Board Director – Step up not just stand up!

Do you recall when you find out that Santa Claus didn’t exist, or the day you stopped dressing up as a superhero because you realised it wasn’t really true; sometimes being in a leadership role can be a little like that.

When younger you looked up to the person higher up, especially those people who had the title ‘Director’, which for many was/is the ultimate demi-god status and some directors are exactly what you are looking for; capable of leading the business on both an operational and strategic level whilst being able to also capture the hearts and minds of people within the business. The Executive Coaching Guru likes Peter Druckers perspective on this:

“The final requirement of effective leadership is to earn trust.
Otherwise there won’t be any followers and the only definition of a
leader is someone who has followers.” Peter Drucker

What hurts the most then is a business that had the ‘hearts and minds’ of it’s people and then started to throw it away, a business that has from the outset achieved what many other enterprises can only aspire to, having a workforce that is inspired by the energy of it’s entrepreneurial founder and gives ‘on mass’ the type of discretionary effort that then drives the business forward to become a darling of the city. But then something happens, the step from SME to Plc and somewhere in that growth there is a subtle sense of loss, that is only picked up on the periphery, by those that are listening to the people and then this loss starts to grow and grow, from a point where it was a given that 80%+ of the population identified with the business, and now below 50% see the business as a great place to work.

How does this loss happen? It is the familiar story of the drive for numbers (£/$) outweighing the capacity of the business to develop it’s leadership community from within and it’s inability to recruit people into that business that ‘believe’ in the journey and the community that already exists. It happens when a business fails to realise that it wasn’t the brilliant leadership that actually created the success, but the add value and discretionary effort that was contributed to the business by those people that ‘believed’ in the dream and reality of what it meant to work there. It’s the senior management team not realising that the business was successful in spite of the leadership and finally as the uber coach Marshall Goldsmith says:

“One of the greatest mistakes of a successful person is the assumption, “I am successful, I behave this way. Therefore I must be successful because I behave this way!” Marshall Goldsmith

One of the greatest challenges for an executive coach is to facilitate the reality for successful senior managers that sometimes, maybe even often, they and the business is successful in spite of their behaviour.

George Bernard Shaw in the film Pygmalion, wrote that, “The difference between a lady and a flower girl, is not how she behaves, but how she is treated”. This is a key factor for those of us involved in leadership, recognising that the emphasis is not on demanding behaviour, but in treating people in a manner that facilitates the elegant behaviours that already exist inside. The Executive Coaching Guru loves the idea that the, “more you lead, the less you have to manage”. As a business if you are losing the internal battle of staff advocacy and engagement, don’t blame the credit crunch, the tough times or any other factor, as your role as a leader is to (sit down for this revelation)……..LEAD!

Leadership is about the being with your business in the moment as well as thinking about the future. To understand about leadership in the moment, follow the link and read the speech made by Colonel Tim Collins (when he made this speech the reporter said, “he went out to talk to the troops about taking their malaria tablets, looked around and then realised they needed something more and then spoke without notes and captured the moment). This speech sets the balance of not worrying about the language, or whether the facts would be cascaded, but just delivering from the heart and understanding that if the message is understood, it will spread of it’s own accord.

• Being a Board Director is more than just numbers and achieving FTSE 100 status, it is about legacy, sustainability, integrity and something called ‘followship’, which is when the people decide to follow and the leadership team realise that making decisions based on ‘career and bonus’ aspirations will never deliver the value that decisions made on ‘people and sustainability’ produce.
• Board Directors share a duty that goes far beyond their fiduciary responsibility, in the same way that being a parent goes far beyond, feeding and clothing a child. People today do not require management in terms of their daily activity, they require leadership to enable them to contribute beyond yours and even their own expectations.
• Being a Board Director automatically comes with the badge of leadership, it’s time to not just step up, but to stand up!

Stand Up!