THE POWER OF POSITIVE THINKING ON LEADERSHIP

I love Henry Ford’s quote "Whether you think you can or whether you think you can't, you're right" and the problem is most of us learn during our formative years that failure is something to shy away from hence “The greatest barrier to success is the fear of failure.” Sven Goran Eriksson. It is key that we become more positive in our outlook and start believing “I can if,” and not “I can’t because,” when faced with struggles or doubt. Many average businesses fear failure whilst the great ones I know pursue success.
However, sometimes it isn’t enough to be the only one who believes in you – positive people make positive things happen they inspire each other to greatness. Collective positive thinking produces a self generating power that lifts group performance way beyond the expectation of any individual involved. Attitude is infectious and attitude drives behaviour “The success of a journey often depends more on who you are with than where you are going.” feel the power by surrounding yourself with “I can if” people rather than I can't because people .
Key to this is how an organisation deals with failure, if a blame culture exists and failure is stigmatised real lessons are never learned and real progress never made. Failure is always a pre-cursor to success. Just think of the great inventions and the number of false dawns that are learned from.
Powerful groups have always existed the book of Ecclesiastis states, “Though one person may be overpowered by another, two people can resist one opponent. A triple-braided rope is not easily broken.” and the ancient Greek philosopher Epictetus said, “The key is to keep company only with people who uplift you, whose presence calls forth your best.”
Some of the most successful organisations I work with recruit solely on attitude or happiness, they employ just positive people and inspire each other to greatness. Timpsons is one example of such an organisation that in its recruiting truly looks just at attitude because skills can be taught and learned; a positive disposition cannot be induced in any college. Your attitude is your own, make sure you take advantage of its power. “Every relationship in your organization will affect you one way or another. Those who do not increase you will inevitably decrease you?” John Maxwell
Successful modern leaders need to be positive in their outlook to influence and inspire those they lead.

GETTING THE BEST OUT OF YOUR PEOPLE

For businesses in and around Exeter, Newcastle and indeed elsewhere motivating your people is an essential skill for great leaders. The Key question being how do I get my team to perform at a superb level for a sustained period? Financial inducements have always been seen as essential inducement but are they really?

The Candle Problem undertaken by Carl Dunker in 1945, where a candle and tacks were placed in a box with some matches on a table and those taking part were asked "how do you attach the candle to the wall, light it and prevent the drips from falling on the table". It was reused by Sam Glaxberg who proved that the pressure induced by financial incentives made teams less efficient by 31/2 minutes. So money can work as an incentive for mechanical and automated tasks but not for tasks requiring creative and cognitive skill here the pressure builds with the size of the reward and the degree of complexity related proportionally to the paucity of the performance. So money is not the answer. Extrinsic rewards were very much part of the management of workers last century. Today’s team members prefer far more intrinsic rewards once they have met their extrinsic needs.

So what other inducements has a leader got to enhance his team’s performance?

Today's employees unlike their predecessors like a degree of autonomy. They like to know where they fit within an organisation and where the organisation is going. They like to understand and fit the culture and the values of the organisation as they consider choice to be an essential part of modern life. But they like to feel they have some say and some control of what they do.

They like to feel that they are developing personally in their chosen occupation or role. There is a desire to be seen and recognised as an expert. So they need to see that they are progressing and expanding their knowledge and experience. They also need to recognise that there are opportunities to do this in the future.

The idea that money is king is balanced by a sense of purpose and this is the dichotomy the world is wrestling with now. How do you as an individual or unit survive comfortably and yet maintain a purpose and a contribution to the wider good in a very capitalist and media driven selling environment.

People need cash enough to survive in their chosen environment at their chosen status but they need much more from their employment if they are to be motivated within their employment they need purpose and control in their lives and that is part of modern freedom delivered when humans no longer need to be in a herd continuously to survive.

Sampson Hall are running a series of events in the South West in Exeter and the North East in Newcastle which cover topics such as this. Further information is available at http://www.sampsonhall.co.uk/services/course-dates-and-descriptions.html

ALLOWING AID TO FUNCTION THROUGH EFFECTIVE LEADERSHIP

The philanthropic nature of our modern western society is based within our capitalist conscience and therefore neither focused nor truly effective in its output. For most benefactors charity ends at the delivery of the sponsorship or donation as a conscience or desire to do some good is personally or organisationally is met. "The West has spent over £ 11/2  trillion on foreign aid over the last five decades and still had not managed to get cheap medicines to children to prevent half of all malaria deaths. The West has still had not managed to get £3 mosquito bed nets to poor families. How can our concerted global efforts at combating such a clearly defatigable issue be so inept. If a business was run in the same way with such a niche aim it would soon be bankrupt. It's such a tragedy that so much well-meaning and genuine compassion does not deliver effective results to the  unlucky and  powerless people who reside in such naturally challenging regions.

Where is the vision? Where is the coordination? Where is the leadership?

The director of the United Nations Mil­lennium Project Jeffrey Sachs offered a Big Plan to end world poverty, with solutions ranging from nitrogen-fixing leguminous trees to re­plenish soil fertility, to antiretroviral therapy for AIDS, to specially pro­grammed cell phones to provide real-time data to health planners, to rainwater harvesting, to battery-charging stations, to cheap medicines for children with malaria -- for a total of 449 interventions. Professor Sachs has played an important role in calling upon the West to do more for the Rest, but the implementation strategy is less constructive.

So the vision is there and the planning that naturally follows it is there. Where is the leadership? Where is the coordination?

According to Pro­fessor Sachs and the Millennium Project, the UN  Secretary-General should run the plan, coordinating the actions of officials in six UN agencies, the UN country teams, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and a couple of dozen rich-country aid agencies. This Plan is the latest in a long string of Western plans to end poverty.

Unfortu­nately, the West has a bad track record when it comes to meeting its goals. A UN summit in 1990 set as a goal for the year 2000 universal primary-school enrolment. (That is now planned for 2015.) A previous summit, in 1977, set 1990 as the deadline for realizing the goal of universal access to water and sanitation. (Under the Millennium Development Goals, that target is now 2015.) Nobody was ever held accountable for these missed goals nations hide behind national agendas and leaders shirk their duties.

So perhaps the leadership is not there but what about the coordination?

At the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2005, Sharon Stone raised a million dollars on the spot for more bed nets in Tanzania. Insecticide-treated bed nets can protect people from being bit­ten by malarial mosquitoes while they sleep, which significantly lowers malaria infections and deaths. But if such nets are such an effective cure, why hadn't Planners already got them to the poor? Unfortunately, neither celebrities nor aid administrators have many ideas for how to get bed nets to the poor. Such nets are often diverted to the black market, become out of stock in health clinics, or wind up being used as fishing nets or wedding veils.

The non profit organization Population Services International (PSI), gets rewarded for doing things that work. PSI stumbled across a way to get insecticide-treated bed nets to the poor in Malawi, with initial funding and logistical support from official aid agencies. PSI sells bed nets for fifty cents to mothers through antenatal clinics in the countryside, which means it gets the nets to those who both value them and need them. (Pregnant women and chil­dren under five are the principal risk group for malaria.) The nurse who dis­tributes the nets gets nine cents per net to keep for herself, so the nets are always in stock. PSI also sells nets to richer urban Malawians through private-sector channels for five dollars a net. The profits from this are used to pay for the subsidized nets sold at the clinics, so the program pays for itself. PSI's bed net program increased the nationwide average of children under five sleeping under nets from 8 percent in 2000 to 55 percent in 2004, with a similar in­crease for pregnant women. A follow-up survey found nearly universal use of the nets by those who paid for them. By contrast, a study of a program to hand out free nets in Zambia to people, whether they wanted them or not (the favoured approach of Planners), found that 70 percent of the recipients didn't use the nets. The 'Malawi model' is now spreading to other African countries.

The local PSI office in Malawi (which is staffed mostly by Malawians who have been with the program for years) was looking for a way to make progress on malaria when it discovered the solution. They decided that bed nets would do the job, and then hit upon the antenatal clinic and the two-channel sales idea. This scheme is not a magical panacea to make aid work under all circumstances; it is just one creative response to a particular problem.

So the co-ordination can be there through innovation and entrepreneurialism!

What is the real problem? Well it’s down to leadership and in the business world leaders make or break an organisation yet in the philanthropic world of humanitarian aid leaders seem unable to operate effectively and deliver to laudable well constructed goals. They lack the tool sets to deliver, they lack the ability to make a difference and yet the Western world sits back happily resting on its laurels having donated over 11/2 Trillion £ to help those poor people who suffer so much in the harsh environs of the third world.

Let’s get cleverer at delivering aid by employing top leaders, empowering them to deliver and rewarding them when they do so innovatively and with an entrepreneurial flair. Let’s give them the tools to deliver aid far more effectively and close that leadership gap.

LEADING A CHARITY

Having worked with several charities I have found that the leadership, team cohesion and motivation and the leadership challenges are very different from those we have experienced when working within the corporate sector. Charities are businesses in their own rights but they work under a different and more challenging set of rules and circumstances.

Where a leader in the corporate sector just has the conundrum of balancing stakeholder profit with customer value and societal/brand expectation. A leader in a charity has to balance trustee requirements, fundraising requirements, employees and volunteers, societal expectations and the end user service/value.

Let's start by looking at the trustee dimension within a charity, as it is the most complex of the issues. Trustees are generally very well meaning and highly motivated people who work genuinely hard for a heartfelt cause. However, they may not all come with the same motivation and agenda. Hence, they may value different aspects of a charities work in different ways. They need to be marshalled to be truly cohesive in their approach and yet they need to be independent in their judgement, in order, to ensure the charity adheres to the requirements of the law and the Charity Commission as it moves forward.

Fund raising has many tenets from investment, the basic retail of products, to the winning of funding and grants from public and charitable bodies, to the support of individuals as they raise money. These aspects combined need to provide the working funds for the charity to function and develop. The charitable  financial world is complex and fraught with risk during these frugal times, accountability and transparency has never been more valued and demanded by the customer and the regulator.

The employment environment of a charity is also complicated when it comes to motivating, leading and managing those involved. A charity will normally have paid employees who work in normal employee circumstances alongside those who volunteer their services. The paid employees, whilst viewing their employment as a job, may be intrinsically motivated to choose to work within the sector. However, it is the volunteers that bring other challenges in terms of motivation and expectation. How do you plan an event when you don't know how many people you will have there organising it?

When it comes to providing value for your customers, identifying who they are and how their expectations can be met is critical. Each customer will have a very different perspective of the charity and it's work. Derived from the reasons for their association with that charitable organisation. Contributors to the charity will expect their money to be spent wisely. Those who benefit from the work of the charity may have real issues and problems in their lives that have driven them to seek help. Some will be so desperate that any assistance will do and others will be far more choosy. Circumstances will be incredibly varied depending upon the focus of that particular charity.

The intrinsic rewards of charitable work far outweigh the financial reward and yet the challenges of leading such organisations in the highly competitive charitable sector can lead to a stressful and lonely existence. Best practice needs to be shared more effectively and proven solutions to common issues need to be more available to all those involved, in the leadership of these wonderful organisations, who afford our society so much.

Sampson Hall are now working with Charity Leaders as part of the Charity Forums UK. To help them work together, share best practice and support each other.

PUTTING A VALUE ON VALUE

We all joke about singing from the same hymn sheet or indeed even being in the same church.  But there’s a serious lesson here that some organisations have failed to learn to their cost.  And the key word here is ‘values’.

Humans are individuals with their own sets of values and beliefs. Businesses too, have organisational values and goals.  People join organisations because they like what they see.  They stay because their personal values match those of the organisation.   And they move on if they don’t.

Aligning these human and organisational values is the key to success in the modern business world where speed is vital and trust its key catalyst.

The simple truth is "me" becomes "we" and when an individual feels strongly that they are part of an organisation that affords them great benefit.  They become disempowered as individuals and much more empowered as a team. They feel stronger within and are therefore loathe to stand up for themselves against their peers.

We are taught in modern education to conform, to be right, to go with the majority. But right is often merely a matter of current opinion. Think back to when the world was flat, women could not vote, capital punishment was an acceptable result of serious criminality, tobacco was good for you, drink driving acceptable. All are now considered unacceptable behaviours within most modern Western societies.

The images of a South African taxi driver being dragged behind a police vehicle for illegal parking and news of his subsequent death in custody has shocked the world. Here we see an appalling example of a state organisation with a poor organisational culture that has become unacceptable to most South Africans.

Last October saw the killing of 44 people at a Marikana mine, the deadliest police action since the end of apartheid. More recently the police officer responsible for the prosecution evidence against Oscar Pistorious was publicly removed from the case as a result of his own pending murder charges. The question is: what type of culture exists within the South African police force. Why do good individuals who join an organisation to uphold the law, then behave this way?

The answer comes from the top.  Poor leadership allows values to slip and behaviour changes in groups to shift. Good leadership upholds values and deals with unacceptable behaviour by stopping it in its tracks.

Visualize a fire-fighter rushing into a building, or a Royal Naval ship venturing into dangerous seas. These acts of extreme bravery are an agreed-upon condition of an individual’s employment at the time of their joining. These are the same acts of commitment as our valiant soldiers undertake in fighting and risking life and limb in foreign wars. They each serve with pride, commitment and passion; their agreed-upon commitment. The power of this commitment becomes a personal promise to do the very best job possible.  What these brave souls deserve are good leaders.

Napoleon once stated "There are no bad soldiers, only bad officers" and I believe he was absolutely right. Individual incidents and mistakes will always happen but when organisations go seriously wrong it’s because of the leadership culture that exists within the organisation.  Invariably when an organisation is in trouble, things are going wrong in several areas.  It’s rarely a one-off incident.

Sampson Hall say:  know and publish your organisational values and you will recruit individuals that match them.   it is then up to the leadership to ensure that the behaviour within the organisation matches those values, however complex and difficult that may be.

BANKING AND THE MORAL MAZE

The Royal Bank of Scotland’s five billion pre tax loss – the fifth annual loss on the trot – is hard enough to swallow.  So how does the bank’s head Stephen Hester sell the idea of paying £215M to its investment bankers?

Not very well is the answer.  With public hostility to the banks showing no sign of abating, when are the banks going to start living by the morals and ethics that most of us in our business and private lives abide by?

Not any time soon, by the sound of it.  Even more interesting, unless RBS faces any further punitive charges, it will return to the same high operating profit of £3.5 billion that it made this year.  Unless more procedural failings emerge.  Lets not hold our breath on that one.   Nor any suggestion of a change in the culture of the banking hall.

In our modern world when does an organisation really need to stand up for the values it expounds? Acknowledging that truth comes before trust; how can the leaders who were the exponents of much of the wrongdoing now inflict a different less profit oriented culture on those who follow them? Particularly if they are still using their obscene, outdated and questionable reward system that does not fit the value sets of current social corporate practice

Why should the tax payer continue to support a self perpetuating antiquated money oriented system that is not fit for purpose? It is as close in terms of risk and reward to drug dealing although the associated rich rewards come without the personal risk. Is this sustainable whilst those within that society struggle to make ends meet.

Is it not time for a serious look at what banking is and what it stands for? What does it deliver to society and how does its current culture, values and ethics really match those of the society it serves.

The imbalance in the Banking, corporate conundrum made up of shareholder profit, customer value and societal expectations that exists is down to poor, unethical leadership. Leaders need to be far cleverer in balancing their delivery appropriately in each of the contributory areas. Those leaders will also need to live by the values they expound. The Banking industry is at a crossroad it is up to its leaders to rise to the considerable challenge of changing the culture and leading it into a new age.

SampsonHall

Good Leaders, Great Decisions

Sampsonhall.co.uk

LEADERS BEHAVING BADLY

What do Lord Rennard, former Barclays boss Bob Diamond and General Petraeus, former head of the CIA all have in common?

Answer – they all left their positions as a result of inappropriate behaviour.

All three were extremely clever and competent, able leaders, yet they all misbehaved in a way that cost them or at least contributed to their losing their leadership position.

It is interesting that moral courage, self discipline and trust are becoming more and more important in life as societal values change.  The common denominator in the News of the World phone hacking, the BBC and Jimmy Savill, the horse meat scandal, the Banks, the South African Police brutality stories is the same:  leaders are not being morally courageous in their behaviours and certainly not when it comes to exposing misbehaviour around them.

If leaders do not have the moral courage to do what is right organisational values mutate. Leaders need to have principles and stick to them they need to have the courage to do the right thing however unpalatable it may be. For to let one piece of misbehaviour go unchallenged is to lower their personal and organisational standards. And results, just judging by the cases above, have been typically disastrous.

A moral compass is essential at the top of an organisation as its leaders, once truly embedded in the organisation will control and influence what happens within the organisation. Once accepted a leader can take an organisation wherever they want with little challenge from within.  Whether they influence by word or deed they will be the ones who must be held responsible for their own behaviour and for the behaviour of those leaders around them.

When Lord Acton, expressed this opinion in a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton in 1887: "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men." he was absolutely right.  But now we have an insatiable media and the technology to match. Never more have society’s leaders needed that moral compass as the likelihood of being exposed for wrongdoing is so much greater.

In other words in today’s world, you’ve got far more chance of being found out.

SampsonHall

Good Leaders, Great Decisions

Sampsonhall.co.uk