Better.

'A critical task of leadership is to protect space for the expression of people's doubts'.

Peter Block

Gordon's weekly meeting rant was an extended version that day.

I sat on my side of the desk and he on his and I did not interrupt because I had nothing to say.

I had to be ready with something wise when he eventually finished. Supportive words that would reassure him and affirm his conviction that the staff member was wrong and he was right. Something boss-like.

I had nothing.

His cadence signalled that he was drawing to a close and that it would be my turn.

Nothing.

He'd stopped talking and was looking at me. My cue. Nope. I let the silence run on because I had no boss-worthy words.

'Do your job, boss,' his folded arms taunted.

I considered whether this was the moment when I did that brave thing that I'd read about and shrugged and said 'Gordon, I don't know.' I was sure I'd read that people admired that.

But I knew Gordon too well and he wouldn't. He was smart and practical. He loved solving problems and assumed the same in others. Yet he wasn't acting smart or practical or curious today. Maybe I could get away with a lazy answer, given that he was tossing me lazy questions. So unlike Gordon.

Wait.

Yes.

Something better than admitting I Don't Know.

'Gordon,' I began, forming words as I spoke them and not retrieved from the memory of a management book.

'This is not you. You're better than this.'

I named the thing that had been choking my words.

'You're better than this. I know because I know you. I know because you've told me so.'

Gordon laughed.

'Yes. Remember what you told me at your job interview?'

'No. What?'

'Your answer when I asked you how you would respond to difficult staff members like the one you've struck today?'

'No. I don't remember.'

'You told me that it was like playing the piano. You even mimed the actions. Sometimes you had one hand playing a melody at one end while the other one kept a rhythm going down the other. 'Just keep that rhythm going,' you said. 'It all combines to make the music.'' I want to see more of that Gordon than the one whinging in front of me today.'

Gordon was smiling.

'You liked that piano metaphor? Fooled you, didn't I?' he said.

'No. Now get back to that rhythm work.'

Gordon's faith in me that I knew him led us both back to ourselves.

Do.

'You've pointed to the fact that I'm a complete business fraud. My only qualification is to look at music. I learned a lot of what I do in Management from Music.'

Kim Williams, CEO News Limited.

Not 'How I manage'.

Or 'management'.

Or 'about management.'

Or even 'in managing'.

(Not a word about 'Leadership' either.)

Instead: 'What I do'...in Management.

Words matter.

Worship.

The Spanish conquered South America and deliberately built their churches over the pagan temples to wipe out the indigenous religions. They were pleased when they saw powerful evidence of success in evangelising the Mixe Indians of modern day Mexico.

The Indians regularly attended Mass in the churches that the Spaniards built and worshipped reverently at the foot of the altars with the devotion of the most devout Catholic.

It wasn't until hundreds of years later when Archeologists began to excavate some of the sites of the churches that the truth was discovered. They found that the Mixe had buried their pagan idols beneath the crucifixes and altars.

The Indians had been worshipping their own deities under pretence of devotion to their conquerer's God.

Now THAT'S a metaphor for a workplace.

Management smiles at the upturned faces of the workers assembled at the staff meetings and strategic planning retreats. It hands out butchers paper and marker pens like wafers and wine. It is pleased as it watches the workers genuflect before the wise and just policies/visions/mission statements/strategic plan. 

In reality, all the authentic conversations have gone underground.

Personal Widgets lie buried beneath the company's glossy altars of annual reports.

Management thinks that workers are bowing in reverence before their gods of enterprise, productivity and the PowerPoint slide icons.

In reality they're kneeling for the blessing of the payroll clerk and praying for the weekend.

Game.

Airmen would ring the Warrant Officer Disciplinary to ask his opinion on what punishment that were going to be given if they were found guilty.

'That will be up to the CO,' Henry would say in his booming parade ground voice modulated for telephone. 'But I suggest you bring your toothbrush.'

He would always schedule trials for Fridays. Punishments took effect immediately so the convicted airman had lost a weekend to restriction of privileges or extra guard duty by the time I reviewed the transcript on Monday. It was Henry's insurance against me finding an error of law and the conviction being quashed.

Henry's tactics to stop the Law from interfering with Discipline didn't affect our relationship. As the Senior Airman on Base, he was fiercely protective of the welfare of the hundreds of airmen who feared him. He had no doubt about his Widget. Some asked him how he felt about having a Legal Officer around. 'I was the one who got the position established and got the Flight Lieutenant posted here,' he would answer, only slightly embellishing the truth. Henry was too good at his job to feel threatened by a junior officer lawyer.

We met and bantered every morning in his immaculate office with his polished pace stick resting on its cradle along the front edge of his desk. As his retirement date approached our meetings became later and he knocked off earlier. 'Working back, Henry?' I'd say at 11am. 'Just waiting for the Sergeants Mess Bar to open, Sir.'

He introduced me to his replacement. 'The Legal Officer comes to my office every morning at eight,' Henry told him. 'And I give Sir his list of jobs for the day.' The new guy looked baffled.

The Monday after Henry retired the new WOD rang me at 8.05 wondering why I wasn't in his office to get my list of jobs. I complied so he wouldn't feel foolish. He rang looking for me each day for a week after that. I never turned up. He stopped calling me.

I think of Henry and the new guy each time I've seen the leadership game being played in workplaces. Good people keep turning up to do work for bad bosses.

The boss assumes that his workers keep turning up and doing good work because of his leadership, management, wisdom, charisma or intellect. Because of the course he did on 'Working With Gen Y', the books he's read, his imposing office, his annual performance reviews of them, and his generous 'My Door's Always Open' policy. Because of his well-run staff meetings, the Thank You speech he made at the Staff Christmas Party, the witty asides at the Birthday Morning Teas, his reserved car space. Or because he's firm but fair. Or because they aspire to be like him one day.

Possibly.

More likely it's in spite of him.

They have mortgages and superannuation that need them to turn up and pride that demands they do good work.

Unlike me with Henry's replacement, they have to turn up and play the game.

Really.

Leadership.

Really?

Are our open plan offices so bursting with innovation and discovery that we need every other line manager to attend leadership courses to equip them with the unique skills needed to inspire their timid and feckless workers towards uncharted spreadsheets?

‘We need leadership’.

May as well say to the aspiring leaders ‘These people over here aren’t going to do what we want them to do without someone qualified to direct them.'

May as well say to the workers ‘Wait right there and someone will be along shortly to tell you what to do.’

So people who may have run a business, buried a parent, given birth, passed exams, travelled the world, owned investment properties, survived cancer, chaired committees, fought bushfires, built a house, played the saxophone, spoken three languages, served on a jury, run a marathon, migrated from overseas, coached a sporting team, choreographed a musical, run a household...

Suddenly need to be led.

Really?

Perhaps our obsession with demanding leadership just ends up producing followers.  Call a man a leader and you compel him to have followers. Supply and demand.

The leaders remain mediocre at best (because Leadership is hard and requires practice in situations that demand Leadership, not management) and the workers become skilled at waiting to be told what to do. Why not? May as well play the game. Let these 'leaders' earn their salaries and we can conserve our initiative and energy for the areas of our lives where we have to 'lead' - running a household or caring for an elderly parent or planning a holiday or searching for a new job.

So our leaders nurture disengaged workers. Which results in increased demand for leadership training to motivate them.

(Full disclosure: People pay me to deliver leadership training.)

Perhaps we should spend more leadership training time and money on less sparkly things.

Like defining the Widget. Writing accurate job descriptions. Drafting honest recruitment ads. Conducting better employment interviews. Writing simpler contracts. Running practical orientation. Building better workspaces. Making good decisions. Having authentic conversations. Doing what we said we'd do.

Really.

'Most organisations herd racehorses and race sheep.'

- Anonymous

Visible.

A Leader makes the work visible.

In knowledge work, decisions build upon other decisions as they move along the assembly line to emerge as the organisation's Widget.

A Leader makes decisions that are visible in process and outcome to others who need to follow.

The word educate comes from educare which means to ‘draw out’.

Leaders draw out followers by making decisions that in turn open up space for them to make their own decisions that they know will be supported by the Leader.

We will follow someone whose decision making processes are transparent and predictable. We gain the confidence to make our own decisions that build upon and enable the decisions of our Leader.

Leaders are teachers and teachers are leaders because through their decisions they draw others into engagement with the world.

Many ‘leaders’ do the opposite. They make decisions in isolation and using processes and reasons only known to them. They sit in meetings where they have exclusive access to information that they use to make decisions. They then expect their followers to act on their decisions based on positional power alone.

A Leader whose decisions are based on policies or other visible processes and who is not afraid or too busy to explain her reasoning, particularly in response to criticism or complaint – or...her own mistakes...is more likely to draw out her followers from their bunkers of fear or suspicion.

'The decision about what to do next is even more important than the labor spent executing it. A modern productive worker is someone who does a great job in figuring out what to do next.'

Seth Godin

Neurons.

'I'm sorry that I didn't seek your advice today,' the Air Commander said over drinks in the Mess, 'But I didn't have a neuron spare.' 

I'd watched from two seats along as he'd coordinated fighter aircraft launches into the skies over Northern Australia and beyond to defend it against waves of attack by the Kamarian Air Force. He was making a decision about every two minutes for eight hours.

What I wanted do say was 'You need to practise having a neuron spare, Sir. Better for you to practise and learn when the air battles are staged.' But I didn't. I was only a Flight Lieutenant Lawyer and he was a Group Captain Fighter Pilot and I wanted to make it to Squadron Leader. 

 'We didn't have the resources to stop and attend to the enemy wounded,' the Army Lieutenant Colonel Infantry Officer had explained to the International Committee of the Red Cross representative who reported this breach of the Law of War to me in Exercise HQ. 'They need to train as they would fight,' I wrote in my post-Exercise Report. 'They must learn what resources that they need to fight lawfully.' I scraped promotion to Squadron Leader.

 'We don't have time to comply with the various policies in this organisation,' the senior executive said to me as his peers in the audience nodded with folded arms. 'We're too busy doing our jobs.' More nodding and the beginnings of applause. 'You need to practise having a neuron spare,' I quoted myself. 'Those policies are laws and doing your job means doing it lawfully.' I glanced across at the CEO who was texting on his phone. 

Good decision making is a skill. Like any skill it needs to be practised until it becomes routine. We need to build the neural pathways by applying the Five Steps until doing so is unconscious. It's called being Professional.

The Air Commander wondered out loud how he could resolve his Rules of Engagement with the radar blips playing out on the huge screen covering the wall in front of us. It was the last wave of the week. 'Air-to-air missiles are not classed as 'aircraft' under International Law, Sir,' I said, loudly beginning my unsolicited advice.

He bought me a drink in the Mess that night.  'Let's kill a few of those neurons you made me exercise today,' he said.

Beard.

There's an old man with a long white beard and a big book who sits at a large desk in a larger office at the head of every organisation. 

Even Liz concedes that it's a man and that he has a long white beard. 

That old man is very wise and has all the answers. 

('The Onion' ran an article along similar lines about a team of people in a room looking after the entire United States.) 

But he's kept in the dark by incompetent people in the management hierarchy below him and so bad things happen to people without his knowledge. 

If only we could get past our line manager, her line manager, and everyone in between us and the old man with the long white beard.

If only we knew his direct number and could bypass the help desk, customer service or call centre operator. 

If only we could appeal to him the decision that we didn't like. 

If only we could tell him our side of the story. 

He would listen. Nod. Stroke his long white beard. 

He would open up his big book and flick a few pages.  Run his finger down the wise words written in it.

He would look up, adjust his glasses, smile at us from behind his long white beard and say: 

'You're right. Sorry. I'll fix it for you.'

He would make things right.  

He would make us happy again. 

I worked for an organisation whose policies allowed a decision to be appealed up to six times - beyond the Chief Executive Officer and to a government minister. 

One appeal step was a review of the decision by a committee of experts and the complainant's peers. 

 'Nothing ever gets resolved,' complainants complained.

'Nothing ever gets resolved,' managers complained. 

Leaders nurture good decision making by supporting decisions made at the lowest appropriate level and at the earliest appropriate time. 

Because there is no old man with a long white beard. 

Beyond.

Listening is Stepping Back.

Listening is the beginning of Leading - Create the Space. 

Listen beyond your answer and towards theirs.  

'You make other people smart by how you listen to them.'

- Steven Tomlinson

Consequences.

The Australian Electoral Commission gave another example of Good Decision Making today. 

Ed Killesteyn the AEC Commissioner was interviewed on Radio National on the decision by the AEC to declare the Senate result in Western Australia despite the disappearance of 1375 votes.

He began by acknowledging the 'gravity' of the situation and apologising to the electors.

He said that he was left with 'a nagging and almost irreconcilable doubt' about the result of the WA Senate election. 

The journalist then asked him if this was the case, 'Why on earth is the AEC going to declare the Senate result in WA this afternoon?'

'I have no choice,' Mr Killesteyn replied. 'I am obligated to declare the result. Legally I have no other choice.' 

'So you need to do this so that it can be referred to the courts?'  the journalist asked.

'That's correct. The 40 day petition period to the courts is only enlivened once the last of all the writs has been returned. '

The Commissioner then summarised to the Australian public, via the journalist, everything that he had done to find the missing votes. 

The AEC had already begun an inquiry into the missing votes and was reviewing its procedures.

Mr Killesteyn understands that he is a servant of the Law, which says that he must declare the election. Despite some withering criticism, he recognises that he must make this decision to allow the consequences to begin flowing from it, whatever they may be.

He steps back from his own doubt and uncertainty and does his job. He produces his Widget so that others may produce theirs.

Like most good leaders, Mr Killesteyn is not in the heroic model. He is a career public servant who appears to have discharged his duties without fanfare or fuss.

In a 2009 speech he listed the four principles under which the AEC operated in order to build public confidence in its impartiality, one of which was 'decision-making in accordance with objective application of the law'.

He quoted from a speech given by the Indian Chief Election Commissioner, who said that the Indian organisation was able to retain the confidence of the electors because it was 'a listening Commission'.

Listening.

The Indian Commissioner concluded by saying: 

'Being human, we can be wrong sometimes, but our intention should never be impure.'

Mr Killesteyn's words and tone of speech showed that he understood and accepted that his organisation had failed in fulfilling its public duty to deliver on nothing short of the democratic process of a Federal Election.

Yet his voice during the interview was calm, measured, steady and without the edge that one expects from someone under so much criticism. Possibly because he was liberated by the knowledge that while he had failed in his Widget, his decision making was flawless.

His response today was even more remarkable given that it was he who decided to overrule the WA Electoral Commissioner's original decision and to allow the re-count that has ultimately revealed his organisation's errors and undermined public confidence in it, and in him. 

Leaders are Brave. 

Distance.

Step One of Good Decision Making: Step Back.

Viktor Frankl wrote: 

'Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom. '

Stimulus: information. A complaint. Criticism. Bad news. New and unexpected data. A problem.

Instinctive reaction. Surprise. Shock. Anger. Defensiveness. Denial. React. Respond. Return fire. Fight. 

Impotence. 

Step Back. 

Lean back in your chair. Stare at the ceiling. Get up and walk. Down the corridor. To the kitchen for a cup of coffee. To a sympathetic colleague's office. Or home.

Have a lemonade or three. Vent to your spouse or pet. Take the cat for a walk. Go for a run. Smash a golf ball. Have another lemonade. Wallow. Feel sorry for yourself. Search the job ads. Watch a movie. Reclaim your freedom.

Be human. Not boss, manager, leader, decision-maker, company woman, parent, mother, father, son, daughter, prodigy. Be worried, annoyed, frustrated, sad, impatient, unreasonable. Wallow. Be selfish.

Allow yourself to be yourself so you can choose to become yourself.

Create the space. 

Expand it. 

Step up and begin doing what your boss is paying you to do and what you promised her that you'd do. (That's called 'Integrity.')

'I'll have an answer to you by next Friday.' (Aim to have it to them by Wednesday. Under-promise and over-deliver.) 

You feel your power returning. 

 The psychologist  Yaacov Trope argues that:

'Psychological distance may be one of the single most important steps you can take to improve thinking and decision-making. It can come in many forms: temporal, or distance in time (both future and past); spatial, or distance in space (how physically close or far you are from something); social, or distance between people (how someone else sees it); and hypothetical, or distance from reality (how things might have happened).

But whatever the form, all of these distances have something in common: they all require you to transcend the immediate moment in your mind. They all require you to take a step back.'

Begin the rest of the Good Decision Making Process unencumbered by the emotions that strangle your ability to analyse and assess data openly and logically and on its merits. Earn your salary. Build your Widget. Become who you are.

'You can't change what's already happened but you can change what happens next.' 

- Peter Baines, Disaster Management Specialist.

Stories.

Most people's work is disconnected from their Widget.

They go to their office, occupy themselves for eight hours, go home.

They know that they've done a good job because nobody told them that they didn't and they're still getting emails on the All Staff mail list. 

Most importantly their boss puts money in their bank each fortnight for them to forward most of it into their mortgage. 

Sure, they make things. Emails, reports, meeting agendas, minutes.

They go to quarterly staff meetings and listen to a boss tell them about how the Widget is going with PowerPoint slides in support.

Once a year they sit down with their boss who tells them how they've performed and what courses they need to do because We're A Learning Organisation. 

So they go to the professional development seminars with relief at the novelty of being away from their desk and eat mints with the other seven perky strangers on their table as an expert projects PowerPoint slides with dot points about innovation with anecdotes about Fortune 500 companies and other stories to inspire them to be better. 

We love stories.  They connect us to something bigger.

Good decision making is story telling.

It has a heroic arc that gives us meaning. 

It's heroic because it's our conscious act to embark on the journey and accept its possible consequences and take responsibility for them.

It's superior to what most call decision making which is actually an instinctive sneeze-like response to a stimulus.

Our journey begins with the ascent of a hill where we sit at the top and take in the view of the Widget.

Wow. We never realised how close our desk was to it.

Good decision making is a journey that takes us out and back again to our desk and it won't look the same afterwards.

That's what a Learning Organisation is. 

'We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.'

- T.S. Eliot 'Little Gidding'. 

Assembly.

The Atlantic Magazine had a recent article about how some companies in the United States are bringing their factories back home.

While increasing wages in developing countries and higher transport costs from the factory to market are part of the reason, most are found in Widget Thinking. 

The time from when a product came into fashion and then fell out had shortened from seven years to two. It meant companies had to shorten the feedback loop between factory floor and design table.   

General Electric is one company reversing the overseas outsourcing trend. It originally had designers in the United States and manufacturers in China. It decided to bring the workers who built washing machines into the same building as the engineers and designers.

Workers on the factory floor identifying any improvements or issues could immediately inform the engineers who could consult with the designers who could modify the Widget. One example was when workers recommended a design change that cut the hours needed to assemble a washing machine from 10 hours to 2.  

This 'inherent understanding' (unconscious competence?) of the product had been lost with the outsourcing to cheaper labour in China. GE got it back by closing the gap between assembly line and designer. 

Co-located assembly and design also allowed companies to adopt the ‘Lean’ manufacturing techniques popularised by Toyota. Everyone has a say in critiquing and improving the way work gets done, with a focus on eliminating waste. It requires an open, collegial and relentlessly self-critical mind-set among workers and bosses alike –a  culture that is hard to create and sustain.

It requires a Leader. 

Each worker adds their widget to the Widget moving along the assembly line. It's the job of the manager to make sure that the assembly line is itself assembled so that the work is as easy and efficient as possible. The best way for the manager to achieve this is through an open, collegial and relentlessly self-critical approach.

In the GE example, the dishwasher team created its own assembly line based on its practical experience of assembling dishwashers. The result was that it eliminated 35 percent of labour. 

Here's where the bigger SPEAR picture is important to Widget production. The GE workers only shared the information that led to the reduction in labour after management promised them that none would lose their job.

The Leaders and managers had succeeded in creating the Space where the workers felt safe enough to be so innovative that they did put their very jobs at risk. 

Every organisation is making something - its Widget. It's probably not literally an assembly line. It is at least made up of people who each makes something that contributes towards the Widget.

Is this process open? Is  it collegial? Is it relentlessly self-critical? 

Does every worker feel that they have a Leader who has created their Space, defined their Purpose, Equipped them, Affirmed them.?

Then got out of their way? 

Dance.

Dance, as with most art, can teach us about how to harness the tension between order and creativity in an organisation and in ourselves.

An hour spent watching professional dancers rehearse is a humbling experience. Their discipline, intrinsic drive to perfect the smallest of moves, facial expressions, even the position of their fingers are inspirational for most workers whose main driver is whether Dorothy put doughnuts in the boardroom for morning tea.

The Weekend Australian newspaper had an article about the work of the choreographer Stephanie Lake that captured the paradox of creating beautiful art.

"When I watch her create movement phrases, to me it's the musical equivalent of listening to Bach improvise a fugue," says Fox, a renowned composer and sound artist. "It's incredibly intuitive but brilliantly precise at the same time."

Lake says of her collaboration with Fox on A Small Prometheus: "We have pushed each other into this place and we have ended up with a piece that has quite a lot of tension in it. We didn't set out to make that; it's where we have been led."

Lake says she often works with dancers in an improvisatory way and then selects those passages she wants to "fix", or retain in the final piece.

But for A Small Prometheus she wanted the dance to suggest instability, or constant flux, so some passages are fixed and others are a little unplanned. "Bodies melt, cascade, fall into each other," she says. "Often things go wrong. It hasn't been lethal, but it's risky. There are sections in this work - which is new for me - that are essentially loose and unpredictable."

Intuitive. 

Precise. 

Space. 

Tension. 

Led. 

Improvisatory 

Instability. 

Flux. 

Wrong. 

Risky. 

Unpredictable. 

These are the nouns of an authentic life of a person and an organisation. We suppress them at our peril. 

Almost all of us read these as signs of error, failure, disaster, impending job loss. Leaders not only allow these elements to exist, they fan them.

That's why Leaders are brave and rare. Not for the reason we traditionally assume - ie that they need courage to make the tough, unpopular decisions needed to preserve order.

A Leader is called to create the space and hold all of these contradictions within, amidst the fear, anger, anxiety, conflict and uncertainty that inevitably arise. The Leader perseveres despite the failures and the criticisms because this is what she is called to do.  There is almost no choice for her.

As Stephanie Lake said about her work:

'We didn't set out to make that; it's where we have been led. '

Boundaries.

A Leader defines the Space in which those who join her will apply themselves towards the Purpose.

A Leader clearly marks out the boundaries - not as an exercise of power to restrain or control those following but as a shorthand way of defining the resources - time, money, laws, staff, decision-making authority - available to them. It removes as many variables as possible so that she can leave them to focus on doing good work.

The space is marked out in the job ad, the employment contract, the duty statement, policies, procedures, budgets. Practical, unambiguous boundary lines around a field of endeavour and creativity and good work.

A good Leader will make the space as large as practicable to allow those within it the freedom to explore and experiment and innovate.

She may have managers who patrol the boundaries on her behalf. (Many 'leadership' positions are actually caretakers of a boundary of the Space carved out by a Leader.)

Some people's response to boundaries is to run as fast as they can to the extremes of the space and pound on the walls. A few will even cross over them as a child-like expression of their independence or dissent from the Leader. Others will probe the boundaries for technical gaps and exploit them, only to retreat back inside and feign surprise and indignation when asked to account by the managers for their actions.

The Leader responds by inviting them to leave her space and create their own.

As she will soon do herself. 

The Leader's final act is to Retreat from the Space that she has created for others to fill.  

So that she can define a new one.

And so on. 

Because that's what Leaders do. 

SPEAR.

She summarised it all. 

Cadets. Law School. Officers Training School. Basic Staff Course. Masters of Defence Studies. Consulting. Workshops. Seminars. Books. Lots of books. All the PowerPoints, training films, lectures, military exercises, manuals, exams, yelling, drill, marching, chains of command, legislation, tutorials, performance reviews and on the job experience.

She was 12 years old. 

I had finished teaching spear throwing to a group of Year 7s who were at New Norcia on a Leadership Camp. They were sitting cross-legged in the shade of the trees at the end of the oval and I was trying to draw leadership lessons from the last hour of throwing Gidgies - the Aboriginal spear - using the Miro. It was impromptu. I was making it up as I went along. I had an inbox full of emails back in my office.

'Did you learn anything today about being Leaders?' I asked them. 

A hand went up. 

 'You're the New Norcia Town Manager and you led the activity today?' the boy said with a child's typical upward inflection.

 'Well, yes. And was there anything that I did that you thought was what leaders do?'

A different hand went up. 

'You drew a line in the dirt and told us that we weren't to go over the line unless you said that we could?' 

'Was that because I was bossy?' 

'No. You didn't want one of us to accidentally get speared.' 

'That's right. So I explained the boundaries of our activity. Good. Anything else?' 

Hand up. 

'You put that cardboard box full of straw in front of us and told us it was a pretend kangaroo and that was our target that we had to spear?' 

'Good. I gave you something to aim for. Anything else that I did that you think a leader might do?' 

'You gave us each a Gidgie and Miro and taught us how to use them?' 

'Yes. Anything else?' I reckoned I'd exhausted all the lessons. One last opportunity to squeeze thoughts out of their capped heads. 

Hand up. I'm surprised.  I nod towards the boy squinting up at me.

 'After each throw you told us what we did right and what we did wrong? We kept missing the box - er - kangaroo but we got closer each time?'

I was impressed. 'Good. So I was giving you feedback. Yes. Leaders give feedback in a way that encourages or affirms.' 

I reckoned that was about it. I was feeling quite chuffed about how much we'd extracted given I'd done no planning. Most had lost eye contact with me and were tugging at the tufts of dead grass. I glanced at my watch. Five minutes left.

'So does anyone have anything else to add? Any questions about our activity?' 

Silence. Then her hand slowly rose from the middle of the group. 

'Yes?' 

'You got out of the way?' she said. A few giggles. 

I started to smile. But didn't. I wondered. 

'What do you mean?' I'm wondering if... 

'Well, the last thing that you did was that you moved to the side and just let us throw the spears. You waited for us all to finish and didn't say anything. You just watched us. And then you came over and let us know how we'd gone so that we could do it better next time.' 

I felt a tingle.

'That's right. I got out of the way. There was nothing more for me to do.' I paused to remember the list of things that they'd told me I'd done. 'I'd shown you the area or space that you had to do the activity in. I shown you what the purpose was - to spear the kangaroo. I gave you all the equipment and taught you how to use it.  I gave you feedback after each throw so that you learned how to do it better. And then - I got out of your way and let you get on with it.'

Wow. 

I scanned their bored faces. They didn't share my excitement at the significance of that exchange. They were thinking about afternoon tea and then Aboriginal tool making with Lester. But my mind was humming.

And then this. 

The same girl's hand rises. 'Yes?' 

'Is that why they say that leaders are brave?'  

My tingles tingled. 

'What do you mean?' 

She blinked. Cocked her head slightly. Waved away a fly.

'Well...it must be really hard for a leader to just stand back and let people do their jobs and not keep yelling at them or taking over and doing it themselves. To know that some people might do it wrong and it's the leader who gets blamed. I think it must take lots of bravery to be a leader.' 

Then off they trotted up the hill behind their teachers to their biscuits and cordial and more lessons about Leadership.

Space.

Purpose. 

Equip.

Affirm.

Retreat. 

Participation.

The Philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah said in an interview something that we all know: 

People who have been heard, and whose position is understood, tend to be more willing to accept an outcome that they wouldn't have chosen because they feel that they've had a voice, that they've participated in the process.

This is consistent with Step 5 of the Five Step Good Decision Making Process - Hearing. 

The 'process' can be a single decision. Or the entire boss-worker relationship.

The job advertisement. 'This is our Widget. If you build Widgets that look like this, we need you to help us build our Widget.'

The interview. 'Have you read the contract of employment that says that if you build your Widget in the way that we describe then we will put money in your bank?'

The informal chat over a coffee. 'What sport do you play?'

The conversation over a copy of the employment agreement. 'Yes, we can add a clause that says that you can leave early on Tuesdays for State representative hockey practice in exchange for those overnight work trips interstate.' 

The tour of the potential workplace. 'Here's your desk and your surroundings where you will spend a lot of hours of your life.'

The job is offered and accepted. 'Thank you for choosing to work with us.'

The Entry Interview. 'Why did you choose to work with us and what are you hoping for in this job?' 

The three days of induction before touching a computer mouse. 'Here are our Values and let's take a tour of our factory floor so you can see the final Widget coming off the conveyor belt with the bit that we want you to build.'

The ad hoc conversations. 'I heard that the Hockeyroos are training down the road today. Let's have our weekly catch up over a sandwich at the oval.'

And so on.

A year on and the boss raises the potential new position in Singapore.

The boss chooses Geoffrey. Disappointment. Hurt. A sting to the ego. Self doubt.

Reflection. Recalibration.

There's a job in the Rio office. 2016 Olympics host city. 

Purpose.

Every experienced decision maker knows the frustration of having to deal with the aftermath of the right decision that was made the wrong way. 

Nicola Roxon, the former Federal Attorney-General and Health Minister gave a speech this week in which she told of the previous government dealing with the same consequences. It was a rare insight into the fundamentals of good decision making in the leadership of the country.

She explained why the Labor Party chose to remove Kevin Rudd as the Prime Minister. 

'I think we had all the right reasons to act,' she said,  'but I think we were clumsy and short sighted in the way we did it.' 

'Even though the reasons were there to justify our action, I don’t think we handled it properly at the time, and Labor has paid a very high price for this mishandling ever since.'

In other words, Labor's process leading up to and following the removal of Kevin Rudd revealed, tested and shaped its Widget in the eyes of the electorate. The re-defining of its Widget that this caused, and the damage to Labor's integrity is hard to overcome.

'If Kevin had been an employee,' Ms Roxon a former industrial lawyer said, 'he would have won his unfair dismissal case. Not because there wasn’t cause to dismiss him, but because we didn’t explain the reasons properly to him, let alone to the voting public.'

'I used to see a lot of these cases - where there was good cause to dismiss someone but the employer hadn’t given notice of the problem, or used a different excuse because it was too embarrassing to simply tell a colleague they weren’t up to the job, or that everyone found them unbearable.'

She spoke about how attempts to save people from the consequences of their actions and the decisions that they draw upon themselves can actually be crueller in the long run.

'After the most brutal and speedy sacking, we got overcome with politeness and thought it would save Kevin pain to say as little as possible and move on quickly. What the rest of the world calls a polite white lie, became political poison.

'So although at the time it seemed unimaginable to contemplate being so publically rude to your own PM, with the benefit of hindsight, some of us should’ve spoken out - if not before, at least immediately after.

'Instead, we made a brutal decision and then shied from the brutal explanation that was needed.

'We left everyone looking for other answers and by doing this we did a great disservice to both Kevin and Julia. On its own it would’ve cast a long shadow over the next three years in government, and with active fanning by Kevin and his supporters, it proved impossible to recover from.'

It's either sobering or reassuring for the average boss to know that the senior law and justice officer in the country and an expert in employment law was collateral damage from her government's poor workplace performance management and decision making. 

This is a striking example of how even the most experienced, intelligent and powerful decision makers can be so fixated on the need to make the right decision, to be 'decisive', that they neglect to make the decision in the right way. 

They got what they wanted - the removal of Kevin Rudd as Prime Minister - yet at the cost of their Widget. As Ms Roxon said in response to the argument that political expediency justified the decision:

'We know bums on seats in Parliament do matter - but they aren’t all that matters. If the damage to our sense of purpose, to our reputation for delivering good policy and for caring for the community is severe, this reputational loss, and lack of purpose, can take longer to recover from than it takes to win back seats here and there.

'And it is harder to win the seats back if your people don’t think you stand for anything.'

Hard.

A Leader recognises the tension between the uncertainty, anxiety and chaos that flow from navigating virgin territory, and the fear that this is evidence that she is failing and that she needs to turn back. 

Leadership is Leadership because it is advancing where no-one has been before. Leadership is taking people in a direction that they otherwise wouldn't have chosen. It follows (no pun intended) that this will give rise to emotional turbulence in both the Leader and those following her.

It is hard.

Leaders are Leaders because they continue to advance towards where they want to be beyond the point where the PowerPoint leaders turn back because there's no path and it's hard and people are complaining.

The PowerPoint leader talks of leadership of leading of leaders of lead of leadership positions with the background hum of their wheels running over the smooth bitumen highway that was beaten, then surveyed, then graded, then laid out in front of them to travel on in air conditioned comfort with the cruise control on directed by the onboard navigation system while everyone's asleep in the back.

The PowerPoint leader then makes a decision in their voice to deviate. They immediately become disconcerted by the sound and unevenness of the gravel and the bumpy ride as they veer off someone else's route. Those in the back seat stir and mutter at being disturbed by the poor driving. They peer through the windows and feel anxious as they don't recognise their surroundings. They seek comfort and affirmation of the legitimacy of their fears in the other anxious fellow back seat faces. There's murmurs of dissent.

The PowerPoint leader makes another decision that relies on what they learned from their first decision. They veer off the track and into virgin terrain. The back seat grumbles grow into calls to turn back because surely the vibrations and the shaking and the noise and the uncertainty mean that this can't be the right direction.

Wrong way. Turn back. You must be lost. There's no track let alone marked highway and signs. Look around. Nobody else is on this route. Here - look at the map that proves you're wrong. Everyone in the back seat thinks you're wrong. We took a vote. Democracy.

The fear for the novice Leader transcending from PowerPoint slides is that the voices behind them and in their head might be right. Who do they think they are to deviate off the bitumen?

The real time symptoms of error are the same as those of Leadership. It's only those who may follow who can see the sense and predictability of the path.

Choosing to transcend the PowerPoint slides and into Leadership demands exceptional confidence that can survive the battering to ego and identity and the ceaseless gnawing of self-doubt that is louder than the critics' voices. Not motivated by any external goal or incentive because these may never be grasped.

But because to do so is to become who you are. 

Decider.

The President of the United States Barack Obama gave revealing interview about his decision making.

 “You’ll see I wear only gray or blue suits....I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make.”

“You need to focus your decision-making energy. You need to routinize yourself. You can’t be going through the day distracted by trivia.”

He quoted President George W Bush who described the President as 'a decider'.

 “Nothing comes to my desk that is perfectly solvable. Otherwise, someone else would have solved it. So you wind up dealing with probabilities. Any given decision you make you’ll wind up with a 30 to 40 percent chance that it isn’t going to work. You have to own that and feel comfortable with the way you made the decision. You can’t be paralyzed by the fact that it might not work out.” [My emphasis.]

Note that President Obama believes that 'comfort' doesn't come from the outcome of the decision. It comes from 'owning' the way that the decision was made. 

The President added that 'after you have made your decision, you need to feign total certainty about it. People being led do not want to think probabilistically.'

“One of my most important tasks is making sure I stay open to people, and the meaning of what I’m doing, but not to get so overwhelmed by it that it’s paralyzing. Option one is to go through the motions. That I think is a disaster for a president.'

"There are times when I have to save it and let it out at the end of the day.”