Inspired Leadership

By Kevin Gaskell

Investor, Author

According to the Offce of National Statistics, Londoners work 100 hours a year more than the rest of the country. This wouldn’t be a bad thing if we all liked our work. But when the psychologist Daniel Kahneman researched how happy we feel by asking hundreds of employees to capture their experience during each day, he found that many of us found our time at work especially unpleasant. The only thing many people hated more was the time they spent travelling to the offce.

And, of course, Londoners have the longest commutes too.

Why does work often make us miserable, and how can we change it? Many surveys show that toxic bosses are one of the strongest sources of strong negative feelings, but the time we spend working alongside our colleagues tended to make us happy.

Also, when researchers ask us to look back on projects after they are fnished, we tend to be far more positive about the experience in hindsight than we were at the time.

The fact that research shows that teamwork, being close to our friends, and the feelings of achievement are the things we like about work probably isn’t a shock to you. But, for many of us, these positive emotions seem to occur in spite of our managers, rather than because of them.

We regularly hear about the negative impact of workplace stress, rewards for failure, bullying and sexism at work. On the other hand, some companies have tried to make work more pleasurable by installing slides between foors in their offce (Google), encouraging employees to dress up as their favourite animal (Zappos), or creating chief happiness offcers who schedule a regular hour of fun at 5pm on a Friday.

My experience of leading more than 20 companies of all sizes, across different countries and markets is that we don’t need to put on a costume to be happy at work. I believe that inspired leaders should (and do) reconnect us with the satisfaction of a job done well, working side-by-side with people we like and value. Flashy offces and compulsory fun give us a feeting boost, but if we want long-term success, we need a shared sense of inspiration. And that fows from the team leader.

If you’re thinking: I’d like that, but we can’t all choose our bosses, that’s true. I’d argue that most of us can be inspired leaders in some small way, at some time. Even if you get to lead one project, or decide to change yourself, my experience is that it can make your life feel more successful and more fun.

And, if you inspire those around you to do the same, we can build a better workplace from the ground up as well as from the top down.

Team members might say: have you seen the news about the economy? It’s hard to take pleasure in a job when we’re worried whether it will still exist next week, and it’s hard to be inspired when you’re under constant pressure to deliver.

To that, I’d argue that this is the time when inspired leaders prove their worth. Some of the greatest team experiences in my life have involved working in companies that are on life support, when every decision and everyone’s contribution is vital. The testing times bring out the inspired leader inside us.

I divide inspired leadership into three categories, which I call Commit, Connect and Create. They capture what I have learned from my experience leading teams and being part of teams whose leaders at every level have been extraordinary.

Time and again I have learned from experience that ordinary people can achieve extraordinary things, if only we trust them with the tools and give them the opportunity to do it.

When I speak at management conferences, one of the most frequent audience questions I get is: “what should I do to motivate people?”

My response is not to focus on motivation but rather ask what you can do to inspire people? It sounds similar, but is entirely different.

External motivation, prizes, money or great speeches may work in the short term but, in my experience, long-term success begins when we commit to a common goal. Inspiration beats motivation, because inspiration comes from inside each of us.

Every successful businessperson is inspired by a dream, and the frst step to your team achieving extraordinary things is when you personally commit to making that dream a reality. You cannot be an inspired leader unless you commit absolutely -- not just to do the job, but to realise a vision.

Inspiration can’t be faked. We’ve all made a vague, spontaneous commitment in a conversation, a meeting, or in a bar. Maybe we believed it for a moment, but by the time the words are out of our mouths we know, deep inside, that we don’t seriously intend to change anything.

The danger is that vision becomes cheapened in this way. It’s just another meaningless PowerPoint presentation, a slogan on a wall, or a fancy way to describe budget cuts. I am continually surprised by the number of companies where the “vision” is to grow by three percent.

It is almost impossible to commit meaningfully to this, because growing by three percent changes little: whether you succeed or fail, afterwards you will probably be doing the same job, in the same way, with the same sort of target.

So I challenge the teams I work with to imagine the changes that could create 30 percent, or 300 percent growth (I am currently working with two remarkable companies who have done even better than that).

The frst reaction you may hear, of course, if to say that this type of improvement is impossible. But when they say this, what they really mean that we can’t do it without changing things.

I tell them: so change things - commit to this change, accept that most limitations are self-imposed, and imagine a world where we take the limitations away.

Forget the spreadsheets for moment, and let’s share an exciting journey to success. How good do you want to be?

To give an example from a company that wouldn’t seem a prime candidate for radical upheaval, when I became the managing director of BMW GB in 1996, it was selling 45,000 cars a year.

I was handed a four year target to reach 54,000 cars a year.

I thought that wasn’t very inspiring: doing very well had stopped people from thinking what extraordinary things we might achieve. Meanwhile, competition was eroding BMW’s traditional advantage in areas like engineering which was diminishing our brand perception, and so three percent thinking wouldn’t sustain us for ever.

Together we committed to create world-class service for our customers, and ripped out old the hierarchies, siloes and attitudes that were holding us back. Four years later, sales were up 80 percent, and proftability up 500 percent.

Most importantly, the team had discovered that they could think differently about the possibilities of their jobs when they committed to changing things that we all, deep down, knew we could do better.

Not everyone feels comfortable with change.

We are scared of what might happen, and that’s natural. But shared inspiration like this confronts that fear, because it makes us think about what we can gain, not what we are losing.

When was the last time that you felt truly inspired to go to work on Monday, because of what you might achieve?

You’d be right to be scared, if the frst you heard about your audacious new goal was when someone from head offce announced it to you. Disconnect between leaders and other employees is a frequent problem that undermines a new vision right at the start.

Connecting is about helping everybody in the business discover the value of their role in creating change.

I have always tried to involve as many of the staff as possible in creating and describing our vision of success, because when you have taken part in creating it, you feel more committed to making it happen.

Leaders often have a habit of talking in vague abstracts, assuming that everyone will automatically understand what they mean. So, at BMW, “World class customer service” could have been just a concept if we didn’t describe what it would mean in real life.

I ask the team to think about what the dream means using their eyes, ears and heart. What will success look like to us, and to our customers? What will they say about us, and how will we describe ourselves?

And, importantly, how will we feel about ourselves that’s different, and how do we make our customers feel? What is the new experience that we will deliver?

This isn’t just a task for a few executives. It matters just as much what people in the warehouse, in the fnance department, or in sales see, say and feel, and it matters that we can share common ground.

After this, connecting is about focusing on the projects that will make the vision real. This, too, can be fun. I invite the team to make their suggestions. We write them on sticky notes, and place them on a wall.

We prioritise, we remove and store the ones that aren’t urgent, and we prioritise again, and again. We take out the noise. We rigorously focus on only the most important priorities.

Eventually, we have a realistic, 1,000-day plan that everyone has helped to create. It is meticulously organised into smaller projects that will make the vision matter, to everyone, every day.

It’s not my plan, or the management plan: it belongs to the entire team. We draw it up and put it on the wall so that everyone can see it, so that everyone knows how we’re doing, and so that anyone can make suggestions.

I’ve done this for international companies and for small start-ups. Together, we track progress every day, we revise the plan when we need to, and we share the feeling of achievement. It works!

For a toxic manager – the very opposite of an inspired leader - this shared connection has consequences they won’t like. They will be obliged to stop thinking that they’re the smartest person in the room. Inspired leaders don’t aim to be a genius but rather create the culture which makes it possible for everyone to be a genius, because each team member knows their job and how to improve it. This way leaders are created at every level. They become obsessive about relentlessly building quality, rather than making big, meaningless pronouncements, because they know that if the product and service gets better frst, bigger follows.

The most uncomfortable part for toxic managers may be accepting that the 1,000-day plan can only work if you devolve responsibility to the team members who are at the sharp end, and trust their inspiration.

When you do this, teams create magic. They may be working under pressure, but they are united and more likely to help each other. The team represents integrity, fairness and achievement.

But to unleash our creativity, an inspired leader also needs to understand that no one is an “only a…” Everyone’s contribution has value, from the cleaner to the CEO.

Everyone deserves to be heard even if -especially if -- they have constructive home truths that are hard to hear.

Thousands of businesses fail because managers learn about what’s going wrong when it’s too late to fx it.

The hunt for scapegoats is one of the least attractive aspects of bad leadership. Amy Edmondson, a professor at Harvard Business School, spent 20 years talking to businesses about how they dealt with failure, and categorising the reasons.

She found that between two percent and fve percent of failures were truly blameworthy, but that managers treat between 70 percent and 90 percent this way.

When we personalise blame without good reason, we lose the chance to learn from it. But we also destroy commitment and connection. We lose the ability to change our toxic workplaces into inspirational experiences.

In our businesses we reverse that thinking –we catch people in rather than catch people out. Inspired leaders identify and celebrate individual contributions whilst quietly ensuring we learn valuable lessons from the instances where it occasionally goes wrong.

uthor of Inspired Leadership: How you can achieve extraordinary results in business (Wiley, 2017) he was the youngest Managing Director of Porsche, Lamborghini, and BMW, leading all three companies to record growth and performance.