Hello shock-heads,

Hopefully you are not yet suffering from gout due to your Christmassy over-indulgence, and are instead primed and ready for some snippety business reading, eh.

So, having finished Leadership, we’re now onto a core element of how a progressive, social business *is*, which is open.

———

CHAPTER FIVE: OPENNESS

The world we now live in radically more open than that which is existed even five years ago. With the digitization of information, our society is only beginning to scratch the surface of what it is to live in a world where openness is easy and increasingly the default. Do you remember the first time you were sent an email you shouldn’t have seen? Who can forget poor Claire Swires and her email to her boyfriend (or was it fiancé?)! With the prevalence of Facebook, incidents like these happen every minute of every day across continents and hundreds of millions of active users. We are still coming to terms with the incredibly low-friction and massively high reach of sharing in the age of the Internet, even today.

Wikileaks releases top secret government records, journalists are able to hobble media empires and members of parliament through careful and persistent chasing down of digital information. Hacktivists Anonymous expose the names of visitors to paedophilia websites and hack Iranian government email systems. Videos of rogue employees misbehaving at work go around the globe in minutes, amongst billions of hours of video footage of kittens, double-rainbows and other oddities and extreme events that transcend themselves to become popular ‘memes’, ending up on t-shirts and in popular parlance.

And our young people are growing up in an age where they may have thousands of friends in social networks, a digital footprint of photos since they were babies that have been published in some form on the internet without their permission and are so creating new norms and new behaviours which have older generations shocked at the lack of privacy.

On the plus side, we can look up user-generated reviews of the restaurants we plan to eat in, the hotels we plan to stay in, of the tradespeople we plan on hiring to work in our homes. We can learn from other parents in Mumsnet, from other car-lovers in Pistonheads, from other gardeners and geneaologists and learners and whoever else we seek, in the ecosystem of niche communities that create a flow of open, helpful information that could never have existed before.

Hard-edged corporations too, even those with the glossiest of brands such as Proctor & Gamble and TK, have begun to share their most troubling and tricky business problems through crowdsourcing platforms and innovation marketplaces like Innocentive to collaborate and co-create solutions with networks of independent problem-solvers and customers alike.

Why is the progressive business more Open?

First and foremost, it makes sense for a progressive business to be more open because openness itself is irresistable. We cannot stop this trend, we cannot hold back this tide, so surely and inevitably we must instead celebrate and harness it.

That may be a little too based on faith alone. Businesses that are inherently more open cannot be driven simply because of some far-off understanding that one day the world will be more like this, can they? There must be some shorter-term reward, something more imminent, more pressing, more rewarding sooner. There must be jam today for openness to be a powerful part of this radical business movement.

In fact, by being more open a social business opens up tremendous new opportunities for itself, its people, its customers and wider stakeholders. These benefits include:

•    More powerful commitment and smarter problem solving internally thanks to greater openness around information and performance internally
•    Lower cost and higher impact marketing through the sharing of valuable information from the inside of the organisation to the wider world
•    Drastically lowering the cost of R&D through innovative and blended approaches to creation
•    Serendipity and unexpected consequences from outsiders making connections and creating possibilities where the organisation could not see or make them (not only in ‘innovation’ but in progress and activity generally)
•    To reduce costs and massively increase consumer loyalty and word of mouth buzz by capitalising on the trend towards greater participation between creator and consumer, including crowdsourcing, co-creation, crowd-funding and so on
•    And as a result of all of these, substantially reduced risks through being better prepared and more able to cope in an open world, which in turn creates a competitive advantage over slower, more reluctant competitors

—

Just a quick one today to set the scene. The next extract will outline 7 practical areas where the power of Open can be applied 🙂

How was that? Please provide feedback: via comments on this post, via email to wmcinnes@gmail.com, tweets @willmcinnes #cltrshck.

Next extract: 7 areas that open can be harnessed.

Thank you for your support.

Merry thingybob, Will

Yo Christmas fiends!

Here’s the third and final section that makes up this chapter on Leadership.

Please do share your feedback – instructions below.

Will.

————–

How do I go on this journey?

We can boil all of these elements down into seven practices which can help any leader learn and adapt.

1.    The Open 360 degree survey
2.    Experimentation
3.    Sharing personal failures
4.    Practicing being emotionally congruent
5.    Publishing a personal rewards log
6.    Using flow tools to share and listen to your team/organisation
7.    Building a progressive support network

Let’s rattle through the practicalities of each practice:

1. The Open 360 degree survey

This one is awesomely simple and awesomely effective. Take your role description, and put it into an online survey platform like Survey Monkey (or your internal equivalent). Set it up your survey to have a Quantitative element and a Qualititive element.

In the quantitative section, configure the survey so that questionees can grade your performance on each area of your role by giving a score (I use 1-5). Results in this section will give you a clear personal benchmark on how the respondents evaluate your performance.

In the qualitative section, ask wide open questions designed to give your valuable insights into your performance, your strengths and vitally, your weaknesses.

I use questions like:

1. What do I do that enables positive performance in the team?
2. What do I do that impairs or reduces performance in the company?
3. What should get more of my time and attention?
4. What 3 things – if sorted – will substantially improve the company’s performance?
5. How can I serve the company better in the next 6 months?
6. This is just in case there’s something extra you want to say or share. You don’t need to, it’s just for those compelled to say more. I know I’m confusing you now. Sorry.

Before sending this out, you need to talk (ideally face to face) with the people who will be responding. Tell them why you are doing it (clue: to learn!), tell them that you have set it up anonymously because it is about you learning, not about you addressing individual concerns or carrying out a veiled witch hunt, but if anyone feels compelled to they can say in the survey who they are. And promise that you will share the high-level results and key takeaways with them – give them a prize and satisfy their curiousity too!

Then send it out, and let the learning begin! You will learn so much about yourself. You may recognise many things, but you may also be shocked or unsettled by others. The important thing, as my colleague Lasy always says, is ‘to not swallow the feedback whole’. No one person is ‘right’ – these are all just many-faceted collages or perceptions of you at work. But overall, the aggregate will tell you some valuable things.

I recommend doing this once or twice a year. I’m doing mine right now after an 18 month gap due to a shift in annual review cycles at our company, and I am alive with and challenged by the brilliant, gritty, intelligent, on-the-button responses coming back. It’s like I’m awake again. Do it. Start today.

2. Experimentation

Particularly in the area of Styles – which we looked at above – you will need to experiment. You may find through your 360 survey that there are styles you have which create great performance in those around you, and others that you have which bring the team down – this is normal.

The goal of experimentation is to expand your range. Try some of the below for size and see how they feel to you and how your people react:

•    Relentlessly detail oriented
•    Laid back, bigger picture, dreamy and visionary
•    Energetic and bouncy ball of sunshine
•    Quiet and pensive professor
•    Shouty desk-slamming hardballer
•    All-conquering warrior-heroine
•    Cheerleading supporter-in-chief and championer of others – ‘you can do it!’

Again, where possible it may help to be open about this – to let your people know that you are learning and developing and part of that is about experimenting with styles that are different to your usual two or three default modes.

By the way, what are your default modes? And which styles would you like to add to the range?

3. Sharing personal failures

Simultaneously the easiest and the hardest practice to do. It really is this simple: tell your organisation about it when you screw up. You can start small if that helps – might help the people around you to adjust too! Using the Church of Fail practice outlined in the People chapter will also provide a powerful and shared platform to do this in.

You can also use some of the platforms that we look at in the Technology chapter to regularly ping out failures (and successes!) without too much pomp and ceremony. In doing so, you normalise failure. This is not seppuku (or it shouldn’t be) – it is about demonstrating that failure is normal, that it is a huge learning opportunity, and that if the organisation and individuals in it are not failing, then they cannot be doing their jobs because they are not learning and not taking risks. Keep that in mind: you’re doing the right thing and it will help the organisation.

4. Practicing being emotionally congruent

Another challenging practice that is easy to say and very difficult to do sometimes. The benefits of being more congruent more of the time are that you will create a more empathic culture, which will lead to less stress for all (including you) because people will not be bottling up their emotions, a more robust and resilient workforce thanks to healthier inter-relationships, and greater performance and productivity due to the flow of more-honest feedback around the team(s).

There’s lots more to this topic that we do not have time for and that is way out of my expertise, but an appropriately straightforward entry point to doing this that we have found very useful in our company is to preface statements with “I feel….”. It’s like a hack for the mind, and gets you straight into accessing some of the feelings related to the topic of discussions rather than the emotion coming out accidentally through the other 99% of your communication (i.e. your body language).

So you say:

“I feel disappointed”
“I feel amazed”
“I feel delighted”
“I feel incredibly annoyed”

5. Publishing a personal rewards log

The British journalist and activist George Monbiot recently began publishing his own Registry of Interests completely voluntarily. As he says himself, ‘I have opened this registry because I believe that journalists should live by the standards they demand of others, among which are accountability and transparency. One of the most important questions in public life, which is asked less often than it should be, is “who pays?”’.

Is there a way you can do the same? It may be impossible. It may in fact, for you, be a sackable offence! So it’s probably worth checking your contract, but if you are an entrepreneur or the CEO, you can make this happen.

6. Using ‘flow tools’ to share and listen to your team/organisation

In the Technology chapter we look at platforms including those we call ‘flow tools’. These are the same kind of tools that CEOs Cristobal Conde and John Chambers referred to earlier in this chapter – things like Yammer and blogging – which are less formal and much quicker than other traditional communication channels available to a leader or manager.

This is not technology for technology’s sake. You don’t have time for that. Using these tools is a powerful way to demonstrate to your team or organisation the need to and value in moving in realtime. The benefit is that by participating you not only make it OK for others and show the way, but also yourself gain access to a realtime pulse of what is happening inside the organisation.

7. Building a progressive support network

Finally, you cannot do this alone. You need a support network, and one made up of people that get all of this. As a leader, no matter at what level in an organisation, there are times when you inevitably feel isolated or need the support of those outside your team. If the only kind of support you have is the slash and burn or command-and-control management 20th century style, then it will be hard to see these challenging personal changes through.

Find people to support you. Put yourself in places where they may come out of the woodwork. Share these ideas so that others might come on the journey and so become part of your network too. Get involved with organisations like WorldBlu, The Employee Ownership Association (UK), National Center for Employee Ownership (USA), and others.

It will be much easier with the right kind of support.

Summary

In this chapter we have looked at the role of leadership in the 21st century business, and broken that role into two lists of seven: seven components of leadership in a social business and seven practices to help develop your 21st century leadership muscles.

This journey towards better leadership is absolutely a journey. It requires change – and change is incredibly demanding. It demands you to get out of your comfort zones, to experiment and necessarily fail, to do things that the people around you find counter-intuitive or even downright odd. And during this journey and especially at times of stress it will be normal to default to old ways.

But the prize is magical, poetic, so brilliant. To become a better leader. To be the change you want to see in the world. To help others see different and better ways of behaving in business.

If you can lead in this world, you will be providing a powerful service to more than just your organisation – you will genuinely be helping make the world we live in better. Because it is only through significant change, led by leaders at all levels, that we will solve the problems that need solving in the world.

Join us. Come on the journey, and bring your people, your organisation. Let’s burn yesterday and make a better future for all!

—-

Whaddayareckon? Please provide feedback: via comments on this post, via email to wmcinnes@gmail.com, tweets @willmcinnes #cltrshck.

Next extract: We move on from Leadership and start the chapter on Openness…

Thank you for your support.

With mince pies and mulled wine at the ready, Will

Hello leaders of the revolution,

Sorry this section is so big – but I wanted you to get it all in one hit.

Lemme know what you think, all of the feedback and edits continue to be HUGELY helpful,

Will

——

So what does progressive Leadership look like?

Here are 7 components of Leadership in a social business.

1.    Self
2.    Style
3.    Trust & Ethics
4.    Transparency
5.    Rewards
6.    Communication / Realtime
7.    Support

1. Leading yourself

Just as this book puts People before Leadership, we must also put leading yourself before leading others.

There is a reason why we have the appallingly bleak but recognisable models of management style such as the mushroom management (‘keep ‘em in the dark and feed ‘em crap’), the seagull (‘arrive in a flap, squawk around for a while, crap over everybody and then fly out’) and so on. It’s because we have all seen and experienced them! They do exist.

Will those approaches to leadership help organisations thrive in the 21st century? I really don’t believe so. So what allows this to happen in the first place? Two things: a lack of organisational awareness and a lack of personal awareness.

As transparency rises in society at large and inside businesses in particular, more and more feedback will exist openly about manager and leader performance. As the agenda to make boardrooms more transparent and accountable to shareholders and wider stakeholders, again the same forces will drive an openness and awareness previously unseen. The organisation will learn more quickly and more transparently what works and who performs, which naturally then must influence the individual leaders and managers. Transparency has a momentum of its own – and will permeate all of our organisations.

As a result, in the evolved organisation it will be very hard to lead others unless you are constantly learning and improving in how you manager yourself. (In fact, that is the case today – it’s just a lot of people get away with crap leadership because the world allows them to).

So knowing how to lead yourself means knowing the answers to the following questions:

•    What is my purpose in this work?
•    What motivates and demotivates me?
•    What are my values, and which ones am I honouring and which am I not honouring in this work?
•    What do I believe my strengths and weaknesses are, and how am I consciously working with them?
•    What do the people around me believe my strengths and weaknesses are?
•    How do I bounce back from challenges and re-energise when I’m low?
•    What are my blind spots, what don’t I know about myself?
•    What do I tend to resist or ignore?

Knowing these answers is an iterative and constant learning process. The answers may change over time, or become more (or less) clear. Knowing to keep reflecting on them, and practicing and evolving methods of operating from these answers is the key to self-leadership.

2. Style

Just as we are all different, so are our styles and approaches to engaging with people and therefore ‘leading’. There is no correct style for this kind of evolved business we look at throughout this book.

However, there are a few stylistic themes or tensions to be aware of. The first is the tension between being the all-solving hero and the convenor or curator of the group.

Heroic leadership

In the popular definition of leadership, the leader rides in on his white stallion, glistening in the midday sun, holding a spear aloft, squinting slightly with a look of hard resolve, his mouth (and this leader definitely is a ‘him’) is very human, his ears wise, his arms strong, his hands etc etc. You get the idea. Now that he has arrived, the problem will be solved. Be it through wisdom, strength, bravery or decisiveness, this leader will fix it and in record time! ‘Stand back, minions!!! I AM SOLVING THE PROBLEM!’.

Personally, I find this style very attractive, and am drawn to it regularly. One of my biggest flaws is that I want to be the hero, the all-fixing leader. If you have the same idea about how you should be as a leader, then you will find that the issue is that it crowds out the possibility for others to participate, for the group to function as a whole, and for others to step up and take responsibility. To unlock a team’s full potential through their participation and democratic practices, this style may not be best. To engage an organisation of smart, progressive people that have seen through the fallacies of old school leadership, this style may not be best.

Convening, curating, gardening

Perhaps a better style to adopt more of the time is that not of the hero, but of a convener or curator of the group – be that a whole organisation or a small team. The shift here is from being the individual fixer that the most complex issues get escalated to, to being the person that helps the group observe what is happening, creates the space for them to share in that information, helps them reach decisions and create accountability.

This is a more removed personal style of leadership than the heroic mode – this is leadership as facilitation, or if you prefer the metaphor, gardening. Adding something here, pruning a little there, encouraging this bit to come forward, digging deeper, patiently nurturing changes and growth.

Given that we are now managing groups of people whose behaviour and attitudes may be becoming more like volunteers, that we are managing people distributed physically (whether they are working from home or working across multiple geographies), and in an environment where the best talent have given up on the idea of a job for life and can pick or choose from the best jobs, our style may need to increasingly be one of influencing over directing. Or curating/gardening over heroic leadership.

The challenge for you and any of us is that when we are told ‘you’re in charge’ then assuming a directive style is easy. Or at least it is a known style – it’s what we’ve been trained in since school. I say jump, you say how high! Teacher, boss, captain, coach, General – all of these have had different styles, but the commonly held view is that leadership is about telling people what to do and making sure they do it. As emotionally intelligent types, we probably don’t couch it like that – but our inclinations, particularly under stress, will be directive. It is the established paradigm, so no need to explain that. What can be much harder is to resist that model and the indoctrination there, and to overcome your urges to just tell everyone what to do. The challenge, then, is to influence and persuade, to garden and curate, rather than just directing.

Managing volunteers and creating ‘followership’

As we have touched on, the people in our organisations will increasingly demand this adapted, evolved style of management. Gen Y in particular seek the dialogue, participation and feedback from their manager, and meaning in the work. Managing Gen Y is often characterised as managing volunteers: finding ways to excite, cajole and generate tangible results from a group of people who have lots to give but will not respond well to just being told what to do.

As John Chambers, the long-standing CEO of Cisco put it in an interview with TK: “I’m a command-and-control person. I like being able to say turn right, and we truly have 67,000 people turn right. But that’s the style of the past. Today’s world requires a different leadership style — more collaboration and teamwork, including using Web 2.0 technologies. If you had told me I’d be video blogging and blogging, I would have said, no way. And yet our 20-somethings in the company really pushed me to use that more.”

Interestingly, at Gore they talk about Leadership being ‘defined by followership’. That is, that the group nominates its leaders – they “vote with their feet” as CEO Terri Kelly puts it. You cannot be a leader at Gore without having people that are willing to follow you. What a powerful evolution from the norm.

So the question for you is how do you create followership in your work? What is it that you do that makes the people around you want to follow you? And what is that you do that makes people not want to follow you? Finally, if your people weren’t paid and were volunteers, how would you engage with them to create the best results possible?

Changing styles

But leadership is situational. There surely will be occasions where this more directive ‘heroic’ stance is the right one to take. And others where being the curator or gardener will generate the best results for and from the group. That is the judgement we all have to make continuously – which style and approach is right for this context.

3. Trust & Ethics

Underpinning much of the 21st century approach to leadership are Trust and Ethics.

The trust dimension is trusting in the people and the practices of the organisation to deliver the desired results. Trust is particularly important in order to accept some of the contemporary practices we talk about in this book: giving power to more of the people in the organisation; allowing new spokespeople to emerge; entrusting big decisions to groups rather than making decisions in ones and twos.

Without trust, there can be no empowerment of others – instead, a lack of trust creates a centre of gravity that leads to micromanagement across the whole organisation, which in turn creates slowness, bottlenecks, stifles creativity and so on.

So there must be trust flowing from the leaders in the organisation. There should be a default ‘I trust you’ position rather than a default ‘I don’t trust you’, though in many organisations it feels the other way around.

The final point to make on trust is that the most powerful thing a contemporary leader may do is to publicly fail inside (and outside) the organisation. By failing and communicating that failure, leaders make it OK to fail AND immediately create a different context for trust to exist in. It sets a new precedent and provides at least the promise that others in the organisation can fail too. This is powerful fuel for the creation of trust, because what it does is not only says but actually demonstrates that it is OK to be vulnerable in this organisation. Leaders fail first. In fact, that’s a nice slogan: Leaders fail first.

The ethics dimension is about behaving with integrity – and particularly about doing only what you would be happy the whole world knowing about if that email or decision was shared with the whole world. I’m sure there are great books on this whole topic – do we really need to describe ethics? You might think so, looking at some business people’s behaviour. But really, it is just about doing the right thing, all of the time. (Simple!).

4. Transparency  

Leading in a more transparent world demands different things from us. We can break these into two sub-categories: Informational Transparency and Emotional Transparency.

Leaders have always dealt with a higher degree of transparency than everyone else in an organisation, to the extent that they have always been highly visible, are subject to higher expectations than normal and are typically surrounded by and at the centre of a variety of competing influences and stakeholders. Clearly, this varies hugely from being a manager in a medium-sized organisation to being the CEO of a Fortune 500 multi-national or a leading politician.

This transparency has manifested itself in a variety of ways: from gossipy tabloid stories about personal lives to the fact that executives in publicly listed companies have their remuneration published openly to the whole world.

However, as we continue to discuss in this book, this transparency around information – not only rewards, but also performance, feedback and increasingly other more subtle data (think MPs expenses, or carbon footprints, or travel patterns) – is going to increase.

So as a leader, you must prepare for and cope with more and more information about you and your various impacts being open and available to others.

The emotional transparency of the coming age of leadership is perhaps the more demanding shift.

If the organisations that we lead in are becoming more conscious, more authentic and more open to dialogue and listening then we leaders must necessarily do so too. It will not be possible for the people in an organisation to take their risks and become more vulnerable and open at work if the leaders do not lead the way.

Emotional transparency requires leaders to be congruent: to actually act in accordance with their feelings no matter how unexpected that is. Can you image you or other leaders in your organisation saying any of the following to a group of your people:

•    “I’m scared about this and I don’t know what the answer is”
•    “I’m feeling sad”
•    “I need help, I’m lost right now”
•    “I feel like going home and hiding”
•    “When I look at this, I’m ashamed to be part of this organisation”
•    “I feel guilty because I haven’t done my job well in this area”

Yes, these are deliberately provocative. But what would it be like if people were more emotionally transparent at work more of the time, starting with the leaders? What is your biggest fear here, when you read through that list of proposed ‘acceptable things for a leader to say’? Are there benefits to this approach? What are the downsides and risks? And how emotionally transparent or ‘congruent’ are you?

5. Rewards

The rewards of leaders in organisations, particularly CEOs and the board, have been at the forefront of media and activist attention for a long time. Hopefully that pressure and attention will continue – it feels like their are some ugly wrinkles developed in the latter part of the 20th century that still need ironing out. Think about golden parachutes for failing CEOs, the lack of a relationship between value-creating performance and rewards more generally, the lack of transparency and rigour in setting of top management rewards including weak or non-existent remuneration committees, and so on. This, however, feels like it is in hand – the world knows about it and expectations and behaviours are gradually changing.

However there are two additional concerns that fit into the scope of this book: the ratio of top earners rewards to the rest of the workforce’s; and a shift towards recognising the value of non-financial rewards.

In a social business, the ingredients of a more empowered organisation and greater transparency result in a clearer focus on the inter-relationship between peoples rewards in the organisation. And in recent times, as the Occupy movement has reminded all of us, the rich have been growing richer and the poor poorer. The gap between the haves and the have-nots has actually grown. An awareness of this has led many progressive businesses to put in place formal ratios or to continually observe the ratio between the earnings of the lowest paid person in the organisation and the highest paid person in the organisation.

At the incredibly admired John Lewis Partnership in the UK, TK

TK Other research on ratios.

Secondly, to the topic of non-financial rewards. Right now it feels like most leaders only do it for the money, but there is rapidly growing body of interest around social enterprise, social business (in the Mohammad Yunus TK definition) and entrepreneurs and leaders doing what they do for a much higher purpose than the accumulation of wealth.

TK Khan quote

Having looked at motivations in the People chapter, we have already reminded ourselves that motivation at work is much broader and richer than the pay packet alone. What would it be like if we as leaders and the other leaders around us were all nourished by and talked about job satisfaction and the rewards we really enjoyed in a more open and nuanced way?

6. Communication / Realtime

In this networked world, both the demands on and opportunities for leaders around communication are increased. We are living in a world where the time between something of importance happening and the world knowing about it are increasingly the same – the buffer between the two are less and less.

There is less time to prepare the right message. There is less belief and trust in leaders generally, and so in the message itself there is an increased demand for authenticity and honesty. There is an always-on-ness to the world’s media, to the workforce with their BlackBerries and internal collaboration platforms (see Technology) so communication cannot be a one-off or occasional piece of work, but more a constant flow.

Consider how Cristóbal Conde, president and C.E.O. of SunGard described it in an interview with the New York Times: “I try to see a client every day, and because of my title I get to see more senior people. And so then they’ll tell me things — you know, what are their biggest problems, what are their biggest issues, what are their biggest bets. All this information is incredibly valuable. Now, what could I do with that? I’m not going to send that out in a broadcast voice mail to every employee. I’m not even going to write a long e-mail about it to every employee, because even that is almost too formal. But I can write five lines on Yammer [which this book looks at in the Technology chapter], which is about all it takes. A free flow of information is an incredible tool because I can tell people, “Look, this is one of our largest clients, and the C.E.O. just told me his top three priorities are X, Y and Z. Think about them.”

The combination of these platforms, this growing culture and these expectations is a huge opportunity for all leaders as an outbound communication channel. But as much of the value for leaders can be in the inbound or dialogue aspect too.

There is a growing application of the concept of ‘people as sensors’. In a networked world, there are exponentially more opportunities to harness relevant, timely information, and for people and attention to gravitate towards which senor has the best available information at any given moment. As Brian Humphrey who was then working with the Los Angeles Fire Dept put it in a tweet: “Every soldier is a sensor. Every citizen is a contributor. Every resident is a reporter of #crisisdata”.

By using the communication landscape to their advantage, contemporary leaders can harness this huge opportunity to plug in to their organisational sensors, and both flow out and flow in realtime information to and from the rest of the business.

7. Support

The last aspect to leadership in a progressive 21st century business is putting in place the appropriate support for yourself and other leaders going on this journey.

The world is pretty much geared up to support the 20th century leader. The expectation is you’re a hero and an all-conquering expert, that you’re doing it for the money alone, that you do not and will not talk about your feelings (and may not even have them), that you will issue command-and-control dictats from your ivory tower, that you only want to hear good news, that you resist and dislike technology and – probably also – that you’re a man or behave like a man and are old and white.

If you are not these, life can be hard. The conventional support networks and the wisdom and advice available through conventional resources may not help you. You may find yourself feeling isolated and stupid – asking yourself ‘why am I doing this differently to everyone else – maybe I should stop trying to do things the long, hard, stupid way and just fall in line with everyone else’.

So to give yourself the best chances of success you must find or create a support network of people that do get this new world, that do belong to the community of changers striving for something different, who have walked the same alternative paths. For me personally, the single best thing I did on this front was go to WorldBlu Live 2011 in San Francisco and met over the course of 3 days a whole community of people motivated by the same things and with many of the same values. It was like coming home! It gave me faith that I wasn’t (that) stupid and certainly didn’t need to feel like it was only my organisation on that path.

Fortunately the world is changing. Our numbers grow! And there are radical shifts in the articles published by the blue-blooded business press (like Harvard Business Review), in the newly-celebrated CEO stars (like Vineet Nayar of HCL) and in the professional support available from accountants, lawyers and associations (like WorldBlu or The Employee Ownership Association).

By addressing and working on these 7 dimensions of leadership in the 21st century you will strengthen yourself over time. As you work at it, you will evolve in exciting ways. You will provide a subtle, powerful role model for those around you. You will become the future you want to see in the world.

—

How was that? Please provide feedback: via comments on this post, via email to wmcinnes@gmail.com, tweets @willmcinnes #cltrshck.

Next extract: ‘How do I go on this journey?’, with seven handy (but not easy!) practical next steps.

Thank you for your support.

Bon voyage, Will

Hello Shockers,

Quite excited about this next chapter, as leadership is much talked about and is certainly a vital part of the mix if we are to make big shifts in how businesses behave.

Please do keep the seriously useful feedback flowing and also spread the word.

Thanks – Will

—–

CHAPTER FOUR: LEADERSHIP

It is quite deliberate that the order of this book puts People before Leadership. In fact, it reflects both a switch from the contemporary sequence of leadership first, people second and a return to Julius Caeser’s long-standing maxim that ‘every soldier has a right to competent command’.

As General Patton put it: “There has been a great deal of talk about loyalty from bottom to top. Loyalty from the top to the bottom is much more important and also much less prevalent. It is this loyalty from the top to the bottom which binds juniors to their seniors with the strength of steel.”

But what defines a ‘competent command’ in today’s environment? And are we at risk of reverting to military models and top down thinking here? Having understood the challenges and opportunities around People, maybe it is clear that this contemporary organisation demands a substantially different type of leadership. This is an approach that will be hugely welcomed by the world, though it will take us all time to adjust and wean ourselves off some of the myths and folklore around leadership.

And is the contemporary leader actually new or is this just a rehashing of principles which have existed for millenia, simply dressed in the emperor’s new clothes? A little ‘realtime’ here, a little ‘networks’ there, but effectively the same as it ever was? I believe it probably is. This probably is a return to the fundamentals of human leadership, but perhaps a necessary recalibration and a shift in emphasis from where we got to in the late 20th century.

The challenge of leadership in the 21st century

The leader in a social business is walking a path that many of her peers before her will not have done. She may not be able to get advice as easily, or support from her stakeholders and investors as immediately.

One important note of caution: there is a great deal of folklore around leadership. Many, many books are published every year on leadership, building on an accepted canon of well-established management wisdom. I do not wish to add to that, and particularly not to the idea that leadership is beyond the many, the preserve of a few ‘special’ destined to become leaders.

So do not be intimidated by what follows.

You already lead, so you must already be a leader – at different times, and in different domains of your work and your life. Nobody does all of this well all of the time. Instead, these are ideas and possibilities about how you can continue to develop as a leader; and one who can help lead in a different world, changing their organisation, their team and themselves. That is all!

Leadership must change

If the behaviour of people in organisations is substantially shifting, then clearly so must leadership shift too. Why should we invest in this shift? Clearly there are the benefits of an unleashed and engaged workforce that were outlined in the previous chapter.

On top of this is a higher order of benefit. Can you imagine a world where leadership had transcended and evolved from the good and bad bits we found in the 20th century? Can you imagine the problems that will be solved in the world through the work of a new generation of leaders, working with purpose and vigour? Can you imagine what it will be like to be part of organisations alive with this kind of leadership? That is the prize, that is the why!

If we can gather and energise a whole generation of progressive leaders, what will the benefits be?

•    More organisations working towards Purposes of Significance, leading to a better world for all (seriously!)
•    Healthier, happier and more meaningful work lives for millions, if not billions
•    Fairer rewards for all participants in business, leading to a more resilient business community and a healthier society
•    Higher standards and demands for leaders in all walks of lives, and a new set of role models to help inspire and lead the way
•    Greater self-leadership in all

———–

How was that? Please provide feedback: via comments on this post, via email to wmcinnes@gmail.com, tweets @willmcinnes #cltrshck.

Next extract: The 7 components of Leadership in a social business – nice and practical (hopefully!).

Thank you for your support through the wind and the rain. Off home for roast lamb now…nice one Mrs.

Tallyho, Will

Dear CultureShocker,

Kapow! Here’s the final part of Chapter 3 on People.

The aim of this chapter is to provide practical next steps for you and me, the prospective company-changers.

How well does it do that? Lemme know.

Go!

—-

So how can you evolve how your organisation interacts with its people?

Here are the four powerful practices suggested:

1. Creating strong values & principles
2. Celebrating personality
3. Enabling people development
4. Establishing freedom and trust

1. Creating strong values & principles

Having spent time studying companies that absolutely nail the People bit, it is clear that one characteristic that they all share is the clarity and belief around their values.

At the WorldBlu Live conference speaker after speaker from visionary companies outlined their crystal clear values, and what really comes through from organisations like Zappos and Gore are the values that are woven throughout the hold organisation: from ‘Create Fun and a little Weirdness’ at Zappos to ‘The ability to make one’s own commitments and keep them’ at Gore.

So what are the values that you want to imbue your team with? Or, better, what are the values that you together are willing to stand by, to hold one another account against and to really strive for in your work?

2. Celebrating personality

In the 20th century, being professional and being yourself were seen as different things. Being professional was not only about delivering against promised made and to a high quality, about being trustworthy. It was about being neutral (like the colour of old school beige desktop PCs!) and in doing so acting within some powerful puritan norms – a little polite laughter, no rough language (at least not at first) and definitely no weirdness. As for emotions, a professional didn’t show ‘em.

In the 21st century, when the alternatives to the job are a freelance careers, where the alternative to working in an office is working from home or in a co-working space, and in a century where people are realising that there’s more to life than work alone, these notions of professionalism are shifting. Hurrah for a return to personality!

What is clear about these progressive businesses that celebrate people is that they welcome and value personality, authenticity, emotion and humour.

This poses new challenges for us all. At our company we know it usually takes a new team member 6 months to really become themselves at work. And it poses challenges to you as a leader, whichever level you lead from. You must lead. You must be authentic, you must celebrate your own real self at work, and make it OK for others to do the same. Easy to say, difficult to do: particularly on bad days.

Sow can you start doing this tomorrow? How can you be more ‘you’ and encourage others to do the same? At scale, how will you institutionalise that? What practices will help it happen?

3. Enabling people development

In this chapter there is an underlying constant which is about enabling people to improve themselves. It is not enforced, and it is not only the slightly twee ‘personal development’ that you can find on your bookshop’s shelves under the title of PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT, but it is an ethos of allowing and enabling the organisation’s people to develop themselves both in their professional and especially in their personal aspects.

4. Establishing freedom & trust!

Perhaps the biggest ideas that 21st century organisations embrace are those of Freedom and Trust. BOOM. Big words, and kinda the diametrical opposite to the established cultures of most businesses. But isn’t that what we demand and expect today?

In Dan Pink’s fantastic TED talk he talks about the three aspects of motivating people as being Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose. We’ve looked at how the three businesses in this chapter each extend significant trust and freedom to their people, and reap the rewards.

I guess the question for you is what can you do with freedom and trust in your organisation? Because they feel like the backdrop for and the shortcuts to this whole chapter. It’s what it all boils down to. Are you going to actually let them – the people – deliver great things?  And who – in your organisation – might not, and why not?

Acknowledging challenges

Before finishing this chapter, it would be remiss not to look some of the challenges around people in the contemporary organisation. There are three that we look at here:

Competition

Competition between peers does not necessarily lessen in a more enlightened business culture. In fact, my current belief is that it may heighten.

By opening things up, with greater transparency, less official hierarchy and a culture and practices which create much more feedback inside the organisation, it is possible that a quite ferocious meritocracy is created. ‘Great’, you may cheer! That may be so, but I believe I am working in such a place and dealing with some of the consequences of an environment where there is both an incredibly strong team ethic AND very high competition between peers. That is not easy. And for the team members themselves it can feel very stressful (and very motivating) to be part of an organisation where there is a relentless drive towards performance, with few places to hide.

Hearing Gore CEO Terri Kelly talking about how every Gore Associate (herself included) is ranked by their peers I cannot help thinking that one of the consequences of some of these ‘better’ people practices may be a tilt towards at times unhealthy competition which will need monitoring and counter-balancing.

This is worth looking out for, particularly when team members may be going through a life event or a phase in their life or career that does not naturally thrive in this environment.

Drowning in freedom and honesty

A related issue can be that in an organisation where there is greater fluidity, less definition around roles, less directive people management and a greater emphasis on feedback is that team members can end up becoming overwhelmed.

When there is little structure to hang on to, many opportunities to engage with and a high performing team to fit into, a new employee may end up drowning and become overwhelmed by the lack of structure and huge possibilities that exist.

Similarly, a new team member at NixonMcInnes described the environment as ‘like having the honesty volume turned up’. That can be tough to deal with at first if a person has become accustomed to a less honest, less authentic approach to communication and management information in a different organisation.

Some people want a 20th century job

Finally, perhaps some people will want a 20th century job. Maybe they do want to just do what they came in to do, to do the same thing for years, to know little about how they or the organisation is doing, and maybe that is OK. These kind of people – and they may even be you – do not want to sit around in a circle talking about their feelings, they do not want some kind of airy-fairy coaching from a ‘sponsor’ – they want a boss, and they want to be told what to do.

Recognising this fact is crucial. When the fit is not right, try to spot it early on – the signs will usually be there. In an environment where the individual cannot thrive, they cannot be really happy and they will sap your efforts. Be clear, and be sure to follow through swiftly – not everybody is ready for your enlightened ways! It’s better for them and for you if you recognise and act on that.

Summary

People are the lifeblood of any business. In this chapter, we have spent some time thinking about what it is that contemporary organisations do with their people to create real advantages. And there are many more practices available than those we have been able to cover in this book.

Fundamentally, what it boils down to is beliefs. If you believe that people are the first, the last, and the everything, then you can write your own chapter for your organisation, your business, your team.

People say that we are in a talent war, and that in business the best team wins. If that is true, then taking these next steps is the difference between whooping ass and being left behind. I know where I’d rather be.

—

How was that? Please provide feedback: via comments on this post, via email to wmcinnes@gmail.com, tweets @willmcinnes #cltrshck (no vowels, we’re crazy like that).

The next chapter is on Leadership – often written about, often talked about, yet still so much to do… 🙂

Thank you for your support. Have a nice day. Do come again.

Here’s the section in the People chapter where I’m showing the reader some of the companies out there doing progressive, brilliant or odd things to help their people give their best at work.

It’s a section that excites me, so I really want it to be excellent – please give me feedback wherever you feel necessary.

Also, I’ve been reluctant to talk about NixonMcInnes – this book isn’t about promoting us as we are a tiny consultancy and as flawed as we are brilliant. But in the end it felt like the People practices we have just fitted into Culture Shock and obviously how we do things is material I know so well, so I whacked NM in. Let me know if you think that’s a bad thing or risks credibility somehow please.

Thank you.

—

So which businesses really celebrate and engage their people?

Zappos

Zappos should be a boring business, shouldn’t it? To massively oversimplify, Zappos is a website, a warehouse full of shoes, and a bunch of people answering telephone calls and enquiries. Dull. Like that beige colour that old school PCs were (or still are?). Yet Zappos may be the most colourful business making waves at the moment – thanks to its unique culture Zappos is all the colours of the rainbow, it’s a graffitti-spraypainted dancing unicorn with a beating heart and crazy eyes.

Zappos is essentially a business built around the principle that if you create the environment, hire the right people and so develop the right culture, you will thrive. And Zappos is delivering against that belief with a thriving business: widely recognised to the be the largest online shoe retailer in the US, it was bought by Amazon in 2009 for about $1.2bn, and is believed to turn over in excess of $1bn per annum.

For the whole story, you must read CEO Tony Hsieh’s book ‘Delivering Happiness. But looking at just a few of Zappos practices should help inspire us all.

Family

Zappos staff use the word family lots. Not just when they speak or write, but publicly on their website and in company materials and their annual Culture Book. The great thing is if you say you’re a family, then you have to live up to it. This is not ‘employee relations’ – the whole thing is powerfully reframed in a way that leads to an entirely different approach at Zappos.

Create Fun and a little Weirdness

Zappos has 10 Zappos Family Core Values. Core value number 3 is ‘Create Fun And A Little Weirdness’. I just love that! And this value clearly permeates everything that Zappos do: from their All-Hands meetings, to their office decor, through to their hiring processes. What could be further from the conventional brainwashing about how people should behave at work? We don’t want you to be ‘professional’, we want you to be WEIRD.

Reply-All hat

One of my favourite Zappos people initiatives in their Reply-All hat. You know that moment when, in a medium or large-sized organisation, you or someone you know unwittingly replies to ALL? Ouchy! At Zappos to celebrate that moment they have a Reply-All hat. Not just any hat, this is a gaudy, ridiculous plumed showgirl hat, and if you are unlucky enough to have Replied-All, you wear the hat and have to parade around the Zappos offices while being shouted and whistled at. You also are at risk of having photos taken, or even a video made! It is as brilliant and mad and awful as it sounds, and I for one wish our team was big enough to warrant one!

Zappos tours and Happiness Delivered

The Zappos culture is so potent that they are increasingly sought out to spread their ideas. They offer free, daily tours (and will even pick you up in a minibus from your Vegas hotel), and their inspiring CEO Tony Hseih has written a book called Happiness Delivered. They also now have a part of the business called Zappos Insights to provide training and consultancy services to other businesses.

Can you see how engaging the Zappos culture is to people like you and me? And also how straightforward it is – completely unlike traditional business, but completely human and immediately recognisable as fun AND smart ways to go about things? A great company.

W. L. Gore & Associates

W. L. Gore & Associates is quite a mysterious business. The makers of many innovative textiles including Gore Tex, the well known breathable waterproof fabric, the company has an extremely interesting approach to people and structure.

What must be said is that for Gore, these practices are not new. Though the ranting and railing in this book is against the staid, stupid mainstream management practices of the 20th century, Gore is a 20th century success – Bill Gore founded the business with his wife Vieve in the 1958! However, if we are able to spread them, then it will not matter how old they are for in most organisations these concepts, practices and the overall culture they create will be utterly new and very different.

Team size and lattice structure

One of the few things that is reasonably well known in the business community about Gore, which remains to this day a privately-held enterprise, is its unconventional practices around organisational structure which fifty years ago must have seemed genuinely bonkers, but today – though still unconventional – can seem much smarter.

Gore’s structure is made up of two particularly interesting components: their team size and their lattice structure.

Team-wise, the business operates very small plants – typically a maximum of 250 people in each. So for every 250 people the organisation has to provide a different building and replicate the same core structure that a single plant requires. We can safely assume that there are inefficiencies here in staff, in building costs, in equipment. Everything is replicated rather than lumped into the same ever-growing mega-plant! But in the words of their current CEO Terri Kelly, an engineer by training and only the fourth in Gore’s history, “we divide so we can multiply”. How does that work? The Gore organisation believes that it can unlock much greater innovation and engagement from its people by keeping smallness. In the mythology of Gore it is said that this was driven by the founder Bill Gore walking around a plant one day in 1965 and realising he didn’t recognise everybody any more. From then on he put in place a principle that no more than 200 people would work in the same building. The company’s growth record, enduring innovation and constant presence on ‘Best company to work for’ lists suggests they might have a point.

Even more radical is Gore’s lattice structure which shares more in common with networked organisations like Al-Qaeda, Anonymous and the Occupy movement than the traditional org chart.

In Gore, there are ‘few’ org charts and ‘no chains of command, nor predetermined channels of communication’. So how does work get done? How do people organise themselves? Put simply, how do they manage a multi-billion dollar global business without such structure?! As they say on their own website:

“Associates (not employees) are hired for general work areas. With the guidance of their sponsors (not bosses) and a growing understanding of opportunities and team objectives, associates commit to projects that match their skills. All of this takes place in an environment that combines freedom with cooperation and autonomy with synergy.” As CEO Terri Kelly put it in an enjoyable talk at MIT (link provided in the Further Reading section for your viewing delight at another time – or even NOW!)  “Associates vote with their feet”.

Utterly brilliant.

What does the 20th century manager say to this? ‘Pah! Must be like herding cats’ and reaches for her latte with a patronising disdain. Yet when so many organisations complain about their silos and their lack of collaboration, surely a little more fluidity might help? Isn’t this how the future looks? People, us, gravitating around the initiatives and projects we feel passionately need to happen?

Coaching

A quick note reinforcing the earlier point about coaching: Gore is small on Management with a capital M, and BIG on coaching. As we’ll look at later, Leadership in Gore is defined by ‘followership’ – if you don’t have an organisation mapped out beneath you, what do you have as a manager or leader? Influence. And every Associate (not employee, as they are keen to point out) at Gore has a Sponsor – that is, someone responsible for their success and usually someone outside of their day-to-day project work. This creates a big coaching culture.

‘Culture eats Bureaucracy for lunch‘

In her MIT talk current CEO Terri Kelly spoke throughout about the tension between the Gore culture and bureaucracy, and how their goal as the environment has become more complex is to keep driving out bureaucracy. Kelly also made the point that “with the right people, a few clear objectives and guidelines you don’t need a lot of rules”.

There is the famous quote from management theorist Peter Drucker that ‘culture eats strategy for breakfast’. I propose a second: ‘culture eats bureaucracy for lunch!’.

NixonMcInnes

NixonMcInnes is the company that I am part of and helped found with my co-founder Tom Nixon. Like any organisation, we have very many flaws and we do lots of things very badly. I do not include us to present us as the finished article in any way – we are a small, focused consultancy just trying to find our own way in the world. However, if there is an area I do feel we are relatively good at, and that is the People bit, so with this caveat made, it felt relevant to share two of our less usual people practices.

Church of Fail

At a company away weekend in a farmhouse we’d hired in the Welsh hills, we split into groups to work on the company culture by developing initiatives that would not only benefit our company but also our clients’.

One group designed a little process to work on the idea of celebrating failure in NixonMcInnes. They developed the seed of their idea based on a stagecraft exercise that Matt Matheson in our team had experienced in his improv work to teach novice improvisers to accept applause and become better accustomed with feeling uncomfortable.

Out of this was born Church of Fail: a bizarre but powerful cultural ritual in our little company. Once a month, the boardroom at NixonMcInnes is converted into a non-denominational (!) church – with the chairs laid out in rows, all facing to the front where a sign of paper marks the ‘comfort zone’. On the wall behind the congregated audience is a poster with three instructions on it:

1.    How did you fail?
2.    What did you do about it?
3.    What did you learn?

One by one volunteers – and the whole thing is a little whacky so it definitely has to be voluntary – members of the group walk to the front, stand in the comfort zone and, looking at their peers, describe a time that they failed in the last period. Having described their failure, the congregation begin to cheer and clap loudly. It is both incredibly uncomfortable to be stood there at that moment and enormously amusing seeing your colleagues whooping and clapping uproariously at the best (i.e. Worst) failure you could remember. As much as the confessor wants the moment to end, so the applause continues way beyond the point of comfort. And then, when the group sense enough has been done, it tails off, and so their turn is done and it is on to the next volunteer.

What we hope this does is change our own perceptions of failure over time. It is hugely cathartic to socialize your biggest fail of the previous month in front of your peers, and I imagine it is good for our people to see all of us – regardless of our supposed importance or length of service – stand up and discuss our failures.

Communication Workshops

Another practice that we ran for about eighteen months was a rolling programme of Communication Workshops. Conceived and delivered by our excellent Finance Director Lasy Lawless who is also a trained therapist and our wise Chairman (now Non-exec) Pete Burden who has been working with and prototyping progressive business practices his whole career, these sessions were fairly simple in structure.

The group, again made up of volunteers, sat around in a circle in a private meeting space (for us, the boardroom). There would usually be 10 or so people, and Lasy or Pete as the facilitator would introduce  the basic ground rules and the ‘Three Core Conditions’ that we wished to practice:

•    Respect – for the other person as a human being, regardless of their behaviour
•    Empathy – experiencing the world as another experiences it (putting oneself in the other’s shoes)
•    Congruence – being appropriately open and transparent about one’s own thoughts and feelings.

With these principles in mind we would practice this ‘conscious communication’, talking as a group about awkward incidents and issues that had come up and how they had made us feel. If it sounds a bit like group therapy, it probably was but I really cannot say as I’ve never done therapy! (Not yet, anyway).

Over time, the groups fizzled out – I think this was for two reasons: that we all found them a bit weird in a work context and that overlap never felt entirely comfortable; and that they had to some extent served their purpose – everyone in the team has got better at communicating honestly and authentically. For some people, that is just little changes in how they speak and how they listen, and for others it has helped make big improvements in their communication with people at work, particularly under stress. For my part, I learnt lots and am glad we did it. I just need to remember to apply it!

Measuring happiness

Clearly one of the challenges for big business is to measure its contribution in more than financial terms alone. However, even for more progressive businesses there is a prickly challenge – especially when there is greater transparency around the company’s finances – which is that the more open the financial data, the more powerful and influential that data can become.

Imagine a company where every Monday morning every single team member is told exactly how much profit/loss the company stands to make that month and that year, how much cash is in the bank and therefore exactly what shape the company’s finances are in and what that means to each individual. For better or worse, that is what happens at NixonMcInnes every Monday.

It can be a horrible way to start a week. In our own efforts to balance the financial aspects of the business with other equally vital considerations we measure happiness every day.

Quite simply we have three buckets – one full of tennis balls, and then two buckets which start every new day empty: a happy bucket and an unhappy bucket. These are by the door to our office, and on the way out at the end of each day you pick up a ball and toss it in the bucket that best reflects your day. Simple.

On the door is a sheet, and we fill out the number of happy and unhappy balls every day as the week progresses. Anyone can count them up, it’s a pretty straightforward system. And then our office manager adds them to a spreadsheet. We now have happiness data going back to June 2010.

We believe this matters. We believe that in creating a currency around our mood, we put a marker down – it shows that it matters, it gives us a point of reference for discussions in teams and as individuals. It also provides a powerful self-awareness check: ‘why am I putting another ball in the unhappy bucket? What’s going on? What do I need to do or who do I need to talk to?’.

And for me as a manager it’s like a spring in the stride or a kick in the gut the minute I walk in the next morning. As I write this on a Sunday morning I see that on Friday we had 30% of balls in the unhappy bucket – that is not normal for a Friday, and I’m now conscious of it. I have realtime feedback about my team’s wellbeing, their mood – and I cannot hide from it. It is ambiently transmitted, for better or worse. It forces me and all of us to act (or to consciously choose not to).

—

How was that? Please provide feedback: via comments on this post, via email to wmcinnes@gmail.com, tweets @willmcinnes #cltrshck (no vowels, we’re crazy like that).

The next extract breaks down 5 or so practices that you – the reader – can implement in your organisation; finishing with a really practical ‘how to’.

Thank you!