FreshNetworks Blog

Last year I wrote about innovation having attended an Open University Business School event on the topic, and recently I’ve just been to another one all about leadership. Here’s a quick summary of 6 questions and answers that came out of the session:

1. What do we mean by leadership?

Professor Jean Hartley took everyone through the 5 Ps:

1. Person – personal characteristics and leadership style(s).
2. Position – e.g. a position of authority often creates access to resource pools, but equally there are many leaders who don’t hold positions of formal authority.
3. Process – i.e. between a set of stakeholders, and energising and organising others.
4. Performance – achievements and skills.
5. Projection – both in terms of the qualities the leader projects to others, and which others project onto the leader.

The advice was to consider all 5 Ps as opposed to focusing on just one area.

2. What type of leadership is best?

It depends on the context, and the type of problem the leader is encountering, e.g. Rittel and Webber’s:

• Tame problems – which although complicated are still resolvable because we’ve come across them before and know how to fix them. In these cases leadership is more about applying tried and tested approaches capably.
• Wicked problems – which we’ve never encountered before, and are typically interlinked with so many other factors and issues as to make them incredibly complex and multi-faceted. In these cases leadership is about asking the right questions, and knowing who the right stakeholders are to be involved, and how they should be managed.

3. What skills should a leader possess?

According to Professor Hartley:

• Strategic direction & scanning – what you need to do, and when, and the tenacity to stick to it. The leader really has to believe in it if it’s going to be a success.
• Building alignment & alliances – i.e.  the leader as a “connector”, and crucially demonstrating political astuteness – a skill which people accepted was important in Hartley’s research, despite the stigma and “dark arts” reputation of organisational power and politics.
• Reading people & situations – e.g. alertness to different agendas and power pockets.
• Interpersonal skills – a mixture of hard and soft skills, and crucially listening to people and properly communicating with them, as well as understanding different situations and perspectives.
• Personal skills – self-awareness and self-control, being genuinely curious about others, and taking the time to be self-reflective and learn from mistakes and feedback.

How do people learn these skills though? According to Hartley’s research, people tend to learn most through making mistakes, and the inference was that more could be done to enhance training and development activities and programmes.

4. What’s an example of these leadership skills in practice?

The FT’s Caspar de Bono gave a particularly interesting talk which highlighted the importance of strategic direction and planning through his concept of leadership as action that is purposeful, but also creative (changing the paradigm), and courageous (i.e. you are out front, leading the way). In the FT’s case it was about listening to what customers wanted, and sticking to their business knitting while still innovating (i.e. operating broadly the same business model, but through improved digital channels and technology). The key was always to keep a clear idea of the WHAT while allowing the HOW to be more emergent, and informed by stakeholder involvement and analysis.

5. What’s the best leadership style to have?

In short: a mixture, and adapted to the particular business context in question (e.g. its size, stage of development, etc. etc.). Hay Group’s Lubna Haq identified 6 leadership styles, and asserted that the most effective leaders tend to have a minimum of 3 or more dominant / preferred ones:

1. Directive – based more on control and coercion, often more prevalent during downturns.
2. Visionary – opposite of directive and is primarily about building and selling a compelling vision.
3. Affiliative – creating harmony.
4. Participative – involving others.
5. Pace-setting – accomplishing tasks to a very high standard of excellence.
6. Coaching – focusing on the long-term professional development of others.

6. What are the key things to know about leadership?

• A leader should live the cultural values of their organisation, and be visible and approachable.
• Focus on achievements and also the long-term. Keep short-term issues in context.
• You can’t please everyone – confront issues head on and make those tough decisions if necessary.
• Think consciously about your style – is it right for the context you’re in? Is your style transformative or transactional?
• Political astuteness is important – forget about its negative press.
• Optimism is key – particularly during these current difficult economic and political times.

Innovation is a common topic of debate and strategies in most businesses (be they new or well established). In the current economic climate, and with the huge potential of the likes of social media data, brands are increasingly looking at innovation (large and small) as a way to beat the competition.

But innovation is often misunderstood. After a recent event debating the topic at the Open University Business School, I left with some insights into what the attendees thought that innovation was, and some misconceptions about what it has to be (but doesn’t):

Five things that innovation is

1. Innovation and growth are inextricably linked, according to the BBC’s Evan Davis. He surmised that innovation hasn’t come to a standstill in 2012, although we do have a growth problem which innovation itself will be crucial to solving.
2. Delicate. It’s important to nurture it gently so as not to kill it off too quickly, but also carefully contain and manage it to prevent any huge financial, market, or reputational fires.
3. More prevalent during recessions. The atmosphere of fear engendered by recession is often the trigger required to force organisations to adapt and survive (as opposed to ending up at the decline end of the sigmoid curve, such as Kodak), as well as being ideal for start-ups. Recessions tend to shake out the worst performers, and those simply coasting along with the status quo.
4. Often within your team already. Any business is likely to have great ideas and innovators already within the team. An open and creative organisational culture and office space is crucial to finding, developing, and encouraging these employees, who will always move to another company (possibly a competitor) to innovate if they can’t do so where they are.
5. Often the victim of resistance and sabotage. Some tactics to look out for and actively surface and manage include Peter Keen’s “lay low”, and “keep the project complex, hard to coordinate, and vaguely defined”. Plus also the wonderfully expressed “Say yes! But do nothing”.

Five things that innovation doesn’t have to be

1. Big or complex. Sometimes the best innovation can come through a series of incremental steps which ultimately amounts to something quite large, impactful and radical. Such gradual change can often be more palatable in businesses.
2. Hugely expensive or driven forward by companies. As demonstrated by the user-led innovations of the maker movement, and also Jugaad Innovation’s more flexible, frugal, and bottom-up approach.
3. A risky business. At least not to the innovators – who have complete faith in their idea. It’s the financial backers who are taking the risks. However, if we’re taking an incremental approach, perhaps that can help reduce the overall risk by breaking innovation up into more manageable and less intimidating or costly chunks.
4. A driver to cut costs. As it’s enabling many companies to retain their current cost bases but stretch those resources further into more countries and ventures.
5. About technology. Thinking and process innovations show it’s not just about technology (e.g. queuing), and service innovations prove it’s not only about products either. Nevertheless, technology is certainly vital, and SAP UK’s CTO Adrian Simpson explored how innovation is being shaped by greater mobility (e.g. increase in mobile devices), social media and networks, the cloud, and huge data sets (including social data).

Ultimately, innovation seems to depend on persistence, belief, adaptability, and relevance to customers and the market. While its success relies on people, behaviour and skills, and spotting and pursuing the opportunity before it’s too late. Undoubtedly money and resources help, but perhaps more of a barrier exists in the minds of employees and cultures of organisations?

Change Priorities (Photo credit: Christine ™)

When brands think about using social media across their business, the focus is usually on the things you will do, the tools you will have in place, the audiences you will work with and how you will report on progress. But more often than not any social business initiatives will need cultural change in your own teams if they are really to be a success.

Any new social initiative should not just be about bolting something on to an existing campaign, process or activity; initiatives that are done like this are the most difficult to make work. Social will have biggest impact when it is more fundamental to what you are trying to do.

So rather than just adding a Twitter account to an existing customer service channel, the real return will be when you think about ways to start redesigning your customer service based on consumer behaviour and the tools that are available.

And to make the most of things that are this fundamental you need cultural change in any organisation if they are to be a success.

When thinking about cultural change there are usually three main considerations:

1. Do your team really understand the role social plays for you?

Most people will use some form of social media in their personal life, and the danger is to take this understanding and behaviour into the workplace. That’s not necessarily the most useful way of thinking of social business. Whilst you are unlikely to articulate clear objectives for your personal Facebook page, or to plan content for the next three months, it is critical you do this as a business.

Your team need to truly understand what social means for a business, and specifically what it means for your business and for their role.

2. Do your team have the skills to make the most of social?

For anybody, social presents new opportunities and also new skills that need to be learned – technologies are changing and consumer behaviours are changing so businesses need to be able to constantly adapt to capitalise on these.

Education and a forum for sharing what is happening are critical to the success of any social business, and this needs to be at all levels but is critically important at senior executive level. Those people driving the business need to understand the opportunities (and limitations) of social if they are to effect real change.

3. Is your team structured in the right way for social?

Many of the ways we structure organisations are based on the traditional ways we have and still work. And they are often effective. But when you are thinking about social business you should consider if these same structures and processes work.

If you are redesigning your customer care processes, for example, do you still need the team to come to a central office every day? Should they all be working office hours or the hours you get most interactions in social media? Even should customer service in social be done by a particular team alone or be supported actively by people across the business who work in the areas being discussed.

The danger with social media is that you focus on what you are doing and that you bolt it on to existing processes, programmes and campaigns. That is always a real shame – you will probably miss the real opportunities that exist across your business, and when you think about social business in this way you will need to consider internal cultural change if it is to really work.