What doesn't kill us makes a stronger - if we learn from it....

So now we have Rishi “in charge” of the UK, and I like him, I think he’ll do a good job – we all hope so anyway.??

But what can we learn from all the recent upheavals, particularly the demise of Liz Truss, that might transfer usefully to our lives at work and at home?

Well, in hindsight (always easy to say!)?I think we can conclude the following:?

1. You need experience, to do anything. Otherwise you’re going to make rookie mistakes. Experience is making mistakes before they matter, and seeing other people make mistakes so you don’t have to.??Rishi isn’t very experienced, but I think he’ll be OK if he follows no 2, 4 and 11 below, and uses the experience of his colleagues to avoid any big mistakes.
2. Consult - even if you don’t listen all the time, at least ask a few people what they think of the plan. If only Liz Truss had done this:?Anybody?would have advised against the 45% cut and the removal of bankers bonuses on her first day.?
3. Explain - tell us what you’re doing and why, give us the credit of having brains and being important enough to talk to, otherwise we are just insulted. For example Teresa May, an intelligent and thoroughly decent person, wasn’t a natural communicator, so she avoided telling us what she was thinking, and that didn’t go well.??The same with Gordon Brown – he had everything except communication.
4. Communicate from your heart, in a normal conversational way,?not just reciting pre planned sound bites. And if you really can’t do that then don’t take a leadership job.?
5. Leadership is difficult!?Intelligence isn’t enough. Strength isn’t enough. Having a plan isn’t enough.??You have to be a communicator, an improviser, and a juggler of many issues at once.
6. Think about PR as well as whether your plan is great. PR shouldn’t be important, but it is, and increasingly so.??Soundbites, video clips, Instagram images, airbrushing of images etc, it’s all escalating.
7. Recruitment is difficult!?We can’t always tell if a person is up to the job until they get into the job.?Similarly even YOU don’t know if you can do it until you try it. I’ve had personal experience of this – being offered a job and thinking “well if THEY think I can do it then I guess I probably can…” – and sometimes they were right and sometimes they weren’t!?
8. Democracy doesn’t always give you the result you want, but it’s the best system so far discovered, and I’m glad we stuck with it even when it didn’t give us the person we wanted. Countries like China and Russia are laughing at us, but at least we are trying to be democratic - our system is more messy, but we hope better in the end.
9. Groupthink is when a team all convince each other that the plan is great and nobody questions it, or anyone with doubts keeps quiet because they think they are the only one with doubts. - Liz and Kwasi convinced each other that their plan was great, in an isolated bubble, when they should have run it past some friends, (or even enemies!), before announcing it.
10. Sometimes the qualities that get you there are also the qualities that cause your undoing, for example in the case of Liz T the complete belief that you are right, or in the case of Boris, the ability to charm and persuade while being sometimes unaware of, or economical with, the facts. How can we make it possible for the people we want in a job to be able to reach that job?
11. Keep your friends close and your enemies even closer – Liz Truss had a cabinet of yes (wo)men. So she didn’t get an alternative view, and also then had endless attacks from outside?of her cabinet - the Party was never going to be united.??Teresa May had a cabinet made of all parts of the party so she united it to an extent – (but unfortunately this wasn’t enough and she failed for some of the other reasons, listed above).
12. Liz and Rishi attacking each other during the long leadership contest damaged both of them as they took hits, and also made each of them look mean and petty and negative.??The process forced them into this dynamic, so the process was bad for the party. (This translates into “Never reprimand people in public” and “Don’t air your dirty linen in public”)
13. The power of an image. That photo of the decaying lettuce next to a picture of Liz Truss went global. Lesson: If you can sum your position up in one image then you’ll probably win the argument.?
14. ‘Nobody cares about you as a person’. It’s pretty bad that nobody is asking whether Liz Truss is okay. Mental health is still forgotten when the media is piling in. And similarly I think we forget the mental wellbeing of managers sometimes, assuming that they are tougher than the rest of us.

what did I miss?

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