Issue 2.8 | March 2011

In this Article: how leadership that influences is the result of persistent initiative.

by Jonathan Wilson

“The essential thing ‘in heaven and earth’ is … that there should be a long obedience in the same direction; there thereby results, and has always resulted in the long run, something which has made life worth living.”  Friedrich Nietsche

When I first heard my former boss speak in 1996 at a leadership conference, I realized that I was listening to one of the great leaders of our time.  Michael Cassidy was born in the tiny African kingdom of Lesotho and eventually established himself in South Africa.  After attending university in the UK and then the US, he founded African Enterprise, which was to become Africa’s largest home-grown not-for-profit organization.  This remarkable organization went on to conduct significant work in peace and reconciliation and socio-economic development in numerous countries across this vast and often troubled continent – including hot-spots such as Rwanda, the Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Liberia.  Michael’s work has brought him alongside many of contemporary history’s most famous African leaders.  He has appeared before parliaments in the Western world and his advice has been sought in the conflicts of Northern Ireland and Israel-Palestine.

When I met Michael in 1996, his most recent accomplishment had been his instrumental involvement in the behind-the-scenes negotiations that enabled South Africa’s first democratic election to take place without violence.  After the West’s great negotiators, Henry Kissinger and Lord Carrington, threw their hands in the air and left South Africa to what they predicted would be its descent into a bloody civil war, Michael worked with Kenyan negotiator Washington Okumu to bring Nelson Mandela, FW de Klerk and Mangosuthu Buthelezi together into an agreement which no outsiders had thought possible.

Michael is a man who carries with him an air of tremendous gravitas and spiritual authority, which has consistently generated a cooperative response towards him.   Just a few months after starting work with Michael as a kind of liaison officer in 1998, I sat with him in a secret meeting with a warlord who had a fearsome reputation.  We were in the early stages of a peace process.  What astonished me was Michael’s instant rapport with this man of violence (who moved about in secret because he was a target of his enemies).  Michael did not establish rapport by means of compromise or fawning.  He maintained his own moral integrity even as he reached out to the humanity in the warlord.  Although the meeting was a success in terms of gaining the warlord’s agreement to participate in the peace process, the part I cannot forget was seeing this powerful man weep as Michael gently but authoritatively spoke to the fear and guilt that weighed on the fellow: something I suspect only Michael, among all those who sat in the room that day, had discerned.

A Thirty-Year Obedience

From his early twenties at least, Michael’s leadership potential was seen and acknowledged.  Respected leaders in America and the UK gave him financial assistance, in terms of both start-up capital and ongoing support.  His network into the spheres of the privileged and influential gave him an unusual leg-up wherever he went.  Putting together his skills, his character and his network, one might assume that Michael’s leadership success was both instantaneous and constant.  It was neither.

In spite of occasional successes, and in spite of the affirmation of a few friends, the first ten years or so of Michael’s work were marked by routine discouragement.  After years of slogging he felt he was not moving any closer to achieving his dream of an African-wide impact.  Furthermore, he quickly developed opponents across the ideological spectrum who vilified him as either a communist or a conservative.  As it turned out, the work he is best known for took place some thirty years after he started.

In the previous article (Issue 2.7)I wrote that while leadership is known by its influence, it begins with obedience: obedience to what is right.  As observed by the troubled philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, “things worth living for” require “a long obedience in the same direction.”  Nietzsche had a rather narcissistic and exploitative view of what is “worth living for.”  Nevertheless, I believe the overall principle he states is correct.  Influence may begin with a leader’s courageous initiative to do the right thing, but it is unlikely to reach its potential unless the leader practises “a long obedience in the same direction.”  Leadership that influences does not only begin with courageous initiative: it is the long, arduous and often wearisome repetition of multiple acts of courageous initiative.  To succeed, leaders have to persevere unstintingly; and to the end.

All the truly great leaders – whose leadership has resulted in substantial and long-term yields of well-being for many people – have exemplified this.  In the realm of politics, think of William Wilberforce and the abolition of the slave trade; Nelson Mandela and the end of Apartheid; Elizabeth Fry and the transformation of Britain’s prison system; or Winston Churchill, who persevered through a political career characterized more often than not by public unpopularity and the contempt of his peers, only to become Britain’s leader in “its finest hour.”   For each of them, their leadership reached its pinnacle of influence only after decades of “a long obedience in the same direction.”

It is not likely that many of us reading this have a Churchillian leadership destiny.  And it is a false picture of leadership that assumes that only a Churchillian influence is “worth living for”.  Nevertheless, we are likely one day to be surprised by just how many people are grateful recipients of our leadership influence, if only we are prepared to repeat a thousand, cumulative acts of obedience, for a long time, in the same direction.

Another soul insight from www.soulsystems.ca.

Leadership by Soul™, Trademark and © Soul Systems, All Rights Reserved.

Issue 2.7 | February 2011

In this Article: how leadership that influences has to begin with leadership that takes courageous initiative.

by Jonathan Wilson

It is commonly said that leadership is influence.  Influence, however, is an outcome.  Before it results in influence, leadership is a set of actions.  The first act of leadership is obedience: obedience to what is right.

In our time, the language of obedience is distasteful.  At the sound of this word we probably imagine an authoritarian leader giving orders and expecting to be obeyed.  There’s a good reason the majority of us have reservations about authoritarian leadership: a leader who is a law unto himself or herself leads with self-interest.  Self-interest innately contradicts the purpose of leadership, which is to serve a cause and those achieving it (see Issue 2.3).  Paradoxically, this is precisely why leadership has to begin with obedience to what is right: unless you are to become a demi-god and tyrant, you have to be true to something greater than yourself.

Because we associate leadership with influence, we think of leadership actions accordingly.  Actions that influence include vision-casting, story-telling, strategic planning, team-building, and decision-making.  But such actions ring hollow unless they flow out of the leader’s demonstrated obedience to what is right.  In other words, leadership that influences has to begin with leadership that takes initiative – initiative that flows out of a conviction about what matters most.  An endeavour is weak if its leader (or leadership team) has not already embodied the cause they represent.  The recent movements in Tunisia and Egypt would not have found their feet but for the initiative of just a handful of leaders, whose courageous action inspired others to act courageously, and eventually the movement swelled like rapidly rising flood-waters.

Here we find another paradox of leadership.  All subsequent leadership actions have to be team-oriented (if one is to mobilize a movement of people to achieve a significant outcome), but the first act of leadership – taking initiative – is utterly personal.  It is often lonely.  No-one can do it for you.  And it may be that no-one does it with you – at least at first.  For precisely this reason, the first act of leadership is not just obedient; it is courageous.

Right vs. Risk

The hardest situations in which to take the lead are those that appear to expose us to the greatest risk.  For a leader, risk to one’s influence is particularly threatening.  That is why politicians are known for vacillation and compromise: influence is their primary currency.  In truth, however, influence built on courageous leadership has the most lasting power.  Hosni Mubarak knows this.  He is an easy target, however.  I can think of numerous times where I have hesitated or failed to do the right thing, because I cared more for myself than for the cause (and for the people that cause represented).

While obedience to what is right can be courageous, courageous leadership is not demonstrated in just the grand things in life.  In fact, it is more likely to be tested, and proven, in the small things.  The following story is a very personal illustration of this.

At one time I was a Director of Leadership Development, when my organization hired a new national CEO, to whom I reported.  He was smart, charismatic and creative.  Over the course of his first year, however, it became increasingly evident that he also had a bullying and autocratic leadership style.  His failure to consult led to strategically ill-informed decisions.

Eventually, I confronted him, respectfully but frankly.  Yet despite the privacy of our interactions, the rumour-mill rapidly got to work and I found myself vilified among my colleagues.  Some even fingered me as an “enemy”.  By this stage the board was investigating matters.  Some of its directors also had concerns about the CEO.  At this point I decided I’d done for the organization all I legitimately could as a direct report, and since resolution didn’t appear to be close, I requested, and was granted, a six-month study leave.

Although my choices exposed me to a degree of risk, it was difficult for me to think in those terms.  What compelled me to act as I did was the tremendous risk I saw to the future health of this organization whose work I believed in.  As a result of my actions, I gained notoriety and lost friends.  This wasn’t easy but I had to trust that I’d acted in the best interests of those concerned.  For six months I quietly studied and wrote.

Three months into my leave, the international CEO phoned me: “Jonathan, the international board wishes to appoint you to the international executive, as executive vice president of leadership development.  Are you interested?”  I had, it turned out, not lost credibility in the eyes of the international leadership (perhaps because, in the months I had been away, the situation in our national office had become increasingly troubling).  I accepted the post and, by the time I returned to the office, my former boss was gone.

In the short term, I lost both reputation and valued relationships.  That I was eventually vindicated was, I hope, an affirmation that I had acted on what truly mattered.  It took time, but I was able to rebuild almost all of the relationships damaged through this experience.  My new role expanded my influence from South Africa to eleven countries in Africa and several in Europe and North America.

Mine is a small story, and there will be others with more objectivity who can point out the mistakes I must certainly have made at that time.  Even so, there are many examples of sung and unsung leaders from history which affirm that before leadership is influence, leadership is obedience: the courageous initiative to act according to what is right.

Another soul insight from www.soulsystems.ca.

Leadership by Soul™, Trademark and © Soul Systems, All Rights Reserved.

(Photo © John D Wilson.  All Rights Reserved.  Used by Permission)

Issue 2.6 | January 2011

In this Article: why a gripping vision will inspire, compel and sustain your company toward the achievement of great things.

by Jonathan Wilson

Standing on the slopes of a remote village along the Balim River in New Guinea, there is a vision to the east that seizes one’s eye and holds it fast (see above).  Here the morning sun rises over high ridges that fold into one another, hiding distant valleys and waterfalls.  This was my primary home for nearly two decades, and as a child I would often gaze and imagine what it must be like to be in those high, beckoning valleys.

Vision – whether for oneself or for one’s company – is a little bit like this.  It is a picture of something not quite in reach, something still in the distance, except, in this case, the distance is not geographical, but chronological and existential.  At the same time, if the vision is compelling enough, the distance between current reality and the vision does not drive one away from the picture, but back to it, again and again.

When you read your company’s vision statement, does it have this power over you?  Does the vision it describes compel you and draw you back, again and again, to the dream of a new possibility?

Vision statements in companies today are too often the result of dutiful exercise rather than the articulation of a genuine dream, held within the company, about what the future could look like.  The statements that result from such exercises are often generic and dry; and rarely compelling.

At other times, vision is confused with purpose, values and other categories of similar ilk.  As a result it conveys little sense of an anticipated new reality.  Coca Cola has seven “P’s” in its vision statement, each of which describes a condition so generic that it is unclear as to how it separates future reality from present reality: e.g. “Planet: Be a responsible citizen that makes a difference by helping build and support sustainable communities”.  This, along with its other “P’s”, states a commitment, not a vision.

Worse yet is a vision that is in essence a fantasy, a grandiose picture (usually egotistical) of the company’s future stature in the market.  For example, one company has said, “We aspire to be the most admired and valuable company in the world.”  Procter & Gamble could, perhaps, articulate such an ambition, given their reach and the nature of their products (consumables of every conceivable kind); but it doesn’t appear valid for a company that is one of dozens of telecom providers in North America.

Three Things that Make a Vision Grip

Three things make for a vision that grips us.  Firstly, true vision inspires.  It imagines a new and much better condition in the future.  It inspires because it aspires.  If the imagined future is not very different from the present, it provides no stretch.  It is more akin to a goal than a vision.  It won’t inspire for long, because it is probably achievable in a short space of time – or too vague to for its achievement to ever be measured.

Too often, a company’s imagined future is self-focused, such as the hubristic company cited above.  A company will never achieve anything without satisfied customers.  Therefore, if a vision doesn’t focus on the customer, it is unlikely to inspire anything but conceit, rather than service mentality that will generate true success.  The best visions imagine a new, better situation for all concerned.

Secondly, true vision compels.  It compels us to act because the change it anticipates is important.  It matters.  And it compels us to act because the change it anticipates is possible.  In other words, it is truthful to the nature of the world and how it works – and specifically, for most organizations, human systems, and how they work.

A vision of substance, one that will stand the test of time, must rest on deeper foundations than creative thinking about how things might look in a few years.  It must rest on conviction about what matters most.  It is the result of saying, “things ought not to be this way”.  Admired furniture company Herman Miller has a vision statement that is supported by a policy statement: “… we believe the future quality of human life is dependent on both economic vitality and a healthy, sustainable natural environment … [Therefore] we have launched ‘Perfect Vision,’ a broad initiative that sets significant sustainability targets for the year 2020”.  In essence they’ve said, “here’s what matters, and here’s how things will look different if we do something about it”.

Herman Miller’s approach reveals how important it is that a company’s vision be rooted in the truth about itself, in its soul: its core motivations, abilities and value contributions.  Such a company imagines how its soul, leveraged with perseverance and creativity, will change things that are into things that could be, for others.

Thirdly, true vision sustains.  It sustains not only because it is important, but because it is important enough to keep working at it, through adversity and challenge, until it is achieved.

When I was very young, it was not possible for me to do more than dream about those eastern valleys.  They were off the beaten track, and although I went far afield even as a little boy, it was always on the beaten track, from village to village, in these wild mountains.  In my teens, however, I did explore those beckoning valleys.  I saw things no outsider had seen before nor, I suspect, since.  We don’t only journey towards our vision: we grow into it.

Another soul insight from www.soulsystems.ca.

Leadership by Soul™, Trademark and © Soul Systems, All Rights Reserved.

Issue 2.5 | December 2010

In this Article: why effective leaders are self-aware but not self-centred.

by Jonathan Wilson

The most effective leaders spend a lot of time in front of the mirror.  Given that leaders do not exist for themselves, but for others, this might seem like a contradiction.  But of all the subjects we can study in order to become more effective leaders, one of the most important subjects is oneself.  As with democracy, leadership is an utterly human affair: it is by a person, for persons.  The more deeply a leader understands the nature and dynamics of both individuals and human systems, the more effectively they are able to lead.  This is not a neutral principle.  It can be badly abused, and often is.  A leader who observes and reflects carefully can also manipulate others in very sophisticated ways.  The saving grace, however, is that manipulative leadership is utterly self-centred: whereas the kind of awareness that is required to lead well is actually hindered by a self-centred perspective.  I speak of self-awareness.

This paradox finds its explanation in the fact that an effective leader’s self-awareness is exercised in the context of, and with a focus on, others.  The person possessing self-awareness of this kind has grasped, keenly, her personal strengths and how they best enable or assist others.  She has comprehended her personal limitations and how they can harm or hinder others, and how to therefore guard or manage them.  When she studies those who lead her she considers what response their approach triggers in her, so that she can manage her own leadership more effectively.  This kind of leader is not self-centred, even while keenly self-aware.  She reflects on herself in order to lead others well.

To develop self-awareness we need to self-evaluate, receive the evaluation of others, and accept the findings without skewing them in favour of ourselves.  This requires a humility that a self-centred person will struggle to possess.

The self-centred leader is aware of others in the context of, and with the focus on, herself.  She can also be very observant and reflective, but because she is self-centred, the focus of her observation is others, not herself.  Any reflection such a leader undertakes is shaped by self-interest: how others can best be managed to serve her own ends.  She cannot receive critical feedback without denying it or massaging it.  At worst, she will take the cynical path of false humility, which has no goal but to create a perception of personal quality rather than create the genuine condition of personal quality.

Mirrors for Leaders

Most of us stand between these two poles.  We have good intentions as leaders but are often caught out by our own self-interest.  Again, and surprisingly, the path to the humility so central to great leadership includes the intentional development of self-awareness.

There are three very practical tools we can use to increase our self-awareness.  We can use personality profiling instruments (e.g. Strengths Finder, Myers-Briggs, and DiSC) to better understand how our personality interacts with other personality types, and how other types perceive our type in action.  I have seen these create many a light-bulb moment for the person being assessed.  Other instruments focus specifically on leadership characteristics.  One that I favour is TAIS.

The second tool is to seek out feedback.  The best kind of feedback uses a constructive and objective framework through which people filter their input to you.  One approach is to take a personality assessment within the context of your team and allow your colleagues to interact with you over the results, which will allow you to gain a much richer understanding of yourself than if you did so on your own.  A process like this requires clear guidelines that encourage both respect and honesty.  Often a facilitator is a good resource to enable the kind of safety that makes such a process work well.

The third tool is to tell your story: to yourself and to others.  Take time on your own to reflect back over your life history and chart out highs and lows, prouds and sorries, etc.  Identify patterns and themes that reflect your strengths and passions as well as your limitations.  By telling your story to others, you gain, through their interaction with your story, an additional rich layer of insight.  I have facilitated the telling of personal histories between political enemies and between corporate executives.  The net result is always an increase in their appreciation of, and respect for, one another.  They discover their common humanity.

In my first management role I had a strained relationship with several individuals on our management team.  I had my explanations for this, but it was not my perceptions that mattered.  Following the wise advice of my (70 year old) mentor, I sought feedback from each.  While I learnt a few things, some about them and some about me, just the act of asking for input generated a virtually instantaneous change in the relationships.  To this day, every one of those managers remains a friend.

Increasing self-understanding can be very enlightening and encouraging.  But self-awareness is another step altogether, and it takes its shape in the context of others: how they best respond to your leadership, and where you are likely to hinder them or let them down.  As you increase your self-awareness, you will not only find others become more responsive to, and enabled by, your leadership: you will find yourself liberated, able to invest in your strengths and happy to let others get busy in those areas where you are less effective.

Another soul insight from www.soulsystems.ca.

Leadership by Soul™, Trademark and © Soul Systems, All Rights Reserved.

Issue 2.4 | November 2010

In this Article: how we can reap the benefits of failure.

by Jonathan Wilson

Failure is a gift.  If it were not for failure, we would continue further into destructive ideas and behaviours than failure allows us to do.  Failure prevents further failure.  This is true personally and it is true organizationally.  It is also true systemically.  When the house of cards of derivatives and sub-prime mortgages collapsed in 2008, we witnessed a failure that negatively impacted every corner of the world.  It could, however, have been worse.  Imagine the impact if the financial tomfoolery that took us to the brink had persisted.  It was not someone’s initiative that prevented further catastrophe.  It was the financial system’s failure.

Failure is not a pleasant gift.  It comes at a cost.  The suffering due to lost jobs continues as national economies struggle forward.  Other failures (such as structural failures in aircraft) lead to peoples’ deaths.  Failure often brings harm.  Failure’s initial benefit is only that it stops bad things from getting worse.  However, we can gain further from failure if we choose.

Failure places us at a fork in the road.  We can learn from the failure and make the necessary corrections to improve whatever it is that failed – whether our organization, our product, our services, or ourselves (for failures can reveal flaws not only in technologies and processes, but in our character).   Or we can demonstrate the wisdom of the ancient biblical proverb: “As a dog returns to its vomit, so the fool repeats his folly” (Proverbs 26:11).

To take the road that leads to learning seems quite obviously the better choice.  But too often it is not the choice we make.  The previous Leadership by Soul article recounted the story of a real-life leader who failed.  As the organization foundered and political infighting spread, “Martin” blamed the developing disaster on the lack of vision among his senior managers.  His supporters blamed the negative behaviours of his opponents.  Their respective diagnoses possessed a degree of validity.  But as one older manager remarked, “Martin is the leader.  The condition of this organization is his responsibility.  If his managers are rebelling, he should not be looking at them, but at himself, for an explanation.”

Denial is Not the Road to a Better World

The one thing that will prevent us from taking the road to a better solution (indeed, to a better world) is dishonesty: when we refuse to admit that what has happened is indeed a failure to which we have contributed.  To refuse to admit a failure is to set ourselves up for worse failure to come.

Behind this denial lies our need to stay comfortable.  If there is a possibility we have personally failed, the threat of humiliation creates a barrier to admission.  If the failure lies in a system or a technology or an assumption, the threat of change can also drive us to dishonesty.  We’d rather maintain the status quo.  Put simply, the barrier to a better world is our ego.

Today there are numerous examples of such forks in the road, and time will show whether the travellers at the fork choose folly or honesty.  Google failed when code written into the software of its Street View cars picked up potentially compromising data from private wireless networks in countries across the world.  It says it will learn from this.  Even so, the value of its solution(s) will be contingent on the degree to which it is honest about what actually happened (for example, whether the code really was rogue or deliberately written in).  The current revitalizing of financial markets (in North America in particular) requires not just honesty about the greed of Wall Street executives and a critique of their flawed financial instruments: it requires an acknowledgement of the average American’s complicity too, since it takes an equal lack of judgement to buy a house on “zero down”.  Again, a proper solution to America’s economic woes requires honesty, not just on Wall Street, but on Main Street.

The initial gift of failure – the interruption of disastrous behaviours – comes without our asking, and its benefit is temporary.  To reap the full benefit of failure, however, you and I have to make a choice.  We have to seize the opportunity to learn from it.

Admission of failure is a leadership trait.  The willingness to acknowledge failure predicates every great innovation or transformation.  If Alexander Fleming, Thomas Edison or Albert Einstein had refused to admit failure (of process, technique or theory) at some point in their work, we would be without penicillin, the world’s first antibiotic; the light bulb; and (among many possible examples) the synchronization of global positioning system (GPS) satellites around the earth.  If South Africa’s FW de Klerk had been unwilling to admit the failure of his party’s Apartheid system, Nelson Mandela would not have emerged from prison to lead the country into a new future.  If Ray Anderson had taken the easier road of denial, his company, Interface, would not be the leader in “greening” the highly polluting carpet industry, all the while continuing to dominate the market.  It has been listed by Fortune as one of the “Most Admired Companies in America” and the “100 Best Companies to Work For.”

Every innovation that improves the world is built on the gift of failure.  For failure to provide not only the temporary gift of prevention but also the long-term benefit of a solution, it has to be admitted.  We step onto the pathway to a better world when we grasp the nettle that is the admission of failure.

Another soul insight from www.soulsystems.ca.

Leadership by Soul™, Trademark and © Soul Systems, All Rights Reserved.

Issue 2.3 | October 2010

In this Article: why a servant leader is not an oxymoron but a necessity.

by Jonathan Wilson

Martin, the new CEO, had arrived.  In his radio show voice, he made a dynamic presentation to the organization charting a grand future.  He promised to eliminate “dead wood” from the organization.  He put up a sign on the campus pointing to the “CEO Office: This Way”.  He renovated his office.  Staff were excited.  The organization needed the shot in the arm of a new, energetic leader.  But the excitement was short-lived.  Within two years Martin was fired, having brought his team to a grinding halt: the result of political in-fighting and strategic over-reach.  The board, chastened, had to significantly rethink the kind of leader they would look for next time around.

In the eyes of many, the focal point of an organization is its leader.  This is understandable, but misses the point.  For a leader does not exist for himself: a leader is a servant.  This well-worn but rich notion often suffers one of two fates: its meaning is diluted by those who prefer more to be served and less to be led; or it is denigrated by those who don’t understand how anyone can lead effectively if they’re also a servant.  Both camps are stuck on the apparent contradiction of the terms “servant” and “leader”.  A third understanding says that it embodies a paradox – that if Martin had been something of a servant and yet also something of a leader, he would have been a better CEO for it.  But there is no paradox or contradiction.  The words “servant” and “leader” are not opposing ideas.  They are mutually distinct concepts that are both necessary to describe a fully orbed leader.

Leadership must be exercised in two directions – internally and externally.  Martin’s catastrophic run as CEO lay in his failure to exercise servant leadership in either direction.  The direction you face will determine what it looks like to serve, and what it looks like to lead.

Externally Directed Servant Leadership

The first and most important direction a leader faces is outward: as a leader, you exist for a cause.  The cause is whatever problem your organization exists to solve.  The team you lead exists, not for itself, but to serve the cause.  For this reason, everything you do as a leader is defined by the cause.  More precisely, in the end your cause is embodied in the customer – the recipient of your service.  If you aren’t hearing it yet, let me make the language explicit.  You and the team you lead are servants.  You exist to serve other people.

Facing outward, leadership takes on three characteristics.  Firstly, to lead is to recognize that there is a service that is needed, whether it be a solution, an innovation or a remedy.  This is where vision, which we often associate with leadership, takes on its proper definition: true leadership vision is that which imagines a solution that betters the situation of a customer or potential customer, not the situation of the organization per se.  Secondly, to lead is to take responsibility for the absence of a solution.  Thirdly, to lead is to take the initiative to do something about the need that has been identified.  Being aware of others’ problems, taking responsibility for the absence of a solution and taking initiative to create a solution are the qualities that set a leader apart from a follower.  Followers blame others or circumstances for problems and therefore assume others should be responsible for their remedy.  In Martin’s speeches, which focused on the glorious future of the organization, the customer and their world was conspicuously absent.

Internally Directed Servant Leadership

The second direction a leader faces is inward: to the team that exists to achieve the mission.  As a leader, you exist to enable your people to achieve the cause.  If your staff flourish in their abilities and personalities, your organization will be able to harness incredible human power in its mission to achieve its cause.  A servant mentality will motivate you to draw on your team, listen to them, and invest in them.  This is what it means to be a servant in team leadership: to enable your people to be all they can be.  You exist for your staff – they do not exist for you.  Whichever direction you face as a leader, you are a servant.

Looking inwardly, the cause defines the leadership you exercise for your team.  You represent the cause to the team. To lead internally is to call the team to pursue the cause, remain true to the cause, and achieve the cause with excellence.  To lead internally is to manage personal and interpersonal needs and dynamics in light of the cause and the customer who embodies that cause.  You have to exercise authority, but in service of the cause and in service of the success of your people.  The cause defines who you hire, equip, and enable.  It defines who you discipline or fire, because they are not best serving the cause, and therefore not best serving themselves.

Within this framework we can see how the qualities of “servant” and “leader” are not in opposition to each other.  The characteristics we typically associate with the “servant” part of a servant leader – humility, compassion, dedication to others – work naturally alongside those we typically associate with being a “leader” – vision, courage, discipline, authority.  To notice problems requires a servant.  To respond to problems requires a leader.  To solve problems requires a team.  To lead a team requires a servant.

Are you a servant leader?

Another soul insight from www.soulsystems.ca.

Leadership by Soul™, Trademark and © Soul Systems, All Rights Reserved.

Issue 2.2 | September 2010

In this Article: The solution to manage rapid change is to slow down and think.

by Jonathan Wilson

If one were to take to heart the advice of hundreds, if not thousands, of business books written in the last two decades, one’s heart would likely fail.  Countless authors cite one recurring theme: the increasing speed and complexity of change.  Typically, they provide one solution: executives need to think, act and adapt very quickly.  Adapt, yes.  Act, certainly.  But think, no.  Because a great deal of evidence thus far tells us that the value of quick thinking is limited primarily to tactical situations.  Rapid adaptation and action that is strategic and bears long-lasting fruit is, in contrast, borne of deep and ponderous thought.

The mind is able to acquire vast amounts of data.  But data acquisition is not thinking.  Thinking, as my friend Robert Krech at the World Bank has said, is making connections.  Those connections are the insights that yield, among many things, innovation.  Consider, for example, the innovation of an entire industry when Cirque du Soleil connected together the idea of theatre with the idea of circus.  The less obvious the connection, the more thought required to make it.  That’s why the Cirque was, and remains, an unbeatable success.

However, pressured as we are by the rapid change brigade, many of us get trapped into making improper or erroneous connections between data points.  Hasty thinking breeds false assumptions.  A global Fortune 500 recently faced massive pressure to catch up to competitors.  It’s answer, to engage in a glut of acquisitions.  But hasty thought has led to a bloated company facing the following problem: a false short-term profitability reading working in tension with the tremendous long-term cost of forcing into alignment the acquired companies, killing their internal cultures and therefore their own performance.

Financial crashes, corporate failures, oil spills – all indicate that we need to think more carefully and more comprehensively, even – indeed, especially – in the face of urgent crises.  What does it take to think better?

Why It’s So Hard to Focus These Days

One prized solution to the dilemma posed by rapid change and human limitation is information technology.  For example, social media permits companies to tap into an incredibly diverse array of insight from employees and customers.  This enables the tremendous speed at which information (in this case, human thought) can be gathered, and multiplies the IQ harnessed in the process.  Thus we appear to have solved a speed and thought capacity problem with the genius of multi-lateral communication that the internet is.

Social media therefore allows us to source a huge array of diverse insights in a way never before possible, which in itself should lead to a higher collective IQ.  Unfortunately, indications are that it will increasingly not.  A number of recent studies reveal that the same social media technologies we use to build vast collective brains actually undermine the individual IQs feeding into those brains: in which case social media simply gives you pooled stupidity.

The barriers erected by current technologies, typically digital and web-based, need to be noted if we are to tap into the profound thinking capacity of the human beings that drive our companies.  Here is what the research is showing:

1. The constant stimulation of e-mails, instant messages, social media sites, and the inevitable link-chasing that ensues, prevents people from taking the down time their brains need in order to effectively process information.

2. The multi-tasking that inevitably arises as we flit from one digital device to another leads to an inability to think in a sustained and focused manner – which persists even when the person is not multi-tasking.  Several studies, including one by Stanford University, published in 2009, demonstrate that people who do not normally multi-task are more effective at multi-tasking when called on by necessity to do so.  Effective rapid action is the result of disciplined mind.  A disciplined mind has spent a lot of time in focused thought. (Multi-tasking also induces stress which, extended over a long time period, leads to a variety of health problems)

3. Finally, the short bursts of visual and mental stimulation that characterize everything from an iPhone app to a Tweet cause the body to inject a spurt of dopamine into the system.  This is frequently addictive.  If you doubt this, consider the effect on yourself of having no access to any web-connected device for more than half a day.  In other words, social media technology has an inbuilt tendency to hook people into habits that undermine effective thought.

At the end of the day, however, the source of thinking remains the human being.  A company might therefore harness speed-enabling, thought-capturing technology, but human thought is no faster than it was a thousand years ago.  People need time and a distraction-fee space to think things through in a thorough manner.  Powerful ideas are the result of a person – or a collective – spending time in sustained and focused thought.

People think in various ways.  Some talk to think.  Some need quiet.  Others think by using their hands to build or draw their developing thoughts.  Many things stand against you or your people having time to think, including the very technology that presents so much genuine promise for increasing collective thinking power.  But this isn’t the only barrier.  The corporate world’s overall culture of haste militates against effective thinking.  If you and your colleagues want to tap into the power of the human mind to create and solve problems, give yourselves scheduled time and space to think, both alone and together.  The greater a leadership role you play, the more time you need to take to think.  A business that doesn’t take the time to slow down and think is stupid.  Literally.

Another soul insight from www.soulsystems.ca.

Leadership by Soul™, Trademark and © Soul Systems, All Rights Reserved.

Issue 2.1 | August 2010

In this Article: there are many ways to drive revenue, but only one is optimal for your company.

by Jonathan Wilson

Anyone who lives in a large city like greater Toronto, Los Angeles or Johannesburg will know that commuting is that part of your business routine that comes straight from hell.  It taxes your time, energy, and resources.  Even listening to pod-casts or catching up on business calls does not compensate for those testing hours spent in a world of concrete, car fumes and various (often frustrating) red lights.  While all roads may lead to Rome, not all will expedite your journey there.  There is an optimal route, and every commuter is delighted when they find one.

There is a similar principle at work in your business.  There are many ways to drive revenue, but only one is optimal.  This is not the promise of some magical silver bullet: your optimal road to profitability is a precise economic formula based on the truth about your business’ core dynamics and how they integrate with dynamics in the market.

As I’ve explained in the past, performance optimization lies in accurately defining the soul—or core—of your business.  Three drivers make up your company’s soul: motivational, aptitudinal and financial.  Each speaks to a key fundamental of organizational performance.  Motivation is the emotional component (why we do what we do that no-one cares about as much as we do), aptitude is the talent and resource component (how we do what we do that no-one does as well as we do), and the financial driver is the economic component (what and how others pay that most demonstrates the value of what we do).

Researcher Jim Collins found that a precisely defined financial driver was one of several critical success factors in businesses that, over fifteen consecutive years, outperformed the market by at least four times.  He posed his finding as a question: “If you could pick one and only one ratio—profit per X—to systematically increase over time, what x would have the greatest and most sustainable impact on your economic engine?” (Good to Great, 2001: p.104).

Driven by Truth, Not Assumption

The initial assumption of many companies I have worked with is that their profit is per customer.  But while the buyer is essential to your profitability, more important in attaining optimum profitability are the dynamics that drive their purchase.  For example, I worked with an online media bank that assumed its profit was per customer (under which lay a more basic assumption; that profitability was per image, video, etc, in its database).  Acquire the libraries of as many good contributors as possible, promote our extensive and accessible database, and we maximize sales, or so the logic went.

However, a consideration of this company’s soul caused us to rethink their profit per X assumption.  We realized that its greatest revenues were through customers who were buying, not just individual media items, but collections of media.  Most often, customers were building a story for a magazine or news production or even a business presentation.  The media bank’s profit was not per customer or per unit, but per collection.  This allowed them to harness their already exceptional IT talents (another part of their soul) to tag media with keywords that linked each image, story, etc to as many and as diverse a set of collections as possible (to protect this company I have omitted other, equally powerful elements of its three drivers which further distinguished this company from its competitors).  Naturally, this simple insight exponentially multiplied their profit potential.

To identify your profit per X formula requires a distillation process – a disciplined analysis that gets you to the bed-rock of your business.  You will find the formula in that dynamic interplay between what motivates your company, the aptitudes it brings to the table and the way its value is best harnessed in the market.  What your financial driver is will not be the same as that of your direct competitor—if it is, you have not yet uncovered what truly sets your company apart (nor has the soul of your company been accurately defined if the three drivers do not seamlessly integrate—they must be mutually reinforcing, otherwise they will pull your company in opposing directions).  One drug store may maximize profitability per region, based on ratios of store to population density.  Another, per customer visit (based on convenient store sites).  One bank (or division) may find its profit is per product, while another is per financial advisor (where banking is a commodity best leveraged by relationships of trust).  Other formulae include: per consumer brand, per division, and per stakeholder.

Determining your financial driver is key to designing an effective marketing and sales process.  It will provide you with a clear basis for reducing uncertainty in how to allocate your precious resources.  And it will give you the right set of measurements for assessing your performance.  Determining your financial driver might seem as demanding as finding your way through the maze of available routes to get to your commute destination.  But a smart commuter taps into a vast array of information available to chart their optimal route.  Some of this is “internal”: fuel levels, the condition of the car, or of the driver.  Other data refers to the externals: weather, traffic flow, road-works, etc.  In the same way, a smart company will study the internal and external data carefully to determine the optimal route to profitability.

Another soul insight from www.soulsystems.ca.

Leadership by Soul™, Trademark and © Soul Systems, All Rights Reserved.

Issue 1.12 | June 2010

In this Article: how focus allows you to increase the power of your resources.

by Jonathan Wilson

To make its mark in a crowded marketplace, every business needs horsepower.  Increasing your business’s horsepower is, at its core, about creating competitive advantage.  Or, to put it another way, add another horse, and you increase your odds of winning.

Adding horses might include hiring talent, mergers and acquisitions, diversification, acquiring intellectual property, and securing investment capital or business loans.  While each of these may add power, we will see that they may also simply add to your load.  Much of our desire for another horse is misguided.  There is a way to get far more from our one horse, and without hurting the horse.

To explain why, however, I need to switch analogies — from horses, to rivers.

In the remote and rugged region of Papua where I grew up, the rivers run strong and swift through deep gorges.  I particularly enjoyed exploring the spectacular gorge of a river called the Heluk.  Its canyon has steep, rainforested sides or, occasionally, sheer cliffs – some as high as 700 metres (2300 feet).  To get to the Heluk, my friends and I would descend along a tributary valley which eventually flattens out about 500 metres from the Heluk.  Although the Heluk river was not yet in our sight, hidden as it was by forest, two things caused me to feel a building sense of awe as we exited the tributary valley: the thunderous roar of the river, even through the trees, and the shaking of the ground.  It took just minutes to emerge from the forest and stand on the banks of this churning, constant surge of water.  It was an exhilarating and intimidating sight.  If we had to cross the river on a make-shift bridge made in urgent need (see inset), I felt some nervousness.  I knew the terrible stories of individuals who had fallen into this river and met with a quick and violent end as the river smashed their bodies against the enormous boulders around which it surged.

The Heluk River is an example of what happens when you focus a resource.  Focusing a resource tremendously increases its power.  The narrower the focus, the greater the power.

The opposite is also true.  A lack of focus dissipates power.  The next valley system east of the Heluk is the Seng.  The Seng River is similar to the Heluk, only it runs down an even bigger valley.  In 1982 a severe earthquake resulted in the Seng being dammed by landslides.  When the dam eventually broke, the released water wreaked destruction as it charged down the valley; until it left the mountains.  There, the accumulated waters from the dam dispersed across hundreds of square kilometres of lowland rainforest and swampland.   In the lowlands, the damage was negligible.

If there is no focus, even substantial resources lack power.   To illustrate: the vast majority of mergers fail because of poor cultural fit; diversification can diffuse a company’s leadership and operational energy; acquiring intellectual property can end up being wasted effort; gaining capital funding can simply lead to indebtedness.  Each failure is an indication that the resource was not properly leveraged because of imprecise or inaccurate focus.  In fact, to return to the horse analogy, where there is insufficient clarity of focus, acquiring additional horses simply adds to the load the company must carry, rather than the power it releases.

Find Your Soul; Find Your Focus; Find Your Power

How do we find the kind of focus that allows us to effectively align and maximize our resources?  In our Leadership by Soul™ model, Capacity is necessary to achieve Purpose.  On the other hand, a clear purpose functions as the canyon walls between which to channel capacity.   An organization with a profound but simple purpose can turn even its limited capacity into focused power.  The tighter the focus, the greater the power of the resource you have at hand.

Earlier this year, my associate, Dave Loney, and I took a historic Canadian not-for-profit through a differentiation and strategy process.  The first step was to identify its soul.  The leadership recognized that, to make vital decisions around resource management, it needed a rationale.  How were they to know why one thing mattered and another did not?

The process we implemented identified three critical drivers for the organization, each reflecting a distinct aspect of organizational reality: motivational, aptitudinal, and financial.  The findings were significant, and immediately resolved some strategic tensions that had existed within the organization.  For example, the organization realized that a key part of its soul was its entrepreneurial and nimble responsiveness to poverty issues.  It is an emergency care organization.  This immediately addressed a question it had previously and inconclusively wrestled with, about whether or not to engage in some long-term, rehabilitative programs.

In the ensuing development of a more finely-tuned business model and then a strategic plan, the organization was immediately able to decisively and confidently redistribute resources in order to focus power into operations that were aligned with their soul.  They also eliminated waste by phasing out non-aligned programs.  The net effect was that they improved projected cost efficiencies by 12%.

There will always be someone who has more horses than you.  Your competitive advantage lies first in learning how to leverage and maximize the horse you already have.  That is what I call market leadership, and the starting point is uncovering the fundamental truths about what can and will set your company apart from others — your company’s soul.

Another soul insight from www.soulsystems.ca.

Leadership by Soul™, Trademark and © Soul Systems, All Rights Reserved.

Issue 1.11 | May 2010

In this Article: how safety builds trust and trust builds traction in the market.

by Jonathan Wilson

The common experience of many a customer is to feel abused.  Where you least feel control or influence in a situation, you experience frustration and, if the stakes are high, the anxiety that goes with vulnerability.  Consider the mood of tens of thousands of travellers in Europe stuck under a veil of ash earlier this year.

The common experience of many a customer service representative is to feel abused.  When a customer phones into a call centre and discovers there are no service options that speak to their issue, they feel powerless.  With no real control or influence to exercise, they employ the one tool left to them: emotion.  As the ash-cloud from Iceland locked down Europe-routed flights, service representatives manning check-in desks across the world fielded primarily not information or the need for information, but anger.  Anger, more than rationality, was likely the primary fuel for the ensuing blame-game, wherein European regulatory bodies and even the airlines were accused of having inadequate contingency plans.

Natural events aside, the feeling of abuse in the world of business is, at heart, a matter of trust.  We trust someone when we feel they are safe, reliable, and capable. I subscribe to a telecom provider whose systems are reliable.  In terms of their technology, they are very capable.  That they add those extra seconds of pointless instructions to my voicemail message, and that they do it to make money ($600 million extra in revenue for Verizon, is the estimate), is a tremendous trust-buster.  These and other similar actions tell me that while they are reliable and capable, they are not safe.  They do not have my best interests at heart, but their own.  They are exploiting their dominant position to exploit me, and millions of others besides.

Failure to build trust comes at a price.  There is a financial consequence to not attending to trust, whether internally, between team members, or externally, with customers.  Ultimately, for publicly traded companies, it is the shareholders who feel the impact of customer distrust.

Two Giants Discover the Price of Breaking Trust

Traction comes from trust.  A business that loses the trust of its customers instantly loses traction in the market.  This loss of traction will increase when a provider enters the market who is deemed not only reliable, not only capable, but also safe.  The exploited and abused customers of their competitors will run quickly into their arms.

Have you ever heard of Diaspora, Appleseed or Elgg?  There’s a reason that Diaspora’s recent efforts to raise capital exceeded goals by 1250%, and why they and these other new social networking sites may soon get popular.  It is because they offer a safer alternative to Google’s Buzz and to Facebook.  Google recently lost traction in the market due to revelations in Germany that its Street View cars were not only photographing streets, but capturing snippets of data from private, un-secured, wi-fi networks.  Google claimed that this was a bit of rogue software built into the cameras that no-one in authority knew was there or operating.  Mike Schmidt, Google’s CEO, says it is a matter of “worry” but not “harm”, to the public.  These facile self-justifications strain credibility: two strikes against trust.  The third may be that Google has said it will not delete the private data collected in Germany or elsewhere unless ordered to.  This breach of trust has come hot on the heels of the clumsy launch of Google’s Buzz, in which default settings meant that a user’s followers and “followees” were visible to the public: probably Google’s way of ensuring a high number of sign-ups as quickly as possible.

Facebook is once again embroiled in a public fuss over its privacy settings, and the result has been yet another quick about-face in which they introduced simpler privacy controls for users and stricter default settings.  This was after observant Facebook users found that the service’s default settings left their information completely open to the public.  But the damage is no doubt done.  Many high profile users deleted their accounts in protest.  Why?  Because they did not find Facebook safe.  Facebook’s every indication was that it only had its own interests at heart: for Facebook makes money only through advertising, and advertising online is driven by access to the demographic information provided by users.  More information enables more targeted advertising: the more effective the advertising, and the higher the click-through rate, the more money for Facebook.

Trust is built not only when the service provider is reliable and capable.  It arises wherever the provider is safe.  Safety is evidenced when the provider is other-serving, and not self-serving.  And herein lies the problem when public companies place a premium on shareholder return: this focus lends itself to self-serving business tactics.  Ironically, however, it is only when the customers’ interests are prioritized and served accordingly that trust builds the traction that generates the kind of profitability that yields cumulative returns for shareholders.  Although it is too soon to determine with confidence how Google’s breach of trust will impact its shareholders, since the buzz around Buzz in April, its share price has dropped 20% (Facebook is privately held).

Google and Facebook have tremendous capacity, enabling them to deliver incredible functionality to customers. But if they continue to appear self-serving, customers will be distrustful, and these companies will lose more traction – and the money that goes with it.

Be safe.  Build trust.  Build traction.

Another soul insight from www.soulsystems.ca.

Leadership by Soul™, Trademark and © Soul Systems, All Rights Reserved.

See these related slideshows: Trust & Performance; Accelerating Business Transactions