Tag: Leadership

Leadership and Legacy Under The Spotlight at #HRVision14

Three hours in to HRVison14 and we’ve been hearing a lot about leadership. In amongst the presentations on culture change and learning, and during the almost complete silence as people listened, spellbound to Tim Macartney, the underlying theme is leadership.

Tim said:

Leadership is a choice.
An invitation to become truly courageous.
Explore what would make a beautiful life.

He captivated the 200+ delegates with a passionate plea to create a greater purpose, to challenge the notions of wealth accumulation, competition and streamlining by having business purpose & values centred around being proud of what have achieved in this lifetime.

He channeled the native American Indians “no product or service, no manner in the way we do business, should be allowed to impact the children for seven generations to come“. In their eyes he believed that today’s core leadership focuses of competition, market share and being top in their field may ultimately seem like hollow victories.

Before Tim we had heard from Frans van Houten, Global CEO of Phillips, on their global culture transformation. Bringing about change within a traditional, established global business, with embedded organisational structures and inevitable silo mentalities, takes time and a fresh approach – “it’s easy for established businesses to work in silos that create a survivor mentality, inevitably leading to people ducking decision rather than taking risk”

A few of his messages that I noted were:

  • Focus on innovation and entrepreneurship, bringing value to customers that makes them smile and makes them happy
  • Always act with integrity
  • It’s not about working harder but about working differently
  • Equip people with new tools, it will help them solve different problems
  • You need to make sure that change doesn’t just happen on the surface
  • Courageous conversations break the cycle of victim mentality and complaining mindset
  • Make the purpose your ‘north star’, the guiding principle that everyone wants to follow

Clearly all this requires a huge shift of mindset from leadership, particularly those used to meeting challenges by shuffling the org structures. Frans was particularly scathing of those who change structures expecting an uplift in performance; his preference was for agile teams created around a problem or project operating across functions.

The session after Phillips was from GE who spoke of strong leaders having a confident humility and learning agility. Their philosophy – Together, we all rise.

Starwood Hotels later spoke of leaders needing to embrace individualism, identity and inclusion within their teams (diversity is nothing without inclusion) whilst at the same time supporting them in making emotional intelligence, continuous feedback and management by objectives core leadership skills to meet developing workforce expectations.

Leaders usually take the plaudits when business performance is strong, when share price and profits are unceasing, so it’s probably right that they are under the spotlight when things need to change.

The words vision, value and opportunity have been heard quite a lot this morning but it was the concepts of legacy and sustainability – most notably from Tim Macartney’s session – that have probably really got most of the HR professionals here talking and thinking.

 

What Type of Leaders do we Really Want?

‘You choose your leaders and place your trust/As their lies wash you down and their promises rust’ (Paul Weller)

What do we expect from our managers and leaders? Judgement and insight, or conviction and ideology?

It’s a question raised in Jonathan Freedland’s weekend piece Chris Huhne, David Cameron and the RBS boss don’t have it, but Al Gore did – asking whether we prefer jaw-jutting certainty to thoughtful judgement in our business and political leaders.

A weighty question. I guess most of us want decisive leaders and managers, the kind of people who know how to sort things out and get things done. And people who can read the signs and adapt. Yet is that what we get? Continue reading “What Type of Leaders do we Really Want?” →

The Wisdom of Herbert : Management Insights 80 Years On

‘The anxiety which is felt in some cases when teams are threatened with the loss of their status must be almost beyond bearing. I know of one club who in their plight insisted on their star players being in their homes every Friday night at nine o’clock, and officials visited them to see that the rule is observed. Recently I have heard of the complaints of players who declare that every Friday night they are spied on, and that they are threatened with all sorts of penalties if they do not observe the club curfew. I have no patience with such supervision. If I were unable to trust a player I would not retain him. In my experience I have found that the man who is treated fairly, and in whom confidence is placed, will not let you down.’

Wise words.

If you changed the word ‘club’ to ‘company’ and ‘players’ to ‘employees’ and said that at a conference or unconference in relation to employer brand and social media you’d be a guru. It would be tweeted and re-tweeted, blogged about and quoted.

And it’s true. If you can’t trust your employees then you shouldn’t have them working for you…likewise if you treat them fairly, and with respect, you will get the best out of them.

But this quote isn’t recent. It’s not from this week, this year or this century. It was written in 1932!

It was written by Herbert Chapman, a man who was named Greatest British Football Manager of all time in a Sunday Times poll in 2004 and is widely regarded as the father of modern football. His revolutionary and pioneering legacy is long and impressive: Continue reading “The Wisdom of Herbert : Management Insights 80 Years On” →

Calling For The Voice of Reason

“I’ve been trying to figure out exactly what it is I need
Call up to listen to the voice of reason
And got his answering machine
I left my message but did he f*** get back to me
And now I’m stuck still wondering
How it’s meant to be”

That’s a lyric from the new Arctic Monkeys album. The song’s called ‘Reckless Serenade’ and deals with the uncontrollable emotions you feel when you’re with the most beautiful girl in the world.

Feelings of passion and attempts at understanding love.

You don’t notice distractions (Those twinkling vixens/With the shining spiral eyes/Their hypnosis goes unnoticed/When she’s walking by) you’re just consumed by what you have (The type of kisses/Where teeth collide/When she laughs the Heavens hum/A stun-gun lullaby).

He needs help, needs the voice of reason…but the voice of reason goes to voicemail and never returns the call. Continue reading “Calling For The Voice of Reason” →

The Carnival of HR – Digging the New Breed and Learning from Old Friends

It’s time for the Carnival of HR and I’m really honoured to have my first go at hosting!

The Carnival doesn’t often pitch its big top on this side of the pond, so I’ve taken to opportunity to introduce you to a whole host of UK HR Bloggers who may or may not be known to you. There’s some really great talent developing here  a real New Breed.

But I’m not biased! My buddies and old friends from the US and Australia have also come up trumps with some really strong and varied posts too. So read on…

Digging the New Breed….

Leading off  is Michael Carty (XpertHR) not least because he is also known as the politest man on Twitter so it would be rude not to! His economic commentaries are a must read for many of us and this March 2011 Edition is no exception

Emma P aka @onatrainagain has only been blogging a short while and has already built a big following with her very personal and honest style. This post is called What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Stronger

Alison Chisnell is our very own HR Juggler! How she also finds time to blog is beyond me, but she does! Always interesting, here she talks about New Experiences, Pyjama Parties and Comfort Zones

Katie Davis is the HR Hopeful and writes a newer blog called They’re Only Humans. ..here she’s musing on the Pull of Community

Doug Shaw is the Johnny Cash of the #ConnectingHR community, with a guitar and a song at every tweetup and unconference! And he writes a blog called Stop Doing Dumb Things To Customers – how cool is that? In this post he even gives us a poem! Phantom HR

What can I tell you about Flip Chart Fairy Tales? Well, its written by an affable and knowledgeable beer expert called Rick and he writes an informative, well researched and extremely readable blog about politics and business. This post is about Confident Leadership in an Uncertain World

Ailsa Suttie is an HR Director who I’m sure only embraced Twitter and blogging to stop me nagging her to do so! She is about to move in to a CEO role in a new business venture, which may be why she’s called her blog HR Metamorphosis. She raises an interesting point in A Monopoly Does Not an Expert Make…

Some of you may already know Felix Wetzel. He’s charming, intelligent, insightful…OK, he hired me recently…what else am I going to say?! He does write a really interesting and thoughtful blog about people, brands, creativity and growth. In this post he writes about The Future of Work

Janet Parkinson has a background in social media, recruitment and personal branding. She brings a really fresh approach to her technology oriented blog Technotropolis, as you can read here in her post on Digital Nomads – The Rise of the Independent Worker Continue reading “The Carnival of HR – Digging the New Breed and Learning from Old Friends” →

Good Leadership Starts Before Your People Do…Is it a Question of Respect?

I’ve been thinking about Leadership quite a bit over the last week or so, since the Leadership track at TruLondon 2, which provided some thought provoking, controversial and animated debate.

The discussions arising from this track, and in particular from one person discussing their own leadership style, have already started developing on 2 excellent blogs by Jon Ingham (a vlog, actually) and Bill Boorman – I recommend that you read them!

I often interview candidates who cite a lack of clear leadership as reasons for dissatisfaction with their jobs, and quite often that dissatisfaction seems to set in soon after starting their roles. What strikes me is that many leaders seem to get it wrong from the very beginning.

If you’re going to hire someone in to your team or company, then I believe you owe it to that person to give them every opportunity to succeed.

Five areas where leaders often come up short for new employees are:

Managing Expectations – do they really understand what job you are hiring them to do? Have you made it plain what will be expected of them? What their deliverables are? What resources will be at their disposal?

Onboarding – what happens from the moment they accept the offer? Do they feel part of the team? Is anything done to include them before they start? What induction programme have you in place? How will they be integrated into your team or your culture?

Clear vision and strategy – do your people know where the business is going? And how you want to get there? Do they know what their team has to achieve, and how they are going to achieve it?

Consistency – once there is a vision and strategy is it consistent? Nothing is more confusing than leaders who don’t think and contemplate, but who have a tendency to draw quick conclusions, act and move on.

Recognise your people as human beings with emotions, feelings and a life outside work – self explanatory, but decisions that you make that affect your new employees will also inevitably affect their families and friends. For me, one of the saddest things I heard at the TruLondon Leadership track was when a guy who seemed to run a hire and fire culture seemed almost proud that he had fired someone after 5 days as he didn’t think the guy would make it, even though this person had resigned from another job to join him…well that person had to go home and face other people (possibly a partner, maybe even children) and tell them he’d lost his job…and why.

For me it’s a question of Respect…Respect your people and they will Respect you.

What do you think? In what other areas do leaders sometimes not come up to scratch?