The Stanton Marris Blog

• What are the risks of working with leaders?

  A client asked me this very good question in a discussion about leadership capability. You’ve talked about the risk for us as leaders of the organisation, he said, but what are the risks for you as leadership practitioners? What keeps you awake at night?

  This is the answer I came up with:

  • Being spat out. If leaders don’t like what we have to offer, they are in the driving seat and they can simply reject it by disagreeing with it or devaluing it. That’s why we work so hard to tailor leadership work to the real needs of the business, and make sure we work with real business challenges, not just set-piece leadership material.

  • Not having impact. By impact, we mean getting through to leaders, getting under their skin so that they personally choose to make the effort to do something differently. I’ve heard Harvard residential leadership courses described as, “Great networking, but not really relevant to my role here.” That’s not having impact.

  • Cynics, perhaps surprisingly, don’t bother us. They are sometimes just looking for something to engage them, and their energy can quite suddenly turn around to become a positive driving force. One of my best moments running a leadership course was hearing a cynic say, “I’ve never before seen a good reason to change my default style. Now, I see a reason to make that effort.”

  So that’s what keeps us awake at night … and the challenge that makes us want to go to work in the morning.

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  Published November 17, 2011
  Written by Beatrice Hollyer. This article is filed under: leadership development
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• Leaders or leadership?

  Companies have to move fast these days in order to stay ahead of the game.

  Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple puts it like this: “There’s an old Wayne Gretzky quote that I love. ‘I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.’ And we’ve always tried to do that at Apple.”
  We know that the quickest way to shift gears is through a shift in leadership behaviour.  In most cases, people think about leaders as individuals.  Heifetz and Linsky, however, point out that leaders tend to be people who are placed in positions of authority, and who are expected to exercise that authority in a particular way (explaining visions, giving answers, giving direction, providing resources etc).  They argue that the real work of leadership is in fact not about meeting such expectations, but about people helping others to make progress on the most difficult adaptive challenges facing the business.

  They prefer to talk about leadership rather than leaders – a process rather than a role.  It is worth thinking about this distinction if you are running leadership development activities in your company, or indeed if you are taking part in them.  Leadership of this kind will certainly get you to where the puck is going, not where it has been.

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  Published July 12, 2011
  Written by Rupert Symons. This article is filed under: leadership, leadership development
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• Keeping things simple

  I’m renewing my campaign on keeping things simple.  It’s long been one of our hallmarks as consultants to help our clients make complex things simple.  Perhaps it’s in the nature of management to proliferate frameworks and systems and measurement.  It sometimes takes an outside view to help organisations back to the essence.

  Adrian Furnham, Professor of Psychology at University College London, wrote recently in The Sunday Times of the perverse consequences of performance management systems.  They’re meant to systematise how things are done and to encourage the less good performers to do better.  Instead, with their complex rules and targets and metrics, they tie up the best performers in red tape and allow the worst performers to play games.  I once had a client who introduced a performance management system with a 76 page book of guidance.  They then wondered a year on why it wasn’t working.

  So let’s get back to the simple things:  good managers who are clear with those who work for them about what is required, support them to deliver those things, are able to have tough conversations with them when they aren’t delivering; good leaders who can look beyond their BlackBerries to the longer term, ask the hard questions and challenge their organisations to grow and deliver more.   Let’s remove the organisational cobwebs – those over-engineered performance and reward systems, the crazed strictures of procurement bureaucrats, the non value adding paraphernalia imposed by corporate centres. 

  One of our current clients has a doctrine of making things simple.  If you’re reading this, I encourage you to play your part in challenging these over complex systems.  Ask what their real purpose is.  Ask whether they really serve that purpose.    Then be rigorous is cutting them back to the simplest system to meet their purpose.

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  Published April 22, 2011
  Written by Andrew Jackson. This article is filed under: leadership development, organisational culture
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• 25% women on Boards by 2015

  The findings of the Lord Davies Review, published recently, with its recommendations on how to increase the number of women on the boards of listed companies in the UK establishes the following as key development needs:
  1. Companies should treat women’s leadership as a dynamic and strategic opportunity rather than an equal opportunities issue.
  2. Companies should consider raising their board’s and their nominating committee’s understanding of and ability to address unconscious bias.
  3. Board placement researchers and interviewers should understand and adopt processes to eliminate unconscious bias.
  4. Boards should provide senior women with influential board or executive level mentors either from within the organisation or outside it.
  5. Senior manager development needs to enable them to recognise and act on their own unconscious bias to ensure women’s skills and experiences are not stereotyped and their talents overlooked.

  I believe addressing these requirements needs Boards to adopt:

  • A long-term, strategic approach to ensuring that women of high potential are more effectively identified and offered the development and experience needed for them to become board member.
  • Boards and Nominating Committees need to have their awareness raised of the existence of unconscious bias in their organisations and its potential negative impact on the performance and advancement of women. A highly effective means of doing this is a short workshop including forum theatre scenarios to illustrate how unconscious bias plays out in relation to women in masculine organisational cultures. Interactive activities are then powerful in enabling workshop delegates to identify and adopt the behaviours they need to practise to address unconscious bias.
  • Companies should consider assigning executive sponsors to their high potential women. A sponsor is someone who acts: on their protégé’s behalf as an advocate for their next promotion; expands their perception of what they can do; connects them to senior leaders; promotes their visibility; opens up career opportunities and gives career advice; offers advice on executive presence. 
  • Leadership development programmes need to incorporate learning on unconscious bias and how to lead and manage inclusively to enable women to achieve their full potential.

  What do you think is required?

  Read the full article "25% women on Boards by 2015"

  Published March 24, 2011
  Written by Ian Dodds. This article is filed under: Boards, culture change, leadership development
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• Leadership in times of uncertainty

  This paper is sparked by a dinner discussion, facilitated by Stanton Marris and hosted by Addleshaw Goddard in November 2010 with participants from a number of financial service businesses with the theme Have our leaders led us down the garden path and how do we get back up again?

  A recent paper by Douglas Board † suggested that there had been a deafening silence about the role of leadership up to and during the crisis in financial institutions.  We wanted to test if a focus on leadership and leadership development had become irrelevant and we wanted to find out if leadership and leadership development had any answers to offer. 

  To see if leadership had fallen off the radar we undertook a quick and simple survey of a number of financial services contacts.  The summary results are appended.  The headlines though were that over the last 3 years approaches to leadership development have changed, becoming more focused, formal and systematic, and investment in building leadership capability has increased as it is seen as more important than ever.  Respondents said that the priorities and challenges for leadership capability were: combining global and strategic leadership with operational leadership skills; talent and succession; change skills.

  Click here to read the full report ‘Leadership in times of uncertainty’ including the survey responses

  Read the full article "Leadership in times of uncertainty"

  Published December 20, 2010
  Written by John Bruce-Jones. This article is filed under: leadership, leadership development, transformational leadership
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