Understanding Voluntary Organisations – Book Summary and Comment

Introduction

This is not a new book. It was published first in 1988 and yet it focuses on an important subject – how do you make ‘voluntary’ organizations function more effectively?

There are a vast array of third sector organizations that play a big role in society – charities, faith groups, political, sports and community bodies. The topic of improving the effectiveness of these is therefore still very important and few management thinkers have ever been in quite such a good position to advise on it as Charles Handy.

Fortunately this book stands the test of time. It is brief (pointing readers to the substantial sister volume ‘Understanding Organizations’ for more detail) and highlights fundamentals that shape organizational effectiveness, providing an insightful angle on their special significance for voluntary organizations. It is not a cookbook but more of a framework and tool for those seeking to examine their own organization.

The Perils of Volunteerism

Handy recognises that this type of organization faces some peculiar risks that flow from its very nature – a sense of democratic legitimacy, challenges over how to measure success, and perhaps an even wider range of motivations for those working in it than other organisations. The impact carries three big risks:

  1. Strategic Delinquency
    The danger of the ethos of the organization getting in the way of the goals of the organisation so that it becomes a goal in itself rather then the means to an end. Real clarity of purpose and method is needed to avoid this. Otherwise the organization can easily fall into the pockets of whoever are the ‘paymasters’ and their agenda.
  2. The Servant Syndrome
    This flows from the economics of the gift economy where, because of the cause, a ‘make do’ mentality grows up undermining quality or driving responses to every need. This leads to staff burn out and undermines the sustainability of the organization.
  3. Ideological Fanaticism
    This can arise because success, structure, professionalism or leadership are seen as threats to the purity of the cause – being united together for the goal. Yet these factors are vital to avoid ineffectiveness.

Types of Organization – the Challenge 

Handy starts by setting the scene. He highlights the three broad overlapping roles for this sort of organization – mutual support, service provision and campaigning (research and advocacy). He explains that each role often carries an unspoken assumption about how they should operate. Mutual support needs servicers, service provision needs organization (to deliver) and campaigning ones need believers.

The first don’t like organization, the second want managers and the third leaders. Yet often their missions overlap as they develop and it is then that friction increases as the cultures and structures that match each category collide. As is the case with all organizations, increased complexity creates issues and inefficiencies.

In advocating the value of good organization Handy helpfully recognises the challenge of  ‘management’ language to the ethos of volunteering. He is a great defender of good management and highlights its essential quality – the fulfilment of the organization’s goals, with their clients, providing services and doing this within the financial and other resources available. Communities cannot do this without being organized in some way – so they key is to choose the most appropriate way.  He has no admiration for ‘amateur hour’ although he recognises that it might be better to organize without the language of management or the engineering metaphors – something that I heartily agree with.

In tackling the topic, Handy has two main sections:

  1. Insights into how individuals work in groups and influence each other, and
  2. Organizing the organization itself

The aim is to highlight important topics and inform with research based insights into the good practices and challenges in each area. These  can help reflection on better ways to do things – good for anyone in the organization.

Individuals, groups and influence

Despite the age of the book and therefore the old examples and references in the text, what immediately strikes you in reading this section is just how little has changed in the substance of what we know about people working together and the nature of the issues that arise. Perhaps it serves to remind us that we know a lot more than we action. He highlights four key areas that need careful thought:

Motivation

Releasing the ‘E’ (energy, effort, enthusiasm) in people in an organization demands that we understand what environment is needed to spark this. This observation in itself is valuable and oft forgotten.

Handy highlights some key considerations to thinking about the topic:

  • The presence of an ‘unwritten contract’ in the commitment we make to an organisation. This comprises elements that motivate and reward us (cause, money, status, responsibility, ability to use a talent..) set against the effort and energy that we are required to put in. These are different for each individual but there is insight to be gained from motivational theory (Maslow etc). We can help or hinder people’s drive by our approach. e.g. more specific goals and measures of success can be motivational; when we see ourselves being stretched we are attracted; when we see a strong risk of failure we retreat and need to consider if the contract remains in balance.
  • Organizations operate with different ‘contracts’ – coercive, calculative or co-operative. The latter are vital for commitment and motivation (in any organization but especially a voluntary one)
  • There are skills to managing people effectively:
    • Discussing goals and methods to build realism and commitment,
    • Praising more than criticising to engender commitment,
    • A wariness over performance rewards beyond praise,
  • Understanding each person has a different contract, but people do like targets rightly used and feeling good about what they achieve.

These are insights that have simply been reinforced not changed with more recent research (see for instance ‘Drive’ by Daniel Pink).

People and their roles

Handy explains that research shows that we like roles. Defined well they help with clarity of purpose but definition can also create stresses around role conflicts, ambiguity and work overload/underload. Failure to get the right level of definition and workload leads to people filtering work (e.g. just to the urgent), withdrawing (physically or psychologically) or displacement. All produce averse results for the organization and the individual – and can often be seen today in many organisations.

It is critical that people understand the core of what a role is about, its boundaries, the fluidity within this and how success is to be measured. Roles then provide an identity and character to play. We tend to own and play the role better with good definition.

Group behaviour

Handy starts by outlining the difference between a team and a committee and the need not to confuse the two! He then identifies the priority when considering groups – the need to be clear first what the purpose of the group is (i.e. not the role of the individuals but why the group as a whole exists). Clarity over this both guides agenda and form for the group. These should reflect the purpose of the group –  distributing work, problem solving, making decisions, resolving conflicts etc.

Once clear this helps creates a sharper focus on the size of each group, how it needs to function to fulfill its task, the composition of it, its development (forming, storming, norming and performing) and its approach to concluding decisions (e.g. how participative?). A useful order and checklist.

The quality of group life depends on great clarity over the task and the quality of the process it follows – especially avoiding group-think (by preventing self-perpetuating membership, ensuring key decisions come to a senior group without any specific recommendation and that outsiders periodically attend.

Power and influence

It is naive to think that voluntary organizations do not have people who engage in power plays or seek influence (arguably their commitment may make it even more common). it is helpful to recognise the styles and sources of influence at play in any specific situation.

Research highlights seven styles of influence: reason, friendliness, coalition, bargaining, assertiveness, reference to higher authority and the use of sanctions. These can be exercised from different power sources: positional, expert, personal or resource power.

People with greater power typically use more influence styles and the greater the relative power more authoritative the style often used. None of this is very surprising but very helpful for reflection when many feel that voluntary organizations should almost be democratic.

Other helpful observations from the research are that the greater the bureaucracy the more likely positional power is used. The evidence is that power often gets abused, especially blocking and gatekeeping. It therefore needs accountability.

He also usefully reminds us that internal competition is not a pariah nor necessarily ‘conflict’ . It can be beneficial – growing the cake and raising standards if it is open, fair and forgiving.

Organizing the organization

In this section Handy highlights important aspects of organization that typically grow up with little reflection in the voluntary sector and yet by their nature may tend to persist for longer than is helpful and normal in commercial organizations.

Culture

All organizations are communities and not machines and therefore as with all groups they have own character, which we call their culture. Handy identifies four classes of culture. This is a great basis to start a discussion from or fuel consideration of healthy or unhelpful aspects of organizational behaviour. Any organization is likely to have a mixture of these but it may well be dominated by one because of its heritage and role.

Club (power) culture: This is where the organization is simply a spiders web that extends the influence of the key players. It will often reflect intimacy with these personalities rather than function. It makes for a very personal organization which thrives where good performance demands speed and personality.

Role culture: This is very different and builds structure around the individual roles in the organization chart rather than the individuals. It is ruled by the need for harmony, rules, rationality and order. Everything is more managed than led – with formalised communications and people playing to their role. They thrive in stable times when well aligned to the environment but struggle when the environment changes especially if it does so constantly.

Task culture: This thrives where problem solving is important and where the specific tasks are more varied and need speed – more bespoke projects, events or actions. The resulting excitement and achievement focus needs co-ordination and teams. These organizations offer little in the longer term beyond this and therefore thrive on youth and talent.

Person culture: Here the organizational purpose is the personal purpose of the individual not  commitment to a great cause – a star doctor, barrister, architect or campaigner etc. The result is that professionals outrank managers and organizational disciplines are weak.

Reality is an organization which is a mix of all these shaped by their history, environment, size and the flow of work. The value to be unlocked is to understand what the culture looks like and then assess the extent to which it matches the needs of its role and environment.

Structure

Handy sees structure as a sensitive area in voluntary organisations. He advocates the analogy of structure being a skeleton that supports what the organisation needs to do (rather than a prison than constrains). His reflections on what to consider are fascinating if you read them when looking at a structure that you know well – I found that they challenged key areas very effectively:

  • Subsidiarity: How far is responsibility pushed towards the coalface? Or does the organisation create too many low-skill, narrowly focused roles, almost as if because they are not paying someone for the work then the role should be of such small value that no-one would expect payment.
  • Differentiation vs Integration: Organisations have to manage the diversity of tasks that need to be done and yet integrate these into the composite that the organisation must deliver. The design needs to be diverse enough to handle services, geographies, channels and functions but Handy believes that voluntary organisations often fall into the trap of a single service focus with wide regional diversity even when this is inappropriate.
  • Integration mechanisms: Integration between the different areas can be achieved through hierarchy, procedures and co-ordinating groups. Most organisations use all three but typically develop from the first through to the last and can therefore end up with too much hierarchy (and often by default a heavily role based culture). Flexibility and responsiveness comes from a flatter structure and other integration approaches.
  • Different structural shapes: He highlights two particular ways of organising that he feels are underused and yet repay attention in voluntary organisations:
    • Federalism: This is where all that remains at the ‘centre’ is the residual elements that cannot be executed in operating units or groups. The energy and initiative comes from the units. This ‘tight-loose’ structure means that the centre often focuses on holding only onto a few things like new money and people, with the ‘hows’ being left to the units to define. Responsibility is delegated and the focus then becomes results more than methods.
    • Shamrock: Three petals that reflect the way staff are handled – a professional core, contractual fringe and flexible workers. Each has a slightly different ‘contract’ with the organisation and therefore should be handled differently. Voluntary organisations may be slightly different – with a professional core and flexible volunteer fringe (although sometimes it also needs a flexible contractual fringe too). The needs, motivations, expectations and treatment of each of these groups should be different and need to be handled appropriately.

Systems

These are the nervous system that turns a skeleton into a body. They determine the capability to discern and respond to the environment effectively. He identifies 3 important ones:

Communications: He first calls out what we all too readily forget – the immense challenge and ineffectiveness of communications generally. Over half of all information communicated is almost immediately lost by those receiving it and this is made instantly worse by distance, a lack of trust, distortions by sender and receiver and the ambiguity of language. Leaders therefore need to use at least two media and forms, shorten communication chains and make them as interactive as possible to overcome this. Good advice.

Numbers: He identifies that ‘hard’ goals (those with numbers) will always end up being treated more seriously than ‘soft’ ones and that therefore numbers need careful thought if they are to help rather than hinder progress.

Rarely are mere financials the most important metrics. It is important to identify the various levels of success for the organisation (treating it as the means to the end rather than an end in itself) and appropriate measures for these. These should scope the tasks that help to advance the purpose of the organisation and measure the success of these tasks in a period of time.

This is often done poorly in many organisations. Designing them needs careful thought – before or after the event measures? individual or group effort? is the metric relevant to the size of the base (e.g. %)? is there a clear route to calculating it that reflects its use?  He also identifies the unavoidable challenges inherent in budgets. This is a really valuable insight for leaders and should provide a powerful push to find or create much more appropriate numbers than most voluntary organisations use. Too often organisations use what’s there and easy – rather than what is helpful and the result is a significant skew that increases cynicism and miscommunication in staff.

Participation: Especially in a voluntary organisation there is then a third key system that helps to ensure the accountability of the organisation to its stakeholders. This comprises the forums and processes that hold organisational leaders to account.

He highlights important considerations e.g. the difference between participation in executive decision making and policy making or the difference between  consultation, consent or consensus. In and of itself it is a great challenge – how do stakeholders participate and hold to account the oragnisation?

The chances of change

The epilogue discusses the challenge of change in organisations, reflecting on the general resistance to it and yet the desirability of organisational development. He suggests ways to mitigate three big blocks to change and comments on levers for change. The chapter is has one or two useful insights into a big topic.

Blocks

Blinkers/filters: We like to adjust reality to our preferences and so miss obvious threats or undesirable changes. Handy’s remedy to this is bake-in exposure to outliers, opposites and opportunities into the operating model by carving out senior time in a structured fashion to reflect on these. Certainly valuable – and rarely or often poorly done.

The predictability imperative: Organisations love predictability even more than individuals   hence assiduous planing, cartels, rules, categories and intolerance of non-conformists. Handy suggests better environmental scanning, counter examples and the use of ranges and uncertainty in plans to help unlock thinking. Again good ideas that are rarely used.

Coalitions: These form naturally and once organisations stop growing they can easily solidify and impede adaptability. He identifies mitigations in robust policies to prevent self-serving governance, fixed-term appointments, federalism and better participation.

Levers

When he turns to change levers he helpfully identifies Harold Leavitt’s diamond model as a useful framework for actions with its four dimensions of task, structure, systems(technology) and people. This emphasises the need to consider all four when changing any one – not merely relying on the one or two that a particular culture might naturally reach for ineffectively.

He also explains the power of particularly task definition and the numbers system as levers that can change organisations powerfully over time – much more reliably than swapping people or roles (despite the norm in change being the reverse!). However, he concludes by pointing out that if we want exciting, developing organisations then they come fundamentally from encouraging the people in them to be like this and take initiative, set themselves higher standards and press for new and better outcomes.

Conclusion

Overall this is a helpful book with some great material for leaders in the voluntary sector to chew on when considering issues in their community or the effectiveness and development of their organisations. Time does not blunt the value of the key messages … even for commercial entities.

 

Great by Choice – book summary and comment

great_by_choiceGreat by Choice by Jim Collins and Morten Hansen

Who doesn’t want to be great – or rather be part of something great? I guess we are all interested… hence Jim Collins continued journey.

He is back on this enduring quest in the fourth study in his series (following Good to Great, Built to Last and How the Mighty Fall). This time the exam question is a different lens into greatness – ‘How to build a great organisation in an unpredictable and tumultuous times?’ which you would have thought covered most industries.

Although this was published 5 years ago, I think I missed its publication (or perhaps I had tired of the theme and style – both of which are resonant of the previously successful publications?)

The authors claim that this look at 10X leaders (those that outperformed their industry by this much over a 15+ year period) builds on what they have identified before. Their ‘winners’ exemplify previously endorsed principles but the focus this time is on why they thrived in uncertainty and chaos, when others didn’t.

They therefore studied players in the most volatile industries – ones experiencing changes in regulation, technology, price wars, serious restructuring or recessions. The focus predictably lands in technology, biotech and computing but also includes airlines and medical supplies.

The conclusions are as ever interesting twists on common sense, well supported from a large data set, manipulated and examined by a large cast of analysts who support the endeavour. However, I am not sure that the lessons will stick with me in the same way as some of the earlier ones have, even though they ring true.

Maybe they are just a bit too close to common sense to make quite so much difference.

Maybe it is because I am (increasingly) led to think that effectiveness is less easily improved by another piece of insight or information than it is by a mindset set to curiosity and challenge.

Nonetheless if you need a bit of a challenge checklist to the way that you operate and you use the book to help facilitate that then I am sure that it can help challenge some core operating principles very helpfully – and that is no bad thing in any organisation!

Their conclusions

The book title gives you an idea of the overall conclusion – it is possible to deliver greatness even in uncertainty if you choose wisely. However, this choice is not the simple red or blue pill of Matrix fame. No – it is rather a set of different behaviours applied across the organisation and through time that help to build resilience and greatness.

Intriguingly these behaviours do not match the nostrums of some analysts which might focus on creativity, vision, ambition or big bold moves as keys to making your enterprise more successful than the next. The study suggests these sorts of things are only hygiene factors – not the differentiators of greatness.

The key behavioural traits are more about the way that the organisation responds to a very uncertain environment. The authors summarise these in three themes – fanatical discipline (unrelenting consistency of action), empirical creativity (an evidential focus – test and learn) and productive paranoia (environmental sensitivity channelled into contingency planning). All three built around Collins’ famous ‘Level 5’ ambition for a great cause on which the enterprise is focused.

Approach business as a 20-mile march

The authors see this as the most important differentiator of the really great from the perfectly average organisations in their study. They describe this as a set of highly specific attributes, largely within the organisation’s control, that provide clear performance standards and constraints (that operate even when they could do ‘better’ short term) applied over an appropriate timeframe for the operation.
These attributes can relate to finance, learning, service or whatever is the priority for the nature of the organisation and its proposition. The key is that it is sustained long term (10+ years) and that it is disciplined – rain or shine. Consistency is its distinguishing feature.

The suggestion is a kind of operational strategy that sets a consistent agenda for action over through time – e.g. a constant style and pattern of product innovation delivered incrementally throughout the period without the switches or changes of priority that organisations often exhibit. Each time delivery is measured against clear standards and with a predefined strategy for what happens next.

Fire bullets then cannonballs

This axiom is an endorsement of companies investing in learning as the base for innovation. The approach is to make low-cost, low-risk bets that enable the organisation to build a body of empirical evidence that will shape and focus major investments. Hence the ‘bullets’ – small tests that can be fired without disrupting the organisation but which will provide important insights into where and what kind of ‘cannonballs’ to fire subsequently.

The key is to ‘cast enough bread on the water’ to find some success that can then be used to shape a calibrated big bet (a cannonball) with significant resources behind it…and not to fire a cannonball without this learning.

This operating principle fights the temptation to make big bets behind inspired guesses or to become so risk averse that the resources never get spent behind bigger plays despite the evidence provided by earlier experiments. The winners in the analysis were not more innovative than the rest – but better targeted and more measured in execution. This targeting was led by the learning gathered through creative experimentation and was done consistently.

Lead above the death line

This is the Collins & Hansen prescription for paranoia. This is the storm preparation – management that is vigilant and scenario smart. It has three key dimensions – Buffers (cash reserves to provide contingency for adverse events), Bounded Risk (being aware of and managing carefully risks, especially those that might kill the organisation, are downside weighted or which cannot be controlled) and Zooming (‘out’ to sense threats that might severely undermine plans and ‘in’ to refocus energy into goals in the light of these).

Quality is not so much speed of response as effective calibration of the environment and the risks attached to the business and then an ability to take these insights into coherent and disciplined execution. Rigour rather than agility is emphasised with an attitude that organisations need buffers to withstand a volatile environment – the 10Xers carried 3-10 times as much cash-to-assets as comparators.

Create a SMaC recipe

This stands for Specific, Methodical and Consistent. It is the operationalisation that turns a strategic concept  into reality with discipline. It is Collins’ view on how to turn his previously described ‘Hedgehog’ concept into specific actions, actions that build and sustain momentum on its proposition.

The recipe includes things that the organisation will and wont do (eg Southwest Airlines will stay focused on short-haul and fly only 737’s – not anything else, it will stay out of food services) and represent the operating principles against which everyday decisions will be made. If well chosen they sustain high standards in even extremely challenging environments and as the authors note even in the face of a strategic shift, such as the one made by Intel into microprocessors in the 1980’s.

Final thoughts

The above summarises the key messages in the book. Much of the rest of the page count is taken up with explaining the study methodology and participant selection or the relevance of ‘luck’ to sustained success (The answer here being that it is not whether you are lucky or not but how you respond to lucky/unlucky events to ensure that you create a great return). Perhaps the most interesting of these is the chapter on FAQ’s!

In short a solid book but not one that I would rush out to buy or reference like I might the earlier ones (I was lent my copy!)

www.4betterchange.uk

The leadership of Michelle Obama

moDo you ever wonder if your leadership makes a difference?

It can be difficult, especially in complex organisations or if you are a leader with a wide area of responsibility, to see what difference leaders make to the performance of those on the frontline of the organisation.

You may be able to see where poor leadership or decisions have disrupted and undermined work and commitment. But is good leadership merely the absence of negative impacts – or can it achieve more?

Well over the summer a study published by Economics Professor Simon Burgess at Bristol University shed a little light on the potential for an inspirational intervention by a leader.

As you may remember, Michelle Obama visited a big London girls comprehensive school on her first UK trip in 2009 and held audience with a group of students. I remember the television news covering a part of the encounter. It was exactly what you normally see on these sort of visits – a famous figure holding court with a class of teenagers. “Ho hum,” you may say.

Yet as Simon Burgess reveals in his study, as students graduated through the school, the academic results of this group of girls started to rise markedly: a little in 2010 and then markedly through to 2012.

The difference between their results and what would be expected was fully 1-2 grades across 8 GCSE subjects – a move from a ‘C’ to an ‘A’. This is a massive difference and difficult to explain other than from the intervention of the first lady.

Her impact clearly was significant. Students describe meeting her in glowing terms: one word descriptions ranged from “Inspirational” to “Indescribable”, from “Awesome” to a simple but exuberant “Wow!”. One said, “I can still hear her saying to us: ‘You have to push yourself hard, because if it feels easy, you’re not trying hard enough’. I won’t forget that.”

Here was a leader who made a real impact.

What do we learn?

So what lessons can leaders draw from this? There must be many leaders and occasions where no such positive impact occurs – so why did Michelle Obama have such a strong inspirational effect?

Inspiration is a powerful tool

Firstly, it demonstrates how important motivation can be in achieving outstanding results. Michelle Obama has no role in the running of the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson School; no position of authority; considerable social and geographic distance from the pupils and no ongoing relationship.

She could really only have an impact in one way – through inspiration and this appears to have been the way that she has affected the pupils. Yet even though she has had only a slender contact and role in the lives of the students she has influenced them very positively through her inspiration. It is clear that this has helped to inspire more commitment to achieving the best academic outcome and provide real hope for the girls that they can shape their own future.

As leaders, especially in the low-hierarchy culture of the UK, we can often underestimate how much impact this ‘soft’ side of leadership can have. Espousing worthwhile values and goals that have resonance with people and articulating how people can live into them can be a great way to inspire hope – a powerful motivator of behaviour.

However, to do this well demands recognition of the opportunities of the role of the leader (and realism of the extent to which we have any ‘celebrity’ status such as that embodied in this example!). It also demands thought over the values to focus on, the role of those being led and the hope that can be offered. My experience is that we are often shy of doing this thinking which is critical.

It is vital to help people identify with you

Secondly, we need to understand the importance of establishing a genuine personal connection.

Michelle Obama has a great personal story of the ‘rags to riches’ variety, with a tough upbringing that she helped transform into a personal success story as she grew up. The honesty and power with which she used this story with the students – woman to woman – was clearly a key to understanding why the students were so impressed by her and how her impact spread virally through the school.

The great gulf that many leaders see between themselves and those they seek to influence is one that we see in the current political turmoil here (and in the USA) and one that needs to be bridged if   leaders are to exercise this level of impact. Understanding the importance of being open enough and engaged enough to allow others to identify with you is critical for effective leadership – as oppose to the often impersonal and distant management that many see in today’s organisations.

Leadership demands follow-through

Thirdly, the story also illustrates the importance of follow through (especially if there is a genuine care for those being led). What I had not appreciated until I read the study was that even though Michelle Obama only visited the school the once, she continued to engage with pupils from the school so communicating her real interest in them. In 2011 she invited pupils up to Oxford to see her when she was there visiting and then in 2012 she invited 12 of them to come to the White House.

If as leaders, we really care about the significance and response to what we believe in then our behaviour gives it away and those we seek to influence can read it. Michelle Obama clearly did that with these students.

Connect with other potential influencers

Finally, the story provides an important lesson in establishing links with others who have common cause and profile. If you led this school then you would have been very pleased to have the opportunity to receive the initial visit but you might have still not have appreciated how much help an otherwise unconnected leader might be able to provide to enhance the performance of your students.

Positive messaging and role modelling doesn’t have to come from your own leadership team – it can be co-opted by bringing those who also share your passion on the same topic –  even local celebrities, political figures, alumni, media commentators and others could play this role. Leaders need to consider who might bring passion to key organisation values and then build connection with these individuals. They can make difference to your organisation.

Conclusion

The statistics behind the study are fascinating. Simon Burgess sought to isolate so far as possible this ‘Obama’ effect from all others to validate the conclusion. He comes to similar conclusions on the learning that can be gleaned from her impact.

However, what I particularly like about the story is that it is a beautiful example of a political leader using their position and success in support of a really good cause and one that is clearly close to their heart. May this always be so.

 

Truth and fear – poor bedfellows?

battle bus

It has been a bad summer for truth and a good one for fear.
Anyone who followed the Brexit campaign saw leaders pedalling the most outrageous misrepresentations of truths (aka lies). Perhaps the most obvious was the ‘Leave’ battle-bus which trumpeted the opportunity to repatriate the £350m that we allegedly give to the EU each week and give it instead to the NHS.

Truth got savaged by every tactic in the campaign – deceptive use of language, selective or provocative images, obfuscation, or simply ignoring or denying facts. To cap it all anyone who entered the debate, even with a genuine position from which to express an opinion, forecast or set of questions found themselves immediately tarred with motives of malign self-interest and bias by those who did not like their comment.

The outcome has left little positive gloss on any of the most active participants – winners and losers. We have embraced a summer of political silence that sees everyone pleased that we are doing well in the Olympics so that our minds are off the sordid argument and the division that now besets the country.

Across the pond in the USA, we can see a spookily similar storyline being played out in the presidential race of Donald Trump. His rhetoric – simple ‘solutions’ for complex problems, ‘betrayal’ by politicians, thin-skinned anger at critics and naked showmanship is further dividing a political climate that few would have thought could have become more partisan.

I confess to being disappointed at the perceptiveness and judgement exercised in the public space. It is as if people don’t care about truth nor understand the importance of testing what they hear. They merely make up their mind and then pick any argument however valid in defence of it.

History could have reminded me of this response had I paid attention. Yet doesn’t our society pride itself on being smarter than past societies? Despite living in the age of the ‘prosumer’ and savvy consumers of media, we don’t seem to use our expertise to judge leaders’ character and rhetoric.

Many leaders often spend a lot of time crafting carefully the content and clarity of their messages and decisions – making sure that they are right and well communicated. Does the summer offer any lessons to add to the preparation?

What could we learn from this?

1. We live in anxious times

I have known for some time that people generally are becoming more anxious. Just two statistics: In the US, the average high school pupil today has the same level of anxiety as the average psychiatric patient in the early 1950’s. In the UK, the proportion of 15/16 year olds reporting that they frequently feel anxious or depressed has doubled in the last 30 years and is up to 20% of all teenage girls. The stress of modern life tends to be felt more strongly by certain groups – not those with the most responsible roles or high status but by the younger, the less educated and minorities.

The Brexit campaign crystallised around ‘fear’, for the economy vs immigration, and Donald Trump has managed to capture and mobilise the disenfranchised school-leaver, white demographic most hit by the loss of traditional industrial jobs in the USA (where he has a crushing lead of up to 40 points in some polls).

There are surely things to learn in this. We could learn a lot about how valuable it is to empathise with and articulate effectively the emotional anxiety of our people. Leaders need to be able to mirror well – reflecting the emotional concerns of people. Disconnected leaders do not communicate well.

Beyond this though we can see the vital importance of hope as a motivator. Fear acknowledged prepares for hope and people only buy into change when they see some hope of things getting better.  The summer shows that people expect leaders to tackle the right issues (their issues) with solutions – not ignore them and hope that they will go away.

2. Transparency beats spin

Looking at those politicians who are achieving cut-through with the general public – like Trump, Farage, Corbyn – we tend to see those people who display their character and personality. They are not perceived to be working from a carefully worked script, not hedging their words or operating with subtlety. We may not personally like what we see – but where it resonates people respond.

‘Professionalism’ is seen as a mark of untrustworthiness and lack of edge.

People want to be led by people.

We should learn a lot from this (especially if it is married to integrity and grace). Leaders need to inject themselves into what they lead and how they approach it. Leaders really need to believe in where they seek to lead. Too often we can settle for too many lowest common denominators to build a coalition needed to win support and lose sight of this.

3. Leaders are not as impactful as they presume

Leaders spend a lot more time thinking about their context and agenda than those whom they lead. Most people are over-media-ed, under-interested and with a short and emotional attention span.(Should we be thanking the internet for this?)

The result this summer in both the US and the UK has been no critical assessment of what a leader says, the happy ignoring of changing policies and messages, and no probing to understand exactly what people mean when they announce their latest thoughts.

The learning points from this for leaders though are a bit of a curate’s egg.

Firstly, for most people, what leaders say is simply not as important as leaders think it is. Even in business leaders are nowhere near as relevant and impactful as they believe. In 2013, when McKinsey examined the engagement of frontline workers using their Organisational Health database they found that leaders overestimated their ability by over 60%! Hence why most workers remain disengaged in their jobs.

As leaders we need to understand the small part that we play in most peoples’ lives – even if they work for the same organisation as us.

This means that it is vitally important to find the best routes and topics to engage with people – so that we really need understand and communicate with constituencies well. It also means that the soundbite and our personal story and its relevance are very powerful tools to influence effectively in these topics.

4. Psychologic > logic*

Perhaps my overwhelming observation of the campaigning of this summer is that in the end it was emotional psychology rather than rational thought that shaped outcomes to date. The arguments that won tapped into the big fears of a fractious and worried population who anticipate that the future is not better than the past and that their dreams for life are cracking.

The casualties of this have been facts, assumptions, logic, reasoning and objectivity. We are a generation that thinks with our feelings.

We might decide from this that logic is not a powerful motivator. However, we should perhaps learn that when facts do not seem very compelling to people, it may be because they are not the most important ‘facts’ – witness the new spotlight in the press being focused on the ‘losers’ from globalisation (the less educated in our society) and the acknowledgement that the winners in our society need to do more about it. We need to start with the issues and work back to the facts – not the other way round.

Conclusion

As we thankfully see cracks emerging in the Trump bandwagon there are perhaps two final points that spring to mind.

Firstly, truth remains constant and make a habit of reasserting itself over time and shaping the legacy of leadership. It is always good to keep this front of mind when leading – and lead into it not away from it.

Secondly,  leadership is not for the fainthearted…a more anxious, less attentive, more fragmented populace facing more headwinds than in recent history is not an easy group of people to lead in whatever context leadership is needed. So, lead where you really care.

Next week, I will blog about a lovely example of leadership that does exactly this and provides some great food for thought.

* I borrowed this observation from Robert Waterman (of ‘In Search of Excellence’ fame).

Leaders need help to be effective helpers

shutterstock_259338482Leading is a lot more to do with accepting and giving help than we often realise.

Many of us carry in our heads an image of how leaders should behave that is at odds with how people actually influence us (aka lead us).  Our model for leadership is rooted in a presumption that they should have specific expertise and knowledge that followers do not possess – a sort of unique secret sauce! After all – this is how they became a leader and hence why they should not need help, isn’t it?

Yet even a cursory amount of thought should challenge our assumptions – not least if you look at the way we all resist ‘leadership’ provided from this perspective. Most leaders will readily admit that in many situations in their organisation they do not have the best expertise to solve an issue. Even in knowledge-based organisations the leaders are rarely those with the most knowledge or insight.

Yet we persist in our assumptions – and the result is that leaders come to their roles often with same assumption. Somehow being helped and being a leader does not sit comfortably. But those leaders who learn how to receive (and give) help well will perform much more effectively.

Leading is a lot about effective helping

The most successful form of influence is that which is perceived as help by those being led: where the follower is a kind of ‘client’ who is assisted to achieve their goals. This is even true when mandatory change is needed. Atul Gawande in his book ‘Better’ recounts the case of persuading medical staff to wash their hands more frequently to improve hospital hygiene. A clear policy with carrots and sticks achieved at best perfunctory compliance despite the essential nature of the change. It was not until doctors (leaders in the hospital but followers in this change) were really asked why hand-washing was problematic that a combination of approaches created success – including more and more convenient washing points and using gels that reduced the time taken to cleanse hands. In effect the goal was reached when doctors were helped to achieve the goal and not before.

In all organisations leaders need to lead leaders – hence why many would say that the best leaders are also those who know how to follow well.

I have always been very interested in the dynamics of giving and receiving help. It is at the heart of effective consulting and at the centre of the sort of teamwork that makes or breaks the resolution of most marketing, strategy or organisational issues.  Effective teams, by their very nature, demand fluid giving and receiving of help. So with the benefit of a recent break and ample time to catch up on reading I was able to read a book on the topic, by one of my favourite academics on leadership and culture, Edgar Schein. ‘Helping’ builds on much of what he has previously written on process consulting but has a more general focus and therefore is even more accessible.

helping

The book duplicates some of what he has written elsewhere but is nonetheless a perceptive and useful analysis that highlights some valuable principles and tips and when I read, “….leaders must first learn to accept help themselves….and must become helpers to the organisation they are trying to influence,” it seemed worth a blog post.

Receiving help is tough

Schein points out that asking for help has a psychological impact on us. It generates anxiety, as we expose our vulnerability. In effect it places us ‘one step down’ from our potential helper – in a position of dependency.

This shapes the initial dynamics of any discussion. Unless handled well by the helper it can lead to a very unproductive interaction. Think of – calls to helplines, advice from a sales assistant, or a favour asked from a friend. Recall how many times you have found the ‘help’ to be less than helpful – things that you’ve tried before, a simplistic answer to an issue, or irritating or downright patronising. These are traps that are easy for helpers to fall into and Schein is adept at explaining why.

Such experiences and this anxiety probably account for our reticence in seeking help. Yet if, as leaders we understand and can effectively coach others to help us effectively, we can start to improve our own giving of help –  and hence our influence. Such skills are vital if success demands as a precondition that each party is ready to give or receive help, as in the hospital example above.

Key lessons for leaders

For me the most memorable lessons in the book include:

  • How readily we picture in our minds eye a helper as either an expert who can provide a specific service or piece of knowledge (think engineer or teacher) or as a doctor who should diagnose the issue and make informed recommendations. Neither of these mental pictures are the most useful ones to start off with let alone for addressing the complex organisational issues that leaders typically handle. A much more effective starting model is the ‘process consultant’. The move to one of the others should only be consciously adopted once we are sure that it suits the situation.
  • The reminder that effective help takes place only when both parties are ready to give and receive help and not before. This is an emotional readiness. Getting to this starting position needs both relationship and task issues to be addressed first.
  • The value that this ‘process consultant’ mindset provides in making a helping interaction effective: the focus on accurate understanding of the issue; equalising the power balance between helper and helped; and creating the conditions to explore problems together. It is a powerful mix.
  • The need to start any helping interaction with what Schein calls ‘pure inquiry’ which means that the helper needs to start with as few assumptions as possible and ‘access their ignorance’. This helps to redress the power imbalance that exists at the start of the discussion and ensures effective communication of what the problem is and what shape it has. It empowers the ‘client’ to retain ownership of the problem and play fully their role in its resolution.
  • The immense value of asking for feedback on what is and is not helpful – especially early on but also periodically. This is the best way to check that the helping model we are using is the most useful one for the person being helped and that what we doing is working.

Conclusion

The book is a great reminder of some basics for effective influence and for offering real value in any role. It reminded me of the need to recognise my own attitude (and reluctance) to being helped and to use the insights that can be gained from this to make sure that I approach leading and securing commitment not just with the right attitude but also with the right tools and skills to unlock a positive impact.

Maybe when I am next lost, I will not so readily wait for access to Google maps rather than asking someone who may have local knowledge…?

* ‘Helping’ by Edgar Schein p129