Monthly Archives: September 2014

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 →

The best way to measure employee engagement

A chap over on Quora posted a question asking what the best method to gauge employee engagement was. In answering I took a slightly different perspective because I believe engagement itself is pretty hard to quantify with a method. Engagement is a state of mind, by nature something that cannot be absolutely observed or determined externally. In lab conditions I’m sure certain sets of answers correspond with a model described level of engagement, but in the real world you’re contending with all sorts of human filters that will introduce bias as people do (or don’t) give the answers they think they should.

If a survey comes out from the boss or HR, are employees really going to be honest about an answer that might cost them their job? At the very least, a sense of duty or loyalty to the team and company will probably inhibit ‘pure’ responses.

It’s much easier and instructive to look at the signs and symptoms  – the behaviours expressed that will show the lack or presence of engagement. By looking at actual behaviours, rather than trying to determine state of mind, instinct and experience tells me that they are likely to be a more accurate predictor of engagement. 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 →