Where I learnt about leadership

So I’ve spent a bit of time doing the line management thing and have therefore had the Official Corporate Training, which like any Official Corporate Training happens somewhat after you’ve started doing it1). But there are other places I’ve picked up things too.

Lesson ye first

In my copious free time I enjoy hillwalking2. My wife and I had the great idea that we’d climb Helvellyn via Striding Edge. Now one of the things I Do Not Do is “heights”, but by dint of willpower and holding on to the mountain with my teeth I made it along Striding Edge to where it broadens out (a bit) and then there’s a bit of a scramble up to the summit.

But at the base of that scramble, where the route was a little unclear, there was a bunch of people milling about unsure where to go. I was similarly unsure where to go, but I knew that whatever I was going to do I was not going to stay where I was. So I went straight up.

And the folks milling about, unsure what to do, followed.

I think, in the Official Corporate Training, this is described as “clearly communicating a team North Star”.

Lesson ye second

So I have dogs, and have therefore spent a bit of time working with them. Specifically, I have a Doberman and a working line spaniel. Neither is an “easy” breed. Spaniels are highly scent-driven, built to find, flush, and retrieve game, and really want to do that. Dobermans were originally bred for personal protection, are highly vigilant and easily distracted. So how do you work with either breed?

The best tool for dog training is “positive reinforcement” — if the animal does something good, clearly mark the moment and give the dog a reward. The theory (and pretty much the practice) goes that the good behavior will therefore be amplified. “Positive punishment” — doing unpleasant things to dogs who offer unwanted behaviours — is also a thing3. What you do and how you do it has to be dog-specific — that which one dog finds acceptable reward can wildly overexcite the other, that which is reasonable “positive punishment” for one (e.g. a stern “uh-uh”) can be too harsh for the other4.

But that’s not the whole trick. You don’t wait for the finished behaviour to show up and then shower it with praise. You decide what you want to get to, think through the approximations on the way, and reward the dog for getting closer.

So I was therefore somewhat startled when the Official Corporate People Development Training introduced exactly the same ideas, minus the bits on deciding on a target and purposefully building towards it. I have never given any of my team a dried sprat, but I will admit to always giving them problems one size bigger than the last one they solved.

Their retrieves are still lousy, though.

  1. 1″Hi, you’re now a line manager, we’ll send you on the Various Training Courses in a couple of months.“
  2. 2Opportunities to do it in East Anglia are for some reason a little bit limited, but back in my youth I lived in the frozen North.
  3. 3 There are also “negative reinforcement” and “negative punishment”, which are more complex. Oh, and the words “positive”, “negative”, “reinforcement”, and “punishment” are technical terms that do not mean what you think they do.
  4. 4On a related note, I was once chatting with a Very Senior Leader who had the human-equivalent version of this: telling a Brit “nice job” is about the same as getting wildly overexcited at an American. I still think she under-egged it: she could probably have gone as far as “not bad”.