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

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? 

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. 

Information

Imagine if everyone went to the Executive team meetings. 

Or received a copy of the Minutes. 

Or at least got an email saying:

'The Executive team met today and here are the things that we discussed and the decisions that we made and why we made them.

We will begin to execute those decisions in 48 hours. If you have any suggestion as to how we could improve any of them, please let us know.

If you have any questions about anything that the Executive does, please also ask us. Thank you'.

How much of the power held in organisations is the result of being at a meeting and having more information than someone who wasn't? 

If an organisation is truly Widget focussed ('Alignment' I think is the fancy term);

If an organisation is truly desperate for everyone to be continuously learning so that it can remain innovative ('The Learning Organisation' is what we consultants cleverly call it);

If it wants people who make decisions that others choose to follow ('Leaders' is what I call people who do that);

Then why wouldn't a leader in a learning organisation who's widget focussed want to throw open the floodgates of information and works-in-progress for everyone to see and contribute towards and learn from as openly as technology allows? 

My best answer so far (I'm still thinking about this) is that it's because people with the power to do this are the ones who go to executive meetings and they have egos.

They are putting their Weekend Widget ahead of their Weekday Widget.

Information is power. 

Google it. 

Other.

There's a theory that matter only becomes matter by virtue if its relationship with other matter.

The word 'monk' comes from the Latin for 'alone'. Yet monks live in community because they discover themselves by bumping into other monks discovering themselves. 

We exist only because of our relationship with another.

We need encounters with other particles to define our reality.

The more that we bump into each other the more we bring ourselves into existence. 

The more we become who we are. 

A Complaint About Me? Why thank you for filing smooth my uneven edges.

A Performance Review? How kind of you to buff me into a sparkling shine.

Shall I Make a Decision? Oh please do so that I can learn more about you.

Cooo-EE! 

Marco!.....

...[polo]. 

Play.

Jonathon sent me an article recently about reconciling the highly regimented processes and structures in modern football with the desire of most sportsmen to just play on instinct. 

It reminded me of a paper I wrote during my Masters of Defence Studies on how much the effectiveness of modern armed forces relied on the threat of courts martial and other forms of discipline. The simplistic view is that sailors soldiers and airmen put themselves in harm's way out of fear of being punished if they hesitate. An infantryman charges a machine gun nest because his officers told him to do it. I didn't think that this could be the thinking in modern armed forces. But I couldn't think of an alternative explanation.

My research directed me to a senior Air Force officer who had studied this question and presented a simple answer. Members of the armed forces behaving contrary to normal instincts of self-preservation was the result of thousands of hours of drills and other training. Soldiers' instincts had been re-programmed so that they reacted in a predictable way to coming under fire, and they knew that everyone else in their section was doing the same in a practised drill. They had become unconsciously competent.

Much like the air traffic controllers, this rote response actually freed their minds up to consider more creative options to deal with the threat. Soldiers charge machine gun nests because it's what they've been trained to do. It's their Widget. Not to detract from the significantly higher risk to them of this behaviour compared to that faced by the average office worker. This is why those whose actions are recognised with medals usually shrug awkwardly when asked about their bravery. They were doing their job. They knew that their fellow soldiers' ability to do their jobs depended on it.

The justification for the structures in football is much the same. As the writer of the article concludes: 

'I think the key that ultimately opens the door for most footballers is that this process is not the football bogyman at all. In fact, if adhered to, these structures will let you return to the battle cry that made you a good player to begin with: ''JUST LET ME PLAY!''

In simple terms, all of these set plays and crosses on the whiteboard are just a place to start. With the right amount of teaching and practice, getting to these spots just becomes part of the routine, part of the rhythm of a game.

For the best players, it gives them a freedom, too. A starting point. To be in the spot your team needs you to be in can give a player a sense of inner confidence.'

Good policies, procedures, routines and Widgets in a workplace do the same. Combined with a good boss, far from constraining us, they free us to just play. 

Always.

Your boss is always right. Always.

This is the First Rule of Employment.

Remember this - and you will set yourself free - one way or the other. 

Your boss is always right because it is her Widget that  you are helping to build. Your job is to give whatever expertise that you have to your boss in whatever form that you usually give it. If she says that you're wrong - then she should know because it's her Widget that you're wrong about. 

Your job is to build the best Widget possible for your boss to incorporate into her Widget. 

 If you think that your boss is wrong - there are two possibilities: There is something about your Widget that you don't understand or there is something about the boss's Widget that you don't understand. Because your boss is always right. If you think that your boss is wrong (and of course she's not) then ask sincere questions with the mind of the naïve inquirer. Not in an annoying way - she's busy.

If you're the boss being asked those questions, then be secure enough to respond to them in a non-defensive, open-minded manner. Why wouldn't you? You want the questioner to make the best Widget possible because your Widget depends on it.

If you know that your team will always assume that you are right once you've made a decision - then the pressure is on to make sure that you are right - because they're off making their Widget to plug into your Widget based on the specs that you've given them.

You can't lose, boss. Because if you're confident about your Widget and how your team contributes to it, then the questioner will go away with their answers and do their bit to make sure your Widget is shiny. If the questions do reveal a flaw in your Widget, or at least the questioner's understanding of their Widget, then best to find that out now and remedy it, before your boss - or worse still - your customer does.

(This is the real incentive to have a genuine Open Door policy.)  

The 'My Boss is Always Right' Rule is so counter-intuitively empowering. You can't lose - boss or worker. 

It frees you up to focus your energies on making your Widget. Or to go and find somewhere else to work where your boss's right aligns with what you think is right. 

Or better still - leave and become your own boss. And quickly learn how good life was when you had a Boss that was always right.

Shortcuts

The authors of The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis make the point that the longer the discussions between President Kennedy and his advisers about what to do about the Soviet missiles in Cuba progress, the less they refer to historical events such as the attack on Pearl Harbour as a way of making sense of what is happening.  The authors call this use of history as ‘intellectual shortcutting’ which is ‘a natural tendency when busy persons of active temperament confront unfamiliar circumstances’.

The authors attribute the gradual immersion in the detail of the crisis before them as the reason for the decreasing frequency with which Kennedy and his advisers refer to historical precedents.  This analysis reinforces the importance of emphasising hard evidence ahead of simple and seductive assumptions that what may have explained something happening before, can explain why it happened or will happen again.

By stepping back from the information and following the other four steps towards a good decision, a decision maker increases her ability to methodically analyse the data instead of defaulting to instinct.

Narrowing

The meetings of the executive committee of the United States Government National Security Council met over 13 days in October 1962 to make decisions that the future of the world would depend upon.

The meetings were described as ‘disorderly’ - not because of lack of formal organisation, but because President Kennedy did not want to be too quick to suppress analysis by his advisers, or to delegate it to a sub-committee.  Kennedy kept the participants on topic, mainly by asking questions, and by keeping his statements short.

The authors of The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis, observed that at times, certain members of the committee broke away and left the main discussion in order to attend to specific ‘action’ items.  This was necessary if tasks were to get done, yet had the effect of narrowing their focus so that they had difficulty adjusting their contributions back to the big picture when needed.

Decision makers need to be mindful of this ‘narrowing’ effect that experts, specialist sub-groups or other niche contributors risk bringing to decisions.  The best way to overcome this is to keep reminding all of those involved in offering advice and analysis of the big picture and to keep them up to date as it changes.

This ‘big picture’ communication applies in the day to day running of organisations as well.  Leaders need to give their people frequent reasons and opportunities to lift their heads out of their trenches and to scan the whole battlefield.

Tension.

In the Conclusion to the book  The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis, the authors state: 

‘Perhaps, above all, we observe in this record - more clearly than in any other documents we have seen - the contrary pulls of detail on the one hand and belief (or conviction or ideology) on the other.’  

These battles between evidence and bias, and the micro and the macro, are critical ones to recognise and win for any decision maker. 

The authors note that histories of decisions - whether insignificant or that such as faced by Kennedy; the destruction of the world- rarely see or even know the subtle flow of details and therefore underestimate their pushing and pulling on the mind of a decision maker.

This effect of detail on the ‘conscious and unconscious minds of decision makers, who see facts and form presumptions within frameworks of understanding shaped both by their personal interests and by their accumulated experience’ is further exaggerated when there are multiple contributors towards a decision.  Each has their biases and personal frameworks and agendas and projects their advice on a decision accordingly.  

Kennedy was under constant pressure from the military to use overwhelming force to solve the crisis, which was a seductively simple response, yet with potentially catastrophic consequences.  Fortunately for the world, the President had learned a bitter lesson about accepting the generals’ advice after the Bay of Pigs debacle early in his Presidency.  He even resists the taunt of  General Curtis Le May that Kennedy’s cautious response to the Soviet aggression is ‘almost as bad as the appeasement at Munich.’  The President has the self-confidence and mental strength to not be influenced by Le May’s highly emotional ‘argument’ against the quarantine.

There are many lessons for decision makers and their advisers in the way in which President Kennedy behaved during the Cuban Missile Crisis.  The need to reconcile the incessant tension between realities and beliefs is one of them.

Emotion.

In the Conclusion of ‘The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis’, the authors assess the decision-making of the Soviet and American leadership that is revealed almost word-for-word in the nearly seven hundred pages of taped crisis meetings in the book.

Khrushchev made his decisions alone and without seeking advice or analysis.  He ‘acted more from instinct than from calculation’, was an ‘impulsive risk taker’ and was described by aides as ‘reckless’.  Khrushchev had little experience or knowledge of foreign affairs and his understanding of the world was framed in simplistic Marxism-Leninism.  He made assumptions about Kennedy based purely on the President’s youth and family wealth, and saw his ‘flexibility’ as a weakness.  Khrushchev also suffered from an inflated sense of his influence on world affairs as a result of his mis-reading of the motivations for America’s responses to his previous decisions.  

In short, Khrushchev’s decision-making was driven by emotion more than reason.  If this made it difficult for the Americans to read and anticipate his actions, it must have been equally so for his generals and ministers.

In comparison, President Kennedy ‘did not make any impulsive decisions during the crisis’.  He ‘opened up much of his reasoning….and likely consequences of his choices before he made them.  He explained his thinking to a range of analyses and critiques from formal and informal advisers and even representatives of the British government.’  He also allows his advisers to ‘reason through the problems’.  

At the height of the crisis, the authors argue that Kennedy ‘seems more alive to the possibilities and consequences of each new development than anyone else’, remaining calm and lucid, and clear about his objectives. 

While Kennedy kept himself open to the advice of others, and had obviously nurtured a working relationship that meant his advisers felt confident enough to disagree with him, he was firm when he needed to be.  He overrode the generals’ planned air strike in retaliation for the shooting down of an American U2 aircraft, even though that was the response that he had initially agreed upon.

The ability to remain uninfluenced by bias is one of the most important qualities of a good decision maker.  It makes her thinking visible, her actions predictable and teachable and gives confidence to her team who may have to execute their own decisions that flow from hers. 

Kennedy used many tools to keep him focussed on the facts.  He verbalised his logic, exposing his thinking even to those outside his circle to avoid ‘groupthink’.  He had private venting conversations with his brother, the Attorney-General Robert Kennedy.  Most importantly, Kennedy did not surround himself with ‘Yes Men’.  

President Kennedy’s willingness to be transparent in his decision making and open in his uncertainties showed courage and were evidence of great leadership.

Athwart.

During one of the meetings in the White House to discuss the US response to the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, Robert Kennedy, Attorney-General and brother of President John Kennedy referred to a memo that had been prepared by Under Secretary of State George Ball.  

The memo argued against a surprise strike against Cuba.  It said that to do so would be to behave ‘in a manner totally contrary to our traditions, by pursuing a course of action that would cut directly athwart anything we have stood for during our national history, and condemn us as hypocrites in the opinion of the world.’

Robert Kennedy said ’I think George Ball has a hell of a good point….I think it’s the whole question of…what kind of country we are.’

Every decision that we make is a statement to the world - louder, more honest and memorable than words - about who we really are. 

Questions.

‘The Kennedy Tapes - Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis' is a verbatim account of all meetings that President Kennedy had with his advisers in mid-October 1962 in response to the Soviet Union installing nuclear missiles in Cuba - thus threatening the world with nuclear war.

Kennedy’s first meeting is a lesson in good decision-making.

He called together 12 advisers.

His advisers spoke 285 times.

The President spoke 66 times - mostly no longer than a sentence.

The first 11 times he spoke he asked questions and listened to the answers.  

The first non-question from him was ‘Thank you’.

He then asked 21 more questions - a total of 32 questions - before making a statement.

His first statement to the meeting was a summary of the information that had been given to him.

He then asked six more questions and listened to each answer.

His 40th statement was ‘Well now, let’s decide what we ought to be doing’.

His asked nine more questions.

He made four asides.

His 54th statement was to ask that the meeting reconvene later in the evening. 

He made three more statements.

He followed these with six questions.

Then two statements, a question, two statements, four more questions, one statement.

He ended with a question.

President Kennedy, the most powerful man in the world, facing a decision that could result in nuclear armageddon, asked four times as many questions as he made statements.

The only decision that he made was that they should have another meeting.

Personal

I was eavesdropping on a conversation between two men sitting just outside my peripheral vision. We were all waiting for a delayed flight departure. One was telling the other how he had asked Human Resources for leave to help his family relocate interstate where he had been posted. HR had refused, saying that it was outside their budget.

"You've seen their financial state," I heard him say to his colleague. "I've just ignored their hypocrisy in the past. But this is personal now. I shall get even. Or better-than-even. I'll just bide my time. "

I wondered how much their company had saved by denying the executive leave to help his family manage the disruption to their lives that the company had caused.  I knew as he did that the cost would never appear on any spreadsheet. There literally would be no accounting for it. There would be no information to allow the HR Department decision maker to connect their decision with its consequences on the company's bottom line. There would be no learning.

I sensed both men rise from their seats so I looked over towards them. I wanted to I see if I could tell from their appearance what their business may be, and thus how the disgruntled one could extract his revenge. 

They walked out of the café, both putting on their airline pilot caps as they went. 

Learning

John Worsfold, the former coach of the West Coast Eagles AFL team said recently: 

"We want to learn about each other in every game we play." 

What a refreshing insight. It suggests that the people who we work with aren't just a means to an end. They aren't just 'team members' who contribute to some work goal. 

They are our our teachers. 

They teach us about ourselves. 

If we play to learn.