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Deep in the Heart of Africa
Lies the Secret to a New Style of Leadership
From Real Business magazine, April 2005
Here's the deal. Make your way to Lilongwe (the capital of Malawi) by Tuesday at 2.15 pm. By Friday, in a nearby village, you must turn two dilapidated buildings into teachers' housing and build a new community resource centre. The physical materials will be provided, but the labour force will consist entirely of local, volunteer labour. You don't speak the language. You will be working in a team made up of your peers from five other countries, and you've not met any of them before. As a high-potential executive with Motorola, you're not accustomed to failing.
No, this isn't a new series of Survivor. It is the new face of leader-ship
training.
It used to be that, for a successful business career, you needed formal
training: lots of the so-called hard stuff - corporate finance, corporate
law, engineering and sales - along with a smattering of the so-called
soft stuff - organisational behaviour and marketing. But multi-cultural
workforces, operating in a world where global politics and technology
regularly turn markets upside down, demand different leadership skills
now.
As the new economy makes ever greater demands on personal talents like communication, collaboration and improvisation, it's increasingly clear to many companies that classroom learning doesn't teach those things. Theory is useless; real learning only happens through experience. Role playing is belittled by senior executives and the rope bridge projects of old were all mastered (and then forgotten) on the way to an MBA. "Most business schools tend to be more controlled, mechanistic and have their own orthodoxies," explains Motorola's Vanessa Loughlin. "I wanted something more complex and more experiential."
The Malawi project derived from the collaboration between Motorola and a remarkable company called Three Hands. Founded by Simon Hamilton, the firm is named for the "three hands" of business, communities and people. It was Simon's experience in the business world (as an accountant) and the voluntary sector (with Leonard Cheshire) that brought him to see the catalytic effects realised by bringing businesses together with charities to train people. "I thought," says Simon, "that if companies are doing personal development and leadership anyway, why not get them to do something that benefits the community at the same time? If you find the right community vehicle and facilitators and trainers, you can provide all the training and development the team wants - but you also do something that matters, and leave behind something that makes a difference, anywhere in the world."
It's a radical idea whose time has come. "We thought that our managers lacked what we call edge: the ability to take risks, move outside their comfort zone, make decisions and make them stick," says Loughlin. "We were looking for something that would involve both individual and collective challenges, that would shift their assumptions about themselves and how they work."
Three Hands is a business teaching business how to do business. That makes it very different from academic institutions. And, because the projects it designs and manages are so complex and so sensitive, it has to execute brilliantly. In other words, Three Hands has to practice what it preaches, every day of the week. As such, it is a classic entrepreneurial organisation, trying to teach the attitudes and practice of entrepreneurship to large corporations that struggle to emulate the vigour, dynamic and purpose of small businesses.
But most of all, what fascinates me about Three Hands is what it reveals about a real crisis in leadership thinking. The Apprentice and (dare I say it) our own government suggest that the command-and-control model of centralised leadership is still with us. But that model is anachronistic and doesn't work anymore.
The Malawi project didn't succeed because a superhero arrived on the scene and figured it all out. It succeeded because there was a sufficiently strong sense of common purpose to persuade everyone to persevere. With a strong enough sense of purpose, politics, hierarchy, all manner of cultural differences are swept aside. That companies like Motorola, Pfizer and the Royal Bank of Scotland are prepared to go to such lengths to teach these lessons is just one indicator of how urgent the search is for new mental models of business leadership.
People aren't motivated by money - they're motivated by a sense of purpose larger than themselves. When they have that, they can - and will - astound you. And themselves.