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- Herausgeber: Crown House Publishing
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Sprache: Englisch
What exactly is it that good leaders do to enable their teams to succeed? How do they think? What do findings from neuroscience teach us about effective leadership? Leader explores and answers these crucial questions. In this wide-ranging book, Katy and Emmie eloquently combine up-to-date research in psychology and neuroscience with inspiring examples of success to show that leadership can be learned and that it is all about looking after your people. They take you on a journey to meet a diverse selection of great leaders from multiple spheres - from the sports field to the corporate world - and talk you through the process by which effective leaders have become great leaders. The secret lies in mastering three key principles: know your people, love your people, inspire your people. These three principles form the core of the book, which also provides a range of practical activities designed to help you reflect on your own and your team's progress and performance. The authors contend that leadership which focuses on the flourishing of people is not only intrinsically valuable, but is also the most important factor in achieving success in any domain. To provide proof, the book features inspiring examples of leaders who have made a significant impact in their organisation, alongside insightful analysis of how and why effective leaders outperform others not just in terms of results, but, even more importantly, through the contributions they make to people's lives. Practical, evidence-based and optimistic, this book is suitable for both aspiring and established leaders. All royalties from sales of this book will be donated to The Prince's Trust. Find more helpful information at www.leaderknowloveinspire.com Leader was highly commended in the leadership for the future category of the Business Book Awards 2021. Leader was longlisted in the CMI Managers Management Book of the Year Award 2021.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
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Praise for Leader
This is an exceptional book on leadership. Leader seamlessly combines fantastic stories with laser-sharp questions to prompt you to think, learn and, ultimately, grow your leadership capabilities.
If disaster strikes, pray for Shackleton; if a need for mental stimulation and insightful guidance hits you, then most definitely call for Katy and Emmie!
Will Greenwood, former England rugby international and 2003 World Cup winner
Leader is an outstanding book for anyone interested in becoming a better leader. The principles covered are relevant to everyone: from executive to apprentice, from parents to teachers and coaches, and, in my case, to those involved in delivering healthcare as both a doctor and as a leader of clinical teams.
The book skilfully weaves case studies of leadership excellence through a narrative that concentrates on compassion, empathy and vision to inspire, motivate and develop your team. A useful feature is the thoughtful practical exercises for the reader to reflect upon and put into action.
Leader is easy to read and is perfect for either a twenty-minute dip at bedtime or a leisurely afternoon with a cup of tea. So if you’re looking for a great book on leadership, my advice is to read this one.
Andrew Cox, consultant cardiologist and general physician, Frimley Health NHS Foundation Trust and the Royal Brompton and Harefield NHS Trust
In Leader, Katy Granville-Chapman and Emmie Bidston show why leadership centred on service, truth, kindness, empathy, generosity, purpose and love is what we need to take us forward through the hardest realities and challenges of life.
Katy and Emmie ground their argument in the latest research and illustrate it with compelling case studies of high-performing teams from the worlds of sport, business, healthcare, technology, politics and education. This is the leadership that powers Google, the All Blacks and the British Army – and is modelled by public figures such as Michelle Obama and Andrew Strauss. But it isn’t all about big names. It’s about strong character. Examples of servant leadership fill the book, as do practical leadership exercises.B
This book doesn’t simply introduce a way of leading; it inspires, challenges and guides you to step up and lead in your own context for the good of those around you.
Dr Edward Brooks, Executive Director, The Oxford Character Project
If you’re seeking the formula for effective teamwork and eager to improve performance and productivity, then Leader is the perfect book for you. Interspersed with fascinating case studies and brimming with practical tips and challenges, it is a treat to dip into or read at length.
Distilling decades of research findings, Katy and Emmie take a fresh look at leadership and talk us through the essential ingredients needed to develop ourselves as great leaders – from the importance of really knowing and caring about our teams, to building and sharing a vision that will inspire and motivate them.
Leader offers a comprehensive and accessible guide to leadership, and I’m now eager to implement what I’ve learned.
Clare Richards, Chief Executive, the ClementJames Centre
This is exactly the sort of book on leadership we need for the modern world in which we live. Katy and Emmie’s writing is clear, engaging and communicates a deep understanding of the human condition – a welcome tonic when an ever-growing body of literature simply adds any adjective before the word ‘leadership’ and claims to be the great catch-all for success. Instead, the authors ground their message in research from a number of different fields, focusing on the essential ingredients which make for a meaningful relationship between the leader and their people. Their particular focus on values is spot-on.
Packed with numerous case studies, useful exercises and practical tips, Leader is a must-read for anyone interested in learning about what it takes to lead with compassion, authenticity and success in the twenty-first century.
James Dahl, Master, Wellington College
To be known, loved and inspired is a basic human need which acts as the fuel for a purposeful, values-driven life. Katy and Emmie have encapsulated this simple yet powerful message as the core of this practical guide for those striving to become better leaders and those who aspire to lead. Leader will quickly become a go-to companion for many on this journey.
Mike Buchanan, Chair, International Positive Education Network, and founder of Positively Leading
Leader
Know, love and inspire your people
Katy Granville-Chapman and Emmie Bidston
Foreword by Sir Anthony Seldon
For Jeremy, Charlie and Harry.
For Neil, Amelie, Bexie and Megan.
Foreword
What constitutes good and bad leadership has fascinated me all of my life. I grew up in the long shadow of the Second World War. I never ceased to be moved by listening to Churchill’s speeches and learning more about him. A good leader. Hitler was ubiquitous in my formative years too, in the school curriculum, in films and in literature. A bad leader, albeit with many of the qualities that good leaders need, including oratory, a vision and the ability to motivate his team. As I grew older, I came to realise that leadership is the magic ingredient that can transform any institution, country, company or college for the better. Or worse.
A vision is essential for a leader, but having a vision in itself is not enough. Hitler, for example, had a profoundly dehumanising and evil vision. Leaders operate in a moral universe. To be a good leader they need to embody goodness. But even a vision and ethics are insufficient: the excellent leader needs to find a vision which is appropriate for the organisation at the moment at which they take command. Coming up with an inappropriate vision explains why one leader could be a great success in one organisation but be utterly baleful in another. The true leader will find a vision which is organic to the organisation they have taken over and true to its traditions, rather than implanting an off-the-shelf generic plan dreamed up by a management consultant. This book takes you through how to create a collective vision that everyone can engage with and feel part of.
When I was headmaster of Brighton College (and, later, Wellington College), I became increasingly excited by the prospect of teaching students and staff about leadership. At the latter institution, I was fortunate to have on my staff Katy Granville-Chapman and Emmie Bidston, the authors of this book. Both of them embodied in their lives at the school, and in their interactions with students and staff, an authenticity and a singularity of vision for leadership that prioritises the flourishing of others.ii
In schools, it is very clear to students, if not always to the teachers concerned, who has sincerity. Students can see through teachers far more quickly than many realise. Katy and Emmie have that gift of effortless authenticity in abundance, and it informs every page of this book.
I believe that every school student and employee should be taught about leadership – good as well as bad, and the leadership traits which pertain to various situations and those which are task specific. The captain of a nuclear submarine requires many attributes in common with the captain of Aston Villa Football Club, but there will be some skills which are particular to each role. In the right hands, few things are more fascinating to learn about than leadership and the qualities we all need to develop as future leaders.
People who might never be turned on by academic work can become highly motivated and fired up when considering leadership and when they are given leadership tasks. They quickly learn that a good leader does not need to shout, coerce or use fear; it is much more effective to lead with clarity, calm, compassion and character.
The challenges we will face in the future include coping with pandemics, tackling global warming and the climate emergency, and helping to rebuild communities torn apart by globalisation and artificial intelligence. The skills required are far more than intellectual. Very few of the greatest political leaders in Britain have been leading intellectuals. Prime ministers customarily come into Downing Street with aides who have very high IQs and brains the size of planets, but who leave after a few months with their missions incomplete.
The leaders of the future need to be rounded figures. They need to be in touch with themselves, with their feelings, with their bodies and, most importantly, with other people. They need to be principled and have a clear vision about how to build a better world.
This wonderful book discusses these and many other topics, and I cannot recommend it too highly.
Sir Anthony Seldon Vice-Chancellor of the University of Buckingham
Preface
It could have happened to anyone. It was just unlucky that he was the boss on shift that day. Fifty-four years old and many miles from home. Drawn by the promise of good wages in exchange for the risks that inevitably came with the job. It was meant to be a seven-day tour. It turned into a sixty-nine-day ordeal of darkness and despair.
On 5 August 2010, Luis Urzua found himself trapped thousands of feet below ground with thirty-three other men. The San José gold and copper mine in Chile had collapsed, leaving them imprisoned under tonnes of rock. They were fearful of being crushed to death by further rock falls and had no way to communicate with the outside world. No way to know how long they would need to wait or how long they would need to make the two days’ worth of supplies last.1
The leadership challenge was enormous. Hungry, scared men started forcing open the food cupboard in their fear and grabbing the little that was there. But their shift manager, Urzua, had a reputation for being protective and loving his team. When he intervened in the situation, they trusted him enough to step back and agree to ration the supplies, living off one teaspoon of tuna and a half-glass of milk every few days. Urzua kept reminding the miners that they were all in this together. They were a team. They ate their meagre rations together in the same spot, at the same time, building a sense of belonging. Every man had a role, everyone had a responsibility. They were all involved and utterly focused on achieving their one goal – survival.2
Their first contact with the outside world came after seventeen days, which had left them close to starvation. It was another fifty-two days before they were rescued and finally hoisted, one by one, to the surface. No miner wanted to be transported to the hospital before the last man had been brought out.3iv
If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.
John Quincy Adams4
vUrzua never spoke about his own leadership role during the crisis, although many others praised him. He talked instead about his men, their talents and their welfare. He thanked the rescuers and the health officials. He did everything he could to look after his people. He was the last man to be lifted out of the shaft, merely commenting: ‘It’s been a bit of a long shift.’5
Similar to many other individuals who have faced extreme circumstances and adversity, Urzua exemplifies the fact that some people can step up and become effective leaders in the face of impossible circumstances. Yet many others who encounter challenges struggle to bring out the best in their teams, pulling people apart rather than together and creating a culture of fear and blame.
What exactly is it that good leaders do to enable their teams to succeed? How do they think? How much of their success can be predicted by IQ, talent or temperament? What do the recent advancements in neuroscience and research teach us about effective leadership?
This book reflects our efforts to explore these questions. In the following chapters, we will take you on a journey to meet leaders from multiple different spheres. We will show you how effective leaders enable their people to flourish. These individuals will, at times, appear to go against mainstream views of strong leadership. However, the performance they have enabled has been extraordinary.
Great leaders have become great because they have mastered three key lessons:
Lesson I: Know your people. Great leaders know their team’s values and strengths through great listening, powerful questioning and empathy.
Lesson II: Love your people. Great leaders love their team through compassion, service and creating psychological safety.
Lesson III: Inspire your people. Great leaders inspire their team through a clear sense of purpose, optimism and gratitude.
Our journey to understand leadership began before we met. Katy Granville-Chapman served in the British Army, deploying to Iraq, and Emmie Bidston in vi the Civil Service after graduating from Cambridge with a degree in economics. We saw outstanding examples, in both government and the military, of leaders enthusing and engaging people through compassionate and positive leadership. We also saw examples where poor leadership resulted in the loss of morale and motivation, and had a negative impact on performance and mission outcomes. These experiences sparked in us an insatiable curiosity about what makes a great leader and how to grow leaders who bring out the best in people.
In later years we entered teaching, which is where we met, and our leadership adventure began. This led to us helping to advise and train numerous organisations, including England Rugby and the Civil Service, and eventually to advise the Prime Minister’s Office. Katy co-founded Global Social Leaders with Jon Harper, a positive leadership and entrepreneurship programme, which now has participants in 102 countries. Emmie co-founded the Young African Leadership Program, a charity that supports innovative African schools as they seek to support, teach and inspire the next generation of African leaders.
We have worked on leadership within elite sport, with government ministers, army officers, head teachers, Oxford University, charities and countless incredible young people from across the globe. Many of these leaders were already serving their people and helping them to flourish – with outstanding results. However, others were harder to convince. They were suspicious of servant leadership (the idea that the main role of the leader is to serve) and perceived compassion as weak and ineffective. This book is our answer to them, because it’s not enough for leaders to lead through their own ego. It’s not enough to shout orders based on leaders’ own values and ideas. Only by watching, listening and working with others can we get the most out of teams and communities.
This book is also our celebration of all the inspiring young people we have worked with, who have set up social action projects around the world and are already having an enormous impact.
By the time you finish reading this book, we hope you will be reconsidering some fundamental assumptions about leadership and what kinds of leaders create high-performing teams. We have set you challenges to complete viiindividually and also with your teams (so please have a notebook handy while you read). Building on the latest evidence, stories and our own experience, we will help you to become the best leader you can be: a leader who knows, loves and inspires their people.viii
Acknowledgements
We couldn’t be more grateful to our wonderful families, who have made such sacrifices to give us the time to write, and to our friends who have been so inspiring. We are particularly grateful to Martha Owen and Emma Tuck for their awesome editing and Crown House Publishing for giving us this opportunity.x
Contents
Lesson I
Know Your People
Introduction to Lesson I
Code name: Project Aristotle. What images spring into your mind? An undercover MI6 mission team creeping stealthily into an insurgent’s hideout? An Enigma-style Second World War crack team working on Nazi codes? Or perhaps a ferociously academic team of classicists sifting through dusty manuscripts?
Project Aristotle was actually the brainchild of Google.6 Google has always been known for its culture of innovation and its relentless drive to improve performance and productivity. Having spent much of the previous decade considering how to bring out the best in the individuals who worked for the company, in 2012 it turned its attention to creating the perfect team – finding out why some teams stumble and others soar.7
The fact that Google is a data-driven organisation means it had both the researchers and the algorithms to analyse gigantic quantities of information, so it threw lots of resources at the question. It employed a team of researchers, psychologists and statisticians who started with a literature review, covering academic journals and books from the last fifty years. They then interviewed and observed hundreds of staff and teams at Google.8
They were hunting for patterns, for a formula that would help them to decode the data, for clues as to how the best teams work. Do they communicate in the same way? Use the same strategies? Is it about the intellectual ability or emotional intelligence of the individual members? They kept searching and hypothesising, but even a year into the project they were drawing a blank as to the elusive characteristics of high-performing teams. The data just seemed to be pointing in different, contradictory directions. It remained an enigma.
What they did realise, early on, was that there was very little correlation between the abilities, backgrounds or successes of the individual members 4of a team and the overall success of the team. They continued to interview more teams and trawl more data for clues.
What gradually emerged was the fact that the most significant predictor of team performance was how the members related to one another – for example, how well they took into account each other’s opinions and emotions. Team culture was far more significant than the abilities of the individuals in the team.
This linked back to some work done by psychologists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology a decade ago, who recruited nearly 700 people, divided them into teams and gave them various tasks to accomplish.9 They used a well-respected classification of group tasks to help them choose the team activities, which involved solving visual puzzles, brainstorming the uses of a brick, making collective moral judgements and negotiating over limited resources.
They found evidence that teams can have a ‘collective intelligence’ independent of the average (or best) individual team members’ intelligence (IQ). This team IQ is largely dependent on the average social sensitivity of the team and how well they communicate – how well they try to know and understand each other and find positive ways to relate to one another.
As leaders, this research reminds us that our teams are more than the sum of the individuals and that their performance and collective IQ will depend critically on how well we can nourish a culture of authentic interactions and real conversations. Leadership is about helping our team members to be the best versions of themselves and work together in ways that allow creativity, risk-taking and vulnerability. The foundation for this kind of high-performance culture is knowing the people on our teams: what really matters to them, their values and their strengths. We will be looking at how to build these foundations in the next two chapters.
Chapter 1
Speaking Serbian
Case Study: The San Antonio Spurs
The San Antonio Spurs are one of the most successful basketball teams of all time, having won five championship titles (1999, 2003, 2005, 2007 and 2014). The Spurs have been an incredible example of a team with the right culture, organisation and winning strategy. An opponent once said that watching them play was like ‘listening to Mozart’.10 What is the secret of their winning culture? Their leader: Gregg Popovich. Popovich has been the Spurs’ coach since 1996 and has been on Fortune’s list of the 50 World’s Greatest Leaders.11 Yet on first impressions he doesn’t seem like the ideal leader, with his volcanic temper and old-school discipline.
He grew up in East Chicago, Indiana, and started playing basketball at a young age. He enrolled at the United States Air Force Academy and was on the academy’s basketball team for the next four years. He graduated with a degree in Soviet studies and served the required five years of active duty in the Air Force, competing in the US Armed Forces’ basketball team and touring Eastern Europe and Soviet Russia. He first joined the Spurs in 1988 and became the head coach of the team in 1996.12
Popovich’s success as the Spurs coach has been a result of the way he has cared about his players. Popovich understands that it is his responsibility to connect with his players, to bring them into the Spurs culture, and to make sure they have a strong relationship with him and the other players. Popovich wants his players to be fully human and he’s genuinely curious about them. Will Purdue explains that Pop went much further than other coaches were willing to go: ‘They cared about you, but they didn’t really 6want to overextend themselves in case you got cut or got traded … I don’t think Pop ever even considered that. He saw you as a human being first and a basketball player second.’13
By talking to them about their interests and their life outside the court, he shows the players that he truly does care about them. This interest in their lives creates the foundation for their solid relationship.
Popovich is always trying to connect to his team in different ways: he discussed Argentinian politics and conspiracy theories with Manu Ginobili. He flew to the island of St Croix to get to know Tim Duncan before he started. He talked in Serbian to two of his players to build better relationships.14
This is a great example of our first lesson in leadership. If you want to be a leader you must really know your people. Not just know their names, but really know them – what makes them happy, what makes them mad, what are their dreams, hopes and aspirations. Consider how amazed Perdue was by how much Popovich wanted to know about the team and the effort he went to in order to connect with and know his players.
One reason that knowing your people matters so much is that, ‘When thinking back over their lives and selecting their most important leadership role models, people are more likely to choose a family member than anyone else.’15 Isn’t that incredible? When people were asked to choose their most important leadership models, they didn’t pick Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa or Barack Obama, they picked family members. Because they are the people who know you best and you know too. It is all about positive relationships.
There are a multitude of books on leadership and literally hundreds of thousands of research papers on this subject. If you Google the word ‘leadership’ you will get about 6 billion results. This suggests that there is a lot of interest in the topic, but also that there is still some uncertainty over both what precisely leadership is and how to develop effective leaders.
However, there is also plenty of agreement in the research. Although we can’t claim to have read every research paper and book on leadership, we have given it our best shot and we will introduce you to some of the most robust research as we go along.7
Relationships with people are what it’s all about. You have to make players realize you care about them. And they have to care about each other and be interested in each other.
Gregg Popovich16
8The evidence suggests that there are two main areas you need to focus on in terms of knowing your people: knowing their values and knowing their strengths.
What Are Values?
We have asked hundreds of people what they think values are. Here is a selection of some of the answers we have received:
What matters most to me.
The things that make me tick.
Who I am when no one is watching.
A compass for my life.
The deepest part of me.
We like to use the metaphor of a stick of rock – if we cut you open, what would be written all the way through you? Professor Noel Tichy of the University of Michigan tells us that your personal values speak to the question, ‘Who am I?’17
Knowing Your Own Values
There is significant interest from leadership scholars in the value of values for leadership. Understanding what you really care about will give you courage in difficult situations and help you to make decisions that are congruent with the kind of person you want to be.
You also need to know your values to be an authentic leader – credibility is considered by many to be the foundation of leadership. Leadership is fundamentally a relationship, so if people are going to follow you, they need to believe in you and trust you: ‘If you don’t believe in the messenger you 9won’t believe in the message.’18 People need moral authority in order to lead well, and to do this it is critical that they know their own values so they can align their behaviour consistently with them.
It’s not just knowing your values that matters, it is also living them out. Your values provide your compass – they show you where you should be going – but you still need to follow them. That is what is meant by being authentic.
In a well-reviewed leadership book, True North, Harvard Business School professor Bill George and Peter Sims argue that the essence of good leadership is being true to who you really are.19 It begins and ends with authenticity. This means that you must be yourself: if creativity really matters to you, then you need to be creative; if friendship really matters to you, then you need to make sure you have time with your friends; if honesty really matters to you, then tell the truth. Authenticity builds trust. People love leaders they can trust – leaders who are being their real selves.
We often discover our own values during the hard times in life, when a situation makes us angry and we realise that something important to us, some critical need or value, isn’t being met.
Case Study: Melinda Gates
Melinda Gates provides a good example of this in her book The Moment of Lift.20 Melinda started working at Microsoft straight after university and she loved the energy, pace and challenge of the company. She was passionate about their dream of democratising computing in a way that would change the world and she adored computer coding. However, there were also aspects of the culture that she found difficult and, after a year and a half, she had reached the point where she was ready to quit. It was just too aggressive, argumentative and competitive for her to thrive. It was all about strength, and you proved your strength by winning arguments and taking no notice of anyone else. No one said well done, thanked each other or celebrated one another’s successes.10
Melinda knew she was capable of performing and leading in that way if she absolutely needed to, but it wasn’t authentic to who she was. The effort of trying to be someone she wasn’t was dragging her down and taking the joy out of her work. Yet every time she thought about leaving she was torn by the fact that she loved the company’s vision. It was an incredible organisation to be part of and the buzz of ideas was electric.
She decided to see if she could either change the culture or at least be a more authentic version of herself within Microsoft. She needed to start being who she actually was: tough and strong, but also vulnerable, honest and collaborative rather than competitive. She searched for people who were also struggling with the culture and built a team of peers, mentors and role models who would help her to find her voice and her own style of leadership.
As she built an honest, collaborative culture she began attracting the brightest stars in Microsoft to work for her – talented individuals who wanted to work in that environment. She ended up leading 1,700 people within the organisation. She created an atmosphere where everyone could be honest about their strengths as well as their weaknesses, where people worked together towards a bigger goal and weren’t trying to prove themselves, where failure wasn’t hidden but learned from, and where nobody was pretending.
