My story

Poor management starts with poor expectations

My first management job was thrust upon me because I was a high-performing salesman looking for a new role. I had no desire to manage anyone and no expectation of it. In those days there was no leadership training to speak of. You were given the job and told to deliver the outcome. People management sat firmly in the command and control camp.

It did not take long for my inexperience and my insecurity to show up, and to show up unpleasantly. I approached management as though it were a sales campaign. I treated my team as extensions of me. I had a dominant personality and a short temper. I worked the team hard and I worked myself harder as justification.

Before long they stopped taking initiative. They simply did as they were instructed.

On paper, the team was performing. The client was happy. In reality it was not a team. I had built an environment in which they could not have performed even if they had wanted to, and in which their opinion did not matter.

Deep down I knew I was doing the job badly but continued to repeat what I thought was expected of me.

What woke me up was a performance review

I went into that performance review expecting accolades, because the numbers were there and I had won over some senior client leaders where others had failed. I was shocked to be told they had marked me down because for all the results, it was clear to see how I was burning myself out. If I had any notion of promotion, then I needed to learn to scale and working harder was not going to cut it.

It was the first real feedback I had ever been given as a leader. It devastated me, and it was a godsend.

The one thing I got right was learning from it

My next role was to take over a large account that was failing. I was determined to reinvent myself and learn from previous mistakes. I rebuilt the team with people I rated and whose opinion I actually valued. Then I listened to them. I became genuinely consultative, I asked for feedback every week, and I got it. It showed up in the sales numbers.

But the ego was still there just better handled. Ego always surfaces under stress, and when it does it brings out the worst in you, because it reads everyone in the room as a threat or competition. You either posture or collapse.

I remember the incident well. An argument about a decision, and a refusal by one of my team to accept that decision that the rest of the team had already made. I lost my temper. The anger was so intense that I saw red and my ears rang. When I had calmed down, I was overcome with embarrassment and shame.

That was the defining moment. I knew things had to change. I had no idea how.

The answer arrived by accident

The answer came at a seminar given by a neuroscientist, on a book he had written. The book was life changing for me as it explained in plain terms how the brain is split between the human and the chimp. I realised I had spent most of my life obliviously driven by the chimp part of my brain; essentially my emotions.

That set me on a path that has now lasted more than fifteen years.

Then I became an executive, and the job changed underneath me

Until I became an executive I had still touched the ‘real work’, and I had built a leadership team around me who never hesitated to tell me the truth about my performance. In my final year running the UK and Ireland service sales business, we were the Highest Performing Specialist Team in EMEA.

Before that year was out I was asked to take the Vice President role for service sales across Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), with just one day's notice, while the company was about to start building an entirely new customer success business with significant impact on the operation I would lead.

So the job became this: manage an undefined transformation. It felt often that decisions were being made on the fly.

Change brings conflict. For two years there was little else. Between departments, between leaders and between teams who were all trying to survive the transition or profit from it.

Thanks to a better-constructed mask, I was able to project the image of control. But in an environment that is relentlessly political, and where you feel you are in a permanent high-stakes fight, the wounds you have been plastering over for years begin to fester. You doubt yourself. Anxiety is always in the room. Paranoia does very well in those conditions.

None of it is visible from the outside. The mask holds. No leader survives if he shows any of that publicly, so you swallow it and carry on.

That is where I became the problem again

I had come to identify myself as an authentic and developed leader. Integrity and authenticity were who I believed I was. Yet my ego still read everything as a threat, and in time the paranoia turned into cynicism.

Looking back, I was naive, and perhaps deliberately so. It is not that what I said at the time was untrue, or that my predictions for the business were wrong. They were not. It is that I believed if I kept fighting the wrong decisions that I could change the outcome. That is not how the corporate world works. I knew this better than most but I lost perspective and I believed I was being true to myself and those who I had a responsibility to but I was just being delusional.

Say it too often, and you stop being the person raising the problem and become the problem itself. Corporations are machines, and whatever they say publicly, they are built on hierarchy. They do not want a dissenting voice. They want a single narrative, plastered neatly over the inconvenient cracks. So my cynicism was received simply as negativity, and rightly so.

I was naive to think I could change that culture by confronting it. Unfortunately, when you are operating from emotion, you do not make good decisions.

Stepping out of the bubble

When I was first divorced, I blamed my ex-partner for the end of our marriage. I failed to see how I had contributed to the final break, because it was easier to blame her for everything. Time gives perspective, and I realised how I had contributed to the break-up as well. The same is true of the end of my career with Cisco.

When I left, I believed there had only ever been two choices: sell out, or shut up. Things are rarely that black and white, and it usually takes time outside the bubble to see it.

There is a third option. It took reflection, time and plenty of study, before I could see it. There is a way to survive that game, to prosper in it, and to remain entirely yourself while you do.

It is the thing I most wish somebody had taught me. It is the thing I now teach.