You confront the F word You conquer fear to kickstart change by identifying and beating the mental blocks that hold back the team.
Connect
Connecting is about helping everybody in the business discover and value their role in creating change. They might not be used to thinking that they can do this, or even that any change at all is a good idea. But we know, and I have experienced, the difference that this connection can make to a team. Not least because it makes it possible for you to plan and to share ownership of the plan with the team.
You begin at the end You connect your vision to how you behave as a team by describing success in 360 degrees.
You make a simple plan You focus on the projects and priorities that will make your vision real and instil urgency by creating a 1,000-day plan.
You don't need to be a genius because you make a genius You uncover creativity that your team didn't know they had by creating ways for bright ideas to flourish.
You become better first, then bigger You inspire a world-class team by emphasizing quality, not profit.
You are in command, and out of control You lead and inspire without micromanaging by trusting your sense of shared purpose.
Create
Teams create magic when they are challenged, united and happy in their work, whatever the scale of the task. To do this, you have to build a culture of continuous change and innovation, at every level, and sustain it.
You have fun You build a culture in which people enjoy what they do by emphasizing integrity, fairness and achievement.
You understand that no one is an “only a …” You avoid stifling hierarchy and damaging cliques by valuing everyone's contribution.
You catch in, and don't catch out You inspire positivity, learning and can-do attitude by praising achievement rather than hunting for scapegoats.
You sustain success You create change that lasts, and enjoy your achievement by building for the long term.
Leadership is About Learning
If you want to lead, you will make mistakes. This is normal, we have all done it. What matters is that you listen to those around you, and learn from them – even if you hear things that you might not like. None of this works without a principle that I call OVT: One Version of the Truth.
OVT does not mean, however, that your opinion as leader must be that version of the truth.
I have tried to be as honest as possible in this book, about mistakes as well as successes. But everyone sees the world through their eyes, and sometimes we forget the bad times. So, in writing this book, I called up some of my colleagues from the past. I asked them what they remembered about the work we did together. Was it how I remembered it? There was one condition: be honest. Some of what they told me is quoted in the book, but their influence runs through every page of it.
I have also gone back into my notebooks. I have kept a notebook of my work for every leadership job I have attempted. When I wrote them I tried to be honest, and capture my feelings, fears and ideas. Looking back at them now, I can remember the moments, and how it felt. They are not just a record, they are something I learned from, and a reminder every day of both the good and the bad parts. I'd recommend that you do the same, but with the same rule for yourself that you use with others: be honest.
Using your honesty and these principles, you can inspire yourself, and the people around you, to achieve extraordinary things together. When you inspire your team with your leadership, ordinary people can do extraordinary things. I've seen it happen, and this book will show you how.
PART ONE
COMMIT
CHAPTER 1
DARE TO DREAM
Every inspiring leader is a dreamer first.
When I try to convince a leadership team that they can achieve something that's extraordinary, I always say to them, “Never start with the numbers. Start by imagining what this business could be.” As an inspiring leader your first goal is to change the definition of success, and commit to a bigger, better dream. This may scare you at first. But we will make that leap. It may take you a while to see the power behind the commitment to dream but, if you can't commit, then the rest of this book will have little meaning for you.
This chapter will introduce the fundamental principle of inspiring leadership. At the end of it, you will be ready to use dreams to inspire your team.
Over the years I have found that this works for teams, and businesses, that are large and small. People often say to me: “It's all very well for you, because you make all the decisions for the company. That's easy. I just run a little department.”
And I say, “It makes no difference. Do it for yourself. Nobody is going to tell you you're wrong when your team and your results start to improve.”
Being a Leader
If you're going to lead this change, we need to agree on what a leader is.
Warren Bennis invented the study of leadership in companies in the 1950s, and he had strong views on what leaders are, and are not. Having grown up in the Great Depression and served in the Second World War, he used his experiences, and what he learned in his research, to advise countless CEOs and at least three US presidents.
He believed that leadership is about using the power to achieve change, and that good leaders were marked out by humanity and humility as well as business results. “A leader is someone whose actions have the most profound consequences on other people's lives, for better or for worse, sometimes for ever and ever,” he wrote.
Bennis also thought that too much of what we call leadership is nothing of the sort. It is management, which is important, but management is all about implementing what other people believe to be correct. All businesses need managers, but all teams also need leaders, and they are rarer. Bennis made this distinction in his research. He used to tell people that a leader both does things right, but also does the right thing. That managers help you get where you want to go, but leaders can tell you what it is you want. And that managers keep their attention on the bottom line, but that leaders are looking at the horizon.
So what sort of people are these leaders? I argue that everyone, in some situation, can learn to be a leader. In the past, many people thought that leaders were born that way, and tried to make a list of the personality traits of historical leaders like Winston Churchill, Nelson Mandela or Steve Jobs to examine what they had in common.
The result: not much. This type of research usually produces a list of traits like self-confidence, assertiveness and a need for achievement. The problem comes when we try to apply that to other people: while leaders might have these traits, there are many more people who have a need for achievement who are terrible leaders. This is good news for us, because it suggests that inspiring leaders aren't created at birth. You can learn to be an inspiring leader.
Other research has asked how leaders behave – rather than looking at the common principles of leaders, they look for what's common about