Food for Thought

If I could change just one thing to make a significant difference to business what would it be. There is no contest.

Leadership. Professionally I spend my life among people in Leadership positions – but I meet very few real leaders. It is a critical distinction in my view – the kind of distinction that led the famously tart Sir Thomas Beecham to describe Herbert von Karajan as "a kind of musical Malcolm Sergeant".

But you know, maybe I had just met the wrong people. Our company’s strap line is "The Science of Psychology" meaning that everything we do in underpinned by tried-and-tested methodologies just "facts" or as close as the art/science of psychology will allow to get.

Accordingly and in order to validate (or indeed invalidate) my perception/prejudice that leadership was poor we commissioned an opinion poll from by CCB Research. They interviewed over 1,500 people from every kind of business from SME to Mid-Size to Fortune 500. The one thing the respondents all had in common was "leaders".

The results were astounding. The headline is that only 15% of respondents thought they were remotely well led. You can see some more details of the poll here. The real worry is that most people think it’s o.k! I wish I had a penny for every time I’ve heard that "leaders are born, not made". If you'll believe that then there is truly one born every minute!

But this is serious stuff. It’s been estimated that bad leadership costs this country about £6bn a YEAR. If we said that bad ACCOUNTING was costing this country even £1bn a year there would be an outcry. Heads would roll.

But that’s real money, isn’t it? Well leadership costs money too. It certainly costs money to train them – but not nearly as much as it costs not to.

Ros Taylor