Let the Dumb Boss Chronicles begin!

The countdown has begun.  Another week in the office before Christmas, and a month of leave and a trip to New York for New Year!

As of today, I have a mere 28 working days in the job before unemployment, a massive cheque and FREEDOM descend.  Ahhhhh.  I picture myself on that plane, readying myself to spend 5 months in the Mediterranean.  Eating grilled fish and salad.  Walking.  Wandering.  Sleeping in.  Swimming.  Thinking.

The lunacy of Dumb Boss continues but it skims off me.  Apart from finalising my severance (the big debate is whether they will be successful in getting me to sign a Deed to purge them of Dumb Boss’s many sins), my biggest dispute at the moment involves the date I start reporting to the COO (the BEST of all dudes I have come across in corporate life).  He says it’s on 1 Jan.  I say that the CEO’s announcement implies it’s now.  We banter.  I send him things to sign off; he sends them back with the message “I’ll sign this in January”.  I quack.

Yes, quack.  I’ve let the COO know that this little duckling has decided he is its momma…quack quack quack.  We laugh together.  LAUGH!!  So long since I did that with my boss.

The COO is a legend within the organisation.  A breath of fresh air.  He speaks the truth.  He calls Dumb Boss “evil”.  He LOVES it when I call Dumb Boss’s minions the Flying Monkeys.  Everyone respects him.  He even used to be a lawyer!  The biggest challenge is getting him to focus instead of skidding off into some sort of mad tangent when you meet with him.  How I wish we had more time together!  Maybe I’m not missing out after all, though.  I think the COO has been appointed Chief Executioner, tasked with raping and pillaging the shared services areas for the Evil Empire.  A crap job, but at least he’ll do it with humanity.

I may have told you that Dumb Boss, as part of his torture campaign,  refused to approved a replacement EA when mine went off on maternity leave.  Naturally, I use this as an excuse not to attend his meetings and not to deliver him reports – after all, my EA co-ordinated such things and I don’t have her.  The COO found out Dumb Boss had taken away my EA, and told our CEO.  The CEO, in an actual moment of support, told Dumb Boss to give me an EA.  Naturally, the evil trog never did…The COO asked me a couple of weeks ago whether Dumb Boss had reinstated my Executive Assistant.  Noooooo…and the COO was MAD.  He was going to speak to the CEO again.  Yayyyy!  I had supporters, albeit silent ones!!

Naturally, I ponder why Dumb Boss so overtly disregarded the CEO’s directive.  Was it him being an asshole?  Or was it because he thought he would never be caught?  Because he knew his white-anting of me had kicked in, and the Evil Empire would soon oust me?

Other supporters have started coming out of the woodwork on Dumb Boss.  Another of his peers- the head of Distribution – has noticed Dumb Boss deleting my name from emails…so the Distribution dude copies me back in!  I LOVE IT.  What FUN.

One thing I’m mindful of is that I will soon forget the evil that Dumb Boss has caused.  It will fade into my memory banks the way the pain of childbirth distances itself in time for a mother’s decision to go a second round.  So, I have decided I’ll take time chronicling it.  From the beginning: My JobInterview.  When, if I had reason to suspect, there should have been clues I to make me run a mile.

Coming Soon: Part 1…

Confidence

Why is it that confidence and ability seem to so rarely form a perfect match?  What is it about self-delusion that makes so many of us unable to truly understand what we are really capable of?

I, for one, often find myself knocked sideways a little when under subversive attack.  I am terrible, I think, at blowing my own trumpet.  So, when the crunch comes, I find that I get that sick feeling in my stomach that sits there, like a dead weight.  I can often lose confidence in my ability to handle the situation, and withdraw or – sometimes worse, over-talk.  I think it’s like that far more for women, as we so often assume that we cannot do things that we are more than qualified for.  Often, more qualified than the very men who turn up and give it a whirl.  Many men just seem to unfairly and (often destructively) ooze with self-confidence.

Typical of this phenomenon is Dumb Boss, a text book example of someone whose confidence way, way outstrips his ability.  Almost to the point of embarassment.  He is, indeed, the corporate equivalent of one of those tubby contestants on So You Think You Can Dance, or those out of key crooners on Idol.  They turn up to their audition, and inflict their over-rated sense of their own ability on the world, and then are amazed and offended when the judges (and the world) so seemingly miss their talent.  I particularly love it when they mutter to the experts: ”Well, that’s your opinion”.

I wish corporate life were more like that.  I could hit the stage with gusto, and belt out a Karaoke tune better than most.  Bring it on – wheel out the Corporate Lunatics, one by one, and expose them!  Let us stand in front of our judges and get kicked off the stage – or the air ticket to Vegas.

I came across this hugely popular You Tube video of a snaggle-toothed mobile phone salesman who is just the opposite: lacking in confidence, he turned up anyway. 

You can tell by the looks on the judges’ faces that they were convinced that this ordinary dude would be yet another one of THOSE contestants – talentless and self deluded.  “Here we go again”, they thought, but then it got worse: The contestant said he was going to sing opera…

In case you didn’t know, this shy, humble man’s name is Paul Potts.  In 2007, he went on to win Britain’s Got Talent, sing in front of royalty and sell millions of CD’s.

Priceless.

Performance Review: Part 2

You can only imagine how much I was looking forward to this.  I walk in and prepare for another schellacking.  Instead, DB is calm.  He begins: “Well, last time I did a lot of talking.  Why don’t you take it away this time.”

I considered his beady little Dumb Boss eyes.  “How honest can I be?”  He choked for a second, then composed himself.  I continued: “The biggest issue is whether our relationship will ever work.”  There.  I said it.

A fairly civil conversation ensued, at which we agreed I would visit the other Executive DIrectors and get direct feedback, and that he and I would (for the first time ever) actually meet on a regular basis.  That he would give me feedback on issues as they happened.  I foreshadowed that I would respond formally to the issues listed in his extensive email.  All in all, it went OK.

Over the next 2 weeks, I finalised my response: when I delivered it to him, though, he seized up…he felt it was like a declaration of war, whereas I felt I needed to respond to the issues that he had raised.  It was a fair and balanced document: where there were things to learn, I acknowledged it.

But I also noted that he needed to remember that my team was a work in progress: that just over a year ago, I had arrived to turn the team around.  Judging me and the team’s performance was premature and particularly unfair given how overworked we had all been for the entire year. 

We will have to see how it goes.  To be honest, I can’t see how it will work.  I know for a fact that he’s dribbled a biased viewpoint into the CEO, and that with all the problems in the business, my troubles with DB are not a priority.  Especially when all his other direct reports toe the line and hush up at the first sign of trouble.

All quiet on the lunatic front?

Oh, I think not, dear reader!  Grovelling apologies for having been silent for a couple of months.  But Dumb Boss is striking at his worst!  I will need to update you in parts as to the whole sorry saga, but suffice it to say that DB and I have come to blows of late.

The story so far:  as you know, we’ve had a new CEO since April.  My initial impressions were that is a top dude who was quickly sniffing through DB’s patronising exterior to find not much substance underneath.  New CEO has been conducting a “business diagnostic”, finding all sorts of problems lying underneath the surface (I don’t think he realisted how dire the place was when he signed up!).

Meanwhile, my team and I have been overwhelmed with work (I am so very very OVER working weekends) and struggling to keep up.  DB seems to have been busy building alliances with some of the other Executive Directors (read: direct reports to the CEO), while other more seasoned execs are rolling their eyes at him and making quiet remarks to me about “some people playing the politics”.

Some of DB’s more stupid moments have included publicly criticising the old CEO – even to junior staff!  This is pretty rank at the best of times but – wait for it – the old CEO got promoted and he’s now the new CEO’s BOSS!  Apparently there was a falling out between old CEO and DB as old CEO left the building and the relationship has been frosty ever since.  In the meantime (and totally unrelated) my relationship with the old CEO has never been better as I’ve been handling something he stuffed up and making sure he and the Company’s interests are protected.

Anyhow, for some reason (don’t know what) DB has bolstered his own confidence and he is acting like King Cockroach (ie top of the pile of lunatics; convinced he will still be around even after the nuclear blast).  His confidence includes ignoring my requests for lawyers to report to me who have been hired on a 2 year project!  He doesn’t understand the need for lawyers to be independent – thinks there will be better results if I just stay in touch with them rather than their having a hard or dotted reporting line to me.  He is, of course, being influenced by a Project Manager of such evil intention that you can hear the Darth Vadar theme in the background every time he wanders away from the Death Star.  Such a schmuck.  Both of them.

Darth has even taken to saying that one of the lawyers he recently hired would make a great general counsel, and that I have no authority to decide what happens in respect of the legal team.  Nice.  All thanks to Dumb Boss.

Then – THEN – I am sitting in a meeting and the CEO announces (out of the blue) that the legal, risk and compliance teams should be located in the business.  I tried to retain my composure, and keep a straight face, all the while thinking “WHAT THE ….?”

Two days worth of phone calls later, and DB still hasn’t explained what the deal is – so I was getting more and more pissed off with DB, and finally flipped my lid at him. 

DB responds by ringing me and listing my sins: (i) I focus too much on the needs of our Boards and not enough on management; (ii) I am too risk averse and (iii) I do not respect the “chain of command” by checking with him first before I raise issues with the CEO or other Exec Directors!  Hell, I am the GENERAL COUNSEL!  Hasn’t this guy worked that out yet! 

So, then he pipes up with “If I were you, I’d be thinking about whether this job is what you want – it seems you want something more senior and a bigger role, so maybe this isn’t the role for you.  I will go into these issues further at your performance review next week…”  I read this as him saying he wants me to leave.  So, I call the former HR guy (who has since been promoted to our head office in Europe) and ask what I should do.

He says that he wouldn’t put it past DB to be deliberately seeking negative feedback about me to bolster his own view and that, if he and the old CEO were still there, this would have been clipped.  He says that his interpretation is that my role as a keeper of corporate governance is under threat, and that I should make an appointment with the CEO – BEFORE my performance review.  Why?  Because I don’t want the meeting to be about my review.  So, I make the appointment…and sweat for the rest of the weekend.

Eliot Spitzer: feet of clay

 I glanced up briefly from the madness of my workload recently to discover that the mighty had fallen.  Eliot Spitzer, once the Poster Boy of “Gotcha”, had been got.  It’s hard to describe how it made me feel.

As NY Attorney General, and in previous roles, he had done massive amounts of good, including helping to bring down the Gambino family in New York.  Suddenly regulators everywhere were Eliot Spitzer wannabes and the financial services industry scrambled to shore up their practices so they lived up to a new model of more transparency.  Corrupt corporates knew the heightened fear of someone as`smart and powerful as Spitzer discovering they were up to no good.  White collar criminals shuddered.  His focus was relentless, and one after the other, he ripped open institutions of unfairness and corruption.

This month, though, it’s like all of it was left behind.  Ohhhh- that photo of his wife – standing there, looking desperately alone, inexplicably trying to help him to salvage something of his world before it all, finally, collapsed.  To me, all of this says a lot about leadership.  Here’s my attempt to articulate what all this made me feel.

1. The most self-righteous among us are probably hiding the biggest secrets

Now, I’m not saying Spitzer was self-righteous.  But there sure was alot of schadenfreude washing around when his reputation hit the skids.  The situation reminded me of 1984, when I was 16.  Back then, I attended a Pentecostal church.  This was pretty controversial at the time, and many of my school friends attended the local Anglican church.  The Anglican Minister was a grey-haired man, who preached of fire and brimstone, and used the pulpit to condemn the Pentecostal church and its practitioners.  Those of us who attended were regarded as wayward children, to be brought back onto the path.  His self-righteousness knew no bounds.  Even his daughter, Pam, who I went to school with, was a caricature of “goodness”.  My overwhelming memory was that he was more than a little terrifying.

Years later, a girl I knew from those times came forward.  When she was 16, the Minister had taken advantage of her; she’d been damaged ever since.  He was removed from Ministry and brought shame to his family, and his church.  I wondered how Pam was taking it: the girl had been one of her closest friends.

When I found out, it was like it all suddenly made sense: those who criticise the most often have the most to hide.  He preached damnation on others and, while everyone else was having tea cake, he was ruining young girls for his own purposes.

I’ve seen this again and again: the biggest protestors are often the ones with the most to hide.  I try my hardest to avoid being self-righteous.  I’m not perfect, and I don’t feel like hearing “I told you so” from anyone.

2. Being ethical isn’t a part-time job

If you are 99.9% ethical, are you still an “ethical” person?  That’s like being only half pregnant.  You either are or you aren’t.  If you want to be an ethical leader, stop stealing the pens.

Apart from the damage to his family, I am saddest about Spitzer’s legacy being lost in some hotel room somewhere.  How such bad judgement can ruin a lifetime of service.  Sure, I know the guy had ambition, and was probably motivated by realising it, but let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater here.

Nonetheless, you are only as good as today’s reputation.

3.  None of this should stop you standing up for what’s right

What I’m saying isn’t about not standing up, speaking up when you need to.  If only someone had said something in 1984, that poor girl might not have been abused by the Minister.  Be brave, but be compassionate.

4. Be understanding and generous-spirited

Particularly about the shortcomings of others.  Especially if you want room one day to recover from mistakes yourself.  See the circumstances from all sides: your first take on a situation is wrong often enough to mean you should stop and think, and ask questions, before passing judgement…come to think of it, don’t pass judgement.  Just give understanding.  Make the tough calls when you need to, but avoid being the One Who Thinks They Are 100% Right.

So…

I suppose that, when all is said and done, I just feel sorry about the whole Spitzer mess.  I want leaders I can follow, and admire.  I don’t want them to have feet of clay; I want to learn from them, be inspired, and have enough of them live up to the dream to make my belief in the human spirit worth defending.

I WANT Spitzer to make a comeback.  He’s taken his medicine; his life as he knows it is gone.  I WANT us all to give him the space to pick himself up and dust himself off.  Please let the press give him the space and respect so he can try and save his marriage, so he can teach his and all our daughters that women are valued and he knows he totally messed up.  He isn’t over: God, I hope what he does next will blow us all away.

Good luck, Eliot.

(Photo credit: Mary Altaffer, The Associated Press)

When to speak up

Standing up for other people, and your integrity, are both the hardest and easiest things for me.  It’s easy because I feel I have no choice.  It’s also hard, though, because my personality type is subtle as a brick…so I feel compelled to jump onto a rooftop and scream that something is going horribly wrong, and everyone needs to listen.  I know you may find this a great shock, dear reader, but that isn’t always the most effective way.  Having an impact in a difficult situation is incredibly challenging, and I’ve seen my fair share of them.  Probably the hardest one to date was when I had to whistleblow to the Board about a CEO.  Not fun at all.

Over the last few weeks, one of those situations has been unfolding.

My team works right next to our Communications and Government team – a group of around 12 people.  Soon after I joined the Company, the Head of the Comms and Govt team arrived too – we were new kids at the same time.  I was really looking forward to him joining, because I always had a wonderful relationship with the incredibly talented Comms and Govt teams in my Old Job, and I figured there were plenty of opportunities for us to work together to really improve some of the way the Company managed its stakeholders.

Boy, was I wrong.  Within 5 minutes of meeting him, my “arsehole” radar shot straight up, especially when he announced he hated a friend of mine.  Hmmm.  He reinforced this when he passed some of my work off as his own in a meeting with the CEO – right in front of me!  Another hmmm.  With my bubbly personality, I couldn’t let that slide, and I confronted him, and asked if he always took credit for the work of others.  Silence.

Since then, we’ve had a pretty frosty relationship.  The big difference is that I am publicly supportive of his role, and keep telling people in the business that they need to engage him on comms issues.  Meanwhile, he is busy building his empire, and he keeps telling his team not to involve me in their initiatives (they have ignored him).

I stood by and watched as he quickly alienated people in his team.  Quite early on, he lost a talented comms person, who loudly proclaimed that they were leaving because of him.  Since then, 8 of his staff have turned over (in just 8 months).  A particular member of his team, Olive, is pretty vocal.  She’s famous for being passionate, and often not letting an issue go when she needs to.  However, she’s smart, diligent, and she’s been with the Company for nearly 11 years.  She’s a good soul.

Olive and the Arsehole has troubles from day 1.  She had been tossing up whether to tell the CEO or one of his Direct Reports about the issues, and ended up meeting with the head HR dude to take him through all the dramas.  Two weeks ago, the Arsehole ”restructured” her out of a job.  Now, I don’t think it was a real redundancy – it was him getting rid of someone who stood up to him.  Being Olive, she stood up for herself.  I was the first person she came to. 

As General Counsel, these situations can be sticky.  However, I knew that I wouldn’t be advising the Company on the legal issues arising from her redundancy (I was conflicted), and I made it clear that I wasn’t going to talk to her about the legality of what was being done.  I was, though, prepared to be a support for her.  To listen, and to give personal advice.

God, the whole thing felt so much like when I left my Old Job - how COULD I not have supported her?  So, I listened, and sympathised, and told her about the importance of finishing up and moving on.  But she wanted to tell some people what was happening in her area, and I understood the reasons why.  If she wanted to have her say, I advised, she needed to be calm and rational.  The more psycho she came across (no matter how much it was deserved), the less her words would mean.   Calm down, prepare what you will say, deliver your message, and leave.  Leave the listener with the feeling that you are telling them these things “more in sorrow than in anger.”

There was another dilemma: what would I do about this situation?  Soon after the Arsehole joined, I gave a warning to the HR people about him, suggesting that they keep an eye on his behaviour.  I also had a number of senior people say things to me about the Arsehole, so it was clear some people were onto him.  But now, with the situation with Olive, what would I do?  Especially since others in her team had started to talk with me about their issues.

The other challenge was that Olive had been pushing for her Government team to report to me.  While I’d love to have that area, I was concerned about the issues in my role as a leader in the Company.  I really try and avoid undermining others at all costs.  The last thing I wanted was to be seen to be speaking up to manipulate the situation.  But how could I ignore the way people were being treated, right under my nose?

So, when I found myself in the elevator with the top HR dude, I quietly dropped a bomb: “there are problems in that team”, I said, “you might want to look into them.”  And out of the lift I stepped (much like the Phantom).  I also thought I should say something to Dumb Boss (but got waylaid by the shock of my own bizarre performance review – see last post!).

Yesterday, Olive went to see the CEO.  He opened their conversation by apologising to her, and promising to look into the issue.  Yesterday afternoon, Dumb Boss rang me.  He asked me what I knew about what was going on.  I went up to see him.  “Should we be losing Olive?”  No, I said.  She’s a dedicated, smart, good worker.  We are nuts to let her leave.  But, and here’s the rub: I thought that, after everything that had happened, she would be better off getting a fresh start.  It would be best for Olive if she took the money and ran.

Dumb Boss confessed that he had been pushing for me to get the Government Team transferred to me, so I made it clear to him that, while I’d love to do it, I wasn’t after the job, and I was just about making sure they understood the issues with the Arsehole.    Apparently, news of other complaints about the Arsehole have filtered up to the CEO, who is working out that the Arsehole isn’t very good at his job.  God Bless Dumb Boss: he is still pushing for the change.  But the CEO has (wisely) decided to sit on the decision: if he moves part of the Arsehole’s team to me, he may as well fire him.

I am really proud of the Company for having this conversation.  At my Old Job, the CEO would have just let this dreadful situation continue until more lives were lost, or something gi-NOR-mormous blew up.  God, I hope something happens to sort this situation out!

At the end of the day, I’m glad I said something.  While I’ll never know what impact my speaking up had, at least I know that I can live with myself; that I wasn’t one of the people who sat in corners gossiping, but not being courageous enough to stand up for the human beings I work with.

One of my Management Team asked me last week why I felt I had to say something (I had told her about my elevator conversation with the HR dude).  Although it’s probably a little exaggerated for this context, I told her, it’s probably because the saying that most irks me most is this one:

“All it takes for evil to triumph is that good men do nothing.”

Great Leadership Books

One of the tools for developing the Management team reporting to me is what we’ve called “The Flamingo Book Club”.  Each month, we pick a book to read, and one person’s role is to facilitate a discussion about it with the rest of the group. 

I figure we could spend a bomb on sending the individuals off to leadership training; however, generally I think that you can get a lot out of just spending time with people and challenging them, giving them feedback, and working together to set boundaries.

We’ve done about 3 of these now, and they’ve gone really well.  After we have read and discussed each book, a couple of copies are added to the library, and we do a book review for the team at the full team meeting.  This way, we get to share the learnings and include the team in what the managers are up to.

The first book we chose was Susan Scott’s “Fierce Conversations”.  This is about having conversations with people that get to the heart of issues, rather than avoiding them and letting wounds fester.  She explores why this is needed, and how to approach it.  That first month, one of the managers used the techniques in the book to give some difficult feedback to one of her team members, and she was very successful.  Another manager felt extremely challenged by it because he is incredibly passive/defensive and won’t say what’s on his mind enough.  Now, when we give each other a bit of tough love, we say “Uh oh, a Fierce Conversation.”

The second book that we read was John C Maxwell’s “The 360 Degree Leader”.  I have loved Maxwell’s writing for many years, and his take on leadership and teamwork are particularly challenging yet simple and truthful.  I find his writing to be a wonderful checklist at any time.

I picked this particular book because I wanted my people to see that leading from wherever you are in an organisation is critical.  So many people think that they deserve to be leaders and that the world has not yet recognised their stellar leadership potential by making them CEO.  Great leaders have a stillness and self-confidence, and this book really gets into so many aspects of leading.  It was a great trigger for much meaningful discussion, and challenged one of my managers who is particularly competitive with others.

John C Maxwell has a great many other books, and I heartily recommend them, and his website at http://www.maximumimpact.com/

Our third book wasn’t a book: I asked everyone to watch the movie Thirteen Days about the Cuban Missile Crisis.  First, it’s an enthralling film.  Second, it closely follows history, which is borne out by the historical commentary and the book of the same name by Robert Kennedy.  Third, it shows leadership under pressure – stripped of all its flashy glitz, naked and in many ways alone.  It was by far everyone’s favourite leadership learning so far.  I’ll be doing a separate post on Leadership and the Cuban Missile crisis soon (although I do note that the new White House Press Secretary apparently had not heard of it before a couple of months ago…what a shocker).

Our next book is Lance Armstrong’s “It’s Not About the Bike”, which I hear is a corker.  We have a few others lined up to follow: “Good to Great” by Jim Collins, Daniel Goleman’s “Working with Emotional Intelligence”, “Authentic Happiness” by positive psychology guru Martin Seligman.  We ambitously put Nelson Mandela’s autobiography “Last Walk to Freedom” on the list.  I suspect it will take us a while to read.

Leading the Flamingos: How South Africa helped create a vision of our future

I was busy building the picture of our vision of the future. The Objectives were great, and I could certainly put a Vision into words, which I was doing.

Then, one day, I read an amazing story. I’d seen something on it before, but now for some reason, it resonated with me and hit straight in the heart. I was on a plane and was reading a business journal, which talked about what had become known as the Mont Fleur scenarios.

The Mont Fleur scenarios were developed in South Africa in 1992. A group of political parties got together with other influential South Africans, and gathered at the Mont Fleur Conference Centre. They invited a facilitator from Royal Dutch Shell, Adam Kahane, who was asked to utilise his skills in scenario planning to help them understand how South Africa’s future might play out.

The interesting thing is that scenario planning does not involve mapping out the future that you want. Instead, participants were asked to work together to describe likely futures based on what they perceived could happen. In the commercial world, you then use these scenarios to test your own strategic options and plans, and to test your business against.

The group from Mont Fleur worked together for months, and were able to put aside political and philosophical differences to identify four scenarios that they regarded as likely:

1. Lame Duck – this is where a white government remains in power and, in attempting to appease too many interests, is unable to define a way forward for the nation;

2. Ostrich – a white government fails to recognise the need for change, and ignores the growing tensions in South Africa;

3. Icarus – a black government takes power and, by implementing reform too quickly, tanks South Africa’s economy; and

4. The Flight of the Flamingos – a unified nation rises slowly, and together, as flamingos do.

Building a Vision

When I first arrived at the Company in April 2007, the biggest issue was the leadership vacuum that had striken the legal team for the past 4 years.  There had been a cocktail of aggressive leadership, absent leadership, and passive leadership which led to large levels of turnover, and great dissatisfaction.

One of my challenges was to establish a plan for this team to emerge from mediocrity (more in reputation than in fact) and transform into a world-class legal function.

The challenge with leading lawyers is that they are natural cynics; respect has to be earned.  Lawyers are smart and agile thinkers, and no empty fluff will engage them.  This team, in particular, had seen years of empty promises about things that would be delivered, and very few of them were.

The team also had a terrible reputation externally.  Lawyers who had left years before were still telling their friends that it was a terrible place to work.  Some of them even gathered up new stories about what I was doing, and scornfully spread negative stories about us in the industry.  It got to the point where this Legal Team was the last place that anyone wanted to work; everyone knew it was a basket case.  This left the team decimated, and missing key expertise needed to service the business’s needs.

Where was I to start?

Well, first of all, Dumb Boss had given all his reports the goal of making the Corporate & Finance function “World Class” (whatever that means).  So this became our anchor.

I have a fundamental belief that people within the team have most of the answers to the hard questions.  They have existed under the poor leadership and have watched as things obvious to them have failed to be done.  So, I always start by asking them what they think we should do.

My mechanism for this was an offsite where on a blank page where I drew a spot on the bottom left hand of the page.  I wrote next to it “We are here”.  On the top right hand side, I drew another spot and wrote “World Class”.  And then I joined the dots.  The line was the journey that we were to take.

I then facilitated a session.  Starting by asking the group to close their eyes and visualise the future; a future where we were in a world class legal team, surrounded by excellence, wonderful colleagues.  I asked them to picture what it looked like, sounded like, felt like.  What did it feel like to come into work?  What sounds were in the department?  What sort of buzz was there?

I asked them to imagine that a reporter was visiting the department to see what a world class team was like.  The reporter began asking them questions: how did you get here?  What do you do that makes you world class?  I asked the team to imagine how they would answer those questions.

Open your eyes.  Now tell me what you saw.  We filled pages and pages with what a World Class legal team would be.  The team knew what it was; equally they knew we didn’t have it.

I broke them into 5 groups and asked them to come up with 2 ideas for what would make us World Class.  They had to define the “What” – ie state their idea, the “Why” – ie why it would make us World Class, and the “How” – with some ideas for what we would do to execute the plan.  Each team then came back and presented their ideas, and we began to put them into categories like “Skills Development” and “Reward & Recognition”.

I gave everyone 3 dots to put onto the ideas that they most believed would make us World Class, and 10 minutes to go around the room and consider how they wanted to vote.  We then counted up the dots, and our three top priorities emerged as “Skills & Knowledge” (by a long way – I was relieved that the team understood there was big gaps), “Reward & Recognition” (they felt underpaid and under-loved) and “Customer Service” (this one usually comes up – you can usually always improve here).

So, I took all this away and typed up the verbatim feedback, and then created summaries of the top 3 priorities.  We circulated this and asked people to sign up to work in groups on delivering the change they called for in these ideas.  And so the journey commenced.

I put all of this into a simple picture of our journey each year as we would work together on defined Objectives and deliver them into Business as Usual.  As they became part of our foundation, they formed stepping stones that we would use to continue to rise higher as a team.

This year, we were proud of what we delivered in our teams; only the Customer Service initiative failed to deliver everything we had hoped for.  The lesson here was that the team that was put together was full of passive or princess-types (yes, Mark was on that team!) who couldn’t bring the Objective to delivery.  That’s OK – it’s inevitable that some will fail to live up to their promise, and you learn the lessons and move on.

I did inject one objective that I was keen on: Innovation.  This, plus Customer Service, External Relationships (ie how Legal relates outside our Company) and Knowledge (ie prcedent development, knowledge management) are our Objectives for 2008.  We have already announced team leaders and the teams, and they’ll kick off their work in January.  In future posts, I’ll tell you about our model for delivering these Objectives, and using them to raise up the next generation of leaders and to test our people.

In any event, the wisdom of our own team has proved to be accurate, and using their ideas has been the core reason for our success.  If I had imposed my ideas without fully understanding theirs, we would have had some success, but it’s likely that we would have failed to gain the sense of ownership that is necessary for becoming “World Class”.  As new people join us, we explain to them how we formed this plan, and why we are spending time delivering on non-legal projects so that they can buy into our Vision.

The year end: when pride and melancholy merge

It’s when you reach the end of each year that you really appreciate how quickly they go.  Life is full of that sad cocktail of time whizzing by, but also grateful awe with what has been achieved.

I started my year consulting to the corporate regulator on a major corporate collapse, looking after the wash-up of mum and dad investors losing all or most of their dough because of some selfish and negligent corporate management.  Corporate Lunacy at its worst.  But I did some good for real people, and am so proud.

Before I started with the Company, I spent 7 wonderful weeks travelling to places as diverse as New York, Italy, Greece and Fiji (I basically just got to list all the places I wanted to go to and shove them into the one air ticket – spending some of my pay-out was truly fab).  My favourite moment was on the Greek island of Santorini where, after 5 weeks of travel, I was waiting for the bus to the capital, Fira.  One of Greece’s crazy taxi drivers asked me if I wanted a ride for 10 euro, saying the bus wouldn’t be along for another 45 minutes.  Normally, I’d have jumped at the chance.  But instead I slowly considered it and said “No thanks, I’ll wait”.  That moment, I think I was the most relaxed of any time in my life.  It was wonderful: relaxation in my core, the depth of my being.  Why oh why can’t life be like that more often?

Then I started at The Company and set about resolving the issues that had beset the Legal team for so long.  Sure, there were some bumpy times and some desperately low moments.  But they are behind us.  In that time, I have started to turn around our recruitment reputation, and brought on board some really wonderful new team members.  Plus, we’ve motivated and focused the great people who were already there.  I laid out a 3-year vision so they can see where we are going; no-one before had done that with them and followed through.

We had a bit of turnover in the first few months, as people who had waited too long for new leadership got itchy feet and headed off.  Happily, most left with regret as they wished they could also be part of what we were doing.  Two went overseas.  One very talented young lawyer told us she wanted to try private practice for a time, so I picked up the phone to the law firm she wanted to work with, and organised for them to meet her.  And she got that job.

Of course there were the people who we were glad left: the team is lighter, more hopeful without the weight of them.  But God there were tough times.  I learned a lot of new lessons this year, I can tell you. 

As for the Dispute Resolution Team, they are in a state of flux.  The new manager is wonderful – the whole team loves her, and she was exactly the right choice.  Two of the lawyers, Lisa and Anne, are like the Bobsy Twins - they always have their heads together.  They are the biggest fans of Mark, and live their lives seeking his approval.  As it turns out, they seek approval a lot, including from me.  Lisa is more the problem child – she’s like a duckling who adopts whoever walked past last as its mother.  Anne, on the other hand, is different.  Between the two of them, she’s the leader.  She resigned earlier this year, before I arrived, because her manager was such a disaster.  When I announced her old manager was going, she rang me the next day and asked to come back, which she did on a 12 month contract.  She was grateful for a second chance and, even when I announced Mark was leaving, she said I had her support (even though she knew her friends would crucify her if they heard her say it).  Our strategy with Lise and Anne is to divide and conquer.

This last week, we told Anne that, not only did we want her to lead one of our project teams next year, but that we were making her role permanent.  She was overjoyed, and said “I’ve been vindicated!”.  I think she’s referring to the frequent drinks/dinners/lunches that the DR Team (both current and former members) have to pick over the bones of old times, and bitch about old and new management in Legal.  I imagine they all told her that I was systematically trying to get rid of all of them, and I wouldn’t make her role permanent.  How wrong they were.

Meanwhile, Lisa was told that she missed out on leading a project team in 2008 – that she didn’t have the leadership skills the others had.  She is disappointed, but will be uncertain how to react to Anne’s being successful.

We’ll see how that goes the next year.