One of the most fascinating aspects of my work with top teams is trying to understand what it is that explains the difference between those that perform very well and those that are truly outstanding.  If you’re a Chief Executive who thinks your top team is somewhere between good and very good and not yet outstanding, I want to suggest that you look at how you behave when the team next gets stuck in a discussion.

In this post and the next two I want to offer three practical suggestions to support you in managing this and also in reducing the number of times it happens.

The traditional response: close it down

Okay, let’s picture you with, say, five Exec Directors sitting round the table.  You’ve been going for just over two hours and during the past 45 minutes you’ve been going round and round one particular topic.  Your Commercial Director has come along with a proposal that your Finance Director has got uptight about and you’re on the verge of getting irritated with your FD.  You’re also becoming bugged that yet again two of your Exec Directors have hardly opened their mouths and are content to look on as if they’re just spectators. 

The traditional response in this moment is for you to go for the not so gentle close down: “Okay, we’ve got four more items on our agenda, we’re out of time and we’re going to have to come back to this next week”.

The others nod their heads in agreement, thinking – like you – that you’ve all just managed to waste the last 45 minutes of your lives.

Try something else: get them on their feet

Let me suggest something different.  How about this:

“Look, I don’t want us to leave this topic without some fresh ideas to move us forward.   So I’m going to go round this table and split us into 3 twos and we’re going to leave our seats and walk round this room and the corridor outside in pairs for 7 or 8 minutes. The deal is that we each have to support the other in coming up with one idea that we bring back to a different seat.  Just one idea from each of us; you might agree with the other person you’re with but frankly I would rather we each try to come back with one idea of our own.

We’ll then go round the table and hear everyone’s idea and decide which two we want to take away and convert into proper proposals to bring back to a future meeting.  Okay?”

Now, you might be thinking that another 7 or 8 minutes won’t make any difference.  Let me tell you that I’ve used this technique for nearly 20 years with all sorts of Executive teams and Boards and I never cease to be amazed by how the sheer act of physical movement can help to free up all sorts of blockages that develop among a group who’ve been stuck in the same seats for far too long. 

The point about having small standing groups for just a few minutes is that you don’t want people to come back with a fully worked up proposition.  It’s the “gleam in the eye“, the core concept that you want. This is why I give them just long enough to try to come up with the outline of an idea and re-energise themselves in the process.

 Needed: fewer decisions and more ideas

What’s great about this approach is that it gets you off the hook of feeling that you have to end up with a decision.  So often what teams need are fresh ideas for Directors to kick around with each other and their own teams after the meeting.  If they’ve got stuck it’s usually because they didn’t have a deep enough pool of ideas to draw on.

This is why the top performing CEO is always trying to increase the amount of time their team spends together in growing new ideas.  They know that what they sometimes need are a lot fewer team decisions and a lot more ideas.

This is because in a high trust, top performing team you can often leave your Directors to get on with it.  What they need from their peers is help with thinking through some of the really tricky stuff, which is much more about problem-solving than it is about decision-making.

More on this tomorrow and then a lot more next month in Virtues and Vices of Exceptional Leaders.

I don’t know about you, but I must admit that until this week the name Alexis Tsipras didn’t mean anything to me.  I now know that he leads the radical left coalition Syriza in Greece, his party came second on May 6th, he’s 37 – and more important than all of that, on Tuesday he described the terms of the 130 billion euro bail-out deal for his country as “barbaric”. 

Why is this one word so important?   And why do opinion polls now show support for Syriza up from 17% to 28%, with widespread speculation that they could even have an overall majority in a second election in June.

Because Tsipras’s use of the word “barbaric” singles him out as the one party leader in Greece who is talking about the impact of the bail-out on the lives of ordinary families.

Austerity has already caused havoc

To those of us who watch this unfolding disaster from something of a distance, we hear about the breathtaking sum of 130 billion euros and are tempted to feel the Greeks are ungrateful for saying that they now don’t like the terms of their bail-out that their political leaders agreed to last month.  Rather than seeming barbaric, it strikes us as breathtakingly generous.

What Tsipras reminds us all of is the havoc that years of austerity have already caused for Greece and the appalling growth in the numbers of the working poor as well as those who are long-term unemployed and now virtually destitute.

Medicine – or poison?

Picture yourself as someone who has had your pay already cut by 40%, as is true for vast numbers of public service workers in Greece, and with two unemployed young adults still living at home, in an economy with nearly 54% youth unemployment and that figure going up all of the time.  And you’re told that this will have to get a lot worse before it gets any better.

Leaders of the European Union say that you have to keep on taking the “medicine” and the leaders of Syriza tell you that the medicine has already turned into “poison”. 

Which one would would you believe?

A slow motion car crash

There is something both compulsive and also profoundly unsettling about what we’re witnessing in the EU at the moment.  It’s as if we’re looking at a car crash in very slow motion and as the vehicles head towards a large collision we see their drivers shouting at each other about what they should be doing to save the day without doing anything to change their own speed or direction of travel. 

So we had the German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle telling the Bundestag this week that “what has been agreed must be applied” because “solidarity does not work without solidity“. 

It might be a nice line for those in the back of his car who want to believe that the impending crash is the fault of the “lazy” Greek driver in the other car. However, it protects Westerwelle’s passengers from the simple truth that they could easily get badly hurt as well and if there is a big pile-up it could be a lot, lot worse for them than he has let on so far.

The one leader who seems to connect

Of course, we can all offer our comments about the leftism of Mr Tsipras. When you read of one of his key advisers claiming that the rest of the EU will be “begging Greece to take more money” so long as they stand firm now, it’s difficult to know whether to laugh or cry.

Yet the fact remains that as we look back on the past few days, it’s the name of Alexis Tsipras that we should remember.  If he is leading his country in a few weeks time into near certain social and economic chaos, it is worth reminding ourselves that he will have gained that new mandate largely because he is the one party leader in Greece who seems to connect with the appalling hardship that millions of Greek families are experiencing and the Euro-babble about solidarity and solidity just doesn’t begin to take on board.

It is the very disconnectedness  of our European leaders that has helped to create the space in Greece that the Syriza coalition are now filling.

All good leaders know that really important messages need to be communicated more than once.   The danger is that the more you repeat them, sticking carefully to a narrow script, the more others can feel that any related issues not included within that script clearly don’t matter to you.  That’s what happened in the French presidential elections, when Francois Hollande portrayed Nicholas Sarkozy as concerned only with austerity without a strategy for jobs and growth.

It’s as if Sarkozy got his record stuck.  And what’s so strange now is that the same seems to be happening with David Cameron and George Osborne in the UK.   They’re telling us endlessly that they will stick with austerity and deficit reduction and then reproduce this same script when they’re asked what their strategy is for jobs and growth.

A sound proposition has become a slogan that’s become a mantra, which now seems to have trapped them in.

There are important lessons here for everyone in all sorts of leadership positions.  Once you have rehearsed in your own mind how you want to manage what you know to be one of the biggest challenges facing you in your job, tell yourself not to get too fixed on a particular form of words.  Let your language move on and evolve over time.

Don’t just keep on justifying yourself

Also, if and when people challenge you on your chosen approach not delivering the goods as quickly as you first said it would, don’t just slip back into justifying why you did what you did.  Say that of course you’re willing to look at new ideas for moving the business on.  Even if you have a non-negotiable element to your “ticket” (as the UK Government has over spending levels) say that if anyone approaches you with the mindset of an entrepreneur and a problem-solver, you will engage with all that they have to offer you in a really open spirit. 

When you feel under attack, don’t try to knock people back.  Ask them to be more specific and show yourself to be more curious about their ideas than they are about yours.

Let others see that your commitment to your organisation (and in the case of politicians, your country) is much more important than you defending your ego or any particular view you might have advocated two or three years ago.

Whatever leadership position you hold, the principle stands that if the record gets stuck on what you have described as your single most important challenge, your leadership can quickly go into a nosedive.  You’ve got to pull yourself out of it as quickly as you can. 

If you’re big enough to contemplate change, those of us who try not to be cynical will want to think the best of you.  But if you keep on repeating what you’ve already said, and repeating it endlessly, when the cynics next foul-mouth you we won’t quite know what to say to prove them wrong. 

We’ll have a horrible feeling in our gut that maybe they’re not all that wrong, after all.

Silos, silos, silos.  Pretty well all organisations have them to one degree or another.  They start off helping you to make sense of things and end up getting in the way of higher performance.  Unhelpful rivalries, petty jealousies and backbiting, senior staff refusing to do things that haven’t been agreed through “proper channels” - they’re all part of the silo mentality.  So how do you get rid of them?

This is something that I’ve discussed with all sorts of top teams and it came up again last week when I was facilitating an Awayday with one.  It had emerged as an issue in one-to-ones with some of the Executive Directors beforehand, when their general view was that “We’re siloised, it’s just the way we are.”

 One had also added: “Silos have their advantages, most important of which is that the others largely leave me to get on with things in my silo.  I keep off their patch and they keep off mine.”

Once I was with the whole Executive team it wasn’t long before the subject came up.  The team quickly recognised that most of them tend to talk just about their own area of responsibility at team meetings and hold back from offering ideas and suggestions when others are reporting on their areas of concern.  They readily accepted that they weren’t being as creative as they could be; they definitely weren’t stretching themselves enough and were stretching each other even less.

But we did seem to be dancing around the topic a little, as if we were discussing some unfortunate fall-out from something that was otherwise fine.

The unstated deal

“Come on”, I said, “we know what’s going on, you’re all in on this together.  You know why you’re keeping off each other’s territory.  It’s one of those unstated deals round this place: you keep off their turf and they keep off yours.”

So often these things are about tone.  Before I opened my mouth I told myself that I mustn’t come across as too critical or heavy; I had to be light, in the spirit of commenting on something that had become part of a shared habit that involved every one of them, and made a point of smiling as I called it an unstated deal.  

“You’re dead right”, said one, “that’s what we do.  We know we’ll have an easier life and be allowed to get on with our stuff if we keep our nose out of other people’s.  As a result we’re not as good as we could be.”

In that moment there was complete and utter agreement.  They all accepted that the silo mentality meant that they ended up selling themselves short.   This is no surprise at all, because silos are at the heart of a whole range of self-limiting leadership behaviours, which is why they inevitably feature as part of Virtues and Vices of Exceptional Leaders.

Thinking about this afterwards, it reminded me of something that we all tend to accept in theory but don’t do nearly enough of in our daily lives.  Call the behaviour.

If we manage to do it in a relaxed and inclusive way, aiming for a light touch rather than a heavy put-down, it is remarkable how readily others can take on board our challenge.

Performance comes first

It helped a lot that we had started off agreeing that we wanted to challenge any leadership behaviours that get in the way of higher performance.  Without this having been agreed it wouldn’t have been possible to be so up-front about the problems of silos.

For most challenges to behaviours, you first need to find a way of agreeing that performance comes first.  The discussion isn’t about “personal stuff”, it’s about good business practice and your performance as a team.

Once this is agreed, you need to be very aware of how you challenge any behaviours that let you down as a team.  Be conscious of using language that is about “we” rather than “you” and think of your tone and how you want it to convey the mesage to the others that you are absolutely assuming the best of them.

If you do this, you might be amazed by how quickly you can renegotiate some of your shared habits as a team and improve your overall performance.

The phrase ”wilful blindness” has entered our national consciousness big time in recent months and all power to Margaret Heffernan for that.  Today she has a brilliant piece in the Guardian that challenges us not just on the Murdochs and their brand of wilful blindness but how much we are all still complicit in it.

So much has been written about phone tapping in recent months that it’s almost impossible to read anything on it without thinking “I knew all that”.  Reading Margaret Heffernan this morning, I couldn’t help feeling “How easy it is to slip into wilful ignorance and just look the other way when you know things are happening that shouldn’t be”.

This is part of the challenge offered by the Murdochs.  Yes, they let unlawful behaviours become virtually institutionalised in News Corporation before they did anything about them and that’s quite unforgivable.  And yes, it is breathtaking when they claim to have been shocked and outraged when they were forced to confront some of the truths about what their employees had been up to. 

Yet there are still far too many Chief Executives who place a greater premium on loyalty and conformity than they do on a willingness to speak the truth, especially when they might not like hearing what others are telling them about their leadership and management of their business.  They don’t see the wilful blindness exhibited by the Murdochs as in any way similar to their own, whereas in fact it is.

How do YOU react to news you don’t want to hear?

This is why we all need to be careful not to stay in “shocked of Tunbridge Wells” mode when we read the latest instalment of the Murdoch saga.  When you find yourself saying “They claim they didn’t know – how ridiculous!” just ask yourself how you react in those moments when someone gives you news that you don’t want to hear.

Do you say “That was difficult to hear but I’m very grateful to you for telling me.  Leave it with me and I’ll sort it out”?

Or do you say “I can’t believe that, it’s not the way we do things round here”?

We are all capable of wilful blindness and what Margaret Heffernan describes as the “moral darkness” that goes with it. 

If only this scandal could now become more about what we all need to do differently to encourage others to speak their truth, and less about the wrongdoings of the Murdochs, we might yet be able to look back on it in a few years time and say how much we have gained from it.

Anyone in the business of leadership development must feel sometimes that you can’t go for more than a few hours with any team without hearing a phrase like “walking the talk” or “leading by example”. 

Yet we all know that some of those who use this language aren’t always best at practising what they preach.  This is one of the reasons why we’ve told ourselves in asaleader.com that from day one we want to set the sorts of standards for ourselves that we encourage Executive teams to set for themselves.

We don’t apologise for wanting to set a commercial price for the products that we will be selling over the Internet because they stem from many years of professional experience.  But we also believe in the principle of contribution and people who seek to profit from the net putting something back.

This is why we are setting up our own charity, the Exceptional Leaders Trust, and will be transferring 30% of all of the monies generated through sales of publications and online programmes to that charity from the first sale that we make after June 11th.

30% for the under-30s

As we build up funds in the charity we will find ways of investing them in exceptional young leaders through awards, loans and grants.  And we will write about their stories on this site: what drives them, what they have found to be their greatest challenges and what sort of support might enable them to become that much more exceptional as leaders.

30% of all income through the net reinvested in the under-30s and then their insights and lessons shared through this site.  We know we mustn’t run before we can walk.  But this feels exciting – and right.

Welcome to the first blog post of asaleader.com.  As you can see from the banner at the top, our ‘bag’ is exceptional leaders and what it is about them that makes them exceptional.

On June 11 we will be launching our first publication, on the Virtues and Vices of Exceptional Leaders.  If you click on the front cover on the right you’ll be taken to a video which is the first of three before the launch, explaining the different clusters of leadership behaviours that we will be profiling across the spectrum from virtues to vices.

Strengths and weaknesses

I’m sure we all know leaders who insist on only talking about their strengths.  “We don’t talk about weaknesses round here because we don’t like to be too negative”.  Tosh – and yet the language of strengths and weaknesses does rather invite this.

We also know that there are those at the other end of the spectrum who start off talking about their weaknesses and quickly move onto their favourite topic: other people’s.  “I got it wrong, but it wasn’t really my fault, you know, it was so and so, I tried to say something but because of how they are I just couldn’t …”

After a few more minutes of this you want to suggest they find themselves a therapist, for your sake as well as theirs.

And then, of course, there’s the large group in the middle.  “We talk about strengths and weaknesses.  They’re linked, you know.”  And so often that’s it, there’s a knowing look, a nodding of the head and they’re onto the next topic which is kept as safe and impersonal as possible.

This is all no surprise because most leaders don’t like talking about their behaviours.  The very word makes some go funny.  Deep down they know that behaviour has an impact on performance and when the argument is had they can’t say anything to challenge it.  But there is still something about the term that makes so many feel on their guard and hoping the discussion will go away.

Moving across the spectrum – from virtues to vices

Our work on Virtues and Vices draws on my experiences over more than 30 years of working alongside all sorts of leaders, many of whom are other than exceptional and some of whom are truly exceptional.

I’ve been fascinated – some might say obsessed – by what it is that makes exceptional leaders tick. The result is our profiles of seven sets of leadership behaviours from virtues at one end of the spectrum to vices at the other.

What so strikes me about these behaviours is how easy it is to move gradually but relentlessly from the virtues end of the spectrum to the other.  You can move back, of course, but it’s harder moving from vices to virtues and if you want to you usually need to be okay about owning how you behave and discussing this with immediate colleagues.

Can you talk straight to those around you about yourself as a leader and persuade them to talk to you about how they find themselves reacting to your ways of leading the organisation?

If you can, you will have a sense of how easy it is for virtues to become vices.  And if you can’t, your performance as a leadership team and as an organisation will be taking a hit.

Time to leave behind anonymous 360

So if you’re committed to being an exceptional leader, you need to find ways of talking to colleagues at work about how you behave towards them and they behave towards you.  You also need to talk about this in ways that are natural and unforced and not mediated as part of some 360 degree feedback.

In recent years anonymous 360 has done a lot more to undermine trust than to promote it.  It’s time to leave it behind and champion the truth that leadership is personal and the personal affects the business.

Put bluntly, if you can’t “do personal” you can’t expect to be an exceptional leader – not for long, anyway.