I think like many of you I will be glad to get to the end of 2020, it's been a tough year for many reasons. I'm conscious of the many lessons there have been and the need to reflect and distil these but for now, 3 very quick thoughts:
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Leadership performance in any domain; business, politics, education, religion or the military seems over time to be firmly stuck. Leadership has not got better and in many cases a cogent case could be made that it has got worse. Is this predestined? Are we to endlessly repeat the mistakes of our forefathers or never to exceed their accomplishments? It seems more than likely but it shouldn’t and needn’t be so.
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Good leaders are constantly adjusting their approach according to the situation. If you’re familiar with John Boyd’s OODA loop model, originally inspired by an analysis of air to air combat, Observe and Orientate, are the first 2-stages in the cycle. They are all about creating good situational awareness.
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I guess a lot of the leadership lessons that I’ve learnt over my career have a lot to do with my particular weaknesses or blind spots as a leader; I’ve learnt to invest far more in team relationships and communicating for example. But I think in some ways the biggest leadership lesson I learnt was when I was still at school.
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There are no bad teams, only bad leaders. Instinctively we recognize there is more than a grain of truth to this statement. It’s not a new sentiment, Napoleon declared ‘There are no bad Regiments, only bad Colonels’. We know leadership has a value but we are not sure how to think about or calculate it.
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In the military, grip is often viewed as a key component of a leader’s performance and potential. Rarely defined, nonetheless it is a quality that is obvious when you see you it and equally obvious when it’s absent or lacking.
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In the Wizard of Oz, the heroine, Dorothy, finds herself on a quest with three companions; a scarecrow in need of a brain, a tin man with no heart and a lion without courage. In our troubled times, as businesses seek to navigate the uncertainty of the immediate future and think about how they need to adapt, the story is a good metaphor to encapsulate some of the biggest problems leaders are facing.
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The concept of the ‘R’ number, or basic reproduction rate in epidemiology, has become widely known over the past few months. The alarming notion of exponential growth, an R of 2 or more, has also become clear to anyone interested in the characteristics and impact of viral spread. Getting the R number as far as possible below 1 has become a key priority for the governments and peoples of the world. When it comes to leadership, however, increasing the R number well beyond 1 is a terrific idea.
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What will change and what will stay the same? As we cautiously start thinking about a recovery phase of this crisis, what do you want to change? What lessons have you learnt out of this crisis? Or maybe more precisely, what lessons have you identified out of this crisis? Since there is usually a gulf between a lesson identified and a lesson learnt and though many manage to identify lessons those that actually execute and apply their learning are a far smaller group.
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In more normal times I work with leaders and teams helping them to have maximum impact and results. April 2020 in the midst of lockdown we are mid-storm and I am having to nurture and maintain my own resilience on a daily basis. Experience helps but resilience is not an innate condition. It’s both acquired and developed. Right now, like many people I’m speaking with it feels like I’m spending a lot of time bailing out the boat, trying to fix the sails whilst simultaneously not being sea-sick or falling overboard.
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