When I ask groups how feedback should be given, there's always someone who mentions the Hamburger Approach.
This is the theory that you should start by saying something positive (the white bread), move on to what you really want to say – apparently often negative – and then close with something a bit more positive (more refined carbs?).
It's a bitterly cold day and it finally begins to snow. I'm due to take my four-year-old son to an assessment afternoon at what I hope will be his new school, which is ten miles away and in the middle of the countryside. I phone to see if the event is still on and an officious sounding school secretary declares it's not snowing over there.
I strap my son into his car seat. Once off the main road and onto the twisting country lanes, snow covers the road and is getting thicker all the time. I try to balance the anxiety of getting there on time with the need to crawl along in second gear. I try to keep my mood calm and light for the sake of the little blonde boy in the back seat, whose trusting face I can see in the rear view mirror.
At every twist in the road the car wheels lose grip and it takes successively longer to regain control. Then there's a corner where the road dips away sharply and I have no choice but to brake. That's when the car starts sliding.
It's true what they say about scary events happening in slow motion, as I've got plenty of time to register the steep bank on one side of the road and a row of trees on the other.
Somehow I resist the urge to brake. Instead I let the engine stall and the car continues to glide, turning around and coming to a halt facing the way we had come. We've avoided hitting anything and I eventually get us to the school by over-riding any instinct to brake.
I was learning and adapting quickly.
Neuroscience shows us that fear makes us irrational; our amygdala takes charge and short-circuits our capacity to reason and think clearly.
Controlling our fear, shortening the amount of time our amygdala is in charge, is the only way we can respond effectively to the environment.
Senior executives have never been so well rewarded. In the UK it now takes the average CEO only three days to "earn" what the average employee takes home in a year. On top of this, lottery-sized exit packages and gold-plated pensions give those at the top unprecedented material security.
According to The Economist, the average life expectancy of public companies shrank from 65 years in the 1920s, to less than ten in the 1990s. Public scrutiny is increasing and innovation is a source of both creativity and disruption. Whilst a golden parachute might break the fall, life in the C-suite is becoming ever more precarious. In just ten years the average CEO tenure has fallen from 8.1 to 6.3 years and is getting shorter all the time.
McKinsey has published numerous papers linking organisational health with profitability, innovation and shareholder return. So every year the spend on leadership and management development training and change and culture consultancy increases.
Dissatisfaction with the results of all this training and development is on the rise. Employee engagement numbers remain stubbornly low and, depending on the survey you read, between 50 and 60% of staff would fire their managers if they could. According to Deloitte Shift Index American companies are 75% LESS productive than in 1965.
This speaks to the fact that everyone in an organisation has a leadership role in order to harness that effectiveness.
Coaching and consulting: Corporate "C" words?
Have you or your company ever used management consultants?
Every year in the US alone, more than $396bn is spent on management and IT consulting, so the chances are there is a consultant somewhere near you, right now.
A variation of that question is keyed into Google more than 1.2 million times a month.
Do people want to know the difference or are they asking how to be better at what they are doing?
Perhaps you could assess this manager against those leadership steps?
Much has been written about what motivates and drives people.
Perhaps we can condense this all into the notion that at its simplest, what drives us is a desire to feel loved and accepted, to feel physically and emotionally safe.
Down the ages our desire to "be safe" has been reflected in where we choose to live, what we use to defend ourselves and who we choose to care about and trust.
So what does this have to do with leading others in modern corporate life?
Every week I talk to managers who fear they might be failing the leadership test.
Every week I work with teams who feel their managers are not leaders.
So what's the big difference between leadership and management?
Recently I read an article by John Kotter where he spent 650 words bemoaning the fact that people use the terms "manager" and "leader" interchangeably.
This really set my teeth grinding because, for me, this totally misses the point.
In real companies, in real teams, real people want real managers. That's managers who are better leaders.
But what do they mean when they say "better leaders"? What's missing?
@MoyraMackie asks: Do the differences between leadership and management really matter to you?