As a lifelong fan of Formula One motor racing, I was hugely privileged to interview Sir Frank Williams founder of the Williams F1 Grand Prix racing team, at his headquarters in Grove, Oxfordshire. He recounted how he had become addicted to motor racing at the age of 16, when he went to the British Grand Prix at Silverstone and watched Peter Collins drive a Ferrari to victory. ‘Ever since that day, all I ever wanted to do was go motor racing,’ he said.
In 1961, Sir Frank began racing his own Austin, funding his racing from his work as a travelling grocery salesman. He realized he was never going to be a great driver and instead turned his hand to running a Grand Prix team. The rest is history, and his partnership with Patrick Head resulted in the formation of a team that has, over the decades, seen both highs and lows in the intensely competitive environment that is the paddock of Formula One motor racing.
A car accident in March 1986 in France saw Sir Frank sustaining a spinal cord injury, which left him paralysed and wheelchair bound ever since. When I saw Sir Frank, he was seated behind his desk in his office, sipping with a straw from a cup of tea on a small block on his desk.
He was uncomfortable talking about the subject of communication and spoke quietly, but was considerate and considered. During the interview, he confessed: ‘This is a somewhat unusual conversation for me.’ He had not thought very hard about communication per se, and never really seemed at ease while talking about the subject.
Having exhausted all my questions, I then asked him about some of the things I really wanted to know. Who was his favourite driver? Who did he think was the best ever Grand Prix driver? (The answers were Alan Jones and Ayrton Senna.) As soon as we moved on to the subject of racing, his eyes lit up as his passion ignited.
‘All I’ve ever wanted is to go racing, and it’s racing that matters to all of the people in this company. We all share a common interest. We don’t just want to participate. We want to win.’
In his own words: ‘I’m a racer, pure and simple.’
After the interview, I stood chatting down in the foyer, and overheard a group of Williams F1 employees. They were talking about the new guy, Adam Parr, who, at the time, was about to take over as chairman of Williams F1. Sir Frank Williams said he was a man who was ‘a great deal more competent at running the business than I have ever been’.
‘Yes,’ said the employees, ‘but is he a racer?’ To them, that was all that mattered… a clear legacy communicated to them and instilled in them by a man who exists to race Formula One cars.
Time and again I saw the same phenomenon: the passion of the leader replicated in the followers. As Sir Frank himself will admit, he is not a great orator. But one thing is for sure: he has managed to inspire and instil common values in his people.
Sir Frank can’t move himself, but he moves people with his passion.
And therein lies the rub, as Shakespeare wrote. Too often leaders focus on trying to become technically perfect orators when they should be learning how to be more passionate orators. And that passion must be genuine, born of profound beliefs and dreams, or people will see through you in an instant.
What followers want from leaders
Leadership does not happen in a vacuum. Leaders operate in an ecosystem of interdependent people in an environment that they all inhabit together, and depend on. Leaders have followers. They have advisers. They have peers. They have competitors. They have customers. They have shareholders. They have regulators. And leaders have to communicate with all of these audiences.
Of course, many leaders are very often also followers. A CEO may take leadership from their board. A section leader may be guided by their director, before leading their own team. Equally, a director might be led by a subordinate when part of a team pitching to a client, for example. For any leader, though, the most important audience is followers. Nothing gets done without inspired and motivated followers. Customers won’t be satisfied, regulators will be alarmed, competitors will be gleeful and advisers will have a field day, if followers don’t perform.
If followers are the most important audience, then what do followers want from their leaders? That seems a good place to start. Above all, what they want in a leader is someone they can believe in. Followers respond best to leaders who have a strong strategic focus, with a clear vision of where the business should be going, who speak plainly and truthfully and, when necessary, courageously and with principles. They especially like leaders who stand up for them and defend them to the hilt. Leaders with a strong set of values built on honesty and openness and respect for other people are the most inspirational of all. They are predictable, and they are human.
Followers want leaders to be accessible, with genuine humility and even, occasionally, vulnerability. They want someone who listens to them and respects their views, someone who gives them energy and makes them feel involved and even electrified; they want someone whose passion and drive make it fun to work with them; they want to be trusted and in turn, to trust their leader; they want to be appreciated and to have their successes celebrated; and they want to feel valued, as much as they need to value their colleagues and the company for which they work. They want to have fun, and enjoy what they do, and they want to believe that what they do makes a difference.
Followers want leaders to make them feel inspired.
And that’s the bottom line. Great leaders know that they must inject emotion into their communications or else they will be unable to make followers feel anything. The language of business is numbers, but for many that can be very boring. Action and commitment follow only when people feel uplifted and enabled and clear about what they are supposed to achieve. All too often I have seen leaders insist on staying in the world of rational argument, rooting their calls to action in the numbers. To be a great leader, you have to learn to communicate with passion, because passion begets action.
What do leaders want from the leaders they hire?
When I asked leaders about the most important skills of leadership, communication always featured as a top-three skill – often the second most important (behind strategic thinking) and sometimes the most important. I also always asked what else they were looking for in the leaders they hired in their own organizations. The answers were very consistent. Most often mentioned, in order of priority, were:
• raw intellect and the ability to think strategically, and with clarity;
• the ability to choose the right people and then align them to a cause;
• the ability to inspire people and take them with you; a good communicator, a good listener;
• a people person, able to be both challenging and encouraging, and able to create a strong culture and a shared set of values;
• a strong sense of mission;
• integrity, authenticity, strong values, honesty, openness and curiosity;
• domain excellence (knowledge and experience of the business they lead);
• energy, drive, resilience and persistence;
• numeracy, and a focus on performance and results;
• optimism, ambition and a willingness to take ‘big bets’.
High on their list of desired skills and attributes are many of the same things wanted by followers: a future focus; strategic ability; a sense of mission; strong values; honesty; the ability to inspire; authenticity; integrity.
Authenticity came up a great deal. When I asked what it was and why it was necessary, here is what they said: ‘It is about being true to yourself. And true to others.’
To do this, you have to do the following:
• Know your own strengths and weaknesses. You have to be clear about the beliefs that underpin your strengths. Figure out your sense of purpose. Articulate all of the above. Only then can you talk from the heart.
• Be trusted. You cannot lead if you are not trusted, and people cannot trust you if they don’t know who you are, so you have to:
– be visible: show up and be accessible;
– have the confidence to be you;
– treat people with respect, as one adult to another, and be interested in them;
– be consistent;
– always be honest, and admit to mistakes or that you don’t know all the answers.
• Be a model of the behaviours you want. If you want to enjoy the benefits of being seen as a hero, you have to be a hero.
• Be authentic and true to yourself. When you are authentic, authenticity works its way through the whole organization.
Let’s have a look at some of those points in depth. What did some of the leaders say about talking from the heart, being visible, being human, being yourself, knowing your strengths and allowing your emotions to show?
Fields Wicker-Miurin is co-founder and partner of Leaders’ Quest, an international organization which works with leaders in the developing and developed worlds. She is a non-executive director of BNP Paribas, Ballarpur International Graphic Paper (India’s leading writing-paper company) and CDC, the British government’s development finance institution. Previously, Fields was chief financial officer of the London Stock Exchange and chief operating officer and partner of Vesta Group, an international venture capital firm.
She says: ‘The most important part of being a good communicator is the secret ingredient of deep self-awareness, warts and all, and knowing and being comfortable with who you really are.’
‘When we listen to a speaker, we know if that person is speaking from the heart and is authentic and honest. They somehow speak with complete confidence and vulnerability, all at the same time. Even if that person is not a very polished speaker, they will have impact. If you want to connect you have to learn how to speak from the heart.’
Yes, but how do you do that? ‘It starts with knowing who you are. That’s hard enough, because as we go through life we develop more and more mechanisms to protect and to shield ourselves and we learn how to conform in order to be successful. A leader has to reach a point of being comfortable and confident enough to say: “I know who I am and I can bring who I am to my leadership.” This is not arrogance, because it needs to be done with a humility that enables you to be elastic, inclusive and porous enough to embrace and make space for lots of other types of people, perspectives and ways of seeing the world.’
‘You cannot be consistent unless you are authentic. You have to understand what is core to your own belief system and figure out why you are here, what you believe in, and only then can you really be yourself and lead from your core.’
Lord Victor Adebowale, chief executive of Turning Point, says the difference between leadership and management is that leadership involves emotional investment in the task whereas management requires intellectual investment. ‘As a leader you are having to communicate at a level beyond the intellect. You are trying to engage the emotion in the achievement of a task. Good leaders understand the importance of this. Sadly a lot of leaders don’t communicate in this way at all, because they are actually terrified. They fear that they will be found out and people will see that they do not have an emotional connection with what they are trying to achieve. They want to avoid exposing themselves. They don’t want to take the risk because all communication involves risk. The fear is that you will be exposed as inauthentic, or worse, that your authentic self will be rejected. I believe that the act of communicating is itself a risk, but the act of being inauthentic is an even greater risk.’
Often, if you are unafraid to show passion, your values will communicate without you having to put them into words. And you will communicate better, even if you are not skilled at giving speeches. Hollywood scriptwriters use a mantra: ‘Show, don’t tell.’ What they mean is, don’t tell your viewer that your main character is mean. Show him in a pub, sliding off to the washroom when it is his turn to buy a round. Let the viewer conclude, simply by watching the character in action, that he is tight-fisted. Equally, as a leader, don’t say you are passionate about your subject, show that you are passionate.
Paul Polman, global chief executive of Unilever, a global consumer products business that owns many of the world’s most famous consumer brands in foods, beverages, cleaning agents and personal care products, says authenticity is the most important factor behind inspiring communicators. ‘I took my leadership team the other day to the Perkins School of the Blind, in Watertown, Massachusetts. I’m the chair of their international advisory board. A man called Andy, who was blind and deaf, gave a speech to my team. Technically, it wasn’t a good speech, but at the end they were all sitting on their chairs, with tears in their eyes, and they were not clapping their hands (because Andy couldn’t hear them) but they were stamping their feet so hard that he could feel it through the floor.’
Andy spoke haltingly from the mouth, but eloquently from the heart, and he moved his audience to tears.
Petrofac is a FTSE 100 business which provides facilities services to the oil and gas production and processing industries. Ayman Asfari is group chief executive of Petrofac, once a US company, which he joined in 1991 to internationalize the business and establish Petrofac International. Petrofac was listed in 2005 and it now employs around 14,000 people around the world.
Ayman is now a very rich man. ‘But I am just as hungry as I was 30 years ago,’ he says, ‘still passionate about this business and our customers. That passion gives me an edge in communication. I am not a very good speechmaker, but if you know your stuff and you have passion, then you will have an impact on people. The one thing I do know is that if you don’t sound like you’re convinced yourself, it’s very difficult to be convincing to others.’
Colin Matthews is CEO of British Airports Authority (BAA), the Spanish-owned operator of six British airports (including Heathrow Airport), making the company one of the largest transport companies in the world. Colin argues that people have an incredibly sensitive ear for sincerity or integrity.
‘You can be a brilliant communicator but the most devastating undermining of communication is lack of authenticity. And yet authenticity is simple – it is simply about presenting yourself truthfully.’
Why is authenticity so important? Because it enables people to trust you. You cannot lead, if people don’t trust you. David Morley, senior partner at global law firm Allen & Overy, says authenticity underpins your ability to win trust. A&O operates in 26 countries, and David says it is the same in any country. ‘If you are going to get your message across and influence the way people behave, which ultimately is what leadership is all about, then there has to be trust in you as an individual and in what you say. When trust goes, cynicism takes its place and it’s very difficult to influence cynical people, or people who are cynical about you or your motives. Then it doesn’t matter how brilliant a speaker you are – if people don’t trust you, you may as well not be talking.’
Sir Richard Leese is leader of the Manchester City Council. Manchester has grown by almost 20 per cent over the last decade and lies at the heart of a metropolitan area of almost 3 million people, the United Kingdom’s second largest urban area. He says: ‘A leader has to have credibility and authority and these are born of authenticity. Authenticity is born of knowing yourself, of knowing your own strengths and weaknesses and being true to yourself. If you are not, people will find you out quickly and when they do you will lose credibility and trust’.
What do you have to do to enable followers to trust you? The advice from all the leaders I spoke with was unanimous…
Be visible, be human and be straight
After qualifying as a barrister, Tom Hughes-Hallett spent more than 20 years working in the City before giving up his job as director of Fleming Asset Management to join Marie Curie Cancer Care in December 2000 as chief executive. Marie Curie is a charitable organization with more than 2,700 nurses, doctors and other healthcare professionals, and provides care for terminally ill patients in the community and in its own hospices, along with support for their families. This year, Marie Curie expects to provide care to more than 31,000 people with cancer and other terminal illnesses.
Tom feels the most important aspect of being authentic is that you have to be visible and you have to get around your organization. That is tough and a real commitment when you become a CEO. But you have to do it. ‘If something needs to be communicated, then people should have a good idea of the bloke that is communicating, know what he looks like, and ideally have shaken his hand. Being authentic means being honest and straight – and definitely not pretending to know everything. You have to say “I don’t know but I’ll get back to you.”
‘Most important, you have to make it fun. I always promised people it would always be fun working at Marie Curie – always. People thought I was potty saying that in an end-of-life care organization, but it attracted people. Fun actually means that you are being stretched, you are working hard, you know what you are doing and why you are doing it and it is just a nice way of codifying it.’
Richard Gnodde is the co-chief executive officer of Goldman Sachs International at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. He has been at this position since July 2006. The Goldman Sachs Group is a global investment banking and securities firm dealing primarily with institutional clients.
Richard says: ‘Authenticity is being very straightforward, saying exactly what you think and being very candid, however difficult it might be. There is no good in sugar-coating something. Always strive to find a positive message to show people the way forward. That said, the message has to be an honest and credible one; don’t try to pretend that your team is in a good place when it isn’t.
‘You really have to walk the walk. People are very perceptive and you are very visible all the time. Good leaders have to be very credible with respect to the message that they are communicating. You can see it in their eyes and you can see it in the way they carry themselves and you can see it in the way that they live their lives. A leader is just very visible.’
Lord Mervyn Davies, formerly a banker and then a UK government minister, now a partner and vice-chairman at Corsair Capital and non-executive chairman of PineBridge Investments, an asset management company, says: ‘Authenticity is crucial. It means talking about your mistakes, talking about your weaknesses, and talking about things that are not going well. Never fall into the trap of thinking that you know everything. And you have to find ways of showing up and being visible, even in a global business. You have to recognize that there are so many different ways to have the dialogue and conversations, from face to face, to iPads and mobile phones and videoconferences.’
Heidi Mottram is CEO of Northumbrian Water, and the first woman to head up one of the big water and waste-treatment companies. She started her career in British Rail and went on to be commercial director for Arriva Trains Northern and then managing director of Northern Rail. Heidi was named Rail Business Manager of the Year in 2009 for being an ‘inspirational leader’.
She points out that there are obvious parallels between the rail and water industries. Both are formerly nationalized, now heavily regulated, sectors, but there’s also a tangible public service ethos. ‘What really strikes you is just how committed and proud and passionate people are about what they do,’ she says. Northumbrian Water employs 3,000 staff, scattered in small groups throughout a wide region. Heidi says her staff hate coming to big events, so Heidi goes to them – organizing regular visits to small groups of people at Northumbrian’s waterworks and plants in a systematic way, even to the most difficult-to-reach places, on a regular basis.
‘It is a big people business, blue collar, and I long ago stopped worrying about being a woman in a man’s world. I turn up and have full and frank conversations with our staff, in their recreation rooms, and when I am there I give them my full attention. I learned years ago from two inspiring bosses how important it is to talk with people like I’ve just met them in a pub, adult to adult, where we both have important jobs to do, just different jobs to do. Talk about everyday things, have fun, and not only business issues. There is a real art in being real, one of the people, while still retaining respect,’ she says.
‘It is really important to me to understand how it “feels” to work in the business, so I ask a lot of questions about that, which brings out emotional issues – frustrations and concerns but also what’s working well. I am at great pains to create the environment where they can talk openly and frankly with me about how they see things. Sometimes I have to be strong and push back, and be frank about why I am not going to do what they want, but at least they know then where I stand on issues. But I also take on board things they tell me, and take action, and that creates credibility as well.’
General Sir Mike Jackson says authenticity is sometimes as simple as being able to admit your mistakes.
‘I always quote this example – and every young officer’s been there: you’re newly commissioned, you’re on your first exercise, you’ve got 20 guys behind you, it’s four o’clock on a January morning, it’s pissing down, the wind’s howling; people are wet, cold, fed up, tired… and you’re lost. And they know that you’re lost. Authenticity is how you handle that situation. The bullshitter will try and say, well, I knew where I was all the time; just taking a very clever tactical route. And the boys will just roll their eyes and say, what a load of cobblers. Instead, the officer should say: “Hey guys, that was a bit of a cock-up, sorry about that; I’ll get it right next time.” That’s the authentic leader.’
To be seen as a hero, you have to be a hero
Ayman Asfari is clear that being a leader means you have to have integrity – and make sure that everything you say is important to you as a value is replicated in your work and your personal life. It must be. You have to be above reproach.
‘A footballer can’t be a role model for kids and then go out and be on drugs. The same applies to leaders. You can’t have it both ways. Authenticity means being consistent. You cannot say one thing and do another. For example, one of our values is we want to be safe in the way we conduct our business. Being consistent to that means we’ve had to make some very difficult decisions. We’ve had to walk away from business that was very lucrative… we were making money out of it, but we walked away because we felt that the customers that we were working with did not share our values on safety, and we could not compromise. That sent very powerful signals to all our people about what safety really means to us.’
If you are authentic, you demand authenticity everywhere. And that is good for the brand, not just you. I came across two striking examples.
Sir Maurice Flanagan is the founding CEO of Emirates and is currently the executive vice-chairman of the Emirates Airline and Group. Emirates is the national airline of Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates. It is the largest airline in the Middle East, and flies to 105 cities in 62 countries across six continents. The Emirates Group, which has over 50,000 employees, is wholly-owned by the government of Dubai. In February 2011, Air Transport World gave Emirates Airlines the title of Airline of the Year for 2011.
On the subject of authenticity, Maurice says: ‘Delivering excellence is a key value for us. For years I have lived and breathed the pursuit of excellence. If you really care about something, you will make sure that others care about it too. For example, if we care about being an excellent airline, that means giving our passengers excellent service. And that means making sure our cabin crew and ground staff are really nice to passengers. You cannot fake that. So, to make sure, we put prospective cabin crew through psychometric tests and we choose people who are inclined to want to be nice to other people. We select those who are nice by nature. That’s authenticity.’
Beverley Aspinall is immediate past managing director of Fortnum & Mason, a world-famous department store and royal warrant holder (the Queen’s grocer), situated in central London, with branches in Japan and a presence in many international markets. Fortnum’s headquarters are located at 181 Piccadilly, where it was established in 1707 by William Fortnum and Hugh Mason. Beverley says: ‘As a leader, you are on stage and being watched all the time, so you have to behave expecting that everything you do will be scrutinized. Above all, you have to be consistent. And you have to make sure your organization is consistent and authentic to your customers too.’
‘Authenticity was actually one of our principal values, and that means everything we sold had to be authentic, not something that looked like it or pretended to be it. We were having these debates about the pottery industry and the demise of the whole industry in the UK, which is very, very sad. You are allowed to have China made in the Far East and then paint it in England and you’re still allowed to pass it off as English pottery, but for me that’s not the right thing to do. To be English, it has to be made here. There are still a couple of UK pottery companies struggling to actually make it work, so why wouldn’t we go to them to buy? It’s in those sorts of actions that I think your own, and the company’s, authenticity is hugely important.’
Dame Helen Alexander was, at the time of the interview, president of the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), the premier lobbying organization for UK business on national and international issues. She is also chairman of Incisive Media and of the Port of London Authority (PLA). Until recently, her director-general of the CBI was Sir Richard Lambert, a former editor of the Financial Times. The role of the director-general is to be the key spokesman for the UK’s business community in the media, on public platforms and with government. The D-G leads the CBI in the UK and represents it internationally. Sir Richard took over the reins from Digby Jones, Baron Jones of Birmingham, another high-profile British businessman. The post is currently occupied by John Cridland, who was previously deputy director-general since 2000.
Says Helen: ‘Authenticity takes courage. Everybody was asking John in his first days whether he was going to be a Digby Jones or a Richard Lambert. His answer was simple – “I’m going to be me.” I was so delighted when he said that, because that has to be the right answer. You just need enough confidence to be able to say it.’
Nick Buckles is chief executive of G4S plc, (formerly Group 4 Securicor) a global security services company headquartered in Crawley, in the United Kingdom. G4S is the world’s largest security company. It has operations in more than 125 countries, and employs more than 625,000 people. (It is the world’s second-largest private sector employer, after Walmart.)
He recalls: ‘My most seminal learning as a communicating leader was realizing that just being yourself and being natural and being confident is the best way of communicating. You have to be authentic. Yes, you have to have some structure, and you have to think about what you’re saying, and you have to think about your audience, but then you have to make sure you say something that is of interest to them, that is genuine and from the heart. As a leader you want to change behaviours, and leave people feeling inspired to do something different, without having to give them instructions.’
‘Before that realization, I would often just go through the motions of giving a presentation because I was asked to give one. Without passion, without real feeling, it was just giving information. Half of the people might think, yes, that was all right, but the others could just as easily say it was a complete waste of time.’
Nick is very clear: ‘The task of a leader is to inspire, to make people think differently, act differently, to want to improve even if they’re doing well. You’ve got to stop complacency. You’ve got to be very generous with your praise but at the same time (and you can do it in a humorous way) you’ve got to make people believe they can do more and better. I believe absolutely in self-improvement and continuous improvement. We should always try to be the best we can be. By talking to this passion, I can convey how deeply I care about it, and I don’t have to use lots of facts to convey how important it is to me. People soon get the message, and start behaving accordingly.’
Know your strengths to be yourself better
Sometimes, leaders have not stopped to think about and articulate what they really care about, and are reserved about projecting their personal beliefs on to others. That is a problem! No passion means no inspiration. And you can’t fake it. People can spot insincerity in an instant and you cannot live a lie for very long. This places a great onus on leaders to dig deep and articulate their own passions and beliefs, consistently and with confidence. Leaders must accept that they have a personal brand and that their reputation is key to their leadership. They are the brand that leads the brand and often, their reputation is also important to the reputation of their company.
How you position yourself, how you choose to be seen, the themes on which you communicate: these things define you – and you define your organization.
Sir Christopher Gent is chairman of GlaxoSmithKline, a global pharmaceutical, vaccines and consumer healthcare company headquartered in London. GSK is the world’s third largest pharmaceutical company, measured by revenues. Sir Christopher was previously CEO of Vodafone, a global British-based mobile phone company.
He says leaders have to think carefully about how they want to position themselves. ‘Confine yourself to talking about your company’s issues, and define what you want the world to know about you and what you will talk about. Unless you do that, you expose yourself to more and more people writing about you, and sometimes saying untruthful things about you. In today’s Google world, a lie once told can take on an eternal life.’
So stop thinking you don’t have a reputation; you do. If you aren’t managing your reputation, then someone else will, so it had better be you. And that means you’d better talk up about what matters to you. Managing your reputation means identifying your strengths and ensuring that they are seen better in the glare of the spotlight you will be under. Managing your reputation successfully can never equal cynical manipulation. The CEOs that I interviewed said a good reputation itself is the wrong pursuit. Reputation is not only the consequence of what you do and say, but also what others say about you – increasingly important in today’s digital and viral world. People will talk about you, so it’s best you make sure they talk about the things you care about.
How do you go about identifying your values and mission?
Judith Hackitt is chair of the Health and Safety Executive. The HSE’s mission is to prevent death, injury and ill health in Great Britain’s workplaces. She says: ‘I have been fortunate during my career to have personal coaching which helped me to understand my own values and strengths and that has been enormously valuable to me as a leader. I can remember working in big corporates where I felt that I was expected to clone my style on that of other leaders in the organization. It was only after the personal coaching that I realized I didn’t need this corporate cloak. My leadership style had to be about me.’
By way of example, I will tell you the story of George, the CEO of a global management consultancy. I have changed his name to spare his blushes, but ‘George’ had worked in this professional services business since leaving college. He asked for my help when he was in the running to become chairman. The chairmanship, however, was an elected position. George needed to show the company around the world that he had the vision to secure the prize. He wanted help with his key messages. After just two working sessions, I could see he had a much more worrying problem.
George worked daily with the chairmen of multinationals. The ones he admired – like the chairman of his own company – had gravitas, grey hair and exuded ‘captain of industry’ status. George was not like that and he knew it. His ‘gravitas’ messages rang hollow because, at heart, he doubted that he was a chairman.
‘Rather than wordsmith ideas, let’s look at your strengths,’ I suggested. Together, we drilled down to what George truly valued, what he was passionate about. ‘It was uncomfortable at first,’ he told me afterwards. ‘I had never done this before, gone down deep to what I really believed in terms of my business, and boiled it down to the essence.’
As we worked, George’s true strengths began to emerge. He was a great collaborator who valued warm relationships but also had a fierce belief in high standards. This combination gave him the desire to draw the best from people and move them forward. We mapped this onto the needs of his company, wrote it down, refined it. As George distilled his core beliefs on the page he became excited. ‘I could see how to make this resonate with people. It was rigorous, I could measure it by the new insights I gained.’
George’s vision was to achieve the great client relationships that would drive his business to be a global leader. He tested this vision, cautiously at first. A colleague and close confidant told him it was not only logical, and necessary for the business, but also very authentic. George now knew he had something he could take to the world. ‘It was a pledge, a promise I could make to our people because it was fundamentally what I believed in.’
George’s message was clear, as was his leadership platform. Much more important, by finding his real strengths, he had banished the nagging anxiety that he might not actually be ‘chairman material’. He now saw he could make the role his own by being himself. ‘I became so much more confident to lead the firm with a real belief in my underlying values, and using those in my messaging. I could go and talk to anyone in any country with real conviction, knowing this wasn’t just something I was saying because I thought people wanted to hear it. The response was so strong because underneath I had a solid foundation of authenticity. That was the key.’
George phoned me one April morning. I knew at once what his news must be. ‘Congratulations, Mr Chairman,’ I said.
A springboard to action, a leadership platform
So, what do we draw from George’s story? When I work with CEOs, as I did with George, we look at every aspect of the leader’s situation – their challenges, aims and concerns, their business environment, past and defining moments. I am deep diving for their strengths. Amazingly, most leaders find their own strengths an extraordinary revelation – they have often thought of them as run of the mill until we put them into perspective. They have the view that everyone must have those strengths, because the strengths come too naturally and easily for them to appreciate their skills. When leaders do realize their true strengths, it’s cathartic, enlightening and, crucially, the springboard for action. That is because their strengths are hard-wired in to them, from childhood, probably, and those strengths are accompanied by strong beliefs and an even stronger attitude to issues. Unearthing those beliefs and then giving them expression are what is so liberating.
For George the revelation was that there are many valid leadership styles. By being himself he could lead with his personal style – collaborative, warm, with a drive to offer the best to every client – that drew people to him like a magnet and truly inspired.
Finally, understanding your strengths allows you to locate the channels you can employ with authenticity and confidence to communicate emotionally. It might be through video streaming, a speech from the podium or the old-fashioned practice of ‘walking the floor’. Or it might just be about listening to small groups, responding to what they say and being seen to be out there doing it.
Whichever way you choose, it is ‘your way’, the one that sits most comfortably with you. A great example of this is John Connolly, the immediate past senior partner and CEO of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Ltd, and also the immediate past senior partner of the firm in the UK. He is currently chairman of G4S, the global security firm. Deloitte is the largest private professional services organization in the world, with about 170,000 staff at work in more than 150 countries, delivering audit, tax, consulting, enterprise risk and financial advisory services.
His ‘way’ at Deloitte was to send his staff a voice message, which he did regularly. They heard him talking about things that matter, and he scrupulously committed to doing regular messages. He knows his successor will more likely be more modern in his communication style, using blogs and Twitter, but whatever the medium, the passion has to be the same. ‘A leader has to be prepared to show passion and not be embarrassed to show it. They have to have character and show courage, they have to be positive and enthusiastic and energetic and ambitious and want to talk with people about the things they care about. Emotion is crucial.’
The need for emotion in business
So, authenticity means playing to your strengths, and gaining insight on how to use them as a power source to achieve your objectives. It entails discovering your own appropriate style to be a great communicator. Because it is only when you understand your true strengths and operate from your own value system that you can know and passionately communicate what is right for your business. This has long-term benefits: it makes you consistently convincing because you are consistently yourself.
However, knowing what those passions are is often only half the story of my coaching. I often find I have to help leaders understand why there is a real need for emotion in business communication, which can be a challenge. Many of the leaders I have worked with are highly rational, fast- and clear-thinking people who have got to where they are by being challenging, numerate and results focused. Emotion seems fluffy and soft to them. But, as I keep saying, how people ‘feel’ determines how they act. Are they committed to the necessary action? Will they go the extra mile that will make the difference between success and failure?
Business plans have stretching targets in them – cold, hard numbers that have to be achieved. Those numbers won’t be achieved if people don’t change their behaviours – if they don’t work smarter, or differently, or innovate, or sell more, or build key relationships. Behaviours deliver the numbers, and are the link between tangible results and fluffy feelings.
Adrian Belton is chief executive of the Food and Environment Research Agency (Fera). His organization exists to support and develop a sustainable food chain, a healthy natural environment, and to protect the global community from biological and chemical risks. He says that when he first came into the civil service he observed a lot of writing for the record, speaking to the gallery – ‘a lot of waffle, frankly’.
‘There just didn’t seem to be people saying what they really felt or meant. Things were dressed up. I have come to believe that authenticity is about lowering one’s guard and being much more open about feelings, about uncertainties, about risks and issues. I think the one thing I have learned about leadership is how important it is to use EQ (emotional intelligence). I am convinced that there is a greater need for EQ than IQ and that as a leader you have to focus on what really motivates people. But you won’t be able to motivate them if you aren’t being authentic.’
The success or failure of any business strategy depends significantly on the ‘emotional engagement’ of employees and front-line managers. Leaders have to articulate strategies that are not only smart and intellectually rigorous, but also have real emotional appeal. Emotional, engaging communication is the link between the business plan and people’s behaviours.
Having worked in dozens of companies, I seldom meet employees who agree that their company’s strategy is either exciting or inspiring. Yet emotional communication is not vague or abstract: any leader can achieve it and benefit. Because the power of emotional communication is centred in leaders themselves, it is leaders who are able to change behaviours in a positive way. And that, let us remind ourselves, is the fundamental purpose: to change behaviours and achieve results.
We have to examine not only what success for the leader and their business would be like, and feel like, but we also have to look at what prevents success and what communications will get over the hurdles. These will be communications that carry integrity, and be effective because they stem from the leader’s own passionately held beliefs – mapped against established organizational values. Leaders can indeed ‘be themselves, better’ because authenticity in business means leaders match their beliefs and values to the values of the organization, understand where they overlap and use the overlaps to gain powerful results.
We do not exclude reason and logic. The best narratives have logic, as well as emotion, and a whole lot of the communicator’s character in them. Aristotle described three main forms of rhetoric: ethos, logos and pathos. An ethos-driven message relies on the reputation of the speaker. Logos is appeal based on logic or reason. Pathos is appeal based on emotion. To me, what is critical is the use of emotion to support logic.
David Morley, senior partner at global law firm Allen & Overy, agrees this is true even in the legal profession: ‘As lawyers we tend to be very logical, reasoning people. Emotion is almost squeezed out of you because you’re trained to be objective and critical. But we live in a world where people are bombarded with messages and information and we respond on an emotional level as well. So if you want to motivate people, win them over and persuade them of the case you are trying to make, you’ve got to appeal to people’s emotions. Not in a blatant or manipulative way. But if you can get your passion across, you can persuade people to go the way you want to go.’
John Hirst is chief executive of the Met Office, the UK’s national weather service. It is a world leader in providing weather and climate services, and employs more than 1,800 people at 60 locations throughout the world. John says that his task is not to control, it is to liberate. ‘I believe that it is my job to set the energy free and give people the permission to be successful. But if I want to inspire others I have to remember that I can’t do that if I am not inspired myself. If I am not convinced I will not convince others. And if I’m not comfortable in my own skin I won’t be able to win people’s trust.’
As we will see in a later chapter on listening, showing your passions and being emotional yourself are one thing. Encouraging people to talk about their emotions is equally important. More than half the leaders I spoke with said they actively encouraged people to talk about their emotions when they walked the floor, by asking the question: ‘How do you feel about this?’ As they said, it surfaces issues they really need to know about, and demonstrates they understand what motivates and demotivates people.
Being yourself better is a skill leaders have to work on, and seldom comes naturally. They have to think about it, choose to show parts of themselves that help engender trust, and bring out their own emotions and the emotions of followers more. This means taking the time to articulate what is important to you. There is an old saying: ‘How do I know what I am thinking if I cannot see what I am saying?’ Writing out your beliefs and purpose is a very powerful action, which equips you with a powerful point of view you can use any time, anywhere.
That’s what you have to map onto the organization you lead, if you want to create a framework for empowering and enabling everyone to do the right things the right way…
• Authenticity in a leader is crucial.
• Followers will not commit if they do not trust you and believe that you have integrity.
• To know you is to trust you: you have to communicate who you are.
• You have to learn to show your character – people must know what you care about and what your beliefs are. This will make you more predictable, and inspire them to follow your beliefs.
• People want to feel inspired. Feelings are emotions, so leadership communication needs to be more emotional.
• Even if you are a highly introverted individual, you will have to learn to speak with more passion, talk to your values and stand up more often to speak to your beliefs.
• Followers must feel your passion, and believe that you believe.
• Passion and authenticity will inspire people more than a technically perfect presentation or speech.
• When you are clear with yourself about the things you really care about, you cannot help but talk to them with passion.
• Most leaders have not spent the time articulating those beliefs.
• Writing out your beliefs and purpose is a very powerful action, which equips you with a powerful point of view you can use any time, anywhere.
• To communicate who you are, you have to articulate your own purpose and values, and talk to them with passion.
• Show that you are human – admit mistakes or that you don’t know.
• You have to be visible, and people must see you are willing to engage on the things that really matter, no matter how difficult.