This blog entry was originally published as an article in the November 2011 edition of the ACSeS magazine, "A Passion for Leadership & Going Beyond Austerity".

Iken Business is a growing technology company, so change is guaranteed on a continuing basis - and where there is change, there is a need for leadership. During 2010 I realised we had been focusing on management structures, with insufficient emphasis on leadership, so I took myself off on a leadership development course to better understand what I needed to do and, by extension, what the team also needed to do. Thus began a continuous journey and here are some of my reflections on that journey so far.

The first thing I learned was that it’s OK, and indeed necessary to performance, to recruit and appraise on behaviours as well as on skills and experience. You can have the most highly skilled person in the world, but if their behaviours are inconsistent with the culture it’s likely to be hard work for everyone concerned.

I have always worried if people feel uncomfortable and my first instinct is to try to remove the discomfort, especially if it’s caused by something I am responsible for. Parenthood can be a good training ground for business leadership on some levels, but the analogy must not be taken too far. It was eye-opening to learn that discomfort is a necessary part of the change lifecycle and that the answer is to support people through that discomfort rather than strive to remove it. Later on in the cycle people come through the discomfort with renewed energy. This is counter intuitive on some levels, but I have seen that it works.

I learned that management is not the same as leadership, and that indeed management structures can sometimes get in the way of less experienced people developing their own leadership skills. So we flattened the structure of the business and adopted the mantra “Everyone is a leader at some level”, which has come to pass. Every person is now expected to evidence their leadership in their sphere of operation. One of our core values is helping people be the best they can be in their workplace and the raison d’etre of our team is to help Iken clients achieve that, as well as individuals achieving it for themselves within Iken Business. It has been a joy to see junior staff grow and develop their own leadership skills within this context.

I have always maintained that confident effective leaders are happy to engage people that can do things they are not good at themselves. As a leader it is important to recruit people who might challenge your thinking and to respect their views. Arguably the worst thing you can do as a leader is surround yourself by clones of you. You have to make sure that your team also feels comfortable with this approach. Fresh blood and fresh ideas, experience brought from other places, are all essential ingredients of change. Be not afraid, but be true to yourself also.

The concept of ‘situational leadership’ was a revelation. This relates management and leadership styles to people and tasks in two dimensions. If a person is highly experienced and skilled in a task but uncertain as to how to proceed in a specific circumstance then they need direction; but if they are not highly experienced they need support. In another dimension, if they are highly motivated and confident they need direction, but if they lack confidence they need support. Thus a person who is highly skilled and confident needs direction in both dimensions.

At the other end of the spectrum is a person who is neither experienced nor confident and they need support in both dimensions. If the right management approach is not adopted in relation to each task and person in that task, then a great deal of frustration and wasted time can result.

Leading on from this is the concept of four levels within a ‘behaviours hierarchy’ starting with Dependency (a person who needs to check in all the time); Counter Dependency (a person who works against the culture, doesn’t see the need, tries to get others to agree with them etc); Independence (where a person works well within their own limited sphere); to Interdependence (a person who can work independently and as a team player within the larger context).

People in high performing companies tend to gravitate towards Interdependent behaviour. Once this is clearly understood people can be engaged in assessing their own place in the behaviours hierarchy, and can take some ownership of their own journey to interdependence within a performance plan.

When you lead a business you do need to be challenged by peers as well as from within the organisation and for this reason, about a year ago, I joined the Executive Foundation. The purpose of the organisation is to grow world class leaders of world class organisations. About 10 of us meet monthly: we hear a high class business speaker in the morning, and bring issues to the ‘Ideal Board’ in the afternoon, of which two are selected for in depth review.

It’s a confidential place where business leaders can be frank with each other and operate as an occasional Board of Directors in unlocking each others’ challenges. The shared intellectual capital in business development is invaluable. We make commitments to each other to take action and are accountable to the group. More information can be found at http://www.executive-foundation.com/.

Consultants are known to be expensive, but they do have their place. We use consultants for two main reasons: the first is to bring a fresh approach or know-how into the business, unlock a problem and act as a catalyst for change; the second is to provide a framework for a specific project in the business that somehow never seems to get done because other things are more pressing.

If a consultant is coming on an agreed date to review a specific milestone and that is being paid for, then the job gets done. The secret in managing consultants is to be clear about a very defined limited brief and not create situations where they become virtual permanent part time employees (unless there is a clear reason for that).

One of the very best talks I have attended at Executive Foundation was on ‘Values Led Leadership’. It was given by Richard Barrett who has written a book on the subject (“The New Leadership Paradigm” - more about Richard and his methods can be found at

http://www.valuescentre.com/richard_barrett/). Richard’s approach to evaluating and modelling values and culture is as applicable to measuring happiness and well being in communities and nations as it is to organisations, and I am fascinated by its potential beyond business as well as the opportunities it affords to identify limiting factors (cultural entropy) and action plans to remedy these.

As a consequence of this learning we have embarked on a review of our core company values, our vision and our branding. I can report no further at this stage because it is very much ‘work in progress’, but suffice it to say that the project has enhanced team spirit in the company and injected energy, creativity and enthusiasm. I have found that asking those all-important fundamental questions like “Why are we here?” and “What is our higher purpose?” is as key to healthy organisations as it is to individuals.

Which brings me back to a core value: “to help people be the best they can be”. Employees travel with organisations for a time, be that long or short. They either grow within the organisation, or they may need to move on to further their own self actualisation goals. Good leaders recognise this and are unafraid of conversations around the issue of whether a person needs to move on in order to develop further. After all, if we have helped a person grow in their life’s journey then we have succeeded in terms of our own values too, and being authentic to the organisation’s core values is the essence of leadership.