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by Andrew Jackson
Integrity is an essential quality of any good leader. The banking crisis brought to the foreground the importance of the right culture and acting with principle. One international investment bank leader kick-started culture change by telling all its employees he regretted profitable decisions made in the past that were not in the clients’ best interests, whatever the prize at the time.
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A frightening statistic is that more than 50% of mergers fail. Perhaps a more frightening statistic, less widely discussed, is that 50% of leaders fail. Of course, it’s harder to measure leadership failure or success unless it’s tied directly to company performance, such as long term growth in shareholder value with Jack Welch and GE. Or to obvious failure, such as Jeff Skilling and Enron.
Most M&As are a mixture of planning and chaos. Have you noticed, however, that those involved, looking back once the dust has settled, often forget the chaotic bits, and tell the story as if it all went according to plan in the end.
In reality, integration plans are constantly changed in order to take advantage of unforeseen opportunities or problems. Synergies which rely on people changing their behavior and ways of working often prove to be much harder than expected to realise in practice. And the challenge for leaders tackling M&As is that most of the synergies they need to bank
Empowerment, like communication, often stands as a proxy for what the organisation is unhappy about. Feedback and staff surveys scoring low on empowerment or communication are a serious matter for the business, because they point to disengagement in the workforce. And disengagement means people not giving their best efforts to achieve the aims of the business: bad news. But it’s only by digging beneath these findings that the business can discover what they actually mean, what’s really going on that is damaging performance and reducing the capability of the business to achieve results –and by understanding what’s going on,
I’ve witnessed many board level discussions about performance management systems – they all seem to focus on the technicalities, and to take place against an underlying belief that somehow a perfect cascade of objectives from strategic plan to lowliest employee will make for perfect corporate performance. And the debate then goes into the complex rules that attend theses systems, the rewards that get tacked onto them, and the rafts of performance indicators that are meant to give ever more objective measure of accountability.
Onora O’Neill’s Reith lectures (2002) on a ‘Question of Trust’ gave a
A client asked me this very good question in a discussion about leadership capability. You’ve talked about the risk for us as leaders of the organisation, he said, but what are the risks for you as leadership practitioners? What keeps you awake at night?
This is the answer I came up with:
Being spat out. If leaders don’t like what we have to offer, they are in the driving seat and they can simply reject it by disagreeing with it or devaluing it. That’s why we work so hard to tailor leadership work to the real needs of the business, and make
We hear a lot about the art of giving feedback, but less about the skills involved in receiving feedback. The way you respond when you perceive a critical message sends a powerful signal about what leaders care about. That makes it one of the most important factors that shape the culture – usually not something best done off the top of your head.
You can send a positive signal in response to even the most negative or clumsily-phrased message. I once saw a Chief Executive turn the mood of 500 people around just by the way he listened to and acknowledged
It’s one of the lesser joys of being an organisational consultant when the client hands you their latest strategy study. It’s invariably long and full of great analysis. All very clever stuff you are tempted to say, but does anyone really understand it? Most good strategy comes down to a few simple ideas which you can often express as simple ‘shifts’. These capture the essence of what is going to be different in the future, for example:
‘Moving from being a regional player to being a global player’
‘Moving from being a set of disconnected businesses to being one firm’
‘Moving from a
