Possibly the best book I have read over the past few years has been Doris Kearns Goodwin’s “Team of Rivals” about the political genius of Abraham Lincoln. Those who saw Doris talk about it at the Hay Literary Festival were spellbound. I began it one morning and became addicted to it, picking it up at every possible opportunity until I had finished it – and it is long. Then I began it all over again. Why? Quite simply, the book is long because it needs to be. She draws together the whole cast of characters that occupied the political stage in the years up to and including the Civil War, ultimately ending on the death of Lincoln with a postscript detailing the responses of those who had been his enemies, to his death – his rivals. These rivals had been the other three contenders to become the first Republican President of the USA. In victory, caused by the fact that he was the preferred second choice to each of the other three much more famous and favoured candidates, none of whom could muster the necessary majority – he invited them to join him in his cabinet. Thius the Team of Rivals was born.

What is so riveting is that they all despised this hick from the sticks, this self taught lawyer from humble origins. They despised him because he said he wanted to abolish slavery, but would not immediately do so. They despised him because he put his faith in what he saw, not in the assertions of special interests. Thus he would during the Civil War promote Ulysses Grant to become commander of his forces when he had previously been demoted for insolence and was a famous drunkard – yet he was a brilliant strategist. Lincoln was extraordinary. Against the wishes of his generals he sat in on all court martials that might have ended in an execution. To paraphrase him he said he would not countenance the execution of a man whose legs got the better of his heart, because he himself understood the instinct and wouldn’t create a widow or a mourning mother for the crime of desertion. The only executions he allowed were for deserters who had killed or wounded comrades in an effort to protect their skins. Everyone accused Lincoln of not understanding soldiers, but he did. They loved him for his humanity. On slavery too, he took it slowly, he needed the people to be ready for its abolition. He wouldn’t bow to the ideas of the educated Washingtonians. He said and I paraphrase again, that a man finding a snake wound between the limbs of his sleeping children would hesitate to beat it to death. He should wait until it was out in the open. His better educated rivals used analogies from the classics that ordinary folk didn’t relate to. Lincoln’s genius lay in understanding the people. I cried when I read the letters in the postscript where his rivals expressed their sorrow at his passing and acknowledged his greatness for understanding what they did not.

I write this because the question of how leaders judge the pace of change depends on what sort of leaders they are. Those in business divide into two camps. Those who see creativity as a series of iterations that deliver a range of products that are destined for obsolescence within a fairly short period of time, thereby guaranteeing them of an ever changing and growing market, or those who are game changers. These are the men and women who don’t respond to change, they make it and the world of  the Internet and its close cousins would be a first port of call. However, if we move away from business to explore the arena of politics we face a very real conundrum. Most of the great leaders of the past would not have survived the constant interrogation of the modern media and the Fourth Estate now so dominates opinion that a career is made or broken on satisfying the demands for reaction or action from the leader writers (what an ironic title that is). This response argues against any form of strategic leadership vision emerging as the passion for it is soon overrun by the need for the spin of it closely followed by the defence of it and ultimately a retreat from it. The status quo, like treacle keeps editorial writers in business.

So…only great leaders, or should we say informed leaders can effect or respond to the pace of change. Obama sensationally mastered social networking and funding mechanisms to become the first Afro-Caribbean President, his hero? Lincoln. It is fascinating to see whether his timing is genius or his downfall. Will America come to love his healthcare revolution before the time for re-election? The thing about change is that most people don’t like it until it has happened. Its anticipation is stressful even if after the event everyone wonders what the fuss was about.

I prefer a model which depends on presenting a new situation as if it is a response to an already voiced need and wrapping a narrative around it that makes the proposition sound like a natural extension of what has been said or done before. For me, as a Dutchman looking out on Britain, my adopted and much loved home, I feel a terrible anxiety that leadership today is incapable of the leaps of imagination that could conceive of our greatness once more. Not in an Imperial sense, but in the meaning of embracing a vision of what our future might be and what the first steps towards that might be. It brings on a deep melancholy when I think of two of Britain’s greatest assets, The BBC and Royal Mail, solid gold yet slightly tarnished and in need of a polish and some love resisting the onslaught of barbarians who cannot see how irreplaceable these things are or how much more precious and relevant they could yet become.

Leaders who survive ask themselves on a regular basis, what could destroy me and explore their weaknesses. The vain and inadequate die through inaction, the successes develop a story which they believe and their colleagues believe, because when you really believe it and the story makes sense you walk differently and your eyes have a different fire to them. No one really judges the pace of change, because that can only be done in hindsight as a post hoc rationalisation. Those that come through it best have some things in common though. They understand what their values are and what is not for sale. They do not fear being disliked and they are honest and possessed of an ambition to be as good as they hoped to be when they were young. Most of all they can master the knowledge that open minds need to be kept open and that certainty of outcome is never assured, but swiftness of response and a pirate grin can turn mistakes into opportunity. Ultimately I would have to say that the great leaders I have met, become part of the change through a strange osmosis which is down to the fact that they can only be successful doing what they believe in and understanding how to tell that story in a compelling way which makes us want to join them or buy things from them!

So…back to Lincoln. He listened to the people, he was of the people, he had known hardship and was unimpressed by wealth or the sycophancy of others. How many of those have we got and how can we make some more?

Written by Tim Smit, Chief Executive (and co-founder) of the Eden Project.

Common Purpose

Common Purpose gives leaders the inspiration, the knowledge and the connections they need to produce real change. Through our unique leadership development courses, a growing number of people around the world are making a difference in the industries and places where they work, in the communities where they live and in wider society.

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Here is the third blog in honour of Common Purpose’s 21st Birthday written by James Campbell who works for Lucara Diamond Corp.

Why is it that leaders don’t adapt to change? Why is it that so many people use tried and tested techniques that have always worked well in the past but perhaps are not relevant for today?

I come from a country which has gone through much change over the last twenty years and the man who led that change, Nelson Mandela, exemplifies how a leader adapts to change. He spent many years in a harsh Robben Island prison cell and, on release, he managed to ease the country into a vibrant, young democracy. I think he did it by being firm on his core values and at the same time exhibiting a great strength of adaptability. Both emanating probably from his large doses of humility.

How often do we choose the easy path – the inflexible path – when confronted with challenges which seem insurmountable or change which seems unintelligible or confusing? In my work life, my new company had to take my old company – which I’d worked for over twenty years – to court. This challenged many deep seated emotions. Could I adapt to the changed circumstances without sacrificing my core values and what I thought was right? The ‘trick’ here was to clearly differentiate between the organisation I had been a member of for over twenty years and what it had now become. They had adapted and changed and so had I. Thankfully, a win-win situation was engineered as both sides struggled to maintain their integrity within a highly conflictual legal system.

Perhaps the greatest change many leaders encounter are when they have children. Nothing changes more; as a child develops, the adult remains essentially the same. To be a successful parent (whatever that might mean) adapting to your child’s various growth phases is probably the ultimate challenge for any leader.

We live in a world of change, global economic cycles have got shorter, political change both at home and abroad is the order of the day, shareholders are getting more demanding and children grow-up. Those leaders who can retain their sense of self, while adapting to the changing circumstances will be those who can make a real difference.

Common Purpose

Common Purpose gives leaders the inspiration, the knowledge and the connections they need to produce real change. Through our unique leadership development courses, a growing number of people around the world are making a difference in the industries and places where they work, in the communities where they live and in wider society.

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Listening to everyone talk about the weather has made me laugh. I had a Canadian friend tell me ages ago that Americans (those of us from the United States) loved to talk about the weather. In fact a Japanese friend reinforced that a few years later. I felt that was quite true. But, and I think most of my British friends agree – talking about the weather in the UK is a favourite pastime for most people.

Its nice, you almost always something interesting to talk or complain about. Where I am from  we talk about the weather a lot but it can get boring for 100 days in the summer it is pretty much the same – HOT. You can talk about the weather, but its often a conversation about the difference between hot and hotter, trust me it can get boring. So as a result here in  the UK I always know how to start a conversation with someone new (especially as I am still learning to follow the football) because the weather is always changing. As a result of it always changing I am always looking to find out what it is doing next.

Believe it or not, and you may find it a stretch, thinking about the weather today has given me a new perspective on leadership. That special thing about British weather, that it is always changing, provides a nice back drop for leadership!

Since moving here, more than any other place I have lived, I have learned to be prepared for the weather changing unexpectedly. I now know to anticipate dramatic shifts in the weather on any given day and plan accordingly or deal with what comes my way. I’ve learned to plan for just about anything, and when the one thing I could not anticipate happens I deal with it.

As a leader it can be easy to become complacent about something that feels good and assume it will not change. It is also easy to become complacent when things don’t change fast enough. But leaders need to be prepared for changes, in fact they need to embrace changes and anticipate them.

It is too easy to become lulled into a false sense of security when the economy is running strongly, or when the government feels like an institution that is unlikely to change, or when an organisation is never quite bad enough. But nothing that I know of lasts forever and seasons change, winds shift, the tide goes out and when that happens leaders need to be ready for the shift, in fact they need to be talking about the change before it happens.

Maybe that is what went wrong when the economy was growing so quickly, maybe we didn’t have any leaders who were honest, willing to recognise that things change. In fact maybe they weren’t even leading, but were letting the winds of economic good fortune lead them?

I’ve heard a lot of people blame the media for talking the public into the recession, but couldn’t we also say that our leaders failed to talk us out of one. From what I saw most of our leaders were unprepared for what happened. During the height of our good fortune Greenspan and others talked us into it as well thinking they had solved the problems around economic bubbles and boom and bust. Their lack of vision (or excess of it) kept them blind, and as a result they failed to anticipate and possibly to even discuss what could be just over the horizon. Granted they have worked to deal with it, but how could leaders not expect some change?

Its too easy to sit back an analyse something that has already happened, but I hope we have learned our lesson. I know that in the next few days this heat wave will end, so my rain coat is with my umbrella still on the hook next to the door rather than packed away at the back of my closet. I’ll keep my shorts and sunscreen at the ready just in case the forecast changes and I’ll make sure to keep talking about the possibilities with others so that I can develop my own opinion of what will happen, whether I am right or wrong at least I will have made a decision based on a wide range of facts, conversations and information.

Ethan Ohs

Twenty years ago a friend gave me the Tao Of Leadership. By reading it again and again I got more used to the idea that it’s ok to approach tough issues in apparently contradictory ways. Sometimes being tough and resilient and at other times letting go. Leaders I come across though find this extremely difficult.

They want to reduce things to a solution, to take the behaviours they have just used and apply them to the next scenario. Instead take time to consider the role of being patient, being determined, to see what is happening. The nature of change means it is already happening, it’s something beyond you that you are also part of. You need to see what’s driving it, notice how you are interacting with it and from all these signals then decide on where you act. Do things in this way and you may help things evolve quicker. Act against what is happening and you’ll be tough when you should have been soft and vice versa.

Oliver Mack

I’ve never thought of leadership as not being linked to change. Is it the sum of your interactions with other entities? Whether we like it or not things change by the fact we interact with them (or if we choose not to they are changed by our absence).

At the heart of this is a twist in perception. Are we actors in society or passive recipients of what goes on around us? This argument comes up in so many guises. Stephen Covey talks about proactivity as the first stage of becoming an effective person. Within his concept he talks of the need to become aware of the relationship between stimulus and response. Once a person has done this they can begin to exercise choice. Hence they become active (and in Covey’s eyes, effective). By default this means those who don’t recognise this space they have for choice are passive and not as effective in making things happen.

The ability a person has to respond to any given situation could also be seen as their ability to lead. The greater their ability to respond then the better a leader they are. i.e. the more able they are to exercise choice over their future and the future of people and other entities around them, the better they are at leading.

Much work in leadership development works on developing people’s self-awareness, ability to become more aware of their prejudices, raise awareness of how they are too reactive, or give them any number of strategies for developing new ideas, businesses and managing projects. I think this misses the heart of leadership. The heart of leadership is this very idea that we are part of something bigger than just ourselves, that we have a connection to something beyond ourselves and therefore the personal will or desire to act on and effect more than just our immediate surroundings.

Eventually everyone can accept they have some choice over things around them, that they can improve how they communicate, how they bring people together to get things done etc. What is harder is to connect to the very society they are part of. This is what compels a person to become more active and create change.

What I’m getting at is that individuals play a role in making society the way it is. We always have done and always will do, hence you can’t separate leadership from change.

The extent of our connection to society around us makes this anxiety greater or lesser. The more connected, the more we understand it, the more we realise we are part of a system. In realising this we can figure out the role we play and how we can effect change. Either to better ourselves, our family, our community our organisation or any part of the wider system. It’s this realisation that is the first step to becoming a leader.

Some people would talk about this as a sense of belonging, feeling connected, part of something bigger. I always remember someone telling me that inspiration was about connecting to something beyond yourself, or your immediate known surroundings. It can inspire you to new heights, to make new things happen. I notice it happens with me. Whenever I’m taken into new surroundings that make me see something different, that challenge how I saw things before I am more motivated, interested, inclined to be involved.

Of course this often gets placed in the arena of social and political education, or more recently education for sustainable development. This of course can produce lots of people who are just angry about what they see and connect to. They become unhappy with it and start to blame others, or organisation and people out side of their immediate circle of influence. If the connections are complete and leaders see the two way interaction between themselves and the system and vice versa though leaders can begin to accept they are part of the whole, that there is no inside or outside the system. Not distance themselves from it as though there is a set of good and bad, a part they can blame. This is the secret to being motivated towards positive change within a system.

The leadership phrase of keeping your eyes on the hills and feet on the ground speaks well to this. Keeping your eyes on the hills keeps you inspired, connected to the bigger picture. Keeping your feet on the ground prevents the disconnect and stress that can be created by aiming too high. It is what helps you translate the dream to realistic actions and steps.

The best model I’ve come across to explain this is that of creative tension, used by Peter Senge and others. It’s the description of the creative tension that I believe to be crucial in the design of a leadership programme. Many will grasp what I’ve written above and use it as the basis for fantastic awareness raising programmes. But can they turn the new found tension into something more than frustration with the system?

Oliver Mack