Footdown helps Mike Veale to realise his ambition to be a better leader
Mike Veale is the kind of policeman who inspires instant confidence and respect. The type of person you’d want to take command of a major terrorist incident, or a fatal road or rail crash. Not that he’d particularly appreciate the comparison, I’m sure, but for someone of my age, grounded in the wholesome values of Dixon of Dock Green, he represents all that is still great about the British Police Force.
I interviewed Mike in his sunny kitchen back in April of this year, just after he’d successfully completed the Strategic Command course, a pre-requisite for positions at Assistant Chief Constable (ACC) level and above. He was just about to embark on a round of interviews for an ACC position and has, just recently, secured the ACC job in Wiltshire.
Mike had been a member of The Esher Fifteen, lead by James Dubois, since June 2007. Unfortunately he’d had to resign temporarily while he waited to see where he would be working next. Just after leaving Esher Fifteen, Mike wrote James Dubois a thoughtful and thought provoking letter of thanks for all of the support he’d received from James and from Footdown’s CEO, Mike Roe, himself an ex-police officer. So the purpose of the interview was to probe some of the points Mike made in his letter and to learn a bit more about the man.
What was it about Footdown that made you think it could help you to become a better leader and develop your own leadership style?
Partly because of Mike Roe’s influence, Mike has coached me for 20 years or more, during which time I’ve always gone to him for guidance, support, advice, telling off, counselling, you name it! And then he joined Footdown and he opened my eyes to the potential of mentoring and coaching, as well as to the group-learning scenario, where you can share your experiences with other senior people in both the private and public sectors. You discover that other people share some of your vulnerabilities, weaknesses or strengths. You can learn from one another, interact in a safe environment and just open yourself up to a whole new level. I decided to give it a go.
Mike’s decision to join a Footdown group was reinforced by his experience of doing team development work with another Footdown leader, Josie Payne, who now leads the Cotswold Fifteen. “We obviously did something right because we were seen as a very strong, cohesive team and we delivered fantastic results.”
Presumably you were able to be open in a way that would have been difficult within your day-to-day working environment?
Very much so, although Mike has always been a confidante, as well as being a coach and a source of support.
In the (monthly) Esher Fifteen meetings you always learn something about yourself and the meetings have been quite cathartic. They enable you to release some of the pressures and tensions away from the working environment and in a sterile and safe place. It is a form of release because you realise that you are not the only one going through some of the pressures and tensions that exist at a high level.
One of many things that I have learned, as a leader, is that the higher up the organisation you go, the more you operate in a goldfish bowl. You are under scrutiny 100% of the time for every decision, every statement that you make. And it’s a lonely place. So to go away to Esher to offload some of these problems has been really helpful. I come back enthused and motivated and with a greater clarity of purpose. And I’m held to account by Roey (Mike Roe) and James (Dubois), and by the other Footdown members, so I can’t hide.
What about the level of commitment needed to take full advantage of what Footdown has to offer? Leaders like you are busy people.
You’ve got to be committed to Footdown because, without it, you won’t get the value and, while it will be a place where you can build up networks, it’s not just about that. It’s worth making the commitment because it’s about how you develop as a senior leader. It’s about understanding yourself, understanding your strengths, your weakness and your vulnerabilities and how you manage and develop them. You can also use the experience to manage other people. I’ve now moved into trying to coach, mentor and support other people and so Footdown has been a fantastic vehicle for me to pass on, to others in my team, some of the wisdom and the wise counsel I have received.
You mentioned both resilience and emotional intelligence in your letter to James. What was it about the group experience, in particular, that helped you achieve these vital leadership qualities?
Let’s deal with resilience first. For years I tried to deal with ambiguity, deal with tension, deal with pressure in isolation, thinking that I can save the world and thinking that I’ve got to be at work for 16 hours a day. So one of those Footdown moments, when the lights came on, was when Risner (motivational speaker, Nigel Risner) spoke to us. He said that what goes on in the boardroom is linked to what goes on in the bedroom. If you’ve got a good home life, your working environment will be better and if you’ve got a poor working environment, you’ll have a poor home life. The change didn’t happen overnight, and I still kept working long hours, but slowly, over the last 18 months I would say, I’ve really started to get it in terms of managing myself, managing the time away, managing home life, not feeling as tired. Exhausted, actually, I would come home on a Friday and want to go to sleep almost straightaway. I would wake-up on a Saturday morning and by twelve or one o’clock I would want to go back to bed again in the afternoon because I was so physically exhausted.
And I was not alone; a number of others in the Esher Fifteen were struggling with the same issue. (Matt Perkins, CEO of SSTL, talked about the same issue in his recent interview and it’s clearly one shared by many leaders.)
Everyone who sat in the Esher Fifteen meetings understood that the pressures and tensions of work have an impact on your life, especially on your home life. So it was a very supportive network for some of the non-professional related issues around work, life and managing your relationships at.
I’ve seen colleagues who have worked long hours and it sets a poor example.
There is no good saying, “Just because I work long hours, you don’t” because that won’t wash. You need to exhibit the behaviours that you talk about. Long hours don’t mean productivity. When I undertook the role of ACC temporarily, prior to the Strategic Command Course, I was working less hours, still too many hours, but less hours and finding myself equally as effective when compared the extra three hours I would’ve done in the old Mike Veale world.
So bringing you to that change was a combination of challenging speakers like Nigel Risner and also sharing the experience with other people in the group?
Yes and Jim McNeill, another speaker from Ice Warrior, said all senior leaders should keep 10% to 20% in reserve for the emotional crises and the organisational crises that you’ll go through. You should be operating to 80% emotional capacity so that you’ve got that extra 10%, 15%, 20% in your tank.
We’ve talked about resilience, what about the emotional intelligence part you referred to in your letter?
I always thought I was emotionally intelligent. We all do, don’t we? We all know what causes our emotions to run wild and we all know what causes pressure and tension, or do we? No, probably I didn’t actually.
Let’s go back to 2005, when I was promoted to Wiltshire from Avon and Somerset. I moved as a Detective Superintendent with 20 years in Avon and Somerset. I thought I was really good, but I didn’t really make the links between how you manage your emotions, how you manage your behaviours, which underpin those emotions, and the impact it has on others. Mike Roe has been on about this for years and I have always nodded, “Yeah, I get it, Mike. I get it.” But I don’t think I did.
The journey I have been on, since joining Wiltshire in 2005, has been fantastic. I was promoted to Detective Superintendent in January 2005 and then promoted again in December 2005, a ridiculously quick promotion to Head of CID at a time when I was new in the Force, in a culture that I didn’t much like, very male, white dominated, old-fashioned, almost misogynistic. And they were very, very suspicious of me.
So that is when I started to realise that you’ve got to know your vulnerabilities, your weaknesses and your strengths and you need to make sure that you can articulate them, share them and then how to operate and to act. I built up some strong relationships with people around me, my PA, some of my team and I said, “Look, you’ve just got to give me feedback every so often.” My style is very open, transparent, honest, enthusiastic and energetic and I create an environment where people can give me feedback, however they want, without any fear of retribution. That’s the way I operate and that’s the way I build my team, with an open, honest, transparent feeling of synergy and team-spiritedness. I haven’t got where I’ve got today by being good at what I do, I’ve always surrounded myself with good people who work together well, who have a cohesive operating style.
So when we’ve talked in Footdown meetings about some of the organisational issues, staffing problems and other challenges that I’ve faced, it has often come back to emotional intelligence and my communication style. How I feel, how I operate, the impact I have on others and how I manage the challenge of difficult people.
In fact, if I could just sell communication and emotional intelligence to people I would be a rich person! 10% of leadership is easy: process, structure, governance, management and the administration stuff, but it is the inspiration, the motivation and the creativity that is 80% of leadership.
You were an early user of Footdown’s Executive Insight within your team. What impact did this have on the way you work with your team?
We just worked harder at the values. What were our headquarters, CID, here for? What were we trying to achieve? What contribution were we making to the overall force? How were we going to deliver it? How were we going to develop our teams? How we were going to develop ourselves? What investment are we going to make in terms of coaching and mentoring?
So lots of good stuff came out of it. What’s really interesting is that most of the people who were on those teams were promoted and – it sounds arrogant – but I’ve had a small part in developing the individuals in almost every appointment to Superintendent or Chief Superintendent in Wiltshire, over the last five years.
In fact, as testament to this, one of Mike’s deputies in Wiltshire did the Strategic Command Course at the same time as Mike and was competing with him for the job of ACC in Wiltshire.
You were in a coaching relationship before you joined Footdown, but is there something more that the group experience has given you that you couldn’t have got from just being coached by Mike?
The diversity of views and the diversity of experience I encountered in The Esher Fifteen group. I think some people see it as an opportunity to network and get business opportunities, but if you’re there for that then you’re there for the wrong reasons as far as I’m concerned. Others, you can see, absolutely benefited from every minute of every meeting. The feedback, the interaction and the advice they’ve received. Some meetings were really emotional because sometimes you’re getting into the heart of people’s leadership. The feedback is incisive and impactful. I don’t think I’d have got through the Strategic Command Course without the experience of being a Footdown member.
The other thing that Footdown gives you is a wider perspective, a greater understanding, the chance to obtain a diverse set of views, a fantastic learning environment and being held to account for your own personal development.
What it really gives you though is confidence. It is not necessarily measurable, but if you have that inner strength and confidence in your own abilities it adds so much more weight and gravitas to the way you operate within your own organisation.
You talk a lot in your letter about James Dubois. Why and how has his leadership of the group been so effective for you?
I think being a leader of a Footdown group is a role that looks easier than it really is. To take a group of strong minded, very successful people, and in such tense times, and to do it well is not easy. Anyone can chair a meeting, but to do it so that everyone benefits is really difficult.
James is very intent on listening. He has always tried to create a team ethos. He is very generous. You know what you get with James and he is not frightened to say how it is sometimes.
James is also very thoughtful. He is a very good facilitator. He has a subtle and genuine way of giving feedback that’s always thought provoking. He is emotionally intelligent and able to manage lots of sensitivities. We have had some really strong personalities, as always I guess, with almost vitriolic views. But the environment created by James enables you to be very incisive with your feedback. That’s the contract and you need to be honest and you need to know that you’re going to get feedback, even if it might make you feel uncomfortable.
You also talk about Mike Roe and I was wondering what it is about his coaching style that is so effective for you?
Mike is a very good communicator. He is incredibly incisive. He is one of the most emotionally intelligent people that I’ve met. He has concentrated on leadership, and the values and the emotional intelligence elements of leadership for many, many years and I think he is incredibly knowledgeable about how to be an effective world-class leader. I think when he was in the Police Service he was before his time. So he has a proven track record in managing people and in managing performance. He also has a proven track record in supporting and mentoring people. He has the courage of his convictions. And he can deliver feedback in a way that will leave you on an up. In fact, his leadership style is something that I aspire to.
Mike is authentic. He is real. He has been there and done it. He has a communication style that makes you feel at ease. He creates an environment where you can have honest interaction. He is knowledgeable. He understands and he listens. He can translate what you say into some tangible outcomes and he holds you to account.
So what is the one thing you would say to your fellow officers about the experience of being a Footdown member?
What being a Footdown member gives you is confidence. It is not necessarily measurable but, if you have that inner strength 
and confidence in your own abilities, that adds so much more weight and gravitas to the way you operate within your own organisation.
I would come back from some meetings absolutely buzzing. I couldn’t wait to go back to work. I would come with a renewed vigour and energy and the confidence to take on the task that was difficult, or those people that weren’t performing or the individuals that weren’t quite on my wavelength.
Footdown just gives you that extra confidence, strength and energy to tackle your many leadership challenges.