Category Archives: Leadership

Leadership, Management

The Upstream Grammar Beneath Leadership and Management

Something unsettling has been emerging in my work with leadership and management.

Not a criticism.
Not a new model.
A reclassification.

Perhaps leadership and management were never the upstream things we thought they were.
They are movements made by a person.
And the quality of those movements depends on the stance from which the person moves.

This changes everything.

For decades we’ve built increasingly elaborate competency frameworks —
separating leadership and management into different behaviours, different theories, different skill sets.

But what if that separation is downstream?

What if the upstream reality is simpler:

One person.
One stance.
Eight inner movements.
Eight outer movements.
Two domains of outer movement.

🌿 With

With is the stance where a person stays open and steady enough for things to move and still feel human.
It’s how someone stays grounded and connected, even when things change around them.

🌿 Stewardship

Stewardship is how a person looks after their inner steadiness so they can move through things in a way that stays human, even when things change around them.

🔵 Eight inner movements

How With moves inside the person:

• Open — keep the field permeable
• Include — keep the field whole
• Notice — keep the field undistorted
• Listen — keep the field relational
• Tend — keep the field responsive
• Steady — keep the field coherent
• Protect — keep the field breathable
• Hold — keep the field continuous

🟣 Eight outer movements

How With moves into the world —
the same eight verbs expressed outwardly:

• Open — create permeability in the shared field
• Include — keep the shared field whole
• Notice — keep the shared field undistorted
• Listen — keep the shared field relational
• Tend — keep the shared field responsive
• Steady — keep the shared field coherent
• Protect — keep the shared field breathable
• Hold — keep the shared field continuous

These movements are inner agility expressed outwardly.

🔧 Leadership

Movement with people
through the eight outer movements.

🛠️ Management

Movement with work
through the same eight outer movements.

—-

And this leads to the real question.

What if failure isn’t about technique at all, but about the stance we’re in when we try to move?

If that’s true, then we haven’t just found a new leadership idea.

We’ve found an upstream grammar beneath leadership and management.

One stance.
Eight inner movements.
Eight outer movements.
Two domains of outer movement.
With is the only stance. Everything else is movement.

Community Engagement, Leadership

The NHS belongs to the People

Last week I discovered a real and practical example of the first line of the NHS Constitution “The NHS belongs to the people”. It was in Shropshire!

A wonderful partnership of the Robert Jones and Agnes Hunt Orthopaedic Hospital and the League of Friends…

On the face of it, one might be forgiven for thinking, “How nice”, “How quaint”, “How old-fashioned”, and as soon as you enter the hospital, you are struck with exactly these sentiments. The community of Friends volunteers, in their pink polo-shirts are everywhere, providing the unsuspecting visitor with a nice and quaint welcome, with old-fashioned community values embedded into the entrance and all the way down the corridor!

On the left there are Friends at the Help Desk, and on the right the Friends Café serves very reasonably priced drinks and cake.

Wandering on, passing more smiling folks in pink polo-shirts, you discover the shop and the post-office, both run by the League of Friends.

…and that it apparently the tip of the iceberg. The Friends also provide services to patients including trolley services to the wards, the disabled swimming club, a spinal patient feeding scheme, veterans orthopaedic emotional support, patients’ library and flower arranging. In the wider community, the Friends have a network of fund-raising branches, based in the town and villages of Shropshire, Mid and North Wales (Bala, Chirk & Weston Rhyn, Corwen, Llanfair Caereinion, Llangollen, Ludlow, Newtown, Oswestry, Shrewsbury, Tanat Valley, Welshpool and Whitchurch).

If you ask as I did, “So what do the hospital-managed volunteers do?”, you will get a sort of blank/quizzical look that I got. After a bit of chatting, it transpired that the hospital had always had a strong sense of community ownership. The response to the fire of 1948, which destroyed or severely damaged half of the hospital, typified this, and within days, an appeal was launched by local newspaper publisher the Caxton Press, and due to massive public support, £45,000 was raised within a year (£2.3m in today’s money). It was these community fundraisers who came together to create the League of Friends, which was formed in the 1960s.

So the answer to my question is something like: “There aren’t any hospital-managed volunteers, the hospital has an agreement with the League of Friends to recruit and support all the volunteers”.

That’s sort of it really, somehow the community and the hospital have become one and the same. I’ve spoken to a few RHAJ patients since and they all say how welcome they feel the minute the set foot in the entrance. A wonderful example that demonstrates the NHS belongs to the people!

Btw, there’s currently a 10-year review of the NHS Constitution. Here’s hoping the first line remains front and centre!

Leadership

Leadership styles

Ideas happen in the most unlikely of places

There is this thing called the deliberation-without-attention affect, which can be translated as ‘having an idea on the loo!’

So, today’s hosting loo is in The King’s Fund. A splendid room of class and elegance – with marble floor and walls, lavish wallpaper, bespoke fittings, a chandelier and Classic FM enhancing the ambience for the grateful visitor.

However, today’s visit revealed a shocking situation. The doorstop had come loose and was the wrong way around! 😲

Further inspection shows unmistakable damage to the door. Where there should have just been a rubber marking, where the door opened onto the stopper, there was now paint missing and damage to the woodwork. 😥

This room has been serving staff and visitors for many years, but amidst the business of the day, the relationship between the door stop and the door was under strain.

Pacesetting and affiliative leadership

The damage to the door wasn’t intentional, it just happened whilst people were going about their busy day.

So who hasn’t experienced life in a fast moving organisation where busy days mean everything has to be completed by the ‘close of play’, or preferably yesterday? In many workplaces the current challenges of keeping the show on the road, means that ‘pacesetting‘ is becoming a default leadership style. Keeping everyone on their toes to optimise production. It’s all ‘Go – Go – Go!

According to Daniel Goleman, this style works best when ‘quick results are needed from a highly motivated and competent team’. So if we’ve got a great team everything’s good – and we can carry on ‘go-go-go-ing’…

But if this is the only leadership style , Goleman highlights the ‘overall impact on climate‘ can be negative. Staff can feel stressed, relationships feel transactional and burnout can occur. Staff turnover increases as folks vote with their feet as soon as a more palatable employment opportunity appears, and the transient workforce feel less and less connected with each other.

So maybe we should ditch the pacesetting style altogether?

But we can’t – everything will fall apart if we don’t keep the show on the road. Something else is needed…

Staff need to feel trusted that they can deliver what they are capable of and that a request for support or flexibility, or whatever might help will be received with warmth. They need something that cushions the impact of the constant push of the pace. Something like the rubber part of the door stopper.

The ‘affiliative‘ style has something to offer here. It helps to ‘motivate people during stressful circumstances’, and is all about empathy, building relationships and constructive communication.

We might ask…“Isn’t this all a bit ‘pie-in-the-sky’ and aspirational?…Where do we find time in the day to do all that stuff?” Well, how about during the next Zoom call or Teams meeting. Just spend a few extra minutes warming up to the meeting, have a chat, check in with people on how they are doing. Spend some time ‘being’ with your team. Go to the meeting with the fundamental assumption that your staff will deliver everything they are capable of, and will flag up if they get in a muddle. Enjoy the chatter and lose yourself in the company of those you are with, whoever it may be. Allow some ‘play’ in the conversations. Do everything you can to encourage folks to enjoy their time with you, and each other. Trust that your team want to and can deliver.

This might mean that a meeting might overrun, and allow less time for the ‘do-do-doing’ and the ‘go-go-going’… So what?… You will have a team who are happy to be ‘be-be-being’ and won’t mind when the pace gets pacey. Think about how more productive we tend to be when we’re genuinely absorbed in our communities of work. We might still get a rubber mark from that, but that’s alright. It’s when the paint and woodwork gets damaged – that’s when things start going wrong.

Leadership

Leadership

The greatest minds in society haven’t agreed on what leadership is, what makes a great leader, or how to develop great leaders…

Leadership is about traits and attributes, it’s about behaviours and skills; it’s about approaches and styles; it’s about relationships with others; it’s about who you are and the impact you have on others; it’s about strategic focus and knowing/sensing how everything fits together.

Also, effective leadership depends on the leader, the ‘followers’ at whatever stage of their own journeys, and the wider situational environment. So many permutations interacting and constantly changing – the leader changes, the ‘followers’ change, the situation is always changing…

So where can we find the perfect leader? No-one can be the perfect leader, no-one ever has and no-one ever will be.

So what is the point of developing your own understanding of leadership and your own ability as a leader?

It’s not about becoming a perfect leader – it’s not actually about the end result – it’s about the journey…

The leadership journey is about discovering yourself, finding out about how you relate to others and developing an appreciation of the complexity of different situations. The leadership journey travelled well is a humbling experience. We find out what we can’t do, we find out what others can do, and we develop a passion for the world we seek.

In the end, we give up on becoming an effective leader, and develop, in the words of Jim Collins, “an absolute, obsessed, burning, compulsive ambition” that isn’t about us. An ambition for a cause; for a company; for the work; for a set of values; for a community.

We accidentally develop humility, ‘an ability to channel our ambition into something bigger than ourselves’, and it is arguably this quality of ‘humility’, when infused with ‘professional will’ that makes the difference between a  good leader and a great leader (Collins, 2001).

So, how do we become a great leader?

Focus on the ambition for the cause – don’t’ try to be a great leader – trust the leadership journey.

 

Leadership, VM and HR, Volunteer Management

Next Generation VM Leaders

Originally posted in 2016…

I was interested to read the just released ‘2016 Volunteer Management Progress Report’ on the state of the VM professionals. A few snippets from the report that caught my attention:

  • “Many volunteer coordinators are seeking an advocate that can help them educate others about their challenges and needs.”
  • “Some volunteer administrators feel their work is unfairly undervalued and under-resourced when compared to colleagues with similar levels of responsibility, most notably development or fundraising departments.”
  • “Many volunteer managers feel a lack of clear professional identity or standards. They often are charged with a wide variety of roles, in addition to volunteer management, that stretch them in ways that sometimes feel unreasonable.”
  • “Although overwhelmed, not all volunteer coordinators are aware of the free and low-cost support resources that already exist for them.”

On the face of it, it seems that VM professionals have found themselves in a bit of a collective pickle.

A few days previously I was reading the CIPD publication – ‘Next Generation HR’, and found myself being drawn into the report’s findings on the ‘Next Generation’ HR leaders – partners and provocateurs, on pages 17-19. This section described the sort of people the researchers found that were currently delivering great human resource management.

So, partly to encourage myself that there may still be hope for VM professionals, I ended up re-structuring the Next Generation findings and presented them in a volunteer management context.

These are presented below in the list of attributes and areas of impact that VM professionals might have in the future. It tends to give a totally different flavour to the VM progress Report, but might stimulate some collective thoughts…

WHAT ARE THE NEXT GENERATION OF VM LEADERS LIKE?

They are in tune…

  • They have an appreciation of what really makes their organsation tick.
  • They have the capacity to be insightful.
  • They are unusually alert to what is going on and whether a response is merited or an opportunity is presenting itself.
  • They are natural systems thinkers.

They have focus…

  • They have a strong underlying sense of purpose.
  • They have a desire to build organisations that will be built to last.
  • They tend to be patient and build resolve over time and in many and varied ways.
  • They are less inwardly facing and insular than might be the norm for many.

They have impact…

  • They have a lightness of touch and humility which helps them to influence assertive senior leaders.
  • They know how to get a thing done in the organisation, with the particular personalities and interest groups.
  • They have personal savvy to pick the big issues.
  • They have great instincts about how and when to pursue a particular agenda and how to build alliances and momentum.

They have integrity and personal depth…

  • They have connection to some fundamental values such as truth, respect or safety that act as an innate moral compass.
  • They do not lack the courage of their convictions.
  • They have a personal presence and natural authority that goes well beyond their ‘official’ role in VM.
  • They have mastered the art of being themselves, both confident in their abilities and open about their fears.

Overall?

  • They are professional, transparent, insightful and thought-provoking.

WHAT WILL THE NEXT GENERATION OF VM LEADERS DO?

They will encourage debate…

  • They will have capacity to offer organisational insight.
  • They will often explore and stimulate rather than challenge or browbeat (unless this is absolutely necessary).
  • They will engage in difficult conversations or challenge firmly held views with a real lightness of touch.
  • They will often take a conversation beyond the achievement of immediate objectives or targets.
  • They will elevate the debate and look at what really matters,

They will find new and tailored solutions…

  • They demonstrate an unusual ability to be real provocateurs, encouraging new ways of operating or new areas of strategic focus.
  • They will focus on what is possible for the organisation.
  • They will join up the dots in ways that others might not and spot the critical insight in a world of ‘information’.
  • They will draw on wide experience, networks and an understanding of the macro trends and how they affect the organisation of which they are a part.

They will influence and inspire…

  • They will often be successful at influencing people who are more senior in the hierarchy.
  • They will operate with subtlety and sophistication.
  • They will develop the right to transcend the traditional hierarchical relationship and offer a viewpoint or stimulate and challenge firmly held world views or opinions.
  • They will ignite the leadership ambition within the organisation even when the going is tough.
  • They will reconnect leaders to what matters and build resolve through a deep connection to the agenda rather than a short-term provocation or jolt.
  • They will be able to step into difficult territory without upsetting people.

HOW WILL THE NEXT GENERATION OF VM LEADERS PERCEIVED BY OTHERS?

  • They will be positioned in the minds of other senior leaders such that they have real share of voice and influence.
  • They will not be seen as mavericks or marginalised for challenging, or taking an unfashionable point of view.
  • They will be very much an individual first and a role second in the eyes of many they are influencing.
  • They will build trust and removes anxieties about hidden agendas or the feeling of being judged.
  • They will be thought of as worth listening to.