Whether we are aware of it or not, we all observe the world through a lens. The lens is made up of our personality, preferences, experiences and history. Like all lenses it can help us see more clearly but it can also distort our view of the world too. Ideally, the lens we view the world through will bring us a sense of contentment and integrity. If it doesn’t, it is worth exploring what aspects of the lens are causing pain or stress.

If you are leading a team, organisation, family, social group etc, being aware of the lens through which you view the world is important. It’s important because it can colour your interaction with others and the results you achieve for yourself and for them.

For example, if you hold the view that people are profoundly lazy, you might push your team hard to achieve results. While this might bring success it might also prioritise productivity over team spirit, causing demotivation and burnout. The opposite view, that people are inherently hard workers might mean giving autonomy and a loose rein which might be good for team spirit but accountability might suffer.

So, what lens do you see the world through? What experiences have shaped you and how does this impact on how you view the world? Take time to consider this and then take a look at the world around you. Do others agree? What other lenses are people looking through? What does the world really look like?

I use the Gallup StrengthsFinder with my clients and have recently taken the questionnaire for the 3rd or 4th time – I forget which. The philosophy behind the Strengths profile is that we should hone our strengths – to make a more powerful and satisfying contribution – rather than trying to shore up our weaknesses. This approach turns conventional training wisdom on its head but its gaining currency around the world. Playing to your strengths makes you stand out, is more fun, enables you to take risks or attempt challenges more successfully and helps you gain the sense that what you are doing is worthwhile, significant and what you were born to do. It’s really important for both leaders and their team members to know where they are strong so that they can take full advantage of what nature has gifted them. It’s also a great platform for generating ideas for new initiatives and directions.

Although my strengths had pretty much stayed the same, it was great to get a refresher about where I am strong and how to work with my strengths. It made sense of a lot of things that I am playing with at the moment and where I am showing up strongly.

I recommend it to you as it’s powerful yet cheap – just £8.99. If you are curious about your strengths, go to Amazon and search on “Now discover your strengths Tom Rath”. Buy version 2.0. When you get the book it will give you an access code for the strengths questionnaire website. You then take the questionnaire and it will tell you your top 5 strengths from 34 that Gallup have researched extensively. The book lists all 34 profiles and gives a list of actions you can take to bring your strengths to the fore.

My clients and friends love it and believe in the power of playing to their strengths. Why don’t you do the same.

By the way, my strengths, to whet your appetite are: individualisation; connectedness; empathy; maximiser and communication.

In the last few weeks, as I have been taking my tentative steps into the world of blogging, I’ve really begun to understand how the world is changing as the new forms of social communication are now becoming mainstream e.g. blogging, Facebook, YouTube etc. Websites and concepts that a year ago were the domain of innovators and early adopters have now gone mainstream.

These changes will have a huge impact I believe on what organisations require of their leaders. The rules are changing as the use and availability of information proliferates. People are starting to expect organisations to share information, want their opinion, listen to them and tailor communications and products to their needs.

The fantastic marketing blogger Seth Godin makes the point in his book Purple Cow that the old forms of advertising, where big companies produced one-size-fits-all advertisements and threw loads of budget at them to reach the biggest possible audience, are gone. Consumers are too busy to listen to what marketers have to say, unless their message is highly tailored to their concerns and needs.

This links to leadership, in my view, in the following way. Over the next 10 years, as Boomers retire and the internet generation – Gen X and Gen Y people – becomes the dominant generations in the working world, the expectations of leaders will change. The servant leader, who is their to provide resources and support for their followers so that they are liberated to make things happen will replace the leader who tells their staff what to to and expects them to obey. Dialogue, questioning, listening and hearing will be key skills for future leaders who will be required to motivate their followers by being authentic, being alongside them and being there for them as well as holding the flag, raising the bar, setting the direction and calling followers forth to better future.

The demand for coaching skills for managers that has emerged over the last few years is testimony of this change, as is the rise of emotional intelligence. Leaders need the skills to engage with their followers not just be more intelligent, more experienced, more focused or more driven.

My friend Libby raised a great question with me this week. If we all follow our passions and do what we love, who’s going to clean the toilets?

In my coaching work, I’ve worked with clients who love doing professionally what I hate – for example: cleaning windows and working with IT. My take on this is that following our passion is the Universe’s way of making sure we all make a skilled and enthusiastic contribution to the world and each other’s lives.

This might seem idealistic to many but often the fine line between doing what we love and not doing what we love, is the choice to do exactly that and to live with the consequences.

I was having coffee this week with a guy who is one of the directors of a social marketing company in Brighton. He and his fellow co-founder have set up really democratic processes in their company such as everyone knowing what everyone else earns. It’s straight forward stuff but surprisingly radical and rare to find. They got the idea from a book called Maverick! by Ricardo Semler when they were setting the company up in 2002.

As we were talking I mentioned a team coaching model that I am using at the moment which is based on the premise of “deep democracy”, meaning that for a team to function properly all the voices in the team need to be heard.

It occurred to me how bizarre it is that structures where everyone gets to be heard and to know what is going on is consider cutting-edge, risky or just plain weird.

In her fantastic book, Fierce Conversations Susan Scott makes the point that organisations tend to avoid soliciting the views of staff, of having real, honest, direct and “fierce” conversations. It’s easy to think that turning a deaf ear means opinions will evaporate. But as anyone who has gathered around a water cooler or collected in a company kitchen will know, the truth about what’s going on in the organisation is expressed all the time. She makes the distinction between “official truth” and what’s really being said: “ground truth”

Wouldn’t it be better to open up discussion and allow differing opinions to be heard? What’s to fear if the conversations are happening covertly anyway.?

I once overheard someone say to a colleague: “I can’t be seen to be going on leadership training. My team might think I don’t know how to lead.” How hilarious is that? This person thought that his team wouldn’t have noticed he couldn’t lead effectively! It’s the elephant in the middle of the room syndrome.

So I guess the message behind today’s ramble is – don’t ignore other people’s opinions – your staff, customers or other stakeholders. They aren’t going away and they could just give you insights and perspectives that will actually help you!

Resources:

The social marketing agency is Nixon McInnes: www.nixonmcinnes.co.uk

Fierce Conversations – achieving success in work and in life, one conversation at a time and Maverick! are both available from www.amazon.co.uk.

I got a call from the Mail on Sunday today to ask me to comment on a recent survey that reported that 63% of women would prefer a male boss to a female boss.

My first thought was that there are loads of great women bosses out there. But it quickly occurred to me that the response may not have anything to do with whether women make good bosses or not.

Despite the enormous strides that women have made in the workplace in recent decades, women bosses are a new psychological phenomenon in the 200,000 years that “modern” human beings have walked the Earth. Old habits die hard and maybe women’s own attitudes to women leaders are no easier to break than giving up smoking or losing weight.

But this is pure conjecture. If you’re a woman leader reading this post, let me and others know what you think! We could open a fascinating discussion on this.

In the last few days a number of things have come together for me which have caused a surge in clarity and confidence about what I want to be doing and achieving. It’s taken a while – several years in fact – to come to this place but it was a necessary journey.

Brian Adams, author of “How to succeed” says “Learn the art of patience. Impatience breeds anxiety, fear, discouragement and failure. Patience creates confidence, decisiveness, and a rational outlook which eventually leads to success.”
While an action-oriented approach in a leader is often praised, few leaders get recognition for patience. Yet, waiting for the right time, for things to slot into place, for when your intuition says “go” is an art which many leaders would do well to bear in mind. Impatience is like taking random pot shots whereas patience is about watching, waiting and then firing once but hitting the target decisively.

It’s a fine balance of course. Too much patience and the target may have moved by the time you are ready to aim for it.

I love taking online personality profiles that give me information about myself. They help me fill the blindspot (the things about myself that I can’t see) and give me a great sense of who I am as a person and as a leader. (Resource: if you are familiar with Johari’s Window you may know about the blindspot. If not, take a look at http://www.businessballs.com/johariwindowmodel.htm where you’ll find a great diagram.)

Anyway, I took a profile that my friend Michele recommended over a glass of wine on Saturday night. So, me, my partner and my brother got the laptops out and took the profile. My brother came out as an Animated Leader. The animated piece really resonated with him and he could also see the leader element which he had not realised before.

When I got my results I had a spooky coincidence. I came out as a “benevolent creator”. This isn’t that far off “compassionate revolutionary” which has been given to me as a tag in the past. The spooky part is that the photo of the green shoots at the top of this blog, which I selected over a month ago, is called “benevolence”!

The only thing that I am not so keen on about the profile is that it doesn’t give an explanation of how the profile is developed. As a trained Myers Briggs facilitator, where the source of the profile is quite clear, I am curious about how they come up with the results. Whatever, it’s free, thought-provoking and pretty accurate from what I can tell.

You can find the profile at www.personaldna.com. Let me know if you get a good result!

Trevor

I’ve been having a few weeks of reading lots of new leadership literature while I develop a new leadership programme. I am an advocate of the current school of thinking that there is no ideal set of traits a leader should have but that the important thing is to be authentic, know yourself and bring your strengths to the fore.

However, I came across some work last week by Patricia Pitcher from 1994 which was the culmination of 8 years factor-based research into leadership traits. She describes three types of leader: artist, craftsman and technocrat. While a flexible leader needs to be able to access all types at various times, we all have a natural preference.

Anyway, my insight was that I tend towards “craftsman” which is about solidifying and building on existing success but at many times, especially when developing business for my company, some of the artist traits would benefit me too – such as voicing passion and being daring. So, I’m going to focus on communicating my underdeniably strong vision with more conscious (but still natural) passion. Oh and to take a few more risks.

Here’s a quick summary of the types. When I’m in a work-delivery mode I tend to be the craftsman and when I’m dreaming and visioning I’m more of the artist. Need to work on bringing the two together as they are both naturally me – though the technocrat most certainly isn’t!

Artists – imaginative, inspiring, visionary, entrepreneurial, intuitive, daring, emotional. Tends to BUILD.

Craftsman – well-balanced, steady, reasonable, sensible, predictable, trustworthy. Tends to SOLIDIFY.

Technocrat – cerebral, detail-oriented, fastidious, uncompromising, hard-headed. Tends to focus on UGLY JOBS such as downsizing.

Trevor

I’m blogging because it’s fun to think and write about things that interest me. It’s engaging, keeps me fresh and also causes me to find out more about things in my field of knowledge.

I’m really getting into the idea of the blog being about connection and sharing views and ideas with people. It feels good to connect with other people – whether we meet or not, whether we agree or not. Somehow, connection makes the world seem like a more human, humane and enjoyable place to be.

I want to blog about leadership because good leaders are hard to find and often not appreciated. If you’ve had a bad boss you will know the impact leadership can have – both negative as well as positive.

It would be great if people began to admire rather than criticise those in leadership positions, but also for people who have the responsibility to lead to realise that they do it at the service of others, to unlock energy, creativity and potential rather than use it as a platform for egotism or oppression.

Another positive outcome I hope will arise from the blog is for people to realise that there is no one proscriptive way of leading, that we all have leadership potential but we need to bring our own style and qualities to leadership and we are more naturally atuned to some situations for leading than others.