Peer to Peer Magazine

SMART MOVES not so Very Good Leadership Lessons from Very Bad Leadership by Bob Lewis, IT Catalysts Editor’s Note: I subscribe to “Keep the Joint Running,” an e-zine written by Bob Lewis, and a recent post resonated with me. This article is more “political” in nature than our typical content, but I’m certain there are important leadership lessons to be learned from the many tragedies inherent in the BP oil spill. Bob was kind enough to let me repurpose/reprint his commentary. ManagementSpeak: We need to revisit our implementation strategy. Translation: I want a way to blame all failures on end-users and contractors, absolving myself of any responsibility. Tony Hayward is finally gone. While Chairman of the Board Carl-Henric Svanberg delayed Hayward’s conversion to one of the “small people” far too long, everything about the controversy over his staying and his eventual departure focused on the sin of his impact on BP’s image. Which tells me neither Hayward nor Svanberg has spent much time shopping at the Insight Store. Hayward needed to go a long time before, and as is so often the case with headline-making examples of lousy leadership, you can benefit from his ineptitude. But only if you understand why, and it’s a reason none of the commentariat has yet mentioned, probably because the commentariat, while paid lots of cash to bloviate, don’t actually understand anything about business leadership. It’s a trait they share with Hayward –– a conclusion that’s an inescapable inference once you listened to his testimony to Congress. What the talking heads focused on was his tone- deafness and inept handling of the crisis. His tone-deafness isn’t in doubt. As for the inept handling, here’s the fact: Nobody knows what adept handling of this situation might have looked like. Here’s how we know Hayward doesn’t understand business leadership: Asked about his role in creating the mess, he asserted that he had none. “I wasn’t part of the 42 www.iltanet.org Peer to Peer decision-making process,” he said, “I’m not a cement engineer, I’m afraid,” “I’m not a drilling engineer,” and “I’m not an oceanographic scientist.” All of which is both accurate and irrelevant. He was the CEO, paid more than $4.5 million in 2009. He was responsible for how the company runs. The tools he had at his disposal for doing so included: Setting the overall tone, style, and business culture; establishing the goals and priorities for which each executive was responsible; establishing the company’s risk profile (which is to say, what sorts of risk are and aren’t acceptable); and aligning executive compensation with all of the above. And, he is paid to be excellent at organizational listening . . . to know What’s Going On Out There. As an IT leader, so are you. Sure, the size of both your organization and your paycheck are one or two orders of magnitude smaller. All that changes are the difficulty and stakes. The subject matter is the same. So take a minute right now to turn this into a personal checklist. Ask yourself: • What do you do every week to define and implement the tone, style, and business culture you want? • Can you envision serious potential side-effects from the goals and priorities you’ve set for each of your direct reports? • Have you made it clear to everyone in your organization what risks and shortcuts are desirable, which you can live with, and which are only acceptable when practiced by your competitors?

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