Leadership…

“…you twist and turn, like a… twisty, turny thing!” (Lord Melchett, Blackadder the Second)

How many books, essays, vlogs are dedicated to this slippery subject? Leadership. How can we quantify this ethereal quality? Like alchemists we try to pull it apart, seek to know its nature, so we can distil it, bottle it and mass-manufacture it!
So, what does an actor know about Leadership? What can I contribute to the mix?
Quite beyond Richard Olivier/Mythodrama’s outstanding work examining Shakespeare’s leaders and how to bring their qualities to bear in the real world, there is one thing I learned a LONG time ago…

It was a throwaway comment from my “mentor” at the first school placement during my teacher- training, following my very first, and particularly disastrous, lesson practice. It was not only the most useful piece of advice he ever gave me, it was the only piece of advice (or feedback) he ever bothered to give. “Use your voice. Draw them to you.” It struck me as the most obvious and yet most overlooked thing. It is something I have worked on studiously and continue to do so. It is one of the first things people notice in a great leader.

Voice.

I’m not talking about dialogue, or narrative but actual vocal sound.
Last year, we lost, to my great dismay, the simply wonderful Alan Rickman. A man blessed with a voice so distinctive that even as you read this you’ll be calling it to mind (who can forget his stellar portrayal of the sardonic Professor Snape? “I can teach you how to bottle fame, brew glory, even stopper death!”) And I’m sure we’ve all laughed at the memes that circulate regularly, a photograph of Morgan Freeman declaring that you’re reading the caption in his voice. (Admit it, you’re doing it now.)

Leaders must be heard. Their message must be heard. And voice, like leadership, is often presumed to be a gift that you either have or you don’t. Patently not true. Now, certainly, some people are very fortunate to be born with rich, resonant voices but (like going to the gym) the rest of us don’t have to settle for what we find ourselves genetically lumped with!

“Speak the speech, I pray you… trippingly on the tongue…” says Hamlet. And we all know what he means! We’ve all sat through torturous meetings and presentations and (*sighs*) keynote speeches suffering the monotonous, droning rumble or nasal piping of a presenter who hasn’t paid any attention to their instrument. But, conversely, we have all been present (even if it was “just” at school) when an inspiring voice has lifted us, buoyed us up, encouraged us to share their vision, or dream our own.

When we think of iconic figures – people like Winston Churchill, John F. Kennedy, Audrey Hepburn, Michelle Obama – these are people with distinctive voices that comfort us, inspire us, hypnotize us. Voices flexible enough to take us through the full range of human experience. Great leaders know how to “use [their] voice” and they don’t leave it to chance. They take the time to notice what works and what doesn’t, they practice, they shape themselves but they also actively seek out good advice, seek out mentors and coaches and experts to help them to be the best they can be. Quite beyond speaking, these habits are the traits of great leadership.

“Use your voice. Draw them to you.”

Speak.

“Hi! I’m Troy McClure, you may remember me from such self-help films as Smoke Yourself Thin! And, Get Confident Stupid!” (Aaah… the ever-insightful Simpsons).

I do an awful lot of talking about Confidence – I talked about it a lot back when I used to teach and now, as a Coach and an Actor, I spend a lot of time helping people to attain a greater sense of self-confidence.

And that word, Confidence, is almost ubiquitous! Every make-up brand, cosmetic surgery advertisement, outward-bound Team-Building offering promises increased Self-confidence, Team confidence… Bomb-proof CONFIDENCE!!! Buy our stuff and get confident! Buy these shoes and walk with more confidence! Wear this watch (Leo does!) and tell the time with more confidence! I know… It’s preposterous. And it occurred to me, that often, when we’re talking about confidence, and especially, increasing confidence, what’s actually required is Courage.

Confidence is the certainty that an action or undertaking can be performed or undertaken! Confidence comes from certainty, and certainty can only come from experience. Once we’ve walked across the rope bridge (and not plunged into the freezing water below), once we’ve asked for (and got) that raise, once we’ve closed that multi-million-pound deal we have a baseline on which to build the confidence that we can do so again. Until then, we can have all the confidence we want in ourselves but it’s actually Courage that is getting our feet to move out over that drop, it’s Courage that’s turning the handle of our boss’ door, it’s Courage that is holding out for that last clause to be agreed!

And Courage comes from somewhere deep inside. From that brilliant, shining part of you that absolutely, positively refuses to be something, that you know in your deepest Self, you are not. And we must nurture and congratulate ourselves when we let that tiny voice guide us to reach beyond ourselves.

So, the next time something is proving difficult and you’re berating yourself and thinking: “I’d be alright if I only had more confidence”, take a moment and congratulate yourself for all those times you’ve found the courage to go ahead and do the scary thing in spite of your fears, because, in doing so you have laid the foundation for an unshakeable self-confidence, steadfastly-built on genuine experience and for that you should be rightly proud.

It’s the same old story…

You’ve got a problem. You’ve had a meeting. And another. And another. And every one follows the same pattern: Belinda thinks it’s a Technical fix; Bill bangs his Adaptive drum. And the other 8 attendees – because let’s face it, they’re not given the opportunity to participate – are sat, slumped and unenthused. The meeting ends, as they always end, with a list of actions to be taken and a corresponding list of names to take those actions. A date is set. And another meeting convened. And another morning or afternoon wasted; spent attending.

But just suppose…

Suppose you had the courage to break that cycle. Suppose someone took that morning or afternoon and invited a new method, quite literally, onto the table. Something dynamic. Something inspiring. Something visceral. Something that works both above and below the neck.

Now, suppose those 8 attendees – who have, until now, been cerebrally bludgeoned into silence – were given a voice and the space to use it. And more than that, suppose that their voices were both heard and understood. Instead of those two, familiar faces replaying their same stuck messages again and again, suddenly there is a new energy in the room; a new offer. Suppose those 10 participants join together and create something different, something new; something to which they are committed, something about which they are passionate.

Wouldn’t that be worth taking a chance on doing things differently?

So… Let me ask you two questions: 1. Are you adventurous? Yes? Excellent. And secondly: What do you know about LEGO SERIOUS PLAY?

Often when I tell people about LEGO SERIOUS PLAY I’m greeted with a smirk. The mouth says “That sounds interesting…” but the face says “Oh that can’t work…can it?!”

It’s OK, I don’t mind; the great part is, while I’m describing all the good that can come from those glorious, colourful, little bricks and wheels and mini-figures (that’s the official name for those loveable, bubble-headed Lego-people) that humouring-smirk very quickly turns into an expression of genuine curiosity…

Because the beauty of LSP isn’t in the models that each person builds – whether expertly complex or deceptively simple – it’s not even in those spectacularly sophisticated, shared, models that the group collectively amalgamates into a compelling, single, unifying vision. No, the real elegance is in the stories that LSP sets free. Because they are absolutely not “the same old” stories. Because suddenly, everybody genuinely WANTS to hear exactly what that sticky-out bit with the long-spindly bit and the clear bit on top and the top hat and the wheels is meant to be! And when they do hear… They get it! Suddenly they get it. That thing you’ve been trying to explain to them for the last four months. They get it!!! And you realise that having this weird, wobbly, wonderful model in front of you has made it so much easier to describe. And you realise that by turning it around there are elements in there that NEVER occurred to you before! Revelations and realisations that mean you can suddenly understand why Sam has never seen your point of view (and perhaps there is something in what she’s been saying all along!)

You don’t have to take my word for it. There are literally thousands of satisfied teams across the globe who owe their new insight, their new enthusiasm to LEGO SERIOUS PLAY. And maybe it’s not for you, but… It’s got to be worth a look, hasn’t it?

Some people might remember a children’s puzzle known as dot-to-dot.  Most pizza places give them out to keep their younger clientele occupied whilst the margheritas are baking.  You’re faced with a series of numbered dots on a page, with odd-looking scribbles here and there, and the game is to follow the numbers with a pencil, join the dots and reveal the picture.

The same sort of puzzle exists for organisations – how to weave together insight from the external environment, business purpose and strategy, organisation operations and talent and capability management such that we can ‘see’ the whole picture and make clearer and more informed choices about how we manage things.

Most organisations I’ve come across tend to compartmentalise each area, usually as a result of a functionalised structure.  Half the business looks out towards the market and the customer and half the business looks in to the operations and people; and there is often a lack of dialogue and connection between.  This seems to have the counter-intuitive result of increasing complexity and organisational ‘treacle’ that makes everything unaccountably hard to get done.

However, organisations who do ‘join the dots’ and align across different parts of the business seem to reduce the frustration of ‘treacle-wading’ and things begin to flow and feel easier and simpler.  I’ve seen the magic happen in two organisations I’ve worked with and the benefits were clear: organisation issues were not only identified but resolved, before they became crises; the leadership team understood how the whole organisation worked and so could make sensible decisions together; the impact, risks and benefits of various scenarios were better anticipated and collectively handled; costs were reduced as the organisation began to make iterative adjustments rather than big disruptive changes; innovation increased as customer needs were understood and anticipated with greater accuracy and relevant capability and capacity were duly created.

So how is this miraculous state achieved?  To start you off, we recommend three simple practices:

1. Find a friend – a bit like blind dating but less risky! Have coffee or lunch with one person you don’t know from a different department – every week. It might sound odd, but people love to meet up and love to talk about their stuff – especially when the other person is genuinely interested. We think you’ll be surprised at the insights you gain into what’s happening ‘over there’ that spark new ideas for your own area of responsibility. You may even invite someone outside your company who has an interesting perspective and start connecting more regularly with what’s going on ‘out there’.  It’s a much more personal way of networking and only takes an hour a week.
2. Dot-to-dot – like the puzzle, think of the dots as corresponding to different departments, roles, projects or people and the scribbles to areas that lack clarity in some way. The scale is different, but the goal is the same: to reveal the hidden picture of the organisation that connecting the dots reveals. We’ve found the simplest way to do this is through an organisation review.
3. Breathe in and out – reviewing your whole organisation sounds like a lot of work, and it is, if you only do so when your back is against the wall. However, if you adopt a regular rhythm of taking stock of how your organisation is operating, choosing a few, key metrics that link across the business, you will be able to identify the gaps, overlaps and duplication (the ‘scribbles’) that are adding cost and complexity into your business and adjust and resolve as you go. Easy as breathing.

Joining the dots between people, across business units and externally, helps organisations to be responsive and flexible and remain continuously relevant and resilient. Something as simple as getting to know colleagues from other departments and being curious about what’s going on for them, starts to re-frame your perspective as a leader and generates deeper understanding of why things work like they do and what it might take to improve.

If you’d like to further explore how to align your organisation, get in touch with us at www.talikandco.net

What we learnt writing the OECD report on Venture Philanthropy for Development

In 2014 Talik & Co conducted research and produced a report for the OECD’s Network for Foundations Working in Development (NetFWD) on the new practices leading foundations are adopting to deliver greater positive impact per donor dollar. This ‘top seven lessons’ was originally written for The Guardian as part of their Global Development series.

It’s become something of a holy grail. Like NGOs, philanthropic foundations are increasingly concerned with maximising the impact they can achieve with the precious high risk capital they have at their disposal. As Rockefeller Foundation is keen to emphasise, the scale of the social issues that development focused foundations are looking to address today is unprecedented, and even Rockefeller, a giant in the philanthropic community, can feel dwarfed by the challenges it is confronting.

This is one of the key reasons, the contributors to the OECD research told us, that many of them have gone on journeys of quite transformational change, adopting principles and practices borrowed from business and venture-style investing, and why they are keen to share their lessons and insights with others. After all, as Sally Osberg, CEO of Skoll Foundation, stressed at the launch of the Social Progress Index, social entrepreneurs know they can’t do this alone.

So what are the key lessons that can be drawn from their experience to date? What principles did we discover that others can apply?  Here’s a quick ‘top seven’ drawn from our findings:

1. Focus: the foundations that have most impact don’t try to support a wide range of agendas but focus in on one or two where their unique combination of skills, knowledge and relationships can make a difference. Rockefeller use their reputation to convene high profile actors for policy-level dialogue that the NGOs they support just cannot access on their own. Emirates Foundation identified the ‘youth bulge’ in UAE, with many young Emiratis in debt, as a key issue they were best placed to tackle. So determine which issue(s) you are going to address. Where do you have the greatest strengths, be they your network, your internal expertise and knowledge base, your reputation?

2. Do your homework: invest in rigorous research on your chosen issues, map stakeholders right around the system, engage them, create working groups that draw in expertise from across the board. Then drill down and look for the smallest change that can achieve the greatest leverage.

3. Design your theory of change (TOC): with others, determine your outcomes and be rigorous. Sadly too many TOCs contain vague and prosaic desired outcomes and reveal a lack of coherent strategic thought about how to get there (n.b. behavioural change may appear magical at times but even the most irrational behaviour can often be predicted! Look at the burgeoning field of behavioural economics.)

4. Align your financial and non-financial assistance to deliver your (rigorously determined) outcomes: the foundations making greatest headway on incorporating business and market based principles are investing significantly in capability from private sectors and non-development fields, and are providing that management and technical capability to the social purpose organisations they support in a venture capital- like style. In some instances the non-financial value added is proving potentially higher (though harder to quantify) than the financial.

5. Collaborate: and build partnerships and networks, in the same and across sectors. Foundations don’t have a strong reputation for co-operation but those pursuing impact at scale recognise that they can only achieve their goals with and through others. Combining a strong issue focus with a systems approach that engages partners with complementary expertise (e.g. from market makers to policy makers), it is possible to tackle highly complex issues on multiple levels simultaneously.

6. Critically appraise your culture and internal systems and processes: and identify and adjust where misalignments exist. Easier said than done, not least because taking a more business or venture-like approach can meet ideological resistance internally (“we’re a foundation, not a corporation”). But with the right leadership and vision, transformation can be achieved. And the foundations we spoke to considered the pay-off well worth it.

7. Monitor for learning, not just evaluation: discovering what impeded success long after a project’s completion, or even half-way through, is way too late to learn from it. Instil a process and culture of real-time and participative reflection and learning into the projects (participative action research for example), and don’t shy away from the thorny issues of power, politics and competing agendas by playing safe on the key performance indicators.

All of which leads to the bonus and perhaps the most overlooked principle of all – contracting. If you decide as a foundation to change your approach and adopt a more venture philanthropy model, don’t expect that your favourite NGOs will automatically want to come with you. But similarly don’t underestimate the power you have to persuade them to. Open, honest and frank discussions about what working in this way means – closer day to day relationships, greater clarity on shared goals, higher levels of scrutiny on social value returned on funds invested – are vital to ensuring that the necessary partners come on the journey with you. Because you can’t do this alone.

Further details on these and other lessons from foundations working for development can be found in the OECD report.

In a recent interview with The Telegraph I was asked to provide a ‘Sustainability 101’ for an audience of executives who may not be well-versed in the concept. I was asked questions like “what is sustainability?” and “what’s the point of sustainability?” It reminded me that I can get complacent in Talik’s own echo chamber, working with leaders who not only understand the term but are driven by the values we associate with it to improve livelihoods and well-being whilst restoring and protecting our natural world.

In answering the reporter’s questions, I was reminded how plastic the term ‘sustainability’ is and how it gets redefined to meet different actors’ needs. Whether we’re politicians, business leaders, lobbyists or green activists, we frame and reframe sustainability to mean different things at different times, to suit our needs and messages. I originally wrote about this in Sustainability As Usual (the published version of my far more dull and academic doctoral thesis). Too often we see the term used in quite cynical ways, giving a pale green hue to less-than-ethical practices. But actually, the idea of ‘using’ sustainability is hugely positive, and not cost or time prohibitive or overly complex as it is too often cast. Put simply, it’s a way of seeing – a set of frames or lenses through which to view our organisations, our relationships and our world. What’s important is to notice which frames we are looking through and try on multiple ones to get a fuller picture (our own, our communities, our customers, our non-human stakeholders). It’s a way of ensuring we can anticipate future uncertainties and start to mitigate or preferably embrace them.

Without doubt, 2016 was a year of major shocks and 2017 is shaping up to be similarly uncertain. And this is a clear reason why it’s vital to pay more attention to sustainability than ever. It provides an opportunity to look at your markets, strategy, operating model, your culture afresh and question whether your organisation really is as resilient as you’d like to believe. It’s about much more than exchange rate risks or supply chain risks – although these alone can be enough to sink a business. What about climate risks (the increase in extreme weather events for example)? Or unexpected competition from cleaner, more socially relevant technologies? From the sharing economy? Having the conversation around the Board table is a good way to expand the collective ‘aperture’ on potential risks and opportunities – from Finance to HR to Operations to Marketing; all will have a different and valid view, and if it becomes a habit – even a standing agenda item – to ask “what’s going on out there” then you benefit from the full diversity of frames already available in the room.

Taking this more ‘outside-in’ approach might seem obvious but in my experience busy executives focused on short-term urgent goals find it hard to make time to think or even be curious beyond their own industry. But rather than consigning sustainability to the ‘too difficult’ box, paying close attention to social, technological, environmental trends and the demands they may have on your business, is an invaluable first step in making your business more resilient.

The purpose of sustainability, seen in this way, is not to produce glossy reports or collate data on an ever-expanding list of indicators. It’s not to support a burgeoning consultancy industry! Instead it can be seen as a new paradigm for doing business that charges you to examine your markets and context in new ways; to identify and mitigate emerging systemic risks arising from changes in society, technology, ecological and political systems; to innovate products and services that provide real social benefit; to design operating models that reduce cost, waste and dependence on natural resources; and to improve accountability, transparency and engagement along the whole value chain in ways that protect your reputation.

And finally – to the bottom line – organisations that pay close attention to these issues are seen by investors, customers and employees as better managed, more ethical and robust. Ultimately, they’re a better bet for our money, careers and future.