With New Year’s resolutions already fading rapidly, how can we make more impact through our leadership this year? One idea would be to recall your Finest Hour. That moment or season of your leadership when you had to dig deepest, work hardest, and be at the very peak of your leadership capabilities to get the job done. It need not necessarily be your most successful hour for, as we saw with Shackleton at the end of last year, fantastic leadership often emerges in the context of painful failure. However, this often creates a platform for even greater success, and is certainly often defining for the leaders involved.

Identify your Finest Hour, dissect it, pull it apart, and splice it open so that you can discover all of its unique nature. How did you think during that time? How did you act? What were the values that you held dear? What were the decisions that you had to make? Physiologically how were you functioning? What was the rhythm of your life? Who were the people involved? How did the team work together? In other words what were the ingredients that built this Finest Hour? Once identified, allow these to become something of a template for how you lead in the coming year.

One of the enduring memories for the English, and for different reasons the Aussies, was last year’s Rugby Union World Cup Final. I know we English are now getting a bit nauseous, continually going on about the World Cup, but, please, have a bit of grace! Winning Englishmen are rare at the best of times and we haven’t won anything of this magnitude since 1966 so believe me, we’re going to milk this for all its worth.

That remarkable, allow me to say ‘outstanding, world-class, world-beating, stuff of sporting-legend’ performance can teach us some important things about Finest Hours. So much of the focus was on young Jonny Wilkinson, who in the dying seconds scored the winning points. He truly is a remarkable young man, who has an almost robotic consistency when it comes to his kicking. However, in the earlier rounds of the competition he had some off days and missed kicks that he normally would have taken. Steve Thomson, the hooker (our American friends might need some translation at this particular point), normally a player of remarkable quality also had a few off matches that nearly cost us dear. In fact, there really wasn’t a department within the team that at some stage during the championships did not have an off day.

Though much of the attention and the awards have gone to young Wilkinson, actually there was one for whom this was truly his Finest Hour of leadership who didn’t really have an off-day, and that was Martin Johnson the captain. He played in every match, he led well in every match, he led from the front in every match, and right through to the final, with some remarkable, big-picture leadership decisions at critical moments, he led consistently. From no quarter have we heard that he had a down moment, did he ever allow himself to wallow in self- pity, or ever give up hope and expectation of a win. This was a leader who had his Finest Hour and he lived it constantly during that time.

All of our finest hours will be different, however it would appear that there are some familiar ingredients that we find in many. The first, as for Johnson, is consistency. Pure, dogged, just won’t let it go, consistency. There is also the dynamics of building a great team, expressing courage when everything seems to go against you. It involves investing in and encouraging others; taking responsibility when you fail, and apportioning praise when things go well. All of these were certainly part of Johnson’s Finest Hour and were no doubt the same for many of us.

So as we look to the challenges of 04, with the backdrop of a wobbly economy, the fear of terrorism, and a whole host of pressures that are uniquely yours, let us try to lead as fully as possible within the framework of our Finest Hour.

Avoid cynicism, exude passion, and if you’re going to brave - be very, very brave.

Phil Wall
CEO