You can always learn while you lead

Ahead of his speaker slot at the Leadership Convention, Sir Martin Narey blogs about leadership and the role of continuous learning.

Recently, after 10 years away from prisons and the criminal justice system I accepted an offer from Michael Gove to become a non-executive member of the Ministry of Justice Board. I was cautious about doing so because one always needs to be wary of going back. But I was convinced that I was unlikely to confuse my new role as a non-executive with the role I held ten years ago as the first Chief Executive of the National Offender Management Service (NOMS): that is the person charged with managing the Prison and Probation Services in England and Wales.

But returning to some of the issues and challenges I faced then reminded me the greatest leadership challenge in my working life when, in 1998, a few years before becoming CE of NOMS, I was asked to lead the Prison Service as its Director General. That experience, daunting, stretching and sometimes overwhelming taught me most of what I know about leadership. Most of all it taught me that in an era where so much of the leadership literature – particularly the various autobiographies and stories of success against all the odds – emphasises the apparently unique personal characteristics which great leaders need to possess, that in reality, leadership is something you can get better at. Like any skill, you can learn to be better. And you can, entirely legitimately, copy others.

A very simple example is how you speak to your staff: how you present on stage when trying to inspire, motivate or persuade your workforce. There is a widely held belief that being able to speak effectively is a result of a bit of good luck: that either we are, or are not, good public speakers. The reality is that some of the best speeches I’ve ever heard and which appeared to be natural, even spontaneous, were carefully planned and practised. As with other leadership skills one can get better at it.

All too often I have seen leaders try to approach an important presentation to a staff conference or public event with the prop, the comfort that is Power Point. Some people are better than others at using Power Point. Many know the necessity of not simply reading out what’s on the slide. But I have yet to see a Power Point presentation where the slides helped the speaker in terms of his or her authenticity. I’ve never seen a Power Point presentation where the impact of what the speaker has been saying, was not diluted by the audience, reading the slides over his or her shoulder and, in part at least, ignoring the spoken word.

If you want to motivate staff and, very often persuade them to do things which they’d rather not, if you want your staff to change, then you need to demonstrate that you care, that you speak from the heart and that you don’t need to read from a script. That might result in presentations which are less coherent but are almost certainly more effective.

That is just one – very small – example of how one can become more effective as a leader by doing things differently. Why should leadership be any different from a host of other skills where we accept without question, that practice and preparation improves performance?

I’m looking forward to speaking at the Sport and Recreation Alliance’s Leadership Convention in a few weeks where I’ll share a little of my own, stumbling, leadership journey and of some of the wider leadership lessons I learned along the way. But I won’t be using Power Point…

Find out more about the Leadership Convention and book your place here.

Share this article:

Back to all news