A Levels and on

This month, I’ve decided to pull together some of the blogs and links that have taken my fancy.

I’m always on the lookout for stuff that will make life better, richer and more satisfying. I’m interested in leadership that does the same.

Here’s what’s floated my boat of late…

As thousands of teenagers go through the process of ‘Clearing’ A Level results in hand, it’s interesting to note that one of the world’s most prestigious business schools has signalled that tomorrow’s business leaders will need smarts AND soft skills.

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-05-15/want-an-mba-from-yale-youre-going-to-need-emotional-intelligence

For the first time ever, Yale Business School will be testing applicants for the MBA for Emotional Intelligence.

It was nearly twenty years ago that Daniel Goleman set the cat among the pigeons when he claimed that EQ was a better predictor of success in life than old school IQ. He’s still around and has interesting things to say.

In particular, I liked this LinkedIn article called ‘Put the Fish On The Table’ – about dealing with difference and conflict.

http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20130117181106-117825785-put-the-fish-on-the-table-not-under-it?trk=mp-reader-card

One of the reasons I like the fish metaphor is that it’s so physical. Conflict is something we respond to in our body.

In our work with The Creative Work Place, we often use cameras and video playback, precisely because of the insight that they can give to our physical responses. When people see themselves tensing jaw muscles, and hunching their shoulders, it becomes much easier to understand why the plan to have a quiet empathetic chat, just didn’t quite happen.

And of course that penny-dropping moment of awareness is a key factor in developing Emotional Intelligence.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8BnWOOEpP0&feature=c4-overview&list=UUykwuqUCbwLfb7ozfenZLZw

But awareness isn’t just about a single moment of realisation, it’s the beginning of a habit of paying attention. Or as the Buddhists would have it, mindfulness.

Pam Weiss came to Wales to talk about mindfulness training at the Do Lectures. Here’s her thought-provoking take on leadership and mindfulness.

http://www.appropriateresponse.com/_media/Winning%20Peoples%20Hearts%20PW.pdf

There’s beginning to be a body of research into the business value of mindfulness that I’m finding really useful in developing approaches to leadership development. Later this year, we’ll be involved in a research driven project with the Swansea Foundation, looking into the impact of this kind of training on people working in the private, public and third sectors. I’ll keep you posted on how it goes!

http://mindfulnet.org/page9.htm

It’s certainly been helpful to make the connection between mindfulness and managing stress. Feeling a little stressed out? Check out the link.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMsUGB_KV7s

Sorted

Well, that's it. Mum's phone and alarm are working again. Phew! Apparently, umpteen BT and Openreach vans turned up at nine in the morning - like one of those movie hostage scenes when the FBI roll in. And then, how it actually played out was that a young engineer from BT... well I can't actually say what he did, or he'd have to kill me. Clambered up the tree, maybe? Made himself safe, and repaired the line, maybe? We'll never know. Anyway, the long and the short is that after 19 days, and the involvement of the Director of BT Scotland, the phone's fixed. I'm curious now as to how long it will take to replace this 'dangerous' pole. And I'm interested in why organisations like Plusnet / Openreach / BT think it's necessary to crush the initiative, energy and will out of their employees. About which, more later. Right now, it's hoorays all round! And a big thank you to Mr Anonymous!

Customer Care - you've got to be joking!

For 19 days now, my Mum’s been without a phone. As she’s house-bound, it’s her only real means of connecting with neighbours, friends and family. She depends on her neighbours for any number of little jobs – an outside door needs jammed shut, a light bulb needs changed. She talks to her sister every day on the phone, and spends lots of time chatting to friends about all the things one chats to friends about. Mum lives in Scotland. My brother and I live in Wales. The phone’s our regular means of keeping in touch. My Dad died just over a year ago. He was my Mum’s carer. Since his death, she’s had surgery on her spine and gets about the house using a rolling trolley. She has stairlift. The bathroom is upstairs. In all of this, her main aim has been to stay in her own home, and remain independent. She has carers who call twice a day. To keep her safe, and feeling secure she wears a pendant alarm round her neck, night and day. One press of the button and a box in the living room calls a social services care line. If the person can’t hear Mum, they immediately send someone out to investigate. Without the phone, this doesn’t work. Mum’s phone contract is with Plusnet. The line is owned by BT and maintained by Openreach. All three of these organisations are part of the same company, BT. Since this distressing saga began, I’ve had dealings with people in all three organisations who could barely be bothered. I’ve also had dealings with people who were keen to help, and clearly doing what they could to shift an enormous weight of inter-organisational inertia. After more than two weeks of emails thanking me for my patience, and earnest tweets assuring me that people were ‘chasing the problem’, I crumbled and called a good friend who works at a senior level for BT. As a result of this call I was able to contact the Director of BT Scotland directly. He passed our complaint on to a small team of people charged with resolving ‘high level complaints’. We muttered darkly about what it would be like if we didn’t know ‘people who know people’. Steve, who was now charged with resolving the matter, was horrified that it had taken so long, to achieve so little. Forty-eight hours after he first got in touch, he called again to say, that he was still waiting for a reply to his email stressing the urgent need to put some sort of temporary line in place, in order that Mum’s alarm could be reinstated. He’d put the information about Mum’s health in red capital letters, he assured me. He sounded defeated. I’d just had a call from Mum, sounding slightly giddy, it has to be said, telling me that at eleven in the morning, her stair-lift had stopped working while she was at the top of the stairs. Her new mobile was downstairs. She’d somehow manoeuvred herself onto the top step and gone down the stairs on her bottom. Later that afternoon, the stair-lift company had called to repair the lift and she was once again able to get about her home. It feels like the closest of shaves. As I write, the situation remains unresolved. Even the highest level of internal complaint resolution has failed to produce prompt and appropriate action. This suggests that something is very wrong indeed within BT/Openreach/Plusnet. As ever, it is the most vulnerable who are placed at risk. I’ll keep you posted.

Just a quickie - with communication in mind. I've been up to Scotland in the last week to see Mum - not least because her phone has been off and as a result she has no healthcare alarm. Her account's with Plusnet, but of course, Openreach and BT are involved. The problem seems to be a pole that's 'unsafe' to climb. Something Plusnet have known since Day 2 of this saga. And BT have known for a long time -since they condemned the pole ages ago. There's nothing new about my frustration in dealing with these organisations. Real listening, practical and imaginative engagement with the problem, comprehensible online communication - all these seem beyond them. (Just as an example - Plusnet won't actually allow you to 'complain' - you have to write a 'question'. Or add 'details' to your 'question'. You're not allowed more than four of these 'questions' at any one time - even if your initial 'question' or complaint remains unresolved. Orwell would just have nodded and said, I told you so.) Today is Day 11 of the saga - eleven days in which my 81 year old, housebound Mum has been without her phone and without the alarm she wears day and night. Yesterday an engineer was due to call. I hope by the end of today we'll at least have a plan. I'd love it if Mum had a working phone and was able to feel safe. Somehow, I doubt it.

Bring your enthusiasm to work

I've been thinking about leadership a lot recently, but a conversation with my friend Charlie stopped me in my tracks. I started wondering, how do you lead when there's only you to lead?

Charlie runs a horticultural business providing beautiful, sturdy herbs to garden centres around Wales. Most of the time Charlie's business is just Charlie. Charlie does the fun jobs, the grim jobs and the dull ones. He’s responsible for standards, morale and vision. Charlie wins when his business goes well, and when things take a wobble - last year's bitter winter, this Spring's tonsillitis, Charlie has to ride that too.

What got me thinking about leadership was listening to Charlie talk about somebody else's business.

Again, nothing global. A tiny Deli and Restaurant called Ultra Comida, in Narbeth, a little town in West Wales.

What Charlie saw in Ultra Comida was a real commitment to excellence. Excellence that really shines out in every last detail. And the effort that it takes to get that kind of detail right.

Charlie empathised. Excellence doesn't come easy and he knows it.

Hearing him talk though, of his admiration and delight in someone doing something, anything, really well, was exciting. There was so much energy and passion in what he had to say, it lifted the mood in the room and lifted me.

Enthusiasm breeds enthusiasm. It's hard to be so-so about something that's fabulous.

Of course tapas might not be your thing. Or gardening. Or having a supplier that really cares about how well her product meets your customer's needs. But boy, it's hard to not to love the buzz around a thing well done.


For the last couple of weeks I've been participating in a discussion hosted by the Wales Management Council. Just writing it here, it feels like a long way from Charlie's polytunnels, but I don't think it is.

The discussion kicked off around a dinner table of invited guests. The criteria for invitation were simply that each guest would be likely to have something interesting to contribute to a discussion about 'Management' and 'Wales'. And they did. The discussion has carried on since in the pages of a LinkedIn group. Passionate, enthusiastic and diverse. But also tentative, searching, curious.

The focus of our discussion has been excellence.

For the academics and entrepreneurs and others who made up that initial guest list, and the participants who have added their contributions to the discussion since, the puzzle is how to lead towards excellence, when you don't necessarily have anyone to lead.

As a group, we might have a slightly wider circle of influence than Charlie, running his company of one, but there isn't a whole crowd of folk lining up behind saying, 'Excellence? Brilliant! Where do we start?'

Thinking about it, I guess it's no different than any other kind of leadership. After all, when was there ever a whole crowd of folk just lining up to follow?

Which brings me back to Charlie.

If we want excellence and great leadership…

We need to be excellent leaders. (Hmmm – that brings the challenge home a little…) Starting with a company of one.

We need to be committed to the effort of excellence. (So, no easy out then.)

And we need to practise the care and support that makes effort sustainable.

The tough stuff is that we need to be what we want to see in the world. To slightly misquote Ghandi.

The good news is that we also need to get excited.

I doubt that anyone ever sold excellence on a ticket of ‘could try harder’.

No. That’s a job for enthusiasm.

Charlie’s enthusiasm reminded me of what excellence feels like. It feels challenging. It feels edgy and alive. It feels worth getting up for.

Leadership is all about taking people to a place that only exists, if people choose to follow.

So we need to paint the picture. Share the good stuff. Lift the energy in the room.

Perhaps the scale of our leadership ambitions matter less than our integrity, and our ability to communicate with enthusiasm, a real sense of something worthwhile, valuable and better.

Oh, and by the way, if you're interested in the chunkiest, most most fragrant and delicious garden herbs, ask your local garden centre to get in touch with Charles Warner at www.grown-inwales.co.uk

Getting Started

It’s taken me a while to get round to it, but in many ways, starting a blog seems like a really natural extension of my work, my interests and my enthusiasm for writing as a means of figuring things out.

I’m not sure how regularly I’ll post, and inevitably, who might be interested, but I guess that’s true of everyone who puts their stuff out there.

I’ve called my blog, ‘the creative work place’ which also happens to be the name of the company I run with my partner Andy. That said, this isn’t a corporate space. It’s more that what came to mind when we were thinking about what to call our company, is the same that comes to mind now.

I’m interested in work. I’m interested in creativity. I’m interested in the ways that creativity adds to work.

Still, it’s probably worth explaining what I mean in a bit more detail. Not least because, creativity is one of those words that sends some people running for the hills – it whiffs of pretension and vagueness and stuff that’s all very well, but that doesn’t pay the bills. So what’s it got to do with work? I mean, haven’t you heard, we’re in a recession! And work, isn’t that just about paying the bills too?

Pretty obviously, that’s not where I’m coming from.

I once tried to put creativity into the pithiest form I could, and came up with – ‘what’s new and valuable’. I’m not sure, as a definition, that it has the mysterious ‘swing’, that’s also part of something creative. So maybe I should say creativity is what’s new, valuable and swings.

As far as work goes, it seems pretty obvious to me why creativity matters.

Any workplace works…more or less. Businesses get by, teams achieve what they need to achieve, you go home at the end of the day and work was…OK. Great maybe.

And on the days when it doesn’t work? Or the longer stretches of frustration or failure.

Well, apart from when the wheel comes right off, that’s much the same.

There’s a quality of familiarity to what we do, that makes it comfortable. Even the frustrations are familiar.

The reason I think work and creativity come together is the chance to make something that lifts us out of that familiarity – the good and the not so good – into something better.

Of course, there’s no real need to bother. Unless the wheel’s coming off. Or you’re in the worst recession since the 1930s. Or you’re worried about your job. Or stumped. Or stymied. Or hungry. Or you catch yourself wondering occasionally – Is this it then?

Who needs something better? Who needs something new? Who needs something that’s got a bit of swing?

To my mind, creativity is the operating system that deals with the way things are and generates the stuff – the ways of working, the ideas, the relationships – that offers the possibility of something even better.

Creativity and work…in my experience, it’s an exciting combination!