Leadership is not just about sticking to one’s own style. You have to adapt to suit the people you manage.

One of the organisational constructs Henry and I use most effectively in Leon is ’Situational Leadership’. We picked it up from Bain, but Bain I’m sure were inspired by someone else (so if you are the creator of it, write me a postcard). It is a construct that determines what style of leadership you should adopt, given someone’s confidence and competence in a certain task.

When someone is new to a team, or maybe new to being Prime Minister, they will probably be on a bit of a high. New pencil case. New car. New set of staff that stand up straight when you walk into Downing Street and brief you as you march down the corridor (please tell me that’s what it’s like). But the trouble is, you have probably not done that exact job before. You may be fresh from your MBA and starting out in banking. Or a sales director who is now sales director in a slightly new company with a different culture and products and selling cycles to your previous company. Or you may not have actually been Prime Minister before, so you may at first be a bit rubbish at it. Now if you have someone in your team who has high confidence but low competence you have to be DIRECTIVE. “Go and see Janet from accounts and ask for the South Region’s sales figures, and ask her to format it the way she did for last year’s national conference”. “Take this knife and chop these onions like you see in the picture – into cubes. And use the knife with the yellow handle”. This is stage 1.

Stage 2 is where your report realises they may not know as much as they thought. Confidence plummets and the whole thing can get a bit sticky. The MBA hire who has been turned into a demi-god during recruitment realises they have a lot to learn about the reality of the job. The trainee chef realises he or she takes an hour to chop the same amount of onions the head chef can chop in five minutes. This is stage 2, and it’s where the leader needs to change his or her style to COACHING. It’s time to explain how it’s done, demonstrate it, let them have a go, and then review how they have done. Repeat this cycle until cooked.

Stage 3 is when the team member is starting to get a little better at the job and maybe has moderate capability but fluctuating confidence. One minute you think you have mastered driving, then you drive up the wrong side of the dual carriageway by mistake. This is when as a leader you need to be SUPPORTIVE. Take them out for a cup of coffee. A beer. A cake (cf my previous advice on this very important technique).

Eventually, things improve all round, and your team member is both confident and competent in that particular task. Every organisation has some of these people – people who are actually very good at what they do, and very confident with it. In armies, they may be the Sergeant Majors who have to initially carry the new officers. In Government, maybe the Permanent Private Secretaries. Either way, these people can be DELEGATED to. They are in stage four. You can merely say “chop me twenty onions” or “I need you to open the restaurant in Soho next month. Come and tell me when it’s done”.

The key thing is to realise that situational leadership is task-specific. One person will be in stage four for some tasks (maybe financial modelling) but stage one for others (maybe launching a marketing campaign). 

How do we become better leaders? Let's work it out together. Here are my starters for ten.

The rise and performance to date of Cameron and Clegg has inspired me to start a conversation about leadership. I was good at it once. And would like to be again. I cannot promise the definitive guide to leadership, nor an entirely coherent set of arguments. But instead here is a stream of unstructured consciousness for you to digest and perhaps throw back at me:

1. The smallest communication of values can dramatically set a new tone. Speeches are still powerful at doing that. Now we are a few weeks beyond the election, I think I have enough distance from it to say that Brown’s parting speech was good. And that Cameron’s opening speech was good too. Just as Thatcher was remembered for her slightly scary Francis of Assisi speech, I hope Cameron will be remembered for his belief in marrying freedom and responsibility – a marriage that I advocated in my first MT musings.

2. I have some strengths as a leader. And many weaknesses. My strengths: vision, passion, energy, care about the individual. I hope I empower people to fulfil their potential. My weaknesses: the ‘puppy dog’ John Vincent can unexpectedly turn into ‘Rotweiler’ John Vincent and you might not exactly know why. I can over-delegate. I sometimes forget names (although never faces nor what makes you tick). And I can sometimes assume my team is psychic. Oops, these sound like pretty bad weaknesses. I had better work on them.

3. There are of course different types of leader. Here are two: i) the motivating, positive tone-setter. A Ronald Reagan. And ii) the do-it-yourself in-the-weeds workaholic, role-modeller- a Jimmy Carter.

4. Some leaders are good for different contexts. An economist last week at breakfast sold me on the idea of the hedgehog and the fox. A hedgehog, like Churchill, is good at one thing, and amazingly suited to one extreme circumstance. After years of failure (peace had been very boring for Churchill) war gave the big man his chance. When peace came again, the task of getting to grips with all that tedious post-war clean-up wasn’t really his bag, Then there’s the fox. Able to plough through detail and, as Cameron and Hague have been stressing, “able to quietly get on with the job of government”. Roosevelt was a fox. Having to steer a country through the aftermath of an economic collapse and patiently put all the little bits of the jigsaw together.

5. Leadership is not just about defining and sticking to one’s own style. You have to adapt to suit the people you are managing, rather than them adapting to you. (More on this tomorrow, when I’m going to talk about Situational Leadership.)

6. The officers’ mess is very valuable. All leaders need a place to drop their guard, talk to other leaders about their problems (a staff room if you like) and even *** about without losing respect.

7. Leaders need emotionally secure followers. Cameron and Clegg need party members, voters and the media who share the desire for the leaders to be successful, and don't manipulate the situation for their own ends. I hope that the media doesn't get bored of reporting that some very intelligent leaders with good integrity are working well together to knuckle down and diligently try to solve our problems. Because how does that sell papers?

8. Leadership is not just for ‘leaders’. It is incumbent on everybody in a country and company to be a leader: take responsibility; see opportunities; suggest solutions not just point out problems; talk about ‘we’ not ‘they’. I hope that we see a rising tide of everyday people doing great things every day.

9. Good, secure leaders are mirrors as much as beacons. They provide the context for the leader in all of us to shine. In political terms, I hope that the Cam-Clegg leadership allows the Cabinet to shine and flourish too. How great is it to see many like William Hague, who made a play for the big job himself, motivated to serve under Cameron.

10. So as not to be partisan, may I celebrate the integrity of Labour ‘leaders’ like John Reid and David Blunkett, who avoided the flailing-around that some of their fellow leaders failed to avoid. Because they said directly "we lost the election", I respect them. The Milliband "we didn't lose it, it's that no-one won it" double-speak is surely the sort of leadership we must avoid.

That’s my starter for ten. Tell me. Help me. Hold me.

You can either tell someone that you are funny. Or you can make them laugh.

My friend Richard has taught me a phrase that I now use in almost every meeting about branding. Are you ready? "You can either tell someone you are funny. Or you can make them laugh".

Get it? I chuckle every time I see a sign saying: "Come try our world famous lasagne". Do we think it is really world famous? Would they have to tell us it was if it were? Does the host ever say: "Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome on stage...the world famous Pope"?

Kings don't earn respect by telling people to respect them. Brands don't earn love by using adjectives. I passed some giant hoardings outside a luxury London hotel and each one had a different word across the top. One had "Sophisticated". Another "Luxury". Another "Exclusive". "Prestigious". It genuinely upset me (do I need to get over it?) that a place that should be unconsciously and implicitly these things thought that it could BE those things by telling people that they are those things. Still with me?
 
Chanel doesn't say "come try our world famous glamorous and prestigious luxury clothing". Please can we go back to a world where people and brands are intrinsically wonderful from the inside rather than advertised and adjectivised from the outside?