Tom Burnet: I am definitely a generalist and have been all my life, I’ve done everything from helping to, you know, build houses, to technology, to corporate entertainment, and to me it doesn’t seem to matter. What matters is the style and the tone and the mood you bring to the organization in terms of your collective ambition and what you’re gonna try and do, and the standards to which you hold yourself. 

Lawrie Philpott: Welcome to Leadership Listening, the show where we get inside the soul and stories of leaders of all kinds, public and private sector, not-for-profit, those who lead well and those who hit the leadership wall.

In this episode, I chat to Tom Burnet, a very successful business leader who has gone on the journey from military training to becoming a CEO and now chair of multiple boards. In this conversation, we talk about what he’s learned along the way and explore the role of effective governance and the practical considerations to getting that right.

Enjoy. Be sure to like and subscribe. Put your feedback and ideas in the comments. And for more information, visit our website, leadershiplistening.com.

One of the things that I’ve often thought is that the migration of somebody from whatever level they had before becoming CEO, that migration process is much, much bigger than most people think. In other words, the gap and the solitude of becoming a CEO. Any thinking on that from your point of view?

Because you’ve done it and I think it’s a very big gap that is underestimated by most.

Tom Burnet:  I think it’s a big gap and it’s very poorly 

supported often. Well certainly in my experience. And so shame on me, I suppose, to some degree. But I think helping an individual make the step from, you know, probably, I say probably in normal practice, you would imagine somebody moving to CEO has probably had some kind of MD type position within a larger organization, has been running a P&L  to some degree at least and has had line management experience across people and teams. So, you know, on the face of it. The step between that kind of role and into the chief exec role. You know, the fundamentals feel like they’re not dissimilar. Whereas actually in practice, I think a lot of people, and certainly me included, find that it’s a really significant step,  in terms of the autonomy the lack of guidelines,  the lack of guidelines within what one, can go about one’s business and the seriousness with which one’s sort of careless musings can be taken by others around you. You know, you suddenly become the boss ultimately, and you are responsible for setting the direction, the mood, the tone, the pace, the strategy, and the way things are done around here. And everybody wants to touch your coat tail a bit, and, you know, kind of position themselves favorably with you.  It’s a great deal of responsibility. You suddenly take on, or at least ultimately you take on responsibility for the wellbeing and the careers of the people that have entrusted their work lives at least to working with you and your team. And that hits hard. Particularly, frankly it’s much easier when business is going well, but when businesses are going through, you know, hitting bumps in the road as they inevitably will and things don’t quite go as you plan, you know, that sits very, very heavily if you have to make decisions around people’s lives and,  you know, curtail activity.  It’s tough. It’s tough and it’s difficult to know where to go for help. And I suppose it’s really not until you become a chief exec or I didn’t at least begin to understand the power and the value of a board and having a group of non-execs, or advisors of whatever sort around you, who’ve got no particular skin in the game, apart from your success and the success of the wider business.

You know, aren’t probably there for the money, dare I say it, but are probably there because they’re interested and want to help. You know, they’re probably later on in their careers rather than earlier in their careers. And you can listen to their council and know that they’ve got no ulterior motive other than trying to make you successful.

And,  that’s a really important plank to lean on. Or I found at least.

Lawrie Philpott: There was a time,  earlier in my career when, non-execs were seen, I think as, you know, the old boys club, and I think it was Michael Grade, who said nobody really knows what non-executives are for they’re rather like a bidet. 

Tom Burnet: I think some probably still are. Laurie, I don’t think that’s necessarily completely gone but I think it’s much, much, much less prevalent and I think, and a whole lot of that is on the non-exec. Right? So it’s a two way street. It’s how do you as a company choose to use your non-exec board?

How do you as a chief exec choose to use your non-exec board? And, how do you as a non-exec wish to participate in the management and oversight and governance of the company in which you are trying to help. Or where you are sitting on the gravy train and just turning up for the odd meeting and not bothering to read the papers.

And you know, you see lots of different behaviors across that spectrum. 

Lawrie Philpott: Yeah. 

Tom Burnet: But I can tell you that as a chief exec, you know, newly appointed,  which I was with Lo-Q, which was the first time I’d been a standalone chief exec, Gosh, I relied heavily on my board and there were two directors in particular, my chairman John Weston and one of my non-execs, David Gammon, who put in a huge shift to help me,  and to be a sounding board as we went about, our business in transforming that company.

It was fantastically helpful, but it’s hard. No one teaches you this stuff. Yeah, it’s a bit like leadership in general, Laurie, right? I was very fortunate. I went to one of the top leadership academys in the world, in the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst when I was a little boy and I had some stuff kind of instilled in me, which I at the time didn’t realize was important or was anything other than, didn’t everybody go through something like this at some point in their career? No, most people don’t. And so that learning how to lead and it can be taught for sure, learning how to lead is something which I think we do very poorly as a business community in general.

You see it, you see people who struggle.

Lawrie Philpott: Yeah. A lot is written about, you know, your first a hundred days, your first 90 days. There are some schools of thought that say, actually you haven’t got it. You’ve gotta hit the ground running straight away.

Where would you sit in that? 

Tom Burnet: I don’t think you need to have,  completed your strategic thinking within the first 90 days or the first a hundred days, but I think you need to, I think there are lots of elements of leadership which don’t necessarily involve, being precise about the strategic direction of a business.

The much softer things, which I think ultimately are probably every bit or if not more important around your style, the emotional compass with which you lead and go about your business. The optimism that you try and bring to the organisation the culture that you are trying to engender or promote or to extend, these things you can do from day one. Absolutely. And I think that’s incredibly important that any leader of any type of organization, whether they be chief exec or whether they be, you know, their first management role as a very young, individual in business, early in their career, I think. You can bring your personality and your style that you feel is important to the job from day one.

And I think that’s incredibly important. I think you can refine, you know, what we’re actually gonna do and what are we gonna do different,  in terms of how we go about our business. That can be done over time. And I think that should be a collective because yeah. Why would you think that you know better than lots of people that have been working in this space for a lot longer than you probably have?

Lawrie Philpott: Yeah. There’s a lot also said, perhaps not enough about a CEO migrating in a sense to be a generalist. And of course we see lots of CFOs, chief financial officers becoming the CEO and then not becoming a generalist. Being in a sort of safe harbor of the financial world and in the worst incarnation, then meddling unnecessarily with his or her replacement CFO. So this whole notion of actually being a generalist seems to me to be something that needs to get through a bit more. 

Tom Burnet: So I think this is a really interesting point. I think that there are two very clear school to thought around it, you know, some boards and headhunters when they’re looking for an individual for a particular role will be thoroughly keen on finding somebody with a very precise and clear demonstrable domain experience and a specialist. Others will care much less about that and be much more interested in style, tone and the breadth of managerial expertise and the generalist nature of the individual. I have to say personally, and I would say this ’cause I’m not really a specialist at anything. I’m definitely a generalist and have been all my life. I’ve done everything from helping to, you know, build houses, to technology, to corporate entertainment, to servicing airplanes and to me it doesn’t seem to matter.

What matters is the style and the tone and the mood you bring to the organization in terms of your collective ambition and what you’re gonna try and do, and the standards to which you hold yourself. And then having the wit to make sure that you’ve got people in the room to help you guide the strategy,  in a way which is going to be appropriate for whatever market you’re trying to serve.

And I quite understand that some people fundamentally will disagree with that as a principle or my approach as a principle. And that’s completely fine, but that’s not for me. What’s for me is this idea that, actually you should harness the talents of the people in the organization that you have and get them trying to be as collectively effective and as efficient and as productive as they can be without necessarily having to tell them how many widgets they need to make in an afternoon. Because how the heck would I know?

Lawrie Philpott: Yeah. But if you go back over time, then having, like all of us, I guess, worked for CEOs, without naming names, the kind of things that they get wrong serially, you know in an unself aware kind of sense.

Tom Burnet: Some are invisible. And I think you learn a lot from that. Because I think people need to be led. I think people want to be led. People want to understand how they can, or at least my starting point is always that people come to work to be successful. They come to work to earn money, they come to work to feel fulfilled to some degree and I appreciate this is harder in some jobs than it is in others, but by and large, I think people want to be recognized for doing a good job when they come to work. And I think your job as a chief executive is to make sure that they understand how they can do that. How can they be successful?

What behaviors do you require of them for them to tick the success, you are doing well, box and then make sure that you build an organization which recognizes that appropriately. And where people understand that you as an individual within the whole greater whole are being successful.

So I think if you start with that as premise for leadership and premise for being a chief exec. That’s a great start. I think if you are hiding in an ivory tower somewhere and no one ever sees you and no one understands your vision and no one understands how they can participate, you know, it’s the old story of, you know, what’s the guy sweeping in the floor and the NASA hanger doing, you know, he’s putting a man on the moon.

And that I think is fundamental. That level of communication, I think is fundamentally important. So I think lack of communication and lack of sharing of vision and style is a real pity when people miss that. I think overpromising probably is one of the biggest failures also that I’ve seen, and I won’t name names particularly, but I worked for a public company where our chief executive routinely overpromised and that led to an almighty crisis in the business because the business then tried to keep his promises on his behalf because, you know, they were trying to do their best for him, and also he and others were putting pressure down on the business to do this.

And people started making, frankly, poor decisions, poor decisions in some situations to drive a financial outcome, which frankly wasn’t achievable without making questionable decisions about how they went about their business. 

Lawrie Philpott: One of the things in my sort of stray thinking is that when you get on an airplane you have a right to be well flown by the leader of the airplane who happens to be captain, and there’s a first officer. 

Tom Burnet: Well, let’s blinkin hope so, Laurie! 

Lawrie Philpott: Yeah, absolutely. But when we get into an organization do we have an equivalent right to be well led? 

Tom Burnet: A hundred percent you do. And you also have the right to vote with your feet.

And I appreciate, again, in not everybody’s circumstances that easy and possible. But I think a great and really important part, and I’ve made this mistake myself by not going through this process, is to do whatever research you can about the style and the culture and the tone of the organization you are joining because it may well be that, you know, they’re gonna tell you at the interview, they’re trying to attract you. They think you are a great candidate and they want you to come work for them. And you know, by and large they’ll tell you what they think you need to hear to encourage you to make that choice.

And I think just as they will reference, they, whoever it is, the company will reference you. I think you need to reference them. And I think one of the democratization of the internet, you know, not that you can believe every review you ever read, but it’s now quite possible to get a sense at least of how employees feel about their employer. And I think being well led, being respected, being treated fairly and sensibly and carefully is a right, absolutely, of an employee.

Lawrie Philpott: Is there a fundamental difference then? In the way that one migrates from being a trainee pilot to the pilot of a triple seven, and the similar journey through which businessmen and business women go to become the captain of a bank, CEO of a bank. 

Tom Burnet: Of course, because you’re assembling skills all the time and experience. My point is that you get better at this stuff through time and you get to see how other people. I think importantly, and this brings me to another point about sort of this whole working from home idea. I think one of the things you miss out on is you don’t get to see other people lead and drive a business forward, however they choose to do it, because I think you learn something from everybody and everybody has a slightly different style. Everybody has a slightly different approach. But there are, you know, there’s, there are, there are themes of best practice, I think, across leadership, which, you know, you can adapt to your own personality and your own strengths and your own weaknesses.

And you can backfill with other people to help you if you’re not particularly good at something, for example. But by and large, I think you learn through time. So yes, I think,  a youngster starting in their career might not get it right every time. Somebody very senior in their career might not get it every time, but you’d hope that very senior person would get it right more often than the younger person, or at least would know why they were doing something and would be thoughtful about why they were doing it and understand the implications of it.

Lawrie Philpott: My related point is that, by and large, airplanes don’t crash very much these days. I mean, we just had a bit of a crash in America before that. There was no real commercial crash for nine years. We crash organizations serially.

Tom Burnet: I suppose, flying an airplane. There are elements that you can’t control.  There are weather events, there are mechanical failures. You know, there are extreme failures. But I think to crash an airplane, they have to be very, very extreme. They have to be right at the edge of the envelope of what the aircraft is designed to do. I think within an organization, you know, similarly, there are extreme events that people can’t control. You know, the collapsing of markets, the massive raising of interest rates. There are things that you cannot control as a leader. But of course there are many things that you can control. And I think, um. What do I think? I think businesses crash for lots of different reasons. Some in control, some out of control. I think a lot of it actually does come from from leadership, and from the boss.

Not necessarily the wider market. And I think that often it’s a failure to react. It’s a complacency. It’s a feeling that we’ve done this for years and it’s always worked pretty well, and it’s gonna continue to, and you don’t spot new entrants. So we live in a time of extraordinary advances in technology with AI, just being one little sliver of that.

But, you know, things are changing across our, across our worlds. And I think a huge number of very well established and large companies, unless they choose to react aggressively to that change are going to fade. And they’re going to be usurped by younger, more agile, less encumbered businesses,  that can, you know, reinvent the mousetrap.

And we can see that happening. It’s happening right now all over the world. And so I think a failure in leadership is a failure to react to a great degree on the strategic points. You know, businesses also fail because leaders are just intolerable to work for. So clever people disappear,  and smart people disappear.

And clearly a business is always a team sport, whatever you’re doing. Yep. And you always need absolutely the best people you can get. And I think as I get older I’m reminded every time I go into a business for the first time that it’s always about the people and their preparedness to get stuck into the issues and the problems in a genuine and compassionate and  smart way.

Lawrie Philpott: Tom, you’ve made the move in the direction of non-exec. And in due course chairman, and I just want to go into the governance side of life. It’s not a move that is particularly easy. And there are examples of people who just don’t make it because the differences between those two environments is quite fundamental.

Your are thinking on that kind of dimension of the corporate journey. 

Tom Burnet: I think that’s exactly right. And the world is littered with people that don’t make the transition particularly well, and in my experience, and this is my experience, but in my, in my experience, it’s typically people that, are frustrated executives, rather than anything else.

So people that find it very difficult to stand back from a chief executive and his or her team doing their jobs without choosing to try and do the job for them to some degree. And, and I think that’s the key test, is you have to be able to stand back and accept that a supremely talented chief exec and his team, her team might get absolutely brilliant outcomes and just not do it in the way that you did it.

And that that doesn’t make them better or worse. It might make them, almost certainly in my case, will make them better, but, you know, there’s no, there’s no one single way to do something. There are many, many ways to skin a cat. And, as an a non-exec, your job is to support, I believe, at least, or a key part of your job is to support that leader or that team of leaders operationally to the best you can, leading on your experience of hopefully similar issues, but not to prescribe, not to prescribe the solution you came to when you came to the, when you came to the same situation 10 years ago. And not to think that your way is the only way.

And I think some people I’ve seen make the transition, find that hard. They find it hard not to leap in and try and continue to be the executive as opposed to the non-executive. And the clue is in the title, right? It’s a non-executive job. My view is that you are there to support and coach, offer alternatives, offer opinions, offer advice, but you are probably one of a number of inputs into the discussion rather than the only input into the discussion. And ultimately it’s not your call. It’s the call of the executive. 

Lawrie Philpott: Interesting.  I mean a number of comments there. I mean, one of the things I tell my clients on the governance side is never to give an executive instruction.

Second sort of miscellaneous thought. Very often I’ve seen poor chairmanship skills. Literally chairmanship skills, and a person has actually been elevated to that level somehow. 

Tom Burnet: Mm-hmm. Well, again, there’s no training for chairmanship. Right? You probably learn how to be a chair by watching some other person have a go at it.

Or other people having watched others have a go at being a chair at some previous point in your career.

Lawrie Philpott: who may not be very good of course.

Tom Burnet: Who may not be very good indeed! And you learn and you learn from that. And obviously, you bring your own personality to it. But I have a very firm view about how I choose to chair, and, you know, I won’t deviate from that.

And, you know, I’m sure it chimes with some, and it won’t with others. And that’s fine too because different companies have different personalities and different cultures and different approaches to how they go about their business. And certainly, you know, as I’m now occasionally asked to get involved with different companies that’s the key. That’s the key point for me – is this is an environment in which I can be successful? Is this an environment in which my style will fit? And that isn’t to in any way judge somebody else’s style as being better or worse? Not at all. It’s perfectly possible to be massively successful in a way that I would not be.

Lawrie Philpott: Well, there’s the actual chairing the board skills. But a piece alongside that is actually making sure the board has the right composition. And I often think then at the beginning there should be a conversation, you know, what is our work as a board? And how should we do that? Work well together and spend some time on that kind of thing. Your thoughts and your own ideas about good chairmanship versus the other side. 

Tom Burnet: Well, the first thing I would say is that different companies require different boards. And I work across a range of different types of companies. I work across some privately owned companies, typically by private equity companies.

It will be the owner, but not in every case. Sometimes they’re owned by founders. I work across public companies, operating companies, which are out there, you know, doing their business and growing their companies, but they have a public. Shareholder,  base community rather than perhaps one or two private equity owners and I work across listed investment companies, which are different again. These are companies which are their sole purposes to invest in other companies, probably, or invest in something anyway. And I would say that these boards all have different, slightly different flavors and different compositions.

You know, ultimately though, I think as a chair and as a board, you have a responsibility to the governance. And by that I mean, particularly to your shareholders or shareholder, to make sure that the board is, or that the executive is keeping its promises really, you know, you’ve tasked them or they have promised you that they’re gonna do whatever it is that they’re gonna do. And that your job as the chair and the board is to make sure that they’re doing that and they’re doing that effectively and honestly and capably and to the best of their ability. And occasionally you’ll make a judgment as a chair probably supported by the rest of the board that maybe the team aren’t exactly the right team at that point for that company. And maybe you have to make a change, which is always a difficult thing. But ultimately you have the governance oversight role to make sure that your shareholders are getting what they think they’re gonna get. And then you have an operational support role, which we’ve talked about, you know, a minute or two ago, which is about how can you be one of the inputs into a decision making process around strategy or around composition of a team or around big risk events in a business’s life, like an M and A program or a merger or whatever it might be. So, I think different boards have different requirements of you as a chairperson or as a non-exec director. Some are much more hands-on than others.

Typically, in the private equity world, you’ll be expected to be much more hands-on than you might be in a public company. And in a public company, many of the roles of the board are defined. They’re defined by the governance code, and they require you to have a series of committees and a series of,  activities as a board, which you then have to report on, which are deemed by others much more experienced than I, to be thoroughly important.

So whether that be a remuneration committee, which is thinking about executive compensation, whether that be an audit committee, which is making sure that we’re overseeing the process and the work of the auditors effectively and properly. And that the numbers that we’re publishing are accurate and timely, whether it be the nominations committee, which is making sure that the players on the pitch from the executive point of view of the right people.

And you’ve got the right succession plans in place for them. And of course for your non-exec community. So a lot of these are formalized in a public company and that best practice hasn’t come from nowhere. Now, you may not absolutely agree with every subtlety of the requirement of the governance code, but by and large, somebody very experienced and very thoughtful, has spent a lot of time thinking about these things, and there’s something in it.

Lawrie Philpott: Is there a, a degree of being over polite very often in boards and board meetings? Do we need to be able to have honest conversations, more honest conversations, you know, fundamental conversations than very often is the case? 

Tom Burnet: That’s a, that’s a nice question and I think it’s perfectly possible to be to the point and extraordinarily polite. The two are not mutually exclusive. You can ask very difficult questions with a smile on your face and without being accusatory, it’s perfectly possible to get to the heart of something if something needs to be got to the heart of, without tiptoeing around it. Albeit part of the judgment has to be that you are not, as a chair at least, or as a non-exec, this isn’t your call. You know, ultimately you are trusting this woman, this man to run this business on your behalf, supported by the team and you’ve gotta give them a fair crack of the whip.

And,  but if it seems ultimately that they’re getting it wrong and that there’s a lot of evidence that they’re getting it wrong, then actually then it’s your job as a board to make sure that the team on the pitch are the right team. And if they’re not, then you have to change something. And that can be very difficult, obviously. 

Lawrie Philpott: And it strikes me as well that the relationship between the chair of a board, the senior independent director is a very, very interesting one. Not always carried out properly in the sense that the senior independent director, the SID is an intermediary between the other members of the board both executive and non-executive. And the chair and where the chair needs to hold him or herself in reserve on some subjects. Then you use the SID to push the boat out on whatever that subject is. Is that something that commends itself to you?

Tom Burnet: Correct, entirely, and I’m thinking about the boards that I currently sit on and where I’m supported by.

I have one board, again, forgive me, I won’t mention names particularly, but I have one board where I have an outstanding senior independent director who’s wildly experienced and, has been a very significant support to me. Now, their skillset is very different to mine, but entirely and I hope they feel the same about this, complimentary.

We’re complimentary to each other. They have a very, a very technical skill set. I have a very untechnical skill set, but between us, I think we make a good team. It feels like we make a good team and I know we trust each other very much. And I would happily defer some elements to her should need be, some decisions, some situations to her, just as I’m sure she’s very happy to do the same to me. And so I think the relationship’s really important. And actually it’s interesting. You don’t really, you don’t really find this out until you have to navigate something complicated and tricky. And in the normal course, you know, board work is a delight.

You turn up and it’s straightforward. Frankly or it can be straightforward. It can be straightforward work. It’s more   confirmatory than it is confrontational. You are there to say – Good. Well done. Thank you. Crikey that went well. You know, let’s do more of it. 

And you are being an encouraging positive force, when things go wrong, clearly you have to earn your money and it’s a bit different. And having a good board team, particularly at a SID supporting you as chair or indeed if you’re the SID and you’re supporting the chair, having that relationship,  well formed and complimentary has been superb actually in my recent experience.

Lawrie Philpott: Well, in what I do, I’ve seen lots of things and I’ve also seen the circumstance at least once, possibly more at least once, where the SID has had to deal with an underperforming chair. 

Tom Burnet: It Happens. Absolutely. And somebody’s gotta look ’em in the eye and say, you know what, chum, maybe you’re not in the right job.

And, it’s time to, it’s time to shuffle off. And that’s SID’s job. Absolutely. And you know, every public board, another one of the good disciplines about public boards is that every year you have to do a board evaluation where you mark each other’s home work, and you do a 360 review and you go through the routine of the board’s work.

And bizarrely, I’ve done two of these in the last two weeks. And if you’re in a FTSE 250 an additional discipline is that,  every three years at least, you have to have an external party facilitate this for you. And there are a number of specialist firms that do this for a living. And so one of the ones I’ve done in the last two weeks has been externally facilitated, and that’s really, really helpful actually in understanding board performance and understanding how you’re getting on, because they’re able to bring you some sensible comparator data.

You know, whether it be anecdotally or formally, and they can tell you how they think you are getting on relative to how other boards get on and how the relationships are working. 

Lawrie Philpott: If on your board then you’ve got a couple of executive board members, chief executive and the chief financial officer maybe. Um, is there something then to say as regards the relationship between the non-executives, including the chair? And the executives? `Because very often in what I do, I’ve seen, you know, circumstances where the executives don’t want the non-executives to be kind of visible in the organization without, for example, great warning and people painting the coal before they arrive.

Tom Burnet: That would worry me immediately as a non-exec. Because, you know, why don’t you want us to know people? So, you know, my view is that whilst you would have, probably typically, and certainly in public company world, you would typically have two exec members of the board, which would be the chief exec and the chief financial officer typically.

You know, I would always have in the room, you know, senior P and L owners to observe and to participate and to present their parts of the business. I would always have in the room,  on a visiting basis, the heads of department or, you know, the chief people officer, or the chief strategy officer, whoever it might be, depending on the scale of the business.

And they would always, always come into the room. I would always insist on meeting both formally and socially, you know, as wide a range of the next level of management in the business as possible. And I would always insist on spending some time walking the floors, wherever the floors are and whether that be a hangar full of helicopters or whether that be a room full of desks and monitors and coders. It doesn’t matter. You can just get a lot just by hanging around over a cup of coffee about the feel of the place. 

Lawrie Philpott: Is there also a rule in your book where non-executive board members have a rightful need almost to have conversations amongst themselves without the executive members of the board present?

Tom Burnet: It happens at every single one of my board meetings. So I’m gonna tell a slightly different story. I work for a very large American private equity business and they have a formalized meeting agenda for all of their companies and they invest in many, many companies. And the format is always as follows. And that is that you start the meeting with the non-exec and the chief executive only and you have about an hour with the non-exec and the chief executive. The chief executive bringing you basically the highlights and the low lights.

You then bring in the wider home team, and you go through the ball pack as to whatever is on the menu that month, to get through. And typically you’d programmatically have different people in at different intervals. You’d have the head of HR in every two months, and you’d have the head of strategy in every three months or whatever it might be.

And you’d have a kind of a drum beat of updates from people. And then this private equity company will have a debrief at the end of the meeting, which is again, just the chief executive and the board and the non-exec board. And that’s really just to talk through how people got on, you know, what were our observations of his top team, how do we feel that they did?

And then the chief executive leaves the room and you as a board have a few minutes talking about him or her behind his or her back. Which is a deeply uncomfortable situation for the chief executive, as you might imagine. Or it could be considered to be an uncomfortable time because you know that people are kind of marking your homework.

But I think these things are really, really important. And we do it routinely in my boards. And then also there should be times when the chairman leaves the room and the non-exec board chaired by the SID are talking about the chairperson. And discussing how did he or she get on.

And then it’s time for some honest feedback, by and large. Whether it be, all’s well, thank you very much. Or whether it’s, you know, we felt it was a shame that you didn’t do a bit more of this, or perhaps you should think about doing a bit more of that.

And it doesn’t mean to be too laborious. It could be five minutes, but a rolling critique I think can be powerful and again if you have a forum where your contribution is expected, rather than you feeling, you are having to force an opinion, in a kind of out of sync with the way that the board usually works.

If you normalize that feedback, you’re much more likely to get it. Does that make sense? 

Lawrie Philpott: Yeah, sure. Absolutely. I’m, I’m just circling back now to what we might call leadership education there in the form of an MBA, which always seems to me to have a wrong title, Master’s in Business Administration.

Tom Burnet: It’s not Masters in Leadership, that’s for sure. I did an MBA in 1993 and,  I don’t think I learned much. Nothing about leadership. Yeah, I learned a bit of vocabulary about bits that I didn’t know about, but that was it. And I know how to do a Porter’s five forces and you know, a few kind of basic tools, but not sure how much I learned really, if I’m honest.

Lawrie Philpott: So there’s a, a message from the level of,  non-executive and chairman and, and former chief executive then as regards executive education. And now I speak as one who taught MBA in a Swiss business school, the organization and HR components, both. So I saw, you know, at close quarter for three years MBA candidates. So what might we say about business administration and business schools that no doubt they may well be offended by whatever we say because the academics of this world fight back vigorously, shall we say? 

Tom Burnet: Well, I should say that I’m very grateful for my experience at business school, but not necessarily for the reasons that they would hope.

I think, you know, I met some thoroughly charming and talented people who remain friends to this day. I’ve just been on holiday with one, literally last week. And I left 30 something years ago. And I met a network of people around the world that are my friends that I can call upon should I need for social or professional help,  which I relished. In my career, you know, I hadn’t been to university before I did my MBA, I’d been to Sandhurst, and not been to university first round. So I was intrigued to see what university was about and I had a thoroughly lovely time,  without any responsibility to anyone but myself, and my local publican It turned out. And I had a very social few months doing it. And it taught me a vocabulary. It gave me a confidence in how things might work. And I think for me also, it showed me, you know, I think my course was about a hundred people and I got to see people who come from all walks of life, from all different sectors, you know, but all in kind of junior management roles of some sort.

Most people would, I was in my kind of mid, late twenties. Most people were kind of there or thereabouts, maybe a few bit older, but, you know, average age probably in late twenties, early thirties. And so people, you know, into their, probably their first leadership role and this was them trying to kind of get a leg up. 

And it allowed you to sort of calibrate yourself. Actually, I’d never worked for a big firm, so I hadn’t been able to do that. And it allowed you to be able to look at, you know, the competition, I suppose to some degree. People who might aspire, you know, who you might aspire to compete with and just work out, you know, where you might sit in the pecking order actually.

And so from a personal ambition, you know, ‘what dare I dream’ kind of perspective. For me, that was extremely helpful. So no, I have no regrets at all about doing it. Did I learn how to, did it in any way change how I go about the softer leadership role? Did it change my mind about how I was actually going to lead? Not one jot For me.

It gave me some, it gave me some tools. Which were useful and some experience and some perspective, which was very useful. 

Lawrie Philpott: You got it, Tom on behalf of Leadership Listening, a wonderful conversation. I have a feeling maybe in 12 months time when Leadership Listening is in a different place, we should reprise and see what life looks like at that point.

But for now, thank you very much indeed for a great conversation.

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