Purpose led leaders: Meet Alastair James, Head of Leadership Purpose Led Performance

"There is no science to it, leadership is an art."

Today we wanted to take a moment to shine a light on our very own? Alastair James .

Today, Alastair is? Purpose Led Performance 's Head of Leadership and a freelance coach to leaders across the business world.

But 37 years ago he started his career as a Professional Engineer. After five years he changed direction and moved into the world of management consultancy. Alastair started out at Accenture before joining Deloitte, where he spent 20 years, 13 of those as a Partner in their consulting practice.

Alastair set up and led Deloitte's Operational Excellence practice for 7 years.?He ran a wide variety of change projects for clients in the public, private and voluntary sectors. In 2013 he was headhunted by G4S to establish and lead a Group wide Risk function and subsequently became their Group Head of Risk and Internal Audit. In 2017 he stepped out of the corporate world to set up his own consultancy, with a purpose to: equip the leaders of tomorrow to succeed in an increasingly dynamic, complex and demanding world.

What is the art of leadership to Alastair?

"For me, leadership is not a skill set but rather a state of mind, an attitude to the world, a way of behaving."

Skills are valuable and essential to have in a top team. You need market insights, strategy development, influential oration, commercial acumen and a talent for spotting highly-skilled individuals.?"But from my perspective they are not what make you a leader."

Alastair believes that a great leader focuses on the most powerful agents of progress in their business: people, purpose, and performance. What sets them apart is HOW they interact with them; their qualities and characteristics.

He has refined all his years of experience leading and coaching leaders into his?model for leading with purpose.?It details what you lead, and how you do it - with the six key qualities of Care, Candour, Consistency, Collaboration, Courage and Curiosity.

So, why does Alastair believe this is the best way to lead?

It has been six years since Alastair moved away from working in business and set up as coach. In that time he has had space to reflect on his journey and experiences of other leaders in the corporate environment.

"As a new and inexperienced manager I only had the way I had been managed to go on. To be honest it was very functional - what are you doing, have you done your tasks... It was only when I started to manage people myself that I realised it was?really all about talking to people and understanding them.

Alastair realised that as you become more senior you run the risk of taking your skills and knowledge for granted.

"I had been learning and having experiences at work for over 20 years. There was no reason why a new graduate joining the firm would have the same level of knowledge. They were unconsciously incompetent at that stage, whereas I was much further along the road to unconscious competence."

He likes to use the 'conscious competence learning model', developed by Noel Burch, to describe the four stages we all go through when learning new skills.

A great leader should recognise that each individual is at a different stage of competence (and it varies skill to skill). At every level in an organisation there are also different experiences, knowledge and ways of thinking. All will be different to yours, and from one another.

This understanding should inform what you expect of each team member and the support you provide to enable them to grow their competences further. It can also help you put yourself in the shoes of peers and those above you in a hierarchy.?They are also on their own learning journey.

Don't deal with people with the assumption that they will go about things in the same way as you do, and with the same expectations, understandings and priorities.

"I realised you have to lead people from their point of view rather than your own. I started to ask not what I needed from people but what they needed from me, and from one another, to be successful."

So Alastair developed his leadership model based on the qualities that reflect this attitude towards the world. Here he outlines how they are demonstrated when leading Purpose, Performance, People and Self.

"You have to be curious about what people think, you have got to be open and candid with them or you will never get a shared and mutual understanding and you have to care about things from their point of view if you are to have any chance of working successfully with them to enable them to contribute to your shared enterprise."

Curiosity and collaboration, operating in tandem, are key to supporting good team work. They enable you to learn more about one another's capabilities and motivations. That is why Alastair dedicated so much of his leadership time to listening to people to understand how they saw the world, and helping groups of people work together.

"Helping Person A and Person B see the world from each other's point of view, understand each other's priorities and values, and?why?they are not the same. This requires pulling both people out of their comfort zone, so it can be uncomfortable for them.

But they are often consciously incompetent. They know something isn't working but are not sure what it is. You work with them by coaching them to understand what it is, work on it and work better with other individuals and teams."

Sounds time-consuming?

Alastair believes that a leader who makes working with their team a priority will see success.

The more senior you get, the more you don't have time as demands increase. But some leaders also struggle to let go of things. This is bad for the leader who is burning out and the team member who is not having any ownership over their work.?Alastair's advice, as shared with him by a mentor of his own, is to practice?ruthless prioritisation.

People are used to having a to-do list of tasks. "Stop and break number one down into 1a, 1b and 1c and then decide which of the 1a's are important enough, and make a big enough difference, to spend time on.

You have to be mentally disciplined as a leader because it’s very easy to find work to do.?Focus on the fact that your role as a leader is not to do your team’s work for them “properly” or “better” but rather to help prioritise strategically and to enable the team to work effectively as individuals, and as a group.?

The psychological challenge for many leaders is that means you have to stop doing things you’re really comfortable with – your area of functional expertise – and start doing something new – managing human dynamics.

"Your primary role as a leader is to enable the team to do their jobs, work together and for the individuals to grow. You have to spend as much time as is necessary doing that so the team can succeed. Any capacity after that you can use to support the doing."

Alastair advocates that leaders use any capacity to focus on themselves and self-improvement.?"Always be open to new ideas, get a coach and get input from external sources, so you are exposed to new and alternative ideas."

"I learned from my own experiences and thinking. Now I spend more time reading, I see really useful examples and ideas I could have used to improve how I worked. I would urge leaders to make time to read books and articles, listen to podcasts, attend seminars etc. to continuously improve."

Take, 'Where did you learn to behave like that?: A coaching guide for working with leaders' by Sarah Hill.

Alastair has reflected on this book's message that 'Every leader in the world is shaped by their formative experiences.

Whether they are aware of it or not, their earliest memories are influencing the way they show up; how they interact with others and what triggers their greatest reactivity.'

The same is also true for every single person you lead.

"Some people are very capable in their roles but not as good at managing and motivating people because they cannot conceive of how an ask could be more difficult for someone else."

Alastair highlighted a recent LinkedIn post from a member of the? Purpose Collective ?network,? Astrid Korin which speaks to the idea that "One person’s armour is another person’s trigger (see the work of Michelle Brody and ‘Deliberate Calm’ by Brassy, J. et al)". This is something that prevents teams from working well together unless they seek to understand one another better. You may find it a useful read:

It sounds like a great leader is defined by their interactions with their people?

Alastair believes that a leader that seeks to put themselves in another's shoes will learn how to best interact with them. If teams work to get to know one another’s triggers and armour, they can support each other to shift into 'learning'.

"There is no science to leadership. It is an art. You can only learn it by talking and listening and learning."

It takes curiosity, and you have to care about the answers.

You need to do it consistently and collaborate with all members of your teams, and external stakeholders, to get all the information.

But leadership is full of challenges, so have the courage to be candid with yourself and others.

How we can help

If you have found this interesting, you can talk to Alastair directly and learn more on Wednesday 3 May 2023 (12pm- 13pm UTC). He is leading a free online session on this leadership model, and to provide you with the opportunity to discuss it with him and your peers.

We also have a free online quiz which you can access. You will receive a report about how well you currently apply these qualities in your leadership.

We hope you find it useful!

We support leaders to uncover, articulate and activate their purpose; grow their businesses; achieve high performance through highly effective teams; and have a greater and better impact on the world.?But there is no one type of great leader.?

We have been meeting with inspirational real-life leaders from our network to understand their leadership style.

We have captured their ideas in a series of newsletters, entitled Purpose led leaders.

We will shine a light on different people and their individual approach to leadership.

We hope you find the series interesting, inspiring and valuable to you wherever you may be on your leadership journey.

Subscribe to this newsletter for more features on real life inspirational and purpose led leaders.

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