Hi, I’m Ian McClean, founder of Flow Group and GreenLine Conversations. This podcast has grown out of the chaos that’s been thrust upon us. And in it, I share the best of 25 years of helping leaders in business organizations deal and cope with change. So, as you’re out there, busy making sense of it all, trying to cope, and repurposing your organisations, I’m hoping that some of this will provide some help, some of the time. I’ll keep it deliberately short, because I know you’re busy. Let’s dive in.
I’m going to borrow from Oscar Wilde for a moment from the phrase that he used to say that work is the scourge of the drinking classes. Well, I’m going to apply that into my situation where the client work has been the scourge of the podcasting classes. In this case, yours truly. So there’s been a long time between drinks and I want to say that the advantage to that is that I’ve been spending more time with clients, therefore more time out in the field observing what’s actually really happening. And the advantage to that is that there are stories that germinate from the experience, not just of the last few months, but also the experience that I’ve gained over the last 30 years of working and dealing with businesses, leaders, leadership, and seeing it in the raw, both the positive and the negative.
So, this is the introduction of a new season of the podcast, which we’re calling Confessions of a Guru, tongue in cheek necessarily. And this is really going to concentrate on themes and characteristics of great leadership that I’ve seen through events that have happened in the boardroom, in the, offsites, in the conversations, in the preparations that demonstrate, in real terms, the leaders who’ve demonstrated the very, very best of what the qualities are that make up good leaders and those who don’t.
So that’s the preamble. And we’re going to dive in with the very, very first of the season conversations or Confessions of a Guru. And let’s start here. The first story goes back a very, very long way to the early, early part of my career. And it concerns a manufacturing facility and the leadership involved with this in the north of County Dublin. And they were about to launch a values program, which was a very new thing at the time, 30 years ago, the idea of companies having values in manufacturing. And they wanted to bring this in and they wanted to launch it. And they invited me to come along to have a conversation about how best to do this.
So I drove to the facility, and I arrived at the security gate, and the security guard directed me to the right hand side of the building, to the public car park, where I drove round to the side, deposited the car, and, as is typical in Ireland, by the time I arrived there and got out of the car, It was teeming with rain. There’d be no sign of the rain, of course, before I left. So I didn’t have an umbrella in the back of the car. So I had to walk and from the car park, there was the manufacturing facility, which was huge and the administration building, which they had newly minted and newly built, which housed all of the support staff and executive teams was on the very, very far side of the manufacturing building.
So I walked. in the rain all the way around three sides of the manufacturing facility until I got to the other side when I was greeted by a brand new facility and a beautiful plush new building. It must have been a quarter of a mile to walk and by now I was pretty wet and there were two things that struck me as soon as I came around the corner of the manufacturing site. The first was some very imposing flagpoles out the front of the building, one of which had the Irish flag, the second of which had the flag of any visiting dignitary, and the third had, in very, very bold capitals, Customer is King.
I was already beginning to feel the hollowness of these words in my soaking state, when I then realized the second thing, just as I was about to enter into the the reception area just latched on to the side of the new administration building. There were four parking spaces, one for the managing director, one for the sales director, one for the finance director, and one for the marketing director. And as I entered into the reception, thoroughly sceptical at this point.
I realized that there were 1, 200 people in the manufacturing facility and a further 200 people in the administration building that were looking at the flag outside that boldly claimed that customer is king and they realized, all of them, that this was simply what Jim McGuinness describes as a bullshit production.
So I had the conversation in the boardroom with the MD and a few representatives of the business, executive. And after that, and one or two further conversations, it became apparent that the say-do gap or the congruence between what they were wanting to declare as their values and how they were behaving and the congruence or incongruence between the two was just too great. So we elected or decided not to continue the partnership or not even to start.
In a previous episode, the episode on building trust in chaos of the podcast, I talk about trust and breaking trust down into three components or the three legs of the stool. One of which is, the component of integrity. We have got to believe that people do as they say, and that they’re true to their word. And surprise, surprise, not everybody’s like that.
So, during this season of Confessions of a Guru, the format will be a story that I’ll relate, just like the one I’ve told you about my manufacturing facility in North Dublin, and a reflection piece at the end to pick out the question for you to reflect on in your role as a leader or your role in life more generally.
So here’s the question for you to reflect on. Where are the areas in your life or in your work where you want or need people to follow your lead?
The second part to the question is, how does your own behaviour and attitude match up to what you expect from others.
Is there a gap between what you say and what you do?
So with that reflection, I’ll leave you.
If you want to get in touch, please connect with me via LinkedIn with any thoughts or ideas you have about this first episode of the new series.
And in the meantime, stay safe, stay sane, stay connected.
