Leadership & Management Coaching

The reduction of the worker to a living tool...must either demoralise or...produce resentment and result in serious difficulties between masters and men
Cadbury 1914 Leadership

We at Ad Manum consultants Ltd have a real desire to improve the quality of leadership and management within UK companies - all too often stakeholder and shareholders suffer as a consequence of poor leadership & management; probably the best example of this has been the sliding decline of the British manufacturing sector over the last fifty years.

We work individually and collectively with leaders in organisations in all sectors; often this is on a ‘one to one’ basis discussing the demands of the business and how this translates into the demands of leadership and management. Each coaching assignment will be different and the process followed will vary, however, in order to provide some insight into what we do, consider the following:

Jon Laughton, our Managing Director, often says that the best qualification he has for coaching other leaders is the mistakes he has made in his own corporate career...the best way of learning is by trying and then being prepared to answer for your own actions but how many of us in leadership roles really do this and do it well?

We find it hard to see ourselves as others do - we know intuitively what we are really like as people working in an organisation, but all too often we find some way of hiding from this truth; for example this could be through the poor use of hierarchy or status to provide insulation / isolation, or blindly following the bad example of others, or fostering a negative pre-existing industrial culture that relies on a ‘command & control’ way of doing things...or, or...

The primary mistake made by many leaders in organisations is to mix up leadership and management; we lead our people (followers) and we manage processes. These two things require very different skills and if this mistake is compounded by inappropriate leadership behaviours then the results can be, literally, catastrophic!

There are many models for leadership: e.g. ‘heroic’, ‘collective’, ‘distributed’, ‘ethical’, ‘transformational’, etc etc. But all of these models have at their core four shared common elements:

  1. It is the role of leadership to set out a compelling and exciting vision for the organisation (the briefer the better!)
  2. It is the leadership’s duty to communicate this vision effectively in such a way that followers buy in to it
  3. It is the responsibility of the leadership to make sure that the necessary resources are made available to ensure achievement of the vision
  4. The leadership’s values and behaviours need to be evidently consistent with the achievement of the vision and create an ‘exciting urgency’ to make progress

None of this of course has anything to do with managing processes such as financial controls or environmental controls etc. In fact there is compelling evidence that the most successful leaders recognise and behave according to the following principles:

  1. Success depends on leaders teaching leadership to their followers
  2. Followers need to challenge leaders
  3. Exemplary followers are recognised by their leaders as indispensable
  4. Leaders willingly share their limelight
  5. Leaders are hero makers not heroic themselves
  6. Leaders recognise that authority lies in the response to orders not their issue
  7. Leaders encourage effective followers to think independently
  8. Leaders ensure followers feel they matter
  9. Leaders hold on to power by giving it away
  10. Leaders are the best exponents of ‘Followership’

So consider how well you and others in your organisation follow these principles and if you feel that it is somewhere between ‘sometimes to not often’ please contact us. We are happy to visit you in your place of work for a free, no commitment discussion on how we can help to make you an even better leader of people and a better manager of process.

Alternatively if you feel that there are others in your organisation that may need our help please refer to our Team Development page.