Event Review

What you missed..."Inspirational Leadership"

It doesn't get much more Thespian than this: Richard Olivier, son of Sir Laurence, reciting some of the finest speeches from Shakespeare's "Henry V" in the basement of the Globe Theatre in Southwark. This was an event designed to give practical advice on leadership, yet it was impossible not to feel a little shiver of excitement as lecturing gave way to drama.

"Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more; Or close up the wall with our English dead!" Not quite the rich voice we've come to associate with the name Olivier. Still, there was no denying the thoroughbred genes of the man before us: hawkish bearing, booming projection, all-conquering posture. Here was an individual sure of himself and of the usefulness of what he was doing. And, as he would soon impress on the audience, such qualified confidence is the key to great leadership.

As the 300 delegates filed into the "The Underglobe" - a large, auditorium beneath the traditional Elizabethan structure on the riverbank - many doubted whether practical lessons could really be drawn from a 400-year-old play. Many also worked in the public sector - unlikely, it seemed, to derive much inspiration from an imperialist warrior-king, no matter how successful. However, all were fans of the plays, and all recognised they would at least come away with a new perspective on some very old management issues.

When the new Globe Theatre opened in 1997, Henry V was its opening production, and Olivier was the play's director. Shortly after the opening run, the artistic director of the theatre, Mark Rylance, suggested the play could be used as a the basis for a personal development course, and Olivier experimented with a two-day workshop for public-sector leaders. "At end of two days, they said everything Henry V did was relevant to modern management dilemmas," he recalls. "The only thing they couldn't get to grips with was sending traitors to the Tower of London, which they were a bit jealous about."

Olivier decided Henry V as a play was an archetype for the development process of any leader, and he broke it down into the following stages:

1. assessing the past and envisioning the future;
2. allocating resources and personnel, then putting the mission into action;
3. hitting the first obstacles to success and adapting to them as necessary;
4. "The Long Dark Night of the Soul," which most leaders will experience during most significant projects, as they wonder if they are the right person in the right position to do the job; and
5. achieving the vision, "turning the battlefield into a garden."

"You won't meet these challenges in every project or necessarily in the same order, but you will hit them eventually," Olivier argued. They aren't purely about strategy, implementation or competency, he added. "They are in fact human challenges and they challenge us to develop ourselves as human beings in pursuit of our leadership goals."

As Henry V opens, we learn the eponymous royal, known as "Prince Hal" before his coronation, suffers from a "dodgy past" of incessant carousing. "One of his first challenges is [therefore] perception management," Olivier suggested. "How do I change the way that people look at me? Because at the moment they're suspicious - they think I'm too young, too inexperienced and will probably bring all my old cronies from the pubs into the throne room. His decision is to make a sacrifice."

In the play, Hal chooses to sacrifice a friend, Falstaff, the fat drunkard who has perpetuated the prince's worst, most irresponsible habits. In business terms, such a banishment probably wouldn't involve old friends, Olivier pointed out. Rather, it would involve old habits or "old ways of being". The key thing to remember, he said, was that "leaders can be developed if they know why they want to lead, rather than just having some huge ambitious need to get on top (which leads us to Macbeth...)"

Henry chooses to galvanise his people by launching a military campaign abroad. In the first instance, this means connecting "their individual sense of purpose to the mission", Olivier said. "To do it requires a particular skill called authentic performance: authentic because if people can't see who you are or what you're about when you're pitching your vision then they won't want to follow you; performance because if you can't figure out how to repeat that message many times with many diverse stakeholders throughout he course of the project then, again, people won't want to follow you." He added: "All great acting is authentic: you're aware someone is performing but also that they're prepared for it and have the energy required to deliver."

In Act II, Henry sails for France with a 10,000-strong army and a very simple strategic objective for the first week of the campaign: take the small town of Harfleur on the north-west coast. Three months later, he is still outside its walls, having lost 2,000 troops in combat, with another 3,000 immobilised by dysentery. Yet far from giving up, he delivers the famous monologue beginning "Once more into the breach..." and rallies the troops to victory.

Olivier impressed the London Business Forum by reciting the entire speech flawlessly from memory, with gusto, then switching back into presentation mode. "Henry has to use his imagination because obviously his troops don't look like 'greyhounds straining at the slips'," he pointed out. "Unfortunately, most of us will not have a leader with the same eloquence and willingness to take risk."

To drive home his point, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a limp A4 document, pretending to read from it as he paraphrased the previous speech in the monotonous style of a modern financial director: "We set you a very simple strategic objective in Week One to take this small town. This means you are now running 84 days behind schedule. This will have severe budget implications for the rest of the campaign..."

Too many organisations, he argued, become fixated on the quantitative rather than the qualitative aspects of what they're trying to achieve. By contrast, Henry (or rather, Shakespeare) uses his imagination to paint positive images of the future to his troops, and negative images to the mayor of Harfleur when negotiating a surrender. It's a technique that he uses throughout the play, and one that will become crucial when he faces potential defeat in Act III.

Here, the English attempt a strategic withdrawal to Calais (then under English control) to regroup. However, they are caught and surrounded at Agincourt by a French force numbering around 40,000. Olivier asked the audience to consider how they feel when their business initiatives hit seemingly insurmountable obstacles: "When you're being metaphorically faced down by the 40,000, do you interpret this simply as another barrier to be overcome on the way to inevitable success?"

Henry has his doubts, but he's sensible in his reaction to them, and the ways in which he conquers them before conquering the French. In Act IV he walks around his encampment greeting his exhausted troops (in today's terms, we might call this MBWA, or "Management By Walking About"). He also finds time to talk privately to his brother, the Duke of Gloucester, and uses this as an opportunity to confess: "Brother, 'tis true, we are in great danger." Then he finds time to reason with himself over whether he is the right person to lead the task ahead. "I and my bosom must debate a while; and then I would no other company." In other words, Olivier said, "my head and heart must have an internal conversation before I can hope to inspire the troops."

It is by confronting himself in this way that Henry realises what must be done for the good of his men and his country in Act V. After winning a miraculous victory, he chooses not to rampage further into France but to negotiate a peace treaty, under which he marries Princess Catherine of France and (seemingly) secures a unified future for their two nations.

Ultimately, Olivier argued, a leader is defined by his or her well-placed sense of duty. "We need to actualise ourselves to serve a greater good, to leave the world a bit better," he said. With this in mind, he quoted the philosopher Albert Schweizer, who suggested the only people certain to be happy in life are "those who have sought and found how to serve." Leaders must be honest with themselves, he suggested, confessing that in his own life this meant shedding the lofty theatrical expectations generated by his background and focusing instead on his desire to help train future leaders. After all, he said: "If you don't know what inspires you, it's going to be incredibly difficult to inspire others."