Episode 53- Mastering the Team of Teams Coaching Approach with Professor Peter Hawkins

Welcome to the Centre for Armour Leadership Podcast. Harmure host, Lieutenant Colonel Dean Cannon, heading up the British Army's Centre of Excellence for Leadership. Professor Peter Hawkins is a distinguished figure in the fields of leadership development, executive coaching and systemic team coaching. With a career spanning over four decades, he has made significant contributions to organisational transformation and leadership practices globally. Peter serves as the Emeritus Professor of Leadership at Henley Business School at the University of Reading. He's also chairman of Renewal Associates and a visiting professor at the Universities of Bath and Oxford Brooks. Over the past 45 years, Peter has collaborated with numerous organisations worldwide, co-designing and facilitating major change initiatives and coaching executive teams and boards. His work spans various sectors including commercial enterprises, government departments, healthcare, professional services and non-profits. Professor Hawkins is an honoree president of both the Association of Professional Executive Coaching and Supervision and the Academy of Executive Coaching. He is also a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and has authored several influential books including Leadership Team Coaching, Beauty and Leadership and Coaching and Team of Teams Coaching which is due for release in the summer of 2025. Peter thank you so much for joining us here at the Centre for Family Leadership and welcome to Soundhurst, although as we've just established in our chat beforehand it's actually welcome back because it was about 65 years ago you were last here. Yeah, it's a log gap I have to say but I think I was here with my family visiting my uncle who was on a comment from the Air Force to the Army Leadership Centre. It was fascinating to hear and as we hopefully get a bit of a look around after we've had this chat you'll probably realise that not very much has changed certainly in terms of the infrastructure. You've had a long and distinguished career in the field of leadership and coaching. How did you find your way into that field and what's kept you in it for this long? I think it started in my early career I worked in mental health and I got promoted very quickly and I was running a therapeutic community for people coming out of Broadmore just down the road in Rampton and Mental Hospitals. This was sort of early 70s when lots of the big mental health institutions were being closed down and as I got more promoted I got to realise that many mental health organisations were actually more disturbed than the people they were treating and so it's one of my sons described when he was very young, I became a doctor, not all sick people but sick organisations and I started to look at and it was based on research that actually came out of the Army in the Second World War where they looked at the fact that many people coming out of army in it into hospital, psychiatric hospitals with what we would now call post-traumatic stress disorder but then was called Shell Shock from the First World War. We're all coming from the same army units and they thought this must be to do with those army units being under more pressure than others but the research didn't bear that out. They found some of the ones at the front line had very little instances of post trauma and those in the supply lines, some of them had very high and then they looked a bit closer and realised that the ones that had high instances of breakdown had high instances of people going absent without leave, violent, conflict and they came up with the notion that you could have a healthy unit and if you put into a healthy unit it would bring out your healthiness and if you put into an unhealthy unit in the army it would bring out your unhealthiness. So they started to set up therapeutic communities where what you treated was not the individual but the community and some of the units I ran, 24 patients, six staffs, it was also a training unit for other communities around the world. The next thing I did when I took over was sack the cook and the cleaner, I said we're all able-bodied adults, everything will be done by the community and so those who weren't big out for voluntary work or getting back into work every morning, they would have one of the patients running the cleaning group, one running the cooking group, one running the maintenance and through working on the health of the community you gradually established people's healthy interdependence, does that make sense? That took me on to looking at how did you build organisational learning and healthy organisational cultures in other sorts of organisations and I did a doctorate on that in the early 80s before organisational learning became more fashionable. We here at the Centre for Unleadership are asked often and read a lot luckily for us on leadership, is there one foundational definition of it or is the breadth of context and situations across the whole subject so broad that it wants at least a few different definitions of leadership depend on who's using it and worry? In my last book called Beauty in Leadership in Coaching with this very grand subtitle and the necessary and its role in the transformation of human consciousness, I talk about a new paradigm for coaching and a new paradigm for leadership and there I talk about how historically we've been caught in this Thomas Carl Lyle view of leadership, the great leader, the heroic CEO, the heroic commander, the great man view of leadership and man is what it was for so long and here I argue that if you think about leadership it is always relational, right? You need a leader and you need to follow us and they co-create leadership but actually there's a third element that's often ignored as I say for there to be true leadership you need a leader, followers and a collective purpose that requires collaboration. If you don't have a collective purpose that requires collaboration you don't need leadership. So by locating leadership in that triangle of purpose leader followers it takes it out of seeing leadership as residing inside a person, yes they have an important role to play in it but I would say of the three collective purpose is the most primary. From what I can see you're in a wherever group of leadership professionals who work hard on both the theory and the practical application of actually improving people do you have a preference of one of those modes over the other, the theory or the practice or do you see them as a single entity anyway? I quite liked it the first time I was introduced as a academic, I don't think you should teach things, that you're not practicing and I don't think you should be teaching things or you don't stay up to date with the latest research. So it leads to a very busy life but it means you're going to research, teach, practice and all of those have all of those inform the others. Yeah and that theory and the research moves on continually, the thinking, the science and also as society and the people that we're trying to have an impact on progress but the essence of human nature and interactions between humans, probably the basic demands of good leaders are probably broadly constant. Do you think there is a baseline? Do you think there is a irrevocable small number of things which will always be the demands on leaders? Well yes and no because if I always say it's the purpose that creates partnerships, it's the purpose that creates the need for leadership, it's the purpose that creates teams and that means that as the purpose changes leadership has to adapt to a very different need in context. But yes the ability to as a leader to build a collaborative team that is more in the some of its parts remains constant and we will come onto this but that the need a higher level of leadership to create a team of teams, it's more than the some of the teams is a constant but as the context changes the way we do that needs to change. We've led us nicely onto that point about collaborative leadership, that's one of the distinguishing facets of your work, application of leadership in and by a team collaboratively. Just explain to us the tenets of your thinking on that. Well it was Professor Amy Edmondson who said the team is the primary unit of organisational learning and it was Red Revens the founder of Action Learning who said unless an organisation is learning at least at the speed if not faster than the world around us is changing, it's on the Darwinian road to extinction. So to be part of a healthy organisation you have to be the whole organisation needs to be learning and adapting and just before we came in I was talking to you and your colleague about how across 50 or so countries I've worked in and across all sectors every organisation I meet is having to do more at higher quality with less resource and in response to that challenge many leaders go into trying to drive harder and pedal faster whereas the really smart organisations start to look at how can we work smarter and one of those is to really maximise the untapped synergies that are within the team, between the teams in the case of the army, between the different forces, between the international countries and their forces and more and more the real challenges lie in not in the people or the parts but in the connections. So more and more I've been saying what we need to do is we need to not just develop leaders but develop leadership, not just develop teams or coach individuals but coach connections. So I did some research when I was a salary professor at Henley Business School called Tomorrow's Leadership and the necessary revolution in today's leadership development and we talked organisations across all sectors right around the world. I had research partners working with me in many countries and we came to the conclusion that 90% of what is called leadership development, it's a multi-billion dollar business, isn't leadership development, it's leader and the danger is and I did some research way back the civil service in about 2005 on how come the Labour government under Tony Blair had spent more money on public sector leadership than probably all previous governments put together, you know we had our colleges of school leadership, colleges of police leadership, army leadership, you know the army leadership were their first but many of these colleges and yet by 2005, 2007 all the civil service departments including the MOD in their three-year review it came up we have a weakness in the senior leadership of the department and they said to me so it's why is that we put all this money in and it became pretty obvious where they'd gone wrong right they thought we've got to increase public sector leadership, we'll take individuals, we'll take them out of their context, we'll send them off one by one to civil service college or school leadership college or centrist and that will improve leadership but it didn't, you might have had some better leaders but they would come back and people would say oh they've been on one of those programs you know they'll be back to normal in a couple of months and what they weren't doing is they weren't educating connections, what do I mean by that so very early on I suppose about 35 years ago probably longer now I started to do leadership development programs where we wouldn't do a leadership development program unless we'd worked with the top team and said okay let's start not by who's going on the program but what are the challenges coming over the horizon the future leaders will have to deal with and how do we use those challenges to develop the leadership of tomorrow so we would have the senior people come to the first day of the first workshop and say look this is what we see coming over the horizon these are the challenges we don't have the time to start addressing those and you're the ones are going to have to deal with them in the future and we want you to while you're on this program work together to work us out then what we do is we bring back senior leadership halfway through and we would get them to talk about their leadership journey so there was a kind of personal connection and then over dinner we would get them to rotate around different tables and we would set them the challenge that they had to listen to what the different groups had come up with on their projects and their job was to shift the mindsets to the next level and we'd say to the group of young future leaders your job is to shift the mindsets of the people above you and halfway through the evening we would call a time out we'd take senior leaders off and we'd take the others off and we'd get them to look at not just what they've been talking about but how through the dialogue where they shifting the thinking of themselves and the other groups so that's just one example of how we build developing not just leaders but leadership in terms of you speak about leadership being situational as we would recognise it people need the skills to be able to recognise the situation they're in the people they have in their team and adapt that's has quite a demand for leaders to have the full range of skills and also the ability to recognise which bits of their skills they need to apply according to the situation do you often come across those either individuals or teams who do have that full range of skills or do you think there were gaps everywhere that people are always going to need to fill in in their development well I think the most important skill and often when I've worked with senior executive teams the turning point is when the team leader can articulate some of the collective challenges cannot be solved by any individual function and can then have the humility to say and I is the leader consult any of those by myself and can then ask from their heart the support from everyone in the team that often is the turning point because the day when in it we expect leaders to have the answers word is far too complex but many leaders haven't learned that collective humility to to enroll every team member and I always say you know a great teabetic is one where you generate new thinking it was not in the head of anybody when they came into the room the new thinking is generated out of the relationship the generative dialogue the thinking together right not exchanging what I call pre-cooked thoughts that makes sense and and then you often this is your perhaps hinting the team won't have all the answers so in the next edition of my book I've just started writing we talk a lot about how do you make AI a a collaborative team member not encyclopedia in the corner or a prop or a guru but a true collaborative team member that could contribute to the dialogue but not control it but but also the team needs to do if we look at my take on resilience I say resilience is the ability to tap into previously unrecognized resources so you know a good leader of a team as one who says when the team gets stuck well where else has this been done elsewhere in the army or whereas it's been done in the other forces or whereas it's been done by other international forces or what could we learn from other sectors how can we go and find that so not just step one don't look for the answer inside yourself step two mobilize your team step three mobilize the team of teams that you're connected to trying to identify what level perhaps if that's the right word of leadership individuals have what skills a team has for their leadership or their ability to collaborate measuring leadership is a question I'm asked about really often would would you support a scientific measurement of leadership and leaders or a bit more holistic in how you look at them well that there is a chapter in my book on leadership team coach again in the book that's coming out in June on our team of teams coach and when I look at the whole thing about evaluation whether it's a leadership programs or leaders or coaching or teamwork and in that I have a model which talks about the difference between measuring inputs which is what often happens on leadership programs near the participants tick a box a happy sheet you know how happy were you with the program that's just measuring the input outputs is would be on a leadership development program would be so what new learning a new skills of people taking away outcome would be what difference did that make the team the unit the organization and value creation is who did that create value for and the problem is even if we do it evidence-based we tend to measure what's easy to measure which is inputs and outputs not outcomes in value creation so if you take leadership in the army I think there are ways that we talk about of looking at with senior leaders how they created the ability to achieve more at higher quality with less resource and what's gotten the way of that and so what do they need to learn to deal with those derailers in order to achieve that outcome which creates value not only for the forces but for the taxpayer for for the nation for international benefit I expect quite often over your years of experience you come across or have come across individuals or teams who are probably described themselves as needing an executive leadership power up a big top-up on what it's already a significant amount of experience and leadership skills when actually what they really need is a grounding in basics of self-awareness humility and emotional intelligence do you often find yourself having those conversations with the CEOs and the like who who think they just need a top level brush up I think probably it's neither of those so when we work with a top leadership team we don't work with them on their individual skills that we brush it up we work with them by asking who does your team create value for who do you serve what's the purpose of your organization who are all the stakeholders what is it they appreciate about you today and what are they going to need different over the next three to five years so now we're we're not because because try to approach senior leaders who often have you know high degrees of self-belief and arrogance until the major brush up is not often very successful but if you can work with them to really do an inquiry process with an eye with them not for them but with them on the gap between where the top team is today and where it needs to be future success then if you like we're on not a leader development curriculum but at the curriculum that life is providing we're on the curriculum of necessity this is where we are today this is what the world's requiring we don't know how to get there now we need collective help and and that's partly because I'm trying to help leaders realize that 95% plus of what happens in organizations is not personal but people take it personally it's just that stuff happens and stuff has to be dealt with and most difficult stuff cannot be dealt with by individuals so we need to work together so I like to work from what life is requiring rather than from theory or from persuading people that they ought to do better my inbox would suggest that there's a real hunger from across a huge range of private public and third sector organizations and sports teams for a dose of military leadership delivered in that style or from that perspective why do you think it is that often people look to the military for leadership guidance or experience well I think there's probably at least two what one is I think the army has a much longer history in looking at how to develop leadership and almost any second but I think the other is that the army is often in situations with enormous immediate challenges and those accelerate leadership development you know what one of the one of the things which was side benefit of the Second World War is a lot of young men in their 18s and early 20s were suddenly in positions of quite important leadership at a very young age with extreme challenge and that either breaks you or makes you and I think in many organizations there are some exceptions we don't put young leaders into situations that will accelerate their maturity and the way the army has been very good at so I think that's that's one of the things if you like that you and your colleagues could be helping other organizations think about do you you work all over the world and you've got a huge amount of people work for you all over the world living your ideas do you spend a lot of time tailoring your leadership and coaching programs to fit the cultural situations that they're in because I would imagine that means that some of them can be almost the same content but delivered in a very different style yes we're quite careful at really looking at both the culture of the country and the culture of the organization so one of the most challenging times I had was working with the fruit industry down in South Africa just post post apartheid and the massive political changes going on and you may not know this but the fruit industry is the third largest industry in South Africa two and a half million people economically dependent upon it and mainly dominated by very large white africana farmers mainly staffed and the largest population black fairly uneducated farm workers massive challenge to try and understand how do you turn around that whole fruit industry with all that's going on in the country at a time where if you don't get it right you're going to have mass movement from the rural parts of South Africa to the urban townships and massive unrest so you know it's important stuff and and having to really work out how do I as a as a Englishman who had been assigned up members supporting the ANC in exile go to a africana based industry and build partnership and relationship so I'm trusted by them to help turn around the industry so you know you have to work quite hard at your ability to not just be aware of other cultures but be aware of the culture that you take into the room and I often think my wife has written two books on how do we deal with white awareness and she says traditionally we tried to do cultural awareness by looking through the binoculars at the other rather than looking the mirror out what am I unconsciously carrying into the room and I had to look at you know what what was I carrying into the room and into that what's the history that's coming in it's a given other example I I went to meet a senior member of the pan west indies government he was probably about the age I am now and I was probably 20 years younger and I went and I said hello I'm Peter Hawkins and he just held my hand very strongly he looked to me in the eye and said ah Hawkins interesting name they just looked at me to see my reaction and if I hadn't been aware that of course Hawkins is going right back to the amada with some of the first pirates and slave traders I would not be aware that in that first meeting 400 500 years of history had entered the room and you know now we work as part of international forces as you're very aware of Dean we better know something about the history that's coming into the room so it's a really interesting perspective at that point but look at yourself first before you look at how to match what you're going into do you see or hear common challenges and perspectives about the future is there a number of themes emerging about what people are worried about in leadership coaching development terms for the future yeah there are the the whole range of usual challenges that come up and in the book I mentioned earlier I've written about that you know the poly crises of our time and we did a book on ecologically climate conscious coaching for instance and but in this book on beauty and leadership coaching I talk about the poly crisis of climate change pollution mass migration um growth in mental distress particularly among young people growing in equality in the world about eight or nine major challenges but the poly crisis is that they are all interconnected you cannot solve any one of those without addressing all of them and I think that's what a lot of leadership is struggling with is that you know traditionally you would have an agenda that atomized all the separate challenges and you would address the person on the team who was an expert in that but not only do we need to coach the connections between people but the connections between issues and now I argue in the book that that all those great challenges that we're facing not only are interconnected but they are all symptoms of the fact that we haven't evolved human consciousness at the pace at which we have radically changed the world and whether we're leaders doing leadership development consultants coaches educators I would argue we all have one really important great work to do together and that is how do we evolve human consciousness to deal with the world we have created and it you know we talked about being over 65 years since I last came here the year I was born we're now at a population of 8 billion people more than 8 billion in the world the year I was born do you know what the population was what would you guess two you're not far off 2.4 and I ask very educated audiences around the world and it ranges from one to seven people just don't realize the exponential growth in the human population and I have to say to those who say one well you know I'm not quite that old I'd have had to be born in 1830 but it took a hundred years from 1830 to 1930 to double the population now I've seen it more than treble I live with another 10-15 years it's possible properly with good medicine I'll have seen it quadruple that's never ever happened and that's just one of the massive changes that have happened and and we're facing challenges that that that having great IQ went deal with even as leadership development has developed in my lifetime to say one it's also about EQ things you mentioned cumulative self awareness relational skills even EQ is not enough that's why I argue we need we need EQ which is as a team to walk to the learning edge where nobody has an answer but we know life is requiring one and not just teams but but partnerships and team of teams how do we get the right people around the table and all of us stand there not knowing the answer of course you know one could look at global conflicts try to get people around the table without predetermined answers is a big challenge for the world right now often it said that conflict crises are huge stimulant for change do you think that perhaps this might be yeah so I think in way back one of the first things I wrote was crisis creates the fire in which new learning is forged it's either going to radically accelerate our evolution of consciousness or we will be the the latest species to join the fossil records I think it's it's that extreme at the moment and so there is transformational leadership required another aspect of which you thought and written a lot about what do you think are the facets of transformational leaders can start to make that difference or pull people and teams and cultures together to make that difference or what would you be looking to teach people in order to become more transformational well I think transformational leadership you know we can go back to a green leaf and servant leadership it starts by focusing on not how do I become a transformational leader but what is the transformation that's been required that's coming over the over the horizon and in that at early stages in army leadership learning how do I make my team more than some of its parts how do I partner with other teams how do I go go on further how do I partner with other forces with the MOD with international forces with the population and some of the previous times I've been consulted by bits of the military one of them was just after the Iraq war where they were recognizing that the army has been brilliant it grew capacity to lead you know a small unit to a larger unit to a larger unit but actually what they were struggling with is what do you do with with generals coming back from the intensity of leading with obvious real challenge in front of you in the war in Iraq or in Afghanistan and now not having lots of people report to you now sit behind a desk and having to take wider responsibility but with very little urgency or control to be a transformational leader is how do you work in that context in how do you you know I always say to people that don't try and sell leadership development don't try and sell systemic team coaching your job is to go and and awaken the right learning hunger help people have the right sleepless night don't don't sell them solutions awaken the need and I think that's at the heart of a transformational leadership and and so I talk about you have to be able to think future back and outside in who do we create value for what are the changing needs of all those people how is that going to change over the next three to five years that's that's radically stakeholder centric leadership we're we're not you know I'm not here to be liked by my team I'm here to discover how the team co-create more value with and for all the stakeholders do you find yourself going back to organizations repeatedly not necessarily because I have a big churn of people but because making these sorts of changes stick is quite different difficult you you spoke about people changing after their individual leadership development or programs they sort of go back then to how they were previously do you think there's a requirement for a constant drum beat and update or reinforcement of programs both for individuals and for teams to really bet it in again yes and no team because not normally when I work with an organization through a whole transformational period I'll probably be working with them for about three years not not full-time but the journey will be at least three years you can't you can't you can't do a major organizational transformation and culture change and unless you're you're on an integrated journey but yes I sometimes do get caught back in but it's often because not that hasn't stuck but but now they're into a new transition to my new book on a team of teams coaching I talk about how do you how do you understand the transition you're going through and how do you turn the opportunity of the transition into a transformation and and so I you know there's some organizations I've been back to a couple more than once but that's because you know they're now into a new life cycle right of passage like it used that metaphor do you do you ever get everyone saying it's just not it's not working whatever you did or said for us before whatever reason it didn't work last time we need to take a different approach or you have to diagnose why it didn't work I often get people when we're on the journey saying but this isn't working I said great let's work out because you you only discover what's going to work and not work when you're in the midst of the change process so let's look at what's getting stuck let's look at what needs to shift you know I was working with a university and they developed this all whole new strategy and they I went into work with the top team and they said but you know it's just people aren't getting it and they the head of the university said yes we've got to communicate harder you know we need to get out there in you know because the employee reviews says they don't understand the strategy we have to all get out there and convince them and I said I wouldn't do that right now is it what do you mean I said let's explore how could you communicate less and engage more because the more you try and convince them the more the more you're just going to come up against a brick wall how do you turn them from audience that you have to convince into partners that you need the help of so so whenever whenever we hit you know I always say resistance isn't a problem resistance is energy that we haven't yet found a way of connecting with so let's ask the question how do we get the resistors what's the need behind the resistance and how do we partner with that reminds me of a part of our fellowship model where we talk about how you move cynics across the model to become exemplary followers and it was actually probably the shortest question I've thought of for a podcast for you which is follow a ship discuss well actually I think we probably and I haven't written this anywhere yet so thank you need to move on from the word follow a ship to because to have an effective see I talk about the difference between a leadership team and a team of leaders very important distinction in most organizations you have the only point of integration at the CEO then you have your people direct to your sales directly your finance director all managing their functions but the only person taking responsibility for the for the whole be more than some of the parts as the CEO and and in today's world that is an impossible job so a leadership team is where all the followers are not standing behind the leader following their footstep but are shoulder to shoulder alongside them so perhaps you should talk about a leader and the leaders collaborators yeah the leaders partners rather than followers which still has the feeling that yes boss we're right behind you we have a lot alongside you we have a lot of discussions about the word and the connotations of it we think whatever the word is and it is easy to get bogged down in the word that actually the the point might match what you're saying which is you need to give people an active role and following well can be an active role whatever title you give it you have a job to do in the leadership followership space rather than just following and I think there's that's the distinction we would make and it goes back to what I said earlier team which is you need to start by saying look this is what life's requiring this these are the challenges and I need your help and the help I need is and there is help I'm gonna need which is beyond what I'll know that we're going to have to discover together so don't just don't just help me with what I'm asking for. Systems thinking is something I just like to touch on because it's another of these fascinating concepts you've thought and written a lot about and it isn't something which is in common parlance for us can you elaborate on what you mean by systems thinking and how leaders can apply that thinking to overcome the sort of complex challenges and create long-term success that we need. Wow how long have we got? Well first of all I now writing a lot about systemic awareness and I talk about four aspects of its systemic perception systemic thinking systemic doing and systemic being because a lot of what's been written about in terms of systems thinking so how do we see all the dependencies of things has been very much about how do we comprehend that with our kind of left hemisphere neocortex but I would suggest that to have real systemic awareness you need to be using not just your left hemisphere but your right hemisphere which is much better at pattern recognition the whole of your limbic and the malian brain your body mind your heart brain your gut brain which would just come in more and more about what's often called intuition is a catch all but we're knowing far more about the ability to be sensitive to what's going on in the room be sensitive to how what's going on the room is reflecting what's going on in the systems that we are all part of and in teaching that you see people quite quickly get that you individually never make a decision because that decision is is interdependently created by all the systems that you're part of your team you're organised your division your organisation the country the culture the nation the environment the planet but what people don't realise is that all the systems you're part of are also part of you so as I try and point out to coaches when a leader walks into the room it's you're never coaching an individual their team dynamic arrives inside them their organizational culture arrives inside them the culture that they grew up in as I say you can leave your family because your family never leaves you as I know you know I now look in the shaving mirror and think what's my father doing my shaving mirror and in the way I some of my gestures and yeah so this notion of of two-way nesting so it's very important when we look at conflict in organisations because as I kind of indicated earlier 95% of conflict is not personal because when you're dealing with the team the the HR manager comes in carrying all the needs of the employees the sales director carrying the needs of the customers the finance director the needs of the investors the production the you know the needs of the output so they're all carrying different stakeholder pressures that makes sense and if you know if you're trying to deal with Putin and Zelensky they're not just carrying enormous, enormous stakeholder pressures and international pressures they're carrying seven generations of history so so systemic thinking is where you can be sensitive on all those dimensions and it's if you're like the opposite of atomising thinking when we try and break everything down to simple problems that we can solve with our left brain your cortex mission command is a phrase which the army bases a lot of its command philosophy on notably slightly different from leadership but a central part to it what I would imagine is recognised in civilian speakers intent-based leadership have you done any work or seen successful organisations switch to a intent-based leadership model mission command model that we would recognise I have a slightly different take on it which is in in the model I developed on the five disciplines of high value creating teams in all sectors including the military and our new model on the five disciplines of team of teams we start from the word purpose and and why purpose guys but I spend years helping people to develop their their missions and I realised we were starting in the wrong direction because it was you know what what do we want to achieve I know it's slightly different in the military I start from purpose which is always outside in in future back who do we create value for what what are those people going to need different so in the military you've got you will have created value for the taxpayer as well as the whole population of this country as well as government as well as international peace as well as the ecology and those are conflicting needs and so yes I think you'd use the word or I would use the word mission but because it's got such historical baggage of colonialisation, vangelism, warfare I would use once we've got our purpose yes we've now got to really define that down to something which is our key objectives and priorities which actually hold all those different conflicting stakeholder needs synergistically we have to translate the purpose that we discover through all our stakeholders into something that is a more connected collective measurable objectives organizational KPIs team keep performance indicators and and those we have to be constantly that's part of our key team charter our dashboard that helps us steer the ship. The COVID-19 pandemic was a crisis that forced change across many sectors one of the most obvious was the switch to a remote style of working which demands a remote style of leadership in a way that the human connections and interactions are reduced if not removed altogether. Do you have any top tips for people who now have to lead in that fashion or expected to be able to leave both face to face and more remotely? Yeah I'll check that it's still on our website at Renewal Associates. I read a whole thing in the midst of the pandemic because actually I started with a big some Chinese companies before COVID arrived here about how they were dealing with lockdown very early 2020 and we just covered a few things you know very practically you need shorter meetings if you're working virtually but more frequent because of the isolation of people working remotely you need to deal with the fact that you don't have the conversation at the at the coffee machine so you need to be able to make personal intimate contact now how to do that across virtual video conferencing how do you make that how do you create that sense of intimacy and we care about each other so you know we've talked about how do you how do you start meetings with check-ins so you get everyone's voice in the room unless you get everyone's voice in the room and then I discovered well actually rather than go around the room because people don't tune in until it's then the next person to speak you you are somebody to start and you get them to choose who they pass to so you're warming up the relationships not just the people we did develop lots of these getting people to reject adjust their video conferencing so you can see them from the way start it's an enormous difference in terms of reading body language yeah post you and that sort of if you can see someone's heart in their hands the level of connection changes and yeah often you see people from the the nose and the ceiling um the ability of the convener maybe the team leader may not be to be able to to to bring different people in at any moment so we're all there all the time we're not reading emails because those visual cues in the room aren't they yeah saying hey Charlie I think you know you you may have something really good to add to that from your experience you know when I when I do a virtual team meeting people are alert and on it all the time but that takes some training I think technology more widely is going to play a positive role in leaders and teams learning either their development or even in actually executing leadership you mentioned AI earlier could is it going to enhance or degrade all the place leaders in some places well what one one of the people I think is with the brightest people around him I'm Ian McGill Christ who's on a lot on brain science and says the left hemisphere of the neo cortex is a fantastic servant but an appalling master I would say the same about AI AI only replicates the bit of of what we do with our left hemisphere which is store knowledge problem solve atomistic and I say AI it can be a great servant as an appalling master so it should be liberating us to to focus on the other parts of our intelligences but at the moment we're allowing it to train us to be more like AI that makes sense so what I remember is you know we know now that AI will be able to listen to a team meeting and not only tell you what you could do to make that meeting more efficient right through the way it's it can observe and monitor but it also now is able to read emotions and tell you what emotions are getting in the way of the team dynamic that's incredible but don't ask it to then coach the team using that data there's a lovely conversation one my colleagues had you know I think we have to learn how to dialogue with AI and she asked it about work you know how come you can read all these emotions in AI said we have to understand I personally don't have any emotions but I have been trained and and it's amazing actually AI is is more humble unless attached to its answers than any of us because it doesn't have an ego but we need to learn how to work with it and partner with it not let it sort of get lazy with it your published work is extensive the the book you've got coming up is team of teams what's new and different and what can people look forward to in that yeah it's called team of teams coaching it's written with my colleague Dr Catherine Carr who's based at Vancouver Island in Canada and it's really taking you know General McChrystal as you know and you've had him on the podcast did a lot to realize that in the Iraq war and just after it when he was left managing all these national forces best trained best equipped forces probably ever assembled but that they they were losing the peace in Iraq you know more people died post the war than in the war and they were been outmanoored by small cells of terrorists and and he realized that the military did but a fantastic teamwork but often people were incredibly boundary and tribal within their teams and how did you build partnership between teams and how do you coach connections between team and that's what the new book deals with because if you really want to really be more effective at organizational transformation you're not going to do it by sending individuals off to leadership development or have lots of coaching of every leader right it won't do it you won't do it just by having every team have a team coach what we've been doing with a number of organizations now is is having training internal team coaches and external and have them work with the teams but coaching them on their connections not just inside the teams between the teams both vertically and horizontally and let me just do a little wager with you Dean when people when you hear people complaining about their division and the army how many of them own about either the team above the team belief the team upstream or the team downstream everyone right even if you were in that team previously they will suddenly somehow we'll be comedians and don't get the context they don't understand us well I'm nagging off of you a very simple four step process for me at the heart of team a team's coach and somebody says to me oh I've got a real problem right with the the team above me and they're always making more demands and they don't understand us first step is I always play it back changing the word problem to challenge I hear you've got a challenge your relationship with the team above you second is I always locate the challenge not in them or the team above but in the connection so I say if I listen carefully I would be saying I hear you have a challenge you haven't yet found a way of asking for help from the team above you or getting them to understand the reality that you are in you see what I've done there just a very simple reframe problem to challenge right we've stopped it being blame now is a challenge that that we are not the victims of but we are partner within the third step she's even harder is to see that that challenge is the next generous generous lesson that life has sent you we all sign up at the school of life right but we don't get to choose the curriculum but most of us spend our lives complaining about the curriculum so how do we see oh that's interesting I've got a new challenge there's no such thing as a difficult boss or an impossible team member right or a terrible supplier or team next down the line it's just a connection we haven't yet got right so that makes sense and and just doing that you know just I'll give you the opportunity the next few weeks every time someone uses a word problem play it back as a challenge and practically catering the challenge in a connection and that's very much at the heart of some of the philosophy behind how we take what general more crystal and others have done about how do you develop the team of teams which is more than some of the teams and how do you operationalize that how do you actually make that work and how do you get that team coaching and team development to really enable more collective organizational transformation and to team across boundaries so we do go on to you know how do you how depending on what develops you know how do all the the what's it to the partnership of the willing it cares Dharma talks about how are they going to be more than some of their parts who are the people or the organizations perhaps that you look to for your impersonal leadership example development what keeps you energized about the subjects whether people you've seen have just been genuinely excellent at it and you admire well in the book we before we started writing the book we again we did a bit of global research and we looked at kind of 70 organizations cross sectors cross countries around the world public sector private sector not for profit um enormous range big one small ones and I would say none of them would I say are you know the perfect exemplar what we've tried to do is to take the best of the best and what would if we if we took that from there and that from there what what would that look like and so in the book we we have a kind of wheel of best practice and uh looking at all these you know I think we need to really learn much faster across boundaries of organizations across sectors across countries and um it's part of that what we're trying to do is to is to not the danger in holding anyone out people will tell you all the things wrong with that organization uh we you know if you put anyone on a pedestal you're you're inviting people to come away and kick away the pedestal and even in the short time between us recording this and uh it going out there there could be something which completely changes changes the whole thing we mentioned earlier you keep your hand in on the practical side of leadership with your work colleagues but you've also got a team that help you look after your bit of land and your few animals at home do you find yourself learning and adapting still from those interactions or is life at home in the woods with the animals your refuge away from work or to perhaps some of your best ideas and thinking happen at those points yeah I I don't make the distinction the um you know I have I have sheep in the winter and I have cuttle on a two-year cycle not not just for the sake of having cut I have that because you need that in order to preserve and develop wild flower meadows you need that to improve the ecology yeah and then we did a whole woodland project involving a thousand children planting our trees and we've now made that uh that woodland twinned with three times the size of Ecuadorian rainforest to try and make an ecological project whereby kids can walk through our woodland I've learned about the ecology but then do a video walk through Ecuadorian rainforest because just learning facts about ecology is it going to create a shift in human consciousness any direct experience only real engagement so so if you like I'm constantly trying to learn what what's the land requiring as a steward so it's the same principle and and and as a you know I've shared a number of small companies and uh pretty for the last 20 years I've always done my chairman's report on what value have we received from our investors or funders our employees our customers our suppliers and partner organizations communities where we operate provide all the hospitals roads garbage collection and the more than human world of the ecology and what added value have we given back because whatever sector we're in I think unless we are co-creating beneficial value for all six of those stakeholder group were not a beneficial sustainable organization so I do try and you know learn from and practice which is again back full cycle to the benefits of being a a a academic rather than a theorist finally then looking back at your own leadership journey is there a key piece of advice or insight that you would give a young Peter if you were starting out on the journey all over again let me answer that sideways and say I've just written the forward for a book on um parent ship family is team written by a colleague of mine in America and in the forward I I tell the story of how I stopped several years ago asking young children what do you want to be when you grow up because I think it condemns them to disappointment because they all want to be by the Taylor Swift or Messi or you know some celebrity and and it just feeds celebrityism I if they're seven or eight I ask what do you love doing what are you passionate about what makes your heart sing and if they're teenagers 13 onwards I've got 14-age grandchildren from one almost their fifth one I say where do you make the best contribution to your class to your school to your sports team to to your family to your home so if you like I'm trying to my advice is stop seeing individual problems stop seeing individuals and start seeing connectedness so fantastic message to finish on Peter wonderful conversation I think you've given all of the listeners lots of things not need to think about but probably to go away and work out how they can better improve those connections collaborate better and just think about these things in a in a broader perspective and in a bit more detail as well at the same time so thank you so much for coming in and sharing that with us it's been a pleasure and I just hope it helps other people have as much fun you know I'm still working at 74 because I still enjoy all the work I do and every week I try to leave with more energy than I started it so thank you for helping me get to this week with more energy than I started it you're welcome. Peter spoke about how he has focused his work on the treatment of leadership communities and teams rather than individuals especially through the medium of coaching them he spoke about how leaders and followers co-creator leadership and emphasised how it must be entwined with the most important factor a collective purpose he highlighted how leaders leadership and its development must adapt to meet that purpose as it evolves and that we need to learn and adapt at the speed of the change of the world for fear of otherwise being left behind he also noted the interconnectedness of the poly crises and hence how solutions that encompass the links between such issues are critical. Peter's advice was to undertake a collaborative approach to leadership and spoke of the requirement for collective humility to identify what leadership and organisational challenges are he was clear there is a distinction between the development of leaders and of leadership as a discipline itself and encourage us to measure value outcomes rather than inputs and outputs as we seek to improve both. Shaping leadership development in the correct cultural context through historical and self awareness also featured in Peter's advice and he championed a Wii Q approach ahead of one founded solely in EQ and IQ. Ultimately he realised on showcasing and developing clear and healthy connections as the basis for meeting leadership challenges. The views you've heard here are those of the participants, they do not represent the official view of the Centre for Army Leadership, the British Army or the UK Government. If you've enjoyed this episode of the podcast then please share it with colleagues and friends and add your thoughts to the bait on social media. You may also enjoy how other podcast channel the Human Advantage which explores the more tactical experiences of leadership and it's available wherever you got this podcast from. From web information on British Army leadership or to get in touch with the team, search for the Centre for Army Leadership website or find us on all your main social media platforms.