What We’re Watching: The Wire

Management consultants and leadership gurus often spend a lot of time looking for inspirational leaders and models of managerial success with which they can inspire people.

It’s become almost a cliché to draw examples from the military and sports. Those examples are often filled with products of private education and great universities, excluding individuals from more diverse backgrounds, or adding them in as ‘exceptions that prove the rule’.

The Wire offers up a variety of perspectives on leadership, management, vision, values and goals. None of them are particularly attractive, but the contrasts between them are instructive.

The show focuses largely on the drug trade in Baltimore. We’re introduced to the harsh realities of life in a criminal gang, with strong leadership, high risks and rewards, brutal performance management and a focus on delivering financial results. Yet even in this world we see conflicts around values and goals – Is market share as important as sustainable profitability? Is some competition healthy? Does co-operation with competitors create long term security of income? These conflicts tend to lead to murder rather than a board room spat, which does draw them into sharp focus.

More interesting challenges appear when the drug trade intersects with law enforcement, the school system, local politics and the media. The need to produce quick results and TV friendly statistics pulls against the need to actually make things better for the long term. Every Sales Director can relate to the struggle between working to produce solid, sustainable revenue, and having something good in the forecast for next quarter.

We don’t recommend that you adopt the leadership and management practices you’ll see in The Wire, but it is a great way to explore how different approaches work and the benefits and limitations of each.

Great leaders and ruthlessly effective management don’t always put their efforts into the greater good.

Being Trusted – Perhaps The Critical Requirement For Today’s Leaders

All organisations are having to change, at a faster pace and in more radical ways than ever before.

This puts the requirement for leadership at a premium, where decisive, inspirational action from those in positions of power and influence is obvious and value-adding. The problem is many people who need to implement these different and challenging requirements look at their leaders with a crooked eye, thinking ‘Why should we follow you?’, ‘We don’t really trust you’.

With trust a leader can achieve much more, without it they will struggle to do more than exhort people to do better. Where does trust come from? To help clarify your own thinking we have put together a summary of the behaviours that stimulate feelings of trustworthiness.

1. Consistent - You need to behave in ways that allow people to feel they always know where you’re coming from. People would prefer someone who is autocratic all the time to someone who flip-flops between being controlling one minute and laissez-faire the next.
2. Fair - You cannot have favourites, or be mercurial in your decision making. People need to see you are objective and even-handed in all your dealings with others.
3. Reliable - Always do what you say you will do, never over-promise and under-deliver.
4. Values Driven - People need to see what you stand for through your dealings with others.
5. Discreet - You are you good with other peoples’ confidences.
6. Straight-forward - Effective leaders need to be political to some extent, but trusted ones are only political in the positive sense of being in tune with the hidden agendas and underlying group dynamics, not manipulating, double-dealing and back stabbing.
7. Supportive - You not only help people with work related issues but offer broader support when needed
8. Tough - You will say the (very) difficult stuff even when it makes you unpopular. You are not interested in how many Christmas cards you get, only in being effective and increasing the effectiveness of those around you.
9. Human - People relate to you because you have empathy for their position, and you don’t put yourself on a pedestal.

These attributes are in no order of importance, and cannot be adopted as a short-cut to trustworthiness. People have got to have belief in your sincerity.

Predaptive work extensively in coaching managers to become more effective leaders. If you would like to find out more, please contact us.

Are You Striking The Right Leadership Balance?

When times are tough people look for leaders to give them confidence and hope like never before. When the route to take isn’t clear, having confidence that someone in the team, the department or the organisation knows where they’re going makes it easy to follow. When people are behaving strangely in situations that they’ve never faced before it’s reassuring for others to know that there’s someone who is behaving in the way they not only expect, but they’d like to behave themselves.

Being a leader in tough times is no different than being a good leader in the boom times. Leaders strike a balance between confidence and empathy, they are able to clearly articulate their vision of what the future should look like, but are not so blinkered that they won’t listen to input from others or take account of a changing context. They are able to drive people forward with enthusiasm and motivate them to higher performance without pushing them into an uncomfortable stress zone.

Having one leader in an organisation is better than none, but having an organised and synergistic leadership team leads to sustainable higher performance. Unfortunately, much leadership reading and theorising focuses on the one transformational leader rather than the transformational leadership team. Having a group who respect and trust each other enough to have open discussions and to challenge the views and actions of others ensures better leadership, more robust decision making and effective implementation.

Finding the right balance at the right time isn’t easy, but Predaptive work with leaders to help them be more effective individually and to make a really positive impact as a high performing, functional leadership team. To find out more about how Predaptive can help your leaders to make a bigger impact contact us.

Did You Choose A Real Leader?

The news has been full of Members of Parliament’s expenses this week. The publication of itemised expenses claims with receipts has been great fun for the newspapers as they construct lifestyles based on charges for swimming pool maintenance, ‘gourmet’ dog food and ladies underwear. For the MPs concerned it’s been embarrassing.

The MPs could feel that they are being unfairly victimised in trying to do a difficult job, living in two locations and trying to balance parliamentary, constituency and family life to the best of their ability within the rules.

Unfortunately it seems that the public doesn’t see it that way. People are expressing anger not at MPs salaries, or at the rules that allow them to claim allowances, but at the way in which MPs have claimed what seemed like unreasonable expenses and as a group worked hard to prevent the public from knowing what the money was spent on.

It seems it’s not the MPs honesty that the public sees as lacking, but their integrity. People don’t like to feel that people they trust would do something which they see as being unfair and underhand. People in leadership positions are held to a high standard of behaviour and those who fail to meet that standard can quickly lose the trust and respect of their followers.

We see the same thing happening in organisations when senior managers cancel all non-urgent expenditure whilst continuing to utilise their travel budget to the max, or when leaders announce pay freezes for all employees and pay themselves a bonus. Leadership means living up to the standards that other people aspire to, whether it’s easy or not. Leaders who do this gain respect, trust and loyalty, all vitally important ingredients of a successful team.