Category Archives: Musings

What Chris Hadfield, Pomplamoose and Toyota can teach Chief Operating Officers about culture and competitive advantage

You might know of Chris Hadfield for his series of fascinating and frankly, just cool videos he posted from the International Space Station. He’s a real life Major Tom and speaks compellingly here on managing fear and the NASA maxim that “there is no problem so bad that you can’t make it worse”.

We see him as finished product, a three time astronaut and legend in his field. What you may not know is that Hadfield spent literally decades doing everything he could to secure his chances of becoming an astronaut. Most importantly, he adopted and then consistently applied a mindset focused on How he would acquire the knowledge and capabilities likely to be valued by NASA. Continue reading →

Five signs your culture is compromised and it’s time to leave

Dog wearing Rose Tinted Specs

When you’re interested in a subject professionally as well as personally, it’s pretty easy to forget that you’re also probably sporting a comfy pair of rose tinted glasses and enjoying a warm fuzzy glow of obviousness that, of course leaders care about culture and managers understand their role is to make the work, work and having engaged employees with clarity of purpose is a useful thing.

If you’re reading this, chances are, you already get that it’s possible to have both people and profit driving your performance. More than that, you’d probably go toe-to-toe with an old school Command & Control manager and say it’s not only possible, it’s necessary.

The sad news is, there are still far too many workplaces out there where these things are not self-evident and practiced with passion.

I’ve been spending some time off the reservation over the last year working on a few contracts and seeing the inside of a bunch of different organisations. Continue reading →

Leadership and taking things personally

I spent over 13 years working at Rightmove.co.uk, one of the UK’s most successful digital businesses, building products, people and teams.

We started out as a few people around a table and over the next decade grew to nearly 400 people spread around the UK. Along the way I stumbled into becoming a coach, leading Rightmove’s management training and induction programmes which were instrumental in creating and sustaining Rightmove’s small company culture.

In time, I became a manager and, with experience, a leader. I became a manager by being in the right place at the right time but I really only became a leader when I began to discover how powerful it was to take things personally.

Now it’s hard to talk about leadership without offering some sort of definition. The one that works for me is to think of leadership as what happens once you move beyond administering processes and people, when you start creating an environment for that activity to take place: when you move from What to How.

Most managers are really only administrators. The clue is in the name : they manage the flow of resources towards given objectives. They are engaged with ensuring things are done right, not whether the right things are done in the first place.

What ‘the right things’ are, most people can figure out with sufficient insight, a dash of creativity and sometimes luck. How you operate and execute your What, the manner in which you and your team behave is where taking things personally really starts to make a difference.

For me, taking things personally marks the line between
leading and simply managing.

Early on in my career I’d taken over the management of a sales team. At my first monthly sales meeting I was nervous about facing a room full of sales beasts, particularly as they were nursing grievances about their commission scheme. The legacy scheme was clunky to operate, complicated to calculate and forecast, didn’t suit business objectives and didn’t allow for differences between sales territories.

Not realising quite how emotional they were about this clunky commision structure, I kicked off the meeting with a series of necessary changes to the business model and pricing – which were almost instantly met with a wall of objections and obstructions. A little ‘five whys’ later, the commission elephant in the room was revealed in all its stinking clunky glory.

This is where it gets personal. Continue reading →

12 Lessons from a Labrador on what
Joyful Purpose looks like

I’m sure there’s a whole shelf in the management library on ‘lessons from animals’ but this 35 second clip illustrating the power of purpose could keep me going for hours.

Here are 12 Lessons from Walter the Labrador on Joyful Purpose :

Lesson 1
Our furry friend Walter has been held back from achieving by his master. Normally this is A Bad Thing, however, placing oneself under artificial constraint can induce lots of great alternative ideas, through the necessity to challenge your assumptions and seek alternative solutions.

Lesson 2
Constraining the release point also serves to charge motivation as the energy has nowhere else to go. Holding back and waiting for the right time to release pent up energy can also serve to provide an extra charge to momentum and get things flying from the word go.

Lesson 3
Note how the hound is constrained yet still has an abundance of motivation (A.K.A. a waggy tail). Walter desires to achieve his goal and abides until he is triggered. He powers himself with hope and belief that he will one day be able to make the leap to the ocean.

Lesson 4
Observe the pace unleashed when he is let off the leash. No dithering, no waiting for permission, no hesitation on executing his mission. He Just Delivers.

Lesson 5
His destination is out of sight. Not just obscured, but completely out of sight.
He launches despite of this. Continue reading →

Decision making in great company culture

Halfway down an article by Lisa Jones on the Corporate Culture Pros blog, this quote from a switched on leader about decision making rang my bell:

“I claim Nagging Rights, but not Decision Rights”

The quote comes from a chap who was staking out the areas of the business in which he would claim final say in any decisions. He came up with only 4 areas in which he would have final say and everything else he claimed “nagging rights”, not decision rights. Continue reading →