All the King's horses

Welcome back.

It seems a while since we were together but it is good to see you back here seeking enlightenment.

Hopefully you enjoyed the rest of the past few weeks and the Nuptials. For Cicero the abiding memory of the Nuptials was the horses. There were rather a lot of them.

And it occurred to Cicero that in our businesses we could learn a lot from the men and horses of the Household Cavalry. And if you give the Man a chance He will explain how so.

Cicero might not know much about horse riding but He does know, or at least He likes to think He knows, a wee bit about leadership in business. And maybe if we look closely at how to ride a horse properly we might become more effective leaders.

Take it from Cicero but riding a frighteningly big and powerful horse is not about saddles, bridles and tight jodhpurs. It is about engaging with the horse on an emotional and intellectual level.

Lesson number one-emotional awareness and confidence are critical. Your state of mind determines your horse's performance. If you're nervous getting on a horse, it will sense that. Horses and people are not that different; your internal sense of foreboding, optimism or confidence has an impact on the people around you whether you realize it or not. Being emotionally aware allows you to consciously choose how to respond in any given situation.

This means that your energy is contagious. Energy passes through you to your horse. To ride well and connect to your horse you need to learn how to use that energy. The same goes for leading an organization. Leaders don't control most of a business's projects and activities. As a leader, what you can control is the energy in a particular situation — be it a meeting, in your 1-1s and around the water cooler. All eyes are on you, and your team will sense if you are scared or uncertain or frustrated, and react accordingly. By harnessing and shifting your energy, you can use it as a resource to imbue the people around you with a sense of trust and calm and focus.

Secondly, be mindful of non-verbal cues. Your body is a crucial instrument for communicating with your horse; everything right down to your posture matters. The same holds true with people. Whether you acknowledge the people around you, how you sit in a chair, the way you hold yourself during a conversation — these mannerisms matter because they send a signal. People notice all kinds of unconscious cues. Be aware of how you conduct yourself. This is an important tool in your leadership toolbox and profoundly influences the message you're trying to get across.

Cicero’s third lesson from the Household Cavalry is that empathy is key to motivation. There are two ways to motivate a horse: carrots (positive reinforcement) or sticks (negative reinforcement). The most effective "carrot" a leader can use is empathy. When your horse spooks, the fastest way to get it to behave is to understand what is bothering it. Ask yourself, "what is going on here and why is it happening?" Take a step back and think about the possible factors influencing a situation before you react; it will prevent costly mistakes and help you keep your people motivated to succeed.

And finally, always remember that as with horses, satisfaction comes from the quality of the work, not from being well-liked. The surest way to lose a horse's respect is to spend your time worrying if it likes you rather than if it's doing a good job and comfortable in this enterprise. Horses, like people, feel a sense of worth and fulfillment simply knowing they are doing meaningful work. If employees, and horses, feel involved in what they are doing they will feel an abiding satisfaction as part of a functioning and productive team. Overcoming the need for people to like you will help you focus on being a more fair and effective leader.

So maybe the Nuptials were not such a waste of time and money after all.

Is it only me.........but it’s time we got back to work.

Now for the past 2 weeks due to all the holidays and the Windsor Nuptial Nonsense, I have not been writing my fine words of wit and wisdom as you will have noticed. If we assume that I will write about 50 pieces over the course of a year the last two weeks represents a 4% drop in my productivity or my GDP. And there you have it in a nutshell-the reason why we are broke.

Every day the news media assault our senses with the latest piece of economic misery-consumer confidence is the lowest it has been since the last time it was low; spending in the shops is down; inflation and unemployment are up; manufacturing output is down; and so on and so forth. In short, and to mis-quote Hobbes here, ‘life is (economically), poor, nasty, bruteish and short’.

And yet despite this out of the past 15 working days we have only worked 11 of them which means we have only been producing stuff and generating value for 11 of these days. And given the lack of chariots on the viae over this period it is apparent that many of you have decided to forsake the work place all together over this period reducing yet further our productive and wealth generating capacity.
Is it any wonder we have a recession?

Now I understand that we do have statutory Bank Holidays and part of problem this year was caused by Easter, a legitimate religious festival even in this polyglot country still, almost over lapping with a non traditional festival to celebrate the proletariat, of which we have few in this country. But did we need an extra day off just because a couple of nice young kids were getting married, something which happens every day of the week. And if one or two people did want to watch this on TV, is there anything wrong with getting married on a Saturday?

Now it might only be me but surely you can see that there is a causal link between our productive capacity being at rest and our economic progress or lack of. We can’t have our cake and eat in, not in these straitened times. If we are not at work making stuff or services to sell we cannot generate the wealth we need to create more jobs to improve our spending power and to keep the Apparatchiks in the style to which they have become accustomed. The circle cannot be squared.

So thank God we are now all back at work. It is the only way man knows to create the economic recovery we are looking for. We won’t get there by taking endless holidays or standing idly by watching two people, we don’t know and are very unlikely to meet or even get to know, getting married by someone in a fancy pointed hat.

Have a great week.

Sis felix. Et sis fortunatus.

The lift is up where we belong

Welcome back and I hope you had a great Easter.

Please don’t think I am getting obsessed with lifts. You will know that barely two weeks ago I was talking about lifts and the need for us all to have our lift conversations to hand, ready and primed for use. I want to return to the questions of lifts again today but in a different context.

I am inspired this week by the works of Matthew Parris. I don’t mean the 13th century Benedictine monk, author and philosopher, though he does provide plenty of inspiration, but the equally inspirational 21st century columnist of The Times. I will come back to him in a moment but first let me tell you a story.

As I have explained to you before I am now sharing my marketing and business wisdom with an unnamed department of an unnamed government dedicated to ensuring safety and security for all its citizens. I would love to share more with you but I am sure you will understand the need for security and sensitivity.

In the building in which I ply my trade there is a lift and for as long as I have worked there, all of 4 weeks, this lift has been out of order. And not once have I seen anyone working on it trying to get it going. And according to the apparatchiks who have dedicated their whole career to serving the State and its citizens, this lift has been broken since at least the start of the year. I cannot say any more about this lift and even to disclose that there is a broken lift might be putting at risk my career and you would not want that, would you?

As is my philosophy I have picked up the napkin and reported it broken and tried to find out when it might be fixed. No one knows. No one cares. No one is it all fazed by fact that the lift has been marked ‘out of order’ for so long. Indeed people are more fazed that I should be so concerned.

Well I am concerned.

As I have said so many times before, everything communicates. To me, a broken lift that has been marked unusable for so long, says an organisation that can’t be bothered, that it doesn’t care, that it couldn’t give a monkey’s how it is perceived by its people, by its customers, by its stakeholders.

And I know that it does care but it is not communicating this thought at all times and across all touch points. In my book, if you get the small things right then the big things will surely follow. If you remove the interferences and barriers and excuses to great work then you get great work. It is that simple.

So where and how does Matthew Parris fit in?

Well my broken lift reminded of his experience of a squeaky door at Derby station which squeaked and squeaked to the annoyance and irritation of staff and customers, aka passengers, alike. All noticed but no one cared enough to fix it. And his solution was to develop a new branch of management consultancy and investigation.

Instead of businesses being subjected to major management investigation or scrutiny on the big issues, when it thinks it might be good practice to take a long hard look at itself, or when something big has gone horribly wrong to identify what went wrong, what lessons can be learnt, who should be blamed, it might be a much better idea ‘to zoom in with massive management attention to something trivial that went wrong, something just so blindingly, obviously silly that no one in their right mind could possibly defend it…..an investigation into how and why the indefensible was tolerated’.

And so going back to my broken lift, just think of the key questions needing answered;
Who knew?
Were there communication channels in place to bring the broken lift to attention of a higher authority?
Who should have shouldered responsibility for fixing? Why didn’t they?
Were people confident that their request to have lift fixed would be taken seriously or were they in despair and give up?
Etc, etc

I am pretty sure that such an approach to corporate investigation would reveal far more to an organisation about itself. The solutions would be easier to fix and maybe just maybe demonstrate and communicate better and more appropriate and relevant messages to all who work there and all who want to do business with it.

And so I ask and call upon you yet again to find and try to fix your broken lifts to help make your business a better place for your people and for your customers. As someone much more intelligent than even I, once said ‘you can become the change you want to see in the world’. Or as Bob the Builder said in similar vein, and who else can link Ghandi to Bob the Builder in the one paragraph, ‘Can we do it? Yes, we can’

And now for your favourite piece of this column……is it just me?

I have had a complaint from an eco mentalist who wants to know why I am always having a go at them. Well you will be pleased to know that yet again I want to ponder out loud about an eco mentalist absurdity and enviro mentalist illogicality.

The Green Brigade are always going on about the need to invest in renewable energy such as wind farms and solar energy. Has it never occurred to anyone that in this country at least it is not always windy or even sunny? This might come as a surprise to the eco warriors but I am sure that if you check with our meteorological media lovelies you will find that I tell no lie. This means that if we want to have 20% of our energy needs met from sources like this we also have to invest in traditional so called non green energy sources to make sure our lights don’t go out and our heating switch off when our weather takes a turn for the better or the worse, depending on your point of view.

So not only do we still need the energy sources that are seen as the Devil’s work, we also need to pay for all this surplus energy capacity. And there is only one person who is going to pay for this. Yes, you got it, you and me. Am I right or am I wrong? It is surely no coincidence that the word ‘mental’ is embedded in ‘environmentalism’.

I await more complaints

Have a great week.

Sit felix. Et sit fortunatus.