STP Leadership Style

Good leadership usually involves the following, which STP wholeheartedly advocates as part of our work:

• Integrity of leadership and management governance.
• An internal team-building approach — this involves lots of things like listening!, understanding goals, strengths & weaknesses, knowing the goals & strategy and where we fit in to it, communications built on trust relationships, acknowledgement & praise of good work.
• Retaining focus on delivery — results do count: we understand deadlines and how to make them.
• Also key to satisfaction are usually cost, quality, ensuring business benefit and business fit, and ease of support after delivery.  It's no good making the delivery date if it's useless.  Good prioritisation requires a firm grasp of the objectives, time and cost restraint.
• We collaborate with all required areas of the client and help the decisions to be efficiently made. A collegiate approach is preferred in organisations that allow for this, and the consultative approach to decision making is often easier for an interim manager to initiate.
• We understand there are times when leadership by example and hands-on leadership are vital to some project teams, and some interim management positions can be adapted to make these opportunities to foster client staff development and address previously unresolved issues.
• Be strong on strategy — this is needed to help everyone understand what's wanted and give them a focus for their efforts.
• Business-IT liaison is vital to educate project managers, development and support teams in the business context of IT systems.  The background to the requirements must be passed on to educate development teams in the business's needs.  For long term efficiency, development groups must be told from the outset of the long-term objectives for new systems, not just the phase I requirements.
• It is then vital to keep open communications and encourage & capture feedback, queries and concerns from the development teams, which should often lead to further clarification with the business and in project documentation.  This step is for all involved parties, not just Business Analysts.

Mottoes of the moment:

• Don't just guess the requirements.  (Analyse them and think about the right questions to ask to check your understanding.)
• For maintenance sake, don't unduly re-invent the code or data, and if it's really right to duplicate, then get a good feed of them from the right department and consider if reconciliations will be needed.
• Staff thought: Most firms find it easy to hide stars from shining, but you get better results by helping people to develop, and by encouraging and praising them.

Old favourites:

Not recommended if you care about team building, but both of these can have their place and are noted in honour of Geoff Doubleday who occasionally felt the need to, err, urge in his own subtle way some of his managers to stop finding problems and focus more on making progress.  His instructions were so well known that they were given in abbreviated form, as all were fully aware of their meaning.  The first was so standard that some of his direct-reports gave him a rubber-stamp with the letters embossed.  The second was reserved for occasions where some unfortunate manager failed to listen carefully enough to the first.  I am please to report that neither was used on me.

Corporate governance

I recently had a letter on an aspect of corporate governance (a subject that seems to be becoming a pet topic) published in the FT, following what I believe to be an outdated view expressed by another reader (a former board member of British Steel), who was asserting that employee representation on boards was important.  I simply disagreed: Letter to the editor…   My letter concluded Atomic Corporations are the future to the development of many types of business.

I would expect this section on governance to be expanded in the future, as I am developing views here through voluntary work as a trustee of a couple of charities and a PCC member, in two cases serving on the finance sub-committee.