Observations on leadership - Part 4

A good leader knows her limitations

I remember Phyllis Hampton really well. I worked for Digital Equipment (DEC) in the 1980s and Phyl was my manager for the whole 5 years I was there. I joined DEC from ICI and it was an amazing change. Gone was bureaucracy, gone was hierarchy and gone was stability. DEC’s revenues were $4bn when I joined and over $12bn when I left. Change was the norm. Phyl’s boss was a man called Geoff Beacroft and Phyl had worked for Geoff for years, at Honeywell, at ICL and now at DEC. I remember Phyl saying to me that she did not want Geoff’s job, that she was a good number two. At the tender age of 33 I was flabbergasted. How could you only want to be a number two? It took me a long time to realise that Phyl was showing another quality of a good leader – and she was a good leader. She knew her limitations: she knew what she was good at and that’s what she was happy doing.

A good leader is committed to the cause

I didn’t really know Judith Maltby particularly well. She was an corporate vice president. The corporation in question was an odd entity – like a curate’s egg, good in parts. What it was not particularly good at was picking senior leaders who listened. I used often to think that when you were elevated to the senior ranks you would have your ears cut off. Perhaps the idea was that if you said something enough times it would become a self-fulfilling prophecy – though it would be more likely to be a self-licking ice-cream! Another weak feature of the culture was a tendency for the loudest voice to hold sway – you’re OK if your trumpet plays the loudest. Unfortunately that can disadvantage some people – and they’re often the people that you want to hear from.

One of the things that this corporation was perennially focussed on was account planning. All the big organisations I have worked for have done account plans – they get thought about, written up, sometimes reviewed by people who are too distant to have any useful idea about anything, and then put on a shelf. They get to a point where they’re useless not so much because they’re not used but because they are demanded purely as part of a process. Senior people expect them because ... well, just because. I used to facilitate these account planning sessions from time to time. Generally speaking there would be a senior person who would turn up, sound off and push off. Sometimes she or he would promise to return at some point – but rarely did.

At one such session Judith turned up ... and she stayed the entire time. When we broke for lunch she was back on time. She did not open her laptop or take a call. This was so unusual that I commented on it saying that when she was ready to go to ends of the earth I would go with her. Perhaps that was a rash statement but she showed commitment. And commitment is a really important trait in a leader. It’s no good saying you’re committed – you have to show it and that often requires some degree of sacrifice.