Phil Dourado - The 60 Second Leader. Everything You Need to Know About Leadership, in 60 Second Bites

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Table of Contents

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Phil Dourado is a leadership consultant, speaker, author and journalist. His specialist area is helping large companies develop a global community of leaders who learn from each other online. He has written for a number of national newspapers and magazines, including The Telegraph, The Independent , GQ, The Observer and The Business. He edited two business-to-business journals before spending five years researching and defining great leadership practice as a director of the Inspired Leaders Network. This, his second book on leadership, grew out of research into distilling the essence of leadership for the 60 Second Leader online development system. It follows the same principle of bite-size nuggets that can be digested quickly by busy leaders and put into action immediately to improve their leadership performance. Phil has an MA in history from Cambridge University and splits his time between consulting, researching, writing, parenting and caring for his wife, who has Huntingtons disease. You can reach him through www.PhilDourado.com.

WHO THIS BOOK IS FOR

People in formal leadership positions are one type of leader. This book is for you. There are also many informal leaders, not recognized in the structure chart. This book is for you, too. Then there are would-be leaders, some of whom are being groomed as leaders by the organization you work for. This book is for you. Finally, and most interestingly, there are should-be leaders, the many potential leaders who do not even think of themselves as leadership material. This book is for them, too. If you know one, give them a copy. They are unlikely to pick it up themselves.

Most leadership strategies are doomed to failure from the outset The first problem with all of the stuff thats out there about leadership is that we havent got a clue what were talking about. We use the word leader to mean executive: The leader is the person at the top. That definition says that leadership is synonymous with a position. And if leadership is synonymous with a position, then it doesnt matter what a leader does. All that matters is where the leader sits. If you define a leader as an executive, then you absolutely deny everyone else in an organization the opportunity to be a leader.

Peter Senge

Introduction

THE 60 SECOND PHD IN LEADERSHIP

This book is a distillation of 30 essential elements of leadership into 60 second digestible chapters. There are also 30 true 60 Second Leader Tales in between the chapters to help bring some of the leader learning points to life.

However, I dont want you to feel misled by the book title. So if you picked this book up expecting to find how to be a great leader in 60 seconds, then here it is:

THE 60 SECOND PHD IN LEADERSHIP

Think back to the best boss you ever had and the worst boss you ever had.

1. Make a list of all things done to you that you abhorred.

2. DONT DO THEM TO OTHERS. EVER.

3. Make another list of things done to you that you loved.

4. DO THEM TO OTHERS. ALWAYS.

And you thought leadership was complicated.

Source: Dee Hock, founder of Visa. I first heard Hocks 60 Second PhD in Leadership from Tom Peters, who uses it sometimes in his presentations.

So, if that is what you wanted - how to be a great leader in 60 seconds - the rest of this book is just gravy.

PERSONAL (SELF) LEADERSHIP

1. The 60 Second Leader and

FAILURE

Forgive and remember. When Jack blew up the plant. The Tripping Point.

ARNIE ON FAILURE

If you fail, try, try again. Then bring in the stunt double.

Arnold Schwarzenegger, quoted in Vanity Fair

You probably dont think of yourself as a failure. But, you or so-called leaders in your organization may find it a useful label to hang on others. Allocating blame when things go wrong is a long-standing convention for maintaining the myth of leader infallibility. It poisons your culture, as those below will follow the lead. Using the authority of position to cascade blame becomes the norm.

The best leaders adopt a different perspective on failure, encouraging a forgive and remember culture. Firstly, you separate failure from the person - its an occurrence, not an inherent trait. Secondly, you make it clear some failures are a desirable outcome of trying new things. Thirdly, you set in place practices for limiting damage when failure occurs and for capturing and sharing learning.

This last - sharing learning to prevent repetition of mistakes - is where most organizations still fail.

The road to wisdom?
Well, its plain and simple to express:
Err
and err
and err again
but less
and less
and less
Piet Hein, Danish inventor and poet

Heres Jack Welch, the legendary CEO of General Electric, illustrating the importance of leaders tolerating failure, with an episode from his own past:

Kirsty Wark: I understand one of the first things you did at GE was blow up the plant you were working in and that it had a profound effect on you. Can you explain?

Jack Welch: I did accidentally blow up the plant, yes. I was about 25 and had been experimenting with a different mixture. There was an explosion. I was scared stiff when I went to the manager. But, he was mainly curious as to why I had done what I had done and what I had learnt from it. Would the process I was trying have worked? is what interested him! That real encouragement to get it right rather than a punishment did have a profound effect on me, yes.

Admit it: you would have fired him.

LIMITING THE DAMAGE OF FAILURE

Use pilots to limit the damage when trying new ways of working. The three principles of successful pilots are: think big; start small; scale fast.

MECHANISM FOR SPREADING LEARNING FROM MISTAKES

Jack Welch again:

We celebrated mistakes at a management gathering with 1,000 people in the room. A manager would get up and say why the environmentally sensitive light bulb or whatever it was had failed then wed give them $1,000 or a TV or something, depending on the scale of the thing. The point was to share the learning and get smarter as an organization.

ON THE OTHER HAND

You will hear again and again in leadership development circles the mantra learn from mistakes and failures. But, in among the din of all that noisy received wisdom, I recently heard one voice point out that there is an ubermessage about failure; a message that is more important than learn from your mistakes. I heard Bob Geldof say this at the end of 2006:

The Bob Dylan line always appealed to me: Theres no success like failure and failure is no success at all. It was a while before I understood it. Leaders need the ability to fail and then get up and go on. It doesnt matter if you dont learn from the failure. But it does matter that you get up and get on.

USEFUL CONCEPT

The Tripping Point: Refers to those moments in life where you land on your backside and suddenly realize, with blinding clarity, that you got it wrong. For great leaders at all levels in an organization, these are significant illumination points in life. The shock of failure sears into you, you learn, change and, as Geldof says above, get up and move on. And you show other people by your own example how to do it.

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