The Leadership Crash Course: Creating Leadership Impact in the Digital World

By Paul Taffinder

The Leadership Crash Course is a hard-hitting day-to-day guide for leaders in the digital world. It helps executives and managers gain insight into their own leadership, then develop and hone the practical skills to become powerful leaders. In a business world fast becoming more digital and more interconnected, genuine leadership makes a huge, often crucial, difference to the value that strategy, structure and culture offer. It moves things forward, it inspires action, it changes the world, it maximizes the likelihood of growth, attainment and success.

Psychologist, executive coach and award-winning author Dr Paul Taffinder pushes you to analyze your own strengths and weaknesses and then systematically build your personal capability to create leadership impact. This book offers not only a pragmatic leadership model and behavioral checklists to assess your leadership but also a wealth of insight from personal leadership stories and cases, drawn from the author's research and his own experience as a corporate executive, coach and advisor to thousands of managers, aspiring leaders and CEOs across the world.

This is a new, fully updated edition of The Leadership Crash Course, designed to help you build transformational leadership in the fast-moving, digital world. It also sets out in detail the 7 leadership types so you can pinpoint your own predominant leadership: Transformational leader, the Enforcer, the Deal Maker, the Administrator, the Visionary, the Serial Entrepreneur and the Spin Doctor.

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"Leadership is key in successful corporations. Paul Taffinder's Crash Course is an excellent hands-on guide for leaders in the real world, facing real-world challenges ... A must for every executive."
JW MARRIOTT, JR, EXECUTIVE CHAIRMAN AND FORMER CEO, MARRIOTT INTERNATIONAL, INC.

"If you want to understand how leadership is changing in a digital, interconnected world -- this is the book for you."
PAUL GREENSMITH, UK CEO, AXA XL

• Language: English
• Publisher: Paul Taffinder
• Release date: Jun 11, 2020
• ISBN: 9781838090609

Paul Taffinder

Psychologist, strategist and award-winning author Paul Taffinder lives in the UK, near London. So fascinated was he as a boy by the underlying motivations of people – the good, the bad and the vile – that he completed three degrees and then a PhD in psychology and still found out that there was a lot to learn. Accordingly he has worked in the deepest mines and travelled to the highest places on earth, by flying Concorde (as a passenger, not a pilot). He is a devotee of fantasy and science fiction because it is a celebration of human possibilities. With four acclaimed business books to his name, he course corrected and created his own world in his debut trilogy The Dream Murderer Cycle.

Book preview

PREFACE

What is the point of leadership? Why is it so important to people? Why do organizations value it so much?

These are questions that most people, if they have any ambition to be a leader, will ask at some point in their career.

The value of leadership can be measured in how individuals can make a difference by:

•providing a sense of achievement and motivation to succeed that structure and organization on their own cannot;

•calling on commitment to action or even sacrifice by individuals to benefit the team or enterprise;

•inspiring people to overcome seemingly impossible obstacles;

•persuading disparate factions to pursue common cause;

•creating excitement and ambition to perform at the highest level;

•engendering hope among people who are despairing.

What you will notice about this list is that the value leadership creates is both subjective and practical. Indeed, for almost everyone, it is subjective experiences that are the most important for them: the feeling of confidence that comes from having overcome impossible odds, the dignity of contributing to a meaningful or important enterprise, the sense of achievement in success or learning something new, the satisfaction of having done the best for one’s family, team or business or having gained the esteem of colleagues. At the same time, leadership value is intensely practical – because it moves things forward, it creates action, it changes the world, it increases the likelihood of growth, attainment and success.

How do I become a leader? How do I develop as a better leader? Throughout my own career, both as an executive in the corporate world and as a consultant and strategic advisor to businesses, it has struck me how universal is the interest in these two questions. Young men and women, starting to make their way in the world want answers to these questions, but are often surprised to learn that so too do CEOs and executive committee members and every other senior manager.

Leadership is hard. It is a more complex, more lonely and more exposed way of behaving. By contrast, management is easier (and just as important, as later chapters show). The skills of management can be built brick by brick, as it were: delegation, reviewing performance, communication, team-building, budgeting, conflict management, interviewing, developing people, planning, running meetings and so on. Learning to lead is not about developing new skills, so much as it is about confronting yourself with how your emotions, thinking and behavior have impact on other people and therefore how you create leadership value.

The intention behind the book is to encourage people to fix in their minds a simple, challenging leadership model and then take the personal risk of applying each of the five elements of leadership behavior in their everyday work. It is not a book aimed only at senior executives running large businesses; rather, The Crash Course is a series of modules that individuals at many levels can study, deploy in their departments or businesses, or simply use as a reminder from time to time of what leadership is really about. In addition, the layout of the book is geared towards behavioral action: reading, assessing your own behavior and then trying things. It is also a book that requires you to be honest with yourself: if you refuse to see and measure your true strengths and weaknesses as a leader, you will have wasted your time reading it.

The Crash Course is also a book that acknowledges the global, interconnected world in which leaders now operate. Smartphones connect you to vast stores of instant data, information and opinions. Apps make your life easier but probably more distracted! New technology can make leadership both demanding and complex. Blockchain, the Internet of Things (IoT), robotic process automation, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Data Analytics are technologies that leaders of businesses and government institutions must not only understand but leverage for commercial advantage or the good of society. If it is the role of managers to make new technology work effectively, it is the role of leaders to judge where and when to deploy it and what it will mean for employees, citizens, school-children, the police, teachers and everyone else who looks to leaders to provide meaning and direction in a confusing and very fast-moving world.

That said, it is also the case that leadership is a very profound human concept. It has impact on both thinking and emotion but its draw, when you see good leadership in action, is immensely powerful in inspiring ordinary people to do extraordinary things – not always for the good of society, as the many wars started by leaders have shown. None the less, leadership appeals at a deeply psychological level. It has been a central part of all societies from the earliest times. It has been written about constantly for all of recorded history. Indeed, most history is liberally punctuated by the stories, triumphs, achievements and, yes, failures and disasters wrought by great leaders.

Why? Leadership offers the comfort of direction, or hope, or promised success. This is because leadership in action is almost always about dilemmas, difficult choices and asking risky questions – and most people would rather someone other than themselves, a leader they respect, faced these difficulties and offered the answers and made the decisions. It is why leaders are ceded authority and status. But beware! With authority and status come loneliness and personal accountability.

One might think that in our modern era the need for leadership is less relevant. Might not education, the power of technology and the incredible freedoms most of us take for granted make leadership redundant? Incontrovertibly no. I find that the need for leadership is more urgent, more important. This need is self-evident. In the political sphere it is signified in the great events that have shaped the early decades of the 21st century: the climate change movement, 9/11, the Palestinian Intifada, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the war on terror and the war on poverty, mass migration and insurgent political leaders. In economics it is the 2008 financial crash, the rise of India and China as commercial powerhouses and the impact of technology and vast capital movements in driving globalization and lowering barriers to entry. And in the organizational world it is the intensity of competitive pressure, the rise of giant global businesses and nimble start-ups, ongoing mergers and acquisitions, the collapse and integration of once separate industries and businesses into new multilayered ecosystems, the accelerating, almost exponential, surge of technological innovation and the blurring of the lines between government and private sector. In all of these events and processes, leadership is intimately and decisively the difference between excellence and mediocrity, success and failure.

COURSE 1

BE A MANAGER OR A LEADER

Key action list and course objectives

•To understand the difference between managing and leading people.

•To assess your own preference for either managing or leading.

•To understand why leadership is so important and valued today.

•To learn how leadership is different in the new globally connected digital business environment.

•To be clear on how to take the six modules of the Leadership Crash Course.

MODULE 1.1: THE BIG DIFFERENCE

Are you a leader or a manager? Yes, there’s a difference, a huge difference. And you need to make a choice about which you want to be. The world is full of managers and desperately short of leaders – real leaders. Organizations all over the world spend hundreds of millions every year training people to be better managers but struggle to develop enough leaders. Sure, we need both managers and leaders – the skills of managing are valuable, indeed essential, in making things happen and keeping work on track – but they are far outweighed by the demand for leadership skills in today’s world.

But why? Why this demand for leadership? What is leadership?

Leadership, as I discuss in more detail in module 1.4, is getting people to do things they have never thought of doing, do not believe are possible or that they do not want to do. In organizations leadership is the action of committing employees to contribute their best to the purpose of the organization.

Faster faster

There are many reasons for needing leaders today, not least the massive shifts in the geopolitical landscape of the world after the 9/11 attack on New York’s twin towers in 2001. The emergence of China as the second largest economy after the USA is marking a shift of both political and financial muscle from West to East. It is closely mirrored by the burgeoning economies of India, South Korea, Malaysia and other countries in the East. In addition there is the ubiquitous pressure of change exerted in every industry, sector and almost all walks of life. Some of this change is expected, even predictable. Witness, for example, the change that has come from outsourcing whole departments such as IT and customer contact centers or the off-shoring of jobs to India, China or South Africa. Likewise, many employees and managers are well accustomed to quality and customer service ‘improvement initiatives’ – some of which crop up with monotonous regularity and only rare impact (and, indeed, for reasons that stem largely from poor leadership). On the other hand, the 24/7 interaction of societies and economies that we call globalization, together with the impact of the digital revolution and the connectedness of people and organizations via smartphones, Internet of Things (IOT), blockchain and a host of other newly emerging technologies are delivering changes not only to office workers right across industries but also to consumers in every market – teenagers with their music and fashions, schoolchildren in their classrooms and homes, patients in the healthcare system and even politicians with their electorates. During the 2011 Arab Spring, YouTube played a critical role in disseminating messages of freedom and democracy. Protestors were able to upload and share videos about their grievances, ideas or political commentary, many going viral with over 5 million viewing hits.

In short, the world has entered a faster faster era, where speed of social interaction, thinking, organizational or political response and even family life is accelerating at unprecedented rates, underpinned by nested, connected technologies. Machine learning and AI will only make all this even faster.

For businesses, many of these connected technologies massively accelerate and leverage something called the ‘network effect’. This economic phenomenon simply means that the more additional users of a product or service that you secure, the greater the economic value of the product or service – and thus, ultimately, the value of the firm. Businesses have always been able to create this effect – but in the past only through massive investment in distribution: store outlets, factories in multiple countries, branches in every major city and with all the infrastructure in people, office space, support teams and so on. What new tech delivers is the opportunity to recreate global distribution via digital connectedness. You no longer need hard-copy contracts or shipment manifests posted or carried by courier companies all around the world; they can be smart contracts with electronic signatures instantly available through a permissioned blockchain. You no longer need laborious customer checks and manual payments; they can be automated. You no longer require a branch office in every country: AI handles the initial customer interaction and hands off to sales people at a regional hub or in a slimmed-down local office. This means that small start-ups and scale-ups can ‘steal’ the same distribution capability, if they are clever enough, that the big players have built with their bricks-and-mortar operations and by planting corporate flags in a hundred countries. It also opens up micro-markets or segments of customers that were never in the past even considered – either because they could not afford your services (like small-holding crop insurance or monthly medical aid cover) or because it was too expensive to build the infrastructure in far-flung regions (like selling fashion items in developing economies). Now you can do these things with a ‘shop window’ on the web, accessible anywhere in the world 24/7, and delivered to a customer’s door via Amazon.com or local parcel companies. A great example of this is eBay. Meg Whitman, CEO of the firm for 10 years, grew the tiny e-commerce business from a humble 30 employees and revenues of $4 million to 15,000 employees with $8 billion in revenue. Whitman was a billionaire when she departed eBay in 2008.

So it is true that as globalization and digital capabilities increase, all of the conditions described above make barriers to entry for new competitors easier to overcome. This means that new companies can easily replicate what existing firms already do and may, through lower costs and network effects, drive the older companies to the wall. It is happening in banking and insurance and in tech firms themselves, with an explosion of challenger banks, Insurtech start-ups and new technology behemoths, that have grown from nothing to huge global powerhouses in a few years – witness Google and Amazon Web Services. In addition, we have seen the sudden growth of digital platforms like Airbnb and booking.com, that own very little in terms of assets but control the movement of data and the transactions that depend on that data.

Current venture capital fund-raising ($131 billion in 2018 in the US alone) and, more importantly, the increasing scale of individual financings are also prompting a new phenomenon: the rapid growth of ‘full stack’, vertically integrated start-ups that have the infrastructure and ecosystem relationships, built on a technology-first principle, to disrupt traditional industries. These conditions make leadership even more important – great leaders will inspire not only their employees but also the employees and customers with whom they collaborate, and make the tough decisions that create superior economic performance in their companies and in the ecosystems within which they operate.

I hazard little in guessing that one of the reasons you have started reading this book is because you yourself are facing a change of some sort or want to introduce change around you, most likely in your work. Psychological research has shown what we all intuitively know: under circumstances of uncertainty or unusual challenge and difficulty, people look for help in understanding questions about what matters, what to do, what direction to take, and what they should not do. Providing people with the answers that help them with these difficult questions is the essence of leadership. And it is only a small step, then, to realize that successful change requires leadership.

Faster faster digital leadership?

The context of leadership nowadays is always, it seems, against a backdrop of digital tech and digital speed. For example:

•Automation of processes and functions (customer service, warehousing, accounting, fraud detection, billing and procurement, to name only a few) is gaining traction everywhere. Traditional administrative and manual jobs are disappearing, replaced by software and machines, whilst new digital-oriented roles are being created.

•New businesses (‘start-ups’) are more likely than ever before to be founded on digital tech than traditional business arrangements.

•Data has moved from being something to store to becoming commercial gold, a revenue generator in its own right.

•Many products and services have moved from being physical and profitable (cameras, 35mm acetate film) to becoming digital and free. Likewise, the biggest risks that corporations face have shifted from physical assets (property, plant, machinery, accidents to people) to intangibles (cyber attacks, loss of reputation and brand damage, data breaches).

•Digital is driving industry convergence. Way back in 1980, the Media Lab Director at MIT, Nicolas Negroponte predicted that by 2000 the computing, communication and content creation industries would become integrated. His prediction was spot on. And the trend has accelerated. Nowadays we have smartphones and tablets that carry messaging, voice, e-mail, news, entertainment, sport and business computing services. The firms that supply these have become part of the same broad sector, both competing and collaborating in ecosystems or merging into giant corporations. In financial services, credit institutions and insurance companies are building combined products and, through pressure to bring efficient risk capital into business models and getting it as close to risk as possible, reinsurers have paired up with alternative capital providers. Even in the retail world, CVS has accelerated convergence in completing in late 2018 the acquisition of Aetna for $69 billion, intending to reshape the U.S. health insurance business. CEO Larry Merlo envisioned new CVS stores that include added health services.

•Business leaders talk about a digital ‘workforce’ – software that mimics human work in multiple processes traditionally done manually (and slowly) by people working at keyboards or moving paper around. This digital workforce operates 24/7, takes no holidays and delivers 50 times faster. Human and digital workers now have to operate side-by-side.

All of this means that leaders need to set the context for digital, how people and machines work seamlessly and where people rather than machines need to be deployed or where software is better suited to the task. Increasingly this will necessitate that leaders are well-informed about tech and are comfortable in a faster faster world. In some ways this is about being tech-savvy or at least well briefed, but mostly it is about intellectual curiosity and understanding the connectedness of sectors, industries, customers and organizations and how these real and virtual relationships interact. It is the new normal. Take YouTube’s move into Netflix and Apple’s turf. It kicked off with movies that did well at the Sundance film festival, but soon was offering content from Disney, NBC/Universal, Paramount, Sony, and Warner Brothers. From being simply an amateur video-sharing site, YouTube was accelerating into entertainment distribution. In 2011 YouTube muscled in on the broadcast business, launching YouTube Live. This enables the firm to stream news coverage or music concerts, the royal wedding or the Olympics.

But, for all this digital speed and global connectivity, leadership is still very much a profoundly human interaction and one that you learn about through your behavior, the insights you gain from trying things, inspiring and influencing people, from being challenged and overcoming the odds and, yes, sometimes failing. Digital technology and interconnectedness is the current context, true, but then for leaders over millennia the same has been true – whether the technology was new hunting equipment and the use of fire in pre-history, farming in the Neolithic and the invention of writing soon after, steel-working and weapons in the Middle Ages, navigation devices and shipbuilding in the 16th century or vast mechanization in the two world wars of the 20th century.

I think that the very rise of the machines, if I can borrow that phrase from the Terminator movie franchise,