Justin Hughes, Managing Director of Mission Excellence was one of three cutting edge thinkers interviewed on their thoughts on the qualities underpinning great leadership.
Ian Florance writes…
Organisations often handle leadership in a commonsense way. They identify potential leaders via performance appraisal, informal talent-spotting, fast-track recruitment, then train them in specific leadership skills. Existing leaders are supported by mentoring and coaching: two years ago the British Psychological Society estimated UK organisations spend about £1 billion on senior development.
Yet, corporate leaders are increasingly blamed for corporate scandals, organisational underperformance and perceived greed. According to the Hay Group, employee disengagement – often caused by bad management – costs UK industry £340 billion per annum
The commonsense approach assumes that certain people are naturally better leaders than others, but that you can teach certain leadership skills. Do good leaders share certain qualities? Research has not yet uncovered them.
Leadership may be important but there seems little agreement about what it is.
We talked to three cutting-edge thinkers from very different backgrounds about the topic. Do any common themes develop from new thinking about what leaders do and are?
Justin Hughes
Justin Hughes was deputy team leader of the Red Arrows and RAF fighter pilot. He then set up Mission Excellence (www.missionexcellence.com ) to provide organisational performance solutions. Justin is a highly regarded business consultant and speaker.
“I do not have a specific model of leadership, a core set of competences or one tool I can use to identify it.” Instead, he shows how military experience can illuminate the identification, development and practice of leadership.
“In the corporate world, potential leaders are identified because they excel in a technical area and are then taught leadership skills. Sometimes it is assumed functional excellence implies leadership effectiveness so new leaders are left to sink or swim.
The RAF provides a contrast. If you join you probably want to fly a plane. But you have to wait six months to get to that point: for the first six months you are immersed in issues of brand, leadership and followership. This is even truer in the Red Arrows. We assume the 35-40 applicants a year can fly. The week-long selection process focuses on informal judgment of applicants’ behavioural skills. Although the skill bar is high, the team prefers someone who’s only just there but with excellent behavioural ability rather than vice versa. In my view organisational leadership development is the wrong way round: behavioural skills should come first.”
Justin emphasises the advantages of his approach. “People see the military as inflexible: as having a set hierarchy, a way of doing things. Of course you learn certain things ‘by the book’ so you can free up your brain to make crucial judgements. But if you are flying a night mission over Kosovo, there is no time for a request to go up the chain of command and the decision to come back down. Everyone is involved in leadership. Mission decision-making is fluid and flexible.”
Justin emphasises process and uses the simple three-stage process used to plan and execute a military mission to show how corporate leadership can be re-imagined.
“In military operations, leadership has little to do with seniority. Operational teams are complex matrix structures. Once goals are set you decide who is best placed to fulfil each role. Since everyone has a grounding in leadership, anyone can take up that role. The key is to decide who is best to lead the project, to push decision making as far down the chain as it will go and then to support the people you’ve delegated to. If you do that right it solves the disengagement problem.”
“A mission without debriefing is unfinished. Debriefing is a constantly iterated cycle of 360° feedback and performance appraisal. Just as in execution, debriefing sidelines seniority. Leaders’ performance is critiqued and praised so they in turn learn. How leaders react to this – defensively or openly – is critical to the loyalty and motivation of their team. So debriefing, carried out in this way, sites leaders within the team: not as someone who ‘has all the answers’ but as someone learning, improving and responding to upward insights. It pulls together everything: leadership; motivation; engagement and an upward performance trajectory.”
“To my mind, a lot of business thinkers and the business schools have taken the passion out of leadership by overcomplicating it. Leadership is underpinned by process but, in the end, it's about behaviour. The sort of approach followed in the RAF provides an excellent model for corporate businesses to follow.” (continued…)
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