The vital leader by Maynard Leigh

THE VITAL LEADER Sustainable leadership for the 21st Century

By Andrew Leigh and Michael Maynard

Table of Contents ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS INTRODUCTION VITAL CONTEXT - LEADING IN THE 21ST CENTURY  Major trends  Who needs leaders?  Leadership is relational  Leadership starts here! THE VITAL STORY  Summary

Foundations CHAPTER 1: INDIVIDUALITY  The Genius Syndrome  The Charisma Myth  The Source of Individuality - Being Yourself - Personal Experience - Your World View - Personal Style - Personal values  Integrity - Integrity Barometer - Taking a Stand  Networking  Summary & Ideas for Action CHAPTER 2: INSIGHT  Self Awareness - Personal enquiry - Internal cast  Understanding other people  Seeing what’s going on - Curiosity - Foresight - Insight is seeing, not magic  Summary & Ideas for Action

Core Capabilities CHAPTER 3: INITIATE  Accept responsibility - Volunteer - Participate - Be accountable - Take centre stage  Research

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Take risks - Step out of your comfort zone - Be assertive - Handle reverses Instigate direct action Follow-through Summary & Ideas for Action

CHAPTER 4: INVOLVE  Intensity of Involvement  Participation and Enrolment  Why Engage?  How to Engage - Being Valued - Being Involved - Being Developed - Being Inspired  Meetings  Empowerment  Coaching  Give People a Voice  Summary & Ideas for Action CHAPTER 5: INSPIRE  How to Inspire - The Why? - Source - Passion  Vision  Communicate - Conversation - Story-telling  Trust  Challenging goals  Summary & Ideas for Action CHAPTER 6: IMPROVISE  The Drive for Improvisation  The Principles of Improvisation  Creativity - Innovate - A try-it environment - Problem solve - Value Ideas - Encourage play  Flexibility  Presence - Physical presence - Psychological presence  Summary & Ideas for Action CHAPTER 7: IMPLEMENT  Be action-minded

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- Paralysis of analysis - Setting Goals - SMART goals - Monitoring progress - Ask for help Model Behaviour Seek Feedback - Personal feedback - Organisational feedback Persist Spot success Well-being Summary & Ideas for Action

CHAPTER 8: THE VITAL ENDING OVERVIEW APPENDIX: ARE YOU A VITAL LEADER?  Check your leadership profile. RECOMMENDED READING

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This book strongly argues that leadership is about relationship. And so is the process of writing. We are deeply grateful to our wives, Gillian and Carol, for their encouragement and willingness to sustain our relationships, especially when we are entrenched in meeting deadlines. We also owe a huge debt to all the people at Maynard Leigh Associates â&#x20AC;&#x201C; they allow us to practise and develop our own leadership on a daily basis. And the workshop leaders, coaches and consultants there have all helped us deepen our understanding of the seven leadership skills highlighted in this book and their practical application in the workplace. Getting anything done, without these relationships, would be impossible.

Andrew Leigh & Michael Maynard

ÂŠ Andrew Leigh and Michael Maynard of

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THE VITAL LEADER by Andrew Leigh and Michael Maynard

INTRODUCTION The world is full of leaders. They are everywhere, yet we are manifestly short of leadership. There is mounting evidence of far too many people at work feeling alienated, disengaged and spiritually unrewarded by their work environment. It is morally repugnant, highly wasteful and expensive. It therefore seems fair to talk of a crisis of leadership, particularly in large organisations. Why? While leaders seem to be everywhere, a dispiritingly small number come across as genuine and highly capable. Far too many have been compromised, deposed, or defeated.i Even more lack ideas, or appear unable to build the necessary bridges to lead in a world of increasing diversity. It is hardly surprising therefore, that the more we experience the shortage of genuine leaders, the more it dominates the media, takes up corporate agendas and is the subject of think tank papers, conferences and countless other forms of communication. Our starting point here though, is not the shortage of leaders, important though that may be. What is far more significant is the universal hunger for humanity, meaning and vitality in the work place. Their widespread absence helps explain the poor performance of many individuals and their organisations. It also speaks volumes for the failure of leadership. In our constantly changing world, leaders of all kinds are struggling to keep up. They may regularly change their cars, computers or mobile phones. Yet often they seem far less ready to adjust their style to reflect the changing expectations of what it means to lead. Too many for example, still yearn for the comfort of hierarchy and the reassurance of familiar command and control - “I tell you what to do and you do it.”

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The quality of leadership therefore continues to be a concern. Business students for example, learn almost nothing about how to manage a high-engagement organisation. Yet this will clearly be critical for organisational, let alone personal success, in the coming years. Asked what firms must do to succeed in the future, numerous surveys of executives put leadership top of the list. Despite this, the investment in developing better leaders continues to miss the desired impact. ii The Vital Leader does more than paint a broad brush picture of successful leadership in the 21st Century. It presents the essential components of such leadership. If you are a leader or want to be one, it can help you get to grips with becoming effective and sustainable. No one knows for certain all these requirements, until after the event. We claim no exceptional powers of prediction. However, in working with thousands of leaders on their development over several decades, we conclude even the most successful ones need a new approach and a revised skill set. To arrive at such an approach, we cannot merely extrapolate from the past. Merely looking at previously successful teams, departments or organisations today, tells us only a little about what will be needed from tomorrow’s leaders. Relying on what previously made leaders succeed will produce a limited and possibly misleading picture on which to base future choices. We’re facing a need for a new kind of leadership and we call it Vital. By Vital, we mean leadership that is both essential for organisations and in the alternative sense of being adaptable, vibrant, and energised. That is, people whose vision, inspiration, and powers of execution, promote humanity, meaning and vitality in the work place, and beyond. We identify two sorts of skill-sets for such leadership: Foundations describe people with strong Individuality and Insight. These, together with five other Capabilities, will be essential, regardless of geography, industry, type of business or organisation. The Vital Leader will be sustainable, with the skills to cope with the challenges of managing across both organisational boundaries and geographical borders. Such a leader will also have far less control than in the past. With the world in constant and rapid transition, “stuff” will keep happening. Faced with new technologies, demographic shifts, consumption trends and other social forces, leaders must manage uncertainty, and be adept at winning consensus. We are therefore attempting to change how people think and talk about leadership. It makes no sense to base future development of leaders on outdated and irrelevant assumptions. To survive and create new futures there must be leaps of faith. These need not occur blindly. Instead, we reflect here on some of the major forces already manifestly shaping organisations and others barely glimpsed over the horizon. Together, they offer important clues for what Vital Leadership means in practice. Why vital leadership? The case for Vital Leadership would hardly resonate if leadership in organisations was mainly working well. But it is patently not. The red warning lights are flashing all over the

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world about the failure of leaders to understand change and to manage it well. In a study of around 4000 executives into why senior leaders failed for example, the main reasons were: communication, interpersonal skills and execution. iii Few big firms, despite the inflated salaries of their top people, survive long-term. The best chief executives money can buy are regularly out-performed by newcomers and market forces. Meanwhile, almost regardless of geography, there are unacceptably low levels of staff engagement and trust, absenteeism, and lack of diversity. These in turn result in poor levels of innovation and creative thinking and weak individual performance. When the world’s leadership gurus gather to talk about their pet subject, ‘trust’ soon surfaces as a major cause of leadership failure. There is a good reason for this. A UK report in 2012 on widespread lack of trust in leaders and their organisations for example, ran to 100 pages of detailed facts and arguments. iv The Centre for Creative Leadership estimated that four out of five new CEOs lose the trust of their stakeholders and fail in the first 18 months.v In ambitious Indian companies for instance, the pace of CEO turnover provides a benchmark and is unnerving. The average tenure of MDs in the technology and consumer sectors for instance, has dropped to a mere one to three years - hardly time to know where all the exits are. vi The demise of CEOs may attract little sympathy. Yet we should be concerned about the waste of talent. Not only are some perfectly competent executives stumbling at the final hurdle, others are positively dysfunctional. Many even cause serious damage to their respective organisations. When a Time Warner CEO lost his job in 2011 after only five months, the company diplomatically explained his “leadership style and approach did not mesh with the company’s”vii This was company speak for “this person was doing us more harm than good.” Astute organisations increasingly realise that if they simply do what they have always done in developing their leaders, they will only get more of the same. Yet more of the same is almost certainly not what most 21 st Century organisations will need. For example, they will require people who can make sense of ever-increasing complexity and who can live comfortably with uncertainty, ambiguity and disruption. They will also need to manage risk with courage and confidence. These were far less important in the previous century when it came to selecting sustainable leaders for the future. “The tragedy of life is that we understand it backwards - but we have to live it forwards” Kierkergard, Danish philosopher

If you are already a leader or want to be one, the Vital Leader is for you. Equally important, we want to connect with those of you who spend a significant portion of your time on talent management. You are the unsung heroes, the professionals who often fight an uphill battle to persuade your organisations to invest in leadership development that looks different to how it looked previously. In this book you will come face-to-face with the factors that make a difference in shaping leadership development, and by implication how to turn these into

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practical action. While you may not agree with everything we present here, at least it’s a starting point for deciding what you do need to do in this area. From reading this book, you will gain a clearer view on what it will take to produce a leader for the 21st Century, and how to be a sustainable one. It is not a cook book with a sure-fire recipe for how to lead. It is more a route map towards inventing your own solution. Follow it and you are likely to be around longer than many unfortunate colleagues who remain stuck with increasingly outmoded leadership behaviours. We offer you processes, stories, case studies and examples to help clarify what it means to be a vital leader. The rate of change and increasing uncertainty means it is impossible to lay down the exact nature of the new style of vital leadership. The full profile of this kind of leader has yet to fully emerge into the daylight, based on long term success in the role. So rather than looking for the elusive exemplars of perfection, we point to examples of Vital Leadership behaviour in action. In using this book therefore, you do not need to read it like a novel. Instead, you will find some sections more directly applicable to your particular leadership situation than others. Equally important, the approach we are advocating provides a fresh language for talking about leadership and communicating with others about its key elements. Why Us? What if anything makes us qualified to talk about what it will take to lead effectively into the future. Why do we argue so strongly for it in determining how to achieve sustainable leadership in the 21st Century? First, for over two decades we have been helping organisations develop their leaders. So the subject of unlocking leadership potential has dominated our radar. For example, to develop both their existing and future leaders our company, Maynard Leigh Associates, continues to work with a wide variety of national and global organisations. Along the way we have witnessed numerous valiant attempts to develop new leadership behaviour. Many have failed or lacked sustainability. This book incorporates lessons drawn from what we have seen, and from our practical experience of generating actual sustained behavioural change. Secondly, our view of affecting leadership behaviour reflects our pioneering use of theatre ideas in business. Once, this approach seemed fanciful. Yet many leadership development programmes now include ideas we introduced in the late 1980s. As anyone who studies leaders soon realises, successful ones rely heavily on techniques and methods that indeed make them “performers” in every sense of the word. Whatever else changes about the leadership role in the coming years, we remain convinced that the successful ones will continue to need this performance capability. Finally, for nearly a quarter of a century we have jointly led our own company through some tough and troubled commercial times. Like steel tempered in a furnace, this experience has tested us both individually and as an organisation. Frankly, we know from personal experience just how tough it is to lead. We continue to evolve our own view of what it will take to succeed as a 21st Century leader. The Vital Leader is very much work in progress.

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VITAL CONTEXT LEADERSHIP IN THE 21

CENTURY

That astute observer of leadership Warren Bennis argued that to make sense of leadership we must consider both the leader as a person, and the context in which they operate. Most of this book deals with the person aspect, and the capabilities they need to be effective. Nevertheless, we must make sure these are seen in a context. This is the environment in which anyone who leads will be working. We can only talk of the Vital Leader while also considering the need for Vital Organisations. Almost before our eyes, organisational capabilities and the context in which they operate keep changing. New notions about what a successful 21st century organisation might look like are constantly emerging. Yet, wherever you are as a leader you must respond to key trends, often mega ones. Any one of these may have important implications for individual leadership. For instance, we expect the boundaries between work and personal activities to become increasingly blurred over the next decade. The assumed norm is being 24/7 mobile, with high levels of connectivity. This alone has huge implications for anyone attempting to lead. It includes the need to adopt flexible, agile working and flatter hierarchies to allow the pace of change of accelerate. We expect yet more virtual work communities, often operating out of different countries. Such trends pose new conflicts and questions about where power lies within your own organisation. It raises issues such as how to harness technology to involve and engage people. These matters were slowly surfacing towards the end of the 20th Century. They are now making themselves felt in many quarters. As a leader or developer, you need to actively address them. An intellectual response is not enough. Somehow, awareness of all these factors must translate into how you, or those you develop, lead. If we compare the key characteristics of the 20th Century firm with those of the likely successful 21st Century firm, we see the following already emerging:

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HOW LEADERSHIP IS CHANGING 20th Century firm Vertically integrated Top-down leadership Build the ultimate product Gain efficiency Hoard information/build IP Experts Lone hero Security Push to change Goal centric Risk aversive Build systems Get everything clear Be sure Seek simplicity Ignore pessimists Big bang solutions Leveraging size Technology aware Demographically aware Networking Instructing

21st Century firm Horizontally networked Distributed responsibility Continuous improvement Scale learning Share information Learning new skills High performance teams Transparency Pull towards change Talent centric Risk tolerant Build relationships Good enough vision Paradox Accept complexity Shadow side Link simple systems Leveraging learning Technology pervasive Diversity rules Connected Collaborating

Source: Expanded from Leveraging the Talent-Driven Organization, Richard Adler Rapporteur The Aspen Institute, 2010, reproduced by permission

The likely characteristics of a 21st century firm were suggested by the Aspen Institute during its first decade. Already we can no longer view an organisation as a machine, as happened in the past century. The machine metaphor meant executives relied almost exclusively on explicit knowledge as a sure guide to action - facts, metrics, objective analysis, formal planning and so on. Now firms are understood better if treated as living and breathing organisms - unpredictable and multifaceted. To lead them, explicit knowledge is not enough. Taken as a whole, these characteristics amount to what some scientists call: Complex Adaptive Systems. Examples of these are often drawn from nature or biology and include cities, rivers, insect, animal or bird populations, family units and so on. What they have in common is they are hard to understand, are often unpredictable and subject to constant change and adaptation. Modern organisations are therefore more akin to flocks of geese than machines. The lead bird constantly changes, to be replaced by another and another. In an organisation this is sometimes called “distributed leadership”, where just about anyone with the talent and drive can at least temporarily play an important leadership role. The Vital Leader is therefore someone who may come from anywhere in the organisation, emerging, perhaps only temporarily, in response to the ever-altering landscape.

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Major trends At least five mega forces are transforming what past leaders once took for granted about the nature of work: viii     

Accelerating globalisation Technology Demography Societal changes Climate change and shift to a low carbon economy.

These are long-term transformations on a world-wide scale. Consequently successful organisations will be those able to ride the waves of these forces, turning them to their advantage. In doing so, many will radically adapt their cultures, structures, systems and processes to survive the new work environment. Above all they will need a new form of leadership. For example, in future successful organisations, diversity of ideas and sources of information will allow just about anyone to potentially emerge from almost anywhere to provide some kind of leadership. It may be temporary but it will also be irrespective of job title. This contrasts strongly with the 20 th Century tradition, where only a few people were seen as able to lead. Instead, power will be more evenly distributed, with less reliance on a single allpowerful top gun. To lead in such an environment you can no longer expect to command and give direction by relying on a highly centralised, obedient, hierarchical bureaucracy. Instead, success will depend on winning consensus across diverse interests, forming ever-changing alliances, networking, and working through collaboration. Rather than relying on authority to get things done, the vital leader will depend on an ability to stay connected. Leadership will increasingly be ineffective if restricted to few at the top of the organisation. For example, increasingly we can expect to see talent-driven organisations in which vital leadership surfaces to help assist with creativity, handle transitions, turbulence, and the need for both individuals and the enterprise to constantly adapt. Later these ‘temporary’ leaders may simply return to their previous non-leadership roles. To make a positive contribution in such a personally challenging environment, you will need to rely on two Fundamental aspects of leadership: your individuality and your insight. Like a talented stage director, you will be conjuring up the equivalent of a three act play, without a script and relying entirely on the abilities of an often sceptical and sometimes changing cast of actors. Who needs leaders? Logical steps and so-called rational thinking make sense mainly in a stable context. The context for leaders of the 21st Century though will be anything but steady. Constant

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uncertainty will hardly suit everyone aspiring to lead. For example, relying on techniques and plans to guide your thinking and behaviour will not be entirely sensible. Of course there will always be some stable areas, such as, health and safety, regulation, execution or logistics. Here there can still be continued reliance on past practices and proven methods for such circumstances. All organisations need boundaries and due diligence - it’s not a free-for-all. But these areas are likely to diminish in importance and vital leaders must grapple with the implications of a more dynamic context. It’s a crazy world of irrationality and paradox, a source of both destructiveness and creativity. In this perplexing environment, you will be better off relying on values, collaboration and talent than the more familiar top down setting of goals. In this unstable, disruptive and ever changing context, new forms of leadership may spring from anywhere to help define and pursue goals. These new-style leaders come forward because they can add value to the situation irrespective of title or position. This may send shivers down the spine of traditionalists. Yet, if a leader is not adding value, then they have no place in a vital organisation. And there are already many organisations that function almost entirely without the standard authoritarian leader. A challenging, yet slowly emerging idea that may yet take hold during the Century is leaderless or “peer-based organisations”. ix These shun hierarchies. In a connected, network-based society, new ways of organising like this need to emerge. The old idea that only a few gifted individuals can make important decisions around strategy, tactics and operations, are being strongly questioned. In the world of music, for example, leaderless orchestras are well-known, despite the importance attached to conductors, Orpheus, an orchestra with no conductor is an annual fixture at Carnegie Hall. It has won numerous awards, without ever having an onstage boss. And many theatre and dance ensembles work perfectly well without a conventional director. “I used to think that running an organization was equivalent to conducting a symphony orchestra. But I don't think that's quite it; it's more like jazz. There is more improvisation.” Warren Bennis

A temporarily ‘leaderless’ Morrison’s, the UK supermarket group, showed it was doing fine with no CEO in place in early 2010. The company unveiled a bumper set of Christmas sales figures. Similarly in Morning Star, a leading US food processor, nobody gives orders and nobody takes them, yet it had over $700 million revenue in 2010. No one there has a boss, employees negotiate responsibilities with their peers, there are no titles and no promotions, compensation decisions are peer based. Sounds mad? Maybe, but it’s the world’s largest tomato processor. With no apparent leaders or managers, except its president Chris Rufer, the company runs three large plants and a trucking company moving over two million tons of the fruit a year. Morning Star has literally killed off hierarchies. Those who lead tend to emerge, not because of their title or track-record, but because they add value in a given situation.

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Despite exorbitant pay rates too many leaders in lots of organisations simply do not add sufficient value, which may partly explain the rising failure rates of CEOs. In companies like Morning Star there is no tolerance for complacent, narcissistic and exclusive leaders, freeloading in the executive facilities of the ‘C’ suite. Such an approach demands talent: vital capabilities that contribute to success. x Our present view of vital leadership stems mainly from practical encounters with those who already seem to bring humanity, vitality and meaning to the workplace and produce exceptional results. Please let go of the out-dated idea that you have to be “born to lead.” In fact, leaders are made all the time-- through experience, by practising leadership, by development efforts of sustainable organisations who value this new approach.

Vital means Vital In this new world leaders may not always be indispensable. So how do you stay sustainable and continue to add value? Vital Leaders survive and thrive by embodying both definitions of the word ‘vital’ – that is, they are essential and spirited. So, they are not just vital to their organisation’s success. They are also vital in the sense of providing a vitality and energy that inspires and transforms - situations, people, opportunities and organisations. “Vital: Full of life or activity...essential to the existence of a thing or the matter in hand.” A Vital Leader is both essential to the organisation and someone who provides energy, inspiration, and meaning. By helping transform the work environment, the Vita Leader creates high levels of engagement and prompts discretionary effort which generates outstanding individual and corporate performance.

Despite their obvious personal power it is asking entirely too much of them to singlehandedly transform or rescue organisations. Particularly in a connected and diverse environment, there will be a need for others to exercise judgement and authority at all levels in the organisation. To rely on a single heroic leader merely perpetuates the crisis of leadership mentioned earlier. xi Leadership is Relational The task facing leaders in the 21st Century organisation is unprecedented. The job is becoming too demanding and complex for any one individual to accomplish it with just a few enthusiastic supporters. Knowing how to engage a wide variety of people will be critical. Therefore the Vital Leader will be something of an expert at relationships. This view of leading, in which relationship-building is an essential skill, is only starting to penetrate the majority of today’s organisations.xii But it will almost certainly be important in how future one in the 21st Century operate. In contrast, many organisations still rely heavily on task-oriented leaders which often results in people feeling secondary and not crucial to success.

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BEING A TASK-ORIENTED LEADER You care less about catering to employees, and are more concerned with finding technical, step-bystep solutions for meeting specific goals. You might ask "What steps can we take to meet our quarterly financial goals?" as opposed to asking "How can we build the kind of employee productivity that brings about success within the company?" BEING A RELATIONSHIP-ORIENTATED LEADER You understand the importance of tasks, but also place a tremendous amount of time and focus on meeting the needs of everyone involved in the assignment. This may involve:  Creating engagement  Finding ways to inspire  Providing incentives, like bonuses or new work opportunities  Being attentive to people’s needs or outside-work activities and interests  Mediating to deal with workplace conflicts  Spending individual time with employees to learn their strengths and weaknesses  Offering above-average financial compensation

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Leading in a personable or encouraging manner.

There are certainly benefits in both types of leadership. If you are a task-oriented leader for example, your focus will be highly logical and analytical. You will have a good grasp of how to get the job done using workplace procedures. This way you ensure everything is accomplished in a timely and productive manner. Similarly, there are benefits in being a relational-oriented Leader. For you, productivity is paramount in meeting goals and succeeding, whether in a business environment or otherwise. However, you also realise that what builds productivity is a positive environment where individuals do not feel unjustifiably driven. An essential aspect of being a Vital Leader is therefore the ability to create 

A powerful relationship between you and those you lead

Probably no leader is entirely one or the other: task driven or relationship driven. However, across the developed world we are witnessing a major shift in which relationships count far more than in the past. They are the key to making things happen and in achieving personal and organisational success. This involves:       

Using values to drive performance Creating engagement Inspiring people Networking Generating constant innovation Managing risk Feeling comfortable with paradox.

All these are undermining old style employer/employee relationships, which depend so heavily on power structures and hierarchies.

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Leadership as a relationship:    

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What is your leadership style? Do you know how to lead diverse teams over which you have only limited authority? Are you able to create a fertile ground for fresh thinking and new ideas? Can you win people’s loyalty, when perhaps the loudest unspoken question in the room is xiii “Why should anyone be led by you?” Is your approach inclusive--can you share ideas rather than selling or telling? It is no longer what you do but how you do it, who you affect--- letting both the mind and the heart guide your way Is what you are doing ethical?

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Do you follow a higher purpose?

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In the previous century, there was much attention on the pure mechanics of leading- “how do I get people to do what I want”. In the more demanding environment of the 21 st Century, this has become “how do I find common ground with people and build powerful relationships with them?” Previous personal experience alone does not guarantee success. There are a host of leaders with brilliant résumés and unquestionable track records who failed to adapt to changing circumstances Hugely experienced people sometimes lack relationship skills  Carly Fiorina, one of the most powerful women in corporate America, was forced out of the troubled computer maker by the company's board in 2005. Apart from not leading the company to renewed success, she created considerable internal tension and conflict.  Enron’s Jeffrey Skilling was unquestionably clever and creative. Yet his misdirected and unprincipled approach to business was not only criminal but morally repugnant. And he became ever more isolated as he went along.  When Jack Griffin, CEO of Time Inc., lost his job in 2011 after only five months, Time Warner explained his “leadership style and approach did not mesh with the company’s” Insiders called it a “polarizing management style” and "a good leader makes decisions that are xiv inclusive, inspiring, motivating. With Jack, it was a demoralized, estranged group of execs."

To sum up, sustainable leadership is likely to involve more emphasis on relationships than pure task. You could call this a “post-industrial model of leadership”, which is merely a handy way of reminding us to look afresh at what it will take to lead in the future. This is unlike the “me-centric” image we still tend to hold about leaders. Many of the most successful business leaders are surprisingly reluctant to talk about themselves. While seldom shrinking violets, they are more concerned with their relationship to others as a way of getting things done. Whilst dreaming up a compelling vision may be high on their agendas of many newly incumbent leaders, it is more likely that they will focus on the prosaic job of seeing what’s needed and then getting the right people around them. And nurturing the right sorts of relationships. Leadership Starts Here! Simple though it sounds, Vital leadership relies on a blend of personal behaviour, attitude and actions. Two Foundations on which Vital Leadership rests are Individuality and Insight:

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Individuality—being yourself, having a distinctive style, driven by values, demonstrating integrity, vitality and character.

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Insight—self awareness, understanding others and seeing the situation with clarity, often in new or unexpected ways

These two pillars of Vital Leadership are the building blocks supporting further action. No leader, in our view, will succeed in the coming years without also paying considerable attention to, five additional core capabilities. The skill to: 

Initiate, Involve, Inspire, Improvise, and Implement

Each of these begin with the letter I – which also reflects the personal and individual nature of leadership.

Together, the 7 I’s depict the personal development journey a Vital Leader must undertake to produce change. It starts with who you are - your individuality defines the areas that you are interested in. These will be affected by your values, cares and concerns. You also need Insight to see what’s needed around you. The two Foundations can certainly be nourished and enhanced, yet not prescribed. And the core capabilities are entirely learnable. You can become a Vital Leader and develop these skills with sufficient practice and commitment. In the rest of this book we will show what this means in practice. For example we suggest the Vital Leader will be excellent at execution, able to handle both strategic and tactical changes. Similarly, we suggest that part of being a

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Vital Leader requires the ability to inspire people and we suggest practical ways you can go about developing this important muscle. We can use the outlines of the likely characteristics of a successful 21st Century organisation to shed further light on what it will mean to be a Vital Leader. Nothing of course is forever, and the table below identifies likely organisational characteristics as we see them now. Although these may evolve differently in the coming years we know enough already to guide us in describing the emerging Vital Leader.

FUTURE ORGANISATION CHARACTERISTICS WILL DETERMINE WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A LEADER Leader Requirements FOUNDATIONS

Organisation Characteristics Horizontally networked Distributed responsibility Scale learning Share information Learning new skills High performance teams Transparency Pull towards change Talent centric Risk tolerant Build relationships Good enough vision Paradox Accept complexity Shadow side Link simple systems

CAPABILITIES INITIATE

               

        



INVOLVE

INSPIRE

               

               

IMPROVISE

               

IMPLEMENT

        



Inevitably there is something intensely personal about leadership. Essentially you will define your own style and approach. That’s what being a leader means - you break the mould and invent new forms that reflect you character. You must decide for yourself which aspects of being a leader you need to develop and which you are already good at. Feedback, coaching and other forms of personal development can all shed light on how your leadership needs to change and grow. In this book we offer guidance on what it will take to succeed in this role. But ultimately it is you - the ‘I’ of Leadership - who decides whether you will step into this new approach, and you who chooses to constantly invest in your personal growth and development.

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Few leaders get it right first time. Learning anything requires the willingness to experiment and get feedback. You learn to lead by constantly trying and sometimes failing. The legendary Steve Jobs may have built one of the world’s most successful companies, but he was also fired from Apple before he later returned in triumph and approached his leadership in a more informed and inclusive way. Whatever your dreams or aspirations, your personal leadership mission needs to uncover what works for you as a leader. Just because some other leader has found a way to make things happen does not mean it is also your way. Only through practice will you come to lead instinctively, and practice means being willing to risk failure and even rejection. “I believe we learn by practice. Whether it means to learn to dance by practising dancing, or to learn to live by practising living, the principles are the same.” Martha Graham, US dancer and teacher

TWITTER SUMMARY: The world is changing and approaches to leadership must keep up. It needs a new approach involving 7 essential capabilities. RECAP This opening section introduces the essential components of leadership in the 21 st Century. Global trends are altering expectations about what successful leaders must do to survive and thrive. In particular, leadership is more than ever in the person and the context. For example, the new style leaders must be able to live with continuing uncertainty, be good at building relationships and success will rely on the foundation of insight and individuality. There are five additional requirements which together add up to the 7I’s of leadership in the 21st Century.

See for example The Role of Tomorrow's Leaders, September 15, 2010, HBR Blog Network, also on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8WRz3CxafE also on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8WRz3CxafE ii

See for example: Leveraging Leadership Competencies to Produce Leadership Brand: Creating Distinctiveness by Focusing on Strategy and Results by Jim Intagliata, Dave Ulrich, Norm Smallwood in Human Resources Planning, Winter, 2000, Volume 23.4, pp. 12-23. iii

Why Leaders Fail, The NBO Group Ltd, 2003

Where Has All the Trust Gone? CIPD 01 Mar 2012

Almost Ready: How Leaders Move Up, by D Clamps Harvard Business Review January 2005

The Art and Science of Picking a New Leader, Andrew Hill, FT 25th October 2011

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Business Standard 21 April 2011

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See for example, The Myth of Leadership: Creating Leaderless Organizations, by Jeffrey S. Nielsen, Intercultural Press, 2004 ix

See for example, The Myth of Leadership: Creating Leaderless Organizations, by Jeffrey S. Nielsen, Intercultural Press, 2004 x

First Letâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Fire All the Managers, by Gary Hamel, Harvard Business Review, December 2011

See for example, Lessons From the Field: An essay on the Crisis of Leadership in Contemporary organisations, by James Krantz, Yale School of Organisation and Management, Journal of Applied Behavioral Science Vol. 26, No. 1, 1990 xii

Relational Leadership Theory: Exploring the social, processes of leadership and organizing by Mary Uhl-Bien, University of Nebraska-Lincoln 2006 xiii

Why Should Anyone Be Led By You? by Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones, Harvard Business School Press, 2006

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Time Inc. CEO Jack Griffin Ousted, by Jennifer Saba, Reuters, Fri Feb 18 2011

ÂŠ Andrew Leigh and Michael Maynard of

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