Today in the world of leadership, Kevin Wilson and Charlotte Valeur had some inspiring words for fellow leaders, while Chris Grayling was denied the post of chairman of the intelligence committee.
Leadership in Focus
Speaking exclusively to The Leaders Council of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Kevin Wilson, managing director of Constant Power Services, said that a leader is someone who has ‘an inner conviction about the correct direction in which to go.’
He said it was absolutely vital for leaders to have a good team around them and to take on board the thoughts and feelings of others but that the direction must come from the leader themselves. He explained that they must have a clear inner strength and a sense of where they wanted to take things. He defined it succinctly as ‘doing the right thing more than “doing things right.”’
Constant Power Services is a specialist power company that guarantees power for hospitals, schools and a range of other organisations. Wilson has been managing director for thirteen years.
When asked about the advice he would have for the next generation of leaders, he extolled the virtues of communication and advised, where possible, to talk to people in person rather than over the phone. For Wilson, everything comes down to the strength of the team and the team is only as strong as the relationships between each member. In that regard, communication is everything.
Leadership Today
Chris Grayling fell foul of an eleventh hour coup yesterday evening as he missed out on becoming chairman of parliament’s intelligence and security committee to fellow Tory MP Julian Lewis.
Writing in The Times Red Box, Patrick Maguire explains that ‘while the job of chairman is by law the concern of the committee alone, No 10 had seen that the nine-strong committee had a majority of Conservative MPs — even booting off the mild-mannered Lord Janvrin, a crossbench peer — and made clear to them that Grayling was their man. Yet he still managed to lose.’
Marina Hyde had earlier poured scorn on Grayling’s proposed appointment in the Guardian, writing: ‘Please don’t ask by what arcane Downing Street process committee appointments such as Grayling’s are decided. You are much better off imagining a wingbacked armchair with its back to the viewer, so that all that can be heard is a Mr Burns voice rasping: “Grayling, you say. Remind me of his track record.” “Well, put simply, sir … his record is that there is no longer a track. There’s just a huge stretch of scorched earth, dozens of charred horse skeletons, and it’s all overhung by a noxious pall so toxic it makes the Chernobyl exclusion zone seem like a visit to the Selfridges perfume counter.” “Perfect. Prepare his office.”
As a result of the alleged coup, whereby Julian Lewis worked with Labour and SNP MPs to secure his nomination ahead of Grayling, Lewis has now been removed from the Tory Party.
In other leadership news, Charlotte Valeur, chair of the Institute of Directors, has spoken to The Daily Telegraph about being the first senior business leader to reveal she has autism. In a call for more firms to embrace neurodiversity, Valeur said ‘workplaces need more people like me’.
The Guardian’s editor and chief executive have used an internal memo to defend the decision to cut 180 jobs related to the newspaper, including those of 70 journalists. The news comes despite the newspaper’s previous decision to furlough 100 staff. Katherine Viner and Annette Thomas said: ‘Even after taking these measures into account though, we face unsustainable annual losses in future years unless we take decisive action,” they said. “It is clear that we will need to make significant cost savings, and change the way we work.’
Leadership in History
On 16th July 1809, Bolivia declared its independence from the Spanish Crown and formed the Junta Tuitiva led by Pedro Domingo Murillo, becoming the first independent government in Spanish America.
Photo by Hunters Race on Unsplash
