Episode #342: The 2020 Leader

Are you a perfect leader? If you are, bully for you. For the rest of us we continue on the journey. As the great American philosopher Yogi Berra once noted, leading is easy, the getting people to follow you bit, is the snag. Leaders do make such a huge difference. This sounds like the great man ideology in history, where specific individuals are credited with making the difference, rather than socio-economic factors and the contribution of others, who didn’t get their names into the official histories. Business is different though.

The same industry, the same market, the same firm, the same staff, the same technology, the same capital, the same competitors but the outcomes can be so different depending on who is leading the firm. We see this phenomenon all the time in various turnarounds. A new leader is sent in and things begin to improve. They bring in their own trusted people to execute their decisions. They break many eggs in order to make the new corporate omelette. They drive through their vision, mission and values for the business. They are relentless about using these to drive structural changes to impact individual thinking. They align systems around these messages to make them come alive for the team.

Then they leave for another post and their replacement begins to unravel all the good that was done and drive the firm down. Within surprisingly short order, the firm is headed south and the office politicians, hangers on, sycophants and assorted ne’er-do-wells take over under the new regime and the whole company goes to hell in a basket. We have probably all seen this either up close or from afar. It is real.

As the leader how do we take the organisation forward? What is our job? It sounds like a stupid question to be asking a leader, but it isn’t. We tend to get drowned in a lot of stuff and find we are living permanently in Quadrant One – Urgent and Important. This means constantly fighting fires, living in the moment, becoming a crisis solving junkie. We are nomads, moving constantly from meeting to meeting, sprinkling pixie dust around wherever we go. We lose sight of our real role because we are too busy working in our business, instead of on our business.

We have three jobs as leader and we should never lose sight of them. We set the direction for the firm, we get the right people on the right bus and in the right seats and we grow those peoples’ abilities. Sounds simple, but we screw this up. We think because we have the vision, mission values installed on various walls throughout the firm such that everyone knows where we are going. If you ask people to repeat the content from memory, I will guarantee that process will be character building, as you discover they will get two of the five values and nothing else. If you cannot remember it I don’t how you can live it? The leader may get sick of saying these things over and over, but that is the job. Maintain a relentless drumbeat on these things, so that the team will get it and keep on getting it.

Have the individual work teams brainstorm how to get these lofty words into daily rituals, so that we are all living them. When they do it they will own it. When they own it, these items will become the basis for decisions and actions being taken. Unless we can manufacture the ownership then these lofty words will be lofty and irrelevant.

When there are 1.6 jobs for everyone looking for a job in Japan, the choice of the right people becomes a challenge. A guy I know here has taken over the running of an American firm and he is out there in the social media telling everyone he is looking for A Players for his business and they should be contacting him. Sounds reasonable except we are all looking for A Players, they are in short supply and now becoming very expensive. We are all involved in a bidding war for talent and these young candidates have no compunction about accepting our offer, arranging to start on a certain day and then dumping us for a prettier face, joining another crew instead. This is Japan! Who could imagine such a thing would become so standard.

So recruit and retain become key leader skills in 2020. Today, we need to inject ourselves into the recruit process and not leave this entirely to others. We need to work on retaining good people by giving them opportunities to grow and that means work assignments, projects, coaching, training and mentoring. Yes, I know you are already busy. But look at what is keeping you busy and ask yourself how that content aligns with the priorities that are confronting us all as leaders today? Time to realign our thinking, time usage and priorities to match the demands this new year is ushering in.