Success Authority Peter Beaumont turns the idea of exemplary leadership on its head when he describes the mistakes that leaders too often make.
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Linda Ruhland
I’m speaking today to Success Authority Peter Beaumont. In our conversation, Peter turns the topic of Leadership on its head. When I asked him, “What defines good leadership?” Peter, instead, explained to me what does not.
Peter Beaumont
I wrote an article probably a couple of years ago. It had over one hundred eleven thousand views and eighty thousand shares. It was about the seven signs of poor leadership. So, I flipped it on its coin and looked at if from a so-called negative, but then made positive points. To me, that’s how to talk about what makes good leadership. It’s “Here’s what leaders are poor at and get recognized for, but here’s how to counter that.” There are so many things written about how to be a good leader. You rarely hear about the opposite side of it. You can learn a lot about from knowing what poor leadership is.
Secondly, there are five things I believe in instilling in my clients on how to be better leaders. Which, by the way, are the things you’d do normally, but are even more important during a crisis.
Part One: Poor Leadership Behaviors
Typically, what I have seen with leadership, it doesn’t matter the size of the company, is…
- threatening behavior—bullying. The whole carrot and stick technique loses the carrot and it’s simply the stick that is being used. The problem, of course, is that it’s incredibly demotivating. You are not going to follow a leader over a precipice if they’re constantly threatening you. It’s the bullying behavior that, unfortunately, all too many of us learned at school. It sends us into a shell, development stops, and there’s no longer teamwork because everybody is focusing on self-preservation.
- Somewhat linked is never apologizing when you make an error. It’s so important to make sure that people realize that you understand you’re not perfect—and you do make mistakes, which is why you need a team. Typically, what happens with people who don’t apologize is they blame other people for everything. This blame disease is a real issue because, again, it has people running to the shadows or to a cave. They are wondering what’s coming next. It’s a real issue for leaders who absolve themselves of responsibility by never apologizing; it’s never their fault.
- The third behavior that we see a lot of and should be avoided is micromanagement. When I was working with a certified value builder, there were seven factors that contributed toward building value in business. One that they talked of being an issue is “hub and spoke.” That is when the CEO, entrepreneur, owner, or principal has grown up doing everything themselves. They continue doing it. They haven’t let go and delegated. The problem is that if the person goes under the proverbial bus, the company is paralyzed. More importantly, they are not building other leaders. They are not building up other people who can actually show some leadership abilities and take over responsibilities for certain segments of the business.
- Fourth is lack of discipline, constantly changing the goals and targets simply because it suits them. Or, even worse, not having goals or targets. “Why haven’t we reached this?” And everybody looks at them and says, “That wasn’t exactly what we agreed—we never had a goal or target.” Moving the goalpost is a wonderful expression for describing what happens. “You didn’t meet your goal this week.” Well, “I didn’t know where the goalpost was.” It’s terribly debilitating, demotivating and creates hostility in the team, if you can call it a team at this state.
- The next is nebulous expectations—not clear about where the company is. What are we going to achieve in the next five, three, or one years? And in that, what are you going to achieve? By not having those it makes everybody a scapegoat. And it makes it easy to shift things around when they are not going well, which is what happens in a crisis.
- Another poor leadership trait that I’ve seen is people not being able to motivate others. They don’t lead from the front and they don’t respond well to negative comments. Instead of saying, “Why do you think that’s the case? And “What is the way of improving that?” It’s discarded as not important. When I first worked for an American corporation, which was Coca Cola (Phillip Morris). The famous expression throughout that time was “Let’s not be negative.” Everything had to be positive—everything. There wasn’t any space allowed to say, “Wait a minute, what if we look at this a different way.” You’d just discard it as being negative, which meant that you were simply turning people into robotic soldiers rather than people who thought for themselves. Any good organization with good leadership has people who can think for themselves.
- The last one is bad communication. While that sounds obvious, I’m not talking about particularly the written word or email. I’m talking more about not listening to others. Early in my career, I was involved in a three-day exercise called “Looking Through the Looking Glass,” which was a reflection of how you react to certain situations. They put us into a simulation. The night before we went into an “office” and were given a particular role. Mine was managing director of one of the three divisions. By the way, you’d make it up as you’d go. It was not set up for you. You were just given a brief, an entree, and then got on with it. In my first “management meeting,” there was a production manager. He was very quiet and hardly said anything, so I discounted him. I was in my late twenties then, and unless anybody spoke strongly, I’d just ignore them. Not a good quality to have. As we went through the exercise, we did not fulfill our production quotas and therefore did not make revenue targets. It took me until towards the end of the exercise to realize what was going on. When we did the post-mortem, I had not been listening to this guy (the production manager) for all the wrong reasons, and he had all the answers—a very good example of poor leadership in my case. On the other side of the coin, this tells you what good leadership should look like.
Ruhland
Connected to that, Peter, how do you develop it in your organization?
Beaumont
First of all, you have to have a platform where the leadership team meets regularly. By the way, there are lots of leadership disciplines that everybody learns from. EOS is one that has some really good things in it. They talk about having a regular meeting, same time, same time of the week, same day of the week, same agenda, and same format so that you get into a rhythm of doing things on a regular basis. Now, if you do that, people feel more comfortable in that arena. The other part is that you have a chance, 60 or 90 minutes during that meeting to talk about issues. What I’ve noticed in the past three years or so, and before, is by setting up that rhythm people get used to discussing what we used to call problems (we now call “issues”). People have a problem with issues, too. And that’s a problem, in itself, because they exist. We need to get them out onto the table. Conflict is one of the biggest challenges for any leader. How do you channel conflict in a positive way? It’s not easy. I would suggest that most leaders need to be good facilitators. The reason I say that is because facilitating is slightly different from being a leader because it allows other people to have a say. By facilitating you allow everybody to enter into the conversation. You do it in a way that it doesn’t feel like conflict. Also, a lot of problems are often solved just by allowing someone to have a voice. They may not actually get their way at the end of the meeting, but they’ll go out satisfied that somebody listened to them in an arena where it was important that it was listened to even if perhaps the decision hasn’t gone their way.
Ruhland
That’s absolutely true, as long as you’ve got an open channel. Whether or not the advice is taken, if people are being listened to, clearly the sense of trust is a little stronger in that environment.
Beaumont
You said a great word there, which I hadn’t yet entered into the conversation, which is trust. You can’t form good relationships without it. I wrote a book on relationships called “Relationship Roadmap” back in 2014. It applies to any part of the business you’re involved in. There are internal relationships, external relationships, but good relationships are formed on two main prongs. One is trust and the other is respect. Without those two things, there is no relationship. Without relationships in a team, you are going to have this silo effect where people are pulling against each other rather than pulling together. That’s what leaders do. To use an analogy of a boat where you have a crew, the boat becomes stilled and rudderless when you don’t have a good leader because everyone is not rowing in the same direction. Instead, you go around in circles deciding where to go. A good leader facilitates “What should we do?” Everyone is committed to the decision because they all have a say in it. Where is that direction? Okay! Now we can start rowing towards it.
Ruhland
Do these principles change?
Beaumont
Good question. I think most principles hold steady because they have to. I would suggest that the rhythm in the meeting, although we couldn’t do it often physically, smart firms, and certainly clients that I advise, continue to do it via Zoom or whatever vehicle is used virtually. It’s probably more important to do it virtually more often to get everybody to realize that we are together on this. Just because we had a pandemic, and by the way, still have a pandemic, we shouldn’t stop the principles (that we just went through) that build good leadership. Facilitating becomes even more important in a virtual world than it does in a physical world because it’s more subtle. You can’t allow people to switch off the video. You can’t allow them to be doing it on a telephone because they are not really embraced in the meeting. Hybrid is just something I would not have because the people that are not in the physical meeting don’t feel part of it.
The leadership principles are the same, but in a crisis, there are some other leadership principles we need to be aware of. I think perfection goes out of the window. A lot of leaders are guilty of wanting perfection, not from just themselves, but they expect everybody else to be perfect, too. In a pandemic, people are going through a lot more issues around the virus and their families. They are worried about their parents, kids—there’s so much more going on in their world than there was. It’s stratified. You can no longer compartmentalize between the home and job. Home and job start merging so much more and there are certainly more pieces to it.
Secondly, we have to understand the difference between complicated and complex. Everything suddenly becomes complicated. Complicated means you can split things down into certain degrees or processes. Complex is a lot more difficult. It means having a team come in to take on parts of it and then splitting them down into the complicated. In the crisis, we got them muddled. We weren’t doing the things that made sense by doing them in easy steps. We tried to do everything together because we had to. In contrast, we thought we’d try to get out of this by putting our heads in the sand. That doesn’t work either. You have to grasp what you can. That’s why we’ve seen a great response of people pivoting. They grasped the complex and split it down. They’d say, “If I keep doing this, then this is going to result. So, I need to look at something else.”
Third, particularly in a crisis you’ve got to work on the business more than in the business. If you do what you had been doing before, which was working the business, in a crisis you’ll keep going down the same path. The old adage applies: “If you keep doing the same thing expecting different results is the definition of insanity.” It reminds me of my golf swing. I’m in a bunker and I keep trying to play the same shot out. Five shots later, I think, “Well, maybe I need to put the golf club a little wider in my stance…” And the ball comes out six shots later. That’s my definition of insanity! Working on the business is so important. Looking down at it and looking at the trends rather than just being “in” the business doing what we’ve always done.
The fourth thing in a crisis I’ve actually wrote about. It’s accepting the discomfort of not knowing. It’s a little like going to the doctor and, after a long wait, they finally manage to tell you what’s wrong with you and prescribe something. You walk out feeling so much better. Nothing has changed physically since you walked in and out, except for what’s going on between the ears. You suddenly know what the issue is and you’re dealing with it. It’s the same with accepting the discomfort of not knowing. I think it was the CEO of Microsoft who said, “We need to shift from knowing it all to learning it all.” Now, that’s a big shift in the way we’ve been doing things. Leaders don’t have all the answers. That’s why they have a team. It’s okay not to know where we’re going in a crisis, but let’s make sure we’re learning how to deal with it.
One of the fifth areas I’ve seen, at least with my clients, they get involved in self-absorption. Suddenly it’s all about them. “How did all this happen? What did I do to deserve this?” They don’t have anybody to share things with inside the company. This is where mastermind groups have been very successful during the pandemic because they’ve been able to share stuff that they wouldn’t have been able to share with other people about their business. That’s been a huge benefit. Finding partners who understand and share how they do it really helps a lot.
Sixth, plan for the worst and hope for the best. Again, that’s a very trite saying when you hear it, but what does it really mean? What I’ve been doing, and it’s been very successful, is scenario planning. What’s the worst scenario that could happen to your business versus where we are now? What could we hope for the best? Once you kind of know the worst, it’s a bit more palatable. Also, it means, “Is that what would really happen? No, there are lots of other things we could do.” I’ve been scenario planning with columns of “worst, better, best.” What do we need to do to accomplish the best versus avoiding the worst scenario? Planning for the worst but hoping for the best is not hoping anymore. It’s either plan for the worst or plan for the best. I think that’s helped a lot during the crisis to get people to where they need to be.
Those are the six things that are a slight shift from where we started and moved to the opposite side of the coin.
Ruhland
A very important shift. What you’ve effectively done, too, in planning for the worst and planning for the best, it seems to me, is that you’re framing that ambiguity. You’re giving it some definition that adds a layer of control, if not comfort.
Beaumont
I agree. By the way, when you think about it, those six should be rolled into the others we’ve been talking about. They’re as good in a pandemic or not. Smart leaders have discovered things. Let’s be honest, the pandemic has actually benefited a lot of businesses and a lot of leaders. They learned things that they hadn’t even thought about before. Now, I don’t have to travel two hours to see that guy for the first meeting. I can catch up on a Zoom for thirty and if it’s worth it, then we’ll get together. That’s just one small thing. If you’ve got geographic issues with your team, rather than flying them all the time, everybody is on Zoom, we can have a Zoom meeting. We learned that we can actually condense what we had as one-day physical meetings. Its very difficult to do an all-day virtual meeting. Just think about it. What I’ve done is to condense them into half days virtually, with lots of breaks. Believe it or not, we were just as productive in those half days than we were in a full day. I think we’ve learned a lot about how to be more efficient, how to be smart about things, and in a funny sort of way, the teams have come together more virtually. There’s a funny story about my mother-in-law going to an event just before July Fourth. It’s the first time they’ve really been out to meet friends. I said, when they came back to the house, “How did it go?” She said, “Oh, incredible! I was even hugging people I don’t like!” That just goes to show what we’ve realized we’ve missed and hopefully won’t forget.