Observation
‘Commitment vs Entitlement’
Mark is my longest standing friend; I have known him since we were at primary school together. He runs a small five person business as part of a much larger organisation, though it operates very independently. For the past 5 months, he and two of his colleagues have been working 6 days a week maintaining the financial viability of his business and providing a service to his customers including going on line for the first time ever! All three are exhausted.
For most of this time his other two colleagues have been on furlough with 100% pay. On return to work they immediately asked for the holiday they had accrued during their time out of the business, despite one of them only having joined the organisation one month before lockdown. I don’t know the individual situation and so maybe I am being unfair but it does seem to me that though many people have shown great commitment over the last few months there are also many who have not stepped up and seem more interested in their entitlement than the future survival of their business and the wellbeing of their colleagues and customers.
As organisations return to the office over the weeks and months ahead, this will require leaders to have the wisdom of Solomon in making a whole range of commercial, practical, legal and moral decisions about people. I don’t have any simple answers but my experience suggests that leaders who aim to be respected by the majority rather than win a popularity contest with everybody, will in the long term be more successful.
Current Leadership Challenge
‘The summer is over, act now’
It has been an odd summer but whether you stayed at home, like us, or managed a mad dash abroad between quarantine periods, summer is now drawing to a close. Who knows what the months ahead will bring but it almost certainly won’t be easy. I suspect you now have a window, days or perhaps weeks at most, in which to start preparing your teams for the next stage. ‘Wait and see’, to me, is not a viable position to take.
Of course we can’t predict with any certainty what will happen but I believe history will show that good leaders took the opportunity in early autumn 2020 to shape their leadership agenda by:
setting out their perspective on the context
articulating what great looks like and helping people understand what that means for them
being clear on the priorities and how the organisation needs to work together to deliver them
holding their nerve and maintaining investment in what is needed for future success.
Practical Action
Be the role model you need to be!
In the First World War, Captain Harry Truman (later the 33rd President of the United States of America) led an artillery battery. The first time they came under fire, a sergeant panicked and started a stampede of men abandoning their guns. Captain Truman stood his ground and then started shouting the most extreme profanities at them, which seems to have shocked the men almost as much as the shells landing around them. The combination of conspicuous bravery and the verbal barrage, not something they were used to from their calm and considered officer, meant that order was regained and though they did abandon the guns they did so under orders. The sergeant was broken back to a private. Later when the men were asked who would undertake the perilous task of reclaiming the guns, every individual in the battery volunteered. Apparently Captain Truman was seen not only as brave and a disciplinarian but also as lucky – nobody had been killed in the exchange. Later he wrote to Bess his wife “The men think I am not much scared of shells but they don’t know I was too scared to run.”
I have seen many times that teams follow the behaviour of the leader, much more so than their words. In the tough winter ahead, your role modelling as leader will be a key part of your effectiveness. I’d encourage you to give this as much thought as you would other aspects of your leadership and, most critically, act on it.
What’s required will be different in every context, however these are the key behaviours that I suspect will be most important to demonstrate over the months ahead:
Be enthusiastic and demonstrate belief – that there is a positive future
Be direct – deal with reality as it is, not as others want it to be
Take the tough decisions – don’t let the organisation die from a thousand cuts
Show you care and demonstrate what matters – whether that is delivering for the customer, the future success of the business, investing in the wellbeing of yourself and your colleagues (so you can perform), exercising financial control on the business etc etc.
Be a leader – do what you are paid to do, don’t get sucked in to trying to control everything
Consistency and visibility – your actions will only make sense if there is a coherence about them.
Nobody is perfect and the real reasons behind your behaviour may not be fully understood, but do not underestimate how visible you are as the leader and how much difference your behaviour makes. As Spiderman’s uncle (and several others) said ‘with great power comes great responsibility.’
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