Personal development and it's relationship to truth and leadership-A form of sublime alignment

Date:   7/16/2005 8:48:49 AM ( 19 y ago)

Leaders: Born or Made?
Paul Gibbons

“To speak ex tempore would have been out of the question for me. I had therefore written down my speech. I stood up to read it, but could not. My vision became blurred and I trembled, though the speech hardly covered a sheet of foolscap. [I had it read for me.] I was ashamed of myself and sad at heart for my incapacity.”

Would this unable speaker make it through an assessment centre to find potential leaders?

This was MK Gandhi, a man who one day later would become the leader of an entire nation and an entire movement. Gandhi’s own accounts, in “My Experiments with the Truth,” suggest that this bookish, painfully shy, and diminutive man didn’t have the “right stuff” of leadership: charisma, presence, and vision.

Yet Gandhi developed the “right stuff” over the years through painstaking analysis and personal development. He was hungry, seeking self-insight, self-perspective, and self-awareness and constantly making improvements where he saw himself coming up short.

Can leadership be developed in anyone? Perhaps not, but in our work, we have been continually astonished by the capacity for leadership to be found in “ordinary” people: people who weren’t dealt great hands in terms of circumstance, intellect or charisma.

Most HR professionals don’t have to worry about this. By the time someone joins a blue-chip company, there has been a sifting of abilities. They are all able intellectually, driven to succeed, and accomplished socially. More frequently the problem is helping such people learn of their limitations – helping them develop a sense of humility so that they may once again become learners.

To take a contemporary example, Frank, 40, is a Director of an investment bank. In a good year, he makes seven figures and is widely respected by his peers and the marketplace. But Frank had stopped growing.

He has an affable personality, but one that avoids conflict; he has excellent ideas, but speaks about them in a somewhat nerdy, uninspiring way; he used to be very driven financially, but that age and wealth have slaked that thirst; he used to have a fit, vital presence, but now his slight “spread” slows him down; he is very self-sufficient, but now a bigger cross-functional role means he has to “play well with others”.

Frank is one of the super-competent actors who aren’t going anywhere. He has plateaued; he is out of his depth in his new role, and not as hungry and inspiring to clients as he used to be. Given time he will be found-out and culled at great cost to his organization (the missed opportunity and the real cost of moving him on).

Larry Bossidy, a top US CEO and former number 2 to Jack Welch said it admirably: “I can only change this organization as quickly as I can change myself.” Put another way, the limit to growth of most organizations is the speed at which its leaders can learn, grow and adapt.

By the time we meet most leaders they have stopped learning. They are accomplished at “knowing the answer”, “saying the right things”: they cover up ambiguity, anxiety and frustration with “corporate speak”. Their very success has become the enemy of future success.

So how do you get leaders off the plateau and get them growing personally?

In our view such a programme must have the following characteristics:

Holistic. The effectiveness of an individual is a function of not just thinking, but of emotions and moods, purpose and values, and their body. Top programmes get to grips with all of these levels.
Deep. By the time an individual is 40 aspects of their character will have begun to ossify. In areas such as conflict, speaking inspirationally, and working on teams the habits and predispositions will have started to form when they are very young.
Long. Changes such as those Frank needs to make don’t happen during a two-day offsite. Frank will need new habits and new practices and will need support to keep making difficult personal changes.
Blended learning. A fashionable word meaning (in this instance) a combination of team-based learning, coaching, offsite sessions, reading, and new personal practices.
Results-oriented. No organization or executive of today will commit anything like enough time unless the prize is very real. Programme participants need clear performance and financial targets, which they will realize with the programme’s support.
Some firms such as KPMG, IBM, Barclays and CapitalOne have begun to take on programmes such as this, but they are still rare. The approach detailed above is still controversial and leading edge. But the approach is paying off for those taking on the challenge. One KPMG Director said: “I can see walking the halls who has been on the programme and who hasn’t by the way they carry themselves, by how motivated they look and how impactfully they communicate.” Julie Baddeley, former board member at the Woolwich (now Barclays), said, “This has been the most successful leadership and culture change programme I have ever been involved with.”

When tightly linked to results, such programmes can be said to pay for themselves. KPMG recently won a critical big deal by a wafer-thin margin. The client’s feedback? KPMG had more presence, more charisma, and more impact.

The dark side to all of this is that these bigger, deeper, longer programmes present many challenges to organizations that they are not used to facing. Some are:

“Enemies of learning.” People earning big six and seven figure sums are extraordinarily successful by this measure. To achieve this success “knowing” and “sureness” have been instrumental. In a personal development programme, these assets become fatal liabilities. “I already know this”, or “this is obvious” become barriers to self-insight and personal change. Here it is not about what you know, but what you can do consistently and while under pressure and these are two different things.
Making time. In a hurry-up culture, reflection, new personal practices, study, and implementation of new ideas can get shunted aside for comfortable, familiar (even less effective) ways of working. In the battle between urgency and importance, importance usually comes second.
Personal ambition. Plateaued executives (particularly those with big incomes) often rationalize their lack of upward progress by scaling down their drive and ambition. In a taxing leadership programme, some ambition is necessary to provide the energy for challenging personal changes. They need a stake worth playing for personally to keep them in the game.
Sloppy performance management. Personal goal setting is vital, but most organizations have some weakness in this domain. It can be linking personal goals to strategy and client targeting; it can be soft line management support for those goals; it can be lack of participant excitement and commitment to those goals; and it can be lack of good measurements systems and clear accountability.
None of these factors is insurmountable, but all require a very resolute and committed sponsor at CEO level. This requires different leadership from the CEO for leading personal development means they have to get “in people’s faces” to a much greater extent than normal. This can be done with compassion and commitment, but without it most executives (and most people) would rather stay comfortable than take on big personal changes.

What is the prize for our CEO? Why should he or she bother? The plateau is insidious. It restricts the potential of his/ her top performers, it ultimately kills their motivation, and it creates “deadwood” and resentment from the hungrier performers below.

The plateau is a killer. As one Director put it: “the biggest thing I have got from all of this is my enthusiasm back. I put much more in, enjoy it much more and produce better results than before.”

Paul Gibbons is Managing Director of Future Considerations, a top leadership consultancy whose clients have included Cadbury, Barclays, British Airways, KPMG, PwC, and WestLB. He is author of “The Body of a Leader” and “Making the Leap: From Managing to Leading” which are available from http://www.futureconsiderations.com .



 

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