Читать книгу Inspired Leadership - Gaskell Kevin - Страница 7

Every inspiring leader is a dreamer first.

When I try to convince a leadership team that they can achieve something that's extraordinary, I always say to them, “Never start with the numbers. Start by imagining what this business could be.” As an inspiring leader your first goal is to change the definition of success, and commit to a bigger, better dream. This may scare you at first. But we will make that leap. It may take you a while to see the power behind the commitment to dream but, if you can't commit, then the rest of this book will have little meaning for you.

This chapter will introduce the fundamental principle of inspiring leadership. At the end of it, you will be ready to use dreams to inspire your team.

Over the years I have found that this works for teams, and businesses, that are large and small. People often say to me: “It's all very well for you, because you make all the decisions for the company. That's easy. I just run a little department.”

And I say, “It makes no difference. Do it for yourself. Nobody is going to tell you you're wrong when your team and your results start to improve.”

Being a Leader

If you're going to lead this change, we need to agree on what a leader is.

Warren Bennis invented the study of leadership in companies in the 1950s, and he had strong views on what leaders are, and are not. Having grown up in the Great Depression and served in the Second World War, he used his experiences, and what he learned in his research, to advise countless CEOs and at least three US presidents.

He believed that leadership is about using the power to achieve change, and that good leaders were marked out by humanity and humility as well as business results. “A leader is someone whose actions have the most profound consequences on other people's lives, for better or for worse, sometimes for ever and ever,” he wrote.

Bennis also thought that too much of what we call leadership is nothing of the sort. It is management, which is important, but management is all about implementing what other people believe to be correct. All businesses need managers, but all teams also need leaders, and they are rarer. Bennis made this distinction in his research. He used to tell people that a leader both does things right, but also does the right thing. That managers help you get where you want to go, but leaders can tell you what it is you want. And that managers keep their attention on the bottom line, but that leaders are looking at the horizon.

So what sort of people are these leaders? I argue that everyone, in some situation, can learn to be a leader. In the past, many people thought that leaders were born that way, and tried to make a list of the personality traits of historical leaders like Winston Churchill, Nelson Mandela or Steve Jobs to examine what they had in common.

The result: not much. This type of research usually produces a list of traits like self-confidence, assertiveness and a need for achievement. The problem comes when we try to apply that to other people: while leaders might have these traits, there are many more people who have a need for achievement who are terrible leaders. This is good news for us, because it suggests that inspiring leaders aren't created at birth. You can learn to be an inspiring leader.

Other research has asked how leaders behave – rather than looking at the common principles of leaders, they look for what's common about leadership. This helps me to understand my observations. I have found that good leaders don't get blown off course by today's events, or even worry too much about them. And I have learnt, like many people before me, that failure is inevitable, and what matters is being flexible enough to change your mind when things go wrong.

But, of course, different situations require different types of behaviour. Leadership behaviour in a situation where safety is critical is not the same as it is in an informal team. You can't run a startup like an army regiment, or vice versa. So when researchers in the 1960s tried to make similar lists of how leaders behaved, they found that the list was too long to be useful.

So, perhaps, are the best leaders the ones who know how to change according to the situation? The point of being a leader is that you will be able to make a difference, and so you can choose, at least to some extent, how to do that. This “situational model” was developed by Kenneth Blanchard and Paul Hersey, and they identified four distinct leadership styles: Telling, Selling, Participating and Delegating, depending on the context.

But this still tends to focus on how leaders communicate with the managers who report to them. An inspiring leader has to look at the biggest picture: everyone you are responsible for, the whole team, the whole organization can be transformed if they can find inspiration in the way you lead them. The attributes, behaviour and situational awareness of leaders are useful tools. We are all interested in something bigger.

Inspiring leadership transforms teams, and it transforms lives because you show the people you lead what can be possible, and then, together, you achieve it.

Learning to Lead

You can learn to lead at any time. I was lucky, I had the chance to learn early, although it didn't seem lucky at the time. I joined Porsche in the UK in 1987, when I was 27. At the end of the 1980s Porsche's image was associated with the “yuppie” business culture at that time. For good and bad reasons, the brand had become a powerful status symbol. In the film Crazy People, an advertising executive played by Dudley Moore decides to tell the truth in his advertising. His (unfair) pitch for Porsche: “It's a little too small to get laid in. But you get laid the minute you get out.” It was not a fair reflection of the Porsche brand but it stuck in the public's imagination.

I'd always loved messing about with car engines, and joining the company that was associated with excellence in engineering should have been my dream job, but by the early 1990s, Porsche in the UK was heading for a nasty crash. As with many failing businesses, respect, pride and support had gone out of the window. We didn't have a strategy, any consistency or any vision. We were well on the way to losing 90 % of our sales in the UK, but we just kept building cars because nobody made a decision.

This wasn't a secret, because Porsche's sales in all its export markets were hit by the global recession that began on Black Monday, in October 1987. In January 1989, Porsche announced a 52 % fall in profits, as US sales had halved the previous year. Group turnover fell by 27 %. “The last business year was one of the hardest in the history of Porsche,” Walter Gnauert, the finance director, had told the press. In the UK, we had three years of inventory, literally parked in a number of warehouses and then in a field as they overflowed. Apparently desirable cars that no one wanted to buy. The Sun newspaper printed a picture of them on its front page. Porsche was the symbol of the impending recession.

The downturn hit the UK later, in the early 1990s. One of the problems for Porsche was that many of the car owners were entrepreneurs and small businesspeople (the yuppie image of the time was never strictly true). When they had problems with their business in the recession, the entrepreneurs liquidated the easiest assets to get rid of, and so the UK's used car dealerships were flooded with second-hand Porsches.

Adrian Hallmark was sales and marketing manager while I was at Porsche. We were about the same age, and thought about things the same way, and we were equally shocked at what was going on in the business. Adrian went and checked all the orders that we were getting from dealers. He found, to his horror, that they weren't real sales: dealers would pre-order cars so that they were at the front of the queue when a sale did happen. When sales dropped, we were left with the stock.

“Finding this out was one of the most horrendous business experiences I've had,” he recalls, “It took 18 months to clear our stock. It wasn't helped by having newspapers' helicopters flying overhead to take photos of all the cars we hadn't sold… When we unearthed all our problems, we went into corporate denial. We ended up with so much stock because we were too frightened to tell the factory the bad news.”

If you have ever been in a failing business, you know that there's a moment when, collectively, no one seems to know what to do, and the company looks for someone to grab it by the scruff of the neck. As is also common, we didn't have anyone who was willing to do it. I was just a young operations manager, but the managing director used to pull me into board meetings in front of the whole Porsche family. He would say, “Welcome! Kevin's going to tell you what's going on.” Four years after I had started work at Porsche it felt as if I had taken on more and more responsibility almost by default because nobody else wanted it.

During my teenage years, when British industry was associated with failure, I had been a small part of a successful business which effectively managed itself because the people who worked there, top to bottom, felt that that it was the right thing to do. Fifteen years later, I was part of a business that was associated with extreme success, but which was headed for disaster.

Eventually, at the end of March 1992, the UK Managing Director was relieved of his duties and Porsche's German management showed up at our offices en masse. They sat in the boardroom and they demanded to see me and the German finance manager who had been parachuted in to keep the business afloat. Together, we'd been running around behind the scenes trying to steady the ship. I phoned my wife and I said, “I'm going to get fired today.”

I was scared stiff. I was 32, mortgaged over my head, with two young kids.

So we were called into the meeting, and they started to give us a hard time. We had nothing to lose. So, assuming I'd be fired anyway, I said to them: “Hang on. You should be embarrassed. This was entirely predictable. You could see it coming, we could see it coming.”

I actually said, “You could fix this.”

They said, “What do you mean?”

For four hours, we stood at two flip-charts in front of this German board and explained to them what we would do.

And then they told us to leave the room.

After the meeting was over I phoned my wife and said, “I'm not coming home.”

“What happened?” she asked.

I said: “They just made me the managing director.”

I had a degree in engineering, a few years of experience as a management accountant, and the idea in my head that, if we could recapture the respect, pride and mutual support that I'd seen in my first job, and if I remembered what my dad had achieved, then maybe we could salvage something.

I started to use these ideas in my first week as managing director of Porsche. I had never run a company before, but I knew we were operating day to day without a clear strategy and we were still spending money we didn't have. In the head office, we employed 260 people, even though our dealers were selling fewer than 2,000 cars a year, and Porsche did all its manufacturing in Germany. In the head office we had our own press office with four staff, an in-house marketing agency, a personnel department. We employed 14 people to develop software, and 12 to do sales planning. On 28 April 1992, I reduced our headcount to 120. We went from 13 departments to 5. It was a dramatic change. Many people told me it was too much change in one go. But the business was failing, so something had to be done to stop the losses, and quickly.

I had been in the company for four years. I knew every employee. I also knew the wives, husbands, kids and even the dogs of the people we let go. It was awful. I went back into my swanky new office, and I locked the door, and I cried my eyes out. This was a defining moment in my journey. The point when I swore I would never again allow a business to get in so much trouble that I had to make mass redundancies, and I never have since.

But, in 1,000 days, we went from losing 20 % on each sale to making 20 % on each sale. We went from being effectively bust to being the most profitable car company in the country. We went from having three years of inventory to having one year of forward orders. The teams' work drove the company from position 32 (out of 32) to first position, for two consecutive years, in the UK national dealer satisfaction survey.

Adrian remembers the struggle, but like me he remembers an incredibly tough period with affection:

“It wasn't a nightmare, it was quite the opposite. Even though we had lost so many people, the remaining team was utterly engaged, completely committed and they would fight like dogs to make sure the business would come back. We had one mission, we had to make it work. So it is still one of the most enjoyable times I've ever had at work.”

The lesson this experience taught me was that dreams can come true – but first of all, you have to know what that dream is.

Abandon 3 % Thinking

Apple's famous “Think different” advertisement claimed: “The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the only ones who do.” When Rob Siltanen, the young copywriter who thought up the line, presented it to Steve Jobs, he hated it. But, when he thought longer about it, Jobs realized it was “a brilliant idea”.1

It's not just a brilliant idea, it's an inspiring way to live and work. It's not just about making new things, it's about finding entirely new ways to think about what you do, or the service you deliver.

When I meet teams for the first time and ask them where the business is heading they often start the conversation by telling me something like “We want another 3 % market share.”

I say: “I have no interest in that.”

And they say: “Why not?”

“Let's get better first, and bigger will come,” I tell them. When you focus on getting better at what you do, you will win your 3 %, the next 3 %, and the 3 % after that, because you're building improvement that is sustainable. You can do this only by thinking differently. The alternative is that you chase a number. You might get there once, but just by picking this number and aiming for it, you have compromised your dream. Let's rebuild what we do, I tell them, and that commitment is far more effective than chasing 3 %.

For example, Paul Polman took over as CEO of Unilever in 2009, and a year later created the company's “sustainable living plan”. His idea was that Unilever could make the planet a better place. It is halving its environmental impact, will soon draw all of its energy from renewable sources, and is introducing products that help a billion people in poverty live healthy lives. He decided the business was too focused on short-term performance, so he stopped issuing quarterly reports.

Salman Khan, the founder of Khan Academy, used to make YouTube videos to help tutor his cousins. When he noticed that thousands of other kids were watching them, he quit his job at a hedge fund to found his company, saying: “We have a mission for a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere.” Today, Khan Academy provides free tutorials to more than 40 million kids around the world, and has been called “the future of education” by Bill Gates, who is one of his financial backers.

You want to build teams that do extraordinary things. That doesn't happen by accident, so the team need to be committed to the goal. As the leader, their commitment begins as your commitment. And for you to be committed, you have to be truly committed to something bigger than yourself, and something that is worthy of your commitment.

Daring to dream has five elements:

Dreaming breaks rules When you dream, you throw off the constraints that you, and others around you, have lived with. No successful dream is small. You embrace a creative future, and the future is unknown. Most limitations are self-imposed. Choose to take them away.

Dreaming is big Many people around you will encourage you not to rock the boat. Too much of our time is spent creating small plans, with meaningless goals. It doesn't matter if they succeed or fail, because they change little. Your dreams will have consequences.

Dreams give us purpose When we dream of a different future, science tells us that we are more likely to achieve our goals.

Dreams inspire change Not all dreams are good, and not all dreamers are leaders. Your success as a leader depends on your ability to take a dream and make it work.

Dreams give you passion If indecision stops you from doing great work, they will help you to make decisions.

Unfortunately, in many businesses the first reaction to difficult times or challenges is to cut costs and lay off staff, instead of saying, “How do we use our resources better? What could we do that's different?” Controlling cost is important (remember, my first major task as a manager was firing half of Porsche's workforce), but it can only ever help your business to survive for the short term. In my experience, it will never change the organization's effectiveness, or allow it to transform and grow to become world class.

Your Learning Starts Now

Why do we need to “dare” to dream? Because the moment you take that first step, as you open your mind to what's possible, you realize that you're stepping into the unknown. It doesn't matter if you are the CEO or the receptionist, daring to dream is risky.

You may have experience, qualifications, competence and an imagination. But you are about to create something new, and you don't know how it will finish, or what will happen next. If I join a new department or company, even as CEO or Chairman, I begin as a learner. That's what I was at Porsche and have been in many businesses since. Knowing next to nothing can be an advantage, because you are looking at your job with a fresh pair of eyes. It helps you ask why. Others around you will tell you that their experience tells them your dream isn't possible. Remember: it is possible to know too much.

At Porsche, we had no choice but to start again. The business was on life support, and our dream wasn't complicated. The next stage of my adventure would be different: could I apply the same approach to a business with thousands of employees and revenues of £3 billion a year, which almost no one believed needed to change?