I believe the two main ingredients for successful management are to create a good environment and to pick the right team.

It’s impossible to do everything on your own or control every situation, so you need to put a team together you can trust. At the same time, they need to have their own ideas - it’s pointless them all being “yes men”. People need to be given the opportunity to grow and feel like they can question my decisions and come up with new, innovative solutions.

When you’re at the top, you can’t look up for help so you need to get answers from your team and trust their judgements. I try to maintain the same behaviour towards staff, whether things are going well or badly. People can be fearful of coming to you before the balloon goes up, but an open approach means my team can come to me with issues before it becomes a disaster.

With all that said, it also helps to be lucky. 

Ron Dobson is commissioner of the London Fire Brigade. Read last week’s tip, from Transport for London chief Mike Brown MVO, here.

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