By Ben Renshaw, Director of Success Intelligence

The development of great leadership is becoming more and more of a strategic priority for organisations. In a world of sameness, i.e. similar products, services and systems, what becomes a competitive differentiator is the quality of leadership that guides an organisation towards its vision. Success Intelligence is now involved in several major leadership development programmes in a variety of sectors including hospitality, manufacturing, banking and professional service firms. This month I wanted to share one of our key ideas to provoke your thinking about leadership:

Vision is not an exclusive club. We have been recently asked to run a leadership programme for 1000 managers in a large manufacturing organisation. Part of the initial challenge to engage people on this journey is that the majority of them do not think of themselves as leaders. The consequence of this mindset includes people waiting to be told what to do, failing to take accountability for their actions, limited decision-making and a short-term focus on results. In a world of work in which there is a need for people to demonstrate greater innovation and creativity, an ability to do more with less and to build collaborative partnerships, understanding that leadership is not for the chosen few is a critical aspect of breaking down narrow parameters that prevent people from fulfilling their potential.

The recognition that vision is available to all does not mean that you have to become a Steve Jobs, or Nelson Mandela. It does mean that you have to develop the ability to see things clearly and to have a well thought through definition of success. A few weeks ago I was running a session for an executive team with Robert Holden. We asked the team who had a written definition of success. One hand went up. This person described how 25 years ago they had formulated their vision for success. When we asked what benefits they had received as a result the individual said two things; Focus and Fulfilment. They went onto say that one of the most powerful aspects of having a clear vision was that it had given them a path to follow, providing important sign posts along their journey.

It can appear overwhelming at first when you start embracing the idea of vision. A simple exercise to provoke your thinking is to ask yourself, ‘What is success today?’ In other words, ‘How would you know at the end of a day if you’ve been successful or not?’ These questions are at the heart of Success Intelligence and on a personal note have been one of the most beneficial techniques to help me become more visionary. A couple of years ago I decided to really get to grips with these questions. One thing we do, as a team at Success Intelligence is to use legendary moleskine notebooks used by thinkers and artists like Pablo Picasso and Ernest Hemingway. These are our success journals. I committed to asking myself the question, ‘What is success today?’ every day for 365 days and writing down my answer. It got to the point that if I had forgotten to do it, by 11 o’clock I knew something was missing. I had to pull out my book and make sure that I had clarified what was most important for me that day. It had a profound effect not only on the way I felt, but also how I approached my work and life.

Here are three benefits of making vision your learning curve:
1. Making sure what’s important stays important. In a manic, busy and hyper world it’s easy to forget what really matters. The act of developing your vision brings you closer to what’s most precious in your life, work and relationships.
2. Overcoming our limitations. Most of the barriers that we have to resolve in life our self-imposed. Vision provides a context to face our fears and realise that we may be greater than we originally believed.
3. Enjoying the ride. As John Lennon famously said, ‘Life is not a dress rehearsal’. It’s easy to live so many years ahead of each day that we can fail to make the most of now.

As a result of this blog I encourage you to ask yourself, ‘What is success?’ daily for the next 30 days and allow yourself to receive the gift of vision.

By Ben Renshaw, Co-Director, Success Intelligence

On January 29th, Success Intelligence hosted a stunning public event (even though I say so myself) focused on making 2010 your best year yet. The day had been long in coming as we had put a lot of focus on it as a team to ensure that it had maximum impact both for us personally, and the 100 delegates that joined us on the day. It was a real mix of people who attended bringing together a selection of our corporate clients including Sky, Nationwide, Vodafone and Zurich with a range of other participants including entrepreneurs, teachers, coaches and health professionals.

I had the joy of co-presenting the day with the founder of Success Intelligence, Dr Robert Holden and fellow director Avril Carson. The day consisted of 4 key sessions to help make 2010 your best year yet:
1. Identity – being clear about who you are.
2. Success – understanding your definition of success.
3. Strategy – removing the blocks to success.
4. Shift – identifying your personal growth for the year ahead.

I thought it would be valuable to share some of the key insights that came out of the day:

Session 1
Stop the world I want to get off…Does this plea sound familiar? We are living faster than ever. The challenge with life running by in a flash is that we can miss out on what’s most important – ourselves. At Success Intelligence we often hear our clients make comments such as, “I barely have a minute to myself.” Or, “I’m 3 days behind in my life. I just need an extra 3 days to catch up.” This manic existence is not a great way of making the most of life and needs to be addressed. It starts with getting greater clarity about our own wisdom and making sure that we live it.

Success Intelligence is based on 4 key intelligences, which are the cornerstone of our wisdom:

PQ: The Energy of Success. Intelligence is an energy. We need to create the space to get plugged into it and get recharged. When we’re connected we listen to energy. Ask yourself, ‘What energizes you?’ ‘What enthuses you?’

EQ: The Heart of Success. ‘What do you love?’ ‘What is in your heart?’ Being successful means that you have a loving relationship with your heart. So often we override the wisdom in our heart through emotions such as fear or guilt. Let your heart lead you this year.

IQ: The Psychology of Success. As Robert Holden says in his book, Success Intelligence, “Sometimes you have to stop and think!” Think time is one of the most important ingredients for being truly successful as it helps you to tune into your best thoughts.

SQ: The Spirit of Success. The first book I wrote was called Successful But Something Missing. The title captures the experience of so many – external trappings but a gap in meaning. As we strive after success we can forget what’s really important. Real success is ensuring that what’s important stays important.

Following this input, our first major exercise on the day was to ask people to conduct a Success Review for 2009. We used 3 different lenses to look at success; your most meaningful, enjoyable and valuable successes from last year. It’s powerful to make success a learning curve and recognise what you have learnt about yourself through success.

Session 2
One of the core principles of Success Intelligence is, ‘Your definition of success influences every other significant decision in your life.’ Getting clear about what is success can save years of chasing false idols and pursuing happiness. In order to help people think about success for 2010 we invited them to try some possibility thinking.

One of the gifts of exercising possibility thinking is that it challenges you to look at your habitual self. This is the part of you that lives with deeply engrained habits, some of which are not so helpful. On a personal note one of my habits, which really doesn’t support me is the temptation to become cynical. For instance, if someone dares to suggest a new idea, or a better way of doing something, my initial response is to dismiss it. Employing possibility thinking encourages us to open our minds to inspiration and help make sure that our life isn’t just a series of repeats.

The exercise we set people was to explore the question, ‘How good can this year get?’ I really recommend having a go at this if you want to get high on your own thinking!

Session 3:
Having explored how good 2010 could get, we then challenged people to reflect upon how they might fail. The purpose of doing this is that although we don’t tend to consciously set ourselves up for failure, our habitual self can easily slip into old ways of doing things that take us off track. Avril Carson quoted part of a powerful poem from GK Chesterton, ‘Unless a man starts afresh about things, he will certainly do nothing effective.’

We highlighted 5 particular blocks to watch out for that could derail you from your good intentions. I’m going to mention a couple of my favourite below:
1. Hyper-cynicism. As I mentioned above I’m an expert in cynicism. Essentially cynicism is a defensive mechanism we employ to prevent us from getting disappointed. The other side of cynicism is passion, so watch out when you meet new opportunities with a cynical approach.
2. The Work Ethic. This pattern is based on the idea that the key to success is hard work and then some more. There’s no doubt that working hard can be a helpful trait, however we live in a world in which most people overly work, leading to exhaustion and a lack of creativity and imagination. How can you work smarter, not harder this year?

Session 4:
Our final session was called, The Shift. The key principle we introduced was, ‘Your life will not grow if you do not grow’. The initial exercise we set was to think about how you grew in 2009, what helped you to grow and the benefits you received. This was followed up by defining how you would like to grow this year, the benefits you hope to gain and what help you will require. We provided people with a couple of tools to help them record their good intentions and commit to following through.

I was so touched by the day that as Robert was closing, he turned to Avril and myself to invite a final comment and I was left speechless. Maybe 2010 will be a quieter year in my life. My family will thank me!

by Ben Renshaw, Co-Director of Success Intelligence

Today was a significant event as the 150 leaders of Government Council gathered together to focus on how they were going to create leadership success in an uncertain future. As a Council they are being faced with needing to make 12-20% financial cuts over the next 3 years, which they recognise means that they will have to discover new ways of leading to deliver the same quality of service with less resource.

I had been invited to stimulate their thinking and had put together 3 key leadership themes to explore:

1. Leadership inspiration.
I started off with the idea that leadership is inspiration. I cited research from the Department of Trade and Industry who conducted a national survey to find out the components of successful leadership. Top of the list with 53% of respondents was inspiration. However, when asked how inspirational employees found their leaders only 11% believed that their leaders had the ability to inspire. This was in marked contrast to the 75% of leaders who thought that they did inspire their people. I find this ‘inspiration gap’ very common. In fact I would go as far to say that it’s quite rare to find leaders who genuinely set a compelling example for their people on a regular basis.

The first challenge I set the group was to think about the kind of decisions they make in the formative part of their days. Responses included, ‘Hit snooze’, ‘Walk the dog’, ‘Get the kids up’, ‘What am I going to wear?’ Inspirational stuff from a room of senior leaders! I set out a proposition that being inspirational starts with a mindset. It is influenced by the type of decisions you make each day. Set the intention to be inspirational and it will encourage you to make it a priority. I then invited people to reflect upon what inspires them through questions such as, ‘What do I love?’ ‘What is my joy?’ ‘What is my passion?’ It was heartening to see a group move from being relatively cynical about leadership to becoming genuinely engaged with the recognition that in order to inspire others, they need to be inspired themselves.

2. Leadership style.
Great leaders have the ability to read situations well and adapt their styles accordingly. One of the most outstanding leaders I know is a CEO who has a remarkable ability to flex his style in an effortless way including fronting up to the City, communicating with shareholders, working with his executive team and inspiring his employees. However, it wasn’t always the case. When he landed the coveted job of CEO he was renowned for a highly directive style, which had certainly helped him get where he was, but was not going to help him succeed in the future. He quickly recognised that in order to engage his workforce he needed to develop a variety of styles, in particular a collaborative style that ensured others felt important through being consulted, listened to and trusted.

Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence, conducted extensive research on leadership styles and identified 6 key styles, each of which has a different impact on the quality of the culture in an organisation. In his well-known Harvard Business Review article, 'Leadership That Gets Results', the most positive style that emerged was a visionary one. The ability to articulate a compelling vision with the message, ‘Come with me’ creates the necessary alignment to take a company forward. Other styles with a positive impact included a democratic and coaching approach. The most negative styles were a commanding/coercive style, which is appropriate in a crisis, but if used overtime causes high levels of disengagement, and a pace-setting approach, which certainly helps drive performance, but if overused burns people out and is not sustainable.

3. Leadership growth.
I challenged the audience to think if they have reached their leadership peak, or do they still have room to grow? One of the key principles of Success Intelligence is ‘For an organisation to grow, its leaders need to grow’. In our work we see a direct correlation between individual and organisational development. In fact the consultancy McKinsey cited important research from their seminal work, War for Talent, which showed that 53% of managers left their jobs specifically due to a lack of development, in the form of coaching, mentoring and job rotation.

Take a moment now to think about how have you grown so far in 2009, and how you intend to grow coming into 2010?

I want to leave you with the idea that leadership success is not a position, title, or role. Ultimately, it is a commitment to giving your best energy, opening your heart, sharing your thoughtful reflections and being inspired yourself.

by Ben Renshaw, Co-Director of Success Intelligence

A key principle of Success Intelligence coaching is, ‘Some people go through life, whilst others grow through life’. The choice is yours. However, in today’s climate of unpredictable change, the difference between success and failure can lie in how you prioritise your own personal development.

Every organisation I work with, such as BAA, the world’s leading airport company, or Premier Foods, the UK’s largest food provider, is investing more time, energy and resource into developing their greatest asset – their people. The cynicism that used to accompany leadership and management development programs is a thing of the past. In fact the tide has turned so much that development is now seen as a competitive advantage, including having a personal coach.

So how do you prioritise your personal development when you’ve got an overflowing inbox, a multitude of deadlines and challenging customers to serve? Well, here are 3 ideas to support your learning and development:

1. Vision for success. John is director of retail for a leading high street brand. I was invited to coach him in taking his next step. When I asked John how he had reached his current position, he responded by saying, ‘long hours’. However, he recognised that this was not sustainable going forward as he had a young family, and a recent 360 feedback exercise had pointed to the fact that people were looking to him for greater imagination and creativity, not more graft. We started our coaching program with the question, ‘What is success in your work, life and relationships?’ John was flawed. He realised that although he had worked hard to be successful, he hadn’t worked out what real success was for him. Before you get busy doing lots of stuff, stop and work out what success is for you. Ask yourself, ‘What is my definition of success?’ ‘What difference do I want to make in my work, life and relationships?’ What is most important to me?’ What do I really enjoy?’

2. Commit to your priorities. Once you have greater clarity about success you can then focus on what will help you to be truly successful. One of the biggest blocks I hear from my clients is that they are unable to prioritise what's most important due to a lack of time. We forget that we cannot manage time, we manage priorities. As we know there are only 24 hours in a day, therefore your time has to be influenced by what’s going to be most valuable. I remember a lawyer telling me that the most challenging time in his life was weaning himself off his long hours (when you’re billing in 6 minute units this is really tough). His fellow partners thought he’d lost the plot when he took 2 weeks to step back from his practice and re-evaluate how he was going to work going forward. When he did come back he discovered a renewed passion and vitality for his work, he deepened his relationships with clients and colleagues and most importantly, his family got to know him again. Ask yourself, ‘What are my key priorities to help me be successful?’

3. Ask for support. I have just returned to work following the birth of my third child. After completing my first meeting with my team members at Success Intelligence, I realised that I could feel the heat was on with the amount of work I had in the pipeline and the increased challenges at home. I couldn’t just keep doing what I had been doing prior to this change. So I asked the team for help. Specifically I requested that they give me feedback about how they see me respond to pressure and how I can be more effective. The response blew me away. The team spontaneously reached out to me and offered me great insight that will make a big difference to how I perform going forward. My friend, Robert Holden created a great motto for our sister project on happiness (www.behappy.net) ‘If you are alive you need help’. Don’t be too proud to reach out to your family, friends and colleagues and ask them to give you the support that will support your success.

by Ben Renshaw - Co Director of Success Intelligence 

The current economic crisis has turned up the heat on individuals, teams and organisations needing to find new ways of working smarter. Whether I’m running Senior Leadership Development Programs for IHG, the largest hospitality company in the world, coaching Executives at Sky, the number 1 provider of entertainment in the UK, or training Head Teachers in the Scottish Borders to become great coaches, I have found that the most effective way of helping people create new solutions is through the power of coaching.

I have identified 12 qualities for Coaching Success based on the 4 Intelligences that underpin the work of Success Intelligence – PQ (the energy of success); EQ (the heart of success); IQ (the psychology of success); and SQ (the spirit of success). The following are three of these qualities, which are particularly relevant in these unpredictable times:

1. Managing energy well for enjoying sustainable success. I’ve just returned from a very restful holiday in Thailand. It never ceases to amaze me how much rest I need to catch up with after the exertions of my regular workload and looking after my two young kids! When the pressure is on the ability to renew energy becomes even more important. It enables you to think clearly, be decisive, communicate well, and take smart moves. Coaching Action: What do you need to get re-energized? Commit to 3 actions that will improve your energy.
2. Engaging authentically through openness and honesty. Probably the biggest cause of wasted time and energy in organisations is due to the lack of openness and honesty in conversation. A client recently summoned the courage to tell his CEO that the organisation was not demonstrating enough hunger for creating sales and cited numerous examples of competitors who were taking the lead in new ways to attract custom. The CEO asked him why he hadn’t shared this opinion earlier. The client had to admit that the last time he gave direct feedback to colleagues the CEO had told him to stop putting down his peers and was therefore cautious about doing it again. By not speaking up we place a high risk of failing to address key issues. As Alan Weber, the editor of the Harvard Business Review said ‘Conversations are the new form of work’. Coaching Action: Who do I need to be more honest with? What do I need to say? When will I have this important conversation
3. Being vision led by having a clear definition of success. A key principle of Success Intelligence is, ‘Your definition of success influences every other significant decision in your life’. Now more than ever before we need to work out what real success means for us. Traditionally people have associated success with financial accomplishment and a position, e.g. being the biggest, largest, fastest etc. One of the opportunities emerging out of the global meltdown is to redefine success. I got a real surprise at the beginning of this year when I asked a client about his definition of success for 2009. Historically he had been very focused on hitting targets and beating the competition. He said that the current climate had forced him to think deeply about what really matters and he identified 3 key things as measures of success – people, development and philanthropy. Coaching Action: What is your definition of success? Schedule time to clarify success in your work, life and relationships.