Leadersmithing

Revealing the Trade Secrets of Leadership

Eve Poole

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Business
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781472941213
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Leadership

Shortlisted for the Business Book Awards 2018 'Leadership' is in danger of becoming a tired phrase in the world of management - it may sound cerebral and important, but more often comes across as static and trite. Which might explain why so many 'leaders' feel like imposters; they may have a vision or masterplan, but the reality is daily messiness, acute uncertainty and fragile loyalty from team members. Often, they have been parachuted in to transform a complex situation, or promoted in unexpected circumstances. Are there more effective ways in which people can learn the art of being a great leader? Being an effective leader is about the daily grind, and it is a far from glamorous existence, but it can be hugely rewarding if leaders are realistic about the choices they face. In many trades and professions, mastery of the subject can take a lifetime; leadership is no different. An apprenticeship approach can breathe life into the development of leaders, day in, day out. Using insights gained by Ashridge Business School about how leaders really learn, Leadersmithing guides readers through the process of becoming more precisely job-ready and more effectively resourced for the challenges they face. The result is a more confident leader, more perceptive as to their vocation and mandate, and able to maintain the most effective position at the very top of their game.

Part one

Theory

Chapter 1

What Do Leaders Need to be Able to Do?

Leadership 101

You have probably sat through more than your fair share of talks about leadership. But in case it helps as a reminder up front, here is a refresher on the history of thinking about leadership. In 2015, the National Gallery in London, hosted a series of events called Life Lessons from the Old Masters. I teamed up with their Head of Education, Gill Hart, to deliver the session on ‘Leadership’. I kicked it off by using three of the gallery’s famous paintings to tell the story.

First, I spoke about Goya’s portrait of the Duke of Wellington. Have you ever thought about where ‘leadership’ really came from, as a topic? Research into the subject became urgent as Europe ran out of leaders after the First World War. Much of it was funded by the military, so it is unsurprising that this first wave of thought-ware was all about the leader as hero, triumphant in battle and a fine figure of a man. Wellington was so heroic that he kept winning medals and Goya subsequently had to add them into his portrait. Wellington epitomizes the heroic leader and appeals to organizations which prize competition and market share, because this narrative is all about beating the opposition. We still have not lost this model, which is why taller men – and men in general – are paid more, and why dynasties remain important in many walks of life, because of notions about the officer class.

Next, Holbein the Younger’s The Ambassadors, which shows two fabulously dressed pillars of the community, surrounded by artefacts and symbols of their education and power. As technology made warfare less about cannon fodder and more about strategy, we began to look for leaders with brains, as well as brawn. The Ambassadors ‘jaw-jaw, not war-war’ represents this phase, which is epitomized today by the MBA culture and the lingering importance of the ‘old school tie’. This phase is also about the rediscovery of classics like Sun Tzu’s Art of War, Machiavelli’s The Prince and Carl von Clausewitz’s On War. It is still based on a military metaphor, though, and is about protecting your home turf, which was the job of the two Renaissance men depicted in Holbein’s painting.

Finally, we looked at Sassetta’s The Wolf of Gubbio, in which St Francis saves the town from a ravaging wolf by finding out what it wants and negotiating with it. The collapse of deference during the Second World War, when men and women from different social classes fought, worked and died side by side, made it much harder for leaders to assume they would be followed by default. The humanistic movement and the emergence of what we would now call Human Resources policies made followers more visible and introduced the notion that they might need to be persuaded to follow, not just ordered to do so. At the same time, women became a more noticeable part of the workforce. So leadership thinking over the last few decades in particular has been more concerned with charisma and Emotional Intelligence, the sort of skillset that might make you drop everything and follow a barefoot preacher, even if he talks to wolves rather than setting the dogs on them.

If the paintings seem a bit too highbrow, the Wizard of Oz works just as well. The Lion needs courage; the Scarecrow needs a brain; the Tin Man needs a heart. A good leader needs all three – and these characters also serve to represent the history of thinking about leadership.

It is almost a national sport, the perennial lists and infographics about the skills that leaders will need in the future, particularly if we are to cope with a ‘VUCA’ world – a world that is ‘Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous’. It certainly feels that way. Or perhaps we are just more globally aware of it through the ubiquity of the media and the internet. While the context is changing – as it always has done – are the leaders we will need in the future so very different? I think the essence is reassuringly familiar, in the same way that parenting has changed, but remains the same. I make this claim because I started worrying about future leadership in 2003 and, in the following decade, it did not change as much as I thought. Thus, we might safely assume that these lessons will hold true for at least another decade or so. If all these think-tanks are right, we will all be on the golf course by then, while robots run our businesses, so we will not need to worry about it anyway.

So, let me set out what it is I think that leaders need to be able to do well – the basic functionality that we might programme into leader software. These are the predictable realities. If a leader gets these under their belt, it frees them up to worry about the unpredictable ones, where their leadership skills will really be tested. We will start with the idea of 20:20 foresight and how leaders learn through ‘Critical Incidents’. Then we will look at the meta-competencies these teach you, before explaining all seventeen Critical Incidents in detail. For those who wish to see how these cash out, Appendix 1 lists them, with the exercises that form the second half of this book mapped against them as their constituent parts. After we have finished this chapter, we will look at the neurobiology behind them, before we move on to consider character and leadersmithing.

Future leaders

There is a story about the wizard Merlin and King Arthur in T. H. White’s The Once and Future King. Arthur is surprised when he meets Merlin for the first time, because Merlin seems to be expecting him and has already laid the table for breakfast. Merlin explains that while normal people are born and live forwards in time, he was born at the end of time and lives life backwards. This means that he always knows what is going to happen because he has already experienced it.

It was Herman Gyr of the Stanford Research Institute who first introduced me to the writer Charles E. Smith, as part of a creativity programme that he ran for the BBC. Inspired by the story of King Arthur, Smith’s ‘Merlin Factor’ is the leader’s ability to see the potential of the present from a vantage point in the future. Smith argues that this perspective allows leaders to act in the present moment as ambassadors of a radically different future, a position that helps their organizations to achieve strategic breakthroughs, such as NASA’s vision to ‘put a man on the moon by the end of the decade’. I was working with a team at Ashridge, at the time, to design a programme for ‘talent’. We were a bit stuck in the eternal management versus leadership loop and needed to find a way out. I loved the idea of 20:20 foresight, so we decided to define it and find out how to teach it to emerging leaders so they were job-ready for top roles. This gave rise to our now famous research question to the C-suite, way back in 2003.We asked board-level leaders: ‘What do you know now as a leader that you wish you had known ten years ago?’ We were surprised at how much common ground there was when we reviewed their answers. In particular, we were surprised that, unprompted, they all said they wished they had known more about themselves. When this chimed in well with the emerging literature on Emotional Intelligence, today so established, we knew we were on the right track. The other question we asked related to their hindsight wisdom: ‘… and how did you learn this valuable lesson?’ Some of them had benefited from formal training, but the vast majority cited specific critical on-the-job incidents that had taught them what they needed to know. This resonated with something else from Arthurian lore, when Merlin teaches Arthur what it means to be a good king by turning him into different animals – a fish, a hawk, an ant, a goose and a badger. Each transformation is meant to instil a lesson which will prepare him for his future life. We asked ourselves if we could do something similar for leaders. We added together our two data sets to produce the magic potion. Then we used it to devise a simulation that provides exposure to these Critical Incidents in quite specific and realistic ways.

Critical Incidents

You will not hear anyone talking about what happens in the simulation, because past participants are sworn to secrecy to protect the learning of future participants. I can tell you that it involves a lot of actual work, several interruptions and some brilliant actors. All the detail boils down to some generics which I can share with you here. This is the full list of the Critical Incidents which our research suggests you need to master in order to feel confident at board level. I have given you the whole list of seventeen items, rather than squashing it into something more modest, so brace yourselves:

1Stepping up

2Taking key decisions

3Coping with increasing change

4Managing ambiguity

5Taking a risk

6Accepting when you get it wrong

7Key board/stakeholder meeting

8Doing the maths

9Joining the dots

10Motivating and influencing others

11Flexing style

12Delegating to and empowering staff

13Dealing with poor performance

14Listening to staff

15Knowing when to seek help and advice

16Giving and taking feedback

17Work–life balance

The core learning objective of the simulation is about templating. It is designed to give leaders ‘muscle memory’ about these archetypal leadership activities, such that their bodies instinctively know how to do them. This means that when they have to perform any of these activities in their real work they feel resourced to do so. This allows leaders to meet situations head on that would normally make them feel stressed and yet still be able to maintain their cognitive functioning, because they have templates for them. This enables them not only to problem-solve well, but also to control their own response to the challenges they face.

When I was about five, my grandfather taught me how to play German Whist. In his version, the first part of the game is all about trying to win yourself the best hand by competing to win the best cards. In the second part of the game, you play for tricks. To win them, you need to have gained in the first phase the hand you need to take the game. This is essentially what building muscle memory is all about. When you train for a marathon, you build up your strength and stamina through practice runs. You never run the full 26 miles, 385 yards until the event itself, relying on your training and the adrenalin to get you through.

Over the years, the Ashridge team has simplified and grouped this list a little, for ease of use in the classroom, but the detail has stood the test of time. Of course, there is a presenting issue with using this kind of retrospective list as a guide to the future. By definition, it is using the rearview mirror to navigate. But the generic nature of the challenges that leaders have identified suggests something more perennial than I had originally thought. Perhaps these Critical Incidents function as foundational competencies and so are less susceptible to fashion. Every time I have evaluated the programme, or tailored the simulation for a new organization, I have asked their senior leaders about Critical Incidents and ‘what they know now as leaders that they wish they had known ten years ago’. This means I have an extremely high level of confidence in this templating list, which has proved stable now for over a decade.

Learning pathways

If this seventeen-item list seems daunting, the research we conducted at Ashridge to assess its impact, after we had run the simulation for a few years, shows that this kind of learning rolls up into four areas of meta-learning: leadership muscle memory, self-regulation, reflective judgement and learning to learn.

1. Leadership muscle memory

By design, the simulation offers leaders the opportunity to pre-programme themselves with the behavioural templates they need for the job. Templating furnishes leaders with the muscle memory to make them resourceful, because they are able to problem-solve better under pressure. It also makes them resilient, because they know they have survived and will do so again. The confidence that comes from this type of felt experience makes leaders cautious yet fearless, which is exactly the combination they will need to get out of their own way and make the right calls in real life. Like a vaccine, the simulation infects you with small quantities of active virus, just enough to train your immune system up so that it is primed to prevent a more serious attack in the future. Through immersive templating, we are trying to give you immunity to failure. But ...