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May 2011

All leadership is interim management!

Mike Brearley, an outstanding Captain of England's cricketers, shares his thoughts on leadership and interim management. He considers how it feels to be the "stand-in" and looks at situations where the overall direction may not always be clear. Mike also comments on England's recent announcement to appoint three different captains for this Summer!

All leadership is interim management! I like the phrase 'during my watch'. We are guardians of a team or organisation. We inherit values, styles and systems, whether we go with them or oppose them. We are there for a more or less short time. Our planning, however long-term, is also, when set against other time-spans, merely short-term. The thousand-year Reich lasted 12 years.

Yet it is also the case that there is a big difference between being in charge, appointed, in role for the foreseeable future, and being a stand-in. As a stopgap, one is either given very temporary tenure (in 1981 Ian Botham was appointed captain of England for one match at a time) or one is a substitute for the main leader, who is on sabbatical, or ill, or busy on some other project for the time being. Being the long-term leader of a team, a squad, a division, a company, a department, a country means: being entitled and expected to set the tone, build for future, have and try to bring to fruition a vision. People can demand of one longer-term initiatives as well as short-term ones.

Mike Brearley and Ian Botham - Botham, who had resigned the captaincy prior to the third Test, celebrates with his successor, Mike Brearley, after the game  

Let's think of the stand-in first. His or her task is complicated. He must be the leader, which inevitably involves doing things in his own style, but at the same time he is obliged to take into account the policies of the temporarily absent leader. He may be tempted to take over, to impose an alternative ethos, whether of consultation, discipline, or policies. There is a balancing act to be achieved. On the one side there is the risk of a drop into being vacuous or innocuous, sacrificing presence for conformity; on the other is the danger of upstaging, of presumption, of indecent haste to take over. He must be willing to take charge while being constantly aware of the longer-term leader's rights and responsibilities. He also avoids some of the burdens of being leader; he is not responsible for the overall strategy; he can often rightly say 'I was doing what the boss wanted, doing things in his way'. He avoids some of the anxieties and loneliness of leadership. But however ambitious he may be, he has to temper his ambition.

From the point of view of the overall leader, the person who is off-stage for the time being, there are parallel problems. On the one hand he has to let his stand-in do the job, not be constantly breathing down his neck. On the other he knows he himself can be held responsible for the failure of the team or its not reaching long- or short-term goals; he can't always completely step aside. He may be anxious about the threat to his position from a talented and ambitious number two, or he may on the other hand be willing to give the latter enough rope to hang himself (or even on occasion consciously to plan such an outcome – in Measure for Measure the Duke pretends to be a monk in order to keep an eye on his replacement, Angelo). In some cases there is enough momentum for the appointment of a skilful and often ambitious to positions of power and authority that he is not suited to, and it may be the mark of a constructive leader to make sure the unsuitability of the substitute is revealed before he can do too much damage.

The overall leader needs to be secure enough not to be too threatened by his subordinates' ambition, flair and personality. He must have enough confidence in himself not to be too worried about being found to be dispensable. His job is to get the stand-in with all his qualities to be productive to the team. His task includes channelling such qualities. He may have to check the junior person, to challenge him if he gets above himself. It may also be important to foster the ambition and forcefulness of his subordinate, delegate or temporary replacement, in order to get things done and bring him on. It is also part of his job to know what is going on, so that conflicting instructions and expectations are minimized.

Leaders need to know that they will themselves be the object of others' jealousy, rivalry and envy, as well as being the object of unearned admiration and idealisation. This is central to being a leader; one of the tasks is to be able to tolerate unreasonable projections of both good and bad qualities, without losing the capacity to reflect on one's own failings and shortcomings and try to do something about them.

Dealing with a stopgap to oneself is akin to being good at delegation, at finding the right mix of letting someone get on with the job, and on the other hand keeping a benevolent eye on how he's managing things.

In families where roles are traditionally divided, the father is often the stand-in parent to the main parent, the mother. All I've said so far applies here too. The mother has to find her balance between being over-controlling her husband, stopping him doing things in his own way, but at the same time she may well be right to counter his tendency, say, to over-excite the child just before bed-time. And she may well know better than he does the best ways of dealing with the child's fragilities and provocations. Many parental problems revolve around such situations.

The England cricket team has made a bold experiment in appointing three different captains for the different formats of the game – Andrew Strauss for Tests, Alastair Cook for One-day Internationals, and Stuart Broad for Twenty-20s. This could involve problems of different styles and different favourites, creating atmospheres in which players feel they have to play different roles to impress the different captains. Some may blossom under the style of one, and decline under another. But there is one overall coach (in Andy Flower) who has an over-arching role and power; who can keep an eye on such potential difficulties, and who is likely to be able to fulfil a unifying function over the dressing room and the overall style and approach.

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