when we express our anger in this way.  We also risk losing the best contribution of those we lead:  people need to know that you’re working with them – on the same side – to feel safe to acknowledge their mistakes as well as to risk their best performance.  Far better to play it safe if you expect a rollocking every time the boss is not happy.

I want to be clear:  we’re all angry at times.  So a key challenge for us as leaders – as well as partners, parents, children, human beings… – is to know how to respond when we’re angry.  One of the worst things we can do is to hold on to the idea that somehow we were “right”.  This opens up a widening gulf between ourselves and those we lead.  And in case you’re wondering “what else can I do?” keep reading – I’ll be offering some thoughts during the days ahead with all the humility of someone who, like you, gets angry at times.

When you’re the boss – becoming the grown-up in your team

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As I sit, I’m keeping one eye on the clock – I’ll be dashing out of the door in 40 minutes or so to sing Carmina Burana at the Barbican concert hall in London this evening.

I have fond memories of this piece from my early days with the London Symphony Chorus.  Back then it was a staple in our schedule – Richard Hickox used to start the year with this crowd puller, which has been used by any number of advertisers over the years for its great tunes.  Popularity didn’t stand in the way of high standards – Richard was famous for rehearsing relentlessly.  I remember rehearsing the semi chorus sections until the pianissimi were unfeasibly quiet as well as tutti rehearsals that ran to the last minute of our allocated rehearsal time – if not a little longer.  In those days, Richard would also give us a final ‘pep talk’ before the concert to remind us of the spirit of the piece and encourage us to sing well.  We were told this was a great piece, and we believed it.  We were prepared to make it a great performance, and we did.

Now, given that I joined the chorus in 1986 (or was it 1987?) you could certainly accuse me of a touch of nostalgia.  Those were the days.  But something else is also on my mind.  Recently, I was struck when a client of mine told me how disconcerting it had been for her to discover just how much weight members of her team placed on all sorts of comments she made.  The implication for her was this:  she was setting the tone for her team without even realising it.  If she expressed frustration about her boss’s latest initiative within earshot of her team she was sending the signal that it wasn’t something to be taken seriously.  If she responded to a mistake by one of her team members before she processed her initial emotions – well, the rebuke she made might cut deep for her team member and the effect would stay long after she’d dealt with the issues arising and got over her initial concerns.  It came as a shock to her to realise the impact of her comments.

My client was discovering the symbolic importance of her role as a leader.  The fact that she held this role, rather than anything about her in particular, meant that people looked to her for – well, a lead.  Effectively, she had become for her team members a kind of ‘parent at work’.  Her team members were projecting onto her all kind of expectations of what such a ‘parent’ should be.  One of their expectations was that she would know best so they took her views seriously.  (And in case you find this idea rather fanciful or my client’s experience an exception, you might like to dive into the research which shows that a leader has a significant impact on the climate in a team and that this, in turn, affects performance.  Try Goleman’s The New Leaders for an easily accessible read or Litwin and Stringer’s Motivation and Organizational Climate to dive deeper into the statistics).

What implications does all this have for my client?  Already she had become conscious of the impact of her comments.  She knew she had to choose her comments more carefully.  This is what is called ‘framing’ in the field of NLP (or neuro-linguistic programming) and it does exactly what it says on the tin – it’s about the frame you put around something you talk about.  The boss’s new initiative?  Well, it could be ‘just one more mad idea from the boss to keep us from our day jobs’ or it could be ‘a way to accelerate our progress towards our sales target’.  And if you can’t see the benefit of an initiative from the boss – well, you might want to thrash that out with your boss before you start talking to your team or at least to process your emotions.  In a sense, it’s this processing that makes you the ‘parent’ or the ‘grown-up’ in the team.

And Carmina Burana?  ‘That tired old piece’ or ‘a piece that continues to stimulate the senses and capture the imagination’.  In case you’d like to decide for yourself, click here to listen to an extract.  Meantime, I’m off to sing.    

Are you ready for the upturn?

Developing as a leader

Now, it may seem premature to be looking ahead to life after the recession.  After all, Greece is still teetering on the edge, the IMF have only just reported that the Spanish banks need 40 billion Euros in aid, the world economic outlook is bleak.  So I was intrigued last week to hear John Rosling of Shirlaws Coaching, addressing a group of CEOs, boldly predict the beginnings of a turnaround in the next six months – you can look at his slides via the event page at OneFish TwoFish.  Just scroll down to the bottom of the page to download the slides.

I wonder, where is your focus right now?  Hopefully you responded in a timely and decisive way to the economic downturn.  You’ve looked at your costs and reduced them significantly, cutting out costs in line with a downturn in business and some – it was time to address the profligate over-spending of the boom years.  Perhaps you’ve addressed the way your business is organised and hopefully for the best of reasons – there’s a difference between rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic and understanding the need to do business in a new way to meet today’s – and tomorrow’s – demands.  Perhaps you’ve looked hard at your business strategy, recognising that you are starting from a quite different place than you were just a few short years ago.  But tell me, are you ready for the upturn?

Now, if this question has had you laugh out loud or experience a jolt of shock or simply realise that an upturn is the last thing on your mind, you’re precisely the person for whom I’m writing today.  There will be an upturn – and the sooner you prepare for it, the more likely you are to successfully seize the opportunities it presents.  Here are just a few agenda items to which you need to give your attention:

  • Do you have a vision for the future which engages and inspires?  Are you sharing it with your staff?  If you want to keep good staff after the upturn begins (and lose those for whom your vision is not a good fit) you need to engage them already with a clear and compelling vision for the future – and tell them how they can contribute to making it happen.  If you haven’t already started to create your future, it’s time to begin;
  • Have you cleared out the debris from life before the downturn?  In case you haven’t, it’s time to take a critical look at your organisation in the light of your aspirations for the future.  Are you in good shape for life after the recession?  This is about the structure of your organisation, the clear allocation of roles and accountabilities, the way your top team is functioning, key values and behaviours…  everything should be under the microscope if it hasn’t been already;
  • Are you investing in the skills of key leaders in your organisation – including sharpening your own saw?  I wish I could track down a piece of research from some years ago (I can’t) which showed how organisations investing in coaching during a downturn were the first to grow following a recession.  You get the point – if you’re not investing now in life after the recession you may miss opportunities that others are ready to seize;
  • What’s the quality of dialogue and learning in your organisation?  Have you and your top team responded to the recession by looking hard and deep at your organisation in order to learn the lessons it brought with it?  Or are you still posturing and saving face?  If you’re not coming out of the recession with an enhanced ability to dialogue with your peers (from looking at the hard facts to sharing your feelings and responses) you may well lose out to organisations which are peopled with leaders with greater self awareness and the courage to share fully and – yes – vulnerably.

So tell me, what are you doing to get ready for life after the recession?

Feeling grumpy about an extra day’s holiday?

Developing as a leader, Emotional Intelligence, ,
Learning to kitesurf on Perranporth beach, Cornwall

Picture this, in the midst of your busiest period, your staff – anti-royalists all – are about to benefit from two UK holidays to celebrate Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee.  You don’t know how you’re going to meet your deadlines and you don’t feel good about what lies ahead.  The last thing you need right now is an extra day’s holiday.  It could even be that, looking ahead, you’re already cursing the London Olympics – everyone’s clamouring for time off and, what’s more, you are dreading the disruption to travel in the capital and all the knock-on effects that might bring.

Perhaps, though, it’s precisely this thinking that gives you a clue to your need for time off.  Some thinkers might add that you need to get out and play.  The Harvard Business Review’s Morning Advantage recently highlighted a blog posting by Psychology Today about the power of play.  Strikingly, the posting highlights research that suggests that play makes an important contribution to our mental creativity, health and happiness.  The writer says:

There is evidence that play […] may in fact be the highest expression of our humanity, both imitating and advancing the evolutionary process.  Play appears to allow our brains to exercise their very flexibility, to maintain and even perhaps renew neural connections that embody our human potential to adapt, to meet any possible set of environmental conditions.

Overall, the article’s evocation of play reminded me of the rhythm of life during my childhood, when my parents were farmers – a distinctly pre-industrial way of living.  Yes, there were certain things that needed to be done and hours to be kept – milking cows twice a day no matter what.  But there was also time between chores to take a cup of tea or to welcome visitors.  Sunday lunch was always a time for family and friends, for example.  In short, rest, respite and play (including my father’s legendary practical jokes) were woven into life – including working life – in a way that is rare in the modern corporation.

So if you’re at full stretch and feeling stressed in the run up to the Diamond Jubilee perhaps it’s time to step back and notice – how much time do you make for play in your life?  How much do you encourage your staff to take time to play?  Equally, perhaps it’s time to down tools for four days, including your PC and mobile, and just get out there and play.

Managing relationships as a key to success

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Once again, Harvard Business Review’s Morning Advantage has come up with a gem in the form of the article below, with links to further articles:

Debunking the “Proven Winner” Myth

If you were the new owner of a middling National Hockey League franchise, and were looking to bring on a new head coach, you’d probably hire a proven winner, right? Well, according to Glenn Rowe in the Ivy Business Journal, hiring a winner may not be the best option. In fact, there’s a good chance your team will get worse — really.

Data shows that it’s extremely rare for a Stanley Cup-winning coach to replicate his success with a new team — and the same goes for professional baseball and football coaches too. Perhaps one reason is proven winners can’t leverage the “complex relationships” they developed within their old organizations. More bad news: this isn’t just a sports problem. Rowe cites this HBR article by Boris Groysberg, who found that the performance of star stock analysts fell as much as 20 percent when they jumped to a new firm. So what are companies to do? When looking for stars, look within your own organization. Train and mentor them. Work like hell to retain them.


Now you may not know much about the Stanley Cup – I certainly don’t – and still, I’m guessing you get the point.  I notice, too, how there’s advice tucked away for those people who want to be winners.  Kevin Evers, who put this brief article together, doesn’t dwell on it and still – the point is there.  Building and managing relationships is a significant aspect of what makes people successful.


You might be thinking “does that mean I should stay where I am?” or even “but I’ve been here for years and I’m just rubbish at building relationships!”  The point is, once you recognise you need to manage key relationships in your current or future employing organisation, you can start to think about what that means in practice.  Here are a few tips:

  • If you want to build a relationship with others, you need to develop a relationship with yourself.  The more you understand your own drivers and motivations, the more you’ll be able to show insight into the drivers and motivations of others;  the more you are able to be authentic with yourself, the more you’ll be able to be authentic with others;
  • Which relationships?  There are people towards whom you naturally gravitate and these may well become key friends and allies at work.  There are also any number of people who, because of their roles, are important to your success at work – often called “key stakeholders”.  Taking time to understand who you need to be in touch with is a great start in a new job;
  • Don’t just wait until you need someone.  From the beginning you need to establish a relationship.  Make time for coffee.  Let people know you’ve arrived.  Get clear ahead of time about the kind of relationship you’d like to build – on which more below;
  • Every now and then you’ll meet someone – a key stakeholder – and wonder what on earth they’re doing in the job.  And still, they are a stakeholder.  The more your emotions are stimulated when you think about that person, the more that’s a reflection on you.  Learn to build relationships of mutual respect even with the people you think least deserve it.  They have things to teach you as much as you have things to teach them.

I could write more but first, I’d love to know what challenges you face or what you aspire to do in your workplace relationships that you haven’t mastered – yet.  Please leave a comment to share your experience.

  

Finding the Challenge in What’s Hard

Developing as a leader, Emotional Intelligence,

You may have noticed that I’ve been away from my blog for a whole ten days – this is a significant departure from my aim to write two or three blog postings a week.  The truth is, I’ve fallen in to an old pattern – of booking an awful lot into my diary and trusting what looks feasible without trying it on for size.  When I feel my way into the commitments I’m making I have a very different experience of what’s possible.

One of these commitments was a three day “virtual retreat” with Mark Silver and his team at the Heart of Business.  I’ve been working with the Heart of Business for the best part of a year now to explore how best to market my business so that those people who are looking for my help can actually find me.  I’ve been holding the aspiration to create an approach to sales and marketing that feels as fully authentic and nourishing for me and my clients as the work I do – helping leaders in the private sector who want to take the hard work out of achieving results.

I was interested to read a posting by Mark which referenced the virtual retreat, entitled Finding the Challenge in What’s Hard.  Two things in particular struck me.  The first is this:  that early in his posting, Mark related how many people cried on the retreat, saying:

The three days were filled with many insights.  A lot of people cried, including me.  And yes, I’ll go on record as saying that I don’t think it’s a successful event without at least half the participants crying at least once.

As I sit here and think of the people I work with, I notice how many of my clients have been known to shed a tear in our sessions together – male, female, senior and even more senior, tough on the outside… you get the picture.  These are people who live and work in a world peopled by judgements – by an etiquette that discourages emotion (yes, emotion, let alone displays of emotion) – and who have learned to live by the rules of that world.  And still, given permission to be present to their most heartfelt thoughts and feelings – yes, they cry.  I wonder what the world of corporate Britain would be like if there was permission for people to touch base with their deepest emotions.

And there was something else that struck me in Mark’s posting.  He wrote:

I don’t know if it will make you cry, but here’s one deceptively simple and profound insight that will turn your relationship with business around if you take it on.


Ready?  In every place of “hard” in your business, there’s a challenge waiting for you.  If you take it on it will make everything in your business easier and more effective.

  • A challenge to trust, learn and grow.
  • A challenge to let go of beliefs and opinions based on illusion.
  • A challenge to take time to care for yourself with health food, exercise, and spiritual practice.
  • A challenge to choose love over anything that isn’t.

Mark’s clients are different to my own and still, my clients also face challenges.  For instance?

It’s hard to receive the feedback that you’re not ready for a longed for promotion and to receive the feedback as a gift – and harder still to get the promotion and to realise that all the things you used to do are not what you need to do in your new job.

It’s hard to manage the day to day minutiae and still find time to step back and look at the bigger picture.

It’s hard to find space to create your own agenda when so many people are knocking on your door asking you to respond to theirs.

It’s hard to give up doing things yourself and learn to do things with and through others.

It’s specially hard to notice how polished everyone else seems to be when, inside, you’re wondering am I good enough?

Healing the hard and finding the challenge

Here again I borrow from Mark (with delight in his permission to do so – thank you, Mark*):

Take a moment right now and identify a hard place in your business.  Take a gentle breath.  Another.  Now take third one – I promise it won’t kill you.


Now, ask your heart, ask yourself to be shown, with a willingness to be surprised, what challenge is waiting for you within that heard place that will bring ease, joy and effectiveness?


Can you find the “Yes” in your heart to let go of the hard and take on this challenge?


Now, don’t keep it a secret.  Share with us what you got.  What challenge did you find?  Did you find a yes?  What are your first one to three steps for taking it on?  Tell me about it in the comments.


PS  Needing some help?


Perhaps you’ve found a way forward by connecting with the challenge in the thing you’re finding hard.  Or maybe going through this exercise has highlighted to you just how much you’re longing for some tailored support – a place away from work to talk things through, a focus on you and your agenda as well as what’s right for the business, a balance of challenge and support, somewhere you can talk freely and in confidence.

I’ve worked for years with leaders in business.  I’m steeped in leadership theory – I know what it takes to succeed.  More than that, I’ve been a support to my clients as they work out how to succeed in leadership roles – and in ways which work for them as well as the business.

If you’d like to learn more, take a look at my profile on LinkedIn or contact me (details on LinkedIn) to arrange a meeting.

* And just to do the formal bit – extracts in italics are from an article by Mark Silver ©2012, all rights reserved. Reprinted with permission. In case you’re interested, you’ll find this article and hundreds of others, along with other free resources are available at http://www.heartofbusiness.com

When being on the right side of the argument isn’t enough

Developing as a leader, Emotional Intelligence,
Azhar Siddique

It’s Wednesday as I write and I am enjoying the prospect of watching this week’s Apprentice this evening.  It’s a kind of guilty pleasure – how is it that people willingly subject themselves to such a harsh experience?  And that’s before you even think about the possibility that one of them will go into business with the man who has fired all their rivals.

Last week I was out when Azhar Siddique caught the bullet, though I caught up with the programme a few days later and my nephew honoured the unwritten house code – not to share the results before we’d both seen the programme.  Then it was time for the debrief.  Goodness, it was a close one – how did his project manager not get fired?

My nephew, like one of the panellists on the after show, picked up on the fact that Siddique was on the right side of the argument.  Several times he’d raised the question of strategy with his project manager and some of his suggestions, which were ignored at the time he made them, turned out to be perfectly sensible.  One of them was for team members to drop off unsold stock with their fellow team mates before going to the warehouse to restock.  Instead, it went with them to the warehouse and spent time, unsold, in a traffic jam on the way.  But being on the right side of the argument wasn’t enough to stop him being fired.  Why?  Because Lord Sugar recognised that he didn’t want to go into business to someone who – no matter the quality of his insights – could not command the attention of his colleagues.

In his role as founder and managing director of a catering and refrigeration company, Siddique’s style does not seem to be holding him back.  It’s easy to imagine him setting the strategy for his company and following it through.  It’s easy to imagine that some people climb on board in response to the strength of his argument – or decide his business is not the place for him and move on.  At the same time, it has clear limitations.  Even in an organisation’s most senior role we fail – at least a little – both when we imagine we are always right and when we convey our arguments without holding our colleagues in our hearts with dignity and respect.  The risk here is that the ideas stop flowing because even the brightest and best of our staff stop sharing them for fear of our response.

In my view it helps to hold colleagues in our hearts with dignity and respect even when we are on the right side of the argument.  In the short term, it makes it more likely that we will find a way to share our message which others will enjoy hearing – a way which makes it safe for our colleagues to accept that maybe they’re wrong.  In the long term it builds relationships of safety and trust, in which the question is no longer who is right but what.  With this level of safety people feel able to bring their best ideas to the table and to find out there are better ideas – because they still feel good about themselves at the end of the discussion.  What business doesn’t want the benefit of the best ideas of its staff?

And in case you need just one more argument to convince you, it may be worth remembering that even if it’s the boss who’s wrong, especially when it’s the boss who’s wrong, there are times when your fate lies in someone else’s hands.  Standing up for what’s right can be a powerful and positive choice when you’re at your limits and ready to move on.  As long as you want to stay, it can be highly ineffectual as a way to make things happen in complex structures of people and power.  At best, it can limit your contribution.  At worst, it can lead you to hear the words “you’re fired”.

Wanting to engage your staff?

Developing as a leader,

How often, when preparing feedback for senior leaders following their assessments for new posts, do I find myself highlighting the need for them to develop and communicate a clear vision for their new team?  It is often a gap.

On the very day that I explore this topic with someone I interviewed recently, a quip from a colleague – sharing his lack of German alongside a famous quote (Ich bin ein Berliner) – reminds me of one visionary speech:  John F. Kennedy’s speech in 1963 in Berlin.  There is an urban myth about Kennedy’s speech, which rests on the fact that “Berliner”, as well as being someone from Berlin, also refers to a kind of jelly doughnut made in Berlin.  The myth is nicely dispelled on About.com – just follow this link.

You can also watch Kennedy make this speech on YouTube – in less than five minutes he makes the case for the free world at a time when the West was at cold war with communism.  Twenty-five years before the Berlin Wall came down Kennedy packs a punch when, whilst acknowledging the challenges of a free world, he highlights that the democratic West does not have to build a wall to keep its people in.  The phrase Ich bin ein Berliner signals his solidarity with the people of Berlin, and he repeatedly uses the phrase let them come to Berlin as a rhetorical device, countering by turn the key arguments for communism.

Such speeches may seem a far cry from the dry and dusty corridors of corporate Britain (and elsewhere) and still, the leader’s ability to engage his or her staff in a vision for the future is one of ways s/he can move the performance of a team or organisation from ordinary to great.  This is the difference – for staff – between knowing what they need to do and doing it because it moves them towards some heartfelt aspiration.  Sharing a vision – again and again and again – can capture the imagination and speak to the heart so that people want to come to work, they want to overcome obstacles, they want to succeed.

Daniel Goleman, in his book The New Leaders, positions this visionary leadership style as one of the styles that builds what he calls ‘resonance’ – it’s worth reading to understand the importance of this leadership style.  And if you want to see more footage of visionary speeches just follow the link to Kennedy’s speech and cast your eyes down the right hand side, where you will find many other examples of the visionary speech.