To attract and inspire talented future leaders, CPOs need to rediscover their emotional side
As I meet and talk with other procurement leaders, what is the topic that comes up most often? That’s easy: it’s the need for us to get even more talent in our organisations, and in particular to develop the leaders of the future. I have been trying to understand what we can do about this. And thinking about it has made me question whether we, as CPOs, are really leading our profession in the way we need to.
With our reliance on supply networks growing, procurement and supply chain management is now more important for many organisations than HR. Yet contrast the amount of time and attention our universities and business schools spend on the management of supply chains and suppliers with what they spend on the management of people.
Why this discrepancy? As far as I can see, the supply of procurement and supply chain thinking and courses from our educational institutions will follow the demand from our children – today’s school leavers and the leaders of tomorrow – to enter our profession. Our leadership role is to create this demand.
Lance Secretan is an academic, author and practitioner best known for his work on leadership theory and how to inspire teams. He talks about leadership as “not so much about technique and methods as it is about opening the heart. Leadership is about inspiration – of oneself and of others. Great leadership is about human experiences, not processes. Leadership is not a formula or a program, it is a human activity that comes from the heart and considers the hearts of others. It is an attitude, not a routine.”
For me, two parts of this quote really resonate: “leadership is about inspiration – of oneself and of others” and “it is a human activity that comes from the heart”. Are we, as CPOs, inspiring the procurement leaders of the future to enter our profession? Are we inspiring more potential leaders from other business fields to work in procurement? Are we really inspirational role models?
(Admittedly, one of my sons at the age of 10 did once say that he might follow in my footsteps when he was older – I think he may have been swayed by the fact that I had just returned from a business trip around Asia. But even then procurement was very much a third choice behind professional footballer and spy!)
Yet, I know that excellent role models do exist in our profession. Indeed, I have met and been inspired by a number of procurement professionals in recent years, not all of them at CPO level. It’s just that we need more of them and we need far more people to see and hear them in action.
As part of my own company’s efforts to develop talent, I recently went back to Neil Rackham’s negotiation research findings (Rackham is probably best known for his work that led to the development of the Spin selling methodology, but he also did some fascinating research into the differences between good and great negotiators, with good and great defined by the outcomes they achieved).
As part of his work, Rackham looked at the amount of time spent in negotiations on seeking and sharing information compared with the amount of time spent seeking and sharing feelings.
The good negotiators, he discovered, were spending around 20 per cent of their time in negotiations on feelings, but the really successful ones were spending double that. How many of us can claim to be at 20 per cent, let alone 40 per cent?
As we “grow up” and pass through education and into our working lives, we seem to lose the ability that we had as children to talk passionately and to share our feelings. In short, we are turning down the volume on the very behaviours and skills that make us inspirational.
It’s time, therefore, for us CPOs to cast aside the old behaviours we got used to as buyers. It’s time for us to stop associating ourselves with old favourites such as “keeping our powder dry” and “playing our cards close to our chest”.
It’s time for us to start being seen as inspirational professionals – seeking and sharing feelings, speaking from the heart and, in doing so, inspiring ourselves and others.
In short, it’s time for us, the leaders of procurement today, to take a highly visible and credible step forward to inspire the leaders we need tomorrow.
Ron Jarman (ron.jarman@reuters.com) is head of global procurement at information company Reuters in London
