Someone outstanding and inspirational in a world gone mad

EVERYONE in her extended family received an email from Maeve this week about instituting a new Kris Kindle approach to Christmas giving within the clan. Each was told which brother/sister/cousin for whom they were to buy. Each was told the price they were not to exceed. Any queries were to be directed to Maeve, although, reading the email, it was difficult to imagine where additional questions would come from, since the instructions were delivered with such succinct clarity.

The communication was timely, taking people off the hook of multiple gift purchase in a tough year. The entire operation was “typically Maeve”, those involved admitted, with that roll of the eyes that suggested they, too could be equally organised if they didn’t have so many other things weighing them down. But, since they DID have so much to deal with and so many costs, coming up to Yuletide, fair dues to Maeve for putting the whole Kris Kringle operation together so effectively.

It showed shrewd observation of a system new to that particular family, but applicable, nonetheless. It showed a capacity to simplify complications down to a couple of easily-fulfilled instructions. And – because they knew her – each recipient knew that, nearer the time, they’d receive a reminder email from Maeve.

Her family may ruefully describe Maeve as a control freak, but they acquiesce in being controlled by her, for three reasons: 1) It’s easier than doing it themselves, 2) They know her systems work, 3) She is persistent, never taking no for an answer.

People who don’t know her might figure, based on a first-glance assessment, that this was just a pretty girl very much into fashion. Wearing the right clothes for every occasion is important to her, certainly, and her refusal to accept any advice on what she should wear, (even from her glamorous mother) is instinctive and absolute. People who work around her, on the other hand, know that, once dolled up for the day and once she has a great pair of shoes on her, she’s capable of running General Motors a hell of a lot better than it’s being run. In a war, if you wanted to take the Isle of Man, you’d just have to point Maeve at the Isle of Man and it would be yours by teatime.

Maeve is an organisational leader for whom people are the raw material for action. Like her father, (a builder), she doesn’t talk for the sake of talking, but – again like her father – when she DOES talk, what results, among the listeners, is a shared understanding of a strategy with clearly devolved roles. Allocated one of those roles, her people find it easier to give in than give out, and – although neither Maeve nor her father would ever promise this to their teams – quickly come to appreciate the great satisfaction in working within tightly choreographed collective action.

Before she became a manager herself, Maeve would have watched the teams working for her father moving into a building site like an army – each knowing what the other does and the pace at which the other works, each knowing their own tasks and the standards to which they must be performed, each co-operating with the man to the left of them and the man to the right of them without even thinking about it.

She would have stood in grave silence in the background while her father persuaded a client that the client’s chosen course of action was wrong and that there was a much better way to achieve the same end result.

Watching him and listening to him, she would have learned that a personality like a Panzer exercised with relentless good humour backed by substantial experience and defensible data can change the mind of even the most obdurate individual. In any situation where the possibility was open to her, she would have instinctively chosen the leadership position, having seen both her parents, in totally different ways, pulling together often challenging personalities and welding them into a successful team.

It didn’t do her management prospects any harm, either, that her Da adored her. Women with strong relationships with both parents but who are close to their fathers are over-represented at the top in business and entrepreneurship.

She will probably do an MBA in a few years, because she has always liked studying, but long before she enters that programme in the Smurfit Business School, she has the practical understanding around which the academic theory will fit.

She’s a living contradiction of the kind of training prevalent in business over the past few years, which conjoined leadership and likeability in an unquestioned and frequently unproductive partnership. This model of the leader as a kind of therapeutic pal of the led is often reinforced by the use of instruments like 360 degree feedback, which necessarily tend to drive towards the average and acceptable, rather than the outstanding and inspirational.

In the next few years, that’s not the kind of leadership this country will require, whether in the public or private sector, the voluntary or commercial areas of Irish life. It was OK when times were good and pickings were easy. It’s useless in an emergency and it’s a complete waste of time in the chronic emergency conditions we will face in the next decade.

The days when boards of directors took themselves off for three nights to some five star hotel with spa and golf course to discuss mission and vision statements for their operation are long gone and with luck will never return. The idiotic statements, of course, will hang around on the walls and websites of companies, each awash in pompous aspirational generalities like “We strive for excellence while creating a culture of mutual respect”.

Maeve would never have had any interest in that sort of time-wasting waffle. If subjected to a 360 degree process, which, thus far, hasn’t been her fate, she would take whatever action was necessary to ensure it would not be an obstacle to her further progress up the corporate ladder, while keeping to herself any scepticism she might feel about the system.

She would never consciously seek to be liked by colleagues. It wouldn’t occur to her. She’s charming. She’s pleasant. But she’s not in the popularity business. She’s in the delivery business. Every day, in every way, she delivers on expectations. Her OWN expectations.

It may sound crazy, but I’d offer this (real) girl a job tomorrow, confident that she would get on with it while silently observing what went on around her, and maybe the day after the upcoming bank holiday, would go to the managing director with three proposals which, if implemented, would make our company more profitable.

It’s not going to happen, in the short term, no matter how convinced I am that she – and a handful of bright sparks like her scattered around the country – will rescue the economy.

But the obstacle to a job offer is only a temporary problem.

Maeve will grow out of being nine years of age.