Leadership BITES

David Pendleton, Professor of Leadership, Henley Business School

December 30, 2020 Guy Bloom Season 1 Episode 36
Leadership BITES
David Pendleton, Professor of Leadership, Henley Business School
Show Notes Transcript

Professor David Pendleton is a Professor in Leadership at Henley Business School, where he works extensively in executive education.

David completed a doctorate in psychology at Oxford University and devoted the first half of his career to research and teaching in doctor-patient communication.

David is also a business psychologist, educator, consultant and author. He has published extensively on medical communication in healthcare and on organisational leadership. His most recent book, authored with Professor Adrian Furnham of UCL and Jon Cowell of Said Busness School, University of Oxford, is titled 'Leadership: No More Heroes' and is in its third edition (published by Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2020). He is currently writing a new book for leaders which is a novel approach to work-life balance and suggests a means for evaluating the impact of work to maximise its benefits.

David is a member of the Trustee Board of the Royal College of General Practitioners and is an Associate Fellow of the Said Business School at Oxford University and Green Templeton College Oxford.


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you have you noticed that i've got a light shining out of my head it's in my bed i actually thought that was just your natural aura well it is there's no electricity there no that's what i thought he's actually in a dark room but just he's he's his natural incandescent style it's just he's coming through so listen david um it is absolutely uh well we'll go into character now you say as uh as they say but uh it is absolutely fantastic to have you on this episode of leadership bites welcome pleasure nice to be with you i'm glad you said that and you haven't come on the wrong call so that's always a good start so listen david i've done a little intro um in on the podcast which i always do just to set the scene um but for those who are watching on video they won't have got that so it's really great just to get a sense of uh who you are what you do and what you focus on be lovely to hear that sure where would you like me to start guy i'm happy to i'm happy to be as open i think just the the job that you have now the effort the the roles that you inhabit today uh and then we'll go back into the past but just right now that's so much the the essence of the roles that you inhabit and and the the organizations that you work with fine i i i i have to start with with a couple of thoughts though if i may that the last time someone gave me a really big build up on stage and i was thinking whoever this person is coming to speak next it'll be fantastic i can't wait i got my notepad out to take notes i turned out it was me it was really disappointing and and my my great friend adrian fernando who's one of my co-authors he always says you know he said david and i and i uh are called gurus but only by people who can't spell charlatan you know so so i thought it's crestfallen at that point of deprecation goes a long way[Laughter] um yeah okay um i'm a psychologist my background i've spent uh almost an entire career operating as a business psychologist um applying psychology initially to the world of education and then the world of medicine through the medium of communication and then into leadership for about the last two decades i'm now professor in leadership at haley business school and also an associate fellow at oxford as well boom that's that's fantastic just there so that's why i reached out to you uh for the roles that you inhabit and and that background um so i often say on these things that to hear somebody's journey to the position that they inhabit is a massive part of why i might listen to somebody because they you know they bring that experience and that insight through their own experiences so you know we could all kind of offer our stories but it'd be great just to have that journey of you know i was i was i was born in a forest and uh but i made my way but however you got to where you are today um and whatever you're willing to offer out within that context uh before i ask you other questions around it it'd be lovely to hear that yeah is it it's interesting you know you put me in mind of that that sort of slightly tearful uh celebration that lewis hamilton had on winning his seventh world championship so they're going to tell people that they can make it in a sense in a sense in a much lesser version of it that that's my story i was born into a into a home in which no one had been to university uh it was a very um simple straightforward home decent people love you know love loving parents and all of that but no one had really had the benefit of much education and yet my my folks and i'm an only child my folks really fundamentally believed in education they somehow thought that that was a a route to success um and and so i had this sort of image of my parents you know on this little desert island finding a rowing boat called education and they put me in it and they kind of push me out to see and wave from the shore you know because they didn't know where the hell this thing was going to go um but everything happened as a consequence of you know the kind of breakthroughs in their life the 11 plus kind of grammar school getting to university getting a degree you know doing a bit of work getting a doctorate all of that um and and i once asked my mom bless her she's now long dead but um i once asked her you know can i my only child i said mom you know all the things i've done you know what are you proudest of and she said when you passed your 11 plus and and that was i think the last time she really fully understood what i'd done uh because the world that that sent me to was a world that my mum didn't know anything about and my dad didn't know much about it either but but they sort of believed it was good believed it was okay and i it all would be well so i i went to um the local university went to nottingham university uh i was raised raised in nottingham uh worked for a few years got a degree in psychology uh worked for a few years then went to oxford to be my doctorate where uh i met my wife and wife took off in a glorious way met my wife wow i said i get i get it all right okay wow kids you know you could imagine a complete mess though yes exactly yes my kids are another story it's like a hairdresser with bad hair so from um from doing a doctorate and uh moving on into that space what were the stepping stones to the roles that you inhabit now um so having finished uh actually if i just go before oxford i thought i wanted to be an academic uh i decided quite quickly that i didn't want to be an academic i wanted to do something more applied i wanted to do something with the psychology rather than just sort of perpetuate the cycle of teaching it so um i went to oxford uh to do a doctorate on doctor patient communication because i was really interested in medical care and how we could make a contribution to doctors effectiveness with their patients and so having done that doctorate i started even whilst doing it to do some part-time work with two organizations one was the oxford regional health authority and the other was their vocational training scheme in general practice um and the other was the royal college of general practitioners and both of them encouraged me uh a guy called john hazler kind of a very senior medic opened the doors and i i got access to do the research and he uh he really kind of sponsored and championed me but through both organizations and so i was able to put together a job applying what i'd done in my doctorate which was all about general practitioners communicating with their patients we were able to build courses and ultimately write books and become known for uh an approach to teaching and learning effective communication in in healthcare and having done that for a number of years i ended up in a place called the king's fund college which was a management school for the health service it doesn't exist anymore uh but it's a rather an anachronism then when king edward vii was was building the queen victoria's diamond jubilee appeal he created a fund of money uh in the bank of england for the london hospitals which of course was rendered redundant when the nhs came along in 48. so uh what do you do with this big bottom money you can't you can't just give it away uh because it's there for a specific reason um and so they built the king's phone college which was a management school for the health service at the time and a professional development centre as well so i i worked with them and taught managerial psychology in the context of trained nhs managers and then having done that for a while i got recruited into um a business psychology consultancy in in bristol and after a couple of comings and leavings and joining and leaving um i ended up building with my wife our own consulting company called the educate consulting group and i left that five years ago ironically i wasn't going to be an academic to become a professor at heavenly business school and that stepping stone into leadership is that um is that an obvious step from what you were doing before or what what is that growth that gave you that credibility in that space yeah it's interesting isn't it um i i used to work with a guy called lori thomas at brunel university who started out as a production engineer and ended up as a psychologist and he said it's because he noticed that that an awful lot of production engineering problems came down to people and so he needed to do something to understand the people bit better and he ended up as a professor of psychology um for me it was a bit similar in the sense that i what i noticed was that um an awful lot of uh communication issues were about the context in which the communication was was happening and if you wanted to influence that context you probably had to get into at least management and ideally leadership because that's what creates the context or fashions the contexts in which people work and so in a sense it wasn't uh it wasn't a million miles away uh one wasn't a million miles away from the other it was a kind of a natural growth or there was a there was an element of the knights move in it you know sort of one up and one across okay so that for me for you then that that interest was i have to get to almost a source space to have an impact because the the river starts there almost kind of yeah it always seems to me that that that there are lots of distinctions made between leadership and management and i don't use use them much because i think you always need both but but the one that i am i am most impressed by is that is that managers tend to sort of work within the context they're given and leaders try to change it and i think that that idea took me to if we want to do something about the effectiveness of any organization or professional group you've probably got to touch leadership issues at some point so i so i found myself naturally graduating particularly working with um develop developing nhs managers you know if you're going to make try and make a difference the nhs you have to get into this of leadership so your daily focus now if you if you left that sort of space and you've gone into um the ronald henley etc um are you running programs are you doing one-to-one work are you working with organizational teams what what's your your day look like in essence well i i i don't work full-time uh at henley i also do uh some consulting um although i'm trying not to work full-time anymore right so i i work at all three levels i work at the individual level the team level and the organizational level uh but when i'm working the organizational level i'm usually working with the top team so you could see that as a team intervention if you like because of course what i'm what i've realized is that in a sense organizations are simply aggregations of people with a business model and and so what i'm trying to do is to influence the human elements of that um at henley i focus on executive education um i i asked when when being interviewed for the job uh i said look i i really don't want to teach students i'm nothing against students i was one myself but but i want to work with those people for whom there's a short and direct connection between what they learn one day and what they can apply the next and so i i i'm um i'm happy to say that henley have given me the opportunity of focusing entirely on executive education so i don't do i don't teach on degree programs unless i can help it i teach short intensive exec programs um sometimes i'm the course director sometimes i'm a contributor really around three three major issues one is leadership the second is psychology in leadership and usually that focuses on personality and the third is about resilience it's about sort of coping with pressure so for you the when we say executive education it's not the how to read a profit and loss tracker or something along those lines it's very much in that human dynamic and that understanding of self to understand others yeah um that's my contribution that exec covers all of those things about how to read a spreadsheet all of that you know finance for non-financial managers that all of that is part of executive education in the business school but you know i'm a psychologist by background so not surprisingly they will mean you need a dane psychologist to talk a bit about people and have you noticed any change in i mean let me let me restart my question um everything has momentum if we go back to you know the the leader is the the hero of the piece who you know comes and and controls and dictates and all the way through to now we have this very kind of um integrated approach to leadership about you know you have to work through others etc so i think things have their momentum and i'm always intrigued by the balance between that the autocratic look there are times when you you have to tell people and and also when people want to be told look let's let's not have a debate on this one boss would you just say what's what so we've got clarity all the way through to that you know the shared purpose is giving people boundaries allowing them to take ownership and on that balance between command and control and giving people space in place and have you over your period of being in this place have you felt that difference do you see it as it's a little bit um sometimes it's a little bit on trend or no i'm actually feeling that people want to operate in a different way is that anything that you kind of see notes factor in i'm smiling because although we didn't prepare this i just happened to have next to me an article not that i wrote but that debra ancona at mit wrote and i'm just going to read you the first two sentences nobody has really recommended command and control leadership for a long time but no fully formed alternative has emerged either i thought that was interesting and relevant but but uh so i'm trying to work on that fully formed alternative um you talk about momentum the i'm uh i'm just literally any day now the third edition of my leadership book is going to come out and we've changed the subtitle it used to be called leadership uh all you need to know but it's really tough to make that case when you're writing the third edition so would you meet it now again even more but um so the subtitles changed we've called it leadership no more heroes okay so it's again relevant to your question um and um and the reason is is really two-fold um one is that the you've talked about momentum the momentum on how leadership has developed and changed through the 20th century into the 21st century is a very simple process to describe it's what i would call simply democratization at the start of the 20th century and probably for time immemorial before then leaders were the pinnacle of authority who simply said what had to be done and if they were enlightened they tried to be kind so that it became kind of paternalistic and it usually was men so i won't say parental um what's happened over time is that around the middle of the 20th century as recently as that the word vision emerged in in research and and talking and writing about about leadership you didn't need vision if you're in total authority if you are the boss and you say guy just bloody do this you know i don't need a vision you just need to have clear instructions you have to go off and do it and ideally touch yours and mind non-existent forelocks you know in the process and so what we've what we've seen in the middle of the 20th century is it's a switch from push-based leadership to pull so so if i can describe a vision which is worth trying to achieve then it pulls us both towards that vision by the end of the 20th century we were into much more partnership-based leadership and in the 21st century the approach to leadership that i'm trying to put together is very much team-based leadership so what i'm trying to say so firstly there's a there's a momentum towards democratization so shared leadership models are the ones that we have to sort of uh go to first most of the time i'm going to come back to this do you need authority and you do from time to time but um the other thing i want to say is that my colleagues and i uh business psychologists uh we have assessed particularly the group that i created with my wife we assessed probably between us literally thousands of leaders all over the world in every walk of life in the charity sector public sector private sector commercial organizations not for profit the whole lot the whole gamut we never found one who was world-class in all aspects of leadership not one anywhere and we've assessed you know knights of the realm people you know knighted for this um and we've met some incredibly impressive leaders but not one of them was complete in all aspects of leadership none of them were perfect none of them were perfect but also you know if we we we used a five-point scale in rating people across all the leadership tasks that we that we that we assessed when we assessed eight of them uh derived from the primary colors model that i'm known for created um but we didn't even find anyone who scored a five which which is not perfection you know it's just it's just being right at the top end of the distribution but so we didn't find one person who was complete and so the puzzle is how to get complete leadership from incomplete leaders uh and of course the answer to that is through working with complementary differences so it doesn't matter that i'm not very good at planning and organizing and by the way i'm not provided i've got the person next to me who really is and from time to time even if i'm the ceo and i was of my consulting company i needed other people to organize me because otherwise i sort of tended towards chaos and brownian motion so the jigsaw pieces make the make the picture right it's exactly that it's which what's the shape of your jigsaw puzzle piece what are you really good at and what do you need other people around you to complete you um and if you can get that sorted out there's some chance that we can have really impressive complete leadership but not on our own so this is where i think it gets quite fascinating because as a consultant i spend my life going into organizations at generally a senior level doing one-to-one coaching i do the team effectiveness and i also do those larger scale transformational change projects when i have my team that do that and so i'm not as quite as seasoned as yourself so uh in in terms of just uh my experience but so still probably two decades worth of experience and what i what i get is this sense that there is i don't know if i'm going to use the word excellence but there are people that are yeah you know who are excellent at their job and as you say they're not the perfect human being but you know they have a a bloody good executive assistant for example who is actually paid an absolute fortune because that individual needs somebody as you say you know to schedule them because they recognize you know that that is not my my space of expertise so they do have the seniority and the capacity to build a support mechanism around them for them to be for them to be great but then what i kind of notice is that there's two or three factors going on there are those examples of excellence and then if what you have is people that due to the nature of the environment have become quite senior in their slipstream so they've been there a long time they understand how the politic works they're very good at saying things i wouldn't say in a machiavellian way the right way but they know what wants to be heard and they know how to present it correctly so you know etc so they become very senior and yet they haven't really developed themselves outside of their their entity and what i notice is dependent on that sort of nature of hierarchy within an organization senior teams have this capacity to say we want the car park painted blue be great if you could get the car park painted blue that goes down and very often becomes they want the car part painted blue which goes down and says right we've got to get the carpet painted boot by this afternoon and there is this kind of the weight of seniority that you know almost that will somebody please rig me of this damnit priest i.e somebody said something and at a very senior level well i noticed one of the big disconnects is is their perception of the weight of their words because they live in quite a strong bubble of wanting to do the right thing they're full of integrity they're very vision led they want to have a culture that they can be proud of they're not the good people trying to do good things and yet they are there's a disconnect between their understanding sometimes of what then happens when their thoughts leave the room and the impetus that gets or the uh aggression that can be attached to a request you know well i want it by this afternoon for them you know and i just wonder how the the learning that you offer or how maybe you overcome or even consider it's not almost sometimes what they're thinking and doing it's the people below them because very often at a senior level they are of the right stuff they are good people but they lose that disconnection i i sense between that con that control they have over the dynamic of what they're being presented upwards as to the way things are so there's a long sort of statement from it there but i'm trying to get across a big a big thing i think you're getting really into the issue of culture yes um i i think that what happens is that um the people at the top end of the organization one of their jobs is to make sure that the culture in the organization fits the the purpose and direction that they're trying to take the organization in um if you um you know smile a lot but are really still quite authoritarian you know you sort of want things done by friday at three o'clock sort of thing and don't mind pointing that out um the culture becomes either rebellious and the organization fails all the culture becomes compliant and people kind of do not only as they're told but as they believe they're being told even if they're not you know they sort of so you can build a compliance culture like that but the most impressive leaders i've come across are people who try to build a culture in which they realize they're incomplete they realize that let's just deal with the top team for the moment i'm not worried about the lower levels yet but if i know well you probably know that i i work with this three-domain model of leadership which is about the strategic the operational on the interpersonal domains and that's why it's hard it's hard because it's hard to be equally good in all three areas and there are some good reasons why that is but let's not go into those now but if you're let's say naturally a strategist a natural natural strategic thinker and some people are and they have a slightly torrid time when they're in junior levels because they're always trying to think about the future and the bigger picture and all of that but they have to learn to do the kind of more anodyne things to get to those opportunities so let's say you're a natural strategic thinker the problem you've got is that you need the operational specialists and the interpersonal specialists to make your thinking complete not to come up with better strategic ideas but when it comes to feasibility if we've got strategic options to choose between and i'm i'm trying to figure out you know is it better to go that way that way or that way you need to talk to an operational specialist quite rapidly because they will talk to you about feasibility they'll talk to you about how to do the things that you'd like to do and the things that which the which the operation which the organization as a whole is more able to do more easily and the interpersonal specialist will tell you what are people most likely to buy into what are they ready for what will they get behind what will they resist uh because they'll be more in touch with those things because that's where their minds are that's where their mindset is as well so so what i think about is um you need to understand that as you get more senior you don't need to become a strategist but you do need to be a part of the strategy conversation but you do it from where you are so if you're an operator you have you have the operational part of the strategy conversation if you're an interpersonal specialist you have the interpersonal part and the culture or the organizational part of the strategy conversation but the strategists who are smart understand that they need those two contributions they don't look to the interpersonal or operational people necessarily to come up with the blue sky thinking that's what the strategists tend to do but they do need reality checks and that will come up in two of two different kinds and from two different places now take the same metaphor i've got a big jigsaw puzzle piece the top team also has a perspective on what the organization needs to do it needs it's got a sense of direction where they're trying to lead the organization but everyone else in the organization probably are much closer to the customers they're much closer to the everyday realities that that you're that when you're into that sort of rarified atmosphere and i too have sat around a 4100 top top team table as in the hr role uh two years seconded from my consultancy um it gets a bit rarified you know you can get you can lose touch with what's happening with everybody else but if you if you build the kind of culture in which you genuinely believe that you need other people's perspectives uh to inform you then and if you're trying to build an innovative culture as well you've got to be enabling as leaders and enabling starts with enabling the conversation so so if you know you're four levels below me in the organization but you think i'm being a real plonker and going in the wrong direction you've got to feel that you can tap me on the shoulder and say david can i just have two minutes of your time and i've got to say usually yes yes and that's i think the thing i see is the pressure of commercial imperatives driving at plus i think probably the shift with um communication technology uh so uh whatsapp's um you know email you know i've got this little phrase which is you know it used to be that people had to wait for you to return to work before they could have a conversation with you yes and that's now not not the sense so and there's something now about there is you know the promise of technology was it would make life easier the reality is it's really sped everything up so it's the same expectation but probably it's a higher level of expectation so we can move faster and it's almost a sense for me that you know that um feeling of running down a hill and if you stop you'll fall over and i get this increased sense of momentum in organizations with greater expected timelines that means you get good people who fundamentally believe in teams trust giving people space etc but because of the weight of the anxiety that they sit with the biggest problem they have is how they give people the space that they had probably when they came up and one person said to me says i realize i'm robbing people of their experiences is because when i was younger if it went wrong you had a week to put it right now you've got 30 minutes yeah but now every bugger knows about it within the hour and everybody wants an answer so i now fear might be the wrong word he said i'm not sitting there in the cupboard nor in on my nails but i'm carrying this anxiety of there is very little buffer on on anything and therefore he says i don't think i'm autocratic but my expectation is highly autocratic well what you're saying i think makes great sense what you're saying is i'm not autocratic but i might be anxious and what that makes me is potentially impulsive um and and also uh i think that there are very few senior people who if you think about the job they held before they became you know sitting around the top table the job they held before that they probably are still amazingly skilled at you know and the person who's just just been promoted into that job still that the top guy probably can do that job better than they can but but i think that they're therefore your values your beliefs they really matter here so the first thing i'd say but let me say something about about anxiety first don't put extraordinarily anxious people into really senior jobs they will make life torrid for themselves and for others at least don't do it without equipping them to cope you know coping mechanisms are exist there are ways you can learn to cope with anxiety and so so let's make sure that we're equipping even the chief exec to handle the pressures that he or she faces and be very very careful if you know you're going to put an extraordinarily anxious person into a top job unless they are extremely intelligent and also extremely kind of warm and accommodating you're asking for trouble but the second thing i would say is so let's catch me catch me having had too much to drink i'll still believe these things you know one people at the top end of organizations should audit their diaries from time to time and they should ask themselves what proportion of my time have i spent doing the things that only i can do they need to focus on the things that only they can do yeah and so you know the where that takes you is into a sort of counterintuitive space that work should always be done by the person least well qualified to do it provided they can do it you know in other words you you you're you're looking for to keep as much at the right level in the organization and don't let things keep getting sucked up to the to the top end of the organization because then the the the limiting factor to growth becomes the top team which is an irony because they're probably some of your most able people in any organization but but if you keep falling for the seduction that oh they need me to rescue this that and the other i've got to go back to two jobs and you know intervene over here it firstly it is a seduction it's an ego seduction but secondly it's completely counterproductive if you spend you know much more than about half a percent of your time doing that you are robbing people as you say of their development opportunities but also you're wasting your valuable time focus on the things that only you can do so i really buy into that people who have that um anxiety and can hold or carry that human reaction to the expectations that are put on on them there's also something else that i notice and it'd be great to get your thoughts on it which is just expectation so uh i'm not anxious i just have high expectation because i'm driven and focused and i might be driven by the vision of creating a great organization or might be driven by the earn out with this private equity company you know i mean there are different factors going on that hey but i'm highly motivated highly driven i buy into the people agenda you can only achieve things through your workplace and all through your people and then what i notice is that as society's commercial angst chefs covert would be a classic you know if i lose my job the market's really tough out there right so that you know that everybody nobody ever talks about maslow anymore but i go well you know the reality is you know that that hygiene factor of you know putting a roof over my head and those that i love that's that's one of the ultimate fear factors that you know people have so the hum the exact the good people they are driving towards a good end and they've got all their chakras aligned and they're they're doing the right thing they're quite acceptable expectation comes down the line and then we have a group of people who dependent you know where they are on the distribution curve of house paid off just got a new mortgage new kid on the way whatever it is and depending on what's going on in the world i sense have a greater level of fear around being seen to be valuable and through their own doubts and fears start to serve more than to be of service because they're holding that anxiety and that senior role likes the output and am i and then i think what happens is sometimes you have a culture of fear but not by the intentions of the person at the top and i just wonder what your thoughts are about that as in you if you see it because then how does a good person with high expectation or a good team with good expectations how do they manage almost in some respects what people are doing to themselves but then they become the arbiter of it because they like the output i think um you're talking about collusion here right and it's frequently unintended uh and some many times you know not even noticed until someone calls it out um but i think that does bring me back to culture again because i think that um if i only ever talk to you about my successes i do the thing that the social media do and that is create this belief that everything i does it everything i do is wonderful i never i never failed anything you know every party i ever throw you know is always wonderful and everyone has a fantastic time and i looked fantastic you know i did my hair just right uh if i'm willing to talk to you about my failures as well not again not over egging it but just genuinely saying look you know i got this right i didn't get that right and if if when we're handling feedback you know i said when i did my work in the medical profession i i became known for some feedback rules which just seemed to me to be so simple why would anyone even remark on them but funnily enough the so-called pendleton rules exist and uh not not my intention but they that they do exist and it always starts with good points first what would you do well and that's not about being nice to people it's about being effective in giving feedback i want to know what you did well because many people say we learn from our mistakes you learn a bit from your mistakes you learn far more from your successes far far more so i want to know what did you do well so that you can repeat it and i want to know what you did well not just in some sort of broad brusho well you did it all very well but you know welder but i want to know in detail what did you say what words did you use where were you at the time who did you involve you know how much time did you spend planning i want to really understand the anatomy of a success i want to understand it in great detail then i want to look at something that doesn't work so well i want to do exactly the same job i want to understand you know what words did you use where were you how long how much time did you spend planning that did you involve i want to start to build the picture of a success and i want to build the picture of something that's not gone so well maybe even failed or was suboptimal in some way and i want to deal with them both a bit like the rodeo kipling poem you know and treat those two imposters just the same i want to treat them forensically i want to understand them in great detail because then we can build this culture of saying we either succeed or we learn and that's not just idle words we've got really detailed methods for making sure that one or the other happens now you know if if you're dealing with some gross misconduct of course you don't go down that road you you might just literally instantly fire somebody or you know but but you know 99 times out of 100 you're not dealing with that you're dealing with every day success and failure um and we all experience all of them so the culture needs to be analytical it needs to be understanding it needs to start by being prepared to forgive uh but not to forget but to learn so forgive and analyze so you need to build those cultures so that people can can face the fact that not any individual in any organization is perfect and totally equipped to deal with whatever it is they have to deal with if we can get that idea we will find that we're we're human beings working with other human beings thank goodness for that so when you're doing your work um david how how would people especially on a one-to-one basis how would people experience you are these um because going deep with somebody and having that forensic analysis and that may be not the phrase that you would use per se but uh going beyond the superficial say that um what would somebody expect if they knocked on your metaphorical door and said david i'm a senior individual i'd like to move myself forward you know i'm great here don't know you know can't see the back of my own head all that kind of stuff blah blah what would that intervention look like david i mean it may be different for different people but inherently what's the truth behind that for you well typically i start with a with a full assessment i i i'm talking about a psychological assessment here but what i what i start with so so you know you come to me guy and say look i want to get better at what i do uh we'll talk a little bit about you know why and what does better look like for you and all of all the things that a coach would do but then i tend to take a detour into will you let me kind of run a psychological ruler over you to see i want to i'm ultimately looking for two different kinds of strengths and two different kinds of limitations because they have different implications two different kinds of strengths there are natural strains natural strengths are where you've over time developed a skill set which maps very nicely onto your personality profile in other words you know the the the natural um naturally conscientious person whose profile shows the high level of conscientiousness they've also learned to do project management and and they've learned their their planning skills and they're very organized and they've learned all the tricks of that particular trade that's what i would call a natural skill there's a compatibility between who you are and what you bring anyway and the skill set that you've learned and are trying to deploy now it may be that you've got the attributes you need but you haven't yet mapped the right skills onto it so that would come out as a limitation but it's what i would call a potential strength you've got the attributes you know you're you're a seven foot athlete but you haven't yet discovered basketball okay well if i teach you basketball chances aren't gonna be right you know that's a potential strength you know but there's another kind of strength that people forget as well and it's what i call the fragile strength a lot of people over the course of their careers you know you spent two decades doing what you're doing there'll be some things that you do and you've learned to do to a reasonable level of proficiency but they've never felt quite natural they've never quite become second nature you always have to focus and kind of make yourself do them because you're working against the grain of the attributes that you've had since very very sincere very very little so those are what i call fragile strings now i haven't come to the fourth one yet natural strengths you can work with and hone and might even be able to become world-class at potential strengths are very high yield development activities you can map skills onto your natural attributes quite quickly quite easily as i say remember the seven foot athlete who hasn't discovered basketball let's teach you how to play basketball the fragile strengths i'm afraid you're always going to have to work on because they unless they do become second nature it's always going to feel like effort so you've got to keep those up yeah yeah what about the fourth quadrant in my little two by two it's what i call the resistant limitation some limitations you haven't mastered them and what's more you're not terribly well equipped from a kind of natural attributes point of view and i realized that planning and organizing was that for me it was a resistant limitation i'm moderately conscientious but not hugely so um but the problem is that i'm i'm hugely curious so when i'm trying to discipline myself to do something that anodine is sort of putting a decent project plan together i get distracted and yet one of the reasons that i think i'm reasonably good at coming up with ideas and doing a bit of strategic thinking from time to time is because i am curious about things so if i turn that off i'm afraid that i might be sacrificing a real potential or actual strength for something which is going to be rather low yield frustrating development in an area that i also don't enjoy so what do you do with those so when i so you say what's it like if someone comes to me and says david can you help me get better at what i do i start with a proper assessment i go through um a sequence of topics we talk about look at their current job we look at their aspirations we look at their interests and we look at their domestic circumstances about who's at home what do you want for them how do you handle the boundary between work and home and all of that and then we go right back to early life we look at childhood development experiences education and career to date and that brings us back to the present day so it's a kind of a circular tour around somebody and what am i looking for i'm looking for patterns i'm looking for trends i'm looking for explanations so someone says you know i really work hard and i want to think well okay where did that start when you know what what what feature does that have in in this life story of yours and what you then notice is that some people are trying to spin you a yarn about the things that they're really good at and there's no evidence for it at all you can't see it uh any any reason it should be there you could it's not been mentioned by anyone in their past you know it's not had a feature in any previous jobs and yet you're telling me now that it's true because oh and by the way it's also in the job ad oh that's interesting so so what i'm looking for is not to try and catch people out but to understand them i want to understand them from day one in as much as i can at that point and interestingly that process takes about three to four hours and we write it up takes another three to four hours right so so it's a full day of consulting time to try and understand the person to that extent and then we agree what we're going to work on but but but when it comes to a resistant limitation i try to steer people away from working on that but instead trying to work around it to say who do you need around you to handle that because trying to develop you in that in that area is going to be a low yield frustrating slow progress pulling teeth experience but but let's by all means work on the potential strengths that i'm afraid let's keep up the fragile strength and let's hone your natural strength that's that's how i start does that answer your question yeah yeah that that really helps and in terms of um profiling do you sort of hang your hat on any particular assessments i had uh range sherman on who's the chief science officer for um hogan assessments um just recently and that was just interesting just listening to his perspective on things so yeah did you utilize an external sort of uh system for that that you're comfortable talking about and why you may have selected that actually because it's such a smorgasbord of um you know uh potential offerings in that field i'm fascinated by what people use and why they've selected them the hogan measures are superb they're excellent right um all of them um i don't use the hogan personality inventory i use the neo okay which is a five factor but we also use the hogan motors values and preferences uh index and we also use the the dark side measure the hope and development survey um so we're trying to do what bob hogan talks about look at the bright side the dark side and the inside of personality um but we also use this semi-auto biographical interview as well i like that a lot yeah it's well it really works i mean i i've found it uh a pretty comprehensive set of investigative measures um and what do i use the psychometrics for well you know psychometrics are helpful because particularly the normed ones because often people have beliefs about themselves but they really can't judge how that compares with other people you know so to quote one guy who should remain nameless but it was the most delightful chap uh he was a general counsel of a big organization and he said i always knew it was a bit eccentric but i didn't realize i was that weird you know it's because what he had to feed back to him was that he was right at the end of the distribution on a couple of things that made him almost kind of quirky um and he said he always knew he's a bit a bit different but he didn't realize the extent of it and that's what the normed measures can tell you um and so um those are the measures i use but i am a believer in the five factor model and of course the hogan personality inventory does that interestingly i think that the five factors are more obvious in the neo than they are in the hpi um but i absolutely love what bob and joyce hogan did bless her and jesus i'm um i know i also want to be careful when you bring other people's names up because you know the other person has a different reaction to them it could go either way but i'm a bit of a jordan peterson fan and he talks um so yeah if you're not then that's into that conversation i always think he's going in a point of view that's worth listening to yeah i don't agree with everything he says but then i don't even you know day to day with everything i say you exactly i'm very much in that camp but i think just in terms of his verbal fluency and his absolute commitment to his the craft of his own understanding regardless of what his position is i mean he's you know he's he's got a verbal fluency and a rhetoric that people have obviously connected to greatly he's a five factor man he's like anything else he's kind of a waste of space and i don't see the value of it you know the the truth of the matter is that literally you know personality comes from the greek word persona meaning the mask as you know that the greek actors used to bring onto the stage to represent a different character and literally since ancient greece people have been trying to figure out what personality is about well personality theory has been all over the place for generations i suppose it became kind of scientific in the early 20th century i guess i guess ray cattell and some of the statistical models you know helped with that uh and through i think in the uk and all of that but the the truth is that um people speaking about leadership um i i started into the field of leadership literally at the turn of the millennium around 2000 and people when they talked about leadership would would stand up and proclaim that there are no personality correlates of good leadership that you know they just don't exist and that's because of people like stockholm and others who came up with these kind of endless lists of personal qualities um and i still remember uh keith grint running a session at oxford once in which he said tell me the attributes you need to be a really effective leader and people tentatively offered one or two things you know and by the end of it he'd got about 50 attributes on the board and so he said so do you think anyone's got all those then and of course it was clear this is a council of perfection and you're all over the place now all of that changed around 2002 2004 with two really important papers timothy judge came up in 2002 and said hey if you if you get really clear about the leadership questions you're asking and it's and they're only two who gets a chance to become a leader it's called emergent leadership and how effective are they are they when they get there that's leadership effectiveness so those are the two questions we're trying to predict and let's look at the five factor model of personality which had just come out about a decade earlier i guess i'm yeah i think i'm roughly right once you focus on just a few aspects of personality and only two questions to do with leadership what timothy judge demonstrated was you actually can find personality correlates of leadership and uh bob hogan and colleagues uh confirmed that in 2004. so just a few years after i got into the field of leadership a couple of really good psychologists said let's focus on the five factor model and as far as i can see it's the one which seems to have the best empirical evidence base underneath it there's a great consensus from most personality theorists that those five factors seem to work and what's more you get in my field of leadership you get interesting predictive validity as well what could be better than that you know i think that's it's almost the point of you know if you chase too many rabbits you won't catch any of them i'm sure of course there are other contributing factors but there just has to come a point where you have to put your energy into what you what you can handle because i think the the full buffet of well it'd be almost like saying what makes a good parent and then you list all the things on a flip chart and say good luck because it's overwhelming you know all the things that you could put up there so actually you have to say probably you know what are the five or six things that if you did those right your kid will actually not end up as a lunatic as a contributor to society and just concentrate on those five you know so i think those kind of it comes to that capacity of the human being to be able to handle especially when it comes to developmental things that people have a day job they're not sitting there like i or you might be which is giving the vastness of thought that we do from nine till five to these topics so i've gotta run a business and i've got to try and develop myself and that's why some of the psychometrics um it's like mars bridge for example which i'm i'm a great fan of i think it works perfectly well but if you try to bring a team into learning mars briggs and the cir the 16 variables and already they're like out i mean they understand it at the moment they understand it in the moment but trying to keep that flow going because there's just too much and it becomes too there's good empirical evidence that diversity in a team makes the team is more likely to make the team more effective now the question is what do we mean by diversity in that context whenever we say diversity people think race and gender but what they're forgetting is psychological diversity um now i i have nothing against trying to get the race and gender distribution to be fairer than it is at the moment um for me the principal motivation around that is social justice um if you want a team to be effective um however you you've got to bring in the psychological diversity yes so and i i still remember having put a number of uh people in an exec program i was running in oxford at the time through a number of psychometric measures uh and i brought out two people and stood them next to me and one was a bright young massively intelligent african guy who was black and the other was a bit like me a sort of pasty faced basically faced caucasian and i stood next to him and we started a conversation about diversity and what i did to try and make the the the um[Music] discussion in a sense more interesting was that we talked about the obvious characteristics first um but then i talked about um the psychological uh diversity issue what it turned out was that the the pasty-faced other caucasian bloke a bit like me turned out to be my psychological opposite and the the african guy turned out to be psychologically almost my twin so then we had a rather more complex conversation about what diversity means in that case and of course what i'm saying is look for all sorts of reasons we want to encourage cultural diversity because that will also bring other things along with it and not not least a sense of equity in organizations and in in society but also we want to have the psychological diversity as well so what i'm saying is don't don't stop short on the diversity agenda by going just to the culture and gender ones that's really important but please don't forget the psychological diversity as well um and and that's you only kind of get at that by getting under the surface at the at the sort of um uh psychological makeup oh i thought you were going to say under the skin there which would have been a perfect kind of metaphor for actually those those psychological diversities actually might be actually what an interesting thing what are we really talking about and if we made the conversation about you know like we all bleed you know we all bleed red right what are the things that are more true about us than are not and actually what conversations can we have that actually then almost join us rather than highlight the difference i'm fascinated by that yeah but please we always say you know we we all bleed red you know under the surface we share more we you know we're all the same actually that's not true in here under the surface here yeah very very different yes and we want to take that into account and so the other thing i i i try to get but it's shared though isn't it what i mean by that is is your skin color maybe your skin color but your psychological makeup though fundamentally your own is still a shared truth we are we are made up of these variables we are made up of these different psychological kind of preferences or traits or whatever we might want to call them but they but we share the fact that we are that bowl of soup and they all come out different and that is something that we can all recognize maybe maybe that's how i'm seeing it well i i i personally believe that it it might be uh as important for us to to shift our attitudes on that a bit by saying you know underneath most human endeavor there are normal distributions you know and and and exactly so analytically that's right but it does seem to me that you know just as there are tall people fat and thin people you know there are there are people who in leadership terms as i to come back to the sort of three domains there are those who naturally gravitate to the strategic those who naturally gravitate to the operational those who naturally gravitate to the interpersonal domains and people bring different um strengths to uh any uh leadership endeavor and what i've got to do is put a team together that's complete i've got to make sure that all the the leadership bases are covered um and and therefore uh i need to be um i need to recognize that that kind of diversity cannot be left to chance it's got to be assembled deliberately and the reason is that because the world outsiders is varying all the time and unpredictably it you've got a kind of a leadership team is like a little darwinian system the selection pressures are varying all the time around us and what i've got to make sure is that i've got this rich leadership gene pool as it were so that depending on how that leadership team needs to flex and change so it can do so so if i if i recruit lots of people who are just like me psychologically frankly an awful lot of them are going to be redundant because there's me anyway you know what i've got that base covered when i need people who are not like me now that's very liberating on the one hand because you realize that you don't have to be complete but it's also a challenge on the other because it means i've got to work with people who are not like me ah you mean the people like people i always find like a complete pain at bum yes the chances are those are some of the people you've got to learn to work with because they bring the very attributes that you most need and don't have and the reason that you find them challenging to work with is that they're constantly wanting to go left when you want to go right so tolerance becomes much more psychological well for me it's more than tolerance it's it's need i've got to see myself as incomplete and therefore needy and i've got to put the people around me who meet not just my needs but the needs of the organization for complete leadership so if we are a clock i need that cog i i exactly otherwise the clock well you know um taking the clock analogy you know stopped clock is right twice a day right um so so i i'm um i'm very conscious that if all i ever have is people like me around me then we will i will there'll be some certain leadership tasks that will all absolutely enjoy no end and we'd be really very very good at but wow beside the organization that needs a different kind of leadership contribution because i can't probably stretch to it uh well i can try it and i can fudge and i can you know make it look a bit like i'm doing it but everyone knows that it's not really my natural game so um much better to have people around me now if you if anyone's listening or watching this and thinking that this is all sounding a bit theoretical let me tell you that you know i've worked with uh one chief executive um who stands out for me and i thought he was absolutely brilliant he came peter erskine who ran o2 and transformed it from bt sumnet into o2 he came to oxford uh having sold o2 to telefonica of spain having transformed this organization it was the most impressive story and what he said was i am a very good marketer but i'm not the best strategic thinker so the first person i put around me was a really good strategist and he happened to have may i say someone who uh in his finance director was really really good interpersonally so what he'd done in those top three jobs is there was peter who really was a deliver deliverer deliver man and this is what he he told us uh there was the the strategy director and there was the very interpersonally oriented finance director they had all three leadership domains covered between the three of them and they had other people in that leadership team as well and what's interesting is that the finance director who was the interpersonal specialist was the guy who succeeded peter when peter left but he'd understood this idea of he's really good at certain aspects of leadership world class and he needs other people to be world class elsewhere and that's what he did that's exactly the way he ran his team well listen david i'm i'm becoming super alert to time and um recognizing that um i could keep this conversation going beyond your patience so thank you for for just some of your thinking uh and it's been really nice just for me to offer some of my kind of frames of reference and just to hear your take on on that and your vocabulary around it um it's uh even simple things that you've probably said without thinking just like leadership teams are quite darwinian you know it's a simple phrase but you know yeah it's very true it's it and all these little things going on so i've loved some of the conversation that we've had um so not because i want to stop but but i just feel that i have to it's i'm gonna say david thank you so much for just your time and contribution to this conversation and uh this episode it's it's it's it's been absolutely great to talk to you my pleasure so on that note i'm going to press stop give me one moment you