10th Anniversary Dinner Panel Discussion Transcript |  10th Anniversary Dinner Panel Discussion Transcript 10th Anniversary Dinner 14th September 2005, Banqueting House, Whitehall
Panel Discussion Transcript The Right Honourable Lord Woolf, former Lord Chief Justice
Baroness Symons, non-Executive Director, British Airways
Mr Stephen Green, Group Chief Executive, HSBC Holdings plc
General The Lord Guthrie, former Chief of Defence Staff
Interviewed by: Mr Martyn Lewis, Trustee of The Windsor Leadership Trust
NOTE: Colour of text denotes person speaking below
The full transcript is also available to download in PDF format at the bottom of this page
________________________
Mr Chairman, Your Royal Highness, my Lords, Ladies and Gentlemen. It’s now my pleasure to introduce to you, Mr Martyn Lewis, who is a broadcaster, a journalist, a businessman and a trustee of the Windsor Leadership Trust who will now handle the remaining part of the programme. Martyn.
Richard, thank you very much indeed. Ladies and gentlemen. [APPLAUSE]. We have an extremely distinguished panel for you this evening. You would expect nothing less given the nature of the occasion. And these are all people who have demonstrated considerable leadership in their fields. Their fields represent the military, the corporate world, the legal world, and the world of politics and trade unions. And between them I hope we will have, over - in fact I know that over the next twenty minutes or so we’re going to have a very interesting discussion about leadership.
Allow me to introduce first of all the Lord Chief Justice, for I think another two and a half weeks. Lord Wolfe. Harry Woolf. [APPLAUSE]
And someone who has had tremendous experience in the trade union sector. She has run a trade union, she has then moved into politics, into the - I suppose she was still in politics and she was running a trade union but she moved into the, what you might call the proper world of politics and had two ministerial posts in the Labour government and was Deputy Leader of the House of Lords. She is now a director of British Airways, Baroness Symons, Liz Symons. [APPLAUSE]
The man who runs the world’s local bank, HSBC, which has if I, I think I’m right 9,800 branches in 77 countries, making it the biggest bank certainly in Europe and I think the second biggest bank in the world. Stephen Green. [APPLAUSE]
And someone who spent virtually his entire life in the military world. He rose to be Chief of the General Staff and is still to this very day, although he’s retired from being Chief of the General Staff, he is to this very day Colonel Commandant of the SAS so we’d all better be on our marks tonight! He is now a director of Rothschild the Merchant Bank, Lord Guthrie. [APPLAUSE]
I would like to start by asking each of our panellists what is their definition of leadership. Their particular definition of leadership. Harry Woolf.
Well I’m ready to be legalistic. Surprisingly. I don’t think you can give a definition of leadership because I think that what is required in different situations is so dramatically different, if you’re going to provide leadership. So I think you’ve got to define the situation and then respond to that situation. And I think that what we’ve heard tonight supports that. We’ve heard different variations of the qualities of leadership, not least from Her Royal Highness. So I’m going to cheat. …
But no general principle that runs through everything?
Well I, what I think, I do think there is a general principle, I think you’ve got to be able to recognise what the situation requires. And then provide that in the particular situation you find yourself. And there is certainly qualities that you need. Like - and I can draw attention to the qualities, but I can’t define leadership because I don’t think there is a general definition which is possible.
Right, well we’ll move on to the qualities later. Liz Symons, can you find a definition of leadership?
Well far be it for me to disagree with the Lord Chief Justice and indeed the Princess Royal who I think both have said that it is very difficult to define leadership. But I - I guess if you had to think about the really great leaders, and some of them haven’t been very good people, let’s be clear about that. I was very interested in the remarks we had about integrity and the plain dealing and honesty. But if you think about some of the great leaders of history, I suppose you would say that they had a vision about where they wanted to take a country or an organisation or an army, whatever it happened to be. And they have the ability to inspire. So I would say it was those things, above everything else.
Now that doesn’t take into account whether or not those visions are good or bad visions. Some of them have been truly appalling visions but they’ve had the ability to lead, to inspire others to follow them in what they wanted to do.
And to inspire everyone? Or just the 60% that we’re told are inspired. [LAUGHTER]
Ah well I think we come on then to the challenges of leadership today which I think are really quite different if I may say to my friend James Burnell-Nugent. I mean they’re a bit different from the time of Nelson because I think there are some other problems that we have with leadership today.
Sure. We’ll move on to that in a moment. Stephen, your definition of leadership.
I’m a little bit on Lord Woolf’s side and the Princess Royal’s side. I think there is a secret at the heart of it that’s very difficult to pin down. Having said that though, I think you - I think it’s quite useful in a corporate context to think of leadership as something which isn’t simply done by those at the top or the centre of the organisation. My particular company employs 250,000 people. I think all 250,000 of those have leadership responsibilities. And what I mean by that is the responsibility for influence, influence that’s exercised purposefully and with some sense of direction and consistent direction one might add. That isn’t the same as charisma, it isn’t the same as being the great commander in the trenches, it isn’t - it can be very hum-drum. And yet leadership which is about influencing other people with a sense of purpose and a sense of direction I think is to the heart of what makes a successful group of people too.
And that leadership at any level? So leaders can be identified way down in an organisation?
In some sense or other, I think everybody has a capacity and a responsibility for leadership in, at least in the sense that they will be with people whom they can influence for good or for ill.
Charles Guthrie, from the military point of view, what is leadership?
Well I think that I agree with everybody that leadership is extremely difficult. You cannot generalise about it. The kind of leadership you need as the Chief of defence staff looking after, having responsibility for the navy, the army and the air force, is completely different from the kind of leadership you need when you’re commanding a four man SAS patrol in the jungle. And if you actually use the kind of methods I did to command, in Rothschild how I did in the jungle it would not be successful! [LAUGHTER] See, you really must not generalise….
Well there may be some in Rothschilds who disagree with that. [LAUGHTER]
Well, I mean this is a debate. I think some would probably benefit.
I thought it was just a different jungle.
Well it’s a - you can say that Rothschilds is at war every day, whereas the army is occasionally at war. [LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE.] But what you have - it’s a different sort of leadership really because what you have to remember in the services, there is a difference between leadership I think and management. You also have to think that you are there in the army for when times are really, really difficult. You can jog along with administration and things in peace time. But our whole raison d’être is when things are incredibly dangerous, when you’re cold, when you’re hungry, when you’re uncomfortable and you’re asked to do things that no right-minded person would want to do. Like charge up a hill and risk being shot. And that is a raison d’être, because if unless the services can do that, when it really matters, what’s the point of the services?
But what are the key things that you would need as a leader to persuade people to charge up the hill into the teeth of enemy fire.
Well, to be prepared to do it yourself I think is one of them. I think…
And as a general……
I think, I think you need courage which, so Her Royal Highness meant, which our Chairman meant. I think courage to take difficult decisions, really difficult decisions which are unpopular decisions. To communicate, to give people a really simple message and keep on giving it to them so they know exactly where they stand, and to trust them. Like James Burnell-Nugent said. And you’ve got to study other leaders. Why is Osama Bin Laden leading millions of people now - I’ve got ideas why he is doing it and I couldn’t agree more with Liz Symons that many leaders are scoundrels. Famous people, heroes, Francis Drake was a scoundrel! [LAUGHTER] He was a pillager, looter, terrorist. He spent three hours a day on his knees my Lord Bishop, but it didn’t stop him slave trading, attacking innocent civilians and murdering people. And he was a hero. He was an absolutely great leader force.
So hang on! Is there some general criteria here. Can you [LAUGHTER] actually say, that all great leaders have to have some kind of a flaw within them?
Well I - I - we all do have flaws for goodness sake.
Sure, I mean everybody does. But…..
Anyway, I mean the hardest thing I ever led was a four man patrol in the jungle. Because I did it for six months and I had no secrets from these people. They saw me and all my weaknesses. And I couldn’t hide from them for six months. And that was extremely difficult. We got on each other’s nerves. In a funny kind of way, I think leading four men is harder than leading 400,000.
Liz, have you had any four men patrols in the trade union movement that you would like to recall! [LAUGHTER]
Not that I’m going to tell you about Martyn, no! …
But tell me, tell me what the leadership qualities are in the trade union movement when you are you know you are battling quite often against the government or arguing with the government, and then you move across to the other side and as - you’re kind of poacher and gamekeeper as it were. When you maybe have to deal with trade unionists or people who will be coming from that, you know from that perspective.
I think, for me it was always starting with listening. Always. Starting with listening is what the grievance was. Whether as a trade union official, listening to members, going and talking to government ministers, whatever it happened to be. And then subsequently as a minister I had a great deal to do with consulate services. Some of which are really heartbreaking and terrible cases. And you’re faced with people who are in the most extreme human difficulty. And taking the time to be quiet, to listen, not to know everything before you’re told it, no matter how great the briefing has been. And to let people express what they want to tell you in the first place.
I really do think the challenges of leadership in the twenty first century are getting more difficult now because people have different expectations there. They expect to have information, whether you’re in corporate life, whether you’re in the armed forces, whether you’re in the legal profession. People expect you to part with information, they want consultation, they want to be part of it and they want to be part of the decision taking process as well, and then you’ve got the real pressure now, more than ever before on accountability which I think in - again for all of us from the various professions represented here on the stage is an enormously important and developing part of how leadership is growing in the twenty first century. And I think in all those respects these are things that do distinguish today’s leaders from yesterday’s leaders in what is expected.
Discussion Panel PART II
Stephen, picking that up, in the corporate sector, do you find that you have to respond to events much more quickly than you used to? Or have you found a way within the corporate sector of being able to sit back, at least hold things for 48 hours while you consider them before you come up with a properly thought through answer.
It depends. I mean there are many circumstances when you are rocked back on your heels and you’ve got to respond instantaneously of course. And there are other aspects of decision making which are much more planned and orchestrated and long-term. You are trying to achieve a certain sort of change, you’re trying for example to introduce more professional approaches to certain aspects of career development within the bank, to name something very technical. This is a long-term process, this is not forty eight hour sort of stuff. You’re laying the ground work for changes that’ll show through over, over years. It is important in leadership terms to be, to have a clear sense of what you’re doing and to see that through and to not worry about the short-term budgetary considerations, necessarily. Not to be looking quarter by quarter for results as an aside, or perhaps, just to widen it out a little, one of the issues that modern corporates, public corporations face is the dilemma between the pressure from the external environment to produce quarterly results, quarterly improvements, quarterly profit growth. And at the same time the responsibility that you have to grow the business over a longer period of time to provide sustainable performance over a long period of time.
And the leadership is about balancing those things, because you can’t ignore those external pressures, but also recognising what your real responsibility is.
Yes, and have you ever been forced to deviate from a - your medium term or long-term plan by what Harold Macmillan called events dear boy, events?
Yes, it happens, yes of course. And it can happen in trivial ways, it can happen in significant ways.
Give us some examples.
Well to take one, example of a crisis. It’s not often the corporate world experiences the sort of environment that the military sometimes finds itself in. But sometimes you do. Rather less than two years ago we had our offices blown up in Istanbul on the same day the British Consulate was attacked. We had three or four colleagues killed. And all of a sudden you see what leadership is really about. Or at least crisis leadership is really about, because suddenly you see how the Chief Executive there behaved. And the team around her and it was a her, and all the colleagues all the way through the system. It comes back to what I was saying. How they behaved was quite extraordinary. They had, by the end of that day, visited all of the injured in hospital. They had sent out 5,000 faxes to our corporate customers or commercial customers, saying we’d be up for business the next day and every branch would be open. And the dealing room was open two hours later with some of them still having head bandages, quoting prices in the market and they got a round of applause in the Turkish dealing market. This was an extraordinary, and I have to say, largely unplanned response, to an outrageous act of violence.
But it was an example of people at every level … leadership.
And it’s an example of everybody at every level and this is an example of instantaneous response, almost from the gut in many ways. How people - there I think the issue about moral courage, the moral fibre that you try and nurture within the company becomes extremely and visibly important.
Harry Woolf, in the legal sense, the legal profession is noted for its independence. It’s got a collective independence and the judges themselves have individual independence. So does that actually make leadership much more difficult?
Well it certainly changes the nature of leadership. Because you can be Chief Justice and can be dealing with a problem of a magistrate who is at the other end of the spectrum. And you can’t give them an order. You can’t get rid of him or her. So the leadership has to take that into account. And you said you were going to ask me about requirements and the great thing that a Chief Justice has got to do, is have the trust of his colleagues, and if you haven’t got their trust and if they can’t rely on you to behave as they would expect you to behave, then you can’t provide them with the leadership and the leadership is not from top down, it’s from bottom up. In this sense they expect their chief justice to support them and to represent their concerns and their interests. And so if I see leadership it’s not a triangle with me at the top. It’s a triangle in reverse so to speak. Magistrates, Judges, Lords of Appeal, all at the top and the Chief Justice should be helping with the help, assistance of others, to support them. And that is the critical thing in this situation.
So you would - used an interesting word, ask. You would ask rather than tell?
Absolutely. And in order to be able to even ask you’ve got to know their concerns and so you have got to be occurring, you’ve got to be interested and you’ve also got to set an example so that they feel that you’re showing them the way forward.
Liz Symons, any difference between women as leaders and men as leaders?
I think that is a tough one. I - I think the received wisdom would be that women like to find a consensus. That if you do have a group of women together, they would try to keep the discussion going until the consensus can be found. Whereas….
What, do you mean people like Maggie Thatcher?
Well I mean I [LAUGHTER] was going to say, there may be one or two very notable exceptions to that, although for goodness sake you know, I certainly wasn’t in the cabinet room at the time and who knows? Maybe there was much more consensus going on than we were led to believe. And many people would say is that this government has not necessarily acted on consensus. I mean that’s obviously a very common criticism. I would suggest that actually there is more consultation now than there was before. But if we’re talking about the differences between the genders I think that, yes I do think that women will try to do that. Put in the talking and the effort to get that feeling of a group of people around trying to move in a particular direction.
In a way that men wouldn’t?
No. And I can’t say that. That’s why I’m so hesitant. I hear the hesitant theme in my voice even - even as I am saying it. Because I do think that actually it, consensus is becoming much more important generally, and as the Lord Chief Justice has said, the importance of listening to what you’re being told by those in your organisation and the ability to draw on that. You may not always act upon it. But you do have the responsibility as a leader I think to listen very carefully to what’s being said and to recognise, as Stephen Green has said, that everybody has a part to play. Even in any organisation, I have seen the women in local offices who can offer leadership. Not, because they are the leaders of the office and the, you know the office managers, but because they are able to galvanise the group around them to act in a particular way.
And Stephen, would you actually see a difference between a woman leader in your organisation and a male leader?
It is a difficult question. I think the answer is essentially no. Or at least there shouldn’t be and I think in many cases there isn’t. Because actually I think it’s dangerous to generalise about either women or men. There are obviously different characters, there is the dominant leader out in front, hoping that others’ll follow behind. That is often a man, it is sometimes a woman. I absolutely agree with Liz that I think consensus is becoming more important, more and more important as life gets more complex.
Have you time for that?
Well I think it’s essential. I think that decision making is in most - I mean there are exceptions. The situation where you are under fire. When you can’t afford to have a great debate about what you do next. But in normal business circumstances a consensus that’s well thought through, and then accepted and acted on collectively, is the best way of taking a complex business forward. I used to be a management consultant. That gave me the ability to see a number of different sorts of companies on the inside, and without naming any inappropriate names, I can think of situations where a decision was a basis for discussion. Well, there comes a point where you’ve got to stop discussing or where the consensus degrades into a lowest common denominator consensus, that won’t do. So finding that effective consensus, sharing the process of having that consensus in that, is a gift of leadership that’s subtle, hard to define and extremely important. And if women are better at consensus, as has been hinted here, than men are, does that mean that their role in the army is limited because the army would require very fast instant decisions without too much, if any, discussion.
I don’t think that, 70/75% of all jobs in the army are open to women but they can’t go into the infantry, they can’t go into the SAS, they can’t go into tanks and there are one or two other jobs they can’t do. So it is open for women to one day get to the top, but you can’t just parachute them in at the top. And the experience of other armies, of taking women into battle, has not been a very happy one. The Israelis tend to stop and pick the women up if they get hit, and I’m afraid I think that women can be a disruptive influence in an attack, in battle. And most women in the army absolutely accept that.
I think consensus, you made the point and I absolutely agree, you can’t have a board meeting before a platoon attack. And I think that sometimes seeking consensus makes it very much harder for the commander. People have ideas, everybody has to, I see it in board meetings now, people who haven’t really got anything to say, think they have to say something [LAUGHTER]. And I don’t think that the army should embrace that sort of procedure
.
One thing I think people haven’t mentioned is that I think good leaders set out on a course and set for a course. And good leaders don’t deviate much from that course unless the situation changes and it is extremely difficult sometimes not to deviate, because the rats get at you. People come and say, wouldn’t it be better to do this? Or we can’t afford that. Or the minister wouldn’t like it. So people do deviate. If you choose a course in action and people go, try and stick with it and once you start meandering, it’s not good.
Well, we’ve had some very, very good and feisty opinions here this evening. I’d like you to leave everyone here with one single thought about leadership, because in this room are people at different stages of the leadership ladder. Some of them right at the top of it already, and others working their way up at different stages. What’s the single piece of advice. The single sentence that each of you would like to leave them with. Harry.
If you’re going to be a leader, you’ve got to be prepared to take responsibility and show that you’re taking responsibility.
Liz.
I think it is the setting an example. It’s a very similar point I guess to the Lord Chief Justice. But it is that you cannot offer leadership unless you are yourself prepared to do some very difficult things and to take some very difficult decisions.
Stephen.
There are as many different leadership styles as there are personalities but leadership has in common that sense of direction and purposiveness and moral courage.
Charles.
There is no template for leadership. The young officers cry out for a template, they expect people to give them one, they have to study other leaders, how they succeed and how they fail, and they then have to adapt what they take to be good for the circumstances they find themselves in.
Ladies and gentlemen will you please thank our panel for sharing their thoughts with us. [APPLAUSE] Thank you very much. [APPLAUSE]
 (113k) Download the full transcript of the panel discussion here. |
