Peter Roehrig and Mark McKergow led an online webinar for SFiO about applying the ‘User’s Guide to the Future’ (from Mark’s book Host) as a coaching tool. The webinar is now available online, and is packed with useful ideas.

Mark explains the concept and framework of the Users’ Guide, which helps people to take huge ideas and quickly bring them into focus as coherent small actions.  Peter has added a couple of very useful elements to the framework to make it even more useful as a coaching too.  Peter demonstrates this by coaching one of the webinar participants. We then hear feedback from the coachee, and there is a discussion.  This is a valuable resource for any coach working with people who want to translate ideas into focused action.

I was delighted to meet Turn The Ship Around author L. David Marquet last week in Edinburgh.  David was in town to speak about his new book Leadership Is Language: The hidden power of what you say and what you don’t (an excellent read, by the way), in which he goes into detail about the concept of ‘power gradient’. 

Power gradient, as David writes, is how much more authority or power does a person higher in the hierarchy feel like they have compared to someone lower in the hierarchy. A steep power gradient is where the senior person ‘bosses’ folk around, speaks a lot, marks themselves as different, doesn’t listen much, and encourages people to do what they are told and shut up.  A flatter power gradient, by contrast, has the senior encouraging others to speak up, listening more, reducing the differences and engaging with their people.  Steep power gradients are vestiges of the Industrial Age where thinking was separated from doing, and cultures of control and comply ruled the day.

There are many examples in Marquet’s book of how steep power gradients are suboptimal, ineffective and even downright dangerous in today’s world.  Some of these are in operational settings such as airplane cockpits or ships bridges.  Others (close to home here!) are about corporate settings – Marquet writes entertainingly about Fred ‘The Shred’ Goodwin, under whose rule the Royal Bank of Scotland collapsed – huge offices, thicker carpets, security guards preventing access to the Executive Suite (also known as the ‘Torture Chamber’… The UK Government bailed the bank out to the tune of £45bn, and Goodwin (as I have discussed here) infuriated all concerned by ignoring the norms of host/guest relations and keeping his huge payoff and pension.

Marquet is quite clear that he is not advocating zero power gradient – that would lead to confusion, ambiguity and uncertainty about responsibilities.  However, flattening the power gradient is a key piece of engaging your people and building shared commitment. It’s up to the senior person /leader to do this, as it’s very difficult for your team to initiate such moves (particularly if you’re not looking!).

One effect of embracing a Host Leadership style is that power gradients are flatter. Whereas the hero boss is looking for one-way communication (“Do this! Yes, sir.”), a host leader is seeking to look after their team as well as taking responsibility for them.  Three very practical ways you can make flatter power gradients are:

• Step back and invite contributions from your team members. In meetings, in briefings, in one-on-one chats, take time to be quiet and let them say what’s important.
• Ask what they need – to do their jobs, to improve their work, to connect with customers and colleagues better.  (You might not like the answers – but at least everyone will be better informed.)
• Co-participate! Take time at the sharp end occasionally – you’ll see how things are, how it’s working and what are the challenges faced by your people from day to day. 

What other ways are there you can flatten the power gradient?

Dr Mark McKergow is the co-author of Host: Six New Roles Of Engagement for teams, organisations, communities and movements (Solutions Books, 2014).  He speaks, writes and teaches about post-heroic leadership development and solution-focused organisational change. http://hostleadership.com  

Ronnie Scott (photo credit Freddie Warren)

As some of our readers will know, Host author Mark McKergow is a keen semi-pro (occasionally!) jazz saxophonist.  When he was writing Host, Mark was looking for great examples of host leaders in different contexts. One of those was Ronnie Scott – saxophonist, club founder and manager, and general leading light of British jazz between the 1950s and the 1990s. Here’s the section from the Host book about him (from the chapter on the Initiator role, page 92):

Hosting around the world: Keeping going for British jazz at
Ronnie Scott’s
Ronnie Scott was a British tenor saxophonist bewitched by modern jazz. In the 1940s, he had worked his passage on the liners to New York to see the giants of bebop perform in the clubs around 52nd Street, and came back filled with a desire to have something similar in London – a place where young adventurous UK musicians could perform their edgy music without being booed off by unhappy diners, and where the best American stars could perform to a sympathetic audience.

He finally raised £1000 with his colleague Peter King and opened in the basement of 39 Gerrard Street, Soho in 1959. The club was a success, and attracted the musicians and audiences that Scott had envisaged (though they had to fight a union ban on visiting Americans to make it happen). A generation of British players grew up around the scene, with Zoot Sims, Sonny Rollins, Bill Evans and many more taking up residencies. Rollins liked the atmosphere of the club so much that he asked to be locked in overnight while he worked on the music for the 1966 film Alfie, starring Michael Caine.

During the 1960s, the club moved to bigger premises in Frith Street, where it remains to this day. Despite being in perpetual financial trouble, Scott and King managed, by hook or by crook, to keep going. Scott died in 1999, but his name and spirit live on – the club still runs late-night sessions of the kind that inspired him in New York. Ronnie Scott was a good tenor saxophonist, but is remembered throughout the jazz world as a brave and persistent Initiator who managed to adjust, keep going and maintain a special place for British musicians.

Today is the 60th birthday of Ronnie Scotts! The club has produced this excellent little video narrated by Stephen Fry about Ronnie and what he ‘initiated’.  Check it out!

We at Host Leadership are very excited that the fourth international Host Leadership Gathering will be held in Vienna, Austria next year from 13-15 May 2020. I am sometimes asked why we style these events ‘gatherings’ and not ‘conferences’. This might be a good moment to share some thoughts about why this is an important distinction for a host leader.

What’s a conference for? Well, to confer, I guess. The etymology of conference shows it coming from the Latin word conferre, which means “to bring together; deliberate, talk over”. It seems to me that In the modern world conferences have become more and more talky, programmed and pre-organised. A series of speakers (often with too much Powerpoint and too little audience engagement) parade their thoughts with little time for questions, discussion or emerging topics and issues. In face, the term ‘unconference’ has been coined to promote events which value the latter engagement over the formal inputs.

The word gathering, however, comes from the Old English word gaderung, meaning “an assembly of people, act of coming together”. This is already much less talky than a conference. Firstly, to the English speaking ear at least, there is a distinction between old English-derived words and Latin-derived words. The former are earthier and more homely, the latter are higher-register and ‘fancier’. Secondly, the purpose of a gathering IS the coming-together – for all sorts of reasons, not just talking.

A ‘clan gathering’ is a term in Scotland (where I now live) for events which the ancient Scottish clans organise from time to time. These take place perhaps every few years and attract people from around the world to a varied programme of events – including dancing, music, food, social events, walks, parades, religious services, reconciliation meetings with other clans (really!), discussions, connections and re-connections and, yes, perhaps a formal Clan Society meeting. The purpose of these events is much more than simply talk – it is about meeting others with shared connection in community, about re-establishing relationships, about taking stock, about re-connecting with traditions (and perhaps forging new traditions as well).

I hope that Host Leadership Gathering will continue to be more like gatherings than conferences. Yes, of course we will have speakers and talking – but every event so far has had a social element as well, included in the programme rather than as an add-on. We started with at the first SOLWorld conferences in Bristol in 2002 and 2003 – a conference dinner for all, included in the ticket price, where we could all sit down together and eat. From 2003 we also had a cabaret, with entertainment by the people and for the people. I am still surprised by the number of events to which I go these days which seem to think that a series of speeches is a satisfactory way to bring people together.

So, a gathering is about being together, sharing, doing things that build connections, with as much joining in (co-participating) as possible. Sounds familiar? Host a gathering for your community, and see what difference it makes.