Great leadership comes down to only two rules | Peter Anderton | TEDxDerby

what I want to talk to you about today is chocolate nerves what can chocolate Hobnobs teachers about leadership well a lot more than you might think I've got three messages that will apply to each one of us today whatever you think of chocolate Hobnobs and whether you see yourself as a leader or not because you don't actually have to be a politician or a four-star general or some sort of chief executive to be a leader actually every single one of us can make a difference every single one of us is a leader in some way or another because leadership isn't actually about position leadership is about who you are but the real message of leadership has been buried deep over the years the last time I googled leadership I got 760 million results in half a second it's impossible to find what we really want in all that information but if you know the average person in the UK spends up to six months of their life searching for everyday things like keys and mobile phones six months and of course the more stuff we have the harder we have to search for the things that we're looking for imagine searching through 760 million things to find your keys and that's the problem that we see today because thousands of different leadership models and concepts have all come together to form this complex tapestry like some sort of remarkable chemical formula that we assume any University Professors can understand well I'm going to tell you today that leadership is actually very simple it's not easy but it is simple and everything you ever need to know about leadership comes down to one of two simple but very powerful rules and if you grasp these rules and put them into practice you cannot fail to inspire others be they teams organizations or communities so why this explosion in leadership theories that causes so much confusion well I think the problem is this too many of us have stopped searching for the keys of leadership and we've started looking for the silver bullet instead constantly looking out for something new this wonderful thing that once I understand this everything will change and fall into place if I can just take my shiny new Silver Bullet and load it into my barrel and fire all will be well and yet rather than producing simplicity it's just produce more and more complexity more and more models have buried the true message of leadership deeper and deeper and deeper and these two rules are lost somewhere underneath all the stuff I'm gonna let you into a secret people have been practicing leadership for a very long time and the essence of leadership goes back for centuries millennia even now I'm not actually a head of state I'm not a professor I'm not Einstein I'm an engineer with a passion for leadership simplicity and alignment and I've seen leadership from all sorts of angles I've seen great successes and I've seen some monumental failures and because I've learned more from my failures than for my successes I'm going to share with you my ultimate failure today because I used to be the man who made chocolate Hobnobs it was the problem child of a factory not so far from here and I was brought in as the young hotshot who would be able to save the day irrespective of what the lion had done to my two predecessors how little we knew now before we join my worst ever shift we're going to go on a journey and the journey would occur go on is the journey of leadership and it's a journey through time and space we're going to head back to the 6th century BC and we're going to join the legendary China man Lao Tzu but on our way there let's just recognize it in under 15 minutes we're going to go through centuries of leadership thinking so the one thing we can be sure of is we're gonna leave a lot out so aloud sue believed that the leader was best when people barely knew he existed that when his job was done his aim fulfilled the people would say we did it ourselves not so far away Sun Tzu was writing the art of war a book that's on the recommended reading list for a lot of top executives today and he believed that the general who advances without coveting Fame and who retreats without fearing disgrace whose only thought is to protect his country and do good service for his sovereign is the jewel of the kingdom the Roman consul Cicero in the first century BC absolutely understood that the leader could only deliver results through other people he had to focus his attention on others if anything was going to happen if anything was going to change Jesus in the first century taught if anyone would be great among you let him be your servant his disciples like in the relationship between leaders and followers to the relationship between a shepherd caring for their flock all of these agreed but the leadership wasn't actually about Dominion leadership was about service until we come to the sixteenth century and our cunning Italian Niccolo Machiavelli wrote his famous book the prince he believed it was all about the leader the leader had to maintain power at all costs the focus was entirely upon that they would maintain power by force or by deceit if necessary and in fact leader needs to appear to be one thing whilst in reality being something else altogether and we're still clearing up his mess today because whilst he taught us some great insights in the perils of managing change what we also learned from Machiavelli was how to lock up rule number one of leadership and throw away the key then we come to the 19th century the Scott Thomas Carlyle believed that leaders were born not made you either happy or you didn't and if you had it then you would make great things happen if you didn't well tough you were either leader or a follower you are either a manager or a worker then into the 20th century Frederick Taylor comes along with scientific management he says forget people becoming their best just optimize the way their work is done the right way to do a job was defined and workers no longer had any responsibility for how they did their work it was all decided for them and while scientific management was parked by the 1940s the impact of his thinking still lingers on like a bad smell today with this massive gap between managers and workers all of this stuff unraveled the ancient wisdom on leadership all of it taking the principles the fundamental principles of rule number one of leadership turned it inside out and placed it on its head so in that's desperate attempt they find themselves looking the traits of leaders the characteristics what if we were to study the best leaders and measure them and see what we can develop ourselves and then this study was put to one side when they recognized that actually the only statistically significant thing that they could come up with was that the best leaders were slightly taller and slightly above average intelligence and that was as good as it got so then finally they moved to what leaders did they said well let's look at this behavioral model surely we can copy the best leaders and then become greats ourselves and this led to the birth of the celebrity chief exec this is where their books their autobiographies were written and read like leadership manuals the whole thinking was if you need to be brilliant you need to be like me you need to walk like me you need to talk like me you need to dress like me in fact the only way you can actually be brilliant is to have a frontal lobotomy and that was essentially the thinking that went forward it led to what Professor Richard jolly from the London Business School called the Heathrow Airport school of leadership this is where your boss goes on holiday and gets to the airport realizing they've forgotten their book so they head to the airport book shop and they end up in the business section clutching the latest celebrity chief exec autobiography and they go away and they devour it and they come back trying to be like that and of course it never works so the really enlightened employers learnt to save a lot of pain by buying their boss a novel before they went away on holiday and all of this stuff just buries the principles of leadership deeper and deeper and deeper and so we get to the point that rule number one is buried and cement in amongst all of the stuff and yet rule number one is incredibly simple rule number one is the starting point everything that you need to know about leadership starts from this one principle number one of leadership is that it's not about you or to misquote Bill Clinton it's about the people stupid everything starts here Eleanor Roosevelt put it like this she said a good leader can inspire people to have confidence in the leader a great leader inspires people to have confidence in themselves why because they get rule number one and a leader of course is only a leader when they've got followers so the temptation is to create more followers who need you for the answers that you can actually then provide but of course the best leaders don't create more followers they create more leaders they recognize that the idea of the hero flying in to save the day solving all of the problems answering everything just doesn't make sense the world is too complex for any one of us to have all of the answers and there I was with our problem child I was everywhere solving this problem solving that problem coming up with fabulous ideas working all hours convinced that I could sort it all out and terrified that I would let the side down terrified that I'd be some sort of failure but I got it all wrong because at the end of the day I didn't understand rule number one so the whole situation was unraveling around my ears because right then I thought it was all about me in my head it was my blood my sweat my tears and my ego you see whenever we find ourself in a situation where we think everything is dependent upon us when we think we're the only one who cares we're the only one who gets it whether it's in our home whether it's a school whether it's at work whether it's in our community the secret is to get back to rule number one Robert Greenleaf in the 70s brought back the key to leadership with his model of servant leadership he brought back rule number one loud and clear but it was only part of the picture the other key was still missing and that key was rule number two so just before we come to rule number two we're going to check in with authentic leadership it's not the only leadership Theory doing the rounds at the moment but it's the one that brings us to rule number two because authentic leadership isn't about a great man it's not about a fixed set of characteristics it's about turning up at the top end of who we really are it's less about trying to be somebody else and it's more about trying to be ourself brilliantly because any one of us can be a leader it starts with having a clear understanding of who we are of what we stand for of what our strengths and weaknesses are and then behaving in a transparent way that draws all of these things together John Maxwell talks about five levels of leadership he says people follow first of all because they have to do that's level one leadership if you're the boss they have to do is the tart that's where in the biscuit factory you've got a queue of people waiting at five minutes before the end of the shift all changed and ready to go just to slide their car to the clock machine as they head out the door they give you their minimum never their best level to is where they follow you because of how they feel about you as an individual level 3 is where they follow you because of what you've achieved level 4 is where they follow you because of what you have done for them and level 5 is where they follow you because of what you of who you are and what you represent you see each layer going deeper and deeper forms a deeper level of commitment and as you move from each layer to the next it's all about choice but not your choice their choice that's leadership rule number one so the change apparently much miss quoted be the change that you want to see in the world brings us face to face with rule number two which is as simple and as powerful as a rule number one it's only about you if ever you want to create change around you it starts with who you are and how you behave an old range of theories from of early oast as a Lesnick takes us through to the point that ultimately if we want to inspire others it's about who we are so anxious brings us back to our chocolate Hobnobs Factory because I thought everybody else needed to change I didn't think the problem was me I was the only one who got it I was the only one who understood the problem I was the only one who cared they were the ones who needed to change but in reality what was going on around me in my team and the powers of chocolate Hobnobs that we were cranking through they were just a reflection of me because leadership and life is a bit like that things can go a bit pear-shaped from time to time and it's easy to find ourselves blaming other people and pointing the finger elsewhere but the true leader looks themselves in the mirror and says if I want anything to be different it starts with me because the true leader recognizes that what's going on around them is a reflection of who they are that's the power of rule number two we recognize there's no point waiting for everybody else to get their act together we need to start cleaning up our own act but if we want others to live up to our expectations then it starts with who we are on what we stand for and are we standing up for what we believe or are we just doing time now some Mandela absolutely nailed rule number two and he said I couldn't change others until I changed myself and don't think for a minute this is anything new ancient wisdom had this long ago Lao su said mastering others is strength mastering yourself is true power Cicero said the enemy is within the gates it is with our own luxury our own folly our own criminality that we must contend jesus said as you want others to do until you do so and to that his principles have been around for a very very long time because the rule number two of leadership recognizes that people around us don't come with remote controls they recognize that if we want to bring about change in those around us it starts with our behaviors it starts with who we are because the environment that we create around us is simply a reflection of our thinking and of our behavior so it's time for us to ask the question what environment are we creating is it like this or is it like this because all of us are leaders we all lead in one way or another we're all creating an environment around us so when it comes to leadership in reality all that we're doing in today's world is repackaging and redistributing what has been known for millennia and yet too many of us are sitting on the floor surrounded by wrapping paper playing with the boxes rather than focusing on the messages that are right at the core I'd love to say that the only mistakes I ever made in leadership involved chocolate Hobnobs but at life's not quite like that life is a journey and sometimes we go around in circles and there's no such thing as the perfect leader but the next best thing is a leader who really gets rule number one and rule number two we live in a really complex world that is crying out for simplicity so let's just take the lead on these two simple rules because there isn't a single element of leadership that doesn't hinge on one of these two principles it's not about you and it's only about you so those are my first two messages I'm going to close with the third and I'm going to introduce you to my little friend here the key Goblin if anyone else has key goblins in their house but whenever I'm about to head out the key goblin notices that I'm trying to get out the door and it takes my keys and it tucks them away somewhere safe you know sometimes it's hidden under a pile of stuff sometimes it's in plain view and the really devious ones will hide my mobile phone but only when it's on silent so there I am just picture the scene wandering around frantically trying to find my mobile phone until I recognize that actually although it's on silent it's set to vibrate so I call the number and I walk around listening carefully trying to identify and find what I think is lost and there it is tucked in my shoe for some unknown reason all I had to do was listen and that's really my final message today we can find ourselves spinning around in circles searching for the Silver Bullet something new that will magically let everything fall into place and my suggestion is that maybe everything that we need to know about leadership and life was written down a long time ago maybe it's simply time for us to start listening listening to what's already been said thank you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 538,456

Rating: 4.7760444 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United Kingdom, Business, Communication, History, Leadership

Id: oDsMlmfLjd4

Length: 17min 28sec (1048 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 25 2016