We all have a collection of things in our lives that we would like to change. When it comes to change, we often find that it's a lot harder than we expect it to be. Even small things turn out to be much more difficult that we think they should be. The problem comes down to control.

In order to change something to be exactly the way you want it, you need to control it. If you try to change something you have no control over, you will fail. A lot of coaches and consultants will get you to draw diagrams showing the things you control vs the things you don't. The message is that you can change the things you control and can only influence the things you don’t. If you want to change something the way to do that is to expand your sphere of control - try to gain control of the thing you want to change. Unfortunately, 99% of those diagrams are completely wrong. We generally have control over far less than we think we do.

Last time I talked about the 3 C's required for people to feel empowered - Clarity, Competence and Care. We need all 3 for people to feel empowered. They need the skills to do the job right (competence), they need the information to make the right decision (clarity) and they need to feel that the organisation and its leadership are asking them to step up and take responsibility because it's the right thing for them, not the thing that will make the most profit or allow more downsizing (care). It should make their jobs better and more fulfilling, it should help them grow and advance their careers. If all 3 C's are present, people will feel empowered.

So care is essential for empowerment, but that's not all. My view is that care is the single most important quality that sets great leaders apart from everyone else. These days, care is not something we talk about a lot in a business context. There might be an "Employee care" section of the HR website which lists the services you can call when the stress of your job gets too much, but there is very little actual care involved in modern business. You are more likely to hear words like "data driven" than "care driven". I mean, most organisations call people "resources" without even cringing a little (and treat them like resources as well). Actual, real care and compassion for people is missing in modern organisations and I strongly feel that it needs to be brought back. Not just because it's good for people, but because it's good for business as well.

Hi folks, first post back after the break. I hope you all had a great holiday season and that the new year is treating you kindly (at least kinder than last year). I thought today that I would go back to a topic that I have covered before, because I think I left something important out when I covered it the first time. I have written before about empowerment and what conditions need to exist before people will accept that empowerment (here) . Empowerment isn't something you can just give to someone and expect it to work, they need to accept the responsibility and authority that they are given. If they don't accept it, they will be empowered on paper but will still turn to the hierarchy to make decisions for them.

I said before that there are two key things that need to exist in order for people to accept empowerment - clarity and competence. Clarity is the organisational clarity around why the decision needs to be made and what the operational constraints and limits are on the options that can be considered. Competence is the skills and other knowledge that someone needs in order to operate in that space. Without those two, no matter how much you tell people they are empowered to act, they will not do it. Unless they feel competent and have the right clarity, empowerment will not happen. All that still holds from when I originally wrote it, but I left something out. There is a third C - Care.

Think back to the last time you joined a new organisation. What was your onboarding like? “Hi, here's your laptop. Here's where the toilets are. Here is the printer. Here is the cupboard with the pens. Here are a whole bunch of people whose names you won't remember for weeks. Here's a technical introduction to the work. Here are your logins to the tools you will need. Off you go.” There might be a welcome lunch to help you get to know the people you will be working with, or some sort of ritual embarrassment at the next all hands meeting so they can "get to know you" a bit better (what's one thing about you that no one knows...). There will probably be some mandatory, cover-our-legal-butts "training" in health and safety and various HR policies that will leave you feeling dumber than when you started.

I suspect most people around the world have similar onboarding experiences in just about every organisation. It's the way things are done. And it's wrong. Not so much for what it includes, but for what it leaves out. The traditional onboarding experience misses some crucial things that help new people get settled into a new role in a new organisation. While it might give you the basic mechanics of your job, it doesn't help you integrate into the new organisation. You are left to discover all the hidden little things all by yourself. The fact that we can't raise that topic in meetings because of last time. The fact that while the process says this, what we actually do is something else because of history. Or the fact that, given a choice between this and that, we always chose this because that's what is important to the organisation. In short, what traditional onboarding doesn't do is introduce you to the culture of the organisation you have just joined.

Last time we asked the question - "What makes a great leader?" and in order to answer that, we had to look at what it is that a leader actually does. What really is leadership? It turns out that the function of a leader is to allow large groups to work in a coordinated and purposeful way. Then we started to look at what sort of skills leaders are encouraged to develop and which of those skills really make the difference between a leader and a great leader.

The skills that really make a difference are not the ones that many people assume are the important ones. Technical skill in whatever it is you are doing is fairly unimportant. How driven you are personally is not that important. The reason for this is that those skills are ones that don't scale. Being technically good as the leader doesn't make the group any better once you hit the capacity of that one leader to dispense technical advice. Being driven to succeed as a leader doesn't make the group driven to succeed. Those things are individual things. They have a scale of one. What matters when leading groups are skills that scale across the whole group - things that lift the whole group up, not just the leader.

What is leadership and why do we need it? If you do a search for leadership books on Amazon you get back thousands of titles, all with a different take on what makes a great leader. Some emphasise technical skills. Some emphasise people skills, others emphasise whatever magic formula the author believes holds the secret. You could read leadership books for the rest of your life and and up more confused than you were when you started.

So what is the secret? What does make a great leader. Why do we need leaders anyway? The only way we will answer the question of what makes a great leader is to work out what leaders really do.

What is the purpose of a company? Any company? Why do they exist? Why do they do the things they do, employ the people they employ, produce the products and services that they produce? Ask that question and most of the time you will get one answer - to make money. While that answer isn't wrong, it's also incomplete.

Legally, the directors of a company are required to maximise returns to shareholders. There are other legal requirements to make sure that a company is solvent, able to pays its bills and so on. So yes, making money is a important part of what a company does. But that's not its purpose - its reason for existing. Nothing exists just to produce money (except maybe for a mint but that's different). To be truly successful a company must fulfil some sort of other purpose - it must produce goods and services that people want to buy, and it must produce them in a way that is acceptable to the society in which they sell them. So really, an organisation's purpose is "Do XYZ, in order to be profitable". Not just "Be profitable".

One of the most highly prized skills these days is problem solving. Being known as a problem solver is an almost surefire way to guarantee success in whatever organisation you are in. As the great Vanilla Ice once said - "If there was a problem, Yo, I'll solve it". Mind you, he did also say "Word to your mother" which is somewhat less profound. Problem solving is indeed a very valuable thing, but at the same time a very limited one. Problem solving implies finding the root cause of an issue and solving it - making sure that it doesn't occur again. But what happens when the root cause of a problem isn't something that can be fixed?

Many of the problems that confront organisations (and society as a whole) these days are not problems where you can look at the problem, see the root cause and fix the system so the problem goes away. Many of the key problems we face are caused not by an easily fixed flaw in the system, but by the system itself. They aren't really problems at all but behaviour that emerges from the operation of the system. What I'm talking about, of course, is complexity. When a system behaves in a complex way, it exhibits unexpected behaviour and we see that as a problem. But you can’t just go in and fix a complex system. Any fix you make will itself have unexpected consequences. Complex problems can't be fixed. At least not in the conventional sense of finding a root cause and applying a discreet solution. What do problem solvers do when confronted by complexity?

One of my favourite authors of all time is the late Sir Terry Pratchett (those of you who know me are currently making that "oh really, never would have guessed" face that people make when someone states the blindingly obvious). His books are a perfect blend of humour, absurdity, high fantasy and really, really deep insights into human behaviour. Over the last few months I have been re-reading my collection and have just reached what is probably my favourite Pratchett book of all - The Hogfather. While reading, one passage jumped out at me because I realised that I see this every day. At work and at home - 

“The phrase ‘Someone ought to do something’ was not, by itself, a helpful one. People who used it never added the rider ‘and that someone is me’.”

Terry Pratchett - The Hogfather

How often do we see this? Someone identifies a problem, points at it and says "problem over here... someone fix it", maybe raises a ticket in the appropriate ticketing system... then walks away, patting themselves on the back for a job well done. How often is the person who does that us?