Empowerment or enslavement?

At a Christmas gathering, a group of us chatted with “Graeme”, a maintenance engineer on a remote mining site. He described his living conditions and the challenges of fly-in/fly-out employment. When I asked him his standard work hours, he laughed and said his shift was 12 hours (7 to 7). His wry chuckle was, he explained, in response to “standard”. He often worked much longer. On his last “tour”, because the second engineer was unavailable, Graeme one night worked from 7am till 11pm. After finishing, he drove back to camp, showered and got to bed at 1am. At 3am he was awoken by a call from his duty manager, “Steve”, asking him to come back to the mine. A key piece of equipment had failed and stopped production.

At the site, Graeme found that to fix the problem he’d have to work 15 metres up a ladder, in poor light, repairing an electrical cable. This was risky work at any time, but more so as he was fatigued. Steve told him Graeme that he didn’t have to do the work (a second engineer was due at 7am); the decision was Graeme’s.

Graeme was conflicted; common sense, health and safety regulations, and company policy said “no”. But he was new to the site, and was worried about being seen to cause four hours of lost production.

Resignedly, Graeme agreed to do the work, but was very glad when the other maintenance engineer finally arrived to take over.

Most listeners to Graeme’s story thought he made the correct decision. I disagreed. I saw this as a dereliction of duty on Steve’s part. It was his job to make the decision, enforce policy, and protect his team member. Instead he chose to put himself and his company (even though the risks to both were high) above Graeme’s safety.

Afterward, I thought about Graeme’s predicament and realised that this situation, where a manager abrogates his responsibility by offloading it onto staff, is quite common. I’ve experienced this – and am almost certainly guilty of it – a number of times in my career (although not with such potentially serious consequences).

Have you had similar experiences? Why do some managers choose the “easy” (wrong?) option in such circumstances?

6 Leadership Lessons from a K-6 school

A Partnership story

Writing in the Australian Financial Review recently, Tim Dodd highlighted the success of a regional Australian primary school in lifting its scholastic performance.  He tells the story of “the remarkable partnership of a committed principal [John Picton] with an education policy specialist and mum [Jennifer Buckingham]” and how they have helped the school to be “significantly ahead of its peers”.

Lessons from RTPS

This uplifting story of Raymond Terrace PS – a previously under-achieving school in a disadvantaged area of Australia - to me has lessons for leaders in both government and business. These lessons are:

1. Be suspicious of  “common sense”, fashionable or theoretical/ideological approaches to solving complex social and organisational problems
2. Don’t adopt a solution before you understand what is really happening in the particular school (or hospital, or office, or factory)
3. To understand, immerse yourself in the school (or hospital, or office, or factory) and listen and observe - don’t jump to diagnosis
4. Engage with the students, teachers and parents (and patients, doctors, workers, managers) – they want to do better, but may not know how; they need you to help them
5. Entrench a culture of continuous student-centric improvement (customer-, citizen-centric); recognise that targets and performance-based pay produce aberrant responses and destroy pride amongst workmanship in students, teachers, staff and managers
6. Provide funding and resources only when those directly involved understand the problems and have determined how to begin addressing them, otherwise the money will be wasted.

The Core Lesson

John Picton believes that “low-income children are not condemned to perform poorly at school”.  Jennifer Buckingham has “changed her thinking”;  “It’s not a one teacher/one student situation”, she says, “ there are so many different factors which feed into” such complex organisational challenges as scholastic performance.
This is the key lesson for all leaders: to boost organisational performance, first understand the complete “system” from those struggling within it.

The BCA and yesterday's leaders

The BCA and its Plan for us

Much is being made by the Business Council of Australia (BCA) and the business media of the BCA's recent polemic against Australian 'governments', their “Action Plan forEnduring Prosperity”. The Plan has a lot of good content, particularly Part 5: Measuring Success which has a very good 'balanced scorecard' that includes indicators in three categories:

1. economic and material prosperity
2. social progress and liveability
3. sustainability.

Unfortunately, the bulk of the plan is a list of 'to dos' for the federal and state governments, mainly the federal government. Here perhaps a bit of politicking comes in – indirect criticism of the current Labor government and instruction to the (likely) incoming LNP government (despite the BCA's professed political neutrality one can see that the plan is consistent with the views of the conservative side of politics).

Yesterday's men

The biggest, and the fundamental, problem with the plan is its central thesis that what's good for business is good for the nation. This thinking is fifty years behind the times – how can these CEOs consider themselves to be community 'leaders' when their 'followers' have passed them by?

For example, the plan has over 100 mentions of “environment”. More than half of these refer to the “business environment” or similar. The others are predominantly related to environmental regulations and approvals that the BCA wants to be more business-friendly. Only one, referring to the energy sector, relates to business responsibility for environmental sustainability.

The plan is full of what the government should be doing, but little to nothing about what business is and should be doing. One can deduce that the BCA and its members feel that they are doing a cracking job and its only terrible government that is holding them back from achieving their true potential.

Self-delusion

The BCA really wants to be seen as a leading organisation in the Australian community. However, it has succumbed to the self-delusion that it, and its members: know what is good for the country; have the authority to demand that what it wants done, be done; and that their views are correct.

Their success as business people has created tremendous self-belief, which is important in a leader. However, they have fallen into believing in their own omniscience, omnipotence and infallibility.

Leadership lessons from Project GLOBE

What is Project GLOBE?

Project GLOBE is a research project that surveyed 17,000 middle managers from 61 countries to better understand the inter-relationships between societal culture, organisational culture and organisational leadership.  The leadership attributes assessed by the project are:

• Charismatic/Value-based - reflects the ability to inspire, to motivate, and to expect high performance from others based on strongly held core values; such leaders are able to create, or drive the creation of, a vision for the organisation and communicate and model that vision and inspire the organisation to pursue the vision.
• Team-oriented - emphasises team building and a common purpose among team members; this type of leader promotes collaboration and a team-based workplace.
• Participative - reflects the degree to which leaders involve others in making and implementing decisions; such leaders employ inclusive decision-making, they delegate responsibility and don't try to lead by command.
• Humane-oriented - emphasises being supportive, considerate, compassionate, and generous.
• Autonomous - refers to independent and individualistic leadership, which includes being autonomous and unique
• Self-protective – invokes a focus on the safety and security of the leaders themselves; self-centred and self-protective.

The charismatic/value-based, team-oriented, and participative stles are associated with exceptional leadership; humane orientation has some association with exceptional leadership; autonomy may impede or facilitate (both slightly) exceptional leadership; the self-protective style impedes exceptional leadership.

Leadership in the 'Anglo' countries

The following chart shows the rating on each dimension for the Anglo cluster as a whole and for Australia, New Zealand and the USA.

As you can see form the chart, the leadership style preferred in “anglo” countries is charismatic value-based with a need to be visionary and inspiring. This must be accompanied by a team orientation and a participative approach.

Societal culture and leadership

Differences across the cluster are slight, but nuances of leadership style are required depending on the culture of each country. The Project GLOBE cultural dimensions are not described here but can be found in http://www.thunderbird.edu/wwwfiles/sites/globe/pdf/jwb_globe_intro.pdf. The societal practices ('as is') scores and the societal values ('should be') for the Anglo cluster are given in the charts below.

The next chart includes the practices and values scores for Australia.

We can see a desire to be more future-oriented, more gender-egalitarian, more family-oriented, more performance-oriented and more humane-oriented, but with less acceptance of an unequal distribution of power (power distance).

The Australian Leader

WIth regard to leadership, the Australian cultural profile indicates that good leadership requires an acceptance of the egalitarian nature of the society – a leader must be 'one of us' – while not being too assertive and not exhibiting self-serving behaviour. Exceptional leadership in the USA and New Zealand will be similar but not exactly the same due to cultural and values differences. This suggests caution when applying US management approaches in other countries, even other 'anglo' countries.

Crisis in management, not leadership

This month's edition of BOSS magazine (in the Australian Financial Review [AFR]) contains a feature article on Leadership (“Crisis in business leadership”, BOSS, July 12). It's key point is that Australian "workplaces suffer a failure of leadership" according to the executives it surveyed.

It quotes John Lord, Chairman of Huawei Technologies, that Australian companies “focus, as people come up through their careers, on their management ability – are they able to drive a profit or run [the business] most efficiently – rather than leadership,” and that “management skills aren’t as important because you can build the right team around you.”

This distinction between Leadership and Management seems to have become axiomatic. The use of the term “leader” to mean the most senior manager (CEO, MD an so forth) has been supplanted by the concept that it confers leadership qualities on the managerial class. The leader has become a Leader. With this expansion in meaning has come an expansion in the assumed purview of corporate and business leaders. Not only are they leaders of their organisations, but they are national Leaders. Their words of wisdom are sought on public policy and are accepted as being in the national interest, not the narrower interests of their business. For example, the Business Council of Australia states that its membership of “business leaders” has initiated and shaped “the key economic and business reform debates that have underpinned Australia’s economic resurgence”. The AFR itself promotes this involvement by hosting “roundtables' of “business leaders” whose utterances are presented as facts rather than opinions.  By "business reform" the BCA means legal and regulatory changes that benefit business, not reforms to how their members manage their businesses.

My first text book on management (from 1982) states that leadership is an important quality of a manager, yet nowadays leadership is treated as supra-management. This would appear to be driven by two forces. The first is the desire of business people to be seen as having risen above the realm of mere manager to a higher state, from where they are entitled to speak philosophically about Management and advise politicians on how to run the country. The second force is the Leadership industry that has seized this opportunity and happily rebadged its Management offerings to meet its customers' demands. The two are symbiotic.

The evidence from many studies – such as the by the McKinsey-LSE and The Society for Knowledge Economics - and newspaper reports on poor company performance suggests that managers have not yet fully mastered what was previously known as “Management”, particularly modern management skills, the application of which requires true leadership. Perhaps they should focus more attention on the transition from Supervisor to Manager before attempting the leap to Leader.

Productivity - Management or Government

The Australian Financial Review today ran a front page article headlined “Managers blamed over productivity”.

The article is an example of the pointless either/or nature of the argument over the causes of low productivity in Australia and who should show leadership in addressing this problem.

Mediocre management

McKinsey (and others) conducted the survey cited in the article and they found that mediocre management leads to mediocre results – and Australia's score of 3 for management performance on a 1 to 5 scale is mediocre!

The US and Germany are only a little less mediocre.  It would appear that mediocrity is the global standard for management performance.

Attribution error

Managers, like everyone else, seek to blame external factors (government, unions, foreign companies) for poor company performance but attribute good performance to their own capability.  This known to social psychologists as “attribution error”.

On this, McKinsey found that government regulations restrict management action but management capability was the primary driver of company performance and that protection from competition allows poorly managed companies to survive.

McKinsey also stated that a 6% gain in productivity follows from moving the management performance score from 3 to 4.  The Total Quality Management (TQM) movement of the 80s and 90s proved that the level of waste in companies could be the equivalent of 30%-50% of revenue.

Boosting productivity through Leadership

It is clear that if business groups (and economists) want Australia’s productivity to improve they must show leadership and promote modern techniques such as Lean Enterprise.

The government must also show leadership and address restrictive labour practices and boost competition between businesses.

For further information on boosting productivity, please check the Library on my company's website

My personal philosophy of leadership, mentoring and coaching

Leadership skills and behaviours

The fundamental principle of leadership is concern for the success and well-being of followers.  The purpose of leadership is to make one’s followers successful, for through their success the leader will also be a success.  But the well-being of followers is also crucial.  There is no point winning a battle if all one’s soldiers lay dead on the battlefield.

How should a leader behave in adhering to this principle?  Firstly, a leader must always strive to make the ‘right’ decision.  Not just the correct decision, but one that is morally sound.  It is not valid for leaders to say “they had no choice”.  Leaders must not embrace determinism – that is moral bankruptcy.  Having made a decision, a leader must engage directly (face-to-face, wherever possible) with followers to develop a shared understanding, and to help followers make sense of the decision.  In these engagements, the leader must always be truthful and consistent – actions must match words.  Whatever the consequences of the decision, a leader must take responsibility for the outcome, accepting blame for failure while giving credit to the followers for any success.

Secondly, a leader must focus on “making a difference”, not on trivial matters.  Leadership is about leaps, not steps.  A leader must focus on the higher purpose of their organisation’s existence – whether it be to serve customers or a community.  This higher purpose both defines success and unites followers behind a common cause, at the same time motivating followers to strive for success.

Finally, a leader must seek to develop followers, in both their technical competence and their emotional maturity.  This requires a leader to coach and mentor followers so that they may create success for themselves.

Facets of Poor Leadership

There are three dangers or lapses that make for poor leadership.  They arise from a leaders misconception of their own capability.  Leaders fail when they believe that they are omniscient, omnipotent and infallible.

Omniscience

Leaders may suffer from attribution bias – believing that the success of their organisation (business, team, nation) is due to their own knowledge and competence.  Any failure or under-performance is due to external factors (government policy, weather, foreigners).  Leaders who believe themselves omniscient make decisions for their followers and supervise their activity.

Good leaders understand that followers know more of what is the actuality, and that they should be given support and encouragement to take appropriate action themselves.

Good leaders also understand that they are not the only possible source of leadership.  The leadership “need” depends on the context, and a good leader knows when to defer to a “better” leader.

Omnipotence

Poor leaders believe that they can lead by commandment, that what they say must happen will, in fact, happen.  Good leaders understand that this is not the case, and they devolve power to their followers.  This not only empowers the followers but, by placing power where its effect is more directly seen and felt, a leader reduces the risk of accidentally causing “undeserved harm”.

Infallibility

Good leaders accept that they will make mistakes.  They also understand that mistakes lead to improvement.  When accepting that mistakes are inevitable, a good leader takes action that minimises or mitigates the consequences of mistakes.  A good leader is always in control, without needing to exercise overt control.