Blair(leader)ship has history on its shoulders. The rest of us have just dandruff

The BBC is broadcasting a series called Blair Years portraying insights into Tony Blair’s life as (ex) UK Prime Minister. The last episode focus on his relationship with George W Bush and the war in Iraq. The series are exquisite in a typical BBC documentary style. They use lots of ‘talking heads’ commentators including GW Bush himself, ex aids etc. There is of course a primary political ’reading’ ( listening, watching…) of this pieces. But there is also a leadership reading which is the one I am interested here.

In the The Leader with Seven Faces book, I wrote:

“We are living in times of pseudo-meta-values. Pardon my language! I mean the abuse of ‘super-value language’ with the goal of providing an overall, blank justification for our actions as individuals and leaders. There have always been those pseudo-meta-values, as I call them, in the religious, social and political arena. But today, we have a few of them pretending to have the power to make most other values totally secondary and dependent, if not irrelevant. My prototype is the new Holy Trinity of integrity, sincerity and honesty. Leaders who profess total honesty, often use that declaration as a justification for other things. The same applies to integrity and sincerity. Many years ago, I spotted an American cartoon where one of the characters said: “If I am so honest, how can I be wrong?” It may make you smile, but don’t take it lightly. Many leaders today seem to be judged almost only on the basis of their sincerity and honesty. We even have the language for it: “At least you can’t say he is not honest, or he is not sincere, etc.” as if that was an overriding justification for everything else.

But you could say that this Holy Trinity of values is nothing more than a baseline, a given. One expects honesty, sincerity and integrity from leaders, but those do not constitute a vaccination against error, misjudgements or other ‘corrosions’. British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, is a master of referring to the Holy Trinity of values as a justification for his political behaviour. I still haven’t heard many people challenging the supposedly overriding power of those values. I would say to the Blair-like-leaders: “You may be sincere and honest, but you may be totally wrong. Or you may not. Besides, your personal sincerity and integrity is simply a pass for you to hold office, and it is otherwise irrelevant for any further socio-political discourse.” Translation: “We take your sincerity-honesty for granted. Now, can we talk about the things we should be talking about?” A similar use of a supposed super-value is the appeal to or recognition of ‘consistency’. ‘He is a very consistent leader’ people may say. It is said as if consistency inevitably leads to the Holy Trinity. And, as the cartoon says, if you are so consistent (on top of honest, integral and sincere), surely you must also be right! Just one small observation: Hitler was very consistent”

These series have brought me back to those days when I wrote the above paragraph and Mr Blair was still in office. On screen, he continuously started his answers to the journalist’s questions with his famous ‘I believe’ or ‘I believed’. This little combination of two words contains the entire leadership DNA code of Blair-like style of leadership.

The word ‘I’ takes us to his me-leader-centric view of the world. We all use the word ‘I’ but when the leader does, one has to be careful as to what comes next. Believing is next here: I-believe. A colossal percentage of Blair’s own case in the explanation of his decisions is based in this combination code of ‘I’ and ‘believing’. It implies that whatever comes next is going to be based upon sincerity and honesty: ‘this is what I deeply believe(d)’, ‘I always believed’ etc.

Blair’s inducement to makes us to believe that, if he believed, he then was honest, and that if he was honest he was doing ‘the right thing’ ( I would be millionaire if I got a penny for each time that Blair uses ‘the right thing’) goes down on screen (whether now or then) as a charming call for understanding. If you follow it and get yourself trapped you will, will you not, become part of the worldwide community of people who (1) believe (2) therefore are honest and (c ) do the right thing. What a privilege.

Blair mesmerizes the crowds ( well, some of them). It still puzzles me how nobody stops him in the middle of his statements and say: “Mr Blair, I know you believe. But I am talking not to Blair’s private persona but Blair (ex) Prime Minister. A country can’t go to war – for example – on the basis of what one person believes, or on the basis of one person belief + honesty + consistency + doing-the-right-thing, not even what this person is the Prime Minister. There is a government here, a Parliament, a collective leadership. I am not interested in you ‘I’. Since when did we devolve to you the power to lead by your beliefs? We welcome them but we see them as the baseline for you to hold office. Beyond that, if all you use is your ‘I’ you are a dictator, not a democratic leader”.

The ‘I believe’ + ‘I am doing the right thing’ school of leadership is dangerous, even if by far there are other more dangerous schools. Picking on Blair is quite frankly easy because he is a natural case study of dangerous naivety and the Father of All Right Thing Intentions leadership. It is almost a caricature case study of the leader-is-right because (please feel free to add), he wants to do the right thing, is honest, is consistent etc. These blair(leader)ship sees his legacy as something that we normal mortals of today can’t grasp. History is the only one qualified to understand ( so we have to wait). History will prove him right. Blair has history on his shoulders ( he said) whilst the rest of us have just dandruff.

In business 2007 we have no room for ‘I believe’ as the sole reason for leading. Collective intelligence is the necessary organizational fabric of today. Leadership is about embracing all, not on the back of ‘my own beliefs’ only but through dialogue and rational+ emotional cooking of ideas. The opposite to ‘I believe’ is not ‘beliefs don’t matter’ ( or we don’t want a leader with beliefs); it is: here are my beliefs, where are yours, can we talk?; and by the way, I feel very strongly about this, convince me that I am wrong if you will.

There are no more polarised styles of leadership than Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. That may seem strange since politically there are (in theory) lots of overlaps. Clinton is another belief man. A strong one. But in Clinton-school-of leadership beliefs matter as much as trying very hard that other people embrace them and emotionally click with them. Clinton was ( sorry to talk past sense, I assume this is still the case today) famous for not being content with wining just the rational argument; he wanted to win the emotional as well since what the other side felt mattered. Agreeing was not enough if the other is left disengaged. Blair seems that, for all his beliefs and righteousness, doesn’t really care if ‘the other side doesn’t get it’ – after all History will. He may talk about wining minds and hearts but behaves as if the only thing that matters is his beliefs. The Blair school of leadership says: If you don’t see it, tough. I can’t change that. I know I am right, History will prove it, next? And he got away with it all. And he got a new job to win hearts and minds in the Middle East. Please, history, come soon and prove me wrong.

Do you have to practice everything? All the Seven Faces? Go beyond your zone of comfort

Our face reflects our soul, our being. We are used to it! We see it in the mirror every day. We may like it or not (!), but we are certainly familiar with it! That leadership face that you or others see, probably is/represents your main zone of comfort. You may be a natural doer who tends to focus on where to go, and then goes there! If so, you may tend to dismiss questions of style, beliefs or even ‘ways of doing’. You will be tempted to practice leadership with that face and that is the only one that others will see. Nothing wrong with that, but remember that other people may react better to other faces; for example, the one of language, or values, or identity. I don’t know. You could be better off practicing leadership with other faces. You may discover your hidden ones in the process!

Don’t stay in your comfort zone.

Practice all faces if you can! Practicing leadership with seven faces is NOT about ‘perfect’ leadership. It is about being sensitive to a very complex reality, the one of your business organization, or your non-profit institution, or your church, or your political party.

In this incredibly complex reality, what leaders say, where they go and take people, what they build, what they care about, how they do it, ‘what’ they are and what they really do, matters equally. The leader with seven faces is a leader for a future that has already started.

What the 7 Faces are

I believe you have to practice to be a good leader (note I don’t say emulate).
To practice leadership, you need ‘a map’ and lots of questions. We are far from a short on answers – remember those shelves - but we’re not sure we have the right questions. So we may just be kidding ourselves with sets of beautiful answers to the wrong questions. I’m interested in questions, and:
The answers to these questions are personal.
Unfortunately, the consequences of your answers are not. Other people at work, home, party, church, organization or in the wider society depend on them. No pressure…

If after reading this or after getting other help and other triggers, it is not obvious to you what to practice, I think you’ll have a problem (if you still aspire to becoming a good leader). Note that I say what to practice, not whom to emulate.

You’ll know that you are a leader when others think of you in that way voluntarily. “The proof of the pudding is in the eating”, my fellow compatriot Miguel de Cervantes said around 1615. The proof of your leadership capabilities is in the response and nature of your followers.

The ‘praxis’ of leadership has different faces.
The practice of leadership may be helped by recognizing that the difficulty in making sense of the plethora of ‘examples’ is not necessarily that it consists of a mix of heroes, villains, charlatans, moralists, dictators, saviours, psychopaths and normal people. That mix is obviously an intellectual challenge in itself (!), because, if nothing else, it’s difficult to have an uncontaminated and clinical view of it without attaching a judgement to each ‘case’. The Mother Theresa case is good, the Hitler case is bad. Sure, but that won’t take us far.

The real difficulty, however, is one of presentation. Leadership is polyhedral, pardon my language. You can be looking at one of the polygons and get excited about it, only to realize that there are others just as exciting on the other side of the three-dimensional solid.

Yes, the leader has seven faces. In some leaders, only one or two are visible. When those leaders are proposed as examples or role models, the only faces of leadership we see are the ones they show us. When you as leader are ‘in front’ of your people, perhaps one or two faces are visible. But there are others, equally important. These seven faces are:
1
What leaders say. Rhetoric, language, words… matter. Many organizations are stuck on something (strategy, process improvement, change) because they do not posses ‘another language’. Leaders provide ‘language’ and meaning, a framework in which action can take place. If this is their visible face, leaders look more like teachers and educators, and language and meaning become the most visible traits.
2
Where leaders go. Leaders go places and take people with them. Some of them have a pretty good idea of the destination, perhaps too good an idea. Others are more of the type who ‘enjoy the journey’. However, if this is the visible face, both look more like cartographers, explorers or conquistadores. Life around them inevitably revolves around these themes of destiny and pathways.
3
What leaders build. Leaders are builders of organizations or ‘projects’. They build purpose and they build places. Places to be, to enhance people, to work in, to think, to do, to succeed, to attract people, to navigate through life. They build other things such as trust and relationships. If this is their predominant face, they look more like architects. ‘Space’ and its sister ‘Time’ are favourite themes around them.
4
What leaders care about. Finding this face of the leader is not difficult, because what they care about forms their language and behaviour. See what the leader says, observe what the leader does, see if it matches and you will discover the value system behind it! When this is the main visible face, these leaders may look more like moralists or teachers, even if they may not necessarily use the language of morality. But what this face shows is mainly beliefs. Beliefs seem to form everything else.
5
How leaders do it. Worrying about how things happen is prominent in some leaders. Very often, the ‘how’ is seen in our culture as ‘a detail’ or ‘a by-product’. But some leaders don’t see it like that. The way of doing things matters to them and this is their most visible face. When this is the case, they look more like stage managers focusing on styles, ways, dynamics, and plots. ‘Ways of doing’ may kill good visions. These leaders know it and worry about ‘the how’ almost above everything else.
6
What they are. This is a sometimes difficult face to understand. Perhaps the best way to do this, is to refer to famous lines from the Jewish text The Ethics of the Fathers: “If you don’t look after yourself, who will?” First stop. It looks pretty selfish, but it’s enormously healthy, because it’s prompting non-dependence on others. “If you only look after yourself, what are you?” Second stop here. This is a powerful question. Note the ‘what’, not ‘who’. “What am I?” is probably the most important question of our navigation system in the world. And third and last stop: “If not now, when?”

Some leaders worry about the ‘what-we-are’ and, if this is their predominant face, they look like identity seekers, rather constantly referring to a sense of belonging. Sometimes they look like historians as well, because identity and belonging are above everything else, with one eye on the past and another on the future. Awareness of themselves and others, including emotions, is very visible in them.
7
What leaders do. This behavioural face is always fascinating. It is often the most ‘visible’ and one that is easier to refer to, mainly to imitate. What leaders do - or don’t do – matters; for some people more than anything else (i.e. what they say, or build, or think…). This ‘action-face’ is certainly enormously important and the engine of the building of other dimensions, such as reputation and trust. It is powerful, both in its building and its destroying potential. Some leaders seem to have great ability to generate action around them, often seen as the only relevant dimension for themselves and the organization behind them. When the emphasis is on the doing and the main visible face is action, leaders sometimes look like heroes, or company acrobats, pointing to outcomes and measurements.

Keywords for a leadership definition

I don’t know you and I don’t know where you are. Where you spend your working life. Perhaps as leader in a corporation, or in an NGO, or in government, or in education, or the Church, or a religious institution. In the private or the public sector. All I know is that you are reading this and something somewhere must have made you do it.

So, yes, leadership is intriguing. Academics, practitioners, consultants, self-help gurus, generals, priests, rabbis, imams, political leaders and community workers are romancing, framing, developing and playing with the idea of leadership. It has been happening for a long, long time. The leadership shop is big. The bookshelves are full.

We have a wealth of surveys and data, categories and taxonomies, lists of leadership competences and styles. We have case studies and biographies, confessions of success and failure, supporters of charisma and supporters of an almost invisible leadership. We seem to have more information, knowledge and stories on the subject than we can handle. So, why does it still feel as if we know little about leadership?

My definition of leadership, and it is entirely personal is the ability to exercise meaningful influence on others who voluntarily accept it, leaving behind a visible legacy of collective impact.

Keywords are highly relevant here:
Influence: it could be translated into different forms: inspiration, reflection, sense of meaning, direction or, very possibly (but not necessarily and/or not always apparent), action!
Meaningful: I am assuming some magnitude or substantial degree, a directional change, a lasting impact, almost even, dare I say, teleological. I mean the provision of big-time meaning and purpose, not the short term ephemeral impact.
Others: the old definition of ‘leader’ (i.e. the one who has a follower) has not yet been matched by any academic!
Voluntarily: I am sorry, but it is not good enough that somebody has been declared my leader. Unless I accept it, there is no real leader. There may be an official party leader, team leader, executive leadership team or Supreme Leader, and I may even be resigned to using the terms BUT I am the only one who decides who my leader is. Let me expand on this. Leaders become, dictators arrive. Leadership is something that you earn, which means that there must be somebody giving it to you. That means there are followers. You can be my boss, my dictator, my inquisitor or my king by decree. But you can only be my leader when I say so and I ask you, and - incidentally - it would be nice if you accepted.
Legacy: Here, a whole spectrum of possibilities applies: from the wonderful memories to the big mess. But it must be something that’s left behind.

Leadership is about questions

A colleague who attended the recent Frankfurt Book Fair told me about a conversation she had about leadership books that made me smile and prompted me to start this post. It was one of those “not another book on leadership!” comments, which is in fact, the title of the introduction of my book and to which my answer is “ Well, yes, another one!” And I suspect it won’t be the last one either. But I want to believe that The Leader with 7 Faces stands out as different, written mainly as a long conversation with yourself, with me, perhaps with others. It is also based upon a novel idea: let’s explore what the questions are before we start giving answers. A second unusual idea: I used plain English as much as I could! This is a long explanation to tell you that you will not find comprehensive bibliographies and many references to theories of leadership in this book. When I do some of the above, it will be minimal and relevant to the conversation.

My subjective world
When I decided to write The Leader with 7 Faces, I had many choices in front of me. Let me explain why I chose this one. I am a psychiatrist through background and professional experience. I practiced Medicine for about fifteen years and then I joined senior management ranks in the pharmaceutical industry on both sides of the Atlantic. I spent another fifteen years or so working for three different companies until I founded The Chalfont Project Ltd, an organisational consulting firm that I lead. Like any other life - yours perhaps - it has been a rollercoaster ride. But I feel privileged.

It would not make sense to summarise my ‘learning’ in bullet-points like a report sent to your manager. But some things - semi-connected themes - have struck me time and time again along the way:

1) Human behaviour is incredibly complex. What a statement! Psychology and Psychiatry are trying hard to find clues for every ‘why’. But each time they think they have achieved something, they come up with a label that frames the issue (abnormal behaviour, for example) and gives some sense of comfort. Practitioners then know what to do or not to do. This is good news for their comfort and often good news as well for the individual who needs help. But it is far from providing a deep insight and understanding of the individual. Management (sciences, studies and education) is no different, but it is usually more superficial. We fabricate an enormous amount of things (frameworks, classifications, competence sets, checklists…) that help us navigate. But again, this is far from giving us a deep understanding of what is really going on inside the organisation! Leadership as a concept is the same. We can put all the studies together, all the theories and classifications and all the lists of ‘qualities’ and who knows, we might have some sort of language. Less good news: we may still not get to the bottom of what leadership is.

2) Early in my business life - which I found fascinating at first and a world apart from medical practice - I began to wonder why some organisations seemed to succeed, attract people and mobilise internal energy and why others - very often similar in size and culture - looked pretty pathetic and hopeless. In hindsight, the question now seems less grandiose or original, but at the time it kept coming to my mind. It didn’t take me long to realize that the quality of characters in the organisational zoo didn’t seem to correlate with anything. I found uninspiring leaders running entire departments extremely well and inspirational leaders in charge of a mess, which made one wonder if it had been created by them. The complexity and sophistication of processes and systems didn’t ensure success either. Compared with the world I was coming from - clinical and academia - the ‘industry’ was a Rolls Royce in information management, for example. But exciting as this was, it didn’t ensure success either.

3) Leadership was progressively climbing the ladder of my list of interests as a ‘place to find the clue’. Throughout my working history, I have made some evolving observations:

a) Over all these years, I have found very few good leaders. I have found many people in top positions for whom the single, recurrent, nagging question I have had is: “How on earth did they get there?” The worst, most dangerous leaders I have found are the ones who appeared honest, ethical, people-oriented, compassionate, value-driven and even overtly religious, and who turned out behaving like little bastards. Their danger lies in their unexpected behaviour. Some of these ‘leaders’ used what I will describe later on in this book as the ‘It’s-the-system-not-me’ argument to justify their - in some cases plainly inhumane – actions.

b) I am now convinced that leadership is a practice that benefits from repetitive action and may even inversely correlate with how much we talk about it or how we use the label!

c) I am also convinced that all of us have the potential to be a leader, possibly in different degrees, and that we can ‘go for it’, armed with some convictions and the desire to achieve things.

Over the last seven odd years, I have led leadership executive development programmes with my clients and have constantly learned from them. This book represents a ‘stop-and-capture-it’ and will no doubt evolve with further editions. But, as I said, I had choices. I could use a significant amount of bibliography and references for the great and good of academia and consulting and give my book a pseudo-scientific-experienced-academic-management-consulting validation. I could quote and re-quote the gurus. I could contrast frameworks and theories. I could ‘critically analyse’ positions and premises. I could propose trends and mega-trends. I could do any or all of the above or I could simply bypass all of this and get straight into sharing some thoughts and experiences, bringing all insights together and providing you with lots of questions for which - very often - I haven’t found answers myself. And in the process invite you to come along to find the answers.

So this book is mainly ‘a book of questions’. My years of leadership experience, my three professional qualifications in both science and business, my three careers and my (greying) hair loss have taught me that there is one single, overriding, most important management question. Everything else is totally secondary. That question is: “What’s the question?”

The ability to ask questions is a sign of leadership maturity. The ability to provide answers is not. If each time we were about to jump into action - analyse a 1,000-page market research report, draw a product development plan, create a recruitment and retaining HR strategy, produce the PowerPoint package for the retreat or sign that big capital expenditure - we stopped and thought and asked the question: “What’s the question I am trying to answer?”…if we could do that, we would jump a few years in our collective leadership evolution… If I were to propose one single management education recipe, this would be the one.

Married to your BlackBerry? Time to watch your assets (with ‘time’ being your last one!)

An article in The Times of a while ago (Don't let the boss get you hooked on BlackBerry) referred to a study soon to be published by Gayle Porter, professor of management at Rutgers University business school in Camden, New Jersey which amongst other things ‘foresees the day when workers will be able to sue their employers for insisting that they stay in touch with the office at all times’. The BlackBerry device has certainly become a pervasive vehicle for the 24/7/365/always-on executive that I described in my book, The Leader with Seven Faces. Though it’s quite popular in Europe, my experience with my US clients shows that it has reached full epidemic proportions over there. In my last meeting with a management team there, 100% of members had one, showed one off, paid attention to one. At the next meeting, I declared a blackberry-free zone and you could see some signs of withdrawal symptoms. It used to be the mobile phone (or cell phone as it is called there) and still is, but, boy, real-time emails are now the thing.

The article in question continued to quote the professor: “Owing to vested interests of the employers and the ICT industry signs of possible addiction — excess use of ICT and related stress illnesses — are often ignored. Employers rightfully provide programmes to help workers with chemical or substance addictions; addiction to technology can be equally damaging to the mental health of the worker.” And it quoted another study: “[…] which suggests that half of BlackBerry users would find it a matter of concern if they were parted from their device, and one in ten would be devastated. More than a third said that they would feel more stressed if they had to leave the office without it, and just over two thirds felt that the device improved the way they were perceived by clients, according to the research, which was conducted by T-Mobile. In all, 90 per cent of BlackBerry users described it as a business lifesaver.”

The tone of the article in The Times, by design, was one of employers actively promoting the BlackBerry addiction (as the current form of 7/24/365 ‘presenteism”, the old requirement of physically showing up 9-5 in an office) and employees, passively adapting and becoming slaves. This is a very simplistic view, which I am deliberately ‘reading’ from The Times in a caricature. The reality is that the cases of conscious employer-led toxicity may be far less important or greater than employees-led fashion and discovery of that continuous umbilical cord with the server.

In any case, the toxicity is mutual. It means that both sides (what ‘sides’?) have commoditised space and time. By being always-on, time has ended, not only in its simply pragmatic angle of ‘physically no more time for anything else’. Space has ended. Mailboxes are full. Disk-life space run out. Since time is man’s last asset (see ‘What you Build’ chapter in my book, The Leader with Seven Faces) employees and employers are jointly walking towards asset-less organisations. It is not apocalyptic; it is real and incredible stupid. As I described in the mentioned chapter, leadership has an urgent need to protect space and time, to create it. The BlackBerry-always-on executive has capitulated. He may kid himself with the idea that he is in control of things thanks to the continuous connectivity, allowing him a rapid response to any question (including the ones contained in the 85% of unnecessary email traffic) but he is giving control away and becoming time-bankrupt.

In the book, I said that if I could think of one key and crucial role of leaders, it would be the above-mentioned ‘protection of space and time’. In some of my Executive Seminars based on The Leader with Seven Faces, we start with this topic or we simply stop there for longer. The article made me think about this again…