There is an old saying (and some dispute about who coined it first): Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away.
This got me to wondering about leadership. Should leadership be breathtaking or breathless? It seems to me that many managers spend their time trying to be everywhere, support everyone, monitor everything and so forth. This is breathless leadership. Whilst this may give the leader a warm feeling that they are a ‘hands on’ influential leader, the chances are that others will not be as impressed.
I suspect that London Heathrow, which is currently wrapped for Christmas in very sticky snow, is full of breathless leaders right now, all seeking to make something (anything, dammit!) happen and get passengers moving again. This is commendable and necessary given the circumstances. But what were these breathless leaders doing in the Summer? Were they still running around in a similar fashion? (Latest news as I write here)
Perhaps what London Heathrow needs is a lot more breathtaking leadership. This is the kind of leadership that listens, that empowers, that connects, that plans, that waits, that assembles, that includes, that challenges, that invests, that innovates, that focuses... that inspires.
Breathtaking leadership is easy to spot. It is the kind of leadership that we have all felt once in a while when someone says or does something that makes us do a mental or real double take. We hold our breath as we think about what the person has just done. If it’s an exceptional moment of leadership, we may even forget to breathe until our body kicks in and we take short intake of breath.
My challenge for 2011: how can you make your leadership less breathless and more breathtaking?
Original blogpost: http://jonharveyassociates.blogspot.com/2010/12/heathrow-breathtaking-failure-of.html
Excellent, timely insight. I agree with everything you say. Unfortunately, I fear that the breathtaking leadership you describe is easy to spot when you've been closely involved but too often is missed by more remote observers and opionion formers. If, for example, Heathrow, through good preparations inspired by management foresight months and years ago had taken the snowstorm in its stride with operations scarcely missing a beat, everyone would have just accepted that as the way things should be and the qualities of leadership demonstrated would have been ignored. However, in the event of a crisis it's the 'all action' reactive head, who manages to bring some slight semblance of order to the way the headless chickens run round, who wins the plaudits. It all seems to come round to the lack of long term-ism in business activity.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you Martin - you have to look at the strategic context as to why breathless rather than breathtaking leadership is often fostered and rewarded more. And the context is - short term financial gains rather than long term investment with more moderate but more sustainable gains. It is a pattern we see in lots of places.Although interestingly, the NY stock exchange did some scenario planning in the late 90's and concluded they needed a second trading floor in case of some calamity. It was a major but strategic investment. On 9 September 2001 - their investment was proven wise.As always, short termism is a gamble - and it is a gamble which often pays off enough to make the those who practice it feel rewarded. But when everything goes belly up (as it did with the world economy in 2008), the short termists are nowhere to be seen...So the question is - are we seeing breathless or breathtaking leadership in DCLG at the moment?
ReplyDeleteThe 'taking the snowstorm in stride' scenario and the resulting 'lack of crisis to provide a reactive leadership backdrop' is a strongly valid point.However, how leadership sans crisis gets recognised is through proactive communications and media / stakeholder relations. Let's suspend disbelief for a moment and assume that not a single flight (or train, or whatever mode of transportation!) was inconvenienced in these last few weeks. Months of building contingency plans, accumulating necessary supplies and running rehearsals has paid off so that the ultimate objective of continued service delivery is met.As part of the preparation, have the marketing / comms team to prepare a 'what would have happened if we hadn't prepared' scenario, expressed as documentary style video, supported by a wrath of detail exploring every aspect of what it took to deliver. Break down every aspect of service delivery - how to de-ice a plane; how clearing a runway is not the same as shovelling the snow off your driveway; how to stop the machinery from freezing up; alternative procedures that need to be employed; etc.And, of course, present the human side of these tasks - this not only gives an identifable dimension but also becomes golddust for recruitment.Get your media teams in action and suddenly you have a good news story where the headlines congratulate you for your foresight and commitment to the nation (a bit of irony if you're reading the story in the Metro on a stuck train that lost power hours ago!)Of course this means that you have set the level of the bar a bit high for subsequent years, but success begets success and you begin to appreciate that it is more beneficial for people to be saying good things about you than to give another opportunity for indefendible pot shots.This is not beyond the realm of possibility - the coordination and delivery only takes a bit of coordination and project management. But it takes a real commercial leader to understand that showing what they do well is one of the strongest tools they have in the box.
ReplyDeleteAbsolutely Michael!
ReplyDeleteInterestingly the CEO at Heathrow on Radio 4 apologised for their poor decision response to the weather crisis, but made us pity him in the regard that the weather was beyond their experience (See JFK and Newark, USA as we write). What he did show was humility in that he acknowledged that BA had got it right in canceling flights which their leadership was critiscised for and no one has acknolwedged as the right thing to do other than fellow professionals. Crisis leadership is not inspirational leadership as set out by Jon. It is being brave and bold and testing your assumptions to see if they work, if not change and move on, just as the Heathrow leadership did.Hugh Martyn, National Crisis Leadership Centre
ReplyDeleteHughI agree - in this crisis - the leadership shown was commendable as I state in my original piece. I don't agree that the weather is beyond experience or indeed beyond prediction. I am not a meteorologist, but there have been colder winters before (1947 and 1963 come to mind) which suggests that this winter's cold spell could have been planned for better. Indeed I note that the NYC airports were open again a lot more quickly than Heathrow. In a crisis you need good crisis leadership - absolutely! (What does that leadership include for you - apart from what you have said above? I would be very interested in your perspective on this.) But you need good strategic leadership to prevent the crises...
ReplyDeleteGive me breathtaking leadership (over breathless) any day. If all the elements you describe Jon, are inacted as a matter of course in 'the way we do things here' the demand/necessity for crisis/breathless leadership is reduced. The trouble is it doesn't grab the media attention or is that really trouble really a blessing?Scenario/contingency planning is part of effective leadership and as you say, although weather prediction is not an exact science we do have experience, knowledge, intelligence (of the information kind), to help us, in the same way we have in leading with unpredictable 'people behaviour. If leaders listen,empower, connects, inspires etc surely we have a great head start to avert the crisis?
ReplyDeleteThanks Elaine. Good to see a diversity of opinion emanating from KCC! Diversity is good!
ReplyDeleteYes diversity is good to get richer contributions/outcomes form varying perspectives. Hugh and I work together on change management and the synergy with his leadership and my org/employee wellbeing & performance focus plus shamelessly learning from others helps us identify the best solutions to issues. Thanks for sharing your perspectives.
ReplyDeleteI looked at this and thought, hang on, whose leadership are we critiquing?Is it the leadership of the CEO? He leads, but only in the direction key shareholders and investment advisers want him to travel. To those shareholders, those commentators who fill newspapers with their views of the company's performance, this winter's troubles could be an acceptable outcome because it let investors take income out of the company in previous years.Are we critiquing the leadership of operations managers? We know precious little about it from the evidence deployed. The plan they worked with might be inadequate, they might have been constrained by decisions far beyond their control, but did they lead well? Or the performance of the informal leaders, the staff on the shopfloor whose small acts of leadership and kindness might change one customer's experience even as the media team pray for another news event, anything, to get them off the front pages?Only those leaders will know if they did everything they could have done. One would hope they'll have time to reflect and to feedback to all the stakeholders the outcome of those reflections.
ReplyDeleteSome interesting discussions and like most of you I would prefer to the breathtaking to breathless.With regards to Heathrow I do have a little sympathey for them. Can they reasonably expect to plan for an event that happens once in a 100 years? Jon is right the winters of 1947 and 1963 were problably more severe. BUT - on both occasions the severe weather was post Christmas no pre! I only remember 63 and had wonderful 3 week break from school due to frozen pipes.
ReplyDeleteJon,Thankyou but no thanks..... My challenge for 2011: how can you make your leadership less breathless and more breathtaking?All of us have the capacities and responsibilities to be leaders. The previous contributions to the blog makes breathlessness an unattractive aspiration already. As for breathtaking..... my own experience suggests that leaders appear to have a limitless capacity to be breathtaking. For me it hinges on breathtakigly good or bad? For those leaders with strategic responsibilities they are useually long gone before we can fully appreciate their breathtaking contributions.For myself in 2011, as a leader and 'a reciever' I'm looking for leadership which is useful and adds value.
ReplyDeleteGareth - it does all connect, of courseBryn - but would they have been any better prepared had this happened in Feb? I guess we might see...Bill - I am all for good solid pragmatic leadership too
ReplyDeleteI think it must be difficult to lead effectively at a time and under circumstances when too many parties seem to fail to accept their responsibilities. This to my mind includes personal responsibility - you couldn't fail to know from the tv and radio that Heathrow was shut and there were mass cancellations - but still passengers turned up in their droves to 'find' that their flight wasn't operating and expecting the airline to 'look after' them. The management team at Heathrow are in many ways in a no-win situation as they have little or no room for making mistakes. The airport is so busy any delay due to weather can have a huge knock on effect and impact on tens of thousands of people. In such circumstances, under a constant media gaze, which is better - breathtaking or breathless? In a situation where the responsibility for customer care is shared by so many parties (airport operator, airline, handling agent, tour operator, etc), how do you ensure effective and consistent leadership across the piece?
ReplyDeleteCross-posting an article picked up by GovLoop:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/29/AR2010122902206.html?sid=ST2010122904253Lots of discussion as to whether Cory Booker could have accomplished even more by leveraging his huge Twitter following more effectively, but I also think there's something to learned about leadership by example: http://twitter.com/CoryBooker/status/20296688501522433.Sure, there's only so much one person can do, but I think he sends a powerful message as a leader by getting out of the office, grabbing a shovel and getting to work.
ReplyDeleteIts interesting to explore the leadership in a crisis. It would be more interesting to explore how Heathrow got to the crisis in the first place? The enquiry will no doubt reach its conclusions in due course. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12049482BAA are owned by a Spainish company Ferrivol. Both are in debt.It seems that perhaps the service is managed by the accountants, and rather than investing in airside facilities, it prioritised its investment in the retail outlets. In other words the first priority is to recover from the debt. Possibly to keep fingers crossed at whilst this is going on, there will be no problems associated with not investing in other areas http://www.telegraph.co.uk/topics/weather/8215723/UK-snow-national-disgrace-Heathrow-owners-accused-of-under-investing-in-clearing-equipment.htmlTo be fair, Heathrow wasn't the only airport - but perhaps there are also lessons here for us in local government as we face rationing decisions as part of the spending review?
ReplyDeleteI was at Heathrow during the cancellations, and was lucky for my longhaul flight to remain scheduled while many around me, including to the same destination but on different airlines, were cancelled. The piece of breathtaking management that sticks in my mind were the free BA sandwiches and Kit Kat pack we all got given. It really hit the spot. But I am easily pleased.
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