As Gordon Brown ponders the damage he has done to himself today, as the press surrounds Gillian Duffy for her thoughts and insights, spare a thought for the other party to this mess – spare a thought for Sue.
If you remember Mr Brown’s first reaction was to ask “who” put me in this situation, he pauses as he scans his vast database of a mind and momentarily a name flashes up “Sue I think” he then spits out the word “ridiculous”.
I couldn’t help wondering what Sue must be feeling. From Gordon’s tone, Sue was in big trouble wasn’t she? She was in for a massive dressing down and the placement of a big black flag next to her name on Gordon’s people database. Sue was going to receive the most disapproving of glances and a shake of the head for a few days to come.
If Sue is travelling in the car with Mr Brown today, I wonder what the conversation is about, the weather, the football, tonight’s debate? My bet is that it’s pretty quiet in Gordon’s car.
The truth is that some of us have done a “Gordon” at some time, but all of us have been a “Sue”. Sue simply put the man in charge in touch with reality – “Gillian”. We see it in business every day – often it’s the Finance Director or the Financial Controller who has to deliver the unpalatable truth, puncture the ego. Sue will just have to take what comes her way and continue to do her best. She must not allow this to stop her from delivering the truth and reality to the top man – otherwise she is deceiving him , the people and ultimately failing at her job. It’s just the sort of resilience all of Isosceles’ interim FD’s and part time FD’s have to show to do their job properly.
Mike O’Connell, CEO, Isosceles
Tags: Finance Director, Interim FD, Part time FD
‘Spare a thought for Sue’, or consider the behaviour of her ‘Leader’ and could his reactions been predicted and better still avoided! Whilst Mike is right in stating that it’s often the FD’s role to deliver the truth, strong leadership is borne from providing confidence and the ability the make decisions. Behaviours that can be learnt, providing you can identify them.
We [Crelos] have conducted a behavioural analysis of the party leaders against the Schroder framework and consider how effective or perhaps ineffectively Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Nick Clegg used these behaviours.
The framework has been proved to effectively predict high performance when used by individuals and teams in the increasingly fast paced and complex world of business.
The framework is based around four behavioural clusters each consisting of individual behaviours. For example, the ‘Inspiring’ behaviours consist of communicating effectively, influencing others and building confidence in the future. All three party leaders have demonstrated classic elements of strong Communication. They consistently used such techniques as personal anecdotes, analogies and “rule of three” (a presentation techniques based on evidence that people remember only three things at any one time) to get their messages across.
Now that the polls have closed and it’s time for negotiation, a different skill set is required, ‘Conceptual Agility’ – but if you haven’t demonstrated ‘Building Confidence’ it will be hard to win allies, so spare a thought for Gordon!
For more information about Crelos and how we help people and organisations manage change visit http://www.crelos.com
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