Do you want to lead? Are are many qualities of a leader, to be an effective leader requires communication skills…to persuade groups,inspire, and motivate. A leader must prove to others that he or she has the background and experience to tackle a problem with an solod solution. A leader must show a proven list of accomplishments that reflect the challenges that could arise in the future. Are you that person?
Pass it on,
Dr Anthony
Rob Noble is CEO of The Leadership Trust
Lead by example: Our core belief is that leadership is using personal power to win the hearts and minds of people to achieve a common purpose. The leader must have credibility through knowledge and provide an example – they must live the values to which they prescribe.
Where is local government today and where does it need and want to be? Can the current team get it to where it needs to go without a new perspective? This is not to say the leadership has to change but the leader may need some new input by reaching out personally or adding to the team. Perceptions of new arrivals with Surrey are interesting and the leader must ensure they do not miss an opportunity to harness this energy.
Tim Hall is a member of new Surrey county council leader David Hodge’s cabinet
Involve all staff and keep ‘walking the floor’: We have adopted a one team approach to leadership, this is very much a transparent style with cabinet members and senior mangers being both upfront and out walking the floor. We think the John Lewis model is a good model to learn from. We move our graduate trainees around departments to get them wide experience of the organisation as with a £1.8 billion pound turnover and over a million residents we are a large and complex organisation. Also the new leader and chief executive visited all our major sites in the first week or two to meet staff en masse, in their teams and at their desks. A lot of effort has been redirected into communication with frontline staff, as they are often residents and service users as well. This is very productive and positive.
Tim Gilling is deputy executive director at the Centre for Public Scrutiny
What makes a good leader? Leadership of any kind in any sector should be built around three principles – transparency, inclusiveness and accountability. In other words how leaders handle information and how open they are about what they do and how/why they do it; the extent to which leaders seek a range of views and respond to them; and how leaders use mechanisms of accountability to demonstrate credibility.
John Atkinson is director of infrastructure, government and healthcare at KPMG
Perspective is essential: Leaders need to really immerse themselves in the context in which they work so being very visible and visiting where the work goes on are both important. Too often we focus inwardly on our immediate environment and what is happening in our organisation without understanding what is happening to the people who we are working for, be they customers, citizens, politicians or staff. Without this range of perspective we build stories that self-fulfil, we can tell ourselves we’re great when the world thinks otherwise.
Nick Forbes is Labour leader of Newcastle city council
Collaborate and co-operate for the best results: Councils are squeezed between increased demand from residents and decreasing resources. Leadership in local government is currently about setting a strong direction. We cannot just wait to be battered by storms and must have a vision for what we want to see in the longer term. To that end we have set out four clear priorities, not just for the council but for the city as a whole. Leadership is increasingly going to be about working with others, not just in soft partnerships but in true collaboration and co-operation.
A leader is not a manager: A key element of leadership is understanding the difference between that and management, or where the two overlap. I set out at a meeting of the top 100 managers at Newcastle city council that I am an elected leader and not another layer of management. Politicians who have as their ambition to simply better ‘manage’ the council should get a job there instead.
Emanuel Gatt is managing director of Shared Service Architects
Sharing is essential to being a good leader: Leaders are increasingly looking to new and innovative ways of collaborating with others, blending services and aligning resources around communities or places to maintain public value. This is challenging leaders to re-examine how they lead their organisations to address the complex issues we face in our society. There is much talk of collaborative leaders (those that can lead beyond their authority) or collective leadership (leaders skilled at both delegating leadership within their organisations and sharing leadership across partnership). The question is how we help our leaders build capacity and capability in these skills.
Broaden your knowledge base: It is dangerous for emerging leaders to develop a selective perception, seeing the world only from their organisational standpoint. The modern day leader must make time to stretch their peripheral knowledge, go see other organisations in different sectors and industries and find out how they address problems and innovate. We can encourage this by asking leaders to build networks beyond their sector or discipline – do some ‘shared service tourism’.
Sarah Hyder is external relations manager for Changemakers
What makes a good leader? Having knowledge and insight, values, being open-minded and communicating well. Younger people are more likely to value more personality based attributes such as charisma and open-mindedness, whereas those over 30 are more likely to see leadership skills as things gained through experience.
How to encourage younger people to become local government leaders: Provide mentoring opportunities for young constituents who may be interested in being a local councillor. Encourage those young people who have already become local councillors/reached senior positions within local government to promote the benefits of these roles to a younger audience – they are often more effective advocates. Maximise opportunities for young people to be engaged in decision making processes such as commissioning or participatory budgeting to give a real opportunity to understand, and influence, how local authorities work.
Robin Lawrence works for The Leadership Trust
Leaders can get sucked into the detail of the task: The more effective leaders divide their attention to ensure the needs of the team and the individual are met. This means lifting ourselves above the detail for long enough to ensure that the people are working effectively together, are clear on the objectives, and have what they need to tackle the task.
Not all changes are a bad thing: Seeking out the positives is a useful quality. Be prepared to muck in or do something different to make change a success instead of blocking or avoiding it. Similar to being positive but with the added quality of being proactive. The overriding quality needed is adaptability.
George Griffin is director of learning and development at Penna
What works best for you? Each organisation we work with faces a variety of challenges and opportunities so the first step is to clearly establish the ‘leadership brand’ required to support the organisation in the achievement of its objectives. A particular leadership style may work well for one organisation but have a detrimental impact on another.
A good leader must motivate people to follow them: Leadership boils down to the ability of an individual to inspire and motivate people towards a vision. This requires the ability to communicate clearly but also with conviction and passion. Additionally, a leader needs to have ‘followability’ which is harder to articulate but is based on a whole host of factors such as their values, emotional awareness, gravitas, impact and credibility. As an ex-soldier, the phrase ‘serve to lead’ resonates deeply with me. The best leaders I have known have always been prepared to put their own team’s needs before their own.
You can read the full debate here.
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Annoying? Yoga? Surely not
I must agree…that yoga is not my first choice when it comes to maintaining a healthy life-style…yes some of the positions you find yourself in are quite silly…but most of my friends seem to benefit from yoga. They seem very focused,organized, and calm in their jobs and social gatherings. Perhaps yoga could be of some good…at least I can work on touching my toes…
Pass it on,
Dr Anthony
In addition to being somewhat crazy – a shrink once diagnosed me with borderline personality disorder, which I thought was a bit of a stretch until I realised that, like everyone else, he just wanted to have sex with me – I am a yoga teacher. Should you, recoiling in horror as you read this, find yourself asking, “But how does someone like this become a yoga teacher?”, the short answer is that I gave a man with a beard and his hot wife $3,200. The long answer is … well, I’d like to say that it’s because if I hadn’t become obsessed with yoga I’d probably be dead, because that’s what people always say about things like this. But that would be, frankly, a little overdramatic. Let’s just say that if I didn’t do yoga everything bad about me would just be worse, and what is bad is already bad enough.
Now, because you can’t get something for nothing, there’s a problem: yoga can be extremely annoying. There’s no getting around it. Yoga has moments of such profound annoyingness that after I finished Eat, Pray, Love (I read the ashram section 100 times) all I could think was: “You wrote an entire book about yoga and meditation and you never mentioned, ‘Oh, by the way, sometimes you will want to punch these people in the face’.”
And this is where I perform my public service; in yoga we call that a seva (how annoying is that?). All the stuff Elizabeth Gilbert was too high on homemade pizza and Javier Bardem penis to mention, you need to know. Everyone’s always telling you how great yoga is, and that’s true, but then you go and maybe the studio smells like onions steamed in cat pee, and it might have been helpful to know about that beforehand.
You need to know exactly what will disturb you before you get there, so you can prepare; and you should also know that, even though everyone around you will seem perfectly unperturbed, someone feels your pain. Oh, and by the way, I want to underscore that what follows below is what bugs me about yoga; everything else is a glittering gift from Lord Shiva. Namaste!
People who just saw each other yesterday will hug like one of them was just rescued from a burning plane. I’ve always thought of a hug as a slightly protracted, lightly physical way of saying hello to people I know fairly well.
But regular practitioners of yoga see hugs as a great way to spend an afternoon. You will want to stare at them and wonder, “Are they really pressing their whole bodies together?” (yes); “are their eyes closed?” (they are); “do they really have dreamy looks on their faces?” (yes, yes, yes). But remember, while you’re staring you’re wasting valuable time in which you could be cultivating your “I am not the sort of person who likes to be hugged for long periods of time” vibe. This is easier said than done because you will sometimes see people at yoga – people you actually know – with whom you may wish to make brief, friendly physical contact. Engage in such exchanges as you wish, but realise that you are setting yourself up as a person who willingly receives hugs, and these people will not take the extra mental step to say, “Oh, but above-the-waist hugs”, or “Hugs that only last a second”.
Make no mistake: these people are looking to soul-blend. To avoid, arrive early. Lie down with closed eyes. Bring flip-flops – essential for a hasty exit.
During hard poses, women and gay men will remain silent and straight men will laugh self-deprecatingly. Imagine being at a gym. Men are lifting heavy weights. They strain, grit their teeth, sweat. But they don’t laugh. So why, here, as they sink into their thighs in Warrior Two or lift their chest skyward during Upward Facing Bow, do they feel the need to let out a little chuckle? You are witnessing an unconscious assertion of masculinity. That little laugh is their way of letting you know that hey, they’re not really embarrassed about being so bad at this, because they’re not even supposed to be here, they’re good at other things, like, for example, sitting in an airport bar working their way through a double scotch, a bowl of nuts and a Two and A Half Men re-run on the corner TV.
Of course, there is also the other type of straight guy in yoga, the guy who can wrap his arms around his ankles and turn himself into a perfect circle. Why, you ask, does this man wear his hair in a bun, on top of his head? There are some secrets that no amount of enlightenment will reveal. I will tell you this: these guys tend to get a lot of ass, so laugh as you will, but know that they’re getting the last one – upside-down.
There will be yoga overachievers. You will be doing Cat-Cow at a normal pace, and they will be bucking and heaving like mechanical bulls. You will be expending an amount of effort somewhere between “challenging yourself” and “able to retain sufficient muscle strength to remove shampoo bottle from shower caddy”. They will be straining, grunting, grimacing. Then, when class is over, and everyone does that weird little bow, the yoga overachiever will bow down for, roughly, an hour. Seriously. You will have put on your flip-flops (good job!), hightailed it away from the would-be hugger/soul-blenders, made and consumed a meal, masturbated to some violent pornography and be just about to crawl into bed, and they remain on the floor in the yoga studio, thanking God for making them, well, them.
There are teachers and students who think flexibility is some kind of indication of how good a person you are. While we certainly hold tension, trauma and rigidity in our limbs and joints and muscles, there is no reason to imagine there’s some absolutely direct correlation between how well we can move and how functional or healthy our mind is. I seriously doubt that Albert Einstein or Susan Sontag had less flexible minds than, I don’t know, Rodney Yee. My point is, some physical limitations can be aided through the practice of yoga and some can’t and no one needs the increased pressure of someone telling them, every time they strain to get their heels on the floor in Downward Facing Dog, that this is because their mind is all screwed up.
So if your teacher tells you that we hold a lot of stuff in our hips and hamstrings and as we begin to let this stuff go and become our authentic selves we will be able to wrap our arms around ourselves eight times, look around the room. You will probably see a guy who can do that, while smiling, and I’ll bet that you will eventually hear from someone in the class about the time he flew into a rage and broke a car window.
Teachers talk like Yoda’s mum. If you were to ask your yoga teacher, “Can my newly authentic hamstrings help the angry guy?” she might say something like, “That depends on whether they were coming from a space of pure intention.” The word “honour” is used a lot, as in “honouring yourself” or “honouring your practice”. Other popular words include “joy”, “integrity”, “space” (not as in outer space, as in “Go into a space of …”) and “place” (not as in “that place next to Shoe Pavilion”, as in “Let yourself come into a place of …”). When class is over, the teacher will say something like, “Bow to your inner wisdom”, or “Take a moment to thank yourself for committing to your practice”, which always makes me intone the prayer: “Please, God, make me less fat than I was an hour and a half ago.”
The worst part about yoga world vocabulary, of course, is how quickly you find yourself learning and using it. The hope is that because yoga has made you – I’m sorry, I mean, allowed you to open up a space to become – so much more self-aware and less narcissistic, you will only talk this way in front of other people who talk like that too. And now that you are friends with so many of them, because you have, after so thoroughly mocking this world basically joined it, that means practically everyone you speak to.
“How are you?” is not a simple question at yoga. No one at yoga is ever just fine. They’re “working through a lot of heavy stuff”, or “dealing with a lot of craziness”. That said, when people ask you how you are, don’t say anything bad. If you are broke, the universe is just trying to teach you a lesson about how much you already have. If someone dumped you, the universe removed that person from your life for a reason.The universe is very busy in the yoga world.
So yes, in the beginning it’s all about slipping the car keys inside the flip-flops so that all the tools of your escape are in a neat little package. But just keep showing up. In no time you will become sufficiently like all these people that they won’t bother you at all. And then some crazy asshole will make fun of you. Is the circle of eternity beautiful or what?
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