“Having carried out interventions in over 150 Fortune 500 companies, in 23 different countries, I know that leadership can be developed and that this can transform organisations. However, it is most effective when this work is aligned with organisational change that gets the culture and the leadership supporting strategy execution.”
A while ago I read an interesting book by Robin Dunbar in which he postulates a maximum number of people with whom one can maintain a stable relationship. Dunbar’s number put’s that figure at around 150.
According to Dunbar human beings are physiologically limited to this amount of relationships, no matter if we are talking about people living in New York City or some mining town in Western Australia.
I recently delivered a leadership programme in Stockholm in which we had people from fourteen different countries. Almost all of them had to manage what we call “Remote Teams” in which the members are spread all over the globe. We did an activity that required the participants to analyse deeply what really worked for them when it came to building these teams. The results were interesting.
Again and again the participants shared stories about how projects went off track even though they had spent time on getting clarity around the aspects that they believed were essential to making these teams work, like for example:
And yet, the teams didn’t seem to function well and, as a result, the work suffered. The fact that the teams were remote teams, meaning that people weren’t with each other every day, plus the fact team members also had to serve on other teams, didn’t help, but these two factors were not the main cause of problems. The one thing that again and again managers had failed to invest enough time on was on building trust. Three important things to do if you want to build trust are:
There are tools available to help managers work with their teams on these three things and yet most managers underestimate their importance and thus pay the price. Perhaps this is one of the differences between managers and leaders, leaders intrinsically understand the importance of building trust, they know that trust is the oil that makes the team engine work. It may not feel comfortable for managers to put these things on the table, to generate meaningful conversations between team members around these themes, it is not as concrete or as rational as, for example, setting objectives, but it is what builds trust, and teams that have trust go far.
I recently worked in Singapore making it the 20th country in which I have delivered Leadership development programmes. But you don’t have to go to another country in order to manage cultural differences for in some of the courses for Electrolux that we have delivered in Stockholm, we have groups of 24 participants that were made up of some 16 different nationalities.
There are those that say that in certain cultures you can’t deliver a leadership programme that requires people to open up and work with the emotional aspects of leadership. If this were true then we have a real problem because I don’t believe that you can build true commitment to a project, a team or indeed to a whole organization unless you touch people emotionally. This is because that commitment is partly build on trust and trust is partly built on emotions. Fortunately I have found that you can put emotions on the table, right across all cultures, however the way you do so may be different.
The day Steve Jobs died I sent a mail to my old business partner Tim O’Connor who had introduced me to the world of Macs way back in 1991 when we started our company. I had only been using a computer for one year while doing a Masters and had basically been using it as a typewriter never feeling comfortable with this PC that I was forced to use and never really understood. And so when I got my first Mac I was basically a beginner and yet I took to it like a duck to water.
Antonio Caño, correspondent for El País in Washington, recently wrote that a client of Apple quickly becomes a militant of Apple. There is great truth in this for there is something about the philosophy behind the Mac that you identify with quickly. Perhaps this was specially true for those of us, like Steve Jobs himself, who grew up in the 1960’s because against the world of the serious, grey, process driven and practical PCs the Macs represented an almost hippie like view of the world, more intuitive, arty, fun and daring to be different. Right from the start there was something intrinsically human about the Mac that for me was instantly attractive. But it was also efficient, basically introducing nearly all the features that made computers much easier to work with.
I recently received some feedback about certain aspects of and intervention I did for a client. My client basically told me that there was a part of the session that wasn’t achieving the reaction they were looking for and so they asked me to take a look at it and to see if I couldn’t make some changes. Thinking back to this incident the most interesting aspect wasn’t in fact the feedback in itself but rather my reaction to it and what that means with regards to my ability to truly add value to my clients.
It is true that the feedback wasn’t actually all that representative as only about 12% of the participants had filled out the evaluations, and only some of them expressed doubt about the effectiveness of this particular part of the intervention. My first reaction was to cling to this statistic like a man clinging to a floating object after his ship had just sunk. I also pointed out that what participants like most in a course isn’t necessarily what they will later get the most benefit from. However, although these two observations may well be quite valid, they actually got in the way of me listening to the reasonable concerns of my client and of my trying to do something about them.
A while ago a friend of mine trying to immigrate to her husband’s country had to go through the process proving that her marriage was real, that they indeed had a loving a caring relationship. In other words proving that she and her husband loved each other.
So how do you do that? You can get friends to say that you love each other and you can do all sorts of incredible tricks with photography that puts you with anyone, in any place and in the most romantic poses. But how do you actually prove that you love someone?
This in fact reminds me of a great movie with Jodie Foster and Matthew McConaughey, “Contact”, in which she played a scientist who had entered science having been inspired by her father with whom she had an exceptionally close relationship and who had died when she was very young. McConaughey played a religious minister. The love affair was problematic because she couldn’t understand his faith as there was no empirical proof to confirm the existence of God. In a great scene there was the following exchange:
Jodie Foster: I just can’t believe anything that you can’t prove exists.
McConaughey: Did you love your father?
Foster: Of course I did!
McConaughey: Prove it!
I come up against the same type of thinking in my work when it comes to defending the need to invest in the development of the people who lead the company. The bean counters always want you to give hard data that proves that a better quality of leadership has a positive impact on the bottom line. Well, you know what? I can’t. Some consultancy companies invest time and money in creating models that prove the ROI (Return on Investment) for training. But with so many variables that could have a positive impact on improved business results how could you actually prove that it was the training? In reality, you can’t and it is better to accept it.
On the other hand, how many of the greatest business decisions that led to a quantum leap in the bottom line could have taken place if the people who took them had to provide empirical evidence that they were going to work? Not many, I would say.
Sometimes, many times, you just need to take a leap of faith, based on good sense, but a leap of faith all the same. And that’s good business!
Yesterday in a conversation with my friend and Internet Guru, Miguel Lucas, he told me about an interesting questionnaire that looks to identify your general strengths so that you can build on those. As the creator of the questionnaire Tom Rath argues, identifying your strengths and building on those is a far more likely to bring you more benefits than identifying your flaws and invest your precious time in improving them.
This reminds me of what Peter Drucker used to say to his clients, telling them that they basically had two choices, either they work on improving what they had identified as their weaknesses and in this case with years of work they might arrive one day at being mediocre, or they could focus on improving at what they knew they were good at and work at that, an effort that might perhaps lead them to be world beaters.
Another example of this approach is Isabel Myers who worked tirelessly for forty years to build a questionnaire based on Carl Jung’s theory of type with the idea of helping people to know what their natural preferences were so that they could choose jobs that were in line with them, probably leading to more satisfying careers and a happier life.
With the financial crisis and in a globalized world, managing is becoming exponentially more complicated. In my experience the great majority of managers feel more comfortable making a decision when they have a lot of solid data to back them up. But today, getting that data is becoming harder and harder.
On the CNN web page today there is a great article about the success of the Apple stores in which the author points out that ten years ago when Apple announced that it was going to launch a major retail project, all the “experts” said that they were crazy. For an Apple groupie from way back nothing makes me happier than seeing Steve Jobs kick another goal, but the interesting thing about this story is that if they had based their decision on hard data they would never have opened their first shop.
And what a success it has been. Ten years after launching the project they have 317 stores worldwide that boast annual earnings of some $3.2 billion, a figure that represents 13% of Apple’s total sales. Not bad for a crazy idea.
But not only that, Apple get to have more control of the customer’s experience, a real attraction for someone like Steve Jobs, but also good business, and their slick store design has done a lot to further enhance the strength of the brand.
This last week I was away from home, delivering a programme up in Stockholm. Over the last two years my wife and I have managed to reduce the distance through Skype that allows us to see each other while we talk. But with my baby girls they weren’t able to recognize their daddy even though I was right in front of them.
All that changed last week when for the first time in their 15 month life they could see me and realize who it was on the scene in from of them. Their waving and blowing kisses made the miles that separate us just melt away and warmed their old Dad’s heart. There was now real interaction.
Many of my clients have to lead in really quite difficult circumstances having to manage teams whose members are scattered right across the globe, different time zones, different languages and different cultures. Getting them all together for physical contact is both complicated and expensive, although this should happen at least once a year. Telephone calls and emails are efficient and fast and yet somehow cold and a potential minefield for misunderstanding. [Read more →]
Following the operations carried out this last week in Libya by the coalition and the avalanche of criticism they are receiving I started to think about just how easy it is to criticise. With respect to the coalition what we have heard are things like:
“Only a great professional in Human Resources and an accomplished cook like Douglas is capable of showing us the way in such an effective manner, creating an experience that is also pleasurable and fun”
Francisco Román CEO Vodafone Spain
Sydney
Douglas McEncroe Group,
Level 14, Tower 2,
101 Grafton street,
Bondi Junction, NSW 2022
Australia
Sydney: 0477 439 155
© 2025 [ENGLISH] Douglas McEncroe
