Leadership

What makes a great captain?

So whenever I'm trying to think about what a great leader should do, I always come back to my captain of the ship story. I think this is a really important story, so I'm going to tell you now. So we have to imagine that you're going on a cruise. Quite a big ship, maybe 200 people. And as you come up the gang plank, the captain welcomes you by name to the, to the ship. And he's welcoming everyone. He goes, "Louise, good to see you. Miles, welcome to the cruise. Sally, great, come on in." And he knows the name of everybody on sight as they approach his ship. And you think, that's amazing, how does he do that? Once you're on board, you have a look and you find that what he does is he looks at every passport and he memorizes the face and the name of every passenger so he can greet them personally because he cares about customer care. So you think, well, that's great. And, he's obviously a good captain. And you go down to your cabin, and when you get to your cabin there's a little folded cardboard sign on your pillow. And it says, Dear, Dave or whatever, your bed was made for you personally by the captain because he cares about quality. And you think, well, that's a bit freaky. Does he make every bed on this ship? He can't have time for that. Has he made just mine? In which case, why? Has he chosen me at random? Does he like me? What's going on? So, you kind of think that's a bit odd. And of course, the best way to ensure quality on the ship, is not to make every bed yourself, it's to make sure there's a system for training the bedmakers, which we'll come back to. So, you're beginning to wonder, is he a good captain or not? He clearly cares about customer care and quality, but does that make him a good captain? So, anyway, you try to put that out of your mind. You get changed, you go down to dinner, and your meal is served to you by a whole lot of waiters in very smart black and white outfits. And then you think, hang on a minute, I recognize that waiter. And of course, it's the captain serving the soup. He likes to serve the soup, every night cause he likes to be in touch with the workers. In touch with his staff. And I don't mean workers in any derogatory way, by the way, I mean they're great. They're the ones who do the work. So, you're thinking, well you know, that's a bit weird the captain's serving the soup. I mean it's great that he's in touch with the workers but, but who's steering the ship while the captain is serving my dinner? So after your meal, which is very delicious by the way, you decide to find out who is steering the ship. Maybe it's being steered by a bedmaker, or a waiter. So, on your way to the bridge, not very anatomically correct this, but anyway you go passed the engine room and the door to the engine room is slightly ajar and in the dark, and all the steam, and noise of the engine room, just illuminated by the orange glow of the furnace, you can see a figure shoveling coal into the boiler. And of course, it's the captain. Cause the normal boiler stoker is off sick, and the captain, who used to be a champion boiler stoker himself, has said, "No worries, I don't mind getting my hands dirty." So he's gone to stoke the boiler. So, we're really worrying about who's steering the ship now. And even though the captain cares about customer care, cares about quality, he's in touch with the workers, he's got the biggest muscles on the ship from his boiler stoking activities, he's not afraid to get his hands dirty, despite all these things, we're thinking he might not be a very good captain. Anyway, so you go on up to the, the bridge and of course there's nobody there. And the ship is just drifting at random. And in fact, there are icebergs dotted around. And the ship is heading towards one of the icebergs. So at this point you start thinking, "Oh no, I'm going to have to steer the ship. What do I do?" So anyway, you, you take the wheel and you're about to turn, turn the ship actually the wrong way, when the captain comes running up from the boiler room still a bit sweaty, and he grabs the wheel and he just manages to swerve the ship and avoid the iceberg. And he goes, "Whoa, that was a close one. I thought we were a goner then. Whew, still, anyway it worked out fine in the end, that's the main thing." And then he says, "God, I love this job, it's so exciting. There's never a dull moment." And what are you thinking? Cause I'm thinking, he's not a very good captain. I don't want a captain who cares about quality, customer care, workers, biggest muscles, gets his hands dirty. All I want, is a captain who's on the bridge making sure everything's alright. I don't want him to actually do any of those things. I want him to delegate all that stuff. So, a good boss, is not somebody who's always running around doing things, it's somebody who's in control. I used to work for a boss once, and he used to drive the forklift truck in the evening, sometimes. If a lorry needed loading, he'd get on the truck and help. And everyone thought he was great, and he loved doing it. But actually, he was a rubbish boss. He should have been in his office thinking about next year's strategy or whatever. So, the essence of management isn't to just do everybody else's jobs and become the highest paid waiter on the ship, while the ship goes into an iceberg. The essence of management is to make sure that everything's being done. To build a machine of people that will do the job for you. Building a machine of people, I think that's what leadership's is all about. And if you think about the areas the captain has to cover, it's people, systems, and vision. So he's got to make sure that he's got the right people in the right jobs, and that they're motivated. He's got to make sure that the system works. There's a system for everything. So the bed making, is there a quality control system? Is everybody trained? Is there traceability? If there's a problem with the bed, can he trace it back to who made it and retrain them? So, there should be a system for everything. And then there should be a vision for where the company's going. So, people, systems, and vision are the three things that the captain's got to do. And if he doesn't do those, then there'll be problems. So, if the ship does run aground, it's the captain's fault. And now, what about if the captain is nipped into the toilet for five minutes, and somebody else is steering and the ship runs aground? Who gets court marshaled? Can he blame the temporary person who's steering? The answer is no. Cause he chose that person, and he put them in charge of steering while he was in the toilet. So, the captain is always responsible, even when he's asleep. Even when he's unconscious, ill for week, he can't use that as an excuse. Because he is supposed to of set up the systems and make sure he's got the right people. So, he is actually responsible for everything on the ship. Everything's management's fault. So, if the soup is a bit salty, that's the captain's fault. He can't blame the chef, he's supposed to have got a good chef. He's supposed to have checked on the chef by sampling the soup occasionally. If one bed is not made, it's the captain's fault. Because he should have put the good manager in charge of the bed making. And he should have made sure that that manager has a system. So, everything's management's fault And everything is therefore the captain's fault. So, in a way, he does nothing. Cause he stands around on the bridge saying, "Are the beds being made? Do we have a system for the beds? " So in a way, that's all he does. But, in another way, he's responsible for everything on the ship. Now, suppose he's got everything running really smoothly, and all the systems are running, the people are great, everything just works. Which I think most ships are probably like. What happens if he's standing on the bed, going, "Everything okay?" And it all is. And a disgruntled bedmaker, who thinks, "Whew, that captain, he gets paid loads and does nothing. He just stands around on the bridge." The disgruntled bedmaker pushes the captain off, into the sea. And he falls into the sea and he drowns. What will happen, by the way, this is only pretend don't worry, what will happen to the ship? And the answer is, absolutely nothing to start with. People won't even notice that the captain's isn't there. Perhaps after a few days, they might think, "Hmm, I haven't seen the captain for a while." But because they're good people, they're trained, they, they've go their systems, they actually don't need the captain anymore. So nothing will happen to start with. But of course, we do still need the captain. Because longer term, we will miss the captain. Because what will happen in a few months time, is that the environment will change. And therefore will need new systems. And, and we'll need a different vision as well. And the environment could be our competitors, it could be our customers, whatever. But also the people will gradually become out of date, they'll become bored, they won't be motivated anymore, or the work they're required to do will change subtlety. And so the arrangement of people constantly needs tinkering with to keep it as good as it can be. So, we will start to notice that the captain is missing after a few weeks, or a few months. So, if you've got a boss who when he or she goes on holiday, you think, "Well, I don't really miss them." That doesn't prove that they do nothing, it actually means they're a good boss. The place should run for a week or two without the boss. And I'm always amazed on training courses when it's just a one-day course and you've got people on the phone every interval, every coffee or tea break, "Yeah, yeah, it's on the third shelf alone. Yes, it's in the blue folder. Yeah, tell him he can have it. No, tell him he's got to pay an extra five quid." And you just think, "They can't do without that person, for just quarter of a day." And really, everything should run absolutely fine without that boss. He shouldn't need to be phoning back base the whole time. Now, they're going to come to delegation, look at it in more detail later. But it's absolutely key. I think the essence of a manager, is somebody who's set everything up well so that it runs. Or somebody who's trying to set up all the systems and get all the people right, so it will just run itself. That's what we want to see. So, people, systems, and vision. A machine of people, that's the essence of what a leader is all about.

Everything is managements fault

Now, in this part of the course, I just want to explore this idea of everything's management's fault. Because is it really? Am I allowed to tell a customer to F off, and then say, oh, yeah, that was my boss's fault that I did that? Now, I think in a way, yes, I can say it was my boss's fault, because my boss employed me, my boss failed to motivate me, failed to train me that's a bad idea to tell customers to F off. And my boss has failed to fire me if I've done it before. So you could argue that although people should take individual responsibility, of course, nearly everything is everything's management's fault. So let's have a look. Now, a few years ago, there was a train crash in the UK, and it was because the guy was meant to do some maintenance on the points, went home early on a Friday afternoon. So he went home early. He left the railway track with a fault in it, and a train crashed, and one person got killed. Now, the question is, whose fault is that? Should the guy who went home early be fired? And when I ask this on training courses, people always say, well, yes, of course he should. His negligence led to a lady being killed. He's got to be fired, possibly even put in prison. Well, maybe, but let's just think about that, because he's got a supervisor. Now, that supervisor allowed him to go home early, possibly even told him to go home early, in which case now it's a bit more tricky, because whose fault was it, really? Now, the truth of it was that there was a supervisor, and he either knew that the guy had gone home early and didn't do anything about it, or he didn't know that the guy had gone home early, in which case, he should've known. So you could argue that either way, that's the supervisor's fault. Now, actually what was happening was that there was a depot of people, probably about let's say 10 supervisors, and they had a culture of sloppiness in this depot. So all 10 supervisors used to let all hundred people go home early on Fridays. That's just what they did there. So there was a depot manager who was to blame for that, and I actually think the depot manager is definitely to blame for the fact that everybody used to skive off home early on Fridays. I think supervisors were just part of the system, and I think it would be quite difficult if you were a supervisor to say, nope, nope, my people can't go home early, even though everyone else's do go home early. So you could say the supervisor is just part of the system, and there's not a lot he could do. I think it's hard to ask them to be strong enough to go against the system. And imagine if you were one of a hundred guys, and everybody finishes early on Friday, and you go, nope, I'm going to stay on late and work. I think that, you know, not many people would do that, so I'm personally thinking that the depot manager is definitely to blame, probably not the supervisor. Now, maybe the actual individual if it's life or death, but of course he didn't know the train was going to crash. He thought it was okay. He probably knew there was a tiny chance there'd be a problem, but there's probably always a tiny chance there's going to be a problem, so, you know, maybe he didn't realize about the danger. But that depot manager, he's definitely to blame. Now just take it one step further. There's a national manager in charge of all the depots. Is he to blame? And I think yes, he is. He should've known that one of those depots was not performing properly. His only excuse is if he's only just taken over in the job, and he hasn't had a chance to sort it yet, perhaps hasn't had a chance to discover it. But if he's been in the job for, say, a year, he should know by now that one of his depots is completely incompetent. Almost his only job is to measure the various depots and find out what's going on. So just as the captain of the ship needs to make sure the beds are being made, and the soup isn't too salty, that national manager needs to check on all the depots, and if one of them's bad, it's his fault. So personally, I would almost certainly sack the national manger. I would definitely sack the depot manager. I don't think I would sack the supervisor, and I'd have to think about whether I sack the actual guy at the bottom. But those top two, oh, yeah. So everything's management's fault, and if you think about your company, really the boss at the top is responsible for everything, and you as a manager are responsible for everything that happens in your area. So everything's management's fault, but it's okay, because if you have the right people and the right systems, and if you do a certain amount of monitoring, you're going to be okay, and it's the monitoring that I want to come to in the next section.

Connecting with your team

Now if you are going to be the captain of the ship in your area, you're going to delegate, you're going to have systems, you need to monitor and make sure that everything's okay. And they're two main ways to do that. The first one is management by wandering about, MBWA. Sometimes people say that stands for management by walking about. But either way, the captain of the ship needs to walk around the ship everyday, I would say. I think he should walk around the whole ship everyday. Now your ship might consist of offices in Cardiff, and Newcastle, and Birmingham, and Paris, or whatever. So you probably may not be able to go around everything everyday. But I think you need to visit every branch probably once a month, maybe once a week, it depends. Enough to have a real feel for what's happening, and you need to see every person in your company, ideally once a month, or maybe once a year if it's a huge company. So management by walking about, you got to work out the amount. But I think you should probably spend an hour or two everyday, just walking around talking to people. That's a big time commitment. And of course, communication's the first thing to go when things are getting tough. And yet, really, it's the most important thing to be doing when things are getting tough. So communication's incredibly important. And you must walk around everyday for an hour or two. Now what would you do during that hour or two? And the answer is just see how people are going, check you know, how are you getting on with this latest job Fred? Did you ever hear back from the customer? Whatever, just ask them what they're working on at the moment if you don't know, that sort of thing. It's partly for you to pull in information, to get a feel for what they're doing, and what they're thinking, how they feel. But it's also for you to transmit information. So when they go oh, what's happening with this? You can say well, we've got a plan for that. Nothing's going to happen for a couple more months, but don't worry, it's in the pipeline. Most of your communication should really come down through your managers. But here's a chance for you to put some messages out directly, and also to check whether your managers are communicating the messages down. Sometimes messages get garbled along the way. So you can make sure the message has come down correctly to the guys. So maybe a quarter of the time, you're on transmit. And three quarters, you're on listen mode, you're on receive mode to see whether people are happy, and find out what's happening. So in a way, you're judging the whole system. Is the system working? And you're judging the people. And you're not necessarily judging the actual workers, you're judging the managers in-between. Are your managers running a tight ship? That's what you're trying to get a feel for when you do management by walking about. It's such an important thing to do. Now the other type of monitoring is back to the floor. I don't know whether you've seen any of those TV programs called "Back to the Floor," or "Undercover Boss," "Secret Millionaire," and all those things. But it's very easy to get out of touch with what really goes on. So it's a great idea for maybe one day per year to go back to the floor and do the lowest job. When I say lowest, it's often the lowest paid, but it's often the most important job. So for example, I saw the boss of a bin of waste recycling company go back, and he just emptied the bins for a week. And he spent a week on the lorries, emptying the bins. And of course, because he was a manager and was about 60, he was pretty hopeless as a bin man. And all the other bin men laughed at him at how he wasn't, and they didn't know who he was. He was secretly going back to do their job. But he discovered how tough their job was. And when he revealed at the end who he was, they were amazed and they were also a bit embarrassed 'cause they'd all, taken the pee out of him, because he was so feeble. But when he said that he really had respect for what they were doing, it was a brilliant moment. By the way, what I think when you do back to the floor, you shouldn't do it secretly. And you should say, I want to spend a day with you, or possibly a whole week, because I want to really understand the issues. I want to get a feel for what it's like. And I know I'll be hopeless at it, you'll have to look after me. But I want to understand what it's really like for you. And you should find that you'll be welcomed. They'll think it's brilliant that you're doing that. So don't be tempted to think, oh I don't want to do that, it'll be hard work, 'cause yes it will be hard work, and it might be cold, or dirty, or smelly, but you must do it. It's really important, partly for credibility, but mainly because then, you'll make better decisions when from on high, you have to make decisions on do we need more people, should we put the price up, should we invest in new equipment? All those sorts of decisions, you can make much better decisions if you do a bit of back to the floor. Now you may think, I already know. But it's amazing how quickly you get out of touch with what it's really like. So if you haven't done that job for a few years, or if you've got two or three layers in between you and the shop floor, then you will be out of touch, I bet you. And it's amazing how out of touch we get. One of the reasons by the way that we get out of touch, is that our direct reports tend to only give us good news. They're not going to say oh yeah, my department's rubbish 'cause I'm such a bad manager. It's all out of control. They make mistakes the whole time. So what they tend to do is they tell you everything's great. So before long, you, the senior boss, start to float on a sort of raft of bullshit that's been pushed up by the people below you, and you start to not really know what it's like down there at the cold face. So back to the floor, really important idea. And those are my two monitoring methods. Management by walking about, and back to the floor.

Addressing the troops

Now, I've just been talking about management by walking about and back to the floor. There are actually five types of communication you can use to get your message down to the troops. And those are two of them, but as well as management by walking about and back to the floor, there are three others. One of them is just the cascade down of information. Some people have a formal briefing system, some people it's just informal, but the point is that the things that you tell your managers, they should pass down to supervisors who should pass it down to workers. And you can check that the cascade is working when you do your management by walking about. If it isn't, you may need to bring in a formal system and you need to say to the supervisor look I need you to get your guys together once a week and tell them stuff. And of course, it can be done with written briefing sheets as well as words if you want. You can have a sheet that has to be given out to everybody. Or these days you can use technology, it can be on the Internet or whatever. But, the cascade of information is the third way, and you need to watch that and make sure it's really happening. The fourth way is team meetings, I think these are incredibly important. So, the supervisor should have a team meeting with their workforce once a week where they tell them what's going on that week. And everybody has a chance to say I want holiday or I've got a particular problem. And in fact, everybody at every level should hold a team meeting with their team approximately once a week. If you've got shift workers or people spread around the country it might be more difficult. But, maybe you could do a joint Skype call or conference call, I don't know, but generally every week you should have a team meeting with your team. And if you think about it, that means you're going to be in two meetings, doesn't it? 'Cause you're going to run a team meeting with the team who report to you, but you're also going to attend a team meeting run by your boss, at which all your peers are there. So, you should really be in two team meetings a week. Now each one should only be 15 minutes, it's not arduous. And it will save a lot of time. People sometimes say to me, do I need a team meeting? We all sit an open plan office, but the answer is yes you do because you don't often sit down as a group and just compare notes and just think about what you're doing. So, it will easily pay for itself. People will discover that someone else is working on the same thing as them, or somebody else knows about something that they're grappling with, so really important if people are going to feel like a team they have to have a team meeting. So, that's the fourth type of communication, the two team meetings every week that you'll have to go to. The final one is addressing the troops. And once a year, the boss should address all of the troops en masse. Christmas is a good time to do this. Just, you know, stand on a box and say to them right, this is what's happened this year, these are the finances, this is how much profit we've made, this is what we've plowed the profit back into because I haven't kept it all in my pockets, so it'll be invested back in, and then these are the plans for next year, this is what we're going to invest in, these are the new areas we're going to try and sell to, new products we're developing. So tell them about the year that's gone, and the coming year. And it's important to do that for the whole company once a year. Now you might find that a bit scary, you may not like doing it, it may take a bit of work because you'll have to probably have a PowerPoint presentation maybe, maybe give them each a page of notes to take away, so they can look at the accounts later. But, it's a big thing for people. They want to see the whole company in one room so they can feel the size of it, and it makes everyone feel part of a big team. So, management by wandering about, back to the floor, the cascade down of information, the team meetings, and then addressing the troops. You need to make sure you do all five of those communication methods. Communication's the biggest thing. There was a, some general said, he who communicates, leads. So, communication is almost the essence of leadership. And of course nowadays you can also be she who communicates, leads, but that quote was from 100 years ago. So, communication is absolutely fundamental to leadership. And you have to make sure you do plenty of it. Remember that when the pressure's on, it's the first thing to go, but it mustn't be. You must always make sure you communicate.

Are great leaders born or made?

Now probably the biggest name in leadership theory is a guy called John Adair. John Adair is still alive, he's quite old now. He was in the army and originally he was given the job by the army of trying to find out what characteristics the best leaders had, so that they could recruit more of those type of people. And what he found was that it wasn't actually personality at all. It wasn't what you are, it was what you do that made you a great leader. And he found that the best leaders did certain things. It was nothing to do with their personality at all. And you might think the good leaders are approachable, intelligent, charismatic, decisive, tough, et cetera, and they probably are. But we can all learn to do the right things. And actually, if you look at leaders that are both decisive and good listeners or whatever, you'll find a lot of the traits are almost contradictory. So you can be any different type of personality and still be a good leader. Perhaps to be a really great, world class leader you have to inherit some characteristics, but to be a good leader in a company, anybody can do it. You just have to learn what to do. So John Adair moved the whole subject on from trait theory to the idea of transactional leadership. It's what you do that matters, rather than what you are. And he came up with two theories. The first one is that there are three areas that leaders have to pay attention to. He called this Action Centered Leadership. And his idea is that, first of all, the leader has to make sure the task gets done. You have to define it carefully, measure it, et cetera. Secondly, the team has to be happy, so that involves a certain amount of team building, et cetera. And then the individuals have to be happy within the team, and that involves looking after the individuals and having plans for each person. So task, team, and individual. He drew those as three overlapping circles and he called it Action Centered Leadership. Now I suppose he's right. That theory doesn't excite me particularly. And it was actually based on the work of Blake and Mouton anyway, because they originally, before John Adair, said that the two areas that you have to look out for are the task and the people. So they said if you're too tasky and you forget the people, that will be a problem. And if you're too people-orientated and you forget the task, you'll have a lot of fun but that won't be much good either. And they said it's not really a compromise between the two. They said the objective is to do both, to be really hot on the task and really hot on the people. And that's what Blake and Mouton said. John Adair then divided that down and he divided the people part into the team and individuals. But John Adair's second theory, which I do rather like, said that things go in five stages, and the leader has to pay attention to the task, team, and individual in all three of those stages. Sorry, all five of those stages. And the five stages are first of all, setting the objectives, what are we trying to do. The leader would make sure everybody understands the objective, perhaps would involve them in some objective setting but normally would probably provide a vision of where we're going. So that's objectives. Second stage is planning. So again, the leader would make sure we spend enough time on planning, would involve the people in the planning, would control the planning process, make sure that lots of ideas are considered before we home in on one, that kind of thing. The third stage is then briefing, making sure that everybody understands the plan. And quite often the people who've got to carry it out are not the same as the ones who were involved in making the plan. So briefing is explaining the plan to the troops who have to carry it out. You can see it's quite a military model because he was a military man. The fourth of his five stages is the action. That's when you actually do whatever the job is. And the leader at this stage is monitoring, controlling, checking that the team are happy, make sure that everybody's involved, make sure the quality is done right. So there's a few jobs the leader does during the action. And then finally, review or evaluate. Afterwards, what can we learn, how did it go, was everybody happy, et cetera. So those are the five stages, objectives, planning, briefing, action, and review. And within each of those five stages you've got to look after the three areas, the task, the team, and the individual. And you can draw this out as a matrix. And John Adair would say, and I think he might be right, that everything a leader does is in this matrix somewhere. So for example, appraisals are to do with setting objectives for individuals and then evaluating, reviewing individuals. So they actually appear in two boxes on the matrix. That's John Adair's structure. I think there's one flaw in his structure, actually, which is that because he's an army guy, he's very interested in command tasks. Invade that country! And a lot of it has a start and a finish, almost like a project. And it's great for that. What are the objectives, what's the plan for doing this, et cetera. But a lot of us, we're doing some projects but we're also controlling processes. So let's suppose you just run a factory or you run a call center or something like that. His model doesn't work so well for that because it's not as if you've got one objective which you then plan. So then keeping people happy and monitoring processes, I think his model isn't as good as some of the other models which I'm going to come to later. Anyway, that's John Adair. He is the guy when it comes to leadership. And that concludes this first section on what is leadership. We're going to have a look at motivation next. There are some great theories on that. And then we're going to come back to leadership a bit more because we're going to look at leadership style, and there are some really good theories on leadership style I'm going to share with you later in this course.