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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Courage must be the firmer, heart the bolder, spirit the greater the more our strength wains. Written over a thousand years ago and recorded in a fragment of Anglo-Saxon poetry the words are those of an Anglo-Saxon warrior fighting an invading Viking force. Words that echo out of the centuries and remind us that bad things show up.
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I’ve worked with a lot of teams in the military, in sport and in business. In almost every case where the team does not work well or is somehow less than the sum of its parts the root causes are to do with the quality of relationships that team members have and in particular the relationships the leader has.
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In my late teens I was pretty obsessed with rock climbing, unfortunately I lived in Kent about as far from climbable rock as its possible to get – I climbed a lot of trees! None the less it has stuck with me as a passion. A couple of years ago I got back to it more seriously doing more and then training seriously. Not actually with any specific goal in mind other than to get better – a pursuit that now takes around 10-15 hours a week. The process as much as the result fascinates me and I’m struck by the parallels between a physical training process and the quest to get better at anything or to perform at your best consistently.
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On November 19th, 1863 President Abraham Lincoln, stood at the battlefield of Gettysburg at an event to consecrate the Soldiers’ National Cemetery. He was not the main speaker at the event, Edward Everett a fellow politician had spoken for 2-hours before Lincoln rose to his feet. When Lincoln finally rose to his feet, his speech lasted a few minutes and constituted less than 300 words. Lincoln himself considered the speech a failure and the Crowd’s reaction was polite. Now known as the Gettysburg address it is one of the most famous speeches in American History and one of the profoundest statements on how we should frame our relationship to those who paid the full measure of sacrifice with their lives.
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