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I would like to thank the members of the Farquharson Institute of Public Affairs for having the vision to ask for the creation of a practical leadership book: particular appreciation is given to Frank Phipps, QC, O. J., Ken Jones, C.D. J.P., Dr. Oliver Jones, O. J., David Buckley and Petius Chang. It is our vision to make available a book on practical leadership at a reasonable cost for leaders around the world.

The book is dedicated to the life of Ken Jones, who passed in June, 2015. He was a visionary who blazed a trail of optimism behind him. Because he undertook the role of editor, his intellectual verve and élan remain in this book.

The Biblical book of Proverbs tells us: “Where there is no vision the people perish”. It is a maxim widely quoted with the general understanding that although there may be a “better land” with promises of higher moral and material standards, if “we as a people” cannot conceive it we will not achieve it. To varying degrees, individuals will have their personal visions of grandeur; and work successfully toward their goals. However, is a community, of whatever size and type – home, village or nation -- likely to realize visions without first having good leadership? That is the question!

There is abundant evidence that a community’s vision is of little value if there is no leader to share it, articulate its message and co-ordinate the required action. Marcus Garvey, one of the outstanding leaders of the Twentieth Century, shared the vision and aspirations of a people suffering both shackle and mental enslavement for centuries. The obvious disadvantages remained a source of irritation among scattered millions; subjugated and lacking the power of a united voice. And then a leader came in the person of Garvey. He articulated the situation and recorded these thoughts:-

“I read of the conditions in America. I read Up from Slavery by Booker T. Washington; and then my doom -- if I may call it so -- of being a race leader dawned upon me in London after I had traveled through almost half of Europe. I asked: where is the black man’s government? Where is his King and his kingdom? Where is his President, his country and his ambassador; his army, his navy, his men of big affairs? I could not find them, and then I declared, I will help to make them…My brain was a fire. There was a world of thought to conquer. I had to start ere it became too late and the work be not done.”

Garvey went on to lead a movement that inspired millions living on every continent and willing to follow his lead although never seeing him in person and never directly hearing his voice.

Many years later, Martin Luther King, another Black leader, gave voice and vitality to the vision of Afro-Americans and others who longed for and murmured about racial equality. In his immortalized words he called the vision a dream:- “I have a dream that one day…sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.” This was not just his dream, but also that of a people pining for “a better land”; and hungry for leadership.

When the British Empire was threatened with destruction by the Nazi forces of Germany, the people all knew that the danger had to be faced with one accord; and their vision of triumph over evil was given substance by Winston Churchill. He encapsulated the vision of the people in his first statement to the House of Commons: “I beg to move that this House welcomes the formation of a Government representing the united and inflexible resolve of the nation to prosecute the war with Germany to a victorious conclusion.” He ended the speech by saying; “At this time I feel entitled to claim the aid of all, and I say, “Come then, let us go forward together with our united strength.”

Churchill’s style reflected the democratic form of leadership, contrasted with that of his opponent Adolph Hitler, who formulated his own vision and enforced leadership. The German leader in his book Mein Kampf stated: “The strength of a party lies in the disciplined obedience of the members to follow their leadership. The decisive factors are leadership and discipline. When troops battle one another, the victorious one will be that which is blindly obedient to the Superior Leader.”

So, there is positive leadership and leadership that can go awry no matter the vision. This speaks to the urgent need to examine and understand the implications of sound leadership. In this book, Dr. Angela Ramsay, a superb leadership coach, analyzes the subject in-depth and shows how to identify good leaders at all levels of society. She provides instructive material, not only to enable a better understanding but also to help realize how urgent is the need for sound leadership.

It would seem logical that effective self-leadership precedes the effective leadership of others, but this logic is often discarded in the eagerness to teach us how to lead others. Because strong self-leadership skills prepare us to lead others successfully, Part 1 of this book is devoted to creating masterpieces of ourselves. Though occasional references are made to family and friendship roles, Part 1 is tilted toward the skills required for a successful career.

Quality of leadership has a tremendous impact on the performance of followers, affirmed by hundreds of research studies conducted around the world.¹ As any number of studies attest, leaders need a lot of training in order to successfully lead today.² Leadership is much more subtle than described by popular theories.³ Ideally, leaders should be flexible and have nuanced social skills. They should tolerate complexities.⁴

Indeed, complexities will always be a feature of leadership but we need to reduce the quantum of needless complexities. Just being cynical or naive incurs a backload of complexities. Part 2 of this book addresses these concerns and more.

Though the aim of Part 2 is to provide useful information to leaders in private and public organizations, much of the information is also designed to be useful to anyone else who guides others. Teachers, from the pre-primary to the adult education levels, have a particularly powerful impact on the thinking of future adults. Social workers are the power-brokers of harmony. Teachers and social workers should read all of Part 2.

The Farquharson Institute of Public Affairs is of the view that successful leadership is a capacity vital to those persons affecting the livelihoods of large numbers of people, including but not limited to the leaders in the public and private sector. The strongest onus is on elected officials to provide sound leadership, as it is the quality of this leadership that has the most impact on the quality of life of citizens. To this end, Part 3 provides a short discussion on national governance. Part 3, like Parts I and 2, is intended to stimulate thought rather than be a comprehensive treatise on leadership or provide all of the answers.

Good leadership in this book is defined as inspiring oneself and others by continually developing four major “talents”: competence, astuteness, resilience and integrity. It is proposed that the Competent, Astute, Resilient person with Integrity is sufficiently talented to be Brilliant: to form the anagram CARIB. Separation of the talents allows for easier organization of leadership information, but of course any kind of delineation of characteristics in leadership is artificial, as all traits are integrated. For example, resilience is a form of astuteness when we do not allow rock-hard circumstances to sink our heads in the quicksand. Becoming competent, especially in a position where our performance can affect hundreds, thousands or millions of people, is also a matter of integrity. The proper treatment of each of these areas require a series of books, and I have selected cogent items that I feel are of interest to leaders, based on my experience in working with leaders at all levels.

I have been a leader in both stimulating and trying circumstances. I have been involved in leadership development for decades and in three continents, with a particular interest in the execution of projects. Within the last several years, I served as the consultant chief environmental health and safety officer for a company to lay the foundation for others to continue in this area. Under my watch, the environmental health initiative at the company received the first Gold Award for Voluntary Compliance for Occupational Safety from the Ministry of Labour, and another company within the Group also received several awards.⁵ I have also received an award for outstanding teaching:⁶ in addition, for five consecutive years my students presented me with plaques for excellent teaching.

Presenting testimonials can however mask one’s failures. Once I asked a set of twenty two students if they wanted to hear of a career success or a career failure involving leadership. All but one was more interested in hearing about a failure. A failure means you’re human. Excellent “failure” experiences have helped me to become more empathetic to persons who work with particularly challenging individuals or circumstances. With these experiences in mind, this book is written with the attitude that the author is imperfect. The book is hopefully a process whereby both the author and the readers continue to grow in the role of leadership.

Whether you’re twenty or ninety, Part 1 reminds you to use the best cards that life has given you, among them, the four “talents” needed for great self leadership. Though many suggestions are offered, it is recommended that you change or improve one small thing at a time, and celebrate each success.

In Part 1, you will observe the emphasis on self awareness, the most essential self-regulatory ability, which distinguishes the above-average person from the average person. Gaining greater self-awareness is liberating – you’re not just logging up the years, but compiling wisdom. And you can remake, reframe and 0build your strengths at any stage of your life, in the spirit of George Dawson, who learned to read at age 98.⁷

“It takes less time to do things right than to explain why you did it wrong.” -- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Competence is the shining foundation upon which astuteness, resilience and integrity work best. I have heard it argued that a professional can have integrity without being competent. That’s true, but the home owner who discovers cracks in his newly built walls would rather that the builder had known the correct formula of cement to water, than the builder having the integrity to admit “I messed up, because I didn’t know the formula.”

It makes for a good feeling when you’re competent. Your professional value is bolstered on account of your credibility. You know the importance of keeping abreast of new information in your field, and you know you’re good at what you’re doing.

Excellence is a more attractive sounding term than competence, but competence is what you want in your heart surgeon. Excellence, as used today, can emphasize characteristics such as acumen, generosity and the ability to build a good image – rather than actual competence.

There are few terms subject to so many misconceptions as competence; and I believe that this misunderstanding impairs the way we work. You hear “I’m talented in this field so I’m competent.” Talent is insufficient to attain competence, which is the subject of many studies;⁸ talent eases the journey to toward competence, if the necessary work is done. Nor are certifications automatic indicators of competence. Actually, in the past, many organizations were run with sterling efficiency by people without tertiary education qualifications.

Rather than offer a definition of competence, I provide the three steps that realize competence. If we desire competence, we parent ourselves effectively – hence the acronym DAD for desire, apprenticeship and discipline.

The desire to become competent is the first step. Desire is about wanting to feel the pride that arrives when a great job is done. Desire prompts us to find self-development opportunities, which constitutes a self-appointed apprenticeship if no formal guidance system exists in the organization.

Apprenticeship involves a blend of strategies that is just right for you: it could be becoming a member of an association of forward-looking individuals in your profession, scouring the web for particular information, asking questions of experts, seeking mentors, and so on. I see myself as an apprentice for life – so I continually remind myself that I don’t know it all. Apprenticeship helps us to develop or sharpen the best practice skill sets for a particular job. A good definition for “best practice” is: those protocols, procedures and steps that research has shown to produce optimum results in a particular professional field. When jobs have heavy social interaction components, best-practices include superior interpersonal skills.

Experience can help us to use best-practices in non-ideal circumstances. On the other hand, experience can just be a log of years during which best practices are absent: perhaps the biggest misconception about competence is that it is automatically associated with work experience – fortunately, this has been debunked by a series of research investigations.⁹ A case in point - a colleague provided evidence to me that her child’s teacher was unprepared to teach, even with over twenty years experience under her belt. My take on it was that the teacher’s long experience could have led to greater competence by leaps and bounds, if she had been initially placed in a school that strongly emphasized competence in teaching - which is also a strong emphasis on discipline.

Discipline is self-mastery. It means that you are not enslaved by tedium, temptation or timidity. Research suggests that when discipline is absent, weak results are evident in every endeavour.¹⁰ Being disciplined produces happiness: studies confirm that adults and teenagers are happier, healthier and more successful when they enjoy the trait of self-discipline.¹¹

Teachers, uninspiring textbooks and large class sizes are often blamed for youth underachievement in America. Martin Seligman, a celebrated psychologist, believes that the blame should be squarely placed on the lack of self discipline that leads to underachievement. It is the ability of the disciplined students to make choices that require them to let go of short term pleasure for gain in the longer term. Observed for over a year, the highly self-disciplined eighth graders demonstrated greater competence than the ones who were not highly disciplined. The disciplined youngsters:

Earned higher grade point averages

Had higher achievement test scores

Were more likely to get into a selective high school

Spent more time on their homework and started it earlier in the day

Were absent less often

Watched less television¹²

With disciplined effort, mistakes still occur. Great pianists such as Horowitz fumbled keys and quickly rolled them back into sounds of spectacular dreams. The most successful producers and directors experience movie-flops. A word occasionally used as a synonym for failure is incompetent, which goes beyond “not competent” and connotes stupidity and recklessness. Few people embody those traits. We also do not know all of the circumstances that lead to a mistake or failure. It is also instructive that colleagues often cover for each other when mistakes are made, so that the mistake-maker is often not identified,¹³ and the “incompetence” ascribed to an innocent party. Also, competence gets burned out in chronic high stressed families, organizations and communities. Healthy environments fatten competence.

If a person is naturally disciplined, his habits do not alter radically when he feels demotivated. All of us experience that occasional tad of tedium, the yawning hole in our motivation when confronted daily by a dull project or task. Tedium occurs when the golden frame put around a project has lost its luster. You can’t be bothered to polish anything right now. If we realize that these thoughts are natural, we won’t feel so badly. And if we don’t feel so badly, we’re less likely to be conquered by tedium, because feeling badly and giving-up are intimate friends.

If the tad of tedium is just about a tendency to procrastinate, time is being wasted. Procrastination – blowing time away with a bassoon - is different from reflection, the time needed to cogitate on the continuing appropriateness of your strategy. If the tedium is due to procrastination, perceive it as a weed in your garden you have the power to dig up, and congratulate yourself for putting sinews in your resolve. Every thinking, functional adult has the ability to break tedium assertively. It may be adjusting the mind or improving on the quality of food and sleep required to strengthen one’s body, because tedium is built into weakened bodies.

Even if you’re strong in physicality and mentality, unbridled tedium may arrive after the first few failures. The story of Thomas Edison reportedly failing hundreds of times before inventing the incandescent light bulb is well known. At the same time, no one wants to keep returning to a dead end. Maybe the project is not working because the initial plan was faulty or an unforeseen threat came into play. Some things work, others bomb. Flexibility is vital at this point. Anyone can be held hostage by tenacity, and every achievement-oriented person knows that some things are not likely to work. Before quitting though, solicit advice from at least one wise individual, who could discern if you are too stressed to make a serious decision, or review the blocks to determine if they can be vanquished in time.

Sometimes the blocks remain. A manager I knew was wrapped so tight in tedium that he did the mandatory continuing education points for his profession with just enough effort to meet the requirements. I asked him if someone offered him a lot more money to do the job well – well, would he take the bait and throw himself wholeheartedly in his work. He said “I’d love the salary and would do the job better, but still wouldn’t like the job itself. It’s not my thing.”

Polls conducted in the US and the UK suggest that the majority of workers do not like their jobs. In the US, men are more likely than women to dislike their jobs; even if they earn the same salaries.¹⁴ It is also difficult to do a job well when a boss or organization is actively disliked, which speaks to the importance of sound team leadership, discussed in Part 2. Like my acquaintance who said “it’s not my thing”, disliking the career itself also has a lot to do with disengagement.¹⁵ We sometimes make career choices based on status or income potential over and above any other factor. It is instructive that an online questionnaire of 24,000 American doctors across 25 specialties indicated that 54% would not choose medicine as a career again.¹⁶

You do not automatically shed matted tedium because a job is status-filled. And it’s hard to quit in a tight job market. But you can start the journey towards making a career switch to avoid a chronic attack of untreatable tedium. Switching careers almost always involves additional training, but just starting that process will nudge you out of that career stalemate. You are then more likely to experience less dissatisfaction on the job, and thus more likely to be competent. Happily, an increasing number of persons are making career switches, even at midlife.

Planning fleshes out the path of a vision. People blessed with sharp memories don’t need to write down their career trajectories, they retain details in their heads, and execute their plans with precision. The vast majority of us are best served with a written formal plan, making changes to the plan when appropriate. But most of the goals I see are far too ambitious for the thin time frames allotted to them. The people who can do marvellous things quickly are few and far between. Plan for small steps, and for tiny steps if the small steps are unachievable. Do not try to perfect the plan all at once, in fact, it can done as roughly as the one below.

Scenario: You have noticed the growing number and variety of advertised jobs asking for fluency in Spanish. Even though your present job does require you to speak Spanish, you want to be more attractive to the job market. You learned Spanish in high school, but that was 15 years ago, and you have forgotten virtually everything.

Plan: I want to learn to complete the final level of an advanced Spanish programme within three months. By that time I should have passed Advanced Spanish Level 3 of my audio programme, getting a 97% pass average on the prescribed tests. Then I will hire an individual whose mother tongue is Spanish and hold hour-long conversations with him/her five days per week.

This goal is vulnerable to an attack of tedium, especially if you have a demanding job, two kids, a spouse and a sick mother who has just moved in to live with you. Most people overestimate what they can do in six months and underestimate what they can do within five years. You think about that and come up with a more realistic plan:

Adjusted Plan: I want to complete the final level of an Intermediate Spanish Programme within 10 months, getting a 90-95% pass on the prescribed tests.

Don’t worry too much at this stage about getting it all absolutely right – the plan can always be refined. In the refining process, ask several questions of yourself from time to time. Examples are: