Leadership — The Multiplier Effect

Leadership is a complex topic, especially in today’s world when one needs to manage a diverse team. In the current environment, it is challenging to drive the energy of individuals in one direction.

I remember when one person mentioned to me that he generally rejects hiring people who are smarter than him. This is a pity as the role of the people is not only to hire people smarter than them but also to nourish them to be smarter.

I got the book recommendation from Daniel Hilson for “Leadership: The Multiplier Effect” by Andy Cope. This is an amazing book, capture so many important lessons for leaders.

Some of the key learnings from the book:

1. In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a person who can stay in control of virtually any situation is somebody who is said to know where his or her towel is.
2. Expecting the world to treat you fairly because you are good is like expecting the bull not to charge because you are a vegetarian. ~ Dennis Wholey
3. If more of the same isn’t the answer, then maybe we need to re-focus to less of something different.
4. Leadership is an education. And the best leaders think of themselves as the students, not the teachers.
5. The moment when Sunday stops feeling like a Sunday and the anxiety of Monday kicks in.
6. Thousands of people are living lives of screaming desperation where they work long hours at jobs they hate to enable them to buy things they don’t need to impress people they don’t like. ~ Nigel Marsh
7. The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence — It is to act with yesterday’s logic. ~ Peter Ducker
8. The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do. ~ Michael Porter
9. ‘Big L’ is a series of epic projects that require strategic decisions. Real leadership is all about the ‘little l’ acts that affect the day-to-day climate in your team and, ultimately, your entire organization.
10. Leadership isn’t a theory. It’s not even a ‘thing’. It’s a feeling — an emotional connection. In modern parlance, it’s akin to ‘engagement’.
11. Leadership is about getting people to go above and beyond their job description.
12. Leadership isn’t about what happens when you’re there. It’s about what happens when you’re not. ~ Anon
13. True leadership isn’t about motivating your people. It’s about showing your people how motivation rests with them individually and thus, the team collectively. It’s about what we call ‘franchising’ motivation — getting people to buy into the fact that motivation is theirs for the taking.
14. A big part of your job is to help them make the right choices and, of course, you have to make good choices for yourself.
15. An organization cannot command employees to be happy and motivated — it’s something that has to spread naturally throughout the organization. ‘Group affective tone’ is when emotions shared within the team are reproduced and reinforced by verbal and non-verbal behaviors — because emotions and the behaviors that go with them are contagious.
16. Attitudes are contagious — the tendency of emotions to transmit from person to person, beyond an individual’s direct ties.
17. The emotions have a ripple effect that reaches three degrees of people removed from you. The magic numbers are 15, 10, and 6. If you’ve got a smile and a positive attitude, everyone with whom you come into direct contact experiences an emotional uplift of 15 percent. (Hyder-dyadic Spread -Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler)
18. Every employee’s emotions contribute to the overall mood of the team, leaders are the most contagious.
19. Emotional Soup (Daniel Goleman) — The analogy being that everyone is adding something to the team. Two important questions are:

• What flavors are you adding? Are they tasty ingredients like inspiration, positivity, and energy, or are you inadvertently adding sarcasm, sighing, and criticism?
• Not everyone is equal. The leader has the biggest say in the flavor of the team soup.

20. The best thing you can do is get good at being you. ~ Dennis Menace

21. Concept of FED (Future — Engage — Deliver) — When you are being yourself, you are glowing with creativity, positivity and ideas.

• Future — What do I care about?
• Engage — What do you want to lead for?

22. Leadership is not about a ‘great person’, a ‘situation’ or a ‘transformation’- it’s simply that we need to be true and authentic, pitching in at the top end of who we already are.

23. Leadership is not about competencies, skills or personality. It’s not about inspiring people or trying to motivate them. It’s about being inspired. Inspiration comes from being in touch with your passion and then going for it. (Radcliffe)

24. The most exciting breakthroughs of the 21st century will not occur because of technology. But because of an expanding concept of what it means to be human. ~ John Naisbitt

25. Teal organizations are about ‘wholeness’ as well as purpose. There are a few trailblazers who’ve developed a set of practices that invite us to reclaim our inner wholeness and bring all of who we are to work.

26. Teals are seen as having a life and a sense of direction of their own. Instead of trying to predict and control the future, members of the organizations are invited to listen in and understand what the organization wants to become, and what purpose it wants to serve.

27. It is creating a feeling of ownership. No one will wash the rented car. It is important to bring the concept to your team — are your people ‘renting’ or ‘owning’? Organizations that achieve ownership will be rewarded with genuine and loving care.

28. When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change. ~ Wayne Dyer

29. Baby eagles learn to fly by being pushed out of the nest. They have 500 feet to learn.

30. Challenging yourself to be your best self is first base.

31. We can be very quick to have a pop at someone else when they don’t behave in the way we think they should. The thing is we sometimes expect others, particularly our bosses, to behave in a way that they may not even be capable of, yet we are continually surprised and disappointed when they fail to meet the expectations we have set in our minds about them. It is worth remembering that just because your boss is not living up to your expectations, that does not make him or her as bad person.

32. Shortest poem by Muhammad Ali — “Me, We” — Introspection only gets you so far. We need some ‘outrospection’ to really live good lives.

33. MBWA (Management by Walking About) — a call to arms that required managers to forcibly remove their backsides from their desks and walk the floor, chatting, smiling, listening, building relationships, being present, praising, encouraging, catching staff doing things right, making eye contact, being available.

34. Gemba (Japanese concept) — a place where value is created — meaning the leader ought to be where the people are working so he or she can get an understanding of how it’s going.

35. We see, hear, taste, touch, and smell in the only way we can. As ourselves. That means you and I live on the same planet as billions of other people, but we don’t all live in the same world. Every one of us perceives the world around us differently because we have different brain filters. We can only ever experience the world as our own blue dot.

36. Myers Briggs Personality types — 16 different personality types

37. At the basic level, the connection is easy with those who think like we do. We have got lots in common, we hold similar views and most importantly we rarely make each other wrong. It is called ‘Halo effect’ and ‘Confirmation bias’.

38. When we have different sets of filters it takes a bit more effort and once you realize it’s just that ‘they view the world differently to me’, it gets easier. It also gets more interesting when you get that their view of the world adds value to yours because they come up with insights that your brain filters out.

39. In high-performance teams, the members are not just committed to the success of the team, they are also committed to the success of each other.

40. Organizational behavior is an umbrella term that includes motivation, leadership, teams, and culture, among others. It was about measuring and reporting an ‘employee satisfaction’. The mantra was that the organization needed to contort itself in such a way as to create the ideal conditions for staff to feel ‘’satisfied’

41. Leadership is not about being in charge but about taking care of those in your charge — Simon Sinek

42. Engaged employees are driven with vigor and energy. In short, they are not ok with ‘ok’.

• Engaged — Top right quadrant’s emotions (enthusiastic, joyful, inspired and excited. This is ‘2 percenters’ — These employees are not only significantly happier but also possess more energy.
• Satisfied — Bottom quadrant’s emotions (calm, relaxed, laid back and at ease)
• Depression — Bottom left (depressed, dejected, despondent, and hopeless)
• Anxiety — Top left (nervous, anxious, tense and worried)

43. Four types of energy (Kim Cameron)

• Physical — the body’s naturally occurring energy, produced to burn calories.
• Mental — is all about experiencing intense feelings and is depleted by periods of intense excitement or sadness.
• Psychological — is specifically to do with mental concentration and brain work
• Relational — is an energy that increases as it is exercised. This form of energy is enhanced and revitalized through positive interpersonal relationships.

44. Relational energy is uplifting, invigorating and rejuvenating — It is life-giving rather than life-depleting. Relational energy comes from the people.

45. Corporate policies just mainly aim to increase job satisfaction (i.e. give people what they want) but are unlikely to create active engagement. This seems especially true when you bring in the concept of habituation. Habituation is all about the way in which things become the established norm.

46. Motivational factors are short-lived because they become ‘custom and practice’ and once embedded, lose their motivational power. It is why a pay rise only motivates in the short term. After a couple of monthly salaries, you become used to the higher level.

47. A good leader needs to hear what’s not working from those who are passionate enough to care and speak up. Rather than suppress negativity, a positive leader should create a culture that allows for the appropriate expression of negative feelings. By ‘appropriate’ we think it’s about shaking your folk out of ‘grumble mode’, the low level of background negativity that can become a habit, and into ‘what can we do about it?’ mode.

48. In order for your customers to be saying ‘Wowza’ behind your back, you do have to be creative, you do have to be courageous enough to try new things, some of which would not work.

49. We need Mood Hoover’s critical eye — If you think that would not work, who do you think will work?

50. The organization alone can not create a culture of engagement because engagement is partly an internal construct. You can not command engagement. Your people have to want to be world-class and that’s a within-person drive.

51. One of the favorite definitions of leadership is ‘lighting fires within people rather than under people’. Intrinsic motivation describes those who have an internal pilot light and fuel supply that has fired their motivational boiler. ‘Intrinsic’ means motivated from within.

52. The emergent model suggests culture change is more viral spreading via the changing nature of interactions between people. ‘Culture’ is nothing more than ‘the way things are done around here’ and, although that might encompass processes and procedures, it’s really all about what’s going on in the heads of your employees.

53. Culture is simply a set of repeating behaviors. Whilst the culture affects the behaviors, the behaviors affect the culture. Just like starlings. Nobody is really ‘in charge’ of culture. Rather than being at the behest of managers, control lies in the connectedness of the people and their behaviors.

54. Organizations are often described as ‘complex adaptive systems’, just like a flock of starlings. ‘Emergence’ is the notion that the overall pattern of group behavior emerges from individual behavior. The emergent direction of the flock is created by the individual actions of each bird, yet the individual action of each bird is influenced by the emergent behavior of the flock, forming a complex adaptive system.

55. “Hard” and “Soft” Leadership

• Hard skills tend to be things you have learned at school — the ability to manipulate a spreadsheet, write an adequate press release or use PowerPoint
• Soft skills are more subtle — things like the ability to listen, ask the right questions, motivate, inspire, empathize, create trust, and get on someone’s wavelength.

56. Hard skills are easy as you can go on a course and learn about them, whereas soft skills are rock-hard.

57. Listening might not solve all your leadership worries, but it is probably the single most important thing anyone can do to make a real connection with their team.

58. When you are communicating with someone, the key question is: Where is the focus of your attention — is it upon you, or is it upon them?

59. Why listening is hard as the key is to be focussed on them, and your primary goal is to seek to understand their perspective rather than sharing yours. Everyone has a different perspective be curious about it, and be fascinated by how they have come up with a different viewpoint from you. And when you do that your connection with them will flourish.

60. The minimum ratio you should be aiming for on the first indicator is 2:1; you have two ears and one mouth for a reason. But if you really want to be a great listener some suggest you aim for 10:1 (list-ten). Always listen more than talk and always be aware of the ratio.

61. Them and their ideas (called inquiry) involve asking questions (real questions that are not statements with a question mark at the end), supporting and building on other people’s ideas, checking you understand what someone has said, summarizing where the discussion has got to so far. It can also be about bringing other people and opinions into the conversation, particularly when there are two differing views or there are strong voices monopolizing the debate. All of these demonstrate that your focus is on others and will build connections and buy-in from the team.

• High performing team has 6:1 positivity ratio
• Generally, the team has 2:1
• Corporate bloodbath has 1:1

62. When you are in charge of a meeting, your job is not to select the best ideas, it is to create a great environment that allows the very best ideas to emerge.

63. Listen is an anagram of ’silent’

64. Quite Listening is when you bin all those mental distractions and just focus on the person you are with. Just them and you with you totally focussed on them — it is powerful.

65. You will never achieve ‘world-class’ through control. The only way to create an environment where everyone feels compelled to give their best is to create an environment of trust. That would mean letting go of the control joystick and that requires courage. Someone’s going to mess up, guaranteed!

66. Quite listening is a gift. It can only be given and when it is, your team will flourish.

67. Praise is one of the most powerful motivators in existence- so much so that being praised triggers the release of dopamine, a chemical in our brains that helps control feelings of reward and pleasure. It can enable more innovative thinking and creative problem-solving. But be careful, it’s the same chemical reaction when drinking and taking drugs.

68. How to structure praise:

• Make sure it’s a good time to speak to them
• Talk specifically about what they did
• Explain how you felt as a result
• Thank them
• Reflect afterward on their response

69. Praise should be Timely, Often, Sincere and Specific (TOSS)

70. Anyone can start something new, it takes real leaders to stop something old- Dan Rockwell

71. Empathy is second nature to most humans. It allows people to be in a perpetual state of communication: reading people, intuiting, stepping into their minds, assuming, and sending.

72. People who live in comfort zones are actually extremely uncomfortable ~David Taylor

73. Rule no 6 — Don't take yourself too seriously

74. We all are superheroes pretending to be normal ~Richard Wilkins

75. The leader’s job is to tap into their inner superhero and, if you do, it benefits everyone.

76. Our corporate preoccupation with fixing weaknesses also does a great hatchet job of diminishing the strengths on the other side.

77. Quit trying to get everyone to be competent in everything, and if you have to use a competency framework then use it to build strengths.

78. A focus on deficiencies leads only to the development of competence whereas a focus on strengths leads to excellence and positive deviant performance.

79. If we focus on what’s wrong we create a world of grey where everyone is average, if we focus on what’s right then we create a world of brilliant color where different people stand out and excel in different ways.

77. Identify your top five strengths. Make a note of them. Use them every day.

78. A team-based view of key strengths will help you to optimize the work across the team to get the best out of all members. When you do that, connection, engagement, and productivity will rocket because you are recognizing what your team loves and giving them what they do best.

79. The challenge in most organizations is that performance management policies and processes and the terminology all focus on making you mediocre, not bad, fair to middling. The term ‘weakness’ has been replaced by ‘development need’.

80. When you’re looking at your strengths, make sure you focus on your true strengths. You’re probably good at a whole load of stuff, but your true strengths will be those that you love doing and energize you when you’re using them.

81. Richard Branson's Top Ten

• Listen more than you talk, Nobody learned anything by hearing themselves speak.
• Three steps to success: Hire great talent, give them the tools to succeed, and get out of the way
• Train people well enough so they can leave, treat them well enough so they don’t want to.
• It is only by being bold that you get anywhere, if you are a risk-taker, then the art is to protect the downside. The brave may not live forever but the cautious don't live at all.
• Have courage. Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.
• I never get the accountants in before I start up a business. It is done on gut feeling, especially if I can see that they are taking the mickey out of the consumer.
• You don’t learn to walk by following rules. You learn by doing, by falling over. One thing is certain in business. You and everyone around you will make mistakes.
• There is no greater thing you can do with your live and your work than follow your passions — in a way that serves the world and you. As soon as something stops being fun, I think it’s time to move on. Life is too short to be unhappy.
• Fun is at the core of the way I like to do business and it has been key to everything I have done from the outset.
• If somebody offers you an amazing opportunity but you are not sure you can do it, say yes — then learn how to do it later.

82. GRW Model (Sir John Whitmore)

• What are your Goals?
• What is the Reality? (i.e. where are you now?)
• What Options do you have?
• What’s the Will to move forward?

83. Coaching is perhaps the most powerful way of telling your people that you care. The tacit message is that I value you, I trust you, you are worth listening to and I want to help make you even more awesome than you currently are.

84. The greatest mistake you can make in life is to continually be afraid you will make one — Elbert Hubbard

85. Pygmalion Effect — The phenomenon whereby folk live up to assumptions made about them. It is captured really well in the classic folklore class examples where a new maths teacher was told she had the top set and six months later they had achieved top set grades.

86. Golem Effect — The concept is encapsulated in the classic Good Hoover appraisal statement of setting low standards and continually failing to achieve them. In ‘little-I’ speak, if you assume and treat your employees like they are untrustworthy and work-shy, who only come to work to do the minimum they can get away with for the maximum return. They will behave exactly like that.

87. Theory X managers — They have low expectations, trust nobody and end up being a little bit control-freaky. — Douglas McGregor

88. Hire good people and then get the hell out of their way. — Richard Branson

89. You hired that particular person because of who they are and what you saw, so stop trying to iron them out to conform to some sort of corporate stereotype.

90. The traditional leadership focus has been on eliminating weaknesses and solving problems. This is important, but flourishing organizations must go further and, they must focus on what is ‘’positively deviant’, i.e. what is ‘outstanding’, what is already working and what is world class.

91. Appreciative Inquiry — Organizations need to switch to focusing on the best rather than on the worst. The emphasis falls on strengths, capabilities, and possibilities. It does not exclude negative events, it learns from them. Thus, you stand a better chance of creating a world-class team — one that is flourishing, benevolent, generous, and honors people and their contributions.

92. The more we look for what is wrong with our organizations, the more we will find. Every organization has the potential to present a never-ending stream of weaknesses for our attention. Fixing problems is gratifying but, when it becomes a way of life, it is demoralizing and exhausting.

93. ‘World Class’ requires behaviors that extend beyond what is normally expected.

94. The relatively stable basic emotional state of ‘happiness’ refers to the momentary level of happiness that an individual typically experiences.

95. Your happiness set point is determined by your sense of identity which is determined by your psychology. At its simplest, most people think like the person they perceive themselves to be (for example, victims get stuck in ‘learned helplessness’, winners have a winning mentality, confident people behave confidently, etc.)

95. Organizational culture is one of the most important predictors of high levels of performance over time and for ‘culture’ one should read ‘people’. Organizations that flourish have developed a ‘culture of abundance’ that builds the collective capabilities of all members.

96. As a leader, you need to be courageous enough to take your eye off your targets and focus on your people.

97. Four-minute rule — how long it takes for other people to catch your emotional state. (Steve McDermott) — You can lose the first four minutes of a meeting, creating stress by whinging about how difficult it’s been to organize what with all the pressures.

98. Ever more people today have the means to live, But no meaning to live for ~Viktor Frankl

99. Emotion creates motion. Get the right people fully engaged, and success is inevitable.

100. SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timebound) Vs. HUGG (Huge Unbelievably Great Goals).

101. HUGG is something that is currently out of reach — you have to grow, innovate, and engage in order to achieve it.

• A HUGG is not something to be afraid of — It is something to aspire to.
• The key to making these HUGGs a reality is to take the time to rethink how you’re going to get there.

102. Make sure your team has the potential to succeed — That’s a heady mix of the right skills, knowledge, mindset, and motivation.

103. Your attitudes can make you extraordinary, which you carry around with you.

104. ‘Planning Fallacy’ is a law of business that states we are lousy at figuring out how much time something will take to complete. It results from a heady combination of overestimating our abilities and underestimating the degree to which we are overestimating.

• Scary and true
• Give a Chimp a banana and it will eat the banana
• Give a chimp a lot of bananas and it will share them
• Give a chimp a room full of bananas and it will kill other chimps to protect them

105. The organizations should always put employees first, because that way they will put the customer first.

106. Three types of employee/organization relationships (Charles O’Reilly and Jennifer Chatman)

107. Compliance produces the desired behaviors through punishment and rewards. Employees conform to norms, but because they want to, but because the rewards and punishment system demands that they do. These tend to be employees who see themselves as having nothing more than a ‘job’.

108. Identification relationships are closely allied to employees with a career orientation who tend to be committed to the organization and seek involvement, producing mutually beneficial results for the employee and their employer.

109. Internalization is defined by complete absorption of the organization’s goals resulting in unequivocal loyalty and pro-social behaviours. An internalized relationship is less dependent on the nature of the work and more dependent on the meaningfulness attached by the employees. These people are likely to view their work as a ‘calling’.

110. Brain has two parts

• Neocortex: The rational, logical, thinking part of your brain
• Limbic (amygdala): Much quicker instinctive part of your brain

111. Leadership is not manipulation. Manipulation works, but it is not a one-time thing. Once you start you need to keep doing it because it is the only thing motivating your team/organization to deliver.

112. You are the person you have decided to be. You have created yourself.

113. How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. Life is the culmination of the little things and it is these little things that make the big thing that is your life. Taking the principles of relationships, listening, empathy, being present, and encouraging — and applying them at home — that’s a game changer.