A long time ago, in fact a couple of years after the anti-climax of the ‘Year 2k millennium bug’, the 9/11 atrocity, and the collapse of the dot.com bubble, the Badger attended his employer’s annual international leadership conference in London. The Badger has participated in many of these events throughout his career. They happen, in one form or another, in most sizeable organisations to ‘align’ leaders and managers with strategic objectives, business priorities, and key messages and themes for the coming year. Such conferences often involved gathering large numbers of people in the same place, but the last two decades have seen more creative and cheaper ways of achieving the same objectives by using global video conferencing.
The particular conference to which the Badger refers was a face to face gathering with a predictable format involving lots of corporate presentations and orchestrated workshops. From the Badger’s perspective the real value of the event lay in the ability to network with seniors from around the world. This particular conference took place at a time when the IT services market was the toughest it had been for decades. The company was in the doldrums and morale across the whole organisation was extremely low.
Although presentations at these conferences are rarely memorable, at this one there was one from the Global HR Director on ‘Pride’ that stood out. It was the best presentation the Badger had ever seen them give! Its theme was the importance of having and showing pride – that feeling of deep satisfaction derived from not only your own achievements, but also the achievements of those with whom you work – in overcoming low morale across the organisation. The message was simple, namely, stop wallowing in the gloom causing the corrosive low morale, and start celebrating all the good things that people did at every level in the organisation every day.
With a key role in the company’s delivery community, the Badger already knew about having and demonstrating pride! Good leaders of delivery teams inherently know that you must have and show pride in your own and your team’s achievements, no matter how small or difficult they have been. Good delivery leaders know that their own success depends on their team, and that celebrating the small achievements as well as the bigger ones is good for the team morale that is crucial for success.
Delivery is done by people who take pride not only in their personal standards and work, but also in playing their part in teams getting the job done successfully. This was clearly the case with those involved with the funeral ceremonials for Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, last Saturday. Everyone involved in producing and delivering the ceremonials of this sombre, historic, but fitting event should be proud of their individual and collective achievement. They did themselves, the Duke, the Royal Family, the Queen, and the country proud.
