One of the greatest lessons I have ever received about leadership took place in 1993. I was a young and ambitious 24 year old looking to make his mark in a large corporate organisation. I had been at Optus for 2 months when I first met Bob Mansfield – Bob was the founding CEO of the 2nd Australian telecommunications carrier, and even though the company was less than 12 months old,  its impact on the market was immediate, profound, and very quickly it became a large organisation.  At the time, the employees were in awe of Bob; he was like a rockstar – always in the media, representing the company at every opportunity, and when he came to town, people would relish the opportunity to be close to him. He would religiously ‘walk the floors’, engage with the employees, attend Team Meetings, and seek opportunities to serve his team. And what impressed me the most was Bob’s incredible ability to remember names. He would only need to meet you once, and on the next visit to town, if your paths happened to cross, he would proactively greet you by name and engage in a genuine conversation. His demeanour and his approach was engulfed in curiosity, and he created an environment where, in his presence, you felt as though you were the most important person on the planet, at that moment. It was years later when working with a mentor that I realised the lesson that Bob taught so well; as a Leader, it is actually not about you!  Following this realisation, I then reflected on how Bob created this leadership environment, and how the organisation was able to grow so strong, so quickly, to become a very successful company. Here is what I discovered : Continue reading →

With the new calendar year now in full swing, how are you travelling in terms of the progress towards your 2015 goals and objectives? Are you starting to tick off small wins on the list you created in late 2014, or are you already starting to experience challenges, and dare I say it, experiencing failure already? If you are starting to experience failure, that is actually a good thing, contrary to what you may think. In fact, nothing worth achieving, will come easily – it will take work, it will take focus, and it will take persistence. Actually, success will reveal itself only through a series of failures! Now you may be sitting there thinking ‘what is this person on about?’, but stay with me – history is filled with successful people who created great movements, built strong companies, built powerful governments and achieved great outcomes, on the back of failure, and for many of them, many failures.

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A couple of months ago I was fortunate to spend a week hiking and white water rafting in the beautiful Mitchell River National Park, in Gippsland, Victoria. The week was part of my daughter’s Exeat Week for Year 9, where the challenge is for the students to explore and embrace living out of their comfort zones. Spending a week with 13 students aged between 13 & 15, camping in tents in the middle of nowhere, having to carry our food and water, and with no access to toilets and showers, was certainly going to test the boundaries of our comfort zones!

The excitement started on Day 2 when all of us, along with large backpacks and other supplies, had to fit into 2 medium sized rafts for the 3 hour white water adventure downstream. This was the first glimpse I had of the undertones of resilience being developed by the individuals within the group, and the first signs of emerging leaders bubbling to the surface. The logistics of the adventure meant that the students had to work together to ensure that all equipment was loaded onto the rafts in the correct sequence, as well as ensuring that the correct mix of people were positioned at different points of the raft to ensure even weight distribution. The 3 hour downstream adventure resulted in a number of students breaking through their existing ‘terror barriers’, especially when they fell out of the raft amongst the rapids, and realising they were capable of achieving an outcome they originally felt they couldn’t. The looks on the students faces at the end of the rafting was priceless – I could almost see the levels of confidence of the students rise right in front of me.

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Over the last 20 years, I have constantly been intrigued by the responsibility of Leadership and what it takes to build a loyal and engaged team. How do some leaders create teams and organisations that enjoy long term sustainable success, while other leaders build teams that only enjoy short term or periodic success, and suffer from regular attrition and high people turnover? It is a fascinating question and one that was fiercely discussed during a recent Leadership Mastermind session. One of the members of the Mastermind group was sharing a story of a leader in a large not for profit organisation, who was having all sorts of challenges retaining staff – and they could not identify why. The leader believed they were leading the team effectively, constantly seeking opportunities to improve performance, to motivate the team, and to reward performance, but following a detailed analysis, it in fact turned out that his ‘leadership’ was driving his people away. The very things he thought was building a loyal and engaged team, was in fact, building the complete opposite.

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A few days ago I enjoyed a fascinating conversation with a colleague in relation to Leadership, and what actually makes a great leader – how do they think & act, what qualities and attributes do they possess, and what separates a Leader from a Manager? It was a wonderful opportunity to reflect back on the last 20 years and really look closely at the people who had a level of influence over our career and our own leadership, either directly or through observation . We talked about Leaders who lead by example, leaders who were charismatic, who were able to influence people to align around a common objective and lead them forward, leaders who sought to serve others as their default, who would be the first to stand up and take responsibility when things went awry, and would be the first to give others credit for a job done well.

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What does success look like in a big corporate organisation? Is it a high level of Employee Engagement? Is it positive sales and revenue growth year on year? Is it underlying Net Profit? Is it growth in market share? Or is it all of these? Having spent over 20 years in big corporate environments, I have noticed that success can be all of these, and yet it can be any of them – depending on the message that the organisation is looking to deliver to the market and to their shareholders. And the interesting thing about the messaging is that if it seems to change year after year, what message does it send to the real ‘assets’ of the organisation – the employees, and how do they then act and operate in the environment? Is there consistency? Are the results replicable, predictable and sustainable?

I have seen this play out over the last 5 years in a very large corporate organisation, and it has been intriguing to witness – even more intriguing as I have continued to learn more around leadership, Emotional Intelligence, and what distinguishes a good solid company from a great company. Global leadership expert John C Maxwell believes that leadership rises and falls on influence, and when we look at a leader’s ability to influence in a large corporate environment, combined with the level of Emotional Intelligence of the leader, we can gain an insight into the health and vibrancy of the organisation. And when we add the additional layer of ESIP from Meta Dynamics, we can quickly see the underlying patterns emerge that either underpins the organisation’s strong, sustainable performance, or severely hampers the performance, and holds the organisation back. Continue reading →