Claim OwnershipThe Rest is Work
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© Ciarán Fenton
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Ciarán Fenton is a leadership consultant, board facilitator, and author focused on helping people find peace - even joy - in their working lives "most Mondays". The Rest is Work is a series of short podcasts on every aspect of work: the executive and main boards who control our working lives but whose working lives are often less than peaceful, how we can better manage our relationships at work and the business of our careers. His new focus on peace and joy at work, which he feels is achievable "most Mondays", follows his recent lengthy chemotherapy process for cancer. He’s now in remission.
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Why many problems at work and in organisations are caused by the absence of a purpose shared by all of its directors.
The impact of your formative years #MostMondays
How to win at interview #MostMondays
#MostMondays: how to feel fulfilled at work most of the time whether you lead or follow
How to tell someone they must leave #MostMondays - how to feel fulfilled at work most of the time whether you lead or follow
How to facilitate your own off-site #MostMondays - how to feel fulfilled at work most of the time, whether you lead or follow
So, if you are “the CEO”:
are you likely to be “the CEO” in three years time?
if yes, why, and how will you have changed, if at all?
if not, will you have jumped or been pushed
See the blog version of this podcast episode here: https://ciaranfenton.wordpress.com/2020/01/13/small-change-you-three-years-from-now/
“Least likely to say” is a great board game, it’s easy to play and, although I facilitate these, you don’t need a facilitator.
You can play this at home, as it were, in your own boardroom.
Here are the instructions:
Step 1: It
Choose someone to be “it”. Say, the CEO.
Step 2: Shout out
The CEO stays quiet and everyone else shouts out at once what the CEO is least likely to say the first thing on a Monday morning.
Step 3: Repeat
Repeat the process for everyone on the board.
It’s hilarious.
SMALL CHANGE
by Ciarán Fenton
How small changes in behaviour have a big impact on how you work, lead or follow
That’s the title of an ebook I wrote in early 2020, initially, as a series of 50 short blogs – index here – and as a framework for a longer book.
Section 1.10 CEOs with low EQ struggle in a crisis
Fantasy letter to a Chair from a board evaluator:
Dear Chair,
While I’m sure you will find a way of asserting in next year’s annual report, as you did last year, that your Board complies with FRC/QCA/Wates codes and principles I feel I should draw your attention to the following seven statements by members of your board made during the course of my evaluation:
In an ideal world, boards should focus on fixing the matters arising from their board evaluations. They don’t because the purpose of board evaluations of many boards, despite pleas by regulators, is to tick boxes for annual reports and/or to use them as sticks to beat colleagues.
Even organisations who pride themselves on carrying out rigorous board evaluations including on behaviour issues can miss important systemic weaknesses because of the key limitation of written board evaluations: fear of writing down, for example, the belief by most directors that the CEO, CXO or Chair is a narcissistic bully who brooks no challenge. Delete as appropriate.
The collapse of Carillion is a chilling example of the limitations of written evaluations. Its annual report in 2016 noted that its board evaluation had “confirmed that the board, each of its committees and directors continue to be highly effective’.
My Mum is 90 today. She was born on 22nd September 1930. The Irish Times that day reported widespread gales, a tramcar accident in Dublin and the activities of a man called Hitler.
Mum was nine at the outbreak of World War II, a teenager at a boarding school in the forties, married in the early fifties and had seven children by the early sixties of which I was the sixth.
She ran two small businesses in her lifetime. Her husband, our father, died over 34 years ago. Her daughter, our sister, died aged 57. She lived a full life against a backdrop of global and local socio-economic change the pace of which was unprecedented.
As soon as I came of age, and over the years since, I noticed one consistent pattern in her behaviour:
"Mind-ful-ness"
Imagine if the UK were a Plc and the Prime Minister its Group CEO then I would, this week, be pitching to him my facilitated virtual off-site program, which I piloted successfully during lockdown with a financial services client:
Dear Prime Minister,
UK Plc currently lacks a shared purpose (P), a shared strategy (S) to achieve that purpose and an agreed behaviour (B) plan to implement its strategy – a PSB, if you like an acronym.
This means that, even with your large majority, your administration is likely to end in tears in Downing Street as so many have done before you.
The difference this time is that not only do you risk failure on an unprecedented scale but in becoming the worst UK Plc Group CEO of all time because COVID-19 raises the bar considerably on how history will judge your legacy.
My virtual off-site program could help you avoid this disastrous outcome for UK Plc
Last week a client told me that people desperately need support returning to work.
They usually use the summer to refresh, she said, but were instead preparing kids for school/university which will be entirely new and different experiences; deciding to home-school or not; parents of children with special needs are especially struggling; there’s a constant anxiety about job losses or loss of colleagues; young people starting careers need help, she said. The list is endless.
That stress is exacerbated when people at work are in distributed teams where there is little opportunity to seek or find support. Leaders have to lead across back to back virtual meetings at a time of constant anxiety.
How are things? Are you having a good pandemic, "actually"? Was lockdown "great, in a way"? Did you get in touch with your inner sourdough, learn your kids' names and zoom "back-to-back"?
Is your business "hugely" benefiting from the pandemic, "as it happens"? Sales up, like, who knew? Is "managing growth" your main problem, "frankly"?
Or are you waking each day feeling sick about "Q4"? Have you stopped "furloughing" and started exiting "your people"? Are sales down, "massively"?
Have you had a break, yet? Away from your screens, room, and routine? Have you had a chance to think? Or, better still, feel? You do not live, most likely, in a one-bedroom flat in a high rise with several children. You can afford to philosophise. I encourage you to use that privilege.
The many tributes to John Hume's life in all media over the last week all confirm that he achieved what many CEOs talk about in terms of toe-curling tautology but rarely deliver: "transformational change". It's as if, as Sandy Toksvig once quipped, "there's no change in ordinary change".
Yesterday, Paul Gilbert, CEO LBCWisecounsel, UK’s doyen of commentary and advice to and on in-house lawyers wrote an important blog which, I suspect will have been read by many lawyers but not so many “COVID-19 CEOs” - that is CEOs waking up this morning faced with the task of leading their organisations through an unprecedented global pandemic.
Paul’s blog concerned a conversation he had last Friday “with a lawyer who told him such a gruelling story that I have not thought of anything else since.”
The lawyer spoke of “his loneliness when first fighting for what was right, but then resigning from a company in which he had discovered systemic fraud.”
So, another day another story of a in-house lawyer brutally forced out by “the business”. So what? Everyone knows this occurrence is commonplace, nay, “business as usual”.
Sir Keir Starmer recently completed his first hundred days as Leader of the Opposition in the UK's Parliament. Commentators have assessed these according to their political bias.
But none disagree on his chief achievement: his "forensic" approach to "calling out" the government on its behaviour.
CEOs can learn much from his approach. Keir Starmer is a barrister and, as Nigel Pascoe QC explained in BarriserBlog (2013), there are four rules in cross-examining a witness...
During lockdown, I started reading - or more accurately listening on Scribd on my run - to David Herbert Donald's biography of Abraham Lincoln: Lincoln.
In Chapter 16, he describes Lincoln's fury at General Meade's failure to prevent General Lee's escape into Virginia.
Frustration fuelled the President's anger.
Modern CEOs and leaders will recognise these deeper feelings if they take time to pause, stay in the present moment mindfully, and to acknowledge that anger is a much shallower feeling than the deeper unheard inner screams of frustration.
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