Leadership

Why would anyone follow you?

You may be an excellent technical manager, but are you an effective role
model for your teams? How many people take their lead from you?

Executive Summary

This Orange Paper discusses the relevance of generic leadership models in context with
the current uncertain economic climate. It draws from recent Harvard research and
features Ed Catmul, CEO of Pixar and Sergio Marchionne, CEO of Fiat and their views on
Leadership. Four key themes are central to the discussion: Providing direction and focus,
Engaging hearts and minds, Role modelling desired behaviour and Unleashing creative
talents. The paper looks at neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) as an effective set of
tools for leaders and references current Chartered Institute of Personnel and
Development research on the topic of ‘Shaping the Future – Engaging Leadership’.

L
eaders are an important part of the organisational network, but research and
experience shows that many businesses go about training their managers to be
leaders inappropriately. A current poll1 of 200 executives on business network
Linkedin shows leadership and creativity as being far more crucial than financial
astuteness, team working and technology in helping to navigate the current economic
chaos. With such a demand for strong leadership, should organisations be demanding
more from their leadership development programmes? Dave Ulrich and Norm Smallwood2
of Harvard Business School think so and state the problem with conventional Leadership
training very clearly:

“Thousands of companies spend millions on leadership development—only to get

lukewarm results. Why? They rely on leadership competency models that identify
generic traits (vision, direction, energy). Then they try to find and build next-generation
leaders who fit the model. Result? Vanilla managers and executives who aren’t equipped
to manage their firm’s unique challenges.”

If you are responsible for getting results through others, then you know that leadership is
necessary. Left to ones own devices employees are capable of being distracted and taken off
course by the merest suggestion of a ‘good idea’. This Orange Paper emphasises four crucial
aspects of leadership that pertain most closely to the purpose and role of a leader:

1. Providing direction and focus

You need to delve
2. Engaging hearts and minds
3. Role modelling desired behaviour into the detail and
4. Unleashing creative talents make development
relevant to each
This is the job of leadership – to ensure that people know
how to make a valuable contribution and to leverage the individual leader’s
combined strengths and creative talents of individuals. unique challenges.
However, as Ulrich and Smallwood suggest, you have to

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get away from the generic models when it comes to developing leaders. You need to delve into
the detail and make development relevant to each individual leader’s unique challenges.

As I write this Orange Paper our financial institutions are collapsing and the global economy is in
a deepening crisis. As leaders around the world grapple with what is happening, no-one seems to
be certain of a solution – even top economists can’t seem to agree with each other. The best
anyone can do is to keep an ear to the ground, use whatever information you can get hold of and
listen to your intuition.

The world has changed and will never be the same again. The We need leaders
future is unknown. Uncertainty reigns large in the minds of the
brightest futurists. Gradual change has been hijacked by a new
who are more
kind of chaos with seismic global shifts in human behaviour. concerned with
Never before has business needed leaders with the desire to nurturing our
overcome egotistical self-interests, to come together and co-
operate creatively. Greed and self-interest are mainly
creative talents
responsible for getting us into this mess, but these attitudes than purely
will not get us out. We need leaders who are more concerned financial reward
with nurturing our creative talents than purely financial
reward and status.
and status.

Leaders who make it their priority to engage employees act as a catalyst for change – getting to
grips with what’s actually happening, engaging others in the process and forging a way forward.
If others are to take their lead and follow, then the leader needs to be someone people can trust
with their career and their immediate future.

You may be thinking, ok then, let’s get to it! If it were that simple we wouldn’t be in the
position we are in now. The trouble is a great number of managers are promoted purely for
technical ability, motivated more by self reward and technical excellence than wanting to
engage others. So there are plenty of barriers to overcome if we are to develop leaders who
really care about unleashing creative talents.

Can you be trusted?

One company whose phenomenal success has come about through excellent leadership is Pixar.
In an article published in HBR, Sept 2008, Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar, states:

“The key to being able to recover is talented people! What’s equally tough is getting
talented people to work effectively with one another. That takes trust and respect,
which we as managers can’t mandate; they must be earned over time”.

Today’s economic climate is challenging leaders like never

before, such that conventional views of leadership are
becoming redundant. Leaders need to update their skills in
order to create and drive change faster than ever before.
The training a world-class fighter goes through gives him the
ability to recover quickly from blows and knockdowns.
Without this he would get floored with the first good punch
which finds his chin. This can so easily happen to any
company which fails to develop its leaders.

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Conventional methods of leadership training will certainly not deliver the capability leaders
need today. You can’t merely create a vision in your own head, give a rousing presentation, set
goals, measure performance and give feedback. Leaders need to be seen on the ground, taking
initiative to make sure the physical working environment and the emotional and intellectual
climates support high performance. This doesn’t happen on its own. It takes time, as Ed Catmull
says, to earn trust and respect, before people will follow your lead. He goes on to say:

“What we can do is construct an environment that nurtures trusting and respectful

relationships and unleashes everybody’s creativity. If we get that right, the result is a
vibrant community where talented people are loyal to one another and their collective
work, everyone feels that they are part of something extraordinary, and their passion
and accomplishments make the community a magnet for talented people”.

Taking Ed’s lead, this particular aspect of a leader’s role must be a priority. Talking and walking
the talk, listening without judging and resisting any natural tendency to be overly risk averse are
good places to start. Add to this the ability to create both the environment and climate
conducive to superior team performance, where creativity can thrive, and you have a recipe for
success. These are all skills you can learn.

Go to the link below for an interview with Ed Catmull on Youtube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iizL2iCMe28

The consequence of poor leadership

With poor leadership people easily fall into bad habits and adapt work to their needs and
desires. They distract each other with the unimportant. Focus gets fuzzy, and when there are
problems teams become defensive, silo mentality prevails and inter-functional battles weave
through the fabric of the working day.

If this all sounds normal you might ask what your leaders are doing about it. You might ask if
they are actually aware that the current state is far from conducive to high performance. How
many leaders are actively working to earn respect and trust? How many are actively listening?
How many are aware of hidden talent being blocked by the ignorance or short-sightedness of
others?

Incentives alone are not the answer

Leadership research and science has developed for over half a century and
the key givens about what really motivates people have changed very little,
but the messages don’t seem to be getting through. Whether motivating an
employee or a child, the basics are pretty much the same. In a local store
the other day I overheard a mother yell at her adventurous young toddler
‘remember what I said about Father Christmas!’

Like many parents this mother was using fear of loss to try and control her child. Parental
leadership offers positive rewards for good behaviour, such as a trip to the movies and by
engaging the child in conversations about how satisfying it feels to have done something worthy
of praise. This latter part builds self-esteem and teaches the youngster the value of good
feelings, not just material rewards. It also engages the child in focussing on positive outcomes.
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If you only motivate your child through fear of loss, it may grow up to be jealous of others and
always wanting. If you motivate your people the same way (otherwise known as ‘managing by
exception’) then expect people to hold back their efforts, resist collaboration, and kill the
creative thinking required to come up with new ideas.

Think back to a leader who you respected, and for whom you were happy to pull out all the
stops. My guess is that your motivation came more from the relationship, and positive
incentives, rather than a fear of loss. This concept can be demonstrated in the leader who
understands the importance of job enjoyment. Matching a person to a job they enjoy makes the
job of motivating and engaging easier. It’s mismatching person to job and expecting great
performance that creates stress for both job-owner and manager. This is why leaders need to
have a good understanding of motivation and the ability to apply what they know to the job of
engaging employees in positive outcomes.

Where to start?

Begin with increasing the leader’s awareness of the interaction between

individuals, teams, their work and the working environment. Sergio
Marchionne, the CEO of Fiat has turned around the company’s fortunes by
getting close to people so that he could observe them in action. He
wanted to find a new leadership team and change the culture in order to
compete with the market leaders. He benchmarked against companies
like Apple, and as a result he slashed the time to get a new model onto
the market from four years to eighteen months.

In an interview with HBR3 he said, “We’ve abandoned the Great Man

model of leadership that long characterised Fiat and have created a Sergio Marchionne
culture where everyone is expected to lead”. He adds, “…. I recognized CEO, Fiat
that Fiat had a leadership problem … our senior leadership wasn’t used
to taking responsibility ….. they had too many bad habits”. Marchionne decided to seek out
talented managers and put them in leadership positions. Then he spent a lot of time engaging
them. He was most interested in how they could lead people and lead change. “I don’t believe
in 360s. They’re hard to manage, and people can game them”.

Marchionne understands that engagement isn’t about

… engagement isn’t surveys, tick boxes and other ways to help bosses
about surveys, tick construe the answers which make them feel good.
It’s about having meaningful conversations with
boxes and other ways people about what really matters in the business. He
to help bosses construe also realised how engineers had been dominating the
the answers which culture, looking inward, and he had to change that
so new ideas could be created and shared across the
make them feel good. company. He sums up with “I’m a conduit for
change, but it’s the people in my organisation who
actually make change happen. I derive my greatest satisfaction from seeing them succeed”.

When managers develop bad habits they become anchored in their behaviour. They find it very
difficult to change because the anchors go deep and group conformity helps keep them in place.
To break these anchors you have to go deep into the values, beliefs and core motivations so that
new perspectives and possibilities can emerge.
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Becoming more aware of which anchors create positive responses and which create negative
ones will help the leader maximise the use of positive anchors. I will explain what I mean by
anchors with a true story:

A company hired a manager, Mike, to replace an ousted

tyrant, Adam, who was responsible over the previous 5
years for lowering morale. The office Mike acquired
was furnished with a power desk, power chair, power
ornaments and power pictures on the wall. Adam
managed by exception, so the only time you were
invited into his office was to receive a telling-off. Mike
tried all his listening and coaching skills, but his team
would not play ball. He observed people arriving at
work. He watched them park their cars and walk into
the office. He also noticed their bodies sagging as they
passed by his office and made their way to their desks. Then their heads would droop
down for most of the day with very little interaction with each other.

Mike decided to take dramatic action and posted a notice saying “On Friday at 4:30pm I
will be burning my desk at the back of car park number 2”. Of course everyone thought
he was crazed, but on Friday at 4pm, with the help of some muscle from the factory he
carried the desk outside, poured petrol over it and threw on a lighted match. Whilst this
was taking place a crowd of employees had gathered around the flames, shocked at what
he had done.

As the flames died down he looked around

and made eye contact with the crowd as he
said, “let’s all go home now and next week
we begin something new”. Over the weekend
he had the walls of his office taken down and
an ordinary desk placed amongst the team.
He also took down all pictures and anything
associated with the previous manager. Over
the next few months morale picked up and
through a series of engaging meetings team
interaction increased as did quality and
productivity.

The manager in this story really understood how people became anchored to negative behaviour.
A symbolic gesture along with a change to the environment collapsed their negative anchors
quickly and allowed a change process to begin; and in this case a change of attitude and
motivation.

You may also observe the anchors which are limiting your own behavioural range in various
circumstances. This will help you to develop flexibility in your communication and behaviour,
and become a more dynamic role model for others. Often this alone is enough to have
employees pulling out the stops for you. Some leaders skip this and try to implement
performance measurement systems in order to keep control. Systems like this become just
another task to be ticked off the list. To really engage your people you need to invest time
connecting with them and earning their trust and respect.

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 Leadership is about interacting face-to-face, in the same
Leadership is place and time. You can’t be a positive role model without
it. You can’t engage without it. You can’t really know
about interacting people without it. Texting, emailing and video-conferencing
face-to-face, in the are all useful at times, but you will never get away from the
same place and need to be with people in order to engage and unleash
creative talents. There are just too many misunderstandings
time. You can’t be without it. There are too many miscommunications and too
a positive role many false interpretations - but there is an answer and it
model without it. comes in the form of something called NLP which stands for
‘neuro-linguistic programming’. It’s been around for some
time, and we have been teaching it to leaders and business
professionals for over 12 years. In fact the interest in NLP from the business community has
grown significantly over the last 5 years due to the number of books4 now published on the
subject.

So what does NLP have to offer leaders?

There are 2 distinct areas where NLP is having success, one is in therapy and the other is in
business. At Quadrant 1 International we are specialists in the latter. The reason why NLP is so
popular amongst business leaders is because of the highly
effective skills of communication, learning and change it has to
offer. For leadership development to be effective it needs to be PURPOSE
personalised, and the best models for learning are those which
allow learners to individualise the model to their own personal set ROLE or IDENTITY
of leadership circumstances. NLP does this better than anything VALUES / BELIEFS
else hence it is often called ‘the study of subjective experience’.
CAPABILITY
The most widely used NLP model is the universal alignment model, BEHAVIOUR
or to use its proper name ‘neurological levels of communication
learning and change’. The background to this model lies in the ENVIRONMENT
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work of the anthropologist Gregory Bateson , and popularised by
Robert Dilts6. This powerful model gives leaders the conceptual
framework for working effectively with change at all levels NLP Alignment
including individual, team, organisational, and cross-cultural. It is
also used in various exercises as a change framework and is a Model
superb vehicle for assimilating a new and more dynamic sense of
leadership role.

One of the key NLP skills is ‘sensory acuity’ – or in layman’s terms the ability to notice whether a
person is engaged or not. When you add the advanced communication skills of NLP to this you
have a leadership engagement toolkit. We all know how important it is to connect with people,
and this is exactly what NLP skills offer. It may be no surprise to find that the major investors in
NLP skills among the business community are sales executives, HR professionals and CEOs. They
know the importance of engaging a prospect and motivating that person to buy a product or buy
into a change initiative.

NLP models and skills are taught on the Real Leadership7 programme which gives participants so
much more than you would get on a generic NLP programme. You learn advanced skills of
behavioural modelling8 with an assignment to practice your skills by modelling someone who is a
leadership exemplar. Imagine being able to understand so much more about what makes people
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tick and to utilise this knowledge for positive influence. A leader who is trained in NLP will
notice more about people and ask more insightful questions than their counterparts without NLP
skills.

Applying NLP to Leadership gives you a vast array of practical tools with which to engage,
motivate, influence and unleash creative talents. Used alongside the Harrison Paradox
Assessment9 you will learn how to balance certain paradoxical traits to make you a more
rounded leader. The actual traits we work with from Harrison are:

• Opinions (certainty and openness)

• Decision Approach (analytical and intuitive)
• Strategic (analyzes pitfalls and risking)
• Delegation (authoritative and collaborative)
• Innovation (persistent and experimenting)
• Communication (frankness and diplomacy)
• Power (assertive and helpful)
• Motivation (self-motivated and stress management)
• Self (self-acceptance and self-improvement)
• Driving (enforcing and warmth/empathy)
• Organization (organized and flexible)
• Strategic Acumen (analyzes pitfalls and optimistic)

Participants on Real Leadership have an opportunity to change any or all of these traits using
advanced NLP techniques including Anchoring, Belief Change, Alignment of Values, Language
Patterning, State Management and Confidence Building, plus many more.

Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD)

As a closing comment I will refer to a current leadership research project conducted by the CIPD
entitled ‘Shaping the Future – Engaging Leadership’ which states:

‘Organisations waste thousands, and in some cases millions, of pounds every year by
appointing the wrong people to leadership positions, or by not developing them to
become effective leaders, or by creating cultures in which even the most potentially
effective leaders are frustrated daily in their efforts to have the greatest positive
impact on the performance of their employees.

This Research Insight is about how an organisation, irrespective of size, sector or area of
business, can exploit the potential of its people such that they can give their best in
performance terms, in a way that increases their motivation, morale and well-being.

It combines up-to-date research on leadership with what we know about the

phenomenon of ‘engagement’ and its effect on organisational success, with recent UK
research into the nature of engaging leadership, and the evidence of its validity in
increasing employee morale, job satisfaction, well-being and performance. Other topics
discussed include how engaging leadership can be assessed, the current debate
surrounding competency frameworks for leadership, questions around leader and
leadership development, and factors to consider in embedding a culture of leadership in
an organisation.’

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The findings in this research are used with the latest NLP tools we have developed to help
leaders grapple with the issues, realise what they need to do and create fast personal change
according to their personal development needs and organisational context.

Leadership needs to unleash creative talents today more than at any

other time in our history.

Orange paper written by David Molden, FCIPD, NLP Master Practitioner and Trainer, Director
with Quadrant 1 International, author of Managing with the Power of NLP, and NLP Business
Masterclass, co-author with Pat Hutchinson on Brilliant NLP book and audio CD and How to
be Confident using the Power of NLP, co-author with Denise Parker on Beat Your Goals, co-
author with Jon Symes on Realigning for Change.

1
A Linkedin poll revealed 66% of top executives consider Leadership the most crucial, with Creativity a close 2nd.
2
Dave Ulrich and Norm Smallwood ‘Building a Leadership Brand’ Harvard Business Review reprint #R0707G
3
Harvard Business Review, December 2008 ‘Fiat’s Extreme Makeover’ Reprint #RO812B
4
Read Managing with the Power of NLP or NLP Business Masterclass, both by David Molden.
5
Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, ISBN 978-0226039053
6
Robert Dilts, Skills for the Future, ISBN 978-0916990275
7
Go to http://www.quadrant1.com/Quadrant-1-Courses/real-leadership for details
8
Behavioural modelling is the term used for eliciting the psychological and physiological patterns which together create
a specific behaviour.
9
Refer to http://www.harrisonassessments.com or www.quadrant1.com/Profiling-Tools/

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