Evolve Leadership Consulting Limited

Stay relevant, keep ahead

Paul de Beer

Don’t panic, its time to be calm and reflect

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It appears to be a very challenging time for the world right now, especially considering the coronavirus and the uncertainty ahead.  It has become clear that the coronavirus is worse than seasonal flu. Seasonal flu has a mortality rate of 0.1% and coronavirus mortality is varied depending on age, location and density of infected people.   So far, the mortality rate is anywhere between 1% to 2%.  The big difference is that seasonal flu is well researched and understood. 

 

Coronavirus is not yet understood and appears to act differently in different situations.   This uncertainty is a real challenge for our human brains and could perhaps account for the “frenzy” of varied news and views floating around.  The current preparation that we hear about through the media, appears to be aimed at a virus with a much greater impact than what the statistics suggest.

I have been through several crisis events is my lifetime, ranging from various stock market crashes, virus threats and violent uprisings. On reflection, I can see that none of these events were as bad as what we thought they would be.  So, what are the lessons here for us as individuals and as leaders of business?

 

  1. Our emotional system housed in our primitive brain are hard wired for us to experience negative events stronger than positive events. When we become emotional our almost rational brains further shut down and make flawed assumptions.    This process can send us on a downward out of control spiral.   This is a good time to stop, breath, reflect and examine the facts.   Organisational leaders have a key role to keep everyone aligned around a common purpose, communicating clearly to help clarify assumptions.   Tough times dealt with correctly can lead to new opportunities and growth, see them as such.
  2. Understand that the messages given to us, aren’t necessarily how we should hear them. Every one of our stakeholders packages the message differently.  As an example, anxiety sells news, so expect to hear the worst views in the news.   Political leaders need to show they have every base covered, because if they miss one situation, this mistake could easily lead to their exit.
  3. Organisations should not freeze or stop their future planning in tough times but rather see the opportunities and take time to prepare for the upswing. Many great paradigm shifts and new innovations have happened in tough times.   In the current situation, many conferences have been cancelled and many supply lines have been paused.   Experiment with new options, such as online conferencing/ webinars or look for equivalent or local supplies.   It’s a good time to discover new ways of doing things.

Use uncertain times such as these to learn resilience skills, exercise, reflect and inspire your teams with hope.  Stay calm and keep going back to the truth, the facts and numbers.   Remember, this too shall pass.

 

 

Read more about managing through anxiety: https://evolveconsult.uk/leadership-development/better-leadership-through-anxiety-management/

 

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Enable Organisations with Hope and Optimism

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It’s very important for all of us to step into every day with a note of optimism and hope.  When we are filled with positive energy, we better engage and bring our full selves into all that we do.   Successful organisations are made up of highly engaged staff, hence there is clearly a role for organisational leaders to invigorate people with hope.

So how can you step into the future and help your organisation to “light up” and be better equipped to create its own successful future? It is important to consider that according to the Gallup Consortium’s 2017 workplace report, only 8% of all staff in the UK are fully engaged.  These numbers are far worse than the world average, but also show that we have a huge opportunity to create workplaces that get more people onboard and perform much better.

According to Gallup’s statistics, three things enable engaged people: feeling respected, a sense of personal development and positive relationships.  These three areas have everything to do with the organisations culture, the style of leadership used, the way strategy is created and executed, performance management and people development to name a few.

 

1.       Strategy

Consider that strategy consists of long-term positioning and short-term actions, and that the right execution is core to any successful strategy.  Generally, higher-level managers of organisations should be responsible for the longer-term goals and these should cascade down to every level and staff member and to each action taken day to day.   The general rule is that if you want someone to own their work and fully engage, then include them in some way in the determination of the strategy that they must execute.  Methods that can greatly assist, is to create an organisational purpose, along with a vision and values.   A purpose is of a higher order than a vision and should clearly and emotively spell out why the business exists.  This purpose should then be cascaded down to every division, department and function. Look at the following article and videos for further details:

a) Building an Organization that is Fit to Execute Strategy: https://evolveconsult.uk/strategy/building-an-organisation-that-is-fit-to-execution/

 

b) Start with Why, Simon Sinek: https://youtu.be/IPYeCltXpxw

c) Southwest Airlines, Our Purpose and Vision: https://youtu.be/eGxMf88I5g4

 

2.       Style of Leadership and Culture

I like to think of culture as the road to success.   Without a road, you cannot drive anywhere.    Organisational culture simply put is “the way we do things around here”.  Many things influence the culture:  present and past leadership, the places staff come from, positive and negative organisational events, process and practices, the competitive landscape and many more.  Think about the positive and negative ways people behave within your organisation.   Do you experience the same behaviours regularly, write them down?  This is your culture, and one must ask if this culture will help your organisation to thrive in the long-term or not?  One of the roles of senior leadership is to help define, set and ensure that the organisation has the desired culture.

In the hierarchical and authority centric world, that almost lies behind us, management would mostly use a parent-child style of leadership. They would then wonder why staff are disengaged and do not take accountability (acting like children).   This world demands an adult-adult style of leadership, which means interacting with all staff equally as adults irrespective of their level. As per Gallup’s survey quoted above, people must be treated in a way that makes them feel respected, this is as adults, not children.

 

3.       Cascaded Goals

Once a business has decided on its critical success factors through its strategic process, it ideally then defines its strategic objectives.   The objectives are worded as an end state such as “grow revenue by 10% in market 1 and 2” or “reduce operational costs by 10% in real terms”.   Both these strategic objectives will require a plan of actions (a strategy) to achieve these end states.   In both cases, these plans would cascade to every department and every person in some way.   This link is key. Motivation levels will be high, if each person has bought into the Purpose, Vision and Strategy and has a clear view of how their work relates to the bigger picture.  People are motivated by meaning, achievement and purpose. See the following article for more strategy insights:

Building an Organisation that is Fit to Execute Strategy, Paul de Beer:

https://evolveconsult.uk/strategy/building-an-organisation-that-is-fit-to-execution/

 

4.       Performance Management

The entire field of performance management is still disputed in many areas.   What is understood is that people work for meaning and want fairness and transparency.   One of the key failures of performance management in many organisations is that it is not consistent and fair. Ratings are often biased to ensure most people fall into the centre of the bell curve, and therefore achieve an average performance rating. (to ensure average increases and bonuses where linked to performance)

The ideal performance management system should be linked to the individual and team cascaded goals as described above, as well as link to the desired cultural behavioural drivers. There should be clear differentiation between good and poor performance.   If the person is a people manager, then it is key to performance manage their role as a manager.   Make sure to develop all your managers on how to conduct meaningful performance conversations.

 

5.       Customer Centricity

Customer centricity as the name implies, means putting the customers’ needs in the centre of all you do.  This requires an organisation to be good at the transactional drivers (technology, processes, product, quality, efficiency etc.) as well as the transformational drivers (long-term thinking, EQ, engagement, listening, staff development etc.).  The prerequisite for your staff to powerfully engage with your customers is for them to be fully engaged within your organisation.  Ideally in the long run, all organisations should develop their cultures to fully support customer centricity.

 

Here is a short article with a few additional perspectives: LEADERSHIP WISDOMS FROM EXPERIENCED CEO’S: https://evolveconsult.uk/leadership/leadership-wisdoms-from-experienced-ceos/

 

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The crucial role of Directors in building High-Performance Organisations

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To start this article, let’s have a look at what is required for the creation of a High-Performance Organisation and then put the role of directors and the board in that context.

 

  • Organisations need to be brilliant at what they do in the short-term informed by the long-term.
  • Organisations need to be agile, innovative, ethical and highly client centric.
  • Organisations need to provide cost effective and efficient products and services.

 

All these things are made successful through the people, so staff engagement levels are directly correlated to all these success factors.

Staff engagement is also directly correlated to the style and type of leadership as well as the transparency and fairness within the organisation. Surprisingly only 8% of staff are engaged in the UK according to the Gallup Consortium engagement survey.  With that statistic, it means the UK will be struggling to be competitive in the highly challenging and competitive world unfolding ahead of us.  So how do we change this? We know according to Gallup’s statistics, that managers account for 70% of the variance regarding engagement. Directors oversee the organisation, so they should ensure that organisational practices are sustainable and enabling.

 

Directors have a legally enforceable duty to act as per the provisions of the companies act. These rules are not there just for nuisance value, but rather to ensure that any organisation is long-term sustainable without negatively impacting any of the stakeholders. It is a common mistake for any manager when stepping to a higher-level role, to try control people under their influence rather than empowering, coaching, supporting and guiding them.  This same tyranny is often seen amongst directors, who could remain excessively operational to the detriment of strategic thinking and building an organisation where all stakeholders are aligned with the direction and bigger picture. The companies act tries to guard against this, by helping directors’ step into the correct role and in so doing creates a platform for success and sustainability.

 

It’s time for all directors to understand their roles and learn the skills to be competent as directors as this role has one of the biggest impacts on any organisation.  They must model the correct culture and ensure that organisational managers are managing in a way that enables the workforce and models a culture that enables high quality strategy execution. Ideally directors need to learn to step out of siloed operational thinking and learn to understand the bigger picture, the workings of the organisational system and unfolding trends, opportunities and threat in the competitive landscape.

 

According to section 172 of the companies act (2006), a director has the duty to promote the success of the company:

A director of a company must act in the way he considers, in good faith …

 

  1. the likely consequences of any decision in the long term,
  2. the interests of the company’s employees,
  3. the need to foster the company’s business relationships with suppliers, customers and others,
  4. the impact of the company’s operations on the community and the environment,
  5. the desirability of the company maintaining a reputation for high standards of business conduct, and
  6. the need to act fairly as between members of the company.

The full 7 duties of a director are available here: http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2006/46/section/171/2011-04-22

 

About the author: Paul de Beer consults to organisations to help them perform better through leadership, strategy and alignment at all levels.  His organisation Evolve Leadership Consulting Limited also provides leadership development, teaming and executive coaching.

https://www.evolveconsult.uk

Paul@evolveconsult.co.uk

 

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How to build organisations that rule out the risks of bullying

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Corporate bullying seems to be on the rise, it damages people, brand, reputations and stops innovation dead in its tracks. Not dealing with bullying could result in an organisation that has elements of bullying in its culture. As per this thought provoking talk, a small percentage of society have psychopathic and narcissistic traits. People with these traits in organisations often successfully drive short-term profits as they will use any technique to get people to hit the numbers. In the long term however, the damage caused can come back to haunt the organisation. A properly structured and managed organisation could easily ensure that such individuals are spotted immediately and appropriately dealt with. What are some of the key elements any organisation requires to ensure they have the right managers at the right levels?:

  1. Roles and Responsibilities: Ensure that all people management roles include elements that clearly describe the outputs of their people management accountability’s. If their job spec only talks about the metrics they must achieve, and not what they must do to build a high performance team, the risk is they could turn to forceful methods to drive the numbers.
  2. Congruent Culture: It is the role of top management to ensure that the organisation is long-term viable based on profits, people and customers. The top are accountable to create an enabling environment where people can perform their best, while being treated as adults ( respectfully and with dignity) . The top must lead the conversation to co-create the ideal culture that is in tune with the organisational positioning and ensures the best level of staff engagement. Once this culture is agreed and codified into behavioural statements, it should be lived from the top and linked to the managers roles and performance management. As they say, you get what you measure!
  3. Performance Management: Once roles and responsibilities include managers full responsibilities (staff, metrics, customer) and are linked to the culture, best practice management would become a norm throughout the organisation.
  4. Talent management: Once roles and responsibilities are clear and the culture is clear and being modelled, the development and growth needs of people will become more apparent. People that are brilliant technically don’t always make good managers! The route to recognise and reward someone, should not necessarily be by making them a manager. It could rather be by acknowledging their performance as a specialist and pay them more in that role.

At the end of the day, if someone is bullied within an organisation, the buck must stop with the top management. There are of course many other factors that can assist to create more engaged and energised workforce’s. The list above is a very good place to start.

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Do you really believe in collaboration?

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Collaboration is about coming together with others and creating an output much bigger than the sum of the parts, typically a 1 + 1 = 3 scenario.  True collaboration therefore requires an abundance mindset, a view that there are enough resources and successes to share with others. The alternative is a scarcity mindset, which is founded on the idea that, if someone else wins or is successful in a situation, that means you lose. This does not consider the possibility of all parties winning (in some way or another) in a given situation.


Abundance is synonymous with the field of positive psychology, initially founded by Martin Seligman. Seligman and many subsequent researchers have empirically shown how marriages, teams and organisations flourish when an abundant and positive deviant mindset is present. Each of us can develop an abundant mindset, but this requires self-awareness, self-reflection and self-inquiry . Once the mindset is present, it can lead to feelings of empowerment, well-being, energy and appreciation for the good things that surround us.


Many of the modern businesses that are flourishing today, have achieved success through an abundance attitude. Think of Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, would they have achieved the successes they did, with a scarcity approach?

Now think about your mindset and that of your organisation?  Are these mindsets enabling the success of self and others?  What must change if not the case?


The mindsets of the top management in an organisation have a way of influencing the tone of the organisational culture, and hence the mindset of the organisation.  When organisations work on their strategies, there are two lenses they can use.  A Red Ocean strategy and a Blue Ocean strategy or possibly both. Many of the new highly successful entrants into the market today, tend to have followed a Blue Ocean strategy. These companies would include Uber, Amazon, South West Airlines to name a few.   In the context of this article, consider which of the two mentalities are needed to develop a Blue Ocean strategy? What does your organisation require?


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Building an organisation that is fit for execution

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Organisational Strategy and the way that the strategy is defined, based on the strategic process can be a key competitive advantage for any organisation.  A strategy is a plan of action that should consider long and short term external and internal factors to ensure that the organisation remains long term competitive.   One part of strategy is determining the plan, the second part is the execution of the plan which should be done by every member of the organisation.   Typically, most companies only manage to execute a third of their strategies and this is where the opportunities lie.   In order for people to own and execute strategy, they should be involved in determining the strategy they need to execute on.  This means, strategy determination should be a cascaded process involving the right levels at the right time.

 

Companies often correctly look at the greater PESTEL factors (Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Environmental and Legislative) as well as their product or service positioning when determining strategy.  They most often fail to develop a strategy to transform their organisational system which includes leadership, culture, structure, people & process, skills, talent etc, which is needed in order to execute the required actions.  As the old saying goes, culture eats strategy for breakfast!

 

 

The internal analysis is normally done through the Strengths and Weaknesses part of a SWOT analysis. Organisations need to create strategy to build the organisation to be excellent at executing strategy or simply put, focussing on executing the right things.   The key challenge is, that it is hard for people that are part of an organisation, to clearly see the changes needed within the organisation, as people unconsciously avoid change even when it’s needed.   People develop blind spots over time and pick up cultural baggage that often stops staff being courageous and sharing the truth.  Senior managers end up only hearing the good news, and hence fail to understand the hazards and opportunities they face.   Old world hierarchical cultures further impact many of these challenges, resulting in companies that are not prepared and ready for changes in the competitive landscape.  I believe that companies that build non-hierarchical organisations, where everyone and their skills are leveraged, will stand a much greater chance to stay agile and competitive.

Another area that is key to strategy, is to understand your service or product positioning in the market.   Traditional strategy tools have guided companies to look at the competitive landscape and look at their positioning therein.  This would be called a red oceans approach and is all about winning, for a company to grow, another companies must lose.   It is very important to understand the competitive landscape, but it is equally important to have a blue ocean approach to strategy.   This is about looking at new opportunities and gaps and really focussing on certain positioning areas rather than trying to do everything about everything.

 

In the case of Uber, one could have argued that, the taxi industry was already overly competitive with not many new opportunities.   Uber looked at what consumers needed, attributes such as low cost, convenience, safety, ease etc and used end to end technology to facilitate this.   The result has been a highly successful business, that has enlarged the taxi industry by bringing many more consumers to the market.

 

Southwest Airlines, a long-standing leader in the US low cost airline market, have chosen to focus their positioning on friendly service, speed and frequent departures.  They place little emphasis on lounges, meals and seating choices.  This focus has allowed them to structure every part of their business and service around these areas which have become clear differentiators and a competitive advantage for them.

 

Lastly, getting people aligned and focussed is all about change management.  A key part of change management is having a purpose, vision and values that people agree will and align by.   Purpose has become a very powerful modern tool to align people throughout organisations. In the case of Southwest Airlines mentioned above, their purpose is to Connect People to what’s important in their lives through friendly, reliable, and low-cost air travel.  The purpose is used in all facets of their business to keep everyone true to the organisational focus.

A robust and focussed strategy along with a culture that allows people at all levels to contribute and play to their strengths, will determine which organisations step ahead of the pack in this increasingly challenging world.

 

 

 

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Better Leadership Through Anxiety Management

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A key factor in the success of modern leadership is learning to hold back personal assumptions and listening to the views of those that are able to deliver valuable input on a particular subject.  This is a very difficult skill to master, as it necessitates that such leaders are able to trust first, believe in the potential of others and embrace the fact that their own personal view of the world may be skewed with their own subjectivity.


More traditional or directive leaders often feel that their style is participatory, but are sometimes shocked to hear that this is not what their subordinates think.  Leadership rank tends to have a magnifying effect on their actions, and often limits the feedback given to them by others.  Modern leaders need to learn skills such as coaching and facilitating in order to help enable their teams.  Good coaching and facilitating requires the suspension of personal judgments while guiding others towards the best solution.


So why do we as people feel such anxiety when hearing views that contradict our own, particularly in the workplace? Can we learn to embrace differing views without anxiety?  The normal human response is to avoid anxiety by taking input, but discarding many of the ideas proposed to us.  Leadership behaviour such as this, in a team setting, could be described as energy-draining behaviour, and will result in decreased creativity and minimised team performance.


In order to better understand our own anxiety, it may be useful to consider the constructs of our brain.  In our evolution as humans, we survived with the aid of our autonomic nervous system also known as the limbic brain, the most primitive part of our brain.  At times of danger, this limbic brain would produce the emotions of fear and anger which would trigger a chemical change in our bodies to prepare us for “fight or flight”.  Later in our evolution we developed the cortex, housing the Central Nervous System and we became more intelligent beings.


Today our limbic brain is alive and well and unfortunately often confuses situations such as opposing views as life threatening situations.  Our amygdala (part of the limbic brain) then starts to ready us for fight or flight and hence we feel anxiety.  The limbic brain cannot be trained through cognitive learning, but through experience, reflection and trial and error.  Daniel Goleman tells us that many of these skills are first learned through our experiences by the age of 22 years, but we can continue to learn them with age, it just takes more effort.  One could then say that leaders are not born, but developed, but certain people have more development to do than others.


It may be interesting to reflect that this complex post-modern world in which we live demands a new set of leadership skills that enables people at all levels, and liberates creativity within organisations.  It is therefore no surprise to see that there is an increasing demand for executive coaching to assist leaders cope with complexity, anxiety and hence their emotions.

 

A good way to develop ourselves and “take charge” of our own minds starts with understanding our own emotions during the day.  Ideally our organisations would like us to spend most of our time in the top right “stimulated” quadrant, for that is where we are efficient and creative.  Once a person understands their “swings”, they can slowly start recognising their triggers and pull themselves back to the top right.   Each time one manages to take control of ones anxiety, the task will become easier and easier.

 

It has been interesting for me as an executive coach to observe that many of the factors limiting leaders appear to be associated with the avoidance of anxiety.  It would therefore be a huge advantage for leaders to learn to astutely observe their reactions to the surrounding world, and learn to understand and control their emotional responses thereto.

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Leadership Wisdoms from Experienced CEO’s

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A while back in 2008, I was privileged to facilitate a number of discussions at the annual CEO Summit, a key event hosted and arranged by Dictum Publishing.

 

Each year a number of senior leaders are invited and given various pertinent topics to discuss and reflect on.  One of the topics had leaders reflecting on the barrage of paradoxes and contradictions that they face daily in this ever increasingly complicated world. I will use certain of the discussions to form the basis for this article.

 

The long versus the short

Businesses continually find themselves being pressured for short-term results yet many of the factors that influence these results require a longer term focus. The lower levels of every organisation are closest to the customers and the products and therefore have a key influence on profits. Factors that enable people, often seen as “soft factors” such as the organisational culture, communication, leadership styles, involvement, communication, change management, trust, congruence and vision therefore have a profound impact on profit. Considering the radical changes around us that we need to cope with daily, such as record high inflation rates, increasing world debt, global sustainability, unrest, increasing population rates, increasing poverty, government uncertainty etc, it can be very challenging to keep one’s eye on the long-term game while delivering in the short-term. We need to still minimise risk while encouraging entrepreneurship, deliver to strict timelines while maintaining a work-life balance, and look after and care for people while remaining lean and often right sizing. These are just a few of our challenges.

 

Talent

South Africa is currently experiencing a huge talent shortage, figures published show that the IT sector alone is short some 70 000 individuals at the moment.  Businesses now more than ever, need to look at how they retain, treat and develop talent. On the retention side, it is said that employees leave organisations for bad managers and that the organisational culture reflects the personality of the top leadership. This shows the need for a value system within the organisation that is lived at all levels, a system where people feel they are treated with dignity, respect and transparency. Leadership needs to be unleashed at all levels; people need to feel they are the Managing Directors of their positions. This is easier said than done, as top leadership sets the tone of the business and needs to model the values and behaviours that the business wishes to aspire to.

 

This is not always so easy, considering increasing daily pressures and challenges. South Africa’s talent shortage is related to our rapid growth as well as to many of the practices that suppressed people under the apartheid regime. As businesses we need to think differently to reduce our talent shortages. We cannot abdicate the responsibility to government to solve our talent crisis, the problem is just too large. Businesses need to also take up responsibility and leadership in this area. Businesses need to consider ways to employ people with the right aptitudes and attitudes and then through learnerships and other practices help skill up these people, which is a big commitment from the organisational side. What if these newly skilled people then find a better job? We need to think abundantly, if some of these people do indeed leave, then aren’t you helping the country to solve both skills and employment issues? If every company did this we would have come a long way towards solving many of our unemployment challenges.

 

Broadening scope of senior leadership

The scope of the role facing senior leadership seems to be broadening, organisations are increasingly being affected by national and even global issues such as environmental sustainability, poverty and unemployment, political stability, national talent shortages and energy issues to name a few. Today more than ever, organisational leadership is required to step beyond the traditional limits of their organisations and start dialogue with other organisations, industry bodies and government to help develop solutions to these challenges together.

At the same time, constant crisis and talent shortages pull senior leadership down to doing shorter term technical tasks, compressing the staff at lower levels and often creating vacuums of longer term work that is often being neglected, therefore increasing risk to the organisation.

 

Key skills for leadership today

The team I facilitated at the CEO Summit then came up with a number of skills, behaviours and attributes that they felt were vital to successfully managing an organisation today:

  1. Leaders must be able to master the ability to reflect as well as introspect even in times of crisis.
  2. The ability to tap into the views and perspectives of people that you trust.
  3. You need to always consult and reflect before making decisions, but then you need to make the right call. You need to have the ability to make the right call without being influenced by your personal ego.
  4. You need to find ways that work for you to consistently apply values. You need to think through the big picture on the backdrop of well defined morals and values.
  5. You need to develop a statesperson approach to building networks and creating conversations across industries and sectors, don’t wait for others, you must lead the way.

Being a leader of organisations and people is indeed a complex task, which in itself is a challenge that we face today. We know that leaders are not born but made, yet most of the attributes and skills of a good leader can only be learnt over time through experience and trial and error. Companies today need to pay urgent attention to creating opportunities for people to learn how to lead themselves and others.,

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