Leadership Example - Berlusconi

More allegations about Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s Premier, have emerged in recent days. This time he is alleged to have exchanged business favors for sex from an escort. Call it sloppy management, a devil-may-care attitude or just bad luck, the whole episode reflects back on the vessel under his leadership.

What business is it of ours how leaders behave on their own time? Surely they are entitled to a private life? Of course they are, as long as it remains private.

Berlusconi has proved over many years that he is a flawed leader. He seeks the limelight and has frequently been accused of insensitivity, abusing his position and shady dealing. What, therefore, is his duty to those he leads?

The first principle of leadership is to demand the utmost of oneself. At one level it encapsulates the idea of setting an example. It is a very simple idea that provides a daily personal challenge. A leader’s example can inspire or dispirit in the same measure. Setting an example requires consciousness and an acceptance of responsibility.

As children you may have played a game called ‘Follow the Leader’. Luckily we get to decide if we want to or not in adulthood. Is Berlusconi a rascal or a rogue? Would you follow him?

Management Training Needs Expert Facilitation

When choosing a leadership and management development programme, one is likely to encounter courses which promise “facilitation by experts.” The experts will have a background in a particular industry, and will draw on this background as they develop managers from the same industry on their programme.

In this way, ex civil-servants will train other civil servants, ex manufacturing directors will instil leadership and management disciplines in those working in manufacturing, ex-lawyers will develop other lawyers, and ex IT professionals will inculcate “soft skills” in current IT professionals.

When the development focuses around technical information, it is easy to understand why those with a background in a similar industry might be preferable. Non-lawyers will have no grasp of technical aspects of law, non-IT professionals will know little about the technical issues facing those working at the front line of IT.

Where leadership and management attitudes and skills are to be developed, it is less clear why those with a particular industry background will be a useful choice. An impressive track record working in a particular industry suggests a person is expert at working in that particular field, rather than in developing others to do so. Further, the more impressive the track record, the stronger the hold it will exert over the person’s thinking. Hard-won experience is even harder to relinquish. Yet anyone who wishes to develop wider understanding must do just that: let go of the particular, loosen their grip on their individual insights and begin to see further than their own autobiography.

Developing and inspiring others is not the same as doing oneself, as footballers who turn to management often discover. Who had a better track record than Sir Bobby Charlton? In terms of industry experience, of “been there, done it, got the medals to prove it,” at one stage he was peerless in the English game. His management career underlined the gap between doing oneself and mobilising others. (His choice of subsequent activities shows how fast he learned this, and how shrewd and adaptable he is.)

What qualifications should one look for from those involved in management development? Expert facilitation: facilitation by those who are expert at facilitating, rather than those who are expert at something else, however relevant that may appear. Development by those who have a proven track record of developing others, and who can show measurable results from their work. Management based on principles which hold true for any environment, rather than tactics which worked in certain circumstances, but may not in others.

Securing the Future - Essential Development for Senior Managers

Mitchell Phoenix are pleased to announce the next public dates for their sought-after senior management programme Securing the Future. The course will start in London from September 22nd and continue through October 20th, November 17th and December 15th.

What areas does the programme cover? Securing the Future develops managers’ abilities to respond effectively to meet the demands of the future business environment. The long-term goals of the organization are linked to day-to-day activity in a way that makes planning and decision-making a predictable and enhancing process. Each manager’s inseparable relationship with decision-making, responsibility, creativity and time usage is explored in the context of organizational responsiveness.

What gains can executives expect to make? Securing the Future focuses on the essential management activities of the Implementation of Strategy and Tactical Decision-Making. Since the decisions we make largely define our future (both long- and short-term), this essential and crucial skill lies at the heart of all business success and failure. As managers, our daily lives are a continuum of constant decision-making – the better these decisions are, the better the business future will be.

As businesspeople, we understand how critical it is to devote time to the important and essential tasks that we carry out. But how can we defend our time against the intrusions, interruptions and wastage caused by inefficient practices, processes and the poor behavior of others? Effective people know that time-usage is an attitude not a system. To gain strength and skill in applying correct principles to the use of your time requires future orientation, discipline and understanding. Securing the Future will provide the necessary input to help managers make gains in all three of the essential components of effective time usage.

Who should apply? All those who sit at the head of an organization, division or department and who face the challenge of growth and change; individuals who seek inspiration from ideas and have a bias for action; managers who wish to gain clarity on the potential they have and the potential they can release from their people and their organization.

The Real Secret of Time Management

What is the true value of time?

For businesspeople, the adage “time is money” rings as true as coins clinking into the till. Consultants, accountants and lawyers bill their time. If the time taken to manufacture a product is halved, profit margins increase. If a new product is brought to market quicker than a competitor, businesses gobble up market share. In business, wasting time means wasting a resource which could be spent more profitably.

But businesspeople who see time simply as money are missing half the picture. Anyone who gets frustrated sitting through endless unproductive meetings will know that poor time usage is highly demotivating. Anyone who has offered their staff the incentive of an extra day’s annual leave will know that time can be a reward. Anyone approaching retirement can appreciate that there is no difference between your time and your life – one is simply a measure of the other.

How highly is time valued in your organisation? Most businesspeople are diligent in guarding their time from external threats – we quickly cut off cold callers, throw junk mail straight in the bin, and duck invitations to conferences and events which will be unprofitable for us.

What about internally? How easy is it to encourage our colleagues to run meetings effectively, so that a group of expensive executives are not sat in their chairs for long hours making little progress? Who has had experience of others arriving late, being unprepared, and taking decisions without proper consultation, which then have to be amended, courses of action changed, whole project days lost, and so on? These are just some of the unprofitable behaviours which can eat away at arguably our most precious resource.

“It’s not enough for senior managers to improve their decision-making about their personal time usage,” says Kevin Yates, managing director of Mitchell Phoenix, “they also have to make decisions about what the attitude to time will be in their part of the business. Only if they create a culture in which time is valued will they truly reap the rewards. In other words, the real secret of effective time management is that it can’t only be an individual initiative – it has to be a group effort. You can be as decisive and creative about your personal time usage as you like, but as soon as you are forced to participate in a directionless two-hour meeting, all your good intentions have been scuppered.”

Most Companies Behave Unprofitably

While politicians and those close to government can be lynched for spying the dreaded green shoots of recovery, those further from the centre of power are free to cautiously identify indications of an economic upturn.

The National Institute for Economic and Social Research says industrial output has risen for two consecutive months for first time in more than a year, including a 0.2% rise in manufacturing output in April.

John McFall, Chairman of Treasury Select Committee, chooses his words carefully when he argues for "green roots not green shoots," and the idea that “things are coming forward a little bit.”

Rather than debating whether the economy has simply stabilised, or we are on the gentlest of upward curves, we ought now to ask ourselves just how profitable our behaviour will be over the coming months. Having focused on survival through cost-cutting and downsizing, there is now every possibility that orders will start coming through. Further, it is likely that customers will have re-evaluated their spending habits and requirements as a result of the events of the last year. How we meet these two challenges – of fulfilling a rising order book and responding to customers’ new requirements – will directly impact our profits.

A client of ours recently received a three million Euro commission for technology for an oil field about to come on line. This revenue was intended to form a substantial part of the company’s results, due to be published in the autumn. The supplier had to submit designs for client approval before manufacturing the equipment. Unfortunately, the technical design department of our client’s business was operating according to a different set of imperatives, and despite the stated urgency they assigned the job a low priority. As a result, the client did not sign off on time, production was delayed by six to eight weeks, and the invoice for this work will not be issued this financial year, meaning that 800,000 Euros of profit will not appear on the bottom line.

This is a hard learning curve for a business at any point in its history; for it to occur towards the end of a recession is even more damaging. We all have to learn to behave profitably, which means to be connected to the business requirement and to understand that every decision we make and action we take has some bearing on how much profit we make today.

Hamsters on Wheels

“Time Management” is a myth. No matter how slowly time seemed to drag in the meeting you just attended, no matter how quickly a deadline appears to be thundering down on you, time passes at a constant rate. We cannot manage the passage of time any more than we can influence the phases of the moon.

What we can do is make decisions about how we fill the 24 hours we have in each day. Time management is really decision making on how we spend our time.

Yet most of the advice on time management available to businesses and individuals tacitly assumes that these decisions have already been made. Type “time management” into any search engine and scan the results. You will find tips on making to do lists, prioritising activities, and putting those activities in a diary. There is information on stopping procrastinating, filing documents so you can find them quickly and motivating yourself to press on and achieve your goals.

The question is how did you arrive at those goals? When you stop procrastinating, what exactly are you going to do? After all, the major decision is not to pursue a certain goal between three and five o’clock, but to work towards that goal at all. The available information on goal setting mainly revolves around how we should formulate and subsequently achieve them. In other words, traditional time management does not cover what you do, merely when you do it.

Imagine everybody in your department improves their time management. They choose goals, focus on them, and stick to their schedules scrupulously. Unless major decisions had been taken about the department’s strategic aims and how they will be distributed and achieved on a team and individual basis, everyone will simply get better at doing what they were already doing. The status quo will be maintained even more efficiently than before, like hamsters taking steroids so that they can run on their wheels for an extra hour every night.

In the second half of 2009 sound decisions around our time usage are more important than ever before. The recession has inspired a new more frugal attitude to what we really need: businesses have slashed costs and profligate practices, over-staffing is a thing of the past and in its place is a hard focus on what investment actually produces profit.

Kevin Yates, Managing Director of Mitchell Phoenix, sounds a warning note about our appetite for time management, “as we creep out of the recession, everyone is over-stretched. Clever diarising doesn’t help staff who are covering more than one position, or teams operating at half the strength they had two years ago. This is a problem for senior management. Only informed, strategic decisions about time usage from the top of organisations will create the conditions for more profitable behaviour throughout the business and ultimately secure the future.”

The 'will' to lead

I was recently asked what I considered to be the most important attribute of a leader. It's a challenging question since we all seem to have our own idea about this and quite a few of these ideas are not shared. Perhaps it is not possible for all the people to share the same description all of the time. But if we take a step back and ask what could a leader become proficient at, given the will to do so? The answer is surprising; most leaders could learn almost all the skills of leadership you care to come up with. Charisma may escape this concept, but it would not have been on my list in the first place as it is a product of application. Other qualities deliver charisma (or not) through their use.

So I believe now, and have done so for some time, that the most important characteristic of leadership is the 'will' to do so, all the important other skills can be learned. While all else can be learned, not all is learned and I believe this dichotomy has a bearing on the quality of leadership and is a complex mix of the the same will to learn and the sense to guess that there is more to learn. This sounds a little absolute but I am interested to open up this area, our modern society needs new type of leadership as followers are much better informed and become sceptical of those they perceive as charlatans.
The will to lead is the most important attribute of a leader, the will to learn follows quickly.
Kevin Yates
Mitchell Phoenix London