Julia Middleton's thoughts on leadership

The 360 Day approaches.

For so many leaders, Common Purpose provides an opportunity to see the world through other people’s eyes so it’s great that the Common Purpose 360 Day should challenge people to do something along these lines. Common Purpose extends to every leader an invitation to do one thing, big or small, to challenge the way they see the world.

You don’t have to conquer Everest. There are various ways you can challenge yourself to develop a different perspective.

• Visit a part of your city you’ve never seen,
• Subscribe to receive a blog from a writer you’re unfamiliar with,
• Use a different mode of transport for the day to get around,
• Watch a documentary on a topic you’ve no knowledge on,
• Buy your fruit and vegetables somewhere completely different,
• Enrol in a language course;
• Or just invite your neighbours to your house for afternoon tea!

What will you be doing?

One of the things we encourage our 30,000 alumni to do is try and contact other alumni that they don’t know. This year, I hope our alumni will do something a bit more international. Last year there was some wonderful feedback from people who got in touch with alumni in other parts of their cities or from sectors of work different from their own – but seldom in other countries.

Now that Common Purpose operates in so many countries the opportunity to simply email a someone on the other side of the world is incredible.

You can chat to someone who runs an airport in Bangalore, or a community project in a Johannesberg township, or a bank in Dublin, or a hospital in Leipzig, or a parent teachers association in Birmingham, or a town hall in Glasgow, or a policeman in Hong Kong (ok so the first course does not start till November, but soon…!), or a retailer in Budapest.

What an incredible source of knowledge, generosity and insight.

Having said this, I am not going to contact anyone. I am going to try a day of fasting. For some reason Ramadan seemed to go on for ever this year in the UK for my friends who were doing it. They looked gaunt and tired. It must require huge self control, particularly in a country where others continue to eat unaware. Maybe I’ll understand it better if I fast for one day. A small effort compared to their stretch.

Find out more about the 360 Day and get involved at www.commonpurpose360.org

***********

12 October 2010

So the impact on me? Very simple. For half a day I wondered what people are fussing about. Not eating is easy. Then I started getting bad tempered (no, not bad tempered but short tempered). I did start to obsess about the sun and how slowly it moves. I cannot imagine how you fast if sundown is at 10pm and not 7.30pm.
Did I learn anything? I think I was admiring of people who fast for Ramadan before so no change there, but now I think I am more understanding of their occasional (only very occasional!) short temperedness.

- Julia Middleton.

Back from holidays, people ask me if I have a new sailing story. I have to report that this summer the episode was not caused by me….

We found a lovely cove in the sun and out of the wind. We got to this location in two parties – one  sailing and the other motoring. My son anchored the two boats and we rowed in. Sun was at a premium because it mostly rained in Scotland this summer.

Mid-lunch, someone looked up and saw that the motor boat had slipped its anchor and was drifting out to sea. My son knew it was his mistake and dashed down the beach to row out to the sailing boat, and then sail out to the motor boat and get it. Simple.

What was the leadership lesson? Don’t under-staff a task, especially a rescue task.

We watched from shore for hours, unable to help. We were in a cove out of the wind but there were harsh forces to battle out at sea. The boat drifted fast – faster than I ever would have thought – and fast enough to be halfway to Jura by the time my son eventually caught up with it.

Getting from a sailing boat singlehandedly into a fast drifting motor boat was not easy. Both boats got damaged. At least my son didn’t.

Coming back from summer holiday this story has focused my mind a lot. I – like many leaders – have been pretty exhausted over the last 18 months. It’s lovely to get away and see some things more clearly – to huddle into the cove for a while – but better not to make any important decisions from the cove. They could lack sound judgment.

It’s been a pretty big week at Common Purpose, with the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom paying our emerging leaders course a visit in Bangalore.

The occasion has me thinking about what is emerging for leaders in India – and Hinglish leaps to mind.

It’s the language of the future I am told – a combination of English and Hindi.

I even met one man in India who told me that English was no longer “yours but ours” because “we are the biggest population in the world speaking it” and it will be increasingly Hinglish.

At a course day a group of participants started explaining Hinglish to me. They showed me how they could switch their phones to HING.

And me, who is so famously haphazard about my use of English, got all offended. So this reminded me that leaders need pushing just a bit sometimes.

I spoke to the participants again and they pretty well told me that I needed to get real. English was their language now and soon most English in the world will be spoken in India. And its Hinglish. The British could get all purist about it, but if they did, they would be left behind.

Bear in mind that I was educated French and am very conscious of failing a language by being too purist.

I heard it spoken and understood two thirds. Some highlights were…

• “Hungry kya? (Are you hungry?)
• “What your bahana is?” (What’s your excuse?)
• “Prepone” (i.e.  dinner plans – if you can postpone them, you can prepone them.)
• “Yeh Dil Maange More.” (The heart wants more.)
• “Life ho to aisi.” (This is what life should be.)

Then a few weeks later I got an official letter from an Indian accountancy firm on and remember reading it and instinctively wondering how poorly educated the author was. Then I realised that it was in Hinglish.

I was watching my sons play and one of the kids had the role of an owner of a corner shop, and he had chosen to put on an Indian accent. As I watched it I thought the boy was playing a pretty cheap caricature, little did he know we was actually speaking the English of the future.

Our UK course participants have discovered that Hinglish is a language that they will need to learn, and not the pigeon English that they currently associate with corner shops. They can see that they better start to understand it.

When UK Prime Minister David Cameron asked a participant in Bangalore what had shifted in his thinking by being on a Common Purpose course, the participant said:

“I knew I was a leader at work but not for a minute had I thought of myself as a leader of Bangalore”

This says it all. What Common Purpose is about. What has happened to democracy – even a young democracy – that young leaders don’t know that it’s not just about voting but about standing up too. And most of all it says what democracy is. He got it, was up for it and knew he could lead.

India and the UK have much in common. One may be an old democracy and the other quite young, but they have much in common. Leaders have a deep sense of responsibility and possibility in both countries that it does not take much to awaken. They understand the deep cultural implications of one person – one vote, accountability, commitment to transparency and a sense of justice. And they understand frustrations, short-termism and the discouragement of difficult decisions.

That’s why there is such a special relationship between the UK and India that will benefit both. That’s why Common Purpose will continue to grow in India and connect with Common Purpose in the UK.

I regularly misjudge situations because of pride. Especially situations when I am working with people from many countries. Partly because I don’t have much pride.

I reckon I did once. But that over the years I have made so many mistakes – sometimes bad judgements, sometimes because I was over-stretched and didn’t make a judgement – that I have had a lot of practice apologising. Partly because when you are always asking people to do things – as you are in any charitable role – you sort of can’t afford it.

But I have found myself in numerous situations recently when I have had to double take. And spend an enormous amount of time going round the houses concocting ways forward so that people don’t have to back down or admit that they are wrong. So that they keep their pride. The trouble is that it takes so much time and so often delays decisions.

Expressing my frustration the other day to colleagues, they just laughed at me. All much younger than me they seemed to have got their heads around this before they were 52.

I attended a revolt recently. Many many middle managers were being asked to think different, stretch, lift, work together, jump fences, go the extra mile. And not a single senior manager was there to do it with them. This was an organisation that must adapt or die, there was not just a burning platform, it was burning and sinking and blowing up all at the same time. And the senior managers knew what it was going to take of management. Just they hadn’t, it seemed, planned to do anything themselves. Or maybe they had, just that they didn’t tell or show anyone. In the modern day though the difference is irrelevant.

An investment banker explained the problem of their culture to me. He was not from Goldman but he knew “but for the grace of god…”

He said that there was a “deep commitment to intellectual excellence in a bubble”.

We went back through the words:

Deep, don’t underestimate how deep and in the depth lies the apparent arrogance and underlying confidence of investment bankers.

Commitment, they are committed sure to making money and also to bringing something they value to the chaotic world.

Intellectual, they were educated to value this above everything, intellect is what got them there ( I remember someone from another investment bank telling me that they employed people with brains the size of planets) and it’s what is missing in the world. The rest matters but this is the core central pilar.

Excellence, this goes with the commitment, they thrive to excellence in a really inspiring way, they never sit back and get lazy.

Bubble, they do become disconnected from the world that surrounds them and that fails constantly on excellence and intellect.

I found this very helpful. We need them. But not in a bubble.

There is a lot of discussion and commentary at the moment in the UK about boards and governance following the Financial Reporting Council’s publication of the UK Corporate Governance Code (formerly the Combined Code).

It’s all about how you ensure that the boards of the future protect us from the disasters over the last couple of years.

I too believe that diversity is one of the keys. Homogeneous boards are complacent and risky. Complacent because it means that the organisations are careless about understanding the modern world and don’t care enough about their brands to adapt and stop hiding behind the old excuses like: “oh but we try so hard but there just aren’t enough people out there”. Risky because homogenous boards develop group think and don’t see some things coming.

But there are two forms of diversity that always seem to be forgotten: age and language.

If all your board is of one generation it will miss things that are intuitive to other generations. And on language: how may British international boards speak enough languages to really claim to be international?

-    Julia Middleton was recently interviewed by Knowledge Peers on managing and sustaining effective boards for not-for profit organisations. You can sign up for Knowledge Peers membership here.

-    About Time is a multi-faceted campaign supported by the Government Equalities Office, Anchor Trust and Common Purpose in the UK. The campaign will increase the number of people involved in public life across the UK, by overcoming barriers that get in the way of participation. At the core of the About Time campaign is the notion that diversity is critical to a board’s ability to spot issues and trends.

I have always deeply rejected attempts to draw distinctions between how men and women lead. Mostly in defence of my sons.

Just because they grow up to trust their instincts, use words with values in them, take the trouble to build relationships with colleagues and judge situations through a feel for people and not just facts, does not mean that they have become feminine.

At the moment I am having to work – yes I mean having – with a group of four men who deeply offend me. They reject my very language as over-emotional. They can’t see why a logical strategy simply won’t work just because the people involved won’t go for it. They can’t see that if you build trust amongst people then almost anything becomes possible. They dismiss my passion…actually that’s not fair, they admire it and dismiss it almost at the same time. They sneer at what they see as my over-emotional approach.

Why does trust building, intuition backing and values language have to be written off as over-emotional – ergo feminine? For that matter why isn’t under-emotional as much of an insult as over-emotional?

On Monday I am going to another think tank about what leaders need these days. I would never normally say it, but maybe we need more men to be confidently feminine. Except that it’s not feminine – just human.

When I went on the board of Common Purpose India a fellow trustee sent me a dictionary of Indian terms. There is one that he has to keep re-sending to me because I forget it every time and get all excited.

It’s “yes” means “maybe” and “maybe” means “no”.