Category: Authentic Leadership

What is your leadership theme?

Just over a year ago on 10 August 2009 I wrote my first blog Who is doing your dirty work. I had started contracting to AUT University a few months earlier to establish the Centre for Innovative Leadership and started the blog partly, at least, to gain a web presence for the Centre.

I came to enjoy blogging and combined some of my other interests – movies, photography and general commentary – into other related blogs.

But the leadership blog remains my core. I’ve learnt a lot about the technical aspects of putting stuff on the web including photographs, linking, doing automatic feeds into twitter and facebook and recently, video – which I believe will be the key to communication on the web going forward.  These words will become more limited.

Speaking of words, I’ve created an electronic book with my 56 (including this one) blogs and done some reflection about the themes within my work (sorry about all the headshots of me – it’s to do with the linking I did on LinkedIn and I can’t remove them … yet!). Writing about leadership has both consciously and unconsciously been a reflection of my own journey in the last year and the other nearly 47 years before that.

Which brings me to themes.

My conscious themes are about authenticity, vulnerability, having fun, photography, narcissism, anti-dogma, transparency. But what else comes through? What are my unconscious themes?

Looking through the blog book and doing some searches I also found a story embedded about my sons, my father and mother, holidays, Space, Evolution, Officials hiding, values, fake personal branding, religion, tolerance, running, forests, driving and disclosure.

No surprise then that that’s been my life this past year: my authentic leadership themes.

What are yours?

Stephen

Defensive Force

Watching Seinfeld tonight Elaine was bemoaning the fact that she wasn’t seen as responsible enough to babysit a friend’s child. “Who wants to be responsible” responded Jerry Seinfeld “Whenever anything goes wrong the first thing they ask is who is responsible”.

It’s a question that has exercised the mind of the auditor general:  why did four Defence Force officers falsely claim allowances while on secondment to the UN. Listening to interviews on the radio on the way to my run this evening I heard “they’ve been disciplined”, “won’t happen again” and “they only claimed what they were entitled to remember” several times. What I didn’t hear was mention of culture and values that the auditor general had identified as underlying causes of the falsities.

At times of crisis, the leaders of any organisation will need to adopt a command and control leadership style, where directions are given and acted upon without question. The Defence business while on operations surely fits into this camp. But what about the rest of the time? Can the culture switch as required or is there just one culture?

We get glimpses of  an organisation’s culture through stuff that pops out externally – staff retention, how problems are dealt with, choices people make about where to work and statements from leaders are the sorts of things where we can pick up clues. So when its said that the culture and values caused the environment that gave rise to the false claims what culture are we talking about? Is this the culture that requires obedience to superior officers in all circumstances, even when illegal?

On the one hand you need to have officers able to unquestioningly respond to orders. But outside of operations you need to have a culture that allows questioning, coaching and responsibility for ones own actions. Sounds like a big challenge.

So when I listened to the radio tonight I heard all the things that one might expect with the organisation top-down rule book approach to “make things happen”.  “I will ensure that it doesn’t happen again”. That’s a fine aim, but you won’t if you don’t change the culture. And you won’t change the culture by doing treating the problem with the same culture that caused it. That dreadful defensiveness that uses rules and structures to avoid the potential embarrassment of having to explore the root causes that the auditor general identified.

So who is responsible? Is that even the right question? I believe that in leadership discovery we need to start with self. You won’t be acting without integrity and blind unquestioning if you’re authentic. But if your leadership paridigm is about finding new ways to control and strategise then you’re not even scratching the surface – you’re still on the command and control, but with fancy words.

Leadership discovery of authenticity. It’s the best defence against a culture that is not right, and the most sustainable way to embed real change.

That’s got a lot of force to it I reckon.

Stephen

A week of it

Tomorrow morning I’m going to run a workshop about authentic leadership. I’m pretty certain that Mother Teresa, described as Mother of Mercy will get another airing – my mother, in an act of mercy to someone she never knew,  suggested to me “leave the poor woman alone – she can’t defend herself”. Mum’s right (though if Mother Teresa is where she thought she was going then I guess she can!). We’re also going to talk about personal branding and see if we can discover what if anything, the relationship is between that and authenticity.

Two surveys came out today – one was about who the most trusted New Zealander is and the other was about the most trusted brand. Notice that we weren’t asked to decide who the best branded person was? Not that surprising really for me – if you’ve read any of my blogs you’ll know that I go on a bit about trust and its relationship with leadership and authenticity.

So, authenticity and leadership week. This week came about to celebrate Sir Peter Blake. He struck me at times as a bit gruff and someone who didn’t take any nonsense. If you’re big into emotional intelligence you might say there’s some work to be done if you’re gruff.  But then again, you might think it’s authentic to be who you are. The author Christopher Hitchens who got me thinking about Mother Teresa declares in his book Love, Poverty and War (after describing how, objectively, his life is good and satisfying) that “I wake up ever day to a sensation of pervading disgust and annoyance”. The book explains much of this annoyance.

So I ask myself, if I have a sense of irritation or gruffness, should I exhibit my maximum emotional intelligence and restrain myself? Or are there times to let rip at the ignoramus who texts in the movies, or the paper-pushing bureaucratic that spends our taxes justifying a decision?!! My coach says that I need to get mad sometimes. I’m not sure that this is the week to start. After all, I’m putting myself and others I work with out there to be involved in Leadership Week and people might expect…expect what? Caught myself.

Sorry Mother Teresa (and my Mum). If you are just a brand, expect no mercy!

Stephen

Do you get it?

Sometimes when I’m talking to people about leadership courses they ask whether they’ll learn about leadership styles like charismatic, authoritative etc. I know about those things, in fact, I’ve even got texts that discuss those things in quite a lot of detail.

Today we ran a workshop on authentic leadership for a group of managers who knew each other well. This group works with young people. We started off quite late but, hey, it’s Monday and who’s in a hurry. We started off talking about what leadership is about. This was a group of self-aware, switched on managers who knew about trust, disclosure and being vulnerable. After that we hardly mentioned the word leadership.

At the end of the day, I asked if they’d noticed that we hadn’t mentioned leadership much. They agreed but they then talked about all the important facets of authenticity and leadership that we had canvassed. One of the managers talked about diversity – not just accepting diversity – but embracing it as part of an individual’s whole being. Others talked about enjoying their own preferences, having followers because you’re real and personal leadership. It felt humble, yet strong at the end of the day.

So, is there a place for labels of leadership? You be the judge, but I reckon we are what we are and that’s the place to start. I’ve said that many times I know, but when you get a group like we had today it really brings it home. Straight-up, real, embracing and lovin’ diversity and all that it brings to their group. And wanting more.

People starting out on their leadership journey often start with the labels. That’s natural. As leaders we can do so much for those starting out on their leadership journey by modelling our authenticity rather then worrying about labels and styles. I reckon the young people this group looks after are very fortunate. And so was I today. Without hardly even mentioning that word leadership.

Do you?

Stephen