Bank bonuses – Thought for the Day

I find some of the press coverage around the government bank levy rather bizarre. If all bank bonuses of £6 billion are all taxed at 50%, the Government will reap a healthy and much needed £3 billion.

However, if the scenario existed that banks did not give bonuses, the Treasury would attempt to tax profits. We’d then be in a situation where the banks in their complicated way would hide the money in a cunning tax efficient structure. The net result would be that the Government would gain zero – absolutely nothing.

It seems to me to be a product of the media way of running stories of goodies and baddies in a black and white way, when in reality, the economic situation and its causes are several shades of grey and very much more complex.

Leadership lessons from the Chilean Miners

Although the plight of the Chilean miners has quickly disappeared from the media spotlight the lessons in leadership we can learn from this event will have a greater longeivity. Whilst listening and watching the news reports day by day it struck me that leaders could gain significant insights in to their own behaviour and that of their peers; the parallels between a group of miners focusing on survival down a mine-shaft and that of managers tasked with the leadership of groups of individuals within an organisation are closer than one might wish to think. For example, for the miners, all of the focus now is going to be on how they adapt to life on the surface, or how they ‘survived’ underground, but what about how they ‘thrived’?

What can managers learn from the miners ability to function well as a team under huge pressure? We know that the miners formed a ‘co-operative’ asking legal experts to draw up contracts to make sure all profits from media interviews was shared equally, they took different allocated roles during the time down the shaft and they were disciplined in their approaches to taks and food allocation. These are all characteristics of a well functioning team within an organisation. The environment may have been extreme but the individuals had experience, helping them to adapt. The media have reported that the individual who struggled the most was the most inexperienced, so what role did experience play and what leadership lessons can be learned from this ?

Our research at Ashridge has shown that the most effective learning for an individual takes place in ‘stretch’ zones, when individuals are between ‘comfort’ and ‘terror’. As these individuals were experienced miners, it could be argued that what we perceive as inconceivable was actually just ‘stretch’ to them, thus optimising their learning, team formation and functioning. If you are a leader in your organisation, what learning opportunities do you create for yourself? When do you put yourself in ‘stretch’?”

Ethical Leadership

Today I am VERY EXCITED AGAIN! Today Palgrave publishes my second book, this time based on the first Ashridge International Research Conference on ethics and co-edited with Carla Millar. I think edited collections are such a useful way to get a handle on a complex topic, through a variety of lenses, to help you reach your own conclusions about the matter.

This collection looks at Ethical Leadership in a global context, drawing on contributions from countries spanning the globe, from Spain to South Africa, from the Netherlands to Nicaragua, and from Hong Kong to DR Congo. The contributors are an interesting bunch, drawn both from academia and industry, and the book offers a range of approaches, research, ideas, and references, as well as practical examples.

Topics range from corporate psychopathy and financial misreporting to Chinese folk wisdom and the moral compass, via spiritual anchors and life at the sharp end, and our Chairman Lord Carter has written the Foreword. As you will know from this blog, I am suspicious of the metaphor of the ‘moral compass’, preferring instead John Donne’s image of the ‘fix’d foot’ of drawing compasses. This collection is designed to help you zone in on your own fix’d foot through your reactions to the various contributions, as well as challenging some of your assumptions about both good and bad behaviour. And as we say in our acknowledgements, we are indebted to all the leaders, both ethical and unethical, who inspired us to write this book!

[This post first appeared on Eve Poole's blog: "Eve's Commonplace" on 9 November 2010]

New book: The Church on Capitalism

Today I am VERY EXCITED, because today Palgrave publishes my first book. It’s based on my PhD and is entitled The Church on Capitalism. The book examines Church of England views on capitalism from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the collapse in credit, and sets out a framework for a better theology of capitalism.

The Church both directly and indirectly has a huge amount of financial muscle, and how it uses this influence really matters. My contention is that the Church has been too happy to follow fashion economically rather than to lead it, and that the current period of economic uncertainty offers what might be considered a kairos moment for the Church to make the marketplace more virtuous. Of course, the Church is already doing so, through ethical investment and social entrepreneurship, but these efforts needs to gather pace and scale to have real impact, and ordinary church-goers need to understand their power and responsibility to act, as consumers, employers, employees, investors, educators and pensioners.

Christians are estimated to control $10 trillion around the world, and 6% of the world’s investment capital is in the hands of religious bodies. In the UK alone, every year local churches collectively spend £800m, and give £45m to other charities as well as 278.4 million hours of volunteer service.

1 million children are taught by the Church of England, who run 1 in 4 of the UK’s primary schools.
26 bishops sit in the House of Lords as Lords Spiritual, and there are 26,000 clergy working in communities in the UK. In England, 7 in 10 people consider themselves ‘Christian’ (35.7 million people), with half of the population identifying themselves as belonging to the Church of England (25.5 million people).

Each Sunday, a million people listen to a sermon at a Church of England church. Even the NRA only claims to have 4 million members, and they are reckoned to be one of the the most powerful lobbies in the world. Every time you spend money, you are essentially voting.

Your money sends information into the market about what you and consumers like you value, and this information is used to generate feedback to deliver more of this value. I wonder what kind of market you are creating with your money?

[This post first appeared on Eve Poole's blog: "Eve's Commonplace" on 29 October 2010]

Brainy Learning

We’re in the middle of some very exciting experiments at Ashridge. Working with Dr Tricia Riddell, whose thing is developmental neuroscience, and OptimaLife, whose thing is using heart monitors to track performance, stress and recovery, we are testing participants on our Future Leaders simulation to see why it works so well.

We know it’s something to do with the ‘muscle-memory’ it gives you, making you feel more resourced to tackle the critical incidents of leadership, and we suspect that people learn best when they are stressed, especially as they will most need to draw on their learning when they are stressed as well.

But do different people respond differently, having different parameters for their ‘stretch zone’ as opposed to their ‘panic zone’? And what relation does their heart rate variability have to the amount and intensity of their learning, given the relationship between heart and brain? We’re already picking up some very interesting data about sleep and recovery, as well as about levels of participation, the toll effort takes on cognitive functioning, and to what extent one can learn by proxy.

We have oodles of data to trawl through before we’re ready to say anything, but watch this space!

[This post first appeared on Eve Poole's blog: "Eve's Commonplace" on 16 September 2010]

Ashridge Guardian Public Essay Competition

Are you already exhausted by the amount of change facing the public and voluntary sectors, and fed up with the ‘more with less’ mantra? We want to find a way to cheer you all up, so we are again partnering with Guardian Public for an Essay Competition with a difference. This year we know you are too busy to write us a long essay, so instead we’d like some stories from you. These 600-word vignettes can either be about examples where public service is already delivering – dare I say it – ‘better with less,’ or can be about your role models in public services: whose leadership is making a difference in your world? You can write up to three vignettes in either category, and full details of the competition can be found here. Winning entries will be published by Guardian Public early in 2011, and winners will be eligible for free executive coaching to help you get through the challenges that lie ahead…

Embedding L&D – Sparky PLC

The latest edition of 360° The Ashridge Journal comes out on Monday.

I’ve written a piece in it about embedding L&D into organisational culture, and I’d welcome your ideas. I think Leaders have a key role to play in setting cultural standards like these ones, and here is my example of what I think good could look like.

Our organisation, let’s call it Sparky plc, has ‘learning and development’ listed as a formal competence. As with all of its competencies and values, success stories are celebrated through corporate newsletters and conferences, so an employee who has particularly triumphed in this field is fêted throughout the organisation. The organisation sets staff annual targets for days spent focusing on development, supported by self-service e-learning and personalised budgets. As part of their competence framework, line managers have to demonstrate their coaching skills, and these skills are a standard part of their formal training provision on promotion to the grade.

All staff belong to an action learning set, comprising colleagues drawn from across the business units, and the organisation makes time for quarterly action learning meetings to discuss learning and development issues. Management meetings incorporate a meeting review at the end, and have as a standing agenda item a debrief on team learning activity. Many 1:1 meetings are conducted as reflective walks to aid the thinking process, and larger meetings make use of devices like De Bono’s Thinking Hats to guard against that enemy of organisational development, groupthink.

The organisation has a lively range of job-shadowing and secondment opportunities, keeping a wiki for staff to offer resources and skills to help colleagues with projects organisation-wide. Wikis and other on-line tools are also used to encourage staff to share innovative ideas and new ways of working, and reward structures are in place to support this commitment to on-going innovation and change. The organisation uses hot-desking to take advantage of accidental learning through chance encounter, and is committed to supporting wellbeing through the provision of gyms, sleep counselling, medical insurance, nutritionally sensitive canteen menus, and the option to buy or earn additional holiday allowance.

When hiring, the organisation requires applicants to include their ‘learning CV’ as part of the application process, to demonstrate their commitment to lifelong development. All staff are assigned a mentor on joining, and are encouraged to retain or swap out this mentor as appropriate throughout their career. Informal peer learning trios are also encouraged, to focus on more episodic organisational or functional issues, and to provide further opportunities for peer networking and support. Staff who work with software have e-learning prompts embedded into the system so that when they are working with particular modules they can easily find just-in-time support (for example, the system offers a quick reminder on negotiation skills when the user accesses the customer contact database).

The organisation makes strategic use of executive coaching, open programme attendance, and tailored interventions as required, and is diligent about bolstering and following up the benefit gained from this investment. For example, clear and specific learning objectives are agreed between line managers and staff before any programme attendance. Staff debrief their colleagues through the ‘learning’ slot on the team meeting agenda, and managers agree – and give feedback on – stretching tasks and assignments to enable the application, practice, and sharing of new skills and competencies. Peers are often used as faculty on in-house programmes, thereby embedding their own skills through teaching them to colleagues. The organisation retains an external learning partner to act as a ‘critical friend,’ providing supervision to L&D as they steer the organisation’s learning agenda, and L&D are generous in sharing their ideas with other L&D professionals to ratchet up performance across the industry.

Do you have any other ideas about how organisations could make L&D more a part of their DNA?

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