CONFERENCE REPORT
• Leaders take people where they could not go on their own “I love this definition because it gets to the core of it. Leadership is, first and foremost, about others. It’s about taking people to a place they would never be able to get to if you weren’t part of the equation. Think of the stakes of that.”
• Leaders rally people to a better future
“It is about saying ‘hey, here’s
where we are today – high five, thanks for taking us to this place! But let’s not get complacent because here is way better than there’. These leaders are able to light a fire in the belly of their people to make them want to go there. There’s a future that’s better than today and, despite what certain economic theories say, leaders are able to take their people to better places than what the average laws say the world is going to look like. It’s up to us to get our people juiced up about going there.”
• Leaders galvanise people to want to do what must be done “This a military definition and I love this one. It says ‘yes we’re here but the future is better so, together, we can join hands and go there - and it’s gonna be a gas! Light the rockets, your hair’s going back and we’re going to do it together – who’s in?’. Are you doing that with your people? If you believe that’s a good definition of leadership, then ask yourself, are you doing that with your people? Because I can tell that everyone in this room is being paid a considerable sum of money to be good at that.”
Having made his case for leadership,
John stressed that
delegates need to realise the stakes in this are really high. “These are people we are dealing with; these are lives that matter. And, they’re being influenced by us.”
His next question to the audience was “what do leaders
do?”.
Emphasising how long this list is, John chose to focus on what he believes to be the three things that are uniquely required of a leader. “These are things we don’t ask other people to do,” he said. Initially, he joked: “People who write books about leadership like to try to link it to everything and they’ll say ‘leaders need to be trustworthy’. Of course they need to be trustworthy – what a stupid thing to say! Everybody is required to be trustworthy aren’t they?
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That’s not unique to leadership. You’ve got some clerks in accounting right now that have no direct reports but you want them to be trustworthy, correct? Some of us go to jail if those people aren’t trustworthy!” He continued: “I want to give you
three things that we don’t require our entire workforce to be good at but that leaders absolutely must do.”
1) Leaders must inspire – we have to paint pictures that create passion in people. “An example of this is when I
took my kids to Disneyworld. What I realised that, as a general rule, kids are excited at the prospect of going to Disneyworld. In fact they are so excited at the prospect that, if you are a smart parent, you can manipulate their behaviour for months on end in advance of them going
to Disneyworld.
never even been there but they’re excited because they’re inspired by where they’re going to go. Where is your team inspired to go?”
2) Traffic in idea creation because we’ve got to be looking forward. “Yes there are tasks at hand, yes
there’s inventory that’s got to be put away and fronted and shelved, yes there’s stuff that’s got be priced. There’s work to be done in the present and you need to have some ownership of it but we’ve got to pull out of that and look to the future because, as senior leaders, you probably have a lot of people coming to you to present things and we can quickly become ones who just preside over the work of others who we view as nothing more than achievement automatons who exist to do our bidding. That’s not what leaders do. Criticising is easy but developing something is a lot more difficult. Sitting around bitching about people who aren’t in the room might be fun but it is not what leaders do. “Leaders roll up their sleeves, they leave their titles at the door and they enter into the very hard work or developing stuff. The truth of the matter is that your leadership destiny will be predicated on the conviction and efficacy with which you roll up your sleeves and tackle problems and challenges together.”
3) Turn potential into performance “Leaders have to humbly assess the potential of another human being – and you had better do that with an incredible amount of
humility because, you know what, you could be wrong and these are people who matter. Never confuse potential with worth. Very often, as leaders, if we asses a person’s potential for a particular role and we deem it to be low, we then seem to think and treat them as if they don’t matter, as if they have no worth. Don’t ever do that! Your job as a leader, as hard as it is, is to identify potential and then to pour your life into ensuring that the performance of those individuals meet that potential.”
John ended his talk where he
began, by talking about the heart of a leader. He said: “We’ve got to
recognise that the heart of
healthy leadership begins in the leader’s healthy heart. If there’s an emergency on an aeroplane and oxygen masks come down, the classic line is ‘place the oxygen mask on your face before you try to help others’. You need to make sure you’re getting an input of healthy oxygen before you start impacting others. “You will never become a fully functional leader if your heart is hard. How you’re wired in here [pointing to his chest] is going to affect how you lead out here [gesturing around him] either for better or for worse. Leadership acumen plus an unhealthy heart equals devastating consequences for followers.
One need not look very far back in human history to see the kind of havoc a strong leader with a twisted heart can have on society, a country, a business, a retailer, a retail store, other people, your family.” He continued: “This is oxymoronic in business but a servant heart is not the enemy of a profitable business, it’s the enabler. “Most people in business don’t think that. They think they’ve got to be cutthroat. They think they’ve got to be high-performing jerks and that’s the way to get ahead but it’s not true! In fact, at the very heart of capitalism is that you have to serve someone else better than the competition in order to get something in return.”
John concluded: “Again, in a world that seems to be increasingly fascinated with technical,
impersonal, artificial,
faceless interaction, I will tell you unapologetically that, at Ace, we are betting the farm on timeless truth; that servant hearts and human connection will always have the potential to stir the soul. When we do that well, it’s not just good for business, it’s good for society. It changes branding of business and it turns our people from being aimless, purposeless, bored and disengaged into being wired up to where you want to go, and it impacts society in a meaningful way.”
09 AUGUST 2019 DIY WEEK 19
John Venhuizen
They’ve
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