Is Leadership really all that?

MBA lecturers may disagree, but isn’t it those with the courage to be the first to follow – those early adopters – who are truly the driving power behind innovation?

Sure, takes someone to spark something different, but without endorsement, you are alone. Just another desperate name with an unproven idea.

Instead of celebrating the cult of leadership, should we instead be focussed on the real heroes; those who are brave enough be the first to follow?

Thanks to the always insightful Alan Broom for this gem!

Last night, on a whim, I attended my first Ignite Sydney event at the Oxford Art Factory.

I’d describe Ignite as TED talks for the common man, complete with access to a bar. The basic theme of each event is: a bunch of people of diverse backgrounds, ages and interests (though commonly from IT) gather at a venue usually used for noctural purposes. They do so to listen to non-professional speakers talk about things they are passionate about. The format is; 5 minutes on stage, 20 slides, each slide changes automatically every 15 seconds.

The result was a truly entertaining and informative evening very much outside the square! Things I learnt included:

•  Rainbows are caused when light reflects off raindrops which are elevated at exactly 42 degrees to our line-of-sight.
•  It looks like a lot of fun to go fishing for deep sea fishy delicacies using a multi-million dollar robotic submersible.
• There is such a thing as moonbows.
• The Dalai Lama believes we should treat each other like kittens and puppies, rather than turtles.
• I still don’t get how Steve Jobs changed the world.
• Politicians aren’t all bad

But the thing I really learnt is: people are truly at their best when they are talking about things they love! And when people talk about something they love and show that passion, even the most mundane things suddenly become interesting (including rainbows!).

Thanks to Scot Andrews for inviting me along!

Some interesting comments at last nights’ 8pm parliamentary debate around The Corporations Amendment (Future of Financial Advice) Bill 2011 and Corporations Amendment (Further Future of Financial Advice Measures) Bill 2011:

• “The vast majority of financial planners want to take you by the hand and walk you towards a bright future and a splendid retirement. The Storm model could never be assumed to have that in mind. My concern is that parts of this bill are unnecessarily burdensome on businesses and that this will impact on their ability to provide affordable financial advice.” – Member for Herbert, Ewen Jones.
• “The new measures outlined in this bill will promote the active renewal by the client of ongoing fees for advice, with opportunities for them to consider whether they are receiving value for money. It will also assist to disengage clients from paying ongoing fees that they should not be paying.” - Member for Canberra, Gai Brodtmann.
• “It is important that these financial advice reforms are properly considered so that we do not create a situation where the big players in the industry gain strength and power at the expense of the small to medium-sized financial planning businesses that, by and large, provide the majority of the independent, high-quality financial planning advice to the Australian community. It is the small financial planning practices that are built up over 20 or 30 years that are the true professionals and pioneers in this industry.” - Member for Forde, Bert van Manen.

http://www.professionalplanner.com.au/government-and-regulation/fofa-arrives-but-many-a-slip-twixt-cup-and-lip/

It’s official!

The answer is apparently; try to meet with people who are either smarter than you, or those who won’t feel intimidated disagreeing with the status quo.

As well as celebrating their achievements, a number of businesses this week have kindly shared with me some of the challenges they’ve faced so far this year. FOFA was expected. Trending issues around staff retention and performance came as a surprise.

Too often I speak to dynamic, enthusiastic entrepreneurs about the challenges in getting their people to help them build their businesses. Similarly, many highly capable employees have shared with me the impact too many “spinning plates” has on meaningful progress. Putting aside the significant challenges in working alongside the entreprenerial mindset and the varied demands of corporate life, what is it that can see a hugely capable person significantly underperform?

Edward Hallowel’s Harvard Business Review paper Overloaded Circuits: Why Smart People Underperform made a lot of sense when it came to my attention this week. The crux is this; increased immersion in a constant stream of information from our technology is causing our brains to stick in survival mode. This distorts our ability to think clearly and intelligently.

“The symptoms … come upon gradually. The sufferer doesn’t experience a single crisis but rather a series of minor emergencies while he or she tries harder and harder to keep up. Shouldering a responsibility to ‘suck it up’ and not complain as the workload increases, [sufferers] do whatever they can to handle a load they simply cannot manage as well as they’d like.”

“Marked by distractibility, inner frenzy, and impatience, [this] prevents managers from clarifying priorities, making smart decisions and managing their time. This insidious condition turns otherwise talented performers into harried underachievers.

Sound familiar? It struck a chord for me. I can see elements in me and in those around me.

And here is the killer. Those who care the most will often suffer the most. - “anybody who is conscientious is subject to this because they will try to get everything done, no matter what. So are people who crave high stimulation”

Basically, we’re creating the exact environment to enable those likely to take pride in their work (invest emotionally, always do what they say they’re going to do and prone to giving their all) to fail, whilst those who don’t prosper.

It’s a horrendous feedback loop! Thankfully Hallowell reckons it can be addressed via the following:

• Think positively. Yes, yes, it’s all very Tony Robbins, but the basis is sound. A mind clouded by negative emotion and fear will underperform. This alone creates the possibility that all those advisers believing FOFA is the end of the world could just be talking themselves into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
• Don’t work in isolation. Interact with a person you like every 4 to 6 hours - ”By connecting comfortably with colleagues, you’ll help your brain’s ‘executive centre’ (responsible for decision-making, planning, and information prioritising) perform at its best.” This alone adds weight to the suggestion that working with colleagues and clients who you don’t enjoy interacting with might just be more damaging than you realise. Even more damaging could be not having a business that enables you to spend your time engaging the clients you do enjoy working with!
• Start the day with easy tasks. This is something that’s always worked for me, giving me the opportunity to ‘warm up’ with some easy wins early on, before chugging along at more difficult obstacles in the afternoon.
• Know when you are most “on” during the day. Plan to accomplish your most difficult tasks then. Myself, I’m an early evening “flyer”, so that’s when I focus on my more creative tasks.
• Take care of yourself. Get enough sleep, eat healthfully, and exercise. Join a bootcamp. Get a hobby. Join a sports team. Do something that enables your brain to switch off for a while. Sometimes I’ve found the best ideas and most innovative solutions have come to me not at my desk, but instead in the moments I’ve stepped out to take the dog for a walk or sit on the beach for an hour.

Do this ring true for anyone else out there? Are you seeing these kind of issues in yourself,  employees or colleagues you’d previously thought were your star performers? Or is it all just another bout of psycho babble serving to keep overpaid HR specialists in jobs and underperformers well-stocked in excuses?

To partially quote Peter Finch/ Howard Beale; I’m mad.

If I’ve been drilled with one value in my life, it is that I believe with every fibre of my being that I should do what I say I am going to do.

I see it as one of the precursors of trust. Stu says he’ll do it. Stu does it, therefore Stu can be trusted to do it (and more beyond it) in the future.

Sure, there may be occasions when it doesn’t happen. We’re not perfect (my Father insists he is an exception), but past behaviour is generally a good indication of future behaviour. Consistent lack of delivery says a lot about a person in the same way that serial tardiness does (“Your time isn’t important to me”).

Many advisers I speak to feel the same way. The fate of their businesses (and therefore them as entrepreneurs) rises and falls with their ability to deliver value to their clients through the congruence between their promises and actions.

So as I read Professional Planner this morning, I noted that on February 17th at the SPAA conference, one Honourable William Shorten MP committed that he and his staff would “deal with the accountants’ exemption in the next two weeks”. In my world, that means ‘by the 2nd Mar and no later”.

Yes, yes, at this stage my own coach would be saying to me, “Stewart, those are your values. Whose problem is this? Who is it affecting? Is it bothering Bill? Is it bothering you? Well, there you go then”.

However, I am astounded at how many commitments can be made, deadlines set and then so easily broken. I’m not talking about the rights and wrongs of FOFA itself – that’s a very different argument which I have no desire to get into now. I’m talking about simply doing something on time and lifting our industry out of the counter-intuitive paralysis it is gripped by. At what point does it becomes time for Bill to receive a tap on the shoulder and a quiet word that perhaps there is a stage to pass through before you agree to articles in The Australian positioning you as a potential leader of the country?

After all (political conspiracies aside) isn’t FOFA proposing our industry delivers value in return appropriate to remuneration?

Perhaps we should be considering a two year opt-in for cabinet positions?

A post rather from left field today!

I read somewhere that despite our technological advances, humans fundamentally haven’t changed in tens of thousands of years.

Reading www.listverse.com (one of my favorite wastes of time) I came across this quote from Marcus Tullius Cicero, a Roman politician, lawyer, and orator who lived from 106 BC to 43 BC. I’m a massive fan of trying to make things simpler, rather than more complex. I think this gets to the heart of that concept.

His quote really brought home how despite all our modern genius, it is the simple concepts that often mean the most.

“Six mistakes mankind keeps making century after century:
1. Believing that personal gain is made by crushing others;
2. Worrying about things that cannot be changed or corrected;
3. Insisting that a thing is impossible because we cannot accomplish it;
4. Refusing to set aside trivial preferences;
5. Neglecting development and refinement of the mind;
6. Attempting to compel others to believe and live as we do.”

Wise words from the past indeed!

I’ve been spending a good portion of this week preparing for something I really enjoy; facilitating a workshop.

This one is a workshop on our Pricing Advice program. More specifically, I’ll be working with a PDM team tomorrow for two days and over the course of the next 5 months to together achieve some outstanding personal and financial outcomes for their advisers.

To prepare for sessions like these, I’ve developed a routine. I admire those who can step into a room and simply run a session for a day without any prior preparation. I heard Kerry Chikarovski do it with utmost confidence at the AFA roadshow last year, and Steve Helmich of AMP is also someone who seems blessed with that gift. It’s something I aspire to.

However, I’m more of a preparation Nazi. My modus operandi is much more structured. Even with workshops I know like that back of my hand, my routine goes rather like this:

• Review my audience – Who are they? What do I know about them? What are their likely topics of interest? Do we have any additional information I can use to personalise my content?
• Revise my content – even with presentations or workshops I’ve delivered a hundred times, I still like to make sure that the content is the best and most personal it can be. There’s nothing worse than being in the flow, only to be jolted out by an errant bulletpoint which is no longer relevant, or a piece of information you know doesn’t suit the situation.
•  Compose my speakers’ notes – In actual fact, I think it’s the process of writing them that usually leads me to not use them. However, having them to refer to if my mind goes blank, and to ensure I make all the points/ ask all the questions I want to, is invaluable. I’ve increasingly started using Mindmaps as the way of doing this, which has made the fluidity of planning much easier.
• Finally, practice the delivery – Always the strangest. Just yesterday, my neighbour walked out her door to see me in full-flow, lecturing away to an empty lounge (except for Alan the French Bulldog, of course).

By far the most useful book I’ve ever bought about presenting came into my hands whilst I was in transit between Perth and Adelaide during the AFA roadshow. I picked up Life’s a Pitch: how to sell yourself and your brilliant ideas purely on a whim. After reading it cover to cover during the flight, I immediately set myself up in my hotel room that night and rewrote my presentation from beginning to end.

It’s an outstanding book, full of great tips, delivered in a simple, no-fuss writing style. I’ve used techniques from it in all walks of life; from coaching, to sales training to persuading my wife to approve of me going skiing in Japan on a week-long stag do. See, I told you it’s good.

So, what’s your method of preparing for client meetings, CoI pitches, presentations or workshops? Do you roleplay with others? What have you tried and ditched? What have you found works best for you?

I would really love to hear your opinion on this or any other ideas that might have popped into your head whilst reading this. Please hit the ‘Comments’ button underneath the heading of this post to share your views