Improve Your Leadership
Leadership hacks to increase your impact and effectiveness.
Hack your leadership and make room for clear and innovative thinking Leadership Hacks is the smart leader’s guide for achieving more in less time. As the evolving business environment leaves many leaders struggling to achieve outcomes against constantly shifting priorities, competitors and deadlines, this book shows you how to sort through the madness and get back to obtaining results. Here, you'll find hacks at a personal, one-on-one and team level, to give you the tips, tricks and advice you need to rise above the daily deluge and make real progress. You'll learn how to:
Leadership Hacks shows you how to hack your day, shift your approach and boost your communication to start leading in a more effective and efficient way.
- identify what distractions slow you down
- fast-track your productivity to do more in less time
- streamline delegation so your people perform faster
- re-route meetings into productive outcomes
- learn the communication and technology shortcuts that get faster results.
Leadership Hacks shows you how to hack your day, shift your approach and boost your communication to start leading in a more effective and efficient way.
Introduction
The leadership dilemma—too much to do in too little time
Are leaders born or are they made? This is an age-old question many academics and researchers have struggled with. It’s a question that has wasted millions of dollars—not to mention the millions of days lost sending sceptical employees to old-school leadership- development programs. CEOs, managing directors, divisional directors, vice-presidents and frontline managers can all repeat the theories that have been crammed down their throats by their HR departments. Many leaders I have worked with shared with me their frustration over the latest complex leadership competency model created to show them how they and their leadership teams are screwing things up — regardless of how their business is performing or how challenging the competitive environment is.
Leaders do not want to be perfect; they want to motivate their staff to do the best job possible in the shortest time possible. They’re looking for practical approaches or techniques that they can use to improve their performance. They don’t have time to attend intensive leadership programs that regurgitate leadership theory from the 1980s or 1990s. Much of what has been written about leadership tends to be overly
complicated and so confusing that you need a PhD to understand it. Many people — including university lecturers — are good at theory.
When I was working as an instructor at a university, I was amazed at how few of the professors had real-life experiences in what they were teaching. Many of them had never been in the ‘real world’ because they had spent their time collecting degrees and completing reviews of other researchers’ articles.
Leadership has changed. In the past, the pace of life and business was very different from today. Leaders used to have time. They had the luxury of spending their evenings and weekends thinking, and recharging their batteries, knowing that the rest of the business world was also on hold until the next business day. They didn’t have competitors leveraging new forms of technology to disrupt traditional markets. Leaders are now playing a different game and some of them aren’t even aware of it! Gone are the days of 5–10-year strategic plans, predictable operations and long-term employee loyalty. These are being replaced by short-horizon strategies, flexible operations that adapt based on the changing competitive landscape, and fighting to attract and keep the top talent. Some leaders are winning, while others are not.
Over the past 25 years I have observed and worked with a range of business leaders in the United States, Asia–Pacific and Europe across corporate industries, the government and the military, as well as frontline managers and small-business owners looking for strategies for improving their performance. Some have created incredible cultures and attained amazing results; others have stumbled. I’ve watched as businesses and governments wasted millions and millions of dollars trying to get their leaders and staff to lift their performance results using engagement surveys, statistical analyses, competency metrics and complex models.
I’m constantly looking for leadership approaches that work and can be used in multiple environments and businesses. So what is the secret formula — the silver bullet — to achieving more as a leader? I don’t think there’s one simple answer to this question. In fact, I often think this is the wrong question to be asking. We should be asking, ‘What are the leaders who are achieving more doing?’ and more importantly, ‘How do they do it?’ That is the purpose of this book. My goal is to share with you the strategies and pathways that actual leaders are using to achieve increased results in less time.
The leadership dilemma is having too much to do in too little time. This challenge is not new to leaders. What is new is the speed with which they have to accomplish things—they need to get many more things done in much less time. They need to ‘hack’ their approach: to find methods and processes they can use to fast-track their approach to thinking, communicating and delegating.
Leadership hacks: a faster approach for a faster world
The amount of information available nowadays for planning, executing and tracking tasks is mind-boggling. It’s difficult to keep up with the speed at which information and business are moving in our technology- driven world. Let’s have a look at just some of the changes that have affected businesses, employees and traditional players. As you read through the scenarios below, consider the difficulties CEOs face when trying to create and execute a traditional business plan in these fast-paced environments.
The business environment has changed ...
Leadership Hacks
owning a single property, hotel room or any of the overheads that come with them. Not bad for a company started in 2007 and now worth $31 billion! This has changed the marketplace, with a 2017 Morgan Stanley report estimating that Airbnb
will take 191 million hotel stays away from traditional hotels. This has changed the game for leaders in the hotel and leisure industries.
Employee dynamics have shifted ...
xvi
flast xvi 21 May 2018 8:47 AM
Introduction
was registering over 200 million queries per day. Now Google processes over 4.4 billion searches every day — or more than 50 000 searches per second. This has massively disrupted traditional print publishers, as well as anyone else who
used to sell information (when was the last time you saw an encyclopedia?). An entire industry gone.
This is just a small glimpse at how things have changed. The tsunami of information and new technology is flowing in 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And, as research shows, it’s getting faster and faster. Leaders need to re-wire and hack their approach to leading their teams, to keep up with this new world.
Gone are the days when leaders had the time to analyse a year’s worth of data and spend six months preparing a five-year strategic plan. The days of slow thinking and slow execution are gone.
So what is a leadership hack?
The word ‘hack’ has changed meaning over time. Initially, the Oxford Dictionary defined the verb ‘hack’ as ‘to cut with rough or heavy blows’. According to Ben Yagoda of The New Yorker magazine, the noun ‘hack’ was first used at MIT in the 1950s to describe the act of adjusting machines (primarily electrical systems) in ways that were not common. This morphed into a sense of working on a tech problem in a unique or creative way. In the 1980s the word ‘hacker’ had a negative connotation, describing computer programmers who illegally gained access to early computer systems. Steven Levy’s book Hackers described the positive and negative activity of these innovators in the field of technology. This promoted the term ‘hacker’ and brought it into more common language.
It wasn’t long before the meaning of ‘hacker’ started to gain more positive connotations. Before the launch of Facebook’s 2012 IPO, Mark Zuckerberg published a manifesto titled ‘The Hacker Way’, which provided a unique insight into the meaning of hacking. In this document he says, ‘In reality, hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done’. He added more around his belief that The Hacker Way is about continuous improvement and finding ways to get things done better and faster—often by moving projects around people who are too comfortable with the status quo and unwilling to change. Given the importance of this approach, Facebook continues to run internal hack competitions to encourage employees to find shortcuts and improvements in their systems. Facebook takes pride in finding shortcuts that can be identified and shared with others so everyone benefits.
xviii
flast xviii 21 May 2018 8:47 AM
Introduction
More recently, the word ‘hack’ morphed even further when technology writer Danny O’Brien coined the term ‘life hack’ to describe how computer programmers were creating shortcuts to make their lives easier. This, combined with the explosion of videos on YouTube, enabled anyone with a smartphone to share their hacks or shortcuts with others who could benefit from them. This has led to the sharing of a plethora of hacks, including life hacks, parent hacks, game hacks, political hacks, happiness hacks and—my personal favourite—a potato hack (which is actually based on a diet from 1849 that focuses on eating mostly potatoes to lose weight!).
Dictionary.com defines a hack as ‘a tip, trick or efficient method for doing or managing something’. It adds the expanded definition ‘to handle or cope with a situation or an assignment adequately and calmly’.
A leadership hack is anything that helps you accomplish more in less time. This can include:
• shortcuts that may not be commonly known • simplified steps that make a task easier to do
Leadership Hacks
As you can see in figure 1, to become the leader of leaders, the ultimate hack involves three main keys: mindset, approach and impact.
Are leaders born or are they made? This is an age-old question many academics and researchers have struggled with. It’s a question that has wasted millions of dollars—not to mention the millions of days lost sending sceptical employees to old-school leadership- development programs. CEOs, managing directors, divisional directors, vice-presidents and frontline managers can all repeat the theories that have been crammed down their throats by their HR departments. Many leaders I have worked with shared with me their frustration over the latest complex leadership competency model created to show them how they and their leadership teams are screwing things up — regardless of how their business is performing or how challenging the competitive environment is.
Leaders do not want to be perfect; they want to motivate their staff to do the best job possible in the shortest time possible. They’re looking for practical approaches or techniques that they can use to improve their performance. They don’t have time to attend intensive leadership programs that regurgitate leadership theory from the 1980s or 1990s. Much of what has been written about leadership tends to be overly
complicated and so confusing that you need a PhD to understand it. Many people — including university lecturers — are good at theory.
When I was working as an instructor at a university, I was amazed at how few of the professors had real-life experiences in what they were teaching. Many of them had never been in the ‘real world’ because they had spent their time collecting degrees and completing reviews of other researchers’ articles.
Leadership has changed. In the past, the pace of life and business was very different from today. Leaders used to have time. They had the luxury of spending their evenings and weekends thinking, and recharging their batteries, knowing that the rest of the business world was also on hold until the next business day. They didn’t have competitors leveraging new forms of technology to disrupt traditional markets. Leaders are now playing a different game and some of them aren’t even aware of it! Gone are the days of 5–10-year strategic plans, predictable operations and long-term employee loyalty. These are being replaced by short-horizon strategies, flexible operations that adapt based on the changing competitive landscape, and fighting to attract and keep the top talent. Some leaders are winning, while others are not.
Over the past 25 years I have observed and worked with a range of business leaders in the United States, Asia–Pacific and Europe across corporate industries, the government and the military, as well as frontline managers and small-business owners looking for strategies for improving their performance. Some have created incredible cultures and attained amazing results; others have stumbled. I’ve watched as businesses and governments wasted millions and millions of dollars trying to get their leaders and staff to lift their performance results using engagement surveys, statistical analyses, competency metrics and complex models.
I’m constantly looking for leadership approaches that work and can be used in multiple environments and businesses. So what is the secret formula — the silver bullet — to achieving more as a leader? I don’t think there’s one simple answer to this question. In fact, I often think this is the wrong question to be asking. We should be asking, ‘What are the leaders who are achieving more doing?’ and more importantly, ‘How do they do it?’ That is the purpose of this book. My goal is to share with you the strategies and pathways that actual leaders are using to achieve increased results in less time.
The leadership dilemma is having too much to do in too little time. This challenge is not new to leaders. What is new is the speed with which they have to accomplish things—they need to get many more things done in much less time. They need to ‘hack’ their approach: to find methods and processes they can use to fast-track their approach to thinking, communicating and delegating.
Leadership hacks: a faster approach for a faster world
The amount of information available nowadays for planning, executing and tracking tasks is mind-boggling. It’s difficult to keep up with the speed at which information and business are moving in our technology- driven world. Let’s have a look at just some of the changes that have affected businesses, employees and traditional players. As you read through the scenarios below, consider the difficulties CEOs face when trying to create and execute a traditional business plan in these fast-paced environments.
The business environment has changed ...
- In 1910 the 10 largest businesses in the world were involved in constructing and selling products large enough for human beings to stand on (cars, aeroplanes and the like). In 2010 the largest businesses were predominantly associated with the creation and sale of invisible, intangible and handheld products.
- Although ride-sharing company Uber was only started in 2010, it’s estimated that today it’s worth $70 billion — and it has very few employees and doesn’t own the vehicles that the drivers use. More importantly, the owners and leaders of traditional taxi companies didn’t see them coming until it was too late.
- Airbnb uses a technology platform that offers accommodation
at over 3 million locations in 65 000 cities in 191 countries — all managed through its user-friendly website, and all without
xv
Leadership Hacks
owning a single property, hotel room or any of the overheads that come with them. Not bad for a company started in 2007 and now worth $31 billion! This has changed the marketplace, with a 2017 Morgan Stanley report estimating that Airbnb
will take 191 million hotel stays away from traditional hotels. This has changed the game for leaders in the hotel and leisure industries.
Employee dynamics have shifted ...
- Once again employees are disillusioned at work, with 87 per cent of employees worldwide either not engaged or actively disengaged at work according to Gallup’s 2017 ‘State of the Global Workforce Report’. To keep this in perspective, this trend has continued since Gallup started its engagement surveys in 1997, showing that leaders continue to struggle with how to motivate and retain their workforce.
- In 2013, Forbes magazine published the results of a survey about who wastes the most time at work. It found that 64 per cent
of employees visit non–work related websites each day. It also reported that more than 60 per cent of these employees admitted to wasting at least one hour per day on these websites — with Facebook contributing to over 50 per cent of this time loss. Even more surprising was the feedback received about the reasons for wasting time, which ranged from not being challenged enough to being unsatisfied or bored at work. - The 2015 Future Leaders Index tells us that the next generation entering the workforce is already showing early signs of burnout with 82 per cent reporting they suffer from one or more physical health issues when they get busy and 76 per cent reporting
one or more mind or emotional health issues when they feel overworked. This is leading to increased amounts of employee stress leave, resulting in millions of dollars in medical support being spent, as well as lost productivity and fewer people available to complete departmental tasks.
Technological advances are disrupting traditional players ...
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flast xvi 21 May 2018 8:47 AM
Introduction
was registering over 200 million queries per day. Now Google processes over 4.4 billion searches every day — or more than 50 000 searches per second. This has massively disrupted traditional print publishers, as well as anyone else who
used to sell information (when was the last time you saw an encyclopedia?). An entire industry gone.
- According to the November 2017 Ericsson Mobility Report,
55 per cent of all traffic on mobile devices is in video format. They estimate that this will increase to 75 per cent by 2023 as
a result of increased consumer demand. How many businesses are ready to move their content and communications to mobile video format in a quick time frame at low cost? - Traditional automotive companies, which have in the past been leaders in transportation, have found themselves behind in the race to innovate, with Tesla proving that electric cars are more responsive and better handling than combustion engines, and they integrate the technology that consumers want, such as hands-free driving and increased safety. This has created a shift in the market that has automotive manufacturers scrambling, with many anticipated to struggle (just look at the value of their stock). According to a 2016 Business Insider article, by 2021,
82 per cent of all new cars built globally will be shipped with connected car technology. - Morgan Stanley’s recent ‘Rise of the Machines’ report analysed the automation of tasks across industries. The results led them to estimate that 45 per cent of workforce positions have at least
a 70 per cent chance of being automated using robotics. This means shifts in business processes, technology platforms and the way staff operate. The report also estimates a cost savings of as much as 30–50 per cent once these computer programs or robots develop more cognitive abilities and perform more complex tasks. Which industries or tasks could this affect? Almost every industry, including data entry, customer service interaction, process improvement and back office tasks in industries such
as manufacturing, IT, finance, insurance, legal, health care, government and utilities/energy. The better question is which industries will it not affect?
This is just a small glimpse at how things have changed. The tsunami of information and new technology is flowing in 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And, as research shows, it’s getting faster and faster. Leaders need to re-wire and hack their approach to leading their teams, to keep up with this new world.
Gone are the days when leaders had the time to analyse a year’s worth of data and spend six months preparing a five-year strategic plan. The days of slow thinking and slow execution are gone.
So what is a leadership hack?
The word ‘hack’ has changed meaning over time. Initially, the Oxford Dictionary defined the verb ‘hack’ as ‘to cut with rough or heavy blows’. According to Ben Yagoda of The New Yorker magazine, the noun ‘hack’ was first used at MIT in the 1950s to describe the act of adjusting machines (primarily electrical systems) in ways that were not common. This morphed into a sense of working on a tech problem in a unique or creative way. In the 1980s the word ‘hacker’ had a negative connotation, describing computer programmers who illegally gained access to early computer systems. Steven Levy’s book Hackers described the positive and negative activity of these innovators in the field of technology. This promoted the term ‘hacker’ and brought it into more common language.
It wasn’t long before the meaning of ‘hacker’ started to gain more positive connotations. Before the launch of Facebook’s 2012 IPO, Mark Zuckerberg published a manifesto titled ‘The Hacker Way’, which provided a unique insight into the meaning of hacking. In this document he says, ‘In reality, hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done’. He added more around his belief that The Hacker Way is about continuous improvement and finding ways to get things done better and faster—often by moving projects around people who are too comfortable with the status quo and unwilling to change. Given the importance of this approach, Facebook continues to run internal hack competitions to encourage employees to find shortcuts and improvements in their systems. Facebook takes pride in finding shortcuts that can be identified and shared with others so everyone benefits.
xviii
flast xviii 21 May 2018 8:47 AM
Introduction
More recently, the word ‘hack’ morphed even further when technology writer Danny O’Brien coined the term ‘life hack’ to describe how computer programmers were creating shortcuts to make their lives easier. This, combined with the explosion of videos on YouTube, enabled anyone with a smartphone to share their hacks or shortcuts with others who could benefit from them. This has led to the sharing of a plethora of hacks, including life hacks, parent hacks, game hacks, political hacks, happiness hacks and—my personal favourite—a potato hack (which is actually based on a diet from 1849 that focuses on eating mostly potatoes to lose weight!).
Dictionary.com defines a hack as ‘a tip, trick or efficient method for doing or managing something’. It adds the expanded definition ‘to handle or cope with a situation or an assignment adequately and calmly’.
A leadership hack is anything that helps you accomplish more in less time. This can include:
• shortcuts that may not be commonly known • simplified steps that make a task easier to do
- fast-track processes that speed things up
- any approach that simplifies and speeds up a task.
Simply put, leadership hacks are about identifying ways leaders can make a difference to the people around them and the tasks they’re confronted with. They are about being a leader who is admired by other leaders because of their ability to work smarter and more efficiently and by inspiring and empowering others.
Critical keys to hacking your leadership
So what does it take to be a leader admired by other leaders? What do incredible leaders do that inspires and motivates others to take action? And by ‘inspire’ I don’t mean getting people to do things because they report to you (and have to because of the organisational chart), but making them want to follow you because of who you are and your leadership approach.
xix
Leadership Hacks
As you can see in figure 1, to become the leader of leaders, the ultimate hack involves three main keys: mindset, approach and impact.
Introduction
The leadership dilemma—too much to do in too little time
Are leaders born or are they made? This is an age-old question many academics and researchers have struggled with. It’s a question that has wasted millions of dollars—not to mention the millions of days lost sending sceptical employees to old-school leadership- development programs. CEOs, managing directors, divisional directors, vice-presidents and frontline managers can all repeat the theories that have been crammed down their throats by their HR departments. Many leaders I have worked with shared with me their frustration over the latest complex leadership competency model created to show them how they and their leadership teams are screwing things up — regardless of how their business is performing or how challenging the competitive environment is.
Leaders do not want to be perfect; they want to motivate their staff to do the best job possible in the shortest time possible. They’re looking for practical approaches or techniques that they can use to improve their performance. They don’t have time to attend intensive leadership programs that regurgitate leadership theory from the 1980s or 1990s. Much of what has been written about leadership tends to be overly
complicated and so confusing that you need a PhD to understand it. Many people — including university lecturers — are good at theory.
When I was working as an instructor at a university, I was amazed at how few of the professors had real-life experiences in what they were teaching. Many of them had never been in the ‘real world’ because they had spent their time collecting degrees and completing reviews of other researchers’ articles.
Leadership has changed. In the past, the pace of life and business was very different from today. Leaders used to have time. They had the luxury of spending their evenings and weekends thinking, and recharging their batteries, knowing that the rest of the business world was also on hold until the next business day. They didn’t have competitors leveraging new forms of technology to disrupt traditional markets. Leaders are now playing a different game and some of them aren’t even aware of it! Gone are the days of 5–10-year strategic plans, predictable operations and long-term employee loyalty. These are being replaced by short-horizon strategies, flexible operations that adapt based on the changing competitive landscape, and fighting to attract and keep the top talent. Some leaders are winning, while others are not.
Over the past 25 years I have observed and worked with a range of business leaders in the United States, Asia–Pacific and Europe across corporate industries, the government and the military, as well as frontline managers and small-business owners looking for strategies for improving their performance. Some have created incredible cultures and attained amazing results; others have stumbled. I’ve watched as businesses and governments wasted millions and millions of dollars trying to get their leaders and staff to lift their performance results using engagement surveys, statistical analyses, competency metrics and complex models.
I’m constantly looking for leadership approaches that work and can be used in multiple environments and businesses. So what is the secret formula — the silver bullet — to achieving more as a leader? I don’t think there’s one simple answer to this question. In fact, I often think this is the wrong question to be asking. We should be asking, ‘What are the leaders who are achieving more doing?’ and more importantly, ‘How do they do it?’ That is the purpose of this book. My goal is to share with you the strategies and pathways that actual leaders are using to achieve increased results in less time.
The leadership dilemma is having too much to do in too little time. This challenge is not new to leaders. What is new is the speed with which they have to accomplish things—they need to get many more things done in much less time. They need to ‘hack’ their approach: to find methods and processes they can use to fast-track their approach to thinking, communicating and delegating.
Leadership hacks: a faster approach for a faster world
The amount of information available nowadays for planning, executing and tracking tasks is mind-boggling. It’s difficult to keep up with the speed at which information and business are moving in our technology- driven world. Let’s have a look at just some of the changes that have affected businesses, employees and traditional players. As you read through the scenarios below, consider the difficulties CEOs face when trying to create and execute a traditional business plan in these fast-paced environments.
The business environment has changed ...
Leadership Hacks
owning a single property, hotel room or any of the overheads that come with them. Not bad for a company started in 2007 and now worth $31 billion! This has changed the marketplace, with a 2017 Morgan Stanley report estimating that Airbnb
will take 191 million hotel stays away from traditional hotels. This has changed the game for leaders in the hotel and leisure industries.
Employee dynamics have shifted ...
xvi
flast xvi 21 May 2018 8:47 AM
Introduction
was registering over 200 million queries per day. Now Google processes over 4.4 billion searches every day — or more than 50 000 searches per second. This has massively disrupted traditional print publishers, as well as anyone else who
used to sell information (when was the last time you saw an encyclopedia?). An entire industry gone.
This is just a small glimpse at how things have changed. The tsunami of information and new technology is flowing in 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And, as research shows, it’s getting faster and faster. Leaders need to re-wire and hack their approach to leading their teams, to keep up with this new world.
Gone are the days when leaders had the time to analyse a year’s worth of data and spend six months preparing a five-year strategic plan. The days of slow thinking and slow execution are gone.
So what is a leadership hack?
The word ‘hack’ has changed meaning over time. Initially, the Oxford Dictionary defined the verb ‘hack’ as ‘to cut with rough or heavy blows’. According to Ben Yagoda of The New Yorker magazine, the noun ‘hack’ was first used at MIT in the 1950s to describe the act of adjusting machines (primarily electrical systems) in ways that were not common. This morphed into a sense of working on a tech problem in a unique or creative way. In the 1980s the word ‘hacker’ had a negative connotation, describing computer programmers who illegally gained access to early computer systems. Steven Levy’s book Hackers described the positive and negative activity of these innovators in the field of technology. This promoted the term ‘hacker’ and brought it into more common language.
It wasn’t long before the meaning of ‘hacker’ started to gain more positive connotations. Before the launch of Facebook’s 2012 IPO, Mark Zuckerberg published a manifesto titled ‘The Hacker Way’, which provided a unique insight into the meaning of hacking. In this document he says, ‘In reality, hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done’. He added more around his belief that The Hacker Way is about continuous improvement and finding ways to get things done better and faster—often by moving projects around people who are too comfortable with the status quo and unwilling to change. Given the importance of this approach, Facebook continues to run internal hack competitions to encourage employees to find shortcuts and improvements in their systems. Facebook takes pride in finding shortcuts that can be identified and shared with others so everyone benefits.
xviii
flast xviii 21 May 2018 8:47 AM
Introduction
More recently, the word ‘hack’ morphed even further when technology writer Danny O’Brien coined the term ‘life hack’ to describe how computer programmers were creating shortcuts to make their lives easier. This, combined with the explosion of videos on YouTube, enabled anyone with a smartphone to share their hacks or shortcuts with others who could benefit from them. This has led to the sharing of a plethora of hacks, including life hacks, parent hacks, game hacks, political hacks, happiness hacks and—my personal favourite—a potato hack (which is actually based on a diet from 1849 that focuses on eating mostly potatoes to lose weight!).
Dictionary.com defines a hack as ‘a tip, trick or efficient method for doing or managing something’. It adds the expanded definition ‘to handle or cope with a situation or an assignment adequately and calmly’.
A leadership hack is anything that helps you accomplish more in less time. This can include:
• shortcuts that may not be commonly known • simplified steps that make a task easier to do
Leadership Hacks
As you can see in figure 1, to become the leader of leaders, the ultimate hack involves three main keys: mindset, approach and impact.
Are leaders born or are they made? This is an age-old question many academics and researchers have struggled with. It’s a question that has wasted millions of dollars—not to mention the millions of days lost sending sceptical employees to old-school leadership- development programs. CEOs, managing directors, divisional directors, vice-presidents and frontline managers can all repeat the theories that have been crammed down their throats by their HR departments. Many leaders I have worked with shared with me their frustration over the latest complex leadership competency model created to show them how they and their leadership teams are screwing things up — regardless of how their business is performing or how challenging the competitive environment is.
Leaders do not want to be perfect; they want to motivate their staff to do the best job possible in the shortest time possible. They’re looking for practical approaches or techniques that they can use to improve their performance. They don’t have time to attend intensive leadership programs that regurgitate leadership theory from the 1980s or 1990s. Much of what has been written about leadership tends to be overly
complicated and so confusing that you need a PhD to understand it. Many people — including university lecturers — are good at theory.
When I was working as an instructor at a university, I was amazed at how few of the professors had real-life experiences in what they were teaching. Many of them had never been in the ‘real world’ because they had spent their time collecting degrees and completing reviews of other researchers’ articles.
Leadership has changed. In the past, the pace of life and business was very different from today. Leaders used to have time. They had the luxury of spending their evenings and weekends thinking, and recharging their batteries, knowing that the rest of the business world was also on hold until the next business day. They didn’t have competitors leveraging new forms of technology to disrupt traditional markets. Leaders are now playing a different game and some of them aren’t even aware of it! Gone are the days of 5–10-year strategic plans, predictable operations and long-term employee loyalty. These are being replaced by short-horizon strategies, flexible operations that adapt based on the changing competitive landscape, and fighting to attract and keep the top talent. Some leaders are winning, while others are not.
Over the past 25 years I have observed and worked with a range of business leaders in the United States, Asia–Pacific and Europe across corporate industries, the government and the military, as well as frontline managers and small-business owners looking for strategies for improving their performance. Some have created incredible cultures and attained amazing results; others have stumbled. I’ve watched as businesses and governments wasted millions and millions of dollars trying to get their leaders and staff to lift their performance results using engagement surveys, statistical analyses, competency metrics and complex models.
I’m constantly looking for leadership approaches that work and can be used in multiple environments and businesses. So what is the secret formula — the silver bullet — to achieving more as a leader? I don’t think there’s one simple answer to this question. In fact, I often think this is the wrong question to be asking. We should be asking, ‘What are the leaders who are achieving more doing?’ and more importantly, ‘How do they do it?’ That is the purpose of this book. My goal is to share with you the strategies and pathways that actual leaders are using to achieve increased results in less time.
The leadership dilemma is having too much to do in too little time. This challenge is not new to leaders. What is new is the speed with which they have to accomplish things—they need to get many more things done in much less time. They need to ‘hack’ their approach: to find methods and processes they can use to fast-track their approach to thinking, communicating and delegating.
Leadership hacks: a faster approach for a faster world
The amount of information available nowadays for planning, executing and tracking tasks is mind-boggling. It’s difficult to keep up with the speed at which information and business are moving in our technology- driven world. Let’s have a look at just some of the changes that have affected businesses, employees and traditional players. As you read through the scenarios below, consider the difficulties CEOs face when trying to create and execute a traditional business plan in these fast-paced environments.
The business environment has changed ...
- In 1910 the 10 largest businesses in the world were involved in constructing and selling products large enough for human beings to stand on (cars, aeroplanes and the like). In 2010 the largest businesses were predominantly associated with the creation and sale of invisible, intangible and handheld products.
- Although ride-sharing company Uber was only started in 2010, it’s estimated that today it’s worth $70 billion — and it has very few employees and doesn’t own the vehicles that the drivers use. More importantly, the owners and leaders of traditional taxi companies didn’t see them coming until it was too late.
- Airbnb uses a technology platform that offers accommodation
at over 3 million locations in 65 000 cities in 191 countries — all managed through its user-friendly website, and all without
xv
Leadership Hacks
owning a single property, hotel room or any of the overheads that come with them. Not bad for a company started in 2007 and now worth $31 billion! This has changed the marketplace, with a 2017 Morgan Stanley report estimating that Airbnb
will take 191 million hotel stays away from traditional hotels. This has changed the game for leaders in the hotel and leisure industries.
Employee dynamics have shifted ...
- Once again employees are disillusioned at work, with 87 per cent of employees worldwide either not engaged or actively disengaged at work according to Gallup’s 2017 ‘State of the Global Workforce Report’. To keep this in perspective, this trend has continued since Gallup started its engagement surveys in 1997, showing that leaders continue to struggle with how to motivate and retain their workforce.
- In 2013, Forbes magazine published the results of a survey about who wastes the most time at work. It found that 64 per cent
of employees visit non–work related websites each day. It also reported that more than 60 per cent of these employees admitted to wasting at least one hour per day on these websites — with Facebook contributing to over 50 per cent of this time loss. Even more surprising was the feedback received about the reasons for wasting time, which ranged from not being challenged enough to being unsatisfied or bored at work. - The 2015 Future Leaders Index tells us that the next generation entering the workforce is already showing early signs of burnout with 82 per cent reporting they suffer from one or more physical health issues when they get busy and 76 per cent reporting
one or more mind or emotional health issues when they feel overworked. This is leading to increased amounts of employee stress leave, resulting in millions of dollars in medical support being spent, as well as lost productivity and fewer people available to complete departmental tasks.
Technological advances are disrupting traditional players ...
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was registering over 200 million queries per day. Now Google processes over 4.4 billion searches every day — or more than 50 000 searches per second. This has massively disrupted traditional print publishers, as well as anyone else who
used to sell information (when was the last time you saw an encyclopedia?). An entire industry gone.
- According to the November 2017 Ericsson Mobility Report,
55 per cent of all traffic on mobile devices is in video format. They estimate that this will increase to 75 per cent by 2023 as
a result of increased consumer demand. How many businesses are ready to move their content and communications to mobile video format in a quick time frame at low cost? - Traditional automotive companies, which have in the past been leaders in transportation, have found themselves behind in the race to innovate, with Tesla proving that electric cars are more responsive and better handling than combustion engines, and they integrate the technology that consumers want, such as hands-free driving and increased safety. This has created a shift in the market that has automotive manufacturers scrambling, with many anticipated to struggle (just look at the value of their stock). According to a 2016 Business Insider article, by 2021,
82 per cent of all new cars built globally will be shipped with connected car technology. - Morgan Stanley’s recent ‘Rise of the Machines’ report analysed the automation of tasks across industries. The results led them to estimate that 45 per cent of workforce positions have at least
a 70 per cent chance of being automated using robotics. This means shifts in business processes, technology platforms and the way staff operate. The report also estimates a cost savings of as much as 30–50 per cent once these computer programs or robots develop more cognitive abilities and perform more complex tasks. Which industries or tasks could this affect? Almost every industry, including data entry, customer service interaction, process improvement and back office tasks in industries such
as manufacturing, IT, finance, insurance, legal, health care, government and utilities/energy. The better question is which industries will it not affect?
This is just a small glimpse at how things have changed. The tsunami of information and new technology is flowing in 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And, as research shows, it’s getting faster and faster. Leaders need to re-wire and hack their approach to leading their teams, to keep up with this new world.
Gone are the days when leaders had the time to analyse a year’s worth of data and spend six months preparing a five-year strategic plan. The days of slow thinking and slow execution are gone.
So what is a leadership hack?
The word ‘hack’ has changed meaning over time. Initially, the Oxford Dictionary defined the verb ‘hack’ as ‘to cut with rough or heavy blows’. According to Ben Yagoda of The New Yorker magazine, the noun ‘hack’ was first used at MIT in the 1950s to describe the act of adjusting machines (primarily electrical systems) in ways that were not common. This morphed into a sense of working on a tech problem in a unique or creative way. In the 1980s the word ‘hacker’ had a negative connotation, describing computer programmers who illegally gained access to early computer systems. Steven Levy’s book Hackers described the positive and negative activity of these innovators in the field of technology. This promoted the term ‘hacker’ and brought it into more common language.
It wasn’t long before the meaning of ‘hacker’ started to gain more positive connotations. Before the launch of Facebook’s 2012 IPO, Mark Zuckerberg published a manifesto titled ‘The Hacker Way’, which provided a unique insight into the meaning of hacking. In this document he says, ‘In reality, hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done’. He added more around his belief that The Hacker Way is about continuous improvement and finding ways to get things done better and faster—often by moving projects around people who are too comfortable with the status quo and unwilling to change. Given the importance of this approach, Facebook continues to run internal hack competitions to encourage employees to find shortcuts and improvements in their systems. Facebook takes pride in finding shortcuts that can be identified and shared with others so everyone benefits.
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More recently, the word ‘hack’ morphed even further when technology writer Danny O’Brien coined the term ‘life hack’ to describe how computer programmers were creating shortcuts to make their lives easier. This, combined with the explosion of videos on YouTube, enabled anyone with a smartphone to share their hacks or shortcuts with others who could benefit from them. This has led to the sharing of a plethora of hacks, including life hacks, parent hacks, game hacks, political hacks, happiness hacks and—my personal favourite—a potato hack (which is actually based on a diet from 1849 that focuses on eating mostly potatoes to lose weight!).
Dictionary.com defines a hack as ‘a tip, trick or efficient method for doing or managing something’. It adds the expanded definition ‘to handle or cope with a situation or an assignment adequately and calmly’.
A leadership hack is anything that helps you accomplish more in less time. This can include:
• shortcuts that may not be commonly known • simplified steps that make a task easier to do
- fast-track processes that speed things up
- any approach that simplifies and speeds up a task.
Simply put, leadership hacks are about identifying ways leaders can make a difference to the people around them and the tasks they’re confronted with. They are about being a leader who is admired by other leaders because of their ability to work smarter and more efficiently and by inspiring and empowering others.
Critical keys to hacking your leadership
So what does it take to be a leader admired by other leaders? What do incredible leaders do that inspires and motivates others to take action? And by ‘inspire’ I don’t mean getting people to do things because they report to you (and have to because of the organisational chart), but making them want to follow you because of who you are and your leadership approach.
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Leadership Hacks
As you can see in figure 1, to become the leader of leaders, the ultimate hack involves three main keys: mindset, approach and impact.
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