Is your impact as good as your intent?

a reflective interview with Mark Wharton

Authentic, warm-hearted and with a great sense of humour, I loved working with Mark during my time as Head of People and Ops at IOTICS.

In addition to being one of IOTICS' co-founders, Mark is a man of many talents. Some you’ll hear about in this interview, such as tennis coach, saxophonist, engineer. Others, including beekeeper, honey maker, butter churner and sourdough baker are just part of the “26 things” mentioned in passing… It’s impossible to ever get bored talking to Mark!

The interview focuses on Kornferry/Hay’s Group Leadership Styles and Organisational Climate and DiSC.

Leadership Three Ways

Mark, could you start by describing your leadership style(s) and by providing some context?

There are three leadership roles that spring to mind for us to explore.

The first is in my role as co-founder of a startup. Here you have the Visionary Leadership style, especially critical in the early days, when you say: “This is where we’re all heading, so let’s all pile up this hill and see what we can do.” And when you’re a very small team, which we were when we first started, it’s very familiar, it feels like family to you. So I think this is where the Affiliative Leadership style comes into play for me.

The second one is that I recently started a Repair Café where I’m deliberately trying to have a very… almost non-existent leadership style; where I encourage everyone to be as autonomous and self-fulfilling as they can be.

Here my leadership style is very Participative, everyone has an opinion and is listened to. And Coaching is important as well: we’re all helping each other to be better. Everyone is a grown up, we’re doing this together and so you devolve responsibility. Everyone is responsible for their own clients, their own stuff, and then together we will make something happen.

And the third example is working [as band leader] with the kids in the school band where I volunteer; this is in much more of a Coaching way. As you know, I’ve been a tennis coach so I’m used to that: “I’ll help you to be the best you that you can be…” and try not to impose too much of my own thinking on that. So with the school band it’s like: “Do we like the way that sounds? How can we make that better, what do you think could make it better?” That kind of thing.

From Startup to Grownup 

So, tell me a little bit more about your startup journey and your evolution as a leader: from those early days working around your kitchen table with a small group of dedicated co-founders and engineers, to seeing the team expand with all the growing pains that involved… There will have been times when you came up against yourself?

“I had this tendency to shoulder all of the burdeN…”

The thing when you’re at the early stages of a startup, you’re intensely grateful that anybody wants to come along for the ride. You have this nutty idea and then two or three people go: “Oh I think that’s not so nutty, let’s have a go” and whatever they do, you think “oh fantastic, this is great”.

So you want to absolve them of all blame. You want to give them permission to fail. That way you can say: just try something, it might or might not work, I don’t care, I care that we tried it. And to try and remove blame from people, I said everything was my fault. I had this tendency to shoulder all of the burden and not do that delegation of authority.

Being an Affiliative leader, you’re very focused on how the team feels, on their wellbeing, you want cohesion and harmony. So the positive intent was to make sure people felt happy and secure, and to try and free people from success and failure by saying: If you worry too much about whether it’s going to work, you won’t do it. 

“A lot of these things - which seem like a good idea - have a flip side...”

The impact however was that by removing all blame from them, I ended up shouldering all the responsibility myself. My intention was to protect the [Engineering] team, to take away their inhibitions and allow them to be as creative as they could be, but the flip side of this was that “we’re all in this together” became “let me take care of everything”.

I didn’t delegate or devolve responsibility. And that only scales up to a point, and that point for me was when I also started taking on emotional responsibility. When, say, someone broke a leg or went through a divorce, I’d say “Don’t worry, I’ll pick you up”!

So a lot of these things - which seem like a good idea - have a flip side. There’s a flip side for you and there’s a flip side for the people you lead. For you, as a leader, you get crushed by all the responsibilities because you just shoulder everything.

The flip side for the people you lead, this very paternalistic leadership style means they’re not empowered to do their own thing. They’re not empowered to take responsibility for their own actions. It meant that there were no consequences for their behaviour or decisions. 

So my biggest learning was, you can’t divest people of all responsibility. No one should be in a vacuum, doing whatever they feel like. As a leader you have to say: “I’d like you to do this, these are the parameters, now please go away and do it. It’s your responsibility, go and sort it out and come back to me when you’re done”, rather than pestering them the whole time or getting in the way and taking on all the burden of responsibility.

You’re not helping anyone. We’re all adults and we have to do our own stuff, own our mistakes, and accept the consequences when things go wrong. That is grown-up behaviour.

How did your environment, the climate you yourself were operating in at the time, impact your leadership style?

It had a big impact. In the early days, you are the leader and together with your co-founders you hold the vision and you say “Come, follow me”, but then of course the commercial reality kicks in, you need money and you need to present yourself to the investor community. That wasn’t my strength.

So you bring in external people and rely on them to do that. That doesn’t always work; your [Founder’s] vision might not always align with the commercial vision and you might see behaviours you feel are not in line with the culture you’ve wanted to instil. 

“During that time I lost my confidence… I really questioned myself.”

I don’t appreciate a very blokey management style, I don’t enjoy working for highly Directive or Pacesetting leaders. These leaders say “do what I say” or “do as I do”. I followed people like that in the past and regretted it. It’s refreshing when you then get a leader like [co-founder and CEO of IOTICS] Andrew and you think: yes I’m happy to follow you, and they don’t let you down.

So now things are very different, but during that time in those early days I really lost my confidence. I didn’t like the prevailing leadership style and the impact this was having on our culture. I really questioned myself. So I put my wings around the team even more to protect them from all the noise that was going on and to ensure they could focus on what we were building. 

“I put myself in the middle like a dad between two arguing children…” 

Conflict resolution became very hard. We’re all a happy family, all happy-clappy, then there’s conflict… Being Affiliative, I want harmony, so I put myself in the middle like a dad between two arguing children, which then means that they have to argue through me. They’re not having a grown up discussion together, because I’m intervening, I’m channelling the messages, trying to smooth the problem rather than letting them resolve it. 

We saw this in the team. Fights would happen. We’d all have a meeting and we’d agree on a way forward, and then as soon as we left the meeting we all forgot what we agreed and went straight back to doing our own thing. Nobody was cracking the whip and saying “we all agreed to do this, so let’s do this”. I allowed other people to make decisions that I thought were bad at the time, because I didn’t want to intervene… or I felt disempowered myself. Or a combination of both.

Codify, clarify, simplifY

So around this time we did a team session where we explored leadership styles…

Yeah, that was a seminal moment in my life. You kind of did this thing: codify, clarify, simplify. 

The codification first: these are the different leadership styles. And you go “Oh, there are styles… Oh yeah, I’m that one.” Then clarify: none of them are right all of the time, but all are right some of the time. There is a flip side to all of them, especially when overused or used in isolation. 

That was the moment for me, the simplification. It was like: Okay, you think you’re doing the right thing, but are you really? And what’s the impact on other people? I’d never looked back on myself like that. And that was the thing: I wanted to be everybody’s dad, everybody’s friend, we’re all in this together and it’s all great. And then you have the unintended consequences...

“I began to realise that I was maKing the situation worse…”

It’s a bit like this: a poorly thought through idea in my head is put into words - badly - by me, it goes into your ears and is interpreted by your brain into different thoughts and ideas. And then we all go: we all got that, right? We go ‘Yes, we all got that…’, but obviously we haven’t all got “that”, we have our own version of “that”.  There we go, that’s human communication for you! 

So I began to realise that… well, what I thought was happening, quite a lot of it was just based on hope. Thinking everyone has got it, everyone is on board, everything is great… But it wasn’t all great and in some ways I was making the situation worse by trying to protect the team, achieving the opposite of what I intended to do.

Repair and Contrast - Flexing our styles 

“With the things I’ve built since then I’ve been much more aware…”

So, what was the impact, what did you do?

I realised I wasn’t the wonderful leader that everyone loved with the heavenly choir above my head! I was failing, I was trying to do too much, taking on too much responsibility… So I overcompensated a bit by taking a massive step back. 

With the things I’ve built since then I’ve been much more aware. So, for example, working with school children it’s quite different. They’re not grown up so you have to be more disciplined at times, provide guidance and structure, be more Directive. I’ll say “stop doing this, do that instead”, and I’ll correct their behaviour “Please don’t play your instruments while I’m talking!” Of course, I say I won’t yell at them… while yelling at them!

You’re clearly tapping into different styles here. You mention being more Directive, and earlier you said you used more of a Coaching approach. At the same time, creating music together is all about having a clear Vision: this is the great musical piece we’re trying to achieve by bringing all these instruments together… Are you consciously aware of flexing your styles?

Yeah, looking at the list of styles again, I’m not overly Affiliative at all in this context! You know, they’re all 15, I’m four times older and they’re way too cool to be friends with this silly old grey-bearded guy. So, I still focus on building trusted relationships but with clear boundaries.

Also, having said earlier that I haven’t enjoyed working for Pacesetting leaders, it can be a useful way of establishing credibility quickly. For example, when I first came in I said, “Hi, I’d like to come and help with the band. I play a bit of saxophone”, and basically they all ignored me, thinking “who is this guy with his saxophone!”

Only when I showed that I could not just play, but was actually good, could I establish myself as someone they were happy to take the lead from, who could credibly say “do as I do”, be the best you can be; this is your band, mums and dads come to listen to you, not me. So you need to do this, and you’ve got to be good.

Credibility is not the same as trust though; just because I can do something doesn't mean I can teach you! So Pacesetting can be a helpful tool in certain circumstances, similar I guess to being Directive, but the real key is still in your ability to coach and inspire them.

Different again from the Repair Café, where I’m the Founder but I don’t see myself as [needing to act as] the leader. Everyone is there because they want to do it, they’re driven, motivated, grown up. They’re also volunteers, so I don’t tell them what to do. That’s kind of freeing.

So I’m not really leading it, although to start it, you do need a purpose and a vision; that’s the thing that allows everyone else to come along. But you don’t have to be dictatorial about it. It’s about aligning our visions, not about aligning everyone behind my vision. They all have their own reasons for wanting to come along. 

Connecting The Dots - Leadership Styles and DiSC 

OK, one last question! We also rolled out DiSC across IOTICS and you came out as a strong ‘i’ (influencer). How do you feel that relates to your leadership style and how you engage with people? What’s the overlap or the connection?

Oh blimey! Let me have a think, what are the styles again… S is all about being supportive, steady, perhaps not the people who’d push themselves forward for leadership roles, but they’re the people who the people that do push themselves forwards turn to for support. That would be my interpretation anyway.

C’s are all about detail, they’re direct and precise, they make decisions based on information and facts, and D’s say “I’m right, you’re not” and they move fast, they’re decisive and dominant. So it feels to me like a Jeff Bezos would be a C leader, whereas an Elon Musk would be a D leader.

“there’s a clear connection with my Affiliative leadership style…”

So ‘i’ then… We’re all about people. I think we can struggle in leadership roles because we sometimes have to be the bad guy and we want everybody to love us all of the time. That’s not conducive to saying: “Right, we have to make some tough decisions, so I’m going to have to fire you…”  But we can all move around a bit, you can step into your ‘adjacent’ styles. It’ll make you feel uncomfortable but an ‘i’ could be a ‘D’ for a bit, or an ‘S’…

We’re also a mix of several styles though. We may have a dominant one but we all have some characteristics of one or two of the other styles too. Knowing that can help us change our approach depending on the situation. It’s just that when we’re in an environment where we feel forced to pretend we’re something that we’re not… that can be pretty detrimental.

Yeah, you’ve got to find somewhere where you can be you and people appreciate you for what you bring. If you blagged yourself into a job, pretending to be somebody or something that you’re not - which I’ve done in the past - you’re gonna be uncomfortable and you’ll hate it, you’ll feel the pressure, because you can’t pretend to be somebody else all of the time…

With the ‘i’ style, for me there’s a clear connection with my Affiliative leadership style… I just want people to like me and that can be a weakness. For me, it’s also perhaps based in a deep insecurity… And it makes me think about something else too: I’ll take on a lot of different things, so that people will think I’m wonderful because I can do, like, 26 different things at the same time - although none of them very well…

You do those things because you love them. And you do them well because that’s where your heart is… But there are perhaps other things that you keep getting involved in - things that don’t make you happy - simply because people ask you and that makes you feel wanted…
Yeah, there’s more than a grain of truth in that… Maybe I should be a bit more honest about that… Something for me to ponder on… 

And with that I left Mark to attend to one of his 26 things…