Leadership Success

by Ben Renshaw, Co-Director of Success Intelligence

Today was a significant event as the 150 leaders of Government Council gathered together to focus on how they were going to create leadership success in an uncertain future. As a Council they are being faced with needing to make 12-20% financial cuts over the next 3 years, which they recognise means that they will have to discover new ways of leading to deliver the same quality of service with less resource.

I had been invited to stimulate their thinking and had put together 3 key leadership themes to explore:

1. Leadership inspiration.
I started off with the idea that leadership is inspiration. I cited research from the Department of Trade and Industry who conducted a national survey to find out the components of successful leadership. Top of the list with 53% of respondents was inspiration. However, when asked how inspirational employees found their leaders only 11% believed that their leaders had the ability to inspire. This was in marked contrast to the 75% of leaders who thought that they did inspire their people. I find this ‘inspiration gap’ very common. In fact I would go as far to say that it’s quite rare to find leaders who genuinely set a compelling example for their people on a regular basis.

The first challenge I set the group was to think about the kind of decisions they make in the formative part of their days. Responses included, ‘Hit snooze’, ‘Walk the dog’, ‘Get the kids up’, ‘What am I going to wear?’ Inspirational stuff from a room of senior leaders! I set out a proposition that being inspirational starts with a mindset. It is influenced by the type of decisions you make each day. Set the intention to be inspirational and it will encourage you to make it a priority. I then invited people to reflect upon what inspires them through questions such as, ‘What do I love?’ ‘What is my joy?’ ‘What is my passion?’ It was heartening to see a group move from being relatively cynical about leadership to becoming genuinely engaged with the recognition that in order to inspire others, they need to be inspired themselves.

2. Leadership style.
Great leaders have the ability to read situations well and adapt their styles accordingly. One of the most outstanding leaders I know is a CEO who has a remarkable ability to flex his style in an effortless way including fronting up to the City, communicating with shareholders, working with his executive team and inspiring his employees. However, it wasn’t always the case. When he landed the coveted job of CEO he was renowned for a highly directive style, which had certainly helped him get where he was, but was not going to help him succeed in the future. He quickly recognised that in order to engage his workforce he needed to develop a variety of styles, in particular a collaborative style that ensured others felt important through being consulted, listened to and trusted.

Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence, conducted extensive research on leadership styles and identified 6 key styles, each of which has a different impact on the quality of the culture in an organisation. In his well-known Harvard Business Review article, 'Leadership That Gets Results', the most positive style that emerged was a visionary one. The ability to articulate a compelling vision with the message, ‘Come with me’ creates the necessary alignment to take a company forward. Other styles with a positive impact included a democratic and coaching approach. The most negative styles were a commanding/coercive style, which is appropriate in a crisis, but if used overtime causes high levels of disengagement, and a pace-setting approach, which certainly helps drive performance, but if overused burns people out and is not sustainable.

3. Leadership growth.
I challenged the audience to think if they have reached their leadership peak, or do they still have room to grow? One of the key principles of Success Intelligence is ‘For an organisation to grow, its leaders need to grow’. In our work we see a direct correlation between individual and organisational development. In fact the consultancy McKinsey cited important research from their seminal work, War for Talent, which showed that 53% of managers left their jobs specifically due to a lack of development, in the form of coaching, mentoring and job rotation.

Take a moment now to think about how have you grown so far in 2009, and how you intend to grow coming into 2010?

I want to leave you with the idea that leadership success is not a position, title, or role. Ultimately, it is a commitment to giving your best energy, opening your heart, sharing your thoughtful reflections and being inspired yourself.

Leading with Purpose

by Ben Renshaw, Co-Director of Success Intelligence

I have recently completed the 18th Senior Leadership Program for InterContinental Hotels Group, the largest hospitality company in the world. It is a global program spanning Europe, Middle-East & Africa, Asia-Pacific and America. Over 250 of the most senior leaders in the organisation have participated on the journey during the last three years with remarkable results. The program has received a 100% rating for ‘recommend to colleagues’, and a 100% score for ‘return on investment’ from the delegates.

IHG created a core purpose for the business, ‘Great Hotels Guests Love’. The premise of the program is that for an organisation to become purpose-led its leaders need to understand their own personal purpose and place it at the heart of the way they inspire and lead their people.

The program is spread over a 3-day period. Day one explores the modern context in which leaders have to operate today. It is a picture that captures the complex, fast paced and uncertain times in which we live and requires a new mindset, which embraces a quantum perspective that thrives on ambiguity, welcomes the unknown, capitalises on instinct and recognises that there is not just one answer to the myriad of challenges we face. We then go on to look at the various leadership styles required to inspire, engage and align people in today’s modern age such as being visionary, directive and performance focused. The end of the day gives people the space to start to reflect upon what they stand for as a leader and identifies their own personal purpose. We use a lifeline exercise, which invites people to reflect upon the key experiences of their life to date, draw conclusions from these events in terms of their impact and identify their deepest values as a consequence. They are then asked to draw a graph that represents when they have been most fulfilled to explore their core purpose. Using questions such as, ‘When are you at your best?’ ‘What is your joy?’ ‘What do you love?’ ‘What do you want to contribute?’ ‘What difference do you want to make?’ people begin to clarify their “raison d’etre.”

On day 2 we have the opportunity for participants to share their ‘leadership story’. This is always the highlight as we listen to riveting accounts of what has shaped people’s experience and what they stand for today. Encouraging feedback is given following each presentation in order to accelerate learning and development. The afternoon is a coaching intensive in which we apply non-directive coaching skills on real business issues. We are fortunate that in the evening the President of each region joins us for an informal dialogue over dinner in which they recount their own leadership story and listen to where delegates have come.

Our final day is devoted to building more leadership skills such as engaging people and giving accurate feedback. The last assignment is that participants create their own compelling vision of how they want to be as a leader in the future. Finally people are challenged to make some specific commitments to changing their behaviour, without which the sustainability of the program will be compromised as it’s all too easy to revert back to old habits.

I believe that the program is a sign of the times. Money is not enough to satisfy our wishes. Job security although welcome does not provide sufficient meaning. Ultimately we need to discover our core purpose, our real calling in order to enjoy authentic success.