How To Ensure Commercial Success And Honour Your Good Intentions with Russell Boulter

In the latest episode of Extra-Ordinary Leaders, I sat down with Russell Boulter: actor, documentary narrator, expert communication coach and founding partner of GSB Comms.

We explored the fine line between being a good person and being a good leader: how do we ensure that we’re treating our team with kindness and empathy whilst still being commercially successful? Is there a middle ground? And how do we find it?

The full conversation with Russell is available here.

The double-edged sword

What can a career in acting teach us about extraordinary leadership? The surprising answer is: quite a lot! I was lucky enough to have Russell Boulter (whose voice is simply incredible by the way!) on the podcast to walk us through the surprising lessons we can learn.  

While directing his first  play, Russell, who up until that point had been on the other side of the line as an actor, realised that leadership is a double-edged sword. As he described it, he was confronted with the scandal of authority: the choice leaders have to use their power and influence to serve others, or to use it as fuel for their own ego.

Russell: “The choice is this: do I use this power to serve everyone around me and help them be as good as they can be? Or am I going to sit here and love the power play? It's a choice, and it was presented to me: which one do you want? And I went, 'I want to do the servant thing. I want to help these people in this play be as good as they possibly can. And I want the audience that see it to have a great time.’”

Could we compare this to businesses, I wondered? 

We could see the actors in the play as our staff, the production as our business, and the audience as our customers. How, then, can we ensure that everyone knows their role, and that all roles come together to create the best experience for customers under our leadership?

According to Russell, the answer lies in a surprising place: failure.

To Russell, one of the cruellest things you can do is stop people from making mistakes. 

In much the same way the director of a play has to trust that the actors will learn their lines and their characters, a business leader must trust their team to perform in their roles without constant guidance.

One of the things I have personally struggled with in the past – as both the leader of a business and the leader of small children at home! – is delegating.

Don’t “just do it”

I have faith in the people I work with and I have faith in my children, but sometimes it's just easier to do it myself.

I hear this time and time again in my coaching work with leaders: how do we stop "Just doing it ourselves" and let go of the reins? And why should we?

Russell: “I think the danger of, 'Just let me do it'...it's easier in the short term but in the medium and long term, you've made a rod for your back because you have to have the patience to let people completely screw up. I think failure is the fastest way, if not the only way we all learn. But make it safe to fail.”

The F word

As I was talking to Russell about the importance of delegating and allowing people to fail, I couldn't help but think of the big F word: fear.

I think it's safe to say that most people are fearful of failing. When you're leading a business, however, failure can have extremely significant consequences, some of which could be financial.

Through the People Performance Consultancy, I've met many leaders who, unsurprisingly, want to  protect their team from failure. Often what happens in these leadership styles, however, is that difficult conversations are avoided and there is little incentive for growth or change. 

Sometimes it feels a little too black and white, doesn't it? 

It feels we have to choose either or: either we're a jolly nice leader and make sure we're there every step of the way to catch and prevent mistakes but risk being commercially unsuccessful, or we're a growth-focused leader who deliberately allows our team to fail so that they can learn from their mistakes and further our commercial success.

Is there a nice middle ground?

To Russell, there is one business leader that represents this ideal middle ground perfectly: Tim Gillis, managing partner at KPMG, whom Russell had the privilege of meeting at a conference in Madrid. Russell describes Tim's leadership style as inspiring and quietly humble at the same time as being ruthless and fierce. 

Russell: “He had both things going on. And when you see that in someone, it's not a contradiction. He is one of the most successful partners in the history of KPMG in the U.S. in terms of making money, but he's also brilliant at putting people in the right position and empowering them.”

So what's his secret?

That's exactly what Russell asked Tim himself. 

What are you leaving in your wake?

What it seems to boil down to is something I find quite fascinating: as leaders, we are so focused on looking ahead that we rarely take time to reflect on what is behind us.

Russell shares Tim's metaphor which compares a business to a ship: you don't just look ahead, you look at the wake.   

But what exactly should we be looking at?

Russell: “What are the legal costs when you mess things up because you over promise and under deliver? What are you measuring? You can't only measure the profit and not the health of the system you've created that's generating that profit.”

And how do we look at the health of our business?

By turning our attention to our teams.

The intention gap

Russell: “If you are kind and honest and trustworthy, you're inspiring people, you're not bullying them...  I think there's a huge virtue in gentleness. For me, gentleness is strength at rest... The people I've worked with as a coach, they have that authority, you can sense that strength in them, but it's under some kind of management – it's being held and contained by values and lived out sincerely.”

I found this thought an interesting one to unpack. We all fall victim to the “intention gap” at times, those moments when our actions don't align with our intentions. No one (or no one I'd like to work with, anyway!) wakes up in the morning and thinks, “I'm going to be really untrustworthy, dishonest, and unkind today.” Most of us wake up thinking we're going to try our best to be good people. 

But we all have blind spots, and it is in these blind spots that we risk falling short of our good intentions. 

Let's use myself as an example.

I'm an extrovert through and through. I'm a big-picture thinker with a tendency to hop from one idea to the next. Through years of studying personality, coaching experience, and my own self-awareness journey, I have realised that if I'm not careful, I can hop from one idea to the next and forget to finish what I start. If this kind of behaviour was left unchecked, I might unwittingly create a feeling of distrust between myself and my team. 

Many leaders may exhibit similar behaviours unique to their own personalities and leadership patterns. When we're talking about leadership style, it seems to always come back to this point: self-awareness. How can we ensure our actions match our intentions and we're hitting that middle ground of extra-ordinary leadership if we're not self-aware enough to identify our blind spots?

Russell: “One way to make sure you're tethered to what you say you value and you're actually living it is to look at the facts around you.”

In a lovely cyclical way, looking at the facts goes back to what we were discussing earlier: what are you measuring? Can you delegate it to others when you need to? And who is holding you accountable?

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The full conversation with Russell Boulter is available here. 

For more information on Russell, head over to LinkedIn, or check out GSB Comms.

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