Category Archives: Leadership

Defining leadership

Recently I was asked to write an essay about how I define leadership, and how I live this out in my daily life. While I find the subject endlessly fascinating I have also come to realise that there are about as many definitions of what leadership is as there are people in the world. Equally, many things associated with leadership are also intrinsic – actions we do either consciously or unconsciously, and they end up defining us as individuals and subsequently also our style of leadership. Thus here is but one view, and I hope it will inspire you to share some of your thoughts on this too.

For me leadership consists of 4 elements that are inter-dependent: The first two are about self-leadership in terms of doing the right things as well as doing things right, and the second two are about leading others, where for me defining the vision or direction is one, yet almost meaningless without its companion, empowering others.

Self-leadership: Doing the right things and doing things right
These two seemingly simple statements embody for me two crucial pre-requisites for successful leadership: understanding what are the right things first from a self-leadership point of view, but also when it comes to others. It entails an ability to see the bigger picture, prioritise and focus when it comes to how I spend my time and bearing in mind that for me the right things are about things that create a positive difference for others, as well as helping others learn and grow and be recognised for their contributions. It is about the ability to distinguish between actions that have a long-term benefit and those that have a short-term impact, what Stephen Covey talks about when distinguishing between tasks that are urgent and important (fire fighting) as opposed to tasks that are important but not necessarily that urgent. An inability to focus on the right things eventually manifests itself as a feeling of not being able to see the forest for the trees, stress and a growing sense of a lack of purpose and meaning. Thus as I see it, the right things are essential, not only to affect change, but also keeping us growing, constantly learning, developing and remaining engaged. Not to say that I’m able to completely do away with things that are urgent and important, but it is more about a relentless focus on the right things and a frequent reevaluation of whether the ‘right things’ really are right, that prevents me from losing sight of them when things indeed get busy.

Doing things right for me is about demonstrating trustworthiness, respect, integrity, honesty, caring, courage, doing my very best and to a high quality, while not doing it at the expense of others. It is about doing the difficult things, going off the beaten track in search of a better or new way to do something, always asking why? and challenging the answers, having the courage to speak up and disagree while ideas and strategies are being debated, but once approved, showing the loyalty and commitment of making the decisions happen, even if I didn’t agree with them at the time and providing they are not unethical or dishonest. It is defending those whose voice isn’t heard, giving credit and recognising performance and contributions from others. It is about humility, by which I don’t mean to think less of myself, but to think of myself less, and more about others. It is being accountable for more than I am responsible for, to right wrongs even if I wasn’t responsible for making the mistake in the first place. These two elements are pre-requisites for my role in driving innovation in the company, where instead of direct reporting lines I influence and collaborate with a broad group of stakeholders both internally and externally. Those relationships are heavily dependent on demonstrating the above qualities consistently in order to remain sustainable, and grow over time, brings me on to the next component:

Leading others: vision and empowerment

The second element to leadership for me is about leading others, by defining a vision and being a role-model, while simultaneously working to empower others through creating structures, processes and learning opportunities, which invite contributions, others to take responsibility and be recognised for achievement and by training, coaching, being a mentor, ultimately empowering others to define their own vision and execute it. Rather than giving people a fish, I prefer to teach how to fish.

Vision without execution and without self-leadership is a bit like an octopus on rollerskates – there is a lot of movement, but not necessarily in any given direction. Equally, the most powerful change comes from empowering others, and for me the most meaningful examples of leadership come from seeing individuals rise to meet a challenge that previously eluded them, surprising themselves and others in their capability and achievement. Often a vision is required to inspire and motivate this kind of empowerment, a vision which is about making a positive difference in the world, a meaningful goal beyond simply making a profit. For me profit allows us to be here, but it is not why we are here. For me building a vision in partnership with others, is the first step in leading others, finding a purpose or goal that is meaningful and inspires myself and others to reach beyond ourselves in pursuit of something bigger. Articulating this creates motivation, engagement, and inspiration – the fuel needed for empowered individuals to make a difference.

And genuinely empowering others is ultimately what I find most meaningful. What led me to be involved with NGOs, was the same motivation that led me to become a designer – a desire to make a positive difference in the lives of others. Initially I did that through projects working with volunteer networks, empowering young people to be the change they wanted to see in their local communities. I wanted to become a product designer, because I believe that product design (which includes consumer products as well as automobiles and military equipment) is probably the single most destructive profession in the world in the impact it creates on the environment, or indeed people – but potentially also the single greatest opportunity to invent more sustainable solutions that can indeed make a positive difference in people’s lives. I ended up working for the LEGO Group, because of the impact LEGO bricks have in empowering children and adults in expressing their creativity, and seeing the joy that a simple toy like LEGO can create, when a child proudly shows his parents his latest creation, is simply wonderful.

However, rather than remain designing products, I wanted to affect change more broadly and becoming a leader within the company has been a meaningful step towards making a positive difference on a greater scale. It has given me the opportunity to devote a lot of time to developing people and seeing their growth and success gives me a huge sense of accomplishment. Equally, being a thought leader in the company, working to define the company brand framework and values and making sure that despite our explosive growth of employees from 3000 in 2004 to 8000this year, we won’t lose sight of who we are as a company. Furthermore, reinventing how we empower more employees and our consumers to contribute to innovation has been a wonderful next step for me on this journey. Ultimately these kinds of achievements are more meaningful to me than the products or businesses that have gone on to become best-sellers – concentrating on building the vision and empowering others, the rest also follows, it seems.

The conversation prism

Someone asked me a while ago about how we can control the LEGO brand given that it has such a vibrant community? I tried not to laugh, because the person had a very straight look on their face and besides, laughing would be rude – it is actually a serious question that many brands battle with. My spontaneous desire to laugh was not one bourne out of arrogance or the sense that I know better, it is more to do with the word ‘control’.

Controlling is by nature hard. If you control things too much, you stifle creativity, participation, serendipity – things happening that you couldn’t have imagined. Simultaneously the word ‘control’ is in vogue. We have to control banks from lending to people who can’t pay back, bankers from gambling on the stock market, planes from taking off lest some ash might bring them down, youth drinking too much, not excercising enough.. the list goes on and on. In fact, sometimes the very act of growing up to me feels like we internalise the lie that we can actually completely control things around us – our careers, relationships, earnings and we are shocked when events prove us wrong.

Similarly with brands. They are composed by a trademark that we can control to some extent. Lawyers make a good killing doing just that. The other bit is what we can’t – it is what people emotionally associate with a brand and that’s what brings brands to life – the hearts and minds of those who love you for what you are and stand for. In the olden days it was possible to influence this with advertising. The fancier and more compelling campaign, the better. Somehow the world has changed.

We trust each other more than we trust companies. What a community does with the products associated with a brand is more authentic than what the company behind it tells us we should do. We like people who walk the talk. Better still we like them if they are like us. So control? The horse has already bolted as some would say. Below is a great visual of the ‘conversation prism’. This shows the diversity of platform where conversations about a brand can take place. It is bewildering in its complexity. To try to control it would be futile. The best we can do is to participate as equals in the conversation if we are invited. Brands, just like community members are ultimately trust agents – and you only become one if you repeatedly prove that you are an individual who is deserving of others’ time as demonstrated through actions and words. Control? Forget it.

The Conversation Prism by Brian Solis and Jesse Thomas

Women, success and charisma – worlds that seldom meet?

On the plane back from Billund on Wednesday night I was browsing the Harvard Business Review and came across an excellent article by Alex Pentland, from the MIT Media Lab, who has figured out how to measure the power of charisma. The finding is that apparently it is not what you say, it is how you say it. According to Pentland it is possible to predict which executives will win a business competition solely on the basis of the social signals they send.

Apparently more successful people are more energetic. They talk more, but they also listen more. They spend more face-to-face time with others and pick up cues from them, draw people out, and get them to be more outgoing. According to Pentland, it is not just what they project that makes them charismatic; it’s what they elicit. The more of these energetic, positive people you put on a team, the better the team’s performance. More details in his book Honest Signals (MIT Press 2008).

Anoher piece of interesting writing I came across just now. A debate is going on over at Clay Shirky’s blog about the fact that women are rubbish at promoting themselves like men normally do. We hate making self-aggrandising comments, or telling people we are brilliant – instead we hope others will recommend our work rather than promoting it ourselves. This apparently, is one reason why we women are less successful in business.

Reading the blog post, I cannot help but agree. Bragging about myself makes me cringe, it sounds wrong and somehow as I’m pretty energetic as it is, makes me feel entirely fake and horrible. Coming from my native Finland the idea of this kind of bull**** just makes me cringe. Surely Pentland’s research proves that in actual fact we can be successful and not have to be egos on sticks?

Think Eco-Systems not just Issues

Take global warming or government regulation as examples – these are all very complex topics, collections of variables where solving the problem cannot be achieved through solving one issue alone, but in fact the solution rests in addressing the eco-system tying together all the inter-linked variables. In fact, seeing things on purely the issue level may in fact be contributing to the problem.

In the book Freakonomics the authors quote numerous examples of cases where seemingly complex phenomena have very simple origins, but often in an entirely different field and the eco-system magnifies the impact through all the inter-related variables and creates an impact on local, sometimes national and international levels. One of the striking examples is their analysis of crime figures in large cities in the US. The numbers were growing at epic proportions year-on year until sometime in the mid-eighties the trend suddenly stopped and began a steady decline. Experts tried to attribute this reversal to anything from an increase in spending on the police, a growth in numbers of staff, prisons, different governments, new laws etc. but the biggest impact came from the legalisation of abortion.

How could this have anything to do with crime figures you may wonder? Here the eco-system comes in: the women most likely to have an abortion back in the 60s where women in low-income households with several children already and who before the legalisation either had to risk their lives to have an abortion by often unqualified people in unsafe conditions and risk prosecution or not have one at all. Many didn’t and subsequently struggled to look after their children, who often ended up in crime from a lack of opportunity in life. As abortion became legal in many states, the numbers of these ‘unwanted’ children dropped and the sheer numbers of disadvantaged youth decreased, thus decreasing the populace likely to commit crime. It’s not to say that the other measures had no impact at all, but collectively they helped solve the problem as the eco-system of ideal conditions leading to crime gradually became more untenable.

Biofuels are another example of where eco-system thinking really needs to be applied on a much larger scale than today – touted as the solution to the West’s reliance on fossil fuels, the growth of crops destined for biofuels is now accelerating across the world, leading to an increased rate of rain forest destruction (these are our most efficient weapon in clearing CO2 from the atmosphere) as land is being cleared to grow palm oil – a crucial ingredient in biofuels. Much agricultural land previously home to food production is being converted to grow crops for biofuel, putting food production in danger. The biggest irony of all is that the process of producing biofuels has a greater negative impact on global warming than fossil fuel use – proving that there is no simple ‘solution’ to global warming, in fact simple solutions may in fact be aggravating it further, instead we need to think in eco-systems, not just locally, but nationally and internationally.

Nancy Gibbs of Time, talks in her column about the Vatican reflecting on its mortal sins for the modern age (24th March 2008) of the fact that back in the past sloth, lust, greed, envy and anger accounted for virtually all the crimes of mankind, whereas today the issues that once were the clear culprits behind our follies and misfortunes are far more complex than the 7 deadly sins alone. Causes and consequences come together to form eco-systems, where one problem feeds another and addressing consequences is meaningless without understanding and addressing
the causes. Contextualising what was once simple in our now increasingly interlinked world – Quoting Mohandas Gandhi’s version of the 7 deadly sins:

  • Wealth without work
  • Pleasure without conscience
  • Science without humanity
  • Knowledge without character
  • Politics without principle
  • Commerce without morality
  • Worship without sacrifice

The responsibility rests with the individual, but that includes the duty to take care of others as well as yourself.

Avoiding the 3 pitfalls of Innovation based on Insight

Don’t get me wrong – I’m a fierce proponent of innovation based on insight. How else would you be able to frame your innovation and understand whether what you are proposing is even relevant, unless you understand the competitive landscape in which you operate? The purpose of this post is not to question whether you need insights or delve into how innovation works
or how to fuel it, but instead, assuming you have a smooth running
innovation machine – and you work from solid consumer insight – how come things can still go wrong?

Interestingly, cognitive science can help us here, specifically the work of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, who three decades ago explored the benefits and risks of heuristics, or shortcuts in thinking. Heuristics help to explain the time we get it wrong even when having been presented with all the reasonable information and insight, which presumably should have led us to make the right conclusions rather than the wrong ones. There are three errors, which are common when this happens:

Anchoring error - This is when you seize on the first bit of information and basically make your mind up before you have heard the whole argument, even when some subsequent findings may be contradicting what you seized on initially.

Availability error - This is when some surprising findings emerge that remind you of a dramatic past case and you mistakenly apply mental models or conclusions from that case to new findings and rationalise them in the same way, again leading you to potentially make the wrong conclusion.

Attribution error - Despite getting a ton of insight, it can sometimes be very tempting to group these findings into stereotypes and grossly generalise, to see information as ways of confirming what you already know, rather than seeing the little inklings that your stereotypes aren’t correct. Here again the information may be correct, but your use of it incorrect.

These mistakes are all very human and can easily happen, but research in other fields are showing just how dangerous these mistakes can be. In the engineering field these errors can lead to countless hours spent hunting for a technical problem in the wrong place, in the medical fields the very same mistakes can lead to gross misdiagnosis and potential patient deaths and of course in design, to redundant products and solutions. To err is human, but to err without learning from your mistakes is plain stupid.