You can’t play ducks and drakes with leadership

We all have our favourite leaders and we admire them for many and varied reasons, we may even attempt to model our own leadership behaviours on famous or influential leaders.

But there are leaders for different times and different situations, so how do you know which leader is right for your organisation? And what do you do if you are not that person?

It’s like fishing for little plastic ducks at the fairground. It’s relatively easy when the ducks are bobbing along gently, but stir the water up a bit and suddenly it becomes more difficult. The skills needed to hook the duck instantly change from having a steady hand and a good eye to being quicker off the mark and having an instinct for where and when to grab.

Without making running a company sound simplistic, it’s similar in business. Someone who leads well during a recession, has a focus on financials and a talent for encouraging teams to work together, harder, longer, in a bid to trade through the challenges, may not be the best person to lead a company through an acquisition or merger, or indeed, may be the wrong person entirely to grow the company when the pace of change accelerates in a booming economic environment.

Entrepreneurs who sit at the head of their boardroom table as managing director or chief executive aren’t always strong leaders. Also, employees are often promoted into a management role because they are good at what they do, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll be a good director or leader.

It’s a problem usually better handled by large corporates, with all the advantages that come from having a decent budget; resources to hire and fire, and money to spend on leadership development, training and succession planning.

However, the problem also exists in smaller businesses, and managing the issues without the luxury of a budget can not only prove daunting, but can be significantly damaging if not addressed in the early stages.

Kim Walker is managing director of Advance Consultancy, working with leaders and leadership teams to improve their business performance.

Walker says it’s important to emphasise the correlation between the impact of leadership and the bottom line results. Even in tough times, good leadership can translate into business success.

The requirements of leaders and leadership teams are different in challenging times. A robust strategy is important, but this is only going to succeed if the leader can inspire his or her team to deliver it. Even in good times, bringing people with you can be challenging, but inspiring employees to deliver a strategy when they are feeling compromised personally is much more difficult and requires a different set of skills, says Walker.

“In a prosperous environment, you are usually working with a recipe that’s tried and tested and the leadership team is simply keeping the show on the road. During change or difficult times, this requires a different set of skills and perhaps even a different set of people.

“However, even for the most experienced and skilled leader, it would be difficult to deliver a message that members of their leadership team are going to be substituted with others who are better suited to help implement the changes or deliver a revised strategy.”

For Mentholatum managing director Andrew Tasker, the tough environment is a challenge, but his business is expanding at a rate of 20-25 per cent per year, and he is looking to his home-grown leaders to spearhead the growth.

A structured training-needs analysis to identify specific requirements was carried out, and then Tasker put in place a leadership development programme for the company’s managers. He says it has been really successful, and by training the team around five key projects, there was a tangible business benefit on the projects as a direct result, as well as the overall benefit of the training.

To coin a much over-used business phrase, it’s about getting your ducks in a row and being able to manage them in rough waters as well as in calm. It’s not as easy as it looks.