As a student of leadership whose passion for it has intensified over many years I'm increasingly struck by its parallels with parenting. And as father ('Pop') for over 14 years to an adopted son who turned 19 this week I find them even more striking.
Good leadership, like good parenting, requires self-sacrifice, love, wisdom, patience, resolve, humility, and the ability to learn from frequent errors. It is a lifelong quest, not a destination, and it is the most basic role of any human being. As I blogged last September great leadership is fine art, not painting by numbers.
Poor leadership, like poor parenting, is characterised by selfishness, neglect, bullying, intimidation, manipulation, sniping criticism, the portrayal of self (inadvertently perhaps) as controlling and all-knowing, an inability to learn from mistakes leading to their constant, needless repetition, and often a compulsive need to belittle others to puff up one's own fragile self-esteem. Poor leaders are often unhappy people - fearful and insecure, though they may conceal it well.
As I used to say years ago of an admittedly talented narcissist, one of several I had the misfortune to work for!: "He's like a tennis coach. The first thing he does is take your game apart................er, that's it!!"
Great leaders are, at least when it matters, at ease in their own skin. Above all they are self-aware. That breeds humility, but they also have keen insight into their ability to make a positive difference and they aren't afraid to do so.
Like great parents, great leaders are inspirational and utterly transform other people's lives for the better. They are die-in-a-ditch, princpled people who infuse others with confidence. They can be in sharp conflict with one another - witness Churchill and Ghandi, Montgomery and Rommel, or Lincoln and Robert E Lee for example. There are many examples in sport of competing coaches, or competing captains, who are both great leaders.
Sadly in 'real life' great leaders often suffer, and sometimes pay the ultimate price - Friday night's brutal execution of Boris Nemtsov within spitting distance of the Kremlin in Moscow is a painful reminder of that horrible truth.
However, like great parents the majority work anonymously in the background and don't seek the limelight or take the credit. They are more than content to enjoy the unfolding results of their long-term labours, in the form of the happiness, performance and fulfilment of their charges. Or put another way:
"By their fruits ye shall know them".
For over 20 years the BBC has produced the peak time TV show Room 101 in which celebrities talk about their pet hates and send them to outer darkness - Room 101 - a prison cell for which they throw away the key. I'd love to consign the words management and manager to Room 101.
In the spirit of the 'Stop Doing Lists' of the Top 1% companies in Jim Collins' Good to Great, and with tongue only partially in cheek, this would be a major contribution to organisational excellence! And in the spirit of Jardin's Principle (see Focus - it's easy, right?!) it would simplify organisations wonderfully, focus minds, and prevent humungous time-, energy- and life-wasting for millions. After all, as Peter Drucker put it:
"There's nothing quite as soul-destroying as doing with great efficiency that which one should not be doing in the first place!"
I'm not alone. There are many great books and research programmes that support the basic premise behind this unashamedly irreverant take on the world of management. See 'How Google Works' (Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg - 2014) for example - if this sort of thinking is good enough for Google to create over $50 billion in revenues in 15 years from a standing start it's good enough for me.
"So what?", I hear you say. Where is this going?
In last week's blog Don't get ill in the UK!!! I described the Dickensian standard of medical care my father-in-law has experienced in recent weeks as he waits for a hip replacement. It has long been de rigeur in the UK to decry the at times breathtaking dysfunctionality and self-defeating stupidity of the National Health Service (NHS). Yet there's an almost hysterical resistance to creative, common sense thinking about changes to the NHS that would benefit everyone, most of all patients, for goodness sake! Oh yes, sorry, did anyone tell you they're real human beings, not inanimate widgets to be processed through the system??
My father-in-law and I talked today about a perfect example of NHS idiocy. As a diabetic he has suffered two hypoglycemic episodes (abnormally low blood sugar) in the last 2 days, whilst in hospital. He told me the food is very poor, unappetising, often not properly cooked, and made from poor quality ingredients because of course the over-riding focus is cost. Choosing external contractors on cost is somehow not deemed as "creeping privatisation", whereas more effective solutions are. The hyporcrisy and closed-mindedness is infuriating.
My father-in-law knows his own body and manages his diabetes very successfully when he's at home. In hospital he is finding it difficult to do this since the diet isn't geared to his diabetes. Sorry.....did I hear that correctly? He's in.......hospital, did you say.......and the diet is not geared to his diabetes?!
He and I swapped ideas for improving hospital food. He suggested providers of airline food could do a better job. Ever the entrepreneur I suggested patients could pay for their own food. I can hear the sharp intakes of breath from NHS true believers - what a sacrilegeous suggestion! Surely I must be some rabid, facist, free marketeer?!
OK, now you've vented, think about it logically (and no, I'm not, by the way). Patients would be paying for their own food if they were at home, within their own budget, so why should it be free in hospital and thus inevitably farmed out to the lowest cost bidder?? Why not offer a range of foods that could be brought in from outside, ranging from budget to gourmet level, and give patients the choice? Indeed why not offer a whole raft of other services to patients that help them to feel they are still in control of their lives, not some helpless piece of meat left in the lap of the gods, at the mercy of an incompetent system?!
This brings me to the crux of the argument. In study after study after study you find that the highest performing organisations in all walks of life do exactly the same 5 things:
- They devote themselves to the end-user of their products or services, in this case the patient. Google's astonishing success is built on this principle - read 'How Google works'.
- They pursue an inspiring non-financial purpose and they do not compromise on it in order to achieve financial targets, whether on sales, profits or costs.
- They focus on effectiveness in striving for the non-financial core purpose and meeting the needs of the end-users, not on efficiency. (They learn from Peter Drucker's maxim quoted earlier.)
- They measure the performance of the whole system in delivering value to the end-user, in this case again the patient. By focusing performance measurement on the end-user they highlight all of the really big inefficiencies, which occur at the boundaries between different parts of the organisation along the so-called value chain, or value stream. And so they dramatically outperform the pedants who steadfastly refuse to see this logic, and who tend to be.......bureaucrats rather than leaders.
- They engineer the entire organisational model to gradually deliver more and more value for end-users and to systematically eliminate waste, classified as anything not adding value for end-users. This strategy was originally called the Toyota Production System and it turned Toyota into the No 1 car company in the world. It is now called Lean Thinking, but is commonly totally misunderstood and incompetently applied, including by the NHS, to improve efficiency for 'internal' stakeholders rather than effectiveness for end-users.
Should this all seem rather theoretical I conclude by offering a compelling personal case study that it really does work, which you'll find in full on my LinkedIn profile.
In late-1999 I was asked on behalf of the Chief Financial Officer of £4 billion turnover British Nuclear Fuels Ltd (BNFL), to undertake a rather unusual and challenging assignment at their infamous Sellafield site on the North West coast of England. BNFL bore many of the hallmarks of the NHS - a large, complex, essentially public sector organisation run by bureaucrats and unchallengeable black art technocrats, in this case nuclear engineers rather than consultant doctors. Like the NHS the costs to the UK taxpayer of the nuclear industry were slowly, inexorably spiralling out of control.
Sellafield
My 'Mission Impossible' was to come up with a way of quantifying the financial value of decommissioning and waste management at Sellafield. It is the largest industrial site in the UK, and one of the largest in Europe. It contains dozens of streams of nuclear waste, some coming from the decommissioning of 1950s, 1960s and 1970s nuclear weapons programmes and spin-off civilian nuclear power programmes, and some from plants which reprocess fuel for British nuclear power stations and for overseas customers, principally the Japanese.
Reprocessimg was viewed as highly profitable by BNFL managers (bureaucrats and technocrats), whereas decommissioning and waste processing were deemed necessary evils, to some extent distractons, paid for by the UK taxpayer, who would of course go on picking up the tab ad infinitum.
By applying the five principles above I created a financial performance measurement system that met the brief extraordinarily well. far better than any of us could have imagined. The CFO, a very experienced senior accountant who had worked in a tightly financially controlled large corporate (plc) environment previously, described it as the best measurement system of its type he'd ever seen. By making the true financial picture starkly visible in a way that non-finance people could immediately understand it completely transformed both the operational and the strategic realities. It broke down barriers along the value chain, leading to far greater effectiveness and efficicency, and it contributed to a complete restructuring of the nuclear industry. The UK Government broke up BNFL and formed a new public body - the Nuclear Decommissioning Agency - to oversee a strategic shift away from reprocessing to decommissioning.
A similar earth-shaking change is needed in the NHS. It starts with the correct application of the 5 principles. It's essentially the same change that CEO Dave Lewis is applying to turn around Tesco's fortunes (see How to make your company more resilient, Stop your company's demons coming back to haunt you and Was Tesco's Terry Leahy really such a great leader?).
So how do you get people to do what you want?
- By acting like a selfless, nurturing parent, not a selfish, petty bureaucrat
- By focusing unequivocally not on internal targets, especially financial ones, but on the needs of others, first and foremost the end-users of your products or services.
As Norman Schwarzkopf so memorably put it, at the end of the day it's about CHARACTER, stupid, and it ALWAYS will be, whether individually or collectively, and on whatever scale you care to name.
The evidence is out there in spades if you're willing to listen and learn. Go for it!
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I’m grateful you’ve taken the time to read this post. If you find it helpful please share it. And make a difference - be a smart giver and do something positive for others this week. Pay it forward.
Mark Ashton
I’m grateful you’ve taken the time to read this post. If you find it helpful please share it. And make a difference - be a smart giver and do something positive for others this week. Pay it forward.
Recent blogs you may find helpful include:
If this blog is particularly relevant to you, your organisation, or to someone else you know, I may be able to help or advise. I strive to be a smart giver – Adam Grant’s excellent book “Give and Take” (2013) explains why smart givers are the highest 25% of achievers in all walks of life. They go out of their way to help others, intelligently, without allowing themselves to be widely exploited. In this way they inspire higher performance and create sustained new value through collaborative exchange.
My business Resolve Gets Results provides commercial expertise, leadership capabilities and in some cases financing to different sized businesses with long-term growth potential. I work with a superb small team of Board-level professionals, each a leader in their field with over 30 years’ business experience. We are based in the UK but have international business backgrounds, in my case including 5 years in the United States, where I ran a high growth machinery sales and service business.
You can find my contact details under the ‘Contact info’ tab near the top of my LinkedIn profile.
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