The Stanton Marris Blog

Articles filed under leadership

  • Conversations as a leadership intervention

    We hear a lot about the art of giving feedback, but less about the skills involved in receiving feedback. The way you respond when you perceive a critical message sends a powerful signal about what leaders care about. That makes it one of the most important factors that shape the culture – usually not something best done off the top of your head.

    • You can send a positive signal in response to even the most negative or clumsily-phrased message. I once saw a Chief Executive turn the mood of 500 people around just by the way he listened to and acknowledged the fierce anger of a junior employee when she attacked him in an open meeting about the downsizing he was leading.
    • Don’t take it personally – however personal it is. Remind yourself that learning can be extracted from almost any experience, and you can put this one to good use.
    • Re-frame if necessary. Look for a meaningful or useful message in what’s being said (however buried) and play it back: “What I’m taking from this is…”
    • Say thank you for taking the trouble to talk. It’s not easy to say difficult things (much easier to talk behind your back), so make it easier for them, not harder, and acknowledge the courage and effort it took, even if you didn’t enjoy it.
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    Published October 18, 2011
    Written by Beatrice Hollyer. This article is filed under: ,
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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: ,
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  • The dangers of losing your sense of direction

    As we witness David Cameron’s latest ‘flip flops’ on key policy areas of health and social care and crime last week, and hear Rowan Williams’ strong comments about the impact of having no clear leadership direction and underpinning values in the current Coalition government, a striking image sprang to mind . Try Googling the words ‘confused picture’ and it’s one of the top four images that pop up. It’s a signpost with the words ‘Confused, Lost, Perplexed, Disoriented, Unsure and Bewildered’ on its posts – all pointing in different directions. It was used recently by several different employees in a focus group when asked to find an image to sum up how they feel about their company. And it also came to mind when I heard what’s been happening at one of my clients.

    About six years ago, when they were a very confident, growing business, I helped them to develop a very distinctive set of values: five key attributes that employees felt defined who they were, as well as setting a clear aspiration about how they behave and act. For six years, these values have been used to underpin their strategy, shape ways of working, key policies and inform the way they make important decisions. Other companies admired them as a strong values-driven organisation.

    Unfortunately, the business is now experiencing much choppier waters and tough decisions have had to be made to cut costs i.e. people. I was saddened to hear that the way those decisions have been made and communicated have fallen way short of the expectations set by the values. It made me realise that a business (or government) needs to make clear its commitment to its values or principles of policy even more loudly and explicitly in tough times. This is just the moment when employees and customers (or citizens) need to know that there is a path and it is being followed. That helps to reduce the sense of confusion, gives coherence and credibility to a way forward and builds confidence in the leadership.

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    Published June 15, 2011
    Written by Virginia Merritt. This article is filed under: , ,
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  • If you haven’t read this yet, you should

    How often do you read a business book and come away completely satisfied? Like a perfect five course meal with three wines.  In this case my metaphorical five course meal was in a restaurant that has been open since 1981 and I’ve never visited, so all the more surprise that it catered perfectly to my tastes which are not, as you may know, entirely mainstream…Enough of the analogy – I have just been through “Gary Yukl’s Leadership in Organizations (7th ed)“  published by Pearson.

    Yukl has been researching and writing on leadership for 40 years and this textbook for business schools is on the 7th edition, much updated and revised over the years since it first came out in 1981.

    There are libraries of theories, models and prescriptions on leadership  – I’ve certainly read a stackful over the last 20 years – but how to make sense of it all? They all sound plausible but what theories and concepts of leadership have any demonstrable, evidenced, link to leadership effectiveness and organisation performance?  The answers are all here for those with the patience to seek them.

    Don’t skip to the last chapter to find Yukl’s “The 7 (choose-a-random-letter)of leadership” because he eschews the easy answer. But it’s going to help me articulate the 10 Killer Questions of leadership (sorry to disappoint but I am a consultant, not an academic!)

    What’s your top business book?

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    Published April 6, 2011
    Written by John Bruce-Jones. This article is filed under: ,
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  • Could something stunning happen if you freed your mind?

    Travelling to work the other day on the bus, I absent-mindedly reached for my iPod and looked at it.  Simple, minimalist and beautiful.  And a great example of what can happen if you question your constructs.

    By construct I mean an assumption or web of assumptions that helps us make sense of our world.  Constructs help us organise our activities, and identify important things from the extraneous.  They can occur on multiple levels:  individual, organisational, business model, and industry.  Multiple constructs typically converge and form a ‘dominant logic’ for a company and for an industry.

    Here’s one:  “Construction work is dangerous – there will always be fatal accidents”.  Or how about: “Manufacturing always creates waste”? What happens, though, if one leader in an industry challenges the constructs operating today?  Ray Anderson did that in the carpet industry, and his company, Interface aims to become a restorative business – in other words, it will return to the environment more than it takes.  You can read about his remarkable story here

    At Balfour Beatty, Ian Tyler and Andy Rose decided that fatal accidents or serious injury (to anyone, including the public) in the course of their company’s operations were no longer acceptable – they challenged the industry construct.  Their Zero Harm initiative aims to eliminate the risk of serious harm or death by 2012.  You can read about how they are tackling this huge challenge in our latest booklet, “Eating the elephant – how do I tackle the really difficult issues?”

    So, what constructs are working in your industry?  It pays to challenge them.  Something stunning might happen if you do.

    British designer Jonathan Ive refused to accept that MP3 players had to be ugly and covered in switches and buttons.  He wanted something simple, minimalist and beautiful.  His team came up with the click wheel.  MP3s were never the same again.

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    Published February 16, 2011
    Written by Rupert Symons. This article is filed under:
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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

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