About us

The table below tells you something of the V|E|C|T|O|R team. It includes you, since we exist to help you be a more effective leader. It also includes your team and colleagues. They're critical to the task or journey you're responsible for - and are the focus of the leadership actions you take. Without their commitment, you can't succeed.

Following the table, we've added some material about V|E|C|T|O|R, its assumptions, and its complementary relationship to other leadership tools and training approaches. In particular, its unique value-add. It doesn’t just give you an evaluation, profile or theory but a Leadership Action Plan you can immediately implement.

The team	Our roles
Dr Timothy Pascoe His bio page timothy@vectorleadership.com Timothy on LinkedIn	Building V|E|C|T|O|R concepts and content Driving business strategy
Langdon Stevenson langdon@vectorleadership.com Langdon on LinkedIn	Programming Customer support
YOU (The key one)	Using V|E|C|T|O|R, we hope! Taking better leadership actions and we also hope ... Sharing your ideas and feedback with us Spreading the word
Your team and other followers (The most important ones)	Supporting your leadership actions Making things happen
Your colleagues and friends (Other important ones)	Using V|E|C|T|O|R too perhaps Making the world work better!

About V|E|C|T|O|R

V|E|C|T|O|R is based on the assumption that followers take a conscious decision to come on a journey with you – and, thereby, confer on you the role of leader.

Many people have good ideas or good intentions but neither is sufficient to make them a leader. The acid test is the buy-in of others. Having reflected on the vision you offer and other things you do, are they willing to commit their time and effort to help make the dream come true – to follow you?

History is full of leaders, who literally or metaphorically offered people a journey: explorers taking expeditions deep into the jungle; politicians founding parties and taking them to victory at the polls; business leaders establishing enterprises or turning old ones around; social reformers setting up movements to change the social order. On some journeys, the followers had immense commitment and, at the extreme, were willing to die.

V|E|C|T|O|R is about what you can do to build and sustain commitment. The focus here is primarily on leadership in business or similar organisations. The stakes may not always be as high as with exploration or social change but the issues are not too different.

About leaders

Leadership occurs across all the levels of an organisation. It starts, one hopes, with the chief executive and cascades down. You may be a follower in your relationship to your manager but should be a leader to those below. (And, to peers on broader issues, for which you’re responsible.) However, an enlightened team-leader, secure in his or her competence, will often ask a subordinate to lead the team, when the subordinate has expertise or vision for a particular task or time. Equally, in an emergency, you can become the leader, almost by magic: instantaneous recognition by others that you are the one most appropriate to the situation and their needs. In this sense, leaders exert their leadership not only downwards, as we normally understand it, but also upwards and across the organisation.

Whoever leads has one prime responsibility: to make everyone on the team (themself and the followers – as individuals and as a team) as effective as possible. The leader thereby maximises organisational performance: achieving agreed outcomes whether these are long-term profitability or short-term customer service.

About followers

Something needs to be made clear, lest any of us are offended by the “follower” tag. To suggest someone is a follower is not to suggest they are a robot responding blindly to commands. There is an assumption throughout V|E|C|T|O|R that followership, like leadership, is an honourable and well-rounded role. A follower is a thinking, responsible person, who raises issues, provides input, and also challenges things they believe to be wrong – as well as taking instructions and carrying out assigned responsibilities. In sum, while leadership is the focus here, it is a partnership and the goal is to achieve more and better follower capability and contribution.

If ideas and good intentions are not the key to leadership, what is? The answer is contained in one word: action. In some cases, the required action may be to develop ideas, to think through a problem, to analyse and reach a conclusion; equally, it may be to meet with customers or stakeholders, to hire or fire staff or re-think how your team carries out its role. But the test is the relevance of these actions to making your followers want to join and remain on the journey.

It is often said that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. For willing followers, hell is poor leadership: they are not concerned with your good intentions; they may not even care what your intentions are. But, they will evaluate your actions – and particularly how these impact their ability to do what is expected of them. If you preach productivity but waste their time, it is the waste, not the preaching, they will notice. In leadership, as in most things, actions speak louder than words.

Leadership styles

Many people have a favourite or preferred model of leadership – and often one that makes them look good! They may be drawn to the heroic model: military leaders like Napoleon or business leaders like Rupert Murdoch. Others may favour quiet achievers like Mahatma Gandhi or Warren Buffett. Nice as it would be to find a “man (or woman) for all seasons”, life is not so accommodating. Churchill was a splendid war leader but less good in peacetime. Many entrepreneurs build companies to a certain size but stall or fail thereafter. My father did that!

Appropriate actions today may not be right tomorrow. Your team may have changed, so may market circumstances. Your previous job, leading the contracts team, might have required hands-on technical capability. Now, as Customer Service Director, you may need skill in setting policy, building customer relations and holding people accountable.

Even if you still have the same job and the same team of people, the market environment may have changed. Whereas last year, it was a seller’s market with high margins and an emphasis on rushing products out the door. This year, you may need to reorient your team to reduce costs and fight to keep customers so you ensure the viability of your operation. Easy street quickly becomes mean street. And, these two situations require entirely different leadership actions.

IQ and EQ

Choosing the right actions requires intelligence – of both the emotional (EQ) and conventional (IQ) varieties. Obviously, you need to be able to diagnose market conditions and technical issues. But, as importantly, you need to understand what your team, customers and other stakeholders require. Many of us are trained by courses and on-the-job experience to master quantitative and technical issues: growth rates, profit margins, product specifications, and so on. This is classic IQ stuff. However, the EQ skills of empathy, self-awareness and self-control are often left to chance.

We have less preparation for the listening and sensitivity required in diagnosing how our team members (or customers) are feeling, individually or as a group. Too often, we assume everyone is the same – and probably similar to us. Not necessarily an encouraging assumption!

All leaders need a mixture of EQ and IQ to diagnose simultaneously the market and human issues, develop alternatives, make wise selections and find appropriate ways to act. And sometimes, the “how” is more important than the “what”.

Leading whom?

Another ingredient driving our choice of leadership actions is finding an appropriate balance between the needs of individuals and the team. As with international trade, there is a need for both multilateral and bilateral considerations. This is not easy if the needs of one individual – for more of your time or special considerations – disadvantages others. As with most things, there is no simple answer. It depends on the situation – and this can vary as conditions change.

As most writers argue, successful leaders have a number of common traits. They have the capacity to inspire. They can get themselves going at the beginning of the day; and, they can drag themselves out of a rut – focusing on future possibilities rather than past problems.

They also attract, motivate and hold good staff. However, this can be a two-edged sword. It is good for building a team capable of tackling significant tasks. However, it can be a problem for the organisation, and yourself – if having built an operation, when the time comes for you to move on, everyone wants to follow. Flattering, but it may destroy what you have struggled to establish.

Leadership achievement

Outstanding leaders tend to be compulsive – working long hours and compromising other facets of their life. This can lead to burn out in them and the people around them. This is no different from the behaviour of outstanding people in other fields. However, in the case of business people, it tends to be regarded as lack of adjustment. A fixated entrepreneur, like Henry Ford, is seen as narrow, whereas a fixated film director or sports captain is seen as showing professional commitment! Contrary to the common view, in my value system, there is just as much potential for moral splendour in business as in any other enterprise.

Effective leaders spend a lot of time listening and talking – particularly the former. They seek and share information. They walk around and are visible; they spend time encouraging, guiding and coaching. They get out and represent their teams and their organisations and promote the importance of what is being done.

They also show adaptability and a capacity for learning. They recognise changes in the world around them and learn new skills to master new situations.

The V|E|C|T|O|R framework, as you will see below, agrees with the foregoing characteristics of successful leaders. However, there are areas where V|E|C|T|O|R departs from the views of some practitioners and writers.

V|E|C|T|O|R’s differences

First, the V|E|C|T|O|R framework, asserts that there is no single or right set of actions or leadership attributes. There is no “perfect” leader and certainly no “permanent perfect” leadership formula. It all depends, as set out earlier, on the situation: the organisational context and the needs of the individuals and the team. This view is not unique. However, many leaders operate as though there were a single best way; and, too often writers, who assert the importance of situation, still become prescriptive about needed attributes and what is and is not the right way to lead.

Second, the leader needs to be free of fatal flaws – or self-destructive tendencies. These can be things that are broadly undesirable, like dishonesty; or, an otherwise good action, such as accountability, taken to excess, so that team members feel that any minor failure unleashes a witch-hunt.

Finally, an effective leader may be neither good, nice nor easy. He or she may, in fact, at times be unnecessarily unpleasant – but still effective. This is reported of three of the leaders mentioned earlier (Napoleon, Murdoch and Gandhi) – the possible exception being Warren Buffett. But, leadership is not necessarily about popularity or social niceties, though both of these can help. It is about getting people to come on a journey, and in some situations they may prefer a tough bastard, or even a successful rogue, rather than a well-intentioned do-gooder.

Beyond these three differences of view, there are two more interesting differences of emphasis and scope, which make V|E|C|T|O|R complementary to other leadership offerings.

Other leadership models

Much of the leadership literature and many of the courses give priority to general principles – either extrapolating from theories of individual or organisational behaviour or observing successful leaders and generalising their behaviour into lists of dos and don’ts. The theories of Charles Darwin and Carl Jung, amongst others, have been put to work. Equally, myriad observations and anecdotes have buttressed professional papers and enhanced careers in business schools.

This is all high-level leadership stuff. V|E|C|T|O|R, however, is down-to-earth and gritty. It’s about applied leadership: actions not theory; specifics not guidelines; what can work not what might be desirable.

The table below sums up some of the above complementarities:

	KEY FOCUS	DOMINATING OUTPUT
Most Leadership Offerings	The LEADER’S approach: Behavioural theory Normative assumptions	Profiles Labels Ratings
V|E|C|T|O|R	The FOLLOWERS’ needs: Their Questions and Concerns Desired Outcomes	Leadership Action Plan

V|E|C|T|O|R complements a lot of the leadership literature in yet another way. Many books and papers devote themselves to specific aspects of the leadership task. In some cases, this may be a period of leadership, such as the first three months – focusing on what needs to be achieved in order to lay the right foundation for long-term success. Other writers take a particular functional aspect of leadership such as communication and emphasise what needs to be done to ensure open and honest flows of information across the organisation. Still others offer a particular context: leadership of start-ups, of dotcoms, of turnarounds, and so on.

A specific comparison

These segmentations are well illustrated by a short course on Best Practice Leadership offered at one time by the Harvard Business School. The topic headlines (each mirroring a publication by the relevant professor) read as follows: Sustaining Business Success; Leadership Under Fire; The Irrational Search for Charismatic CEOs; Acceleration Plans for Transitioning Leaders; Is Silence Killing Your Company; Time to Value B Players; Extraordinary Leadership in an Era of Turbulence and Change.

In each case, important principles were derived from literature and case studies. However, there was nothing in the course, which gave a general framework allowing participant leaders to diagnose their own situation and select from a smorgasbord of actions as a basis for developing their own Leadership Action Plan.

The following table sums up the above points, illustrating how V|E|C|T|O|R is on the one hand more down to earth and action-focused, but on the other hand broader in scope.

		SCOPE/COVERAGE
L E V E L	THEORY AND PRINCIPLE	Sustaining Business Success	Leadership Under Fire	The Search for Charismatic CEOs	Acceleration Plans for Transitioning Leaders	Is Silence Killing Your Company	Time to Value B Players	Leadership in an Era of Turbulence and Change
	ACTION PLANNING	V | E | C | T | O | R Integrative across all aspects of leadership responsibility

V|E|C|T|O|R builds on profiling and feedback

If you use great tools like LSI or MBTI ... then V|E|C|T|O|R is your traction engine

• Convert your feedback to a personal action plan
• Transform your training to operational outcomes

Efficiently ... economically ... totally online

If you're new to leadership development ... leapfrog here to this new technology

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Tools like LSI* and MBTI* are widely-trusted. Over a million managers (across more than 240,000 companies) have used LSI. Both help you “look in the mirror” and better understand your default approaches to leadership situations.

V|E|C|T|O|R is a planning tool and goes the next step. It helps you convert your increased self-awareness into on-the-job leadership traction:

• Shift the focus from you to those you’re leading;
• Identify concerns holding them back from full commitment;
• Plan your actions to address their concerns and inspire followership.

LSI and MBTI start the job. V|E|C|T|O|R completes it.

Evaluation and profiling tools are widespread in larger businesses. But, in smaller ones (and at junior levels in large ones), few people have such feedback. In these cases, V|E|C|T|O|R is both cost-effective and easy-to-use from scratch. It leapfrogs you directly to planning your leadership actions – and delivering business outcomes.

* The Life Styles Inventory and the Myers Briggs Type Indicator

Are you winning?

Finally, as a leader, how do you know if you are succeeding? The acid test is organisational performance. However, whether you are a front-line supervisor or a chief executive, the first and most important signal is that your people, those who have decided to join and stay with you, are becoming more effective as a result of your leadership. It is crass but true that, year in year out, good leaders increase the market value of their team members.

This sets up an interesting dilemma: it makes other leaders and employers want to poach your people; but, equally, encourages them to stay with you and further increase their value. And, they may even stick with you because they’re enjoying themselves!

You know when you have a virtuous (leadership) cycle when your followers are becoming better leaders of their followers. You initiate things, which are picked up, passed around, and your actions, examples and messages reverberate back to you from deep in the organisation – often in better form!

To fully understand what V|E|C|T|O|R can do for your leadership, develop a personal Leadership Action Plan for your current role.