Work

with organizations and their leaders

Senior people are, as a rule, efficient. They have to be. They allocate their attention with great discipline, they cut what does not serve, and they are ruthless about their calendars. But there is almost always one place where the efficiency stops — one matter that has been on the list for two years, that gets deferred with excellent reasons, that everyone around them has learned not to raise.

That place is worth understanding, because it is not laziness and it is not avoidance in the ordinary sense. It is where two things a leader rightly wants cannot both be had. The founder who means to hand the company on, and who also intends to remain the one who decides. The chief executive who wants candour from the people below him, and who has built a career on being the person who is right. These are not distortions to be corrected. They are real goods in genuine collision, and a person will spend years in that no man's land rather than choose between them. Everywhere else, they are formidable. Here, time turns out not to be precious at all.

My work begins where the efficiency stops.

It does not begin there in the first meeting. In the first meeting a competent leader will tell me, accurately and in detail, where everyone else is stuck — the board, the successor, the head of the division, the market. What they seldom say is where they themselves have stopped moving. I can often see it by then. But seeing it early is not the same as being able to say it, and a truth delivered before the relationship can carry it is simply a truth that gets dismissed. So the early work is slower than it looks. It is the business of becoming someone to whom the real thing can eventually be said, and then saying it.

The organization is in the same condition as the person, and usually for the same reasons. What a company says about itself and what it actually does are rarely identical, and everyone below the top knows exactly where the gap runs. This is not because organizations lie. It is the nature of the thing. But it means that the people two and three levels down are managing a contradiction they did not create and cannot name, and that the leadership above them cannot see what it is asking of them. I work at both altitudes, because the leader's difficulty and the system's difficulty are usually one difficulty seen from two distances — and because what a leader builds in the world and what they carry inside it move together. The work that attends to only one of them soon stops working.

I have spent twenty-five years at this, with individuals and with groups, and supervising others who do it. What I have learned is that the assignment I am given is rarely the assignment that matters. I was once brought in to a chief executive for a piece of organizational work, and ended up drafting his speeches — going over the words with him, again and again, long past the point where the words were the problem. He had a speechwriter for the grammar. What he did not have was one place where he could think out loud in front of someone, and the speeches turned out to be the only sanctioned room for it. That was the work.

Not everyone who comes is stuck. A good many are doing well and want to do better — to see further into a decision before making it, to read a room they are about to walk into, to have one place where they can think out loud before the thing is decided rather than after it has gone wrong. This is some of the best work there is, and often the most useful. Nothing has to be repaired first; there is simply more range to be had, and the appetite to go looking for it.

What I offer is not a programme, and it does not have a finish line. I stay, I pay attention, and I help people see what is really happening and what it is they most want — so that they lead, and live, with more clarity and steadiness.

There is a question underneath all of it. What is the work you want to shape, and what do you want it to make of you? Most people answer the first and never notice the second is happening anyway.