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Beware leaving frontline people with only ‘negative power’

Jun 1st, 2008 | Customer Service | 0 Comments »

I was invited to breakfast a few weeks ago at the home of Charles Handy, the business guru and author. So I didn’t look too ill-informed or stupid, I read his latest book ‘Myself and Other More Important Matters’ before going for breakfast.

In the book, Handy reminds us that if our direct reports, co-workers, front line colleagues etc., do not feel valued or do not feel that they matter, they can easily take it out on the people they do have some power over – your customers.

Here’s what he wrote:

“In one recent survey, seventy-two percent of workers said that they were dissatisfied with their organization. Nineteen percent said that they actively wanted to sabotage it.

“…Frustrated workers can be tempted to activate the negative power that even the most humble possess. The woman in the call center who puts the phone down on me, the waiter who ignores me, the airline employee who closes the gate just as they see me rushing up – they may be exercising their negative power because it was the only way they had of demonstrating that they mattered.”

Sir Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing (or the other way around)

May 30th, 2008 | Leadership | 0 Comments »

Yesterday, Google told me, was the anniversary of Sir Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing conquering Everest. I only mention this because Hillary died in January this year and the obituaries all talked about his combination of bravery and humility. His first words on descending the mountain were ‘We’ve done it” (or words to that effect – ruder words to that effect, in fact). Not ‘I’, but ‘We’.

Also, he would never say which of the two men set foot first on Everest, as he saw it as a team accomplishment. It was only long after Norgay Tenzing’s death that Hillary admitted that he, Hillary, had set foot on the summit first.

He spent much of his life after Everest building schools (30 of them), hospitals and bridges in Nepal, whose people made him an honorary Nepalese citizen. I think we learn from Hillary that great leaders think and act ‘We’ instead of ‘I’, and lead themselves and others to achieve extraordinary things, while not taking themselves too seriously.

He described himsef as a person of modest talents but great determination. And he decided to use his prominence to set up The Himalaya Trust and be a servant of the people of Nepal, which is an interesting example of servant-leadership.

Of course, it might have been Tenzing who was a or the great leader of that expedition (the official leader, an Englishman named Hunt, is largely forgotten), with the cultural bias of the time and the dominance of English-language media in the world, and the sherpas’ role as paid ‘helpers’, all combining to create the assumption that Hillary led, with Tenzing seen as his back up. Sherpas are guides, after all, and guides lead. We may never know. But, that’s a different point. And probably not an important one if we strip away the racial bias in how the achievement was presented to the world, which is, of course, important to at least be aware of.

Hillary’s character seems pure servant-leader to me, or Level 5 leader as Jim Collins would define that mix of humility and bravery and ongoing longterm commitment to the people of Nepal. Here’s some of the coverage after his death if you are interested:

BBC Sir Edmund Hillary obituary from January 2008

The power of stories

May 30th, 2008 | Customer Service | 0 Comments »

Circulating stories about ‘how we do things around here’ – the behaviours that mark your organization out as distinctive – models those behaviours so people know what is expected of them. The great thing about leading through stories is that they can become viral; other employees and customers take up the story and circulate it.

Here’s an example, told to me by Lyell Strambi, Executive Director of Richard Branson’s Virgin Atlantic airline.


Virgin has a number of legendary employees, who epitomize Virgin Flair. If you are a manager at Virgin and have to define Virgin Flair to a new recruit, you might have a hard time defining it. But, by telling real stories describing it in action, you get the message across.

One employee who epitomized Virgin Flair in action, said Strambi, was an in-flight attendant called Sue Rawlings, with a larger than life personality. Just before serving the ice cream that Virgin offers to passengers while they are watching the in-flight movie, this particular attendant would duck into the galley, smear ice cream all around her mouth, then emerge and start serving.

As she moved down the cabin she would pronounce very loudly, so that people would look up at her, ‘I never touch this stuff myself; I’m watching my weight, but people tell me it’s delicious. Enjoy!’ The effect was a wave of laughter that moved down the plane with her, as passengers looked up from plugging in their headphones or adjusting the volume control.

What stories do you have illustrating ‘the way we do things around here’? Are they as distinctive as this one? If not, then your customer experience probably isn’t that distinctive either.

Business is the best art

May 25th, 2008 | Customer Service, Leadership | 0 Comments »

I chaired a track session at European Customer Management World recently where part of my job was to interview Robert Stephens, founder of The Geek Squad. Here are a dozen learning points I jotted down from Robert on how to take a commoditized sector – IT service and repair – and create a cool, profitable, compelling, distinctive employee and customer experience.

Robert’s secret is that he deep themes his business, from the types of car his Geeks drive, to the way they dress, right down to the soles of their shoes. He calls his company ‘a living comic book’.

Clearly, stand-out leadership that creates stand-out organizations has evolved into something different from what it was. And by breaking the rules and treating everything as marketing (“Marketing is a tax you pay for being unremarkable”, he says), Robert seems to have re-invented marketing as well as leadership.

12 Learning Points from The Geek Squad on How to Create a Distinctive Customer Experience

1. Marketing when you have no money is the best kind of marketing. In 1994 when Robert started his IT support business, he had no money, just a mountain bike and a mobile phone to take him to his house calls. “That’s about as integrated as you can get. Everything you do in that situation is marketing.”

2. Marketing is a tax you pay for being unremarkable. Be remarkable – stand out – and you get free marketing. Because everything you do is marketing.

3. “Customer experience is the result of the employee experience. Every company is in the service business, no matter what you do.”

4. Create new rules: “I couldn’t afford to advertise. I’d never run a business before, so I had no rules to go by. I could see the company as a movie in my head. The Geeks were an audience I have to inspire, as are the customers. If you think of your companies as movie plots it is liberating.”

5. Dress the part. Our first uniform was a black SWAT jumpsuit. Our story is that we only turn up in an emergency, so it fit with the storyline. But, it scared the customers to death, so we softened it. Our uniform is now stolen from NASA – all those old black and white pics of NASA scientists huddled around the workstations in Houston, with short-sleeved white shirts, black ties…There’s something humble about that whole thing and we are a service culture. So, in the name of humility that’s how our modern day philosopher-kings, the Geeks, now dress.

6. Starve your teams on projects. They’ll be most creative that way.

7. Authenticity is one thing that can’t be copied.

8. Companies are now, in effect, focussed social networks for hire.

9. Replicating the DNA: We all need to be aware of the Founder’s Dilemma. Steve Jobs is reckoned to be 20% of Apple’s worth. What if he’s hit by a bus? My job is to influence and inspire the most efficient form of leadership. I’m a Geek too. When Iron Man comes out we all line up and go see the movie together. I’m a two-time college dropout. There isn’t that kind of separation between leader and led you might get in other organizations. My job is to lead by example and inspire. What the leader can do is influence and recognise people’s contribution. I’m the first director, if you will. But there are sequels, prequels, and other Geeks will direct those. We have one common purpose. There’s a Death Star called mediocrity. Our role is to blow it up with speed and quality.

9. Recruitment is the best form of advertising. We are starting to hold late night Kung Fu film festivals as a recruitment initiative, as the only people who go to schlock late night Kung Fu festivals are Geeks or people who know Geeks.

10. The three skills you can’t train for, that are essential for the Geek Squad, are: curiosity, ethics and drive. Curiosity in particular is that mix of enthusiasm and humility that is vital.

11. Recognize the importance of play: The key to innovation is play.

12. Most of the world is populated by boring businesses. I dropped out of art school because it was easier for me to be creative in a business setting. When companies are so boring, your opportunity to stand out by being interesting is enormous. Warhol said “Business is the best art.”

True North, by Bill George

May 15th, 2008 | Books | 0 Comments »

Bill George is speaking at Leaders in London later this year.

60 Second Summary

* Leadership is about what makes you different; there is no perfect model of a leader
* Stop trying to act like a leader; think ‘leadership’ not ‘leader’
* There are five dimensions of authentic leadership: Purpose; Practising solid values; Heart; Relationships; Self-discipline
* Engage people’s hearts and minds behind the organization’s purpose, rather than behind an individual leader
* You can use authentic leadership to become a market leading organization; it’s about high performance, not about being ‘nice’ for the sake of it

Longer Summary

Bill George was an inspirational, high-achieving leader at the medical instrument company Medtronic, which he grew to become the world’s leading medical technology supplier. Elected CEO in 1991, he became one of the most admired CEOs of his generation as he grew Medtronic’s market capitalization from $1.1 billion to $60 billion, averaging 35% a year from 1996 to 2002. He then became one of the world’s foremost teachers of leadership, as a Harvard Professor and best-selling author.

Most leaders, says George in True North (the follow-up to his book Authentic Leadership) , act the way they think a leader should act, based on leader archetypes (think Churchill, Jack Welch), or the traits, styles and characteristics that have been identified in more than 1,000 studies of leadership over the past fifty years. But, those who see leadership as emulating great leaders or acting out a set of competencies don’t truly lead, says George. You can only effectively lead by finding your authentic voice.

“In the 21st century, without authenticity in leadership,
organizations can’t develop sustained growth.”

For George, leadership isn’t a job title, or a mantle that you put on when you walk into a leadership position, or a set of behaviours defined in your HR Department’s leadership competencies framework. It is the sum total of who you are.

Leadership Is About What Makes You Different

Finding your authentic leadership is the leader’s equivalent of what the business guru Tom Peters calls ‘defining Brand You’. While most leadership theory is spent on codifying what is the same about leadership, George reminds us what the marketplace itself teaches us – sameness creates commodities, difference is what stands out.

No-one can be authentic by trying to be like someone else. One of the 125 leaders George interviewed to define authentic leadership used to be Jack Welch’s assistant at GE in the 1980s. Everyone was running around trying to be like Jack, he explained. Nobody could take that seriously. You need to be who you are, not try to emulate someone else.

Reminds me of my favourite quote about all leadership being autobiography: “Abraham Lincoln was once asked how long it took him to write The Gettysburg Address, the speech that defined a nation. He replied, ‘All my life’.”

There Is No Perfect Profile Of A Leader

All the academic studies have failed to find the profile of a perfect leader, says George, because leaders are highly complex human beings, people who have distinctive qualities that cannot be sufficiently described by lists or traits or characteristics. Once we realise this, says George, and also realise that leadership is not a position, we can stop being bent out of shape by trying to fit into the straitjacket of leadership definitions and instead accept four liberating new laws of leadership:

1. You do not have to be born with the characteristics of a leader
2. You do not have to wait for a tap on the shoulder
3. You do not have to be at the top of your organization
4. You can step up and lead at any point in your life

The Five Dimensions Of Authentic Leadership

Traditional leaders focus on their own success and on getting loyal subordinates to follow them to achieve that success. Authentic leaders, by contrast, inspire others to lead around a shared purpose, rather than around the leader.

This doesn’t mean authentic leaders are perfect. In fact, it is a defining feature of authenticity that you admit to your flaws rather than hide behind the mystique of the leader who can never make a mistake.

George’s research shows, he says, that there are five dimensions to an authentic leader

1. Purpose: Without knowing your purpose (why you lead) you are at the mercy of ego
2. Practising solid values: Integrity is the core value. If your practice slips and slides under pressure, people quickly lose confidence in your leadership
3. Heart: This means having passion for your work and the courage to make difficult decisions
4. Relationships: Authentic leaders develop enduring relationships
5. Self-discipline: Setting high standards, taking responsibility for outcomes, and holding others accountable for their performance, takes strong self-discipline

Critique of True North and its interpretation of ‘authentic’

Following on from Warren Bennis

According to George, an authentic leader has found his or her inner voice and remains true to it. This is Warren Bennis stuff, for anyone who’s read Bennis. And it’s no surprise True North is part of the ‘Warren Bennis Signature Series’ imprint. George echoes the Dean of Leadership (as the FT calls Bennis), when he says that true authentic leaders have commonly been through an extremely tough experience that reveals their true nature to themselves – the death of a loved one, bankruptcy, overcoming serious illness.

Bennis observed that authentic leaders are often forged in the crucible of overcoming adversity, whether as a child or later in their career. This echoes Hemingway’s “The world breaks all of us. But some are strong at the broken places.” And it plays to the heroic, romantic leadership model, even if unintentionally.

We tend to have an archetype in our head of leaders as infallible, certain of where they are going, moving from success to success. Even George’s phrase ‘True North’ reinforces that image. But, great leaders – authentic leaders – often don’t feel that way when they are in the middle of achieving great things.

Great leaders don’t necessarily ‘feel’ great when they are in the middle of it

Anne Mulcahy, the CEO credited with rescuing Xerox from its downward spiral, is a case in point. The emotional roller coaster of trying to keep people at Xerox motivated and pull the company back from the brink was so draining that, at one point, Mulcahy described to George, she was on the way home, drained, and had to pull over to the side of the road. She sat there, temporarily unable to move, and said to herself, “I don’t know where to go. I don’t want to go home. There’s just no place to go.”

The boxer Jack Dempsey once supposedly said champions get up when they can’t. Dempsey would have said, Mulcahey ‘got up when she couldn’t’. And she is now widely praised as the woman who saved Xerox (a claim she would herself deny, as she credits a lot of people at Xerox with saving the company). That’s the test of an authentic leader, says George.

And, of course it applies to people at all levels, not just the top of an organisation. You lead your own life by refusing to be knocked out of shape and by getting up when you are knocked down.

Can a ‘not nice’ leader be an ‘authentic leader’?

The over-riding impression of an ‘authentic leader’ from True North is of a leader in George’s own image: he was a brilliant, empathetic leader at Medtronic (inventor of the pacemaker), which he grew by encouraging leadership at all levels, driven by the higher purpose of saving lives. The 125 leaders he profiled for his research into authentic leaders tend to be like that, too, kind of tough but fair benevolent teacher/leader figures.

Which raises the question: is an apparently autocratic, empathy-lite leader such as the UK’s Alan Sugar or Rupert Murdoch an authentic leader? Of course they are, in the sense that they are honest and true to themselves. What you see is what you get. But, I’m not sure either of them have been through the deep inner journey of enlightenment and understanding self and others that Bill George says is necessary to be an authentic leader.

Nor does being authentic mean being nice, though George tends towards analyzing leaders in this book who exhibit his own traits: nice, empathetic, challenging, values-driven. So, just as all leadership is autobiography, True North and Authentic Leadership can be seen as tinged with George’s own autobiography.

All leadership (books) is (are) autobiography

I once heard Tom Peters, in the middle of a rant about how wrong Jim Collins (author of Good To Great) is to champion quiet, ‘ego lite’ leaders, suddenly break off and say, as an aside, “The older I get the more convinced I become that whatever we think we are writing about, we are writing about ourselves.” That is searingly honest and insightful.

The famously charismatic and shout-y Peters champions loud and proud and colourful leaders with big personalities (like, er, himself). The quietly-spoken, introspective, Collins champions quietly-spoken, introspective, non ego driven leaders. Therefore their research, and the people they hold up as objectively-discovered great leaders that just happen to emerge from the research (Collins at least) clearly aren’t as objectively discovered as they would like to think. There appears to be a good deal of projection going on.

Similarly, George tends to equate ‘authentic’ leadership with his own type of caring (but demanding: that’s how he achieved results at Medtronic) leadership. I think it would be interesting to study equally authentic ‘not nice’ leaders, often those who appear to be driven by ego and the need to win.

Is Rupert Murdoch an authentic leader? Of course he is, as he is true to himself. Is he nice to work for? That’s a different question. Does he shape News International in his own image, rather than aligning people behind a shared set of universal values they all buy into? Of course he does. Ego-driven and Authentic aren’t mutually exclusive, whereas George fudges the logic a bit and seems to conclude they are. I wish they were. But, I’m not convinced of it.

Background: How Bill George led Medtronic : “From ‘I’ to ‘We'”

This isn’t in the book: I researched it separately as it makes useful background before you read the book.

George received his BSc in industrial engineering from Georgia Tech, and MBA from Harvard. His early career was spent as an executive with Honeywell and Litton Industries, and he served in the US Department of Defense.

His definition of leadership involves developing the organization so that passion and inspiration are built into the system, not merely dependent on the CEO, an objective he put to the test by setting himself a ten-year term limit as CEO of Medtronic. His strategy for embedding leadership proved to be right, as Medtronic’s growth path is just as strong today, when it stands at 222nd largest company in the US by market capitalisation, up from 349th in the year George stepped down.

George says the key to effective leadership today is in the transformation from ‘I’ to ‘We’, which he put into practice at Medtronic, inventor of the pacemaker. This involves focussing on the leadership of others, to embed leadership in the system. At Medtronic, people at all levels – 30,000 employees – were shown how to link what they do every day with the company’s core purpose, so they could take the lead in their own jobs. The first thing George himself did on joining the company was to don a surgical gown and spend 120 days watching procedures like open heart surgery, to learn how the company’s products could be improved.

George spotted early on that the company lacked a closed-loop performance management system and the ability to execute plans on schedule. For instance, it took Medtronic four years to bring a new pacemaker to market where competitors were doing it in two. Under George’s stewardship, that time was cut to 16 months.

George also discovered that Medtronic had individuals who were incredibly knowledgeable about the business but who lacked critical leadership skills. The company had grown up faster than the leadership teams. So he gave some people who were great functional managers the opportunity to hold leadership roles. He created the ‘Medtronic Fellows’ programme, for high-potential leaders to go to business school.

Leadership Demands Accountability And High Performance

To ensure strategy execution, George was ruthless on performance. At first this confused employees – he talked about empowering them as leaders, but came down hard when they didn’t hit deadlines. With ‘empowered’ local leadership comes the responsibility to perform, and George was relentless in driving this home. He met bi-monthly or monthly with business groups, travelling across the US and around the world to meet them rather than bringing them to head office, to review performance. George also led a worldwide reorganization away from multilayered management to structure around business units, bringing the organization closer to customers.

Known for his integrity and authenticity, George has translated his experience into a practical values-based leadership that delivers results. His research at Harvard Business School into 125 successful leaders helped him codify Authentic Leadership, as he calls it, leading to the creation of Harvard’s MBA in Authentic Leadership, which he teaches.

Bill George now serves as a Director of Goldman Sachs, Novartis, ExxonMobil and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. In 2002, George was selected as one of “The 25 Most Influential Business People of the Last 25 Years”.

Bill George is speaking at Leaders in London later this year

Phil Dourado Copyright (c) The Leadership Hub

Tom Peters on Authentic Leadership

Apr 28th, 2008 | Leadership | 0 Comments »

“It’s up to each of us alone to figure out who we are, who we are not, and to act more or less consistently with those conclusions.” – Tom Peters

I like that. It’s from Tom Peters’ ‘Thought For The Day’, which you can sign up to as a daily email here: Tom Peters site

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Secrets of The Concierge: Customer Service & Conversation

Apr 28th, 2008 | Customer Service | 0 Comments »

I’ve become addicted to Slideshare. I like this (the Slideshare, below), though I think the title doesn’t do it justice (‘Customer Service is the new Marketing’).

I particularly like ‘The Secrets of The Concierge’, which you can find on Slide 21. They are:

  1. Put conversations at the centre of your business
  2. Reduce your sphere of control to increase sphere of influence
  3. Smash the silos

3. is now a cliche (though true). And the Cluetrain Manifesto taught us 1. ten years ago. I find 2. the most potent message at the moment. Anyway, here’s the slideshare:

[slideshare id=372622&doc=csitnm-1-1209150783625237-8]

17th April 1970: Houston, we no longer have a problem. Leadership and improvisation

Apr 17th, 2008 | Leadership | 0 Comments »

A lot of leadership lessons have come out of NASA over the years.

Teamwork and innovation: Leadership and innovation consultants often remind their clients that NASA would get two teams to compete on coming up with an innovative solution to a problem and that the competitive element accelerated the innovation process, for example.

Connecting everybody’s job with the overall mission, vision and purpose: And then there’s the probably apocryphal story of JFK visiting NASA HQ at Houston and stopping to talk to a man with a mop in the corridor and asking “And what do you do at NASA?” to be answered by the janitor with “I’m helping put a man on the moon sir” – often used as an example of connecting people’s everyday jobs with the overall purpose of the organization and how critical it is for leaders to do that.

Set the vision even if you don’t have all the answers already: And, of course, there’s the famous promise by President Kennedy to ‘put a man on the moon before the end of the decade’ when the technology didn’t exist to do that.

I heard once from Mike Harris, who was founding CEO of the UK bank First Direct, and who was originally a scientist specialising in boron chemistry (and who is a brilliant organizational leader in the mould of Jim Collins’ Level 5 leadership) that Kennedy’s scientists said, among other things “But, we don’t even have a fuel that can take us to the moon and back!” And the answer was “Go and invent one, then”, which led to the creation of a whole new field of chemistry – boron chemistry – which led to the creation of the right fuel. Now, I’m not a scientist so I hope I’ve remembered that right and not garbled the science.

But, we also learnt from NASA about crisis leadership: If you’ve seen the film/movie Apollo 13, you know what I mean. If we leave aside for the moment the tragic subsequent deaths in the space shuttle years later, the way that the NASA team at Houston was led to save the lives of the astronauts in Apollo 13 after an explosion in the oxygen tank – using duct tape, plastic hose and cardboard to rig up a contraption to increase the oxygen (or decrease the carbon dioxide – can’t remember) in the Lunar module so they didn’t run out before landing – was inspiring crisis leadership at its best – with everyone in the project team taking the lead at different times under the guidance of the overall team leaders to do what seemed impossible.

It was April 17th 1970 – 38 years ago today – that the Apollo 13 lunar module splashed down safely.

Great reminder of the dramatic story in Wired here (including the fact that no-one said “Houston, we have a problem.” That was the movie version.)

We spend so much time planning, writing procedures, training people in competencies and so on for leadership. We forget how leadership in the field, in real life, often comes down to improvising with the resources you have available. And we forget just how powerful the ability to improvise can be in leaders at all levels during a crisis.

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Leadership lessons from Humphrey Bogart

Apr 15th, 2008 | Leadership | 0 Comments »

I was just thinking about this, this morning for some reason: There’s a scene in the film Casablanca that is an example of Jim Collins’ Level 5 leadership (modest, courageous, ego-lite leadership).

When a group of German soldiers start singing about the Fatherland in Rick’s nightclub, around the piano, the French people in the club, their homeland occupied, look downcast.

Victor Lazlo, the resistance leader husband (Paul Heinreid?) of Ingrid Bergman, walks up to the band and tells them to play the Marseillaise. The band leader glances across at Humphrey Bogart (Rick), sitting at a corner table. Bogart nods imperceptibly (well, it’s perceptible to the band leader; stop being so picky).

It’s his nightclub. This is a big risk for him to take. It’s a hidden act of leadership. The band starts playing the Marseillaise, gradually drowning out the German soldiers as, led by the resistance leader, the audience stand up one by one and noisily sing along. The German soldiers give up. For now.

This has always been one of my favourite scenes in a film and I have always thought that the grandstanding leadership of the resistance leader – admirable though it was – inspired me less than the little nod given by the hidden leader in the corner, who let it all happen, taking on a risk to himself and his livelihood, and took none of the credit for it.

All the world’s a stage: team psychology and performance

Apr 15th, 2008 | Customer Service | 0 Comments »

I just heard a psychologist talking about how people perform better when they feel they are being watched or ‘on show’. It reminded me of Pine & Gilmore’s book The Experience Economy and the notion that all business is now theatre and your people are players.

As European Customer Management World is coming up next month, that, in turn, reminded me of last year’s event. My friend Chris Daffy had invited some people to a pre-conference dinner. Each course was introduced by the chef and then the servers swept in, around ten of them I think, like a river from two doors on the side.

I watched them – five on each side of the long table – step back in unison and glance at the head waiter, who gave a small signal with a nod of his head, like a conductor of an orchestra setting the timing.

All ten moved forward at the same time, like dancers, and placed the next dish before the guest in front of them. Then they stepped back, all turned as if in military formation, and strode out the door. Some of them were smiling to themselves in satisfaction. I wanted to give them a round of applause.

This wasn’t serving a meal. It was choreographed theatre. It was art. When I was a student I used to be a room service waiter in the summer holidays, at a five star hotel. It was boring work with long hours and a gruelling regime in the kitchens when you ordered and collected the meals as the lowest of the low – the waiter (think lots of Gordon Ramsays shouting at you).

But these people weren’t at the bottom of a pecking order. They were artists on show, part of a flawless team. And they knew it. Whatever your sector is, you can do the same. The Geek Squad even does it with IT service and repair.

All work is now theatre. Your customer experience will be all the better for it once you realise that.

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