Alex Ferguson is one of the few leaders in football who has endured beyond a few seasons. And his genius was his ability to regenerate the team. He regularly surprised people as he moved on through Eric Cantona, Paul Ince, Bryan Robson, David Beckham, Roy Keane, Jaap Stam, Christiano Ronaldo who were all at one time considered indispensable and yet they went and success continued.

What were the characteristics that kept the Ferguson magic going within Manchester United? The Ferguson Way is well documented: you accept someone for what they are, develop them into what you want them to be or move them on. It is as simple as that and businesses when they talent manage should be thinking in the same way accept, train or fire.

Ferguson’s success did not come instantly he had a vision which he stuck to. He mixed youth with experience with the Scholes, Neville brothers, Beckham and Butt  which he nurtured he threw  experience and leadership with the purchase of  Eric Cantona and Steve Bruce. He  also knew when players needed to move on.

Alex Ferguson from the off developed his own brand, he was entirely his own man and whilst the temper came to the fore occassionally  he will be remembered by those who played for him as a compassionate man, a father figure who set the standards and abided by them, whose values were firmly pinned to his sleeve. Business leaders could learn a lot from that too!

Overall business could learn a great deal from  Sir Alex’s success and it was great to see Harvard recognise that when he went to lecture there recently. The real challenge that now faces Manchester United is replacing such a great man. a great visionary and an amazing leader. I wonder if they really have an effective succession strategy in place?

The philanthropic nature of our modern western society is based within our capitalist conscience and therefore neither focused nor truly effective in its output. For most benefactors charity ends at the delivery of the sponsorship or donation as a conscience or desire to do some good is personally or organisationally is met. “The West has spent over £ 11/2  trillion on foreign aid over the last five decades and still had not managed to get cheap medicines to children to prevent half of all malaria deaths. The West has still had not managed to get £3 mosquito bed nets to poor families. How can our concerted global efforts at combating such a clearly defatigable issue be so inept. If a business was run in the same way with such a niche aim it would soon be bankrupt. It’s such a tragedy that so much well-meaning and genuine compassion does not deliver effective results to the  unlucky and  powerless people who reside in such naturally challenging regions.

Where is the vision? Where is the coordination? Where is the leadership?

The director of the United Nations Mil­lennium Project Jeffrey Sachs offered a Big Plan to end world poverty, with solutions ranging from nitrogen-fixing leguminous trees to re­plenish soil fertility, to antiretroviral therapy for AIDS, to specially pro­grammed cell phones to provide real-time data to health planners, to rainwater harvesting, to battery-charging stations, to cheap medicines for children with malaria — for a total of 449 interventions. Professor Sachs has played an important role in calling upon the West to do more for the Rest, but the implementation strategy is less constructive.

So the vision is there and the planning that naturally follows it is there. Where is the leadership? Where is the coordination?

According to Pro­fessor Sachs and the Millennium Project, the UN  Secretary-General should run the plan, coordinating the actions of officials in six UN agencies, the UN country teams, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and a couple of dozen rich-country aid agencies. This Plan is the latest in a long string of Western plans to end poverty.

Unfortu­nately, the West has a bad track record when it comes to meeting its goals. A UN summit in 1990 set as a goal for the year 2000 universal primary-school enrolment. (That is now planned for 2015.) A previous summit, in 1977, set 1990 as the deadline for realizing the goal of universal access to water and sanitation. (Under the Millennium Development Goals, that target is now 2015.) Nobody was ever held accountable for these missed goals nations hide behind national agendas and leaders shirk their duties.

So perhaps the leadership is not there but what about the coordination?

At the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2005, Sharon Stone raised a million dollars on the spot for more bed nets in Tanzania. Insecticide-treated bed nets can protect people from being bit­ten by malarial mosquitoes while they sleep, which significantly lowers malaria infections and deaths. But if such nets are such an effective cure, why hadn’t Planners already got them to the poor? Unfortunately, neither celebrities nor aid administrators have many ideas for how to get bed nets to the poor. Such nets are often diverted to the black market, become out of stock in health clinics, or wind up being used as fishing nets or wedding veils.

The non profit organization Population Services International (PSI), gets rewarded for doing things that work. PSI stumbled across a way to get insecticide-treated bed nets to the poor in Malawi, with initial funding and logistical support from official aid agencies. PSI sells bed nets for fifty cents to mothers through antenatal clinics in the countryside, which means it gets the nets to those who both value them and need them. (Pregnant women and chil­dren under five are the principal risk group for malaria.) The nurse who dis­tributes the nets gets nine cents per net to keep for herself, so the nets are always in stock. PSI also sells nets to richer urban Malawians through private-sector channels for five dollars a net. The profits from this are used to pay for the subsidized nets sold at the clinics, so the program pays for itself. PSI’s bed net program increased the nationwide average of children under five sleeping under nets from 8 percent in 2000 to 55 percent in 2004, with a similar in­crease for pregnant women. A follow-up survey found nearly universal use of the nets by those who paid for them. By contrast, a study of a program to hand out free nets in Zambia to people, whether they wanted them or not (the favoured approach of Planners), found that 70 percent of the recipients didn’t use the nets. The ‘Malawi model’ is now spreading to other African countries.

The local PSI office in Malawi (which is staffed mostly by Malawians who have been with the program for years) was looking for a way to make progress on malaria when it discovered the solution. They decided that bed nets would do the job, and then hit upon the antenatal clinic and the two-channel sales idea. This scheme is not a magical panacea to make aid work under all circumstances; it is just one creative response to a particular problem.

So the co-ordination can be there through innovation and entrepreneurialism!

What is the real problem? Well it’s down to leadership and in the business world leaders make or break an organisation yet in the philanthropic world of humanitarian aid leaders seem unable to operate effectively and deliver to laudable well constructed goals. They lack the tool sets to deliver, they lack the ability to make a difference and yet the Western world sits back happily resting on its laurels having donated over 11/2 Trillion £ to help those poor people who suffer so much in the harsh environs of the third world.

Let’s get cleverer at delivering aid by employing top leaders, empowering them to deliver and rewarding them when they do so innovatively and with an entrepreneurial flair. Let’s give them the tools to deliver aid far more effectively and close that leadership gap.

Having worked with several charities I have found that the leadership, team cohesion and motivation and the leadership challenges are very different from those we have experienced when working within the corporate sector. Charities are businesses in their own rights but they work under a different and more challenging set of rules and circumstances.

Where a leader in the corporate sector just has the conundrum of balancing stakeholder profit with customer value and societal/brand expectation. A leader in a charity has to balance trustee requirements, fundraising requirements, employees and volunteers, societal expectations and the end user service/value.

Let’s start by looking at the trustee dimension within a charity, as it is the most complex of the issues. Trustees are generally very well meaning and highly motivated people who work genuinely hard for a heartfelt cause. However, they may not all come with the same motivation and agenda. Hence, they may value different aspects of a charities work in different ways. They need to be marshalled to be truly cohesive in their approach and yet they need to be independent in their judgement, in order, to ensure the charity adheres to the requirements of the law and the Charity Commission as it moves forward.

Fund raising has many tenets from investment, the basic retail of products, to the winning of funding and grants from public and charitable bodies, to the support of individuals as they raise money. These aspects combined need to provide the working funds for the charity to function and develop. The charitable  financial world is complex and fraught with risk during these frugal times, accountability and transparency has never been more valued and demanded by the customer and the regulator.

The employment environment of a charity is also complicated when it comes to motivating, leading and managing those involved. A charity will normally have paid employees who work in normal employee circumstances alongside those who volunteer their services. The paid employees, whilst viewing their employment as a job, may be intrinsically motivated to choose to work within the sector. However, it is the volunteers that bring other challenges in terms of motivation and expectation. How do you plan an event when you don’t know how many people you will have there organising it?

When it comes to providing value for your customers, identifying who they are and how their expectations can be met is critical. Each customer will have a very different perspective of the charity and it’s work. Derived from the reasons for their association with that charitable organisation. Contributors to the charity will expect their money to be spent wisely. Those who benefit from the work of the charity may have real issues and problems in their lives that have driven them to seek help. Some will be so desperate that any assistance will do and others will be far more choosy. Circumstances will be incredibly varied depending upon the focus of that particular charity.

The intrinsic rewards of charitable work far outweigh the financial reward and yet the challenges of leading such organisations in the highly competitive charitable sector can lead to a stressful and lonely existence. Best practice needs to be shared more effectively and proven solutions to common issues need to be more available to all those involved, in the leadership of these wonderful organisations, who afford our society so much.

Sampson Hall are now working with Charity Leaders as part of the Charity Forums UK. To help them work together, share best practice and support each other.

One of the key requisites of a modern day leader is fairness. However as humans we all have our favourites and generally they look, behave and think like us!  All very well until you remember that diversity is a great asset to any modern team. So leaders how do we get the best out of a diverse teams if diversity is such a strength in today’s volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world?

As Coach Boone said in that film Remember the Titans:  ”If we don’t come together right now on this hallowed ground, we too will be destroyed, just like they were. I don’t care if you like each other of not, but you will respect each other. And maybe… I don’t know, maybe we’ll learn to play this game like men.”  Respect is the key catalyst that brings with it a fairness that glues individuals and teams together.

Respect is key in any cohesive group for without it trust will dissipate and teams will become a collection of individuals who function only for self gratification. Without respect the intrinsic bond that is so key to super success will never be found as team leaders and members focus on extrinsic reward. Look at those organisations that have tried to buy their way to success and failed.

Power used to be a key tenet to successful leadership but I am now of the opinion that today’s world is more about win win collaboration rather than the zero sum conclusion. Collaboration and mutual benefit are symptoms of maturing societies rather than the historical imposition of power and authority. As leaders become more ethical in their words and deeds societies judge them on their ability to balance profit for their shareholders, value for their customers with their brand’s expectations from society.

Ethical leadership is not about power and authority it is more about influence and motivation hence it is about fairness and diversity, compromise rather than power and destruction.

Recently as high street names fall the short term focus on profitability has been brought sharply into the fore ground. How do stores like Jessops and HMV survive in the modern world when price is king and overheads are seen as an albatross to retail survival? However how often does cheap last?

Commercial history tells us that the most successful organisations, over the long term, consistently focus on “enabling” people things (leadership, purpose, employee motivation) whose immediate benefits aren’t always clear in the short term. These robust organisations are internally aligned around a clear and cohesive vision and strategy; can execute to a high quality thanks to strong capabilities, management processes, and employee motivation; and renew themselves in an ever more demanding environment more effectively than their rivals do. In short, healthy processes today drive improved performance tomorrow.

The issue in the majority of the larger organisations is the short term requirements placed upon them by their shareholders. Many Chief Executives and Senior Vice Presidents instinctively understand the paradox of performance and health, though few have expressed or acted upon it better than John Mackey, founder and CEO of Whole Foods. “We have not achieved our tremendous increase in shareholder value,” he once observed, “by making shareholder value the only purpose of our business.” No most certainly not and yet the increase in value has been long term it has been as a result of healthy strategic processes and disciplines. Outstanding strategy, effective communication and the evolution of people processes to free up mangers and leaders to focus on the future rather than immerse themselves in the problems of today. Don’t forget that people run businesses and people are the interface between a business and its customer base if they feel empowered, understand what they have to do and the route they have to take to get there, then they can create extraordinary value and longevity!

Companies often mistake profit for value and assume that the proof of profit within our capitalist society automatically indicates that value has been achieved. However the capitalist system is under siege. Companies are widely perceived to be prospering at the expense of their communities. A big part of the current problem is the stakeholders’ and boards adopt a limited approach to value creation and the perception of value by potential customers. Focused on short-term financials, companies overlook the broader influences that will sustain their long-term success. The microscope that has been brought to bear by the economic environment brings with it a far more discretionary customer who is focused on what they get in total for their buck. Clever companies could bring business and society back together if they redefined their purpose as creating “shared value”—generating economic value in a way that also produces value for society by addressing some of its challenges; the old win win rather than zero sum argument.

What is value? Value is an individual perception. It comes from an individual’s expectations which are founded in their own experience and beliefs. Value put simply is the positive difference between someone’s’ expectation and reality. Just as a lack of value is the negative difference between expectation and reality.  So value comes in all sorts of shapes and sizes and it is here that companies need to get cleverer in their delivery of something. Value will last as long as the item is around it is not just about shiny and new products.

Value needs to be measured through the life of a product. It needs to be measured in all sorts of ways to match the expectations of the audience that is trying to assess it.  Long Term Value is no longer about initial cost but it is also about through life costs and disposal costs, it is also about the environmental impact, local economy impact, societal impact etc etc.

Clever companies are starting to focus their marketing on the other aspects of value that society considers important and those that don’t reflect the new principles of non-monetary value will soon find their market dwindling as they look only towards their own profit. Clever companies provide and measure the same value to their employees, after all how good is it to work for a company your proud of!

Every leader has at least one person in their team who isn’t performing. You really want them to do better, but do you sometimes sabotage their progress that by managing them like underachievers? Well perhaps there is another way?

A leader always wants their people to perform at their optimum level. It’s good for every one involved in the team and drives organisational performance. Regardless of the leader’s personal intentions – whether they want to look good as a leader or they want to drive their business forward, all a leader wants is for their people to do their best at work.

As team members start to under perform, start to let the leader down, the leader’s initial impulse is to take back some control. Decrease team members responsibilities, control some of the project, or even micro manage them with a long screw driver just a little in order to make the leader feel more comfortable. This is human nature.  After all a successful outcome is being threatened, so the leader naturally re-assumes control. Good leadership some would say and in certain circumstances that is the right thing to do for the task although it may damage the individual team member.

But stop a moment lets reflect on how this impacts upon the under performer doing the work?

You lead top performers very differently from those under performers and perhaps that may contribute to their lack of success.  Two completely different approaches which achieve different results appear logical on the surface; however, it seems ludicrous when you think you are applying methods that inhibit under performers from learning and developing. Let’s break down the logic:

You do something new – and someone performs really well you give them control and let them get on with it with the belief and freedom that delivers success.

However you have someone that isn’t performing well doing the same new thing – and you really want them to do well – so you do something totally different, you take back control pressurising them and hindering their opportunity for learning and development

In other words, we manage high performers like high performers. And we manage underachievers like underachievers – even though we want everyone to become a high performer for the sake of the team and the outcome.

And a big component of this is the leader feeling in control. When we take control away from people, their ability to think critically, to problem solve and to control emotions and behaviours is compromised. As leaders, we tend to give our high performers a lot of control and our underachievers a little. We are imposing our way upon someone who may have a better but different way. Someone who may just need to learn how to do it and the best way of learning is experimentally. Hence our imposition of control might end up driving a self-fulfilling cycle.

In a recent study a group of people were given a problem solving test and their scores were recorded. Each of the participants was then asked to describe a person in their lives that they thought was controlling. For 15 minutes, they were asked to describe the person, their actions and specific situations. After this interview, they were given another (equivalent) problem-solving test and each and every one of them performed about 30% worse.

Interesting that just the thought of someone controlling us decreases our ability to problem-solve by 30%!

But it turns out actual control by the incumbent isn’t completely necessary. In many research experiments using computer tasks, just the feeling of control can reignite someone’s performance. As with most things, perception is more important than reality. We call this ownership and its all about feeling ownership of an outcome. Effective communication by a leader should leave a team member in no doubt about the expected outcome to be delivered and the boundaries beyond which they have to seek permission to pass in pursuit of that outcome. This creates the impression of control although a good leader will monitor unobtrusively until they have total confidence in that team member.

So as leaders how do we develop our under performers through empowerment through the feeling of more control.

1)    Be more organized in your delegation

To delegate well and give people control, you have to be more organized than when you simply do it yourself. You must clearly communicate expectations (the outcome) and boundaries. Give yourself and your direct reports realistic lead times, which allow them to get their work done, get some feedback and then redo it if necessary. When your direct report gets it wrong too close to the deadline, you have very little choice but to take it back and do it yourself but remember, if you can always, exploit a learning opportunity!

2) Delegate pieces of projects, rather than the whole thing

Remember people do things better if they like doing it.  So you’re bound to find things that people are more proficient at. The most effective leader develops their team members using challenge and support – too much of either is a poor recipe for learning. If you do not have total confidence  in someone give them pieces of the project that you are happy for them to control, rather than setting them up to fail by being over ambitious asking them to do too much. Time spent building trust and understanding is never wasted.

3) Create the perception of control

Ownership is important as people always need to feel like they control something. There are always things that we have no control over – such as deadlines. But there are also things that we can make sure people do have control over – that contribute to the way in which the outcome is achieved. Delivery of a small contributing piece of an outcome such as the provision of refreshments or even the colour of the binding for the final report without interference can afford a perception of ownership. These small things can actually make a big difference in the way team members perform whilst enhancing trust and cohesion.

People do their best work when they feel they are trusted; when they have a sense of control. Not when they are operating on fear or over worried about making little mistakes that make them appear stupid. They need to understand what they own and the expectations and boundaries and then be left to get on with it.

These simple things might just help your underachievers become high achievers and valued team members in the future. The value of experiential learning should never be missed!

Modern leadership in a time when the quick eat the slow has to be different from that which flourished in the industrial era. Sadly very few organisations and academic places of learning recognise the requirement for a softer set of leadership skills. Cognitive leadership is all about understanding the environment in which you lead and then applying the appropriate leadership style, tool or skill to the occasion.  This is beyond the broad definition of situational leading.

The modern leader needs to listen and watch passively to understand their situation and the needs of those they lead. Listening is an underestimated leadership competence that is recognised in some schools of thinking but watching or observing and noticing is rarely considered as a characteristic of leadership. Noticing skills are fundamental to cognitive leadership.

Lessons are learned harder and therefore learned better in failure and a vital component of the cognitive leader is the ability to forgive a mistake as long as it is learned from and not repeated. Humans are fallible and we all make mistakes it is how they are recovered from that makes the difference.

Using your experts many leaders believe they have to be expert at everything to have the right to lead. Experts are with you for a reason, use their expertise allow them to control when the situation is appropriate empower them to make them more effective. With the speed of information flow and the speed of business advisors are often better placed to react rather than just advise allow them the freedom to react appropriately to seize the opportunity before someone else does.

The bottom line in cognitive leadership is the ability to trust and be trusted. You will only be fully trusted by your team if you become a cognitive leader. A cognitive leader is someone who understands what needs to be done when, someone who has the courage and judgement to lead their teams through the toughest of ordeals and environments; someone who uses the cohesive power of the team and all its attributes. To become a cognitive leader you need to have complete faith in yourself and complete faith in those around you. Please do not confuse faith with arrogance.

As individuals we often stop our quests at barriers and use them as easy get outs so that we can justify our weakness to ourselves and others and yet it is often our fear of failure or lack of a vision of success that prevents us from achieving our quests. I love the quote “Obstacles are things a person sees when they take their eyes off their goals” Anon.

Some of us deliberately create or imagine barriers for fear of possibly failing and yet failure should be viewed more positively as it is often the closest bedfellow to success. Like love and hate they are extremes and yet they can be in very close proximity. “Most great people have attained their greatest success just one step beyond their greatest failure”. – Napoleon Hill. It’s having the guts to try and to continue trying, to believe beyond anything in eventual success. “A hero is an ordinary individual who finds the strength to persevere and endure in spite of overwhelming obstacles.” – Christopher Reeve. But a hero is an ordinary person who has become extraordinary through sheer will and determination. Failure brings with it shame, a stigma many of us are unprepared to go through.  The shame barrier is self imposed and even though breaking through it may lead to great eventual success it is all too often the end of our endeavours.  Yet we admire others who have overcome shame, we admire others who are prepared to admit weakness and failure and yet we are often unprepared to tolerate it in ourselves. Shame hurts, shame humiliates, shame is a weakness that we would rather not be part of.   And yet shame is the mother of great invention the soul of great conquests and the source of great courage.

Humans are naturally lazy they get away with as little as possible. It is after all a natural phenomenon. Preserving resources and energy for survival purposes and yet “Laziness is the greatest assassin of talent” Pele. We need to think beyond instinct, think about goals and desired outcomes to motivate ourselves through our laziness to success. People who shy away from challenge and possible failure will never stand out; theirs is the greyness of obscurity. To quote two US Presidents “If you run you stand the chance of losing, if you don’t you have already lost” Barrack Obama and “Only one who dares to fail greatly can achieve greatness” Robert F Kennedy. Both men have lead the Western World!

Thomas Edison once said, “Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success before they gave up.” And this is the challenge that today’s leaders who are destined to break barriers must overcome. Success is hard won. It comes to those who stick to their goals longer than others. Those who do not give up but press through their personal barriers and motivate their teams to press through their personal and group barriers stand a better chance than those who don’t; for success comes to those who learn from and respect their failures and shame rather than just attributing the blame.

The key challenge for modern leaders in whatever position or role they occupy is ensuring their response to their barriers, failures, challenges and shame they meet in their leadership positions matches the environment and reinforces their desire for success. They must overcome self doubt, they must create an ethos of success but they must also understand and respect the benefits and lessons that failure delivers. After all when Galileo called self-doubt “the father of all invention” he understood the inevitable challenges on the leadership journey to success.