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Leadership lessons: Choose your cabinet carefully

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26th Aug 2009
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Blaire Palmer outlines how to manage the informal networks of people connected with your practice and turn them into positive influences on the business.

It’s a well known fact that individuals produce greater results when working as part of a team, and practice managers typically aim to create rounded teams with a mix of personality types and skills. Despite this, we tend to neglect the informal networks that exist around the business, which can be even more powerful in creating the working climate and influence results.

One of the most important of these are the ‘kitchen cabinets’ – the informal teams of experts, mentors, allies and confidantes that successful people create to influence and advise them. Whether you like it or not, these groups can be very powerful. They can reinforce or undermine the creation of a positive corporate climate and you have very little influence over their opinions.
 
Given that these informal structures exist, my interest is in how they can be a positive influence on your business and support leaders in becoming exceptional.

Key attributes
A great cabinet will balance out the flaws of the individual who created it. We all have work style preferences and limits to our expertise, but successful people acknowledge their areas of weakness and turn to others who will challenge them, present alternative views and see aspects of the issue they may not have seen themselves.

Kitchen cabinets rarely meet as a group. The individual who created the cabinet doesn’t need the group to function in one room together. I like to imagine members of the cabinet as jars on a spice rack, allowing the 'chef' to select the right combination for the right dish.

Positive impact
When they work well, these informal networks provide your people with insightful new ideas, emotional support, new tools and approaches for problem solving, expertise from other industries, access to competitor information and the opportunity to develop people skills.

It would be great to know exactly who had a cabinet like this and who was in it, wouldn’t it? Unfortunately, by their nature they operate below the radar. People often want to keep their cabinet secret either because they fear seeking support and advice could be seen as weakness or because they want to protect their sources.

However, you can start to acknowledge that they exist and even encourage a wiser selection of cabinet members amongst your most powerful people.

I often ask my clients to map their external resources by identifying who currently provides them with support and advice and identify gaps in their cabinet. This is a valuable exercise when individuals step up to a more senior role and find that many of their former confidantes now occupy positions of low structural trust.

Support your cabinet
When leaders work on their personal development plan (PDP), they can be encouraged to seek expertise and support from unusual sources. In this way you encourage them to broaden their perspective and bring insights from another industry or seemingly unrelated aspect of life in to their work. This enriches the business and adds depth to a PDP.

More formal arrangements can be made by intentionally connecting leaders up with mentors or potential cabinet members from friendly businesses in other fields. The relationship can be reciprocal. You may feel that leaders in your financial services business could learn a lot from leaders in an environmental charity and vice versa.

You can support kitchen cabinets within your practice by making spaces available for meetings or recognising the benefits of an occasional long lunch or a company-funded dinner. The benefits of three or four hours with a trusted adviser can be far greater than the cost of a three-course meal and a bottle of wine.

In these times it may seem wasteful to allow leaders to leave the office for anything other than a client meeting or to sleep, but in tough times leaders require greater support and an input of fresh ideas, and that’s what the kitchen cabinet provides.

Blaire Palmer is an executive coach and author. Her new book, The Recipe for Success – What Successful People Do and How You Can Do It Too, is out now (publ A&C Black) and available from good bookshops and Amazon.co.uk.
Website:
www.blairepalmer.com 
Blog:
www.letsbesuccessfulagain.com

 

This article is an extract from a feature published on our sister site, HRZone.co.uk. Click here to view the article in full.

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