What can leaders do to make the most of 2012? In this short e-book by Professor Peter Sheldrake, Stuart Dalziel and Pia Lee we propose three priorities that we believe are critical for leaders in the upcoming year: better thinking, customer focus and execution.
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When LIW was asked to address the Government’s public inquiry into Australia’s relationship with the countries of Africa earlier this year, we asked the African leaders we have worked with what message they would like to send.
“Don’t develop things, develop people” was the plea from a senior government official in Tanzania. This challenge sheds light on how Australia (and other ‘developed’ countries) can renew its engagement with Africa at this crucial time.
Read more in Pia Lee’s article in PayDirt magazine: Pia Lee in PayDirt magazine, November 2011
Also, listen in to Martin Kwakwa’s interviews with Deepak Gopaul from Mauritius and Dr Mathew Davies of ANU on 18th November on SBS Radio at 5.30pm and 5.45pm respectively.
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The comment this week by Christine Lagarde, the head of the International Monetary Fund, that if the problems in the global economy are not resolved, ‘we could run the risk of what some commentators are calling a lost decade’ showed that she has a talent for headline-grabbing but less for leadership. Clearly, it is her role to help fix the considerable economic problems that we face and she may have needed to create some drama to inspire action. However, the reality is that the coming decade will be at least a much-needed ‘reset’ and at best a true renaissance.
Over recent decades, the citizens of the West have allowed themselves to measure their lives by money. The gap between rich and poor is widening and yet some of the richest countries have the highest rates of depression. Something is wrong.
Many of the managers that we work with, raised on the logic of ‘Management by Objectives‘ (MBO), have lost the ability to enrol people in what they are doing without some financial inducement. ‘If you want someone to do something, you had better pay them to do it’ has become the firm belief. And yet these same people give of themselves generously as football coaches, scout pack leaders, carers, contributors to online advice forums etc and see others doing the same. No money changes hands but quality work is done. It is almost as if the rules of MBO can be left at work on Friday but have to be picked up again on Monday morning.
Dan Pink‘s recent book ‘Drive – the surprising truth about what motivates’ sheds some light on this phenomenon. Pink tells us that only simple, mechanical tasks are completed better when there is a financial inducement whilst money can actually reduce performance for more complex tasks. His collection of research, including some funded by (as he calls it, tongue firmly in cheek) ‘that notoriously left-wing socialist group’, the US Federal Reserve, shows that this is not the case. Once you pay people enough to take money off the table then more of it does not improve results.
What actually motivates us is:
- purpose (does what I am doing have a positive higher intent?)
- autonomy (am I able to decide what I do and how I do it?)
- mastery (do I feel like I am excellent at what I do?)
These three – each elements of the conditions for success, Clarity, Climate and Competence – are crucial for leaders as we strive to achieve even more than ever in the coming decade (and certainly not ‘losing’ it, as Ms Lagarde suggests).
It is said that the Mandarin character for ‘crisis’ is made up of the characters for ‘danger’ and ‘opportunity’. With good leadership, this crisis presents us with the opportunity of a lifetime. During this crisis, what we have been taught to want (money) is going to be in short supply but what we actually want (purpose, autonomy, mastery) can be plentiful.
Will we grasp this opportunity to change our values system and rediscover some more fundamental and fulfilling drivers? With money scarce, can we finally find those illusive things in our lives that we have been raised to think that money can buy?
More on this subject…
See a beautifully animated summary of Drive at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
More leadership resources at www.liw3.com
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The news this week that the CEO of Lloyds Banking Group, António Horta-Osório, is taking stress leave was met with mixed feelings. An online poll in The Guardian asking the question ‘Do you back the Lloyds boss?’ showed an almost even split between the supporters (Yes – stress affects all of us in different ways) and the detractors (No – he’s paid well enough to take it). These options somehow miss the point: does being at the top always mean that you will be stressed?
Research at Princeton University reported in UK’s Daily Mail earlier this year concluded that it really is tough at the top. Levels of stress hormones were collected from males over a nine-year period and they found that alpha males were more stressed than their beta brothers.
The authors say that the stress is likely to be down to the energy needed to maintain their lofty social position rather than to the psychological factors that come with their status.
The thing is, this research was on baboons. While the researchers extended the results to ‘possibly’ include humans, we actually have a greater ability than baboons to choose our responses to the situations we find ourselves in. We therefore have greater control over the stress we put ourselves under – even more so as we rise to the top.
As a fellow human being, we can sympathise with Horta-Osório. He has had a big year by any standards: against the background of a global financial crisis he has led Lloyds to take a £3.2bn provision for the mis-selling of payment protection insurance (PPI) and to launch a new round of cost-cutting measures.
However, there is a danger that Horta-Osório’s stress leave could reinforce our perception that stress rises as you go higher in an organisation. This perception ignores several things that you get more of as you go up:
Money: when Horta-Osório joined from Santander just one year ago, he received a signing bonus of GBP4.5million. This is equivalent to 145 years earnings for the average person in the UK and the seven whole lifetimes’ earning for someone on the minimum wage. Yes, there is research to show that, like with baboons, the pressure of of maintaining status in your peer group can create stress, but can we really believe that this is equates to the worries of a low-paid single-mother only just making the rent payment each month? You are paid well, so chill.
Smart people: one thing that gets better as you rise in organisations is the quality of the people reporting to you. If you do not use that talent and focus on doing your job, then you will work yourself into, at the very least, a spell of stress leave. The book The Leadership Pipeline by Ram Charan et al once again gives us invaluable guidance here: be clear about the value of your job, do that and delegate the rest. You have a great team, so chill.
Control: when Sir Michael Marmot, an Australian-born epidemiologist, published his ‘path-breaking’ Whitehall II study he destroyed the myth of ‘executive stress’. He followed British civil servants of all grades over several years and showed that, far from being tough at the top, the lower your status at work the shorter your life expectancy. At the heart of the matter is that all jobs are demanding but only higher up do you have high levels of control: it is the combination of high demand and low control that increases the risk of heart disease and a range of other serious ailments. Yes, you have a demanding job but you have some control, so chill.
Purpose: we will only be able to choose our reaction to pressure if we know why we do what we do. This clear sense of purpose – beyond making money – provides the inner compass for leaders that can bring the calm and a sense of direction in the storm. At the top, leaders have the opportunity to define purpose for themselves and their organisations. Tony Hsieh, the perpetually breezy former CEO of Zappos, a company committed to transforming their customer experience, was quoted as saying “when people do something that actually contributes to a higher purpose that they really believe in … research has shown that actually is the longest lasting type of happiness.” You are on a mission, so chill.
So, while wishing António a swift recovery and a bright future, leaders should also take a moment to think that if it’s tough to be you, it is even tougher to work for you.
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by Deogratius Kilawe, 3rd year student at Mzumbe University, Tanzania. Deo tells his leadership story in which he rejects the expectations of someone with a poor upbringing to make a positive impact on the lives of other students. He was helped along the way by leadership workshops run by LIW at the Tanzanian Global Development Learning Centre (TGDLC).
It was in 1999, the year I was about to finish my primary education, when I first began to hear about the strikes and demonstrations at Universities. Students were striking to pressure the government into increasing their student loan amounts so that they had more money. Sometimes the students destroyed University property and other times they were injured as a result of striking. Often I saw universities closed due to these strikes and even in February this year, (2011) the University of Dar es Salaam was forced to close due to students demanding an increase in their student loans.
In 2008, my first year at Mzumbe University, I came up with the idea of setting up The Achievers’ Club. I realised that the real problem for my fellow students was not the government student loan but the availability of money itself – many students believe they have no other option but to depend on the government for their money and when the government fails to provide them with money on time, they simply have no means of survival. Many of my fellow students come from poor families like me, so they resort to striking by putting pressure on the government into giving them money so that they can at least survive living at the University.
The purpose of The Achievers Club is to create a different source of income so that when one source is in crisis, the other source will compensate it. This involves training students to develop their entrepreneurial skills and encouraging them to think about investing and engaging in various businesses while they continue to study. The vision for The Achievers’ Club is to have a student-owned company at every University in Tanzania and other east African nations. This company can either be medium or large as long as the students are the key shareholders. Students invest the amount of their government loan into the company and many of them take casual jobs within these companies.
Our mission is to provide a forum where all university students can discuss important issues for our nation and give their opinion. We continue to face a lot of challenges within this club – many people have asked me to stop running the club because I am from a poor family and they believe that I cannot do something that needs lots of money to implement. However I still believe that it is ideas that change our lives, not money, despite it being useful.
In 2010, we officially began our club events and we held several seminars on entrepreneurship, launching book readings and sharing business and life skills. Though this usually requires money, with some influencing, we managed to run these workshops at zero cost. In 2010 I met with Pamela from Tanzania Global Development Learning Centre and she told me about the LIW Leaders of Change video conferences. I attended every one of the series which included dialogue, learning and application of leadership tools. As a result of these programs, I have seen growth everyday in myself, my life and my club.
On another level, I have learnt a lot of lessons; how to deal with adversity, empowering women, leading yourself with purpose, vision and values, cross-cultural leadership, stakeholder management and creating a leadership architecture. Each of the video conference programs made me stronger and more mature in leading my organisation. My biggest learning is that in order to build my organisation and determine its leadership architecture, I must take responsibility as the builder to ensure that those who are going to ‘live’ in the organisation are safe and that they enjoy their life.
During the video conferences, we discussed the principles of using the 3Ws and the 3Cs to create the right condition for the success of others. These tools helped us to move from one step to another in January 2011 when we decided to open a student microfinance institution. These tools continue to help us as we continue to ask ourselves; ‘what do we want to achieve, where are we now and what next? Using this process led me to realise that in order to run the organization effectively, I need to further my development so I attended another videoconference course run by the Tokyo development learning center, called Microfinance training of trainer (MFTOT). At the end of this course, I am going to teach my fellow students the content and we hope to begin operating our microfinance institution through member contribution and further donations.
We have now expanded to other universities like Mwalimu Nyerere Memorial, Institute of Financial Management (IFM) and the University of Dar es Salaam. We hope to secure sponsorship in the future from people who are interested in building our community. Using the skills I learnt from LIW, I am determined to bring about these changes and larger changes in the future.
My experience of learning leadership tools has enabled me to realise that my options are limitless. There are not many students in Tanzania who interact with others in the global community and the reason for this, they say, is lack of money. I refuse to believe this and choose to ignore it as I think that if I have an idea I can manage.
As a result of the video conferences, I am taking the lead in changing people’s perspective towards poverty by helping them to see it as less of a barrier. I decided to join AISEC international as a Project Manager and this involved me taking an internship in Kenya as a Volunteer at Mathare Youth Association (MYSA). It was here that I had the opportunity to network with lots of students from China, Japan, Holland, Britain, U.S.A, Egypt, Slovenia, Nigeria, Kenya and Germany. When I returned home, many students began to question: ‘well if Deo from a poor family can manage to go abroad for an internship, why can’t I? So, nowadays lots of student go abroad for internships to places like India and other parts of the world far away from Tanzania.
My lesson is that by learning and applying the tools from the LIW leadership videoconferences, one person can influence and lead many others to achieve their goals.
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by Dan Hammond
Having recently returned to the UK it was hard to believe that I could feel any worse than I did watching the riots in London spread across the country. However, I hit my personal nadir while watching the well-respected late-night news programme, Newsnight. I found myself agreeing with former editor of The Sun, Kelvin MacKenzie. It does not get worse than that.
The riots reflect profound social problems that may have been gestating for decades. If Patrick Dunleavy, Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at the London School of Economics is to be believed, this represents a catastrophic disconnection between the government and the people that shows the vulnerability of the British state.
The fires were still burning when the blame game started.
The politicians predictably blame each other. The Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, Harriet Harman, laid the blame at the feet of the government and specifically, their tripling of student fees and the Educational Maintenance Allowance. The Conservative Party Chairman, Baroness Warsi, blamed Labour for allowing social decline to occur on their watch. The people of Britain themselves who were interviewed for radio and TV also blamed the government for their poor policing and ‘the cuts’.
The rioters themselves are silent. BBC reporter Ben Ando tweeted on Wednesday: “Hard 2 hear the voice of unheard youth. All the young ppl I spoke 2 during the nite in London refused 2 B interviewed.” The few people who spoke to camera, their faces covered with bandanas, had nothing to say and could not justify the actions of the crowds.
The blame in fact, lies with us, the majority.
We can no longer expect the government to set the moral tone and recent events show that we cannot count on the media to support them in doing so. The breakdown of hierarchical social structures, coupled with social networking, puts not just the tools but also the responsibility for leadership into the hands of the people.
The Daily Mail’s Max Hastings said the rioters “have no moral compass to make them susceptible to guilt or shame”. It is up to all of us – parents, teachers, business people, whoever we are - to ensure that the compass is set.
This will require a great deal more of people than simply staying out of trouble. In a microcosm of society as a whole, the riots were watched by large groups of ‘law abiding’ people filming the action with smartphones. On the streets, the majority inadvertently obstructed the police and encouraged the looting through their tacit acceptance of it. In everyday life, the same is true: passivity and acceptance are part of the problem.
The majority now needs to show that kernel of personal leadership: to choose what society they want to live in and to take some action to move towards it.
There are a few notable successes when the majority asserted its will that give us cause for optimism. A Twitter campaign using the hashtag #riotcleanup generated bigger crowds with armed with brooms to clean up the streets than those that had caused the damage the night before. In Dalston, a group of shopkeepers peacefully saw off a group of potential attackers. West Yorkshire almost avoided trouble completely through strong engagement with communities: since 2005, the county’s police force has followed a strategy “to improve awareness of the relevant agencies and the work being done to reduce crime and disorder, to increase participation by communities and to improve trust and confidence in the police.”
What Mr MacKenzie said on Newsnight that had me, and I am sure many others, surprising ourselves by nodding was that the rioters have no point to make “except that they want a 42 inch Samsung TV.” We must not dignify the riots by trying to give them a higher purpose than entitlement-fuelled violence and greed.
Many people in Britain feel rightly aggrieved about the ever-expanding difference between rich and poor even, at a stretch, about the shooting of a man in Tottenham at the weekend.
The question is: how are these problems going to be solved by robbing of a Malaysian student by people pretending to help him, by setting fire to blocks of flats inhabited by families or by ransacking the small businesses owned by people, who themselves are fighting to make a living?
The answer is that it won’t.
It is time for the people, not the just the government, to show some leadership, take control of their communities and to build the cohesion that is required not just to stop, but to prevent, the catastrophe that is still unfolding on our streets.
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A clear vision can give employees a single point of focus and a sense of direction. Don’t the people of Australia deserve the same? In an attempt to raise this debate above the polls, the personal and the pettiness, our CEO, Pia Lee, has written to the Editor of the AFR. The letter, published on page 60 today, is below.
For this important idea to flourish we are encouraging Australia’s leaders to join the debate. Take a few minutes to comment below - have your voice heard!
Dear Mr Jones,
Re: Forget the polls, where’s the vision for Australia?
Gillard has led the government to an election of victory of sorts , (AFR, “Gillard experiment unravels”, 20 June 2011). But as a recent 16-page report in The Economist said a strong, active leadership must present a vision, not to be popular and score well in polls but to pull people together to prepare for the long-term future of the nation. There has been no expression of a vision for Australia by its leaders, and especially its politicians.
Australia has everything to play for, and every advantage it could hope for, but it also has every chance of blowing its future prospects because we don’t have any vision for Australia. The report argues there is tremendous opportunity in Australia. We have a tolerant, optimistic society and an economy that can prosper beyond the resources sector, but it’s time now to work out what Australia really wants to be.
We exist in a bubble of petty, squabbling politics, and we’re in danger of losing sight of the bigger picture, if indeed we ever had one. A 49/51 split in political allegiances is a clear representation of the fact that we don’t have a leader who inspires the majority of people. The leaders of both major political parties have some of the qualities required but their rhetoric is neither inspirational nor aspirational.
Our aspiration must address building a sustainable future and maximising the talent of our youth. We have a golden opportunity to create a wonderful future, far beyond the next three-year political cycle. But what we get is a lot of fighting down in the weeds, which doesn’t generate the appropriate level of discourse, nor does it tease out convergence towards a longer term goal. It’s a gladiatorial approach to government which leaves us in a stalemate. The current debate about climate change and carbon taxes is not really about where we are today but where we’ll be in 50 years, and whether the nation will be able to sustain itself. Yet much of the commentary is mired in petty arguments about minor adjustments in the cost of living now.
Our wake-up call would ring loud and clear if we examined the cost of not having a vision — the cost of what would happen to this nation if we slip into mediocrity and we miss our opportunities. Current parliamentary debate is draining the energy out of us as a nation, and that’s dangerous. We as individuals, and together as a nation, must decide what legacy we want to leave for future generations.
This is not about government, but the nation of people, clearly articulating our desires. But it takes genuine leadership to enable that.
Yours sincerely,
Pia Lee
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