Shine On You Crazy Diamonds.

"Come on you raver, you seer of visions, come on you painter, you piper, you prisoner, and shine!" - "Shine on you crazy diamond" by Pink Floyd

 "That Margaret Thatcher, eh? What's she all about?"

Fear not - this is not going to be a politically inspired post. The above statement is usually a trigger for those who know me to drink up and head for the nearest exit, indicating as it does that I am about to launch into what I fondly consider to be my brilliant impression of a stand up comedian. This is accompanied by me rolling up the sleeves of my jacket (if wearing one) and leaning on an imaginary mic stand. The impression generally comes in somewhere during the third pint and was inspired, as the more astute amongst you may have worked out by now, sometime in the mid 80's by the likes of Ben Elton and co. It has remained unchanged, frozen in time, and unaffected by the fine works of the Izzard's, Bailey's, Mitchell's and Webb's of this world ever since.

I mention this here, not because I am currently midway through my third pint, or because I am feeling particularly humorous but because it is a typically long winded way of mine to introduce the subject of this post which could be stated as:
"That [insert name of leader of your choice here], what's he/she all about?"

Or, to put it another way: "What do we mean by 'Leadership'?"

From time to time I help out a friend and colleague by presenting a session on 'The Role of the Project Manager' on a public training course that he runs. One aspect of this session is a discussion about the differences between the role of the Project Manager as 'leader' and that as 'manager' during which I ask the attendees to give me their examples of great leaders. This usually results in a list that includes everyone from Gandhi to Margaret Thatcher, Jesus to Hitler and Beckham to Branson and all shades in between. When we then try to determine what we can learn from these examples and there follows a debate which revolves around just how can you, or even should you, assess the leadership qualities of individuals as diverse as, for example, Jesus and Hitler.
As I am a great believer that the development of excellent Leadership Behaviours in work, or in any endeavour, are an essential component of success, it's quite important to me that we understand what we mean by great leadership and what are the essential behaviours that contribute to that greatness. In order to get to grips with this I decided to ask a different (and I hope easier) question. Rather than, "What do we mean by [great] leadership?" I decided to ask myself, "What are the outcomes associated with great Leadership?"
This proved easier to deal with and led me to identify the following three outcomes:

1. Great leadership causes a group of people to attempt something – usually challenging – that they would not otherwise have attempted. If you like, causes people to boldly go where ... etc.
2. Great leadership also enables them to go there – it provides the desire, skills, know-how and energy to make the journey and to reach the desired goal.
3. Great leadership ensures that when they all get there, it is a worthy and desirable place to be – it is a goal that contributes to the greater good.

From which I conclude that there are three essential qualities of great leadership: it is Inspirational, it is Effective and it is Ethical (and yes I admit that I struggled a bit with that last quality but I think that the concept of ethical leadership comes closest to that sense of the greater good that I wanted to capture – any contributions to the debate are welcome).
I like this definition because it is simple to understand, focuses on outcomes (what leaders do) rather than inputs (what makes a leader) and it also helps me make sense of the diversity of great leaders that I am usually faced with during the 'Role of the Project Manager' course. And it does it in this way.
First, every leader that appears on the list is there because they fulfilled the first criteria, Inspiration - they caused (a great many) people to do something or go to a place that they otherwise would not have done. This seems to be the minimum needed to have lodged in the general consciousness as a 'great leader'. (Obvious really, you can't be a leader if you don't have followers!)
It is when we consider the second criteria, Effectiveness, that we start to see differentiation. Typically this is a question of timing and timescales. At some point all leaders on the list were considered effective - they achieved or were on a path to achieve their goals. However, for some, that achievement was transient - suggesting that their place in the pantheon of leaders should be some way off the first rank - an obvious example here being Hitler who initially achieved much but ultimately lost everything. The corollary to this of course being that for some great leaders ultimate success was preceded by apparent failure - and it is interesting to consider whether there is a link between adversity overcome and the sustainability of ultimate success – the greater the trial the more embedded the ultimate success becomes.
When you look at the final criteria, Ethicality, it becomes interesting - because a judgement on the worthiness of the goal is subjective and requires agreement on the value (and values) of the outcome - and that depends on who you are and where you sit.
This criteria deals with the example of Hitler once and for all – he was Inspirational – yes, effective – yes, initially but then lost the plot somewhat, but Ethical? I think we can agree that against this criterion he gets a resounding no.
For other potentially great leaders the jury is still out - we will not go into 'Thatcherism - A Good Thing?' here but I suggest that the debate will be long and heated and is nowhere near resolved yet. And so, presumably greatness is not yet conferred.
And that leaves us with the obviously worthy - although even here it is by no means clear cut. For example, Gandhi - does the end justify some of the means? Kennedy - does a successful moon landing justify sweeping some frankly debatable choices of influential supporters under the carpet? Perhaps leadership can be defined but true greatness is harder to deal with.
However, we at least now have an approach that enables us to structure our debates and to filter out the obviously second tier from the (potentially) truly great leaders.
In my next post we will start to look at what are the capabilities that have enabled these great leaders to:

• Set the right goals;
• Inspire others to attempt the task; and to
• Equip them with the necessary capabilities to succeed;

... and how these capabilities can be developed for you and I.
In the meantime perhaps we should all be asking ourselves how well we match up against the criteria of Inspiration, Effectiveness and Ethicality so that we too may aspire to shine on.