Phil's Leadership blog

“If you don’t fully understand an instrument, don’t buy it.

If you would not buy a specific product for yourself, don’t try to sell it.

If you do not know your customers very well, don’t lend them any money.

If you do these three things, you will be a better banker, my son.”

– Emilio Botin, 73-year-old Chairman of Spanish bank Santander, whose bank has emerged unscathed from the credit crisis, “delivering a tongue-in-cheek lecture on the basic tenets of banking” (FT) at the Euromoney Awards, where Santander was named ‘World’s Best Bank’.

“I hate a song that makes you think that you are not any good,” he explained in Ed Cray’s popular biography Ramblin Man. “I hate a song that makes you think that you are just born to lose…I am out to fight those songs to my very last breath of air and my last drop of blood. I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world.”More at Wired Magazine

Sounds like leadership to me…

Sir Terence Conran was once asked to describe himself in ten words. He replied ‘Ambitious, mean, kind, greedy, frustrated, emotional, tiresome, intolerant, shy, fat.’

Dan Pink says we can go even shorter in describing ourselves. He points to the book ‘Not Quite What I was Planning’, six word memoirs by a collection of people, both famous and obscure.

Now, this sounds trivial, but we live in a world of digest, where your leadership ‘brand’ has to be conveyed fast and deep. Remember Tom Peters’ powerful idea ‘Brand You’; that you have to brand yourself through your behaviour as a leader to stand out as unique, because the market tells us difference wins, sameness doesn’t?

So, here’s a useful exercise: what six words sum you up as a leader? Come up with six word then try them out on your colleagues to see if they agree. It’ll help you sharpen your leadership brand – aligning how others perceive you with how you perceive yourself as a leader.

Dan tried it at a business conference he was attending and these are a few of the replies. They aren’t specifically about leadership, but you get how it works by reading them:

* Did what I was supposed to.

* Happy, sad, angry, confident, really happy.

* Unsure, but you would never know.

I like that last one in particular – describes a lot of people in leadership positions.

One of the first things Jack Welch did as a 24-year-old manager of a GE plant was blow up the part of the plant he was responsible for.

The head of the plant called him to his office to explain.

Welch, assuming this was the end of his managerial career, duly explained that he was experimenting with a different mixture from the standard one and it had caused an explosion. The plant boss probed further, asking him why and what he had hoped to achieve.

Satisfied that Welch had

a) learnt a lesson from the experiment and

b) had practised sound thinking, just needed to adjust his risk analysis, the plant head protected Welch and he kept his job.

Welch says that act of leadership had a profound effect on him for the rest of his life. As head of GE, Welch championed experimentation, learning from mistakes and not blaming people if an attempt at something new went wrong…unless they repeated the same mistake more than once, that is.

Source for this story: My notes from a conversation between Jack Welch and the journalist Kirsty Wark. She had spotted the story in his book Jack, Straight From The Gut and so asked him about it. A secondary learning point: he tells that story to make it clear that leaders are not infallible and need to admit to their own mistakes – admit their own fallibility – if they are to create a culture in which others are honest and admit to mistakes, too. Otherwise you get the myth that the leader can’t be wrong and everyone covers up evidence to the contrary, and also never admit that they themselves are wrong.

“Heroes don’t have a special personality. They are not more compassionate, more altruistic, more or less of anything. They are simply people that in a particular situation where most people, observing something bad, do nothing, then the hero is the one who steps out of the crowd and challenges the definition of the situation, challenges the authority, dissents, defies, rebels and does not comply.”

That’s psychologist Philip Zimbardo talking to BBC Radio 4 in an interview this week.

Zimbardo is famous for the classic Stanford Prison Experiment when back in 1971 he turned the university basement into a fake prison where the young men playing the guards soon started abusing the people they were told were their prisoners. He showed how much circumstances can distort how individuals behave and how, given complete control over others, anyone can act as a monster.

Now he’s turned his attention to how to create environments in which people do the opposite – act heroically. His definition of ‘a hero’, above, maps onto the everyday leaders carrying out acts of leadership up and down the organization, regardless of position, that we need today.

I can’t reproduce a transcript here of much more of the item than the quote above without breaching the BBC’s copyright. But, if you have Real Player installed and go to this link, you should be able to listen to it yourself. After you hit the link, below, and once you are in the BBC site, look for the ‘All In The Mind’ programme title and click on that to listen again. If it doesn’t let you in jump down this page to the other link, which also lets you take this further:

BBC Radio 4, All In The Mind Programme, Thursday June 5th

In case that doesn’t work for you, this link, below, goes to a blog post from Zimbardo in which he talks about stimulating the heroic imagination.

“I believe that an important factor that may encourage heroic action is the stimulation of the “heroic imagination”– the capacity to imagine facing physically or socially risky situations, mentally struggle with the hypothetical problems these situations generate, and consider one’s actions and the consequences.”

Your role as a leader, then, becomes stimulating the heroic imagination in people – making them realise what they are capable of. There’s a clip in The Leadership Hub, on the Home Page at time of writing, that gives a fictional example of a teacher stimulating the heroic imagination – the belief that someone can take the lead and accomplish something great – in the movie Paying It Forward. Here’s the link to the Zimbardo blog post:

Philip Zimbardo on the heroic imagination

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

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.