We think of organizations as systems that take some inputs, do something with them and produce outputs. Their performance is measured by how well they do that: taking resources, transforming them and, in the case of a business organization, selling products and services to customers for more than they cost. We believe organizations perform best when they interpret the external environment accurately, set mission and strategy clearly, possess an organizational culture that serves them well and where the leaders live out personally the strategy and culture of the organization. Such high performance organizations also need effective leaders and good governance.
We believe that leaders are not the heroes of our imagination, but real people who find an inner capacity to envision a future and live it with such integrity themselves that others are drawn to follow. Without followers, leaders are merely people with titles. The best leaders, in our experience, so live out, in their own unique way, both the mission and strategy or the organization and the values of its culture such that others are inspired to find within themselves the capacity to contribute their own best performance. Leaders go where their organizations need to go, first, and in so doing, win both the credibility and conferred authority of those who will follow.
All around us, our client organizations are experiencing surprises. Not all of them good, unfortunately. In many places, stakeholders and their representatives, boards of directors are asking themselves about the quality of their governance. Much training and even certification of directors has ensued, but Boards need to stay current and effective. Periodically they need to ask “how good is our governance?” and, of individual directors, “how effective is their contribution as an individual director”? Good governance helps effective leaders sustain high performance organizations.
We find that an organization’s culture to be one of the most influential factors and one of the most difficult to define and address. Here, often number fail us as a ‘language’ to help us make choices about culture which is that system of beliefs, values and assumptions that govern behaviour. Cultural change is often so difficult because we can’t find language that helps us talk to each other about what we mean, let alone becomes both intentional and successful in bringing about cultural change. We believe that cultural transformation is impossible without the embodiments of its ideals in leaders – the place where ideas, beliefs and assumptions take on ‘human flesh’ and are found expressed in the life of the organizations leaders.
Few words have more confusing meaning and lofty association than “strategy”. We try to make it simple – strategy is about choice. Strategy is not what is printed as intentions, it is what is reflected in the budget and in what people are actually doing. Some critical choices include: WHOM the organization serves, often customers; WHAT the organization chooses to offer as products and services; HOW the organization creates value from ‘inputs’ and creates new ‘outputs’. These choices imply the special CAPABILITIES the organization must possess and exploit, the MEASURES of performance that must be achieved and the important RESOURCES that must be applied to achieve certain results. These are some of the most important choices in the domain of Strategy and taken together, they must bring about a Financial Performance that stakeholders value sufficiently to continue their support for the organization's leadership.
Perhaps no other word has more books and theories, models and prescriptions than “leadership” – it is that classically intangible reality that you simply know when you have it and feel its gaping absence when you don’t. We are struck by the often simple question “is anyone following?” as a guide to who are leaders. But in this overworked domain of theory, of this one thing we are convinced, leaders must incarnate, must live out in their own lives, the strategic and cultural choices that the organization must make. In this regard, leaders are pioneers, encountering their own inadequacy and finding in that honesty, a capacity to bring others with them. In this current climate, as perhaps in no other before, leaders find themselves facing a sea of unknowns and into it must venture first, with both courage and integrity, so that the organizations they lead can thrive even in great uncertainty. Certainly, how leaders engage their strengths is important, but of even greater significant is how they engage their weakness, their sense of inadequacy, their fraility. It is as leaders confront and engage their own disadvantages that they develop a capacity to elicit in others the courage, confidence and capacity to overcome their own barriers to elicit in others the courage, confidence and capacity to overcome their own barriers to graeter performance. Inspiration matters, to be sure, but the 'perspiration' of personal growth in leaders is fundamental to their capacity to exert positive influence on their organizations. We challenge leaders to grow first, if they would lead others.
We believe that the most important and impactful decision that a leader makes is what he or she chooses to do with their fear. We all experience this emotion and we often deal with it in very different ways. But what we do with this powerful emotion profoundly shapes whom we become and what we inspire in others. We are convinced that leaders must engage and deal with what elicits fear. Over twenty years ago, I recognized that in the discipline of management, the frontier of new learning was not in the academic journals but in the personal experience of managers engaging challenges and opportunities that lay beyond their experience and their understanding. Here, we have chosen to live out our calling as consultants, walking along side leaders who, from within, must first summon a courage to act in such a way as to bring others with them. Such leadership begins with what they choose to do with their fear. And so we, as consultants – servants of such leaders – must first walk those paths ourselves...that is our challenge, we too must walk the same way.
About teams, reems of paper have been printed, techniques prescribed, mountains climbed, dynamics examined. We don’t plan to add anything new to an already crowded field. But teams matters, because individuals can’t get everything done. Work is too much or too complex and so must be shared. In many things, two brains are better than one. We focus on teams that lead organizations and for the organization to have coherence and focus and success, the leadership team needs to work. Fragmentation at the top breeds fragmentation and dysfunction in the organization. An effective senior team is a necessary but not sufficient ingredient to a successful organization. A great team will not ensure success, but a dysfunctional group of leaders are a powerful contributor to failure.
It may seem self-evident, but we start with the assumption that leaders are people; people with a story that has shaped them, people with gifts with which they are endowed, people with skills that they have cultivated and practiced. This starting place matters because leaders are all different and we choose to approach them in their uniqueness, celebrating that uniqueness and not seeking to prescribe some formula for effective leadership. We are often asked “how should I lead?” to which we respond “act out of your deepest convictions, trust your best instincts – your “gut” – and watch to see if anyone is following”. We observe that the best evidence of real leaders is “followers”. Like others things in nature – the best evidence of an apple tree is apples – simple, really, but often forgotten in the self-absorption of “leadership”.
Every group of leaders has some method to run the organization they lead. Sometimes the method is mysterious, mis-understood and ineffective, but in every instance, there is some method. We call that the “management system” – the way the leaders choose to understand and effect the performance of the organization they lead. The management system comprises five key elements: leaders, using data, to make decisions about resource allocation and behavior, in some pattern or rhythm. When it works well, the right people, engage the right data and make sound decisions, deploying resources at the right time. We help leadership teams define, practice and keep getting better at the way the run their organization. While the world is becoming more and more unpredictable, a thoughtful group of leaders, with a rigorous management system can give confidence to an organization that must rapidly adapt to profound change.
Numerous characteristics of leaders have been selected as central to the role of leadership. We choose to work with leaders who have embraced two, in particular; personal integrity and courage. As change agents we are, first of all, servants of our clients. Our impact can only be through them and we are only as good, in terms of results, as our clients. Since we are deeply committed to finding and engaging what we call “truth”, we seek out clients who are, in the final analysis, more interested in their personal integrity than they are in their commercial or reputational success. Often our clients find success in the terms that many would recognize but it derives not from their intentional manipulation or exploitation of others but from their restless pursuit of being real and authentic as leaders. Such seemingly naïve optimism comes not from a failure to recognize that commercial success is often fraught with moral challenge but from a choice that if we choose what is higher, loftier, more noble, then perhaps more of that will emerge.
Effective Boards are groups of people with a broad range of experience and perspectives who represent the interests and purposes of the “owners” of the organization. In this role they are advocates for long-term viability and success that can be achieved within the boundaries of both opportunity and constraint. Of late, their vigilance, independence from management and the rigor with which they perform their role have been challenged. Boards often meet too infrequently to develop the personal camaraderie of the management leadership yet must engage challenging issues, leverage all the potential of their diverse membership and give wise guidance for leadership. Like other teams, they can perform to the full potential of their membership, or they can fail. Boards are led well or badly. They adopt sound or unsound process. They are effective or ineffective at their unique task. Increasingly, their performance matters profoundly. Some organizations fail catastrophically because their Board failed. We have found that Boards can be intentional and more successful when they purposefully and systematically engage in their own development.
Directors, like leaders, are individuals who must bring the richness of their skills and experience, often developed in management and leadership elsewhere, to the unique task of governance. Directors do not run organizations, they hire leaders and managers to do that, but they do work collaboratively together to provide the organization with sound governance, oversight, counsel and sometimes, constraint. Like leaders, directors can be effective in the application of their skills to the task of governance, or not. Boards often comprise directors some of whom are making helpful contribution and some who are not, perhaps even disruptive to the process of governance. We have found that just like leaders, directors can grow in their effectiveness through regular feedback and personal development. We choose to provide that kind of feedback so Directors can become better governors and organizations be better governed.
Boards operate well or badly, sometimes both. The governance process prescribes the information the board engages, the means by which they arrive at decision and then engage the leadership and management of the organization through whom they effect their impact. The Board committee structure – its division of labor, the boundary with and engagement with the leaders and managers, and the way power is shared within the board all impact the effectiveness of the Board. The governance process can be defined, understood and continuously improved – but only if the Board chooses to do that work. More and more, good governance is a product of a sound governance process and that takes Board attention, focus and intentional change. That is change we help bring about.
