Regular readers over the years will know I am a fan of James Timpson and his leadership of the eponymous and family-owned company he leads, with emphasis on the word lead. A search on this site for the term Timpson will return numerous posts. This week James posted the above image on Twitter, with the simple note: “This is how I try to do my job in leading the company with a culture of trust and kindness.”
I hope to have James on WhatComesNextLive soon as a guest but for now, a reminder that as of today) there are 89 shows on the site and on your favourite podcast platform, a widely varied group of inspirational leaders in conversation with me. I love my job!
I love each of these seven reminders he has hand-written for himself, his own “important things” to lead with a culture of trust and kindness. Today I’d like to extract three as important and specific lessons for leaders to shift away from control and towards trust, from managing people and resources to being a leader:
- “Operate at the top and at the shop floor – don’t worry about the middle bit – trust everyone to manage this”
- Lead, don’t manage, as communicated in each of these phrases that I always ultimately share with all leaders I work with
- The one-line job description of a CEO is “Keeper of the Vision“
- “The less you do the more valuable you are to the business“.
- “Leadership is about people, end of story”
- In summary, be out in your business rather than behind your desk, and be out there listening to your people, at all levels
- Lead, don’t manage, as communicated in each of these phrases that I always ultimately share with all leaders I work with
- “have incredibly high standards”
- if this is not clear to all, this very much includes behaviour, living the values.
- As Reed Hastings of Netflix says: “Do not tolerate brilliant jerks“
- “Recognise that your colleagues are better at most things than you are”
- Again, lead, don’t manage.
- Another “Tom-ism”: “your role is not to have the answers, your role is to ask the right questions of your people. Trust them, they will have the answers”