Getting in tune with leadership       

 

What are the characteristics of a good leader?

 

“Not again!” someone sighs. From the time the word ‘management’ slipped from its high perch to be replaced by ‘leadership’, we have been bombarded with lists of the characteristics of good leaders.  If you are like many people, you compare your own personal attributes and those of your own colleagues with those on the list, and wonder if there is actually anything you can do about it. And that of course is the rub. It’s one thing to have a list of attributes, it’s quite another to know how to acquire them.

 

Besides, the facts do not support the claim that there is a fixed list of characteristics that taken on board - if you knew how to - would turn you into a brilliant leader.  Look around you to the great leaders of history, and there is no fixed leadership mould. In fact, they seem as different from each other as they could possibly be.  There’s Sir Winston Churchill, the ‘bull-dog’, strong in time of war; there’s Mahatma Gandhi with his soft-voiced call for non-violent resistance; there’s Martin Luther King inspiring a great wave of energy with his impassioned almost sung speeches; there’s Nelson Mandela who spends 27 years in prison (what sort of preparation for leadership is that?) and seems to emerge a fully-fledged international leader.

 

If there is a commonality, it lies in that very difference. Each was a life lived in a unique way. The power of leadership emerged in each from his individual way of coping with the hand he had been dealt. Churchill went through tough times at school as a relatively low achiever, and met considerable opposition as a young MP which built in him a strong resilience.  Gandhi, as a timid young lawyer, had to overcome many fears in the beginning, and through this found the quiet centeredness which carried him through the years of abuse and arrests to the achievement of Indian independence.  Luther King through discrimination, and then arrests, became fired up with the passion for equality which carried all before him as civil rights leader. Nelson Mandela used his experience as a convict to practise leadership. As he said of his time in the lime quarries,  “On Robben Island we honed our debating skills while we chipped away at limestone.”

 

The way these men met their experiences developed their thinking and decision-making, but also fostered that broader wisdom to understand feelings and emotions, and deal with people wisely.

 

Does this mean that you have to endure adversity to become a good leader?  Not necessarily.  But it does require the breadth of understanding that these historic leaders acquired through struggle.  It is not sufficient to be intelligent, the master of cause and effect.  I am sure you can think of at least one person who is highly intelligent and clearly would make the most terrible leader.  Leadership is like a tuning fork which has need of both prongs to ring out true.

 

One prong represents IQ, the conventional intelligence of reasoning and judgement, facts and figures, cause and effect.  The other represents EQ -Emotional Intelligence, in the headline-catching phrase of David Goleman. Many business leaders have built up the IQ prong at the expense of the EQ prong, resulting in leadership that is fatally unbalanced. 

 

Goleman sums up emotional intelligence in five phrases:

 

·         Knowing your emotions

·         Managing your emotions

·         Motivating yourself

·         Recognising and understanding other people’s emotions

·         and managing relations, i.e. managing the emotions of others.

 

These elements are interlinked. As you become more aware of your own emotions and step into the shoes of others to experience emotions from their point of view, you begin to gain insight into the dynamics of relationship and recognise the positive intention of even ‘negative’ emotions.  Emotions brought into the open in this way lose their power to overwhelm and sabotage. Positive emotions on the other hand are the key to influence, the tool for motivation, inspiration, relationship and a major factor in building community.

 

To continue the metaphor, if IQ and EQ are the two prongs of the tuning fork of leadership that interact in harmony, what is the shaft that holds the prongs together? Recently, there has been added to the concepts of IQ and EQ a third quotient – SQ, or spiritual intelligence, sometimes described as the ultimate intelligence that serves as a foundation for the effective functioning of both IQ and EQ.  Getting away from neuro-physical terms, it refers to occasions when many different parts of the brain are synchronously engaged. In these times, effectiveness is vastly increased, as when an athlete is ‘in the zone’,  or an artist is ‘in flow’ or someone in the face of danger or challenge is functioning at the peak of performance.  Csikszentmihalyi describes many such instances in his excellent book, “Flow”.  At these times, you have a sense of being entirely yourself, present in the here and now, deeply authentic. This is the shaft of the tuning fork, the quality that joins IQ and EQ to produce something greater than either.

 

You as a leader have entirely different characteristics from another leader. Your bedrock is that very difference: it is the act of being you.  If you are authentic, you are solid and grounded with or without your role.  You don’t need the title or office of ‘leader’ to lead.  You lead naturally, in whatever circumstances you find yourself. And you do that by being at ease with yourself, as you are, in the here and now. You are entirely present, able to relate, make decisions and perform in the moment. The accoutrements of leadership are absent: there are no musts and shoulds, ideas are not fixed, self-image, status and expectations do not dictate a particular way of operating.

 

These accoutrements of leadership that get in the way of authenticity are the trappings of self-consciousness. If you have any sense that your authority comes from your office, you show traces of self-consciousness, which, even if you try to hide it, reveals itself to those who meet you in a myriad of tiny ways: your body language, your tone of voice, the language you use. It is amazing in these days of media hype, sound bites and the rest, all designed to manipulate us, that the public is quick to sense at least at some level traces of non-authenticity it its leaders.

 

There is a great sense of freedom in being authentic. When someone acts ‘in the zone’, they are not confined to acts that they believe possible.  Extraordinary performances can result.  The tennis player Leighton Hewitt, interviewed after a semi-final match at Wimbledon in 2002 said, “It was like the ball was as big as a football, and just couldn’t miss the centre of the racquet.”  Extraordinary performance became incredibly easy.  The deep sense of self of a great leader also allows of many choices and possibilities.  The small sense of self has a fixed self image, and anything outside the self-image feels foreign or difficult. It feels that only a confined range of responses are somehow appropriate or fitting.  People say of some new response, “It just wasn’t me.”  Some people will even prefer to stay in situations that are uncomfortable or even painful, because at least they are being themselves. “If I behaved differently, it wouldn’t be me”, they say.

 

The deep sense of self, on the other hand, connects to something much more powerful. It allows you flexibility.  “This is me.  And this also is me.” In the science of Cybernetics there is a law that says that, in any system, the part with the greatest flexibility will be the one that controls the system.  In a small boat it is the rudder – the moving part – that controls the boat’s direction, not the body of the boat itself. In a company, the person who has the biggest choice of things he/she can do is the one with the power.

 

In the current TV programme “The Apprentice” a group of wannabe business moguls battle it out in a business challenge before one of them gets ‘fired’ each week.  The multi-millionaire manufacturer, Sir Alan Sugar, sets the tasks and evaluates the contestants, and is clearly the person who has the most flexibility and therefore calls the shots, while the contestants have to exhibit behaviours according to rules.

 

Greg Dyke, as Director General of the BBC, was a positive example of flexibility in action.  When he was appointed in 2000, he launched an initiative called ‘Making it Happen’.  Employees thought at first that it was the traditional consultation exercise: ask everyone what they want, and then take no notice and do what you thought of in the first place.  This turned out to be different.  Starting with the first part called ‘Just Imagine’, he invited employees to come up with some great idea for their own departments and for the BBC as a whole.  When the ideas came up – in their thousands – he went with many of the ideas, and began to give employees the confidence that they could influence their own organisation.  His flexible approach paid enormous dividends.  He completely revolutionised the culture of the BBC and carried his people with him, resulting in better programmes and more fulfilled staff.  When he announced his resignation in the aftermath of the Iraq dossier scandal, he was mobbed by staff shouting, “We want Greg” and deluged by e-mails urging him to stay. One member of staff well down the ranks told me, “He’d talk to anyone. If you were in the lift, he’d chat to you. At a party when he was new and I was too, he chatted to me for an hour. And he really listened.”

 

Such stories tell us that he had EQ in abundance too.  But his main strength, and what people appreciated most of all, was his ability to be utterly himself – i.e. authentic. 

 

If you want to know how to acquire authenticity and flexibility, I know nothing better than doing some practical NLP training.  Emotional Intelligence borrows from NLP, which itself has borrowed from earlier developments in psychotherapy.  NLP gives insight into how very differently we all process internally, and offers simple and effective ways to increase our flexibility to have more choices in dealing with these differences in others.  It also offers the quickest and most elegant process I know for becoming more present in yourself, more happy in your own skin. 

 

When you are present and at ease with yourself, you become attractive to others, and begin to create a community through magnetism rather than control.  This is true of all the great leaders. They create a field of endeavour, a culture, to which others want to belong. This culture is a reflection of the leader.  When you look at the work of Mother Theresa, you see Mother Theresa in the values, ethics, style, and everything that the organisation does.  When you look at Virgin, you see Richard Branson echoed in the originality, non-conformism and energy of the enterprises. When you look at the great changes achieved in India and South Africa by Gandhi and Mandela, you see their mark in the way the change was achieved, and in the spirit of the people involved.   And when you look at the BBC in the era of Greg Dyke and afterwards, you capture the vital difference that a leader makes to the whole culture, feel and energy of an organisation.

 

A list of attributes operates at the level of competence.  Being an authentic leader operates at a higher level, the level of your essence – who you are – and is therefore much more influential. It was Gandhi who caught this most succinctly.  He said, “You must be the change you want to see in the world.”  The mediaeval Persian poet Rumi echoed his language of being: “Be your note”, he said, “Sing loud”.

 

Judy Apps, March 2006.

 

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