On the weekend I was browsing online when I came across this story “Culture key to success” by Glenn McFarlane in the Herald Sun.

No it wasn’t your usual Jessica-reading, so get ready for the sports analogy. I’m actually quite interested in sports having played a lot when I was growing up, however AFL is generally not my thing unless it involves good company, beer and some sunshine.

So here’s how the article went:

CARLTON coach Brett Ratten would refuse to pick a player if he found out they had already committed to another club, even if he could be the difference between a premiership and missing out.

Ratten told SEN yesterday that it all came back to culture, and that was as important as anything else.

“I’d move past (the player) and develop someone in that time and if they want to continue their football somewhere else, that’s fine,” Ratten said.

“But they can’t use our time to benefit themselves.”

“I suppose it’s about your club culture and what you stand for against the window of trying to win finals.

“That’s the big call, what do you stand for?”

“I think it’s really critical about creating that culture to make sure that when people come in, they come in for the right reasons, and it’s not all about money.

“Money is not everything.”

This guy, the Coach (i.e. Leader or Manager) is looking for people who are committed to the organisation and the overall goal/strategy. He’s placing those committed players in front of others, irrespective of whether they are the ‘favourites’ or ‘stars’ that have been pegged to win the match.

He’s openly talking about culture, its importance and asking his players to question what they stand for.

Tick. Tick. Tick.

This Coach knows a thing or two about engagement. He knows that money isn’t the key motivator and it won’t get him or the team the success they are after. He knows the importance of culture and wants his players to explore how their values and goals align with that of the organisation.

Best of all, he’s willing to tell the star to stick it if he’s not going to be a team player. I wish all Leaders felt this way because we’ve all worked in businesses where someone is allowed to get away with murder because they are the leading salesperson, they bring in the big bucks, they are well connected or well known in the industry.

Anyone you might send this article to?

Goffee and Jones say that the main body of literature on Leadership talks about the characteristics of leaders and that is gives it a strong psychological bias. I’m sure we can all think of a few, and we may have also been witness to discussions on whether a person can learn to be a leader or whether they are simply born a leader.

However, have you ever considered Leadership to be a relationship?

The underlying assumption is that leadership is something we do to other people. But in our view, leadership should be seen as something we do with other people. Leadership must always be viewed as a relationship between the leader and the led.

The point? There is no magic recipe or list of characteristic that can make someone an effective leader. It’s not one way. It’s about the relationship between the leader and their followers. After all, a leader is nothing without followers.

I’ve finally gotten around to reading “What got you here won’t get you there” by Marshall Goldsmith that I picked up at the AHRI Convention. Can I say that I loved every moment of it and after seeing him speak, I was reading it and in my head I could totally hear him saying every word.

The best thing about this book is that it can apply to everyone, and that you can take things out of it for your work life and your personal life. The book talks about challenges in interpersonal behaviour and focuses on twenty bad habits that we need to stop doing rather than typical leadership traits that we need to start doing.

The twenty bad habits are:

1. Winning too much
2. Adding too much value
3. Passing judgement
4. Making destructive comments
5. Starting with “no”, “but” or “however”
6. Telling the world how smart we are
7. Speaking when angry
8. Negativity, or “Let me explain why that won’t work”
9. Withholding information
10. Failing to give proper recognition
11. Claiming credit that we don’t deserve
12. Making excuses
13. Clinging to the past
14. Playing favourites
15. Refusing to express regret
16. Not listening
17. Failing to express gratitude
18. Punishing the messenger
19. Passing the buck
20. An excessive need to be “me”

Now when I first heard Marshall speak at the convention I saw a lot of these bad habits in myself, particularly in my personal life. After doing the LSI a couple of years ago in my second job out of uni I think I have really valued feedback and knowing how I come across to other people in the workplace. However, not so much in my personal life. When I heard Marshall speak a few months back, I vowed to make some changes and I have made some ground. Reading the book again was a refresher that there’s still a way to go.

In any case, in reading this book I was reminded of a person that I used to work for and report into. Let’s call him Jake. Now Jake was a bit of a jerk, and I’d like to talk about some of the things that he used to do and hear about times when you’ve had to work with Jake the jerk yourself.

Here are a few examples from Marshall’s list.

No. 8- Negativity or “Let me explain why that won’t work”

Marshall defines these people as those that are “constitutionally incapable of saying positive or complimentary to any of your suggestions. Negativity is their default response. You could walk into their office with a cure for cancer and the first words out of their mouth would be ‘Let me explain why that won’t work’”. People in senior positions often do this to insert themselves as the senior critic.

Well this guy was a Negative Nancy, Debbie Downer, a perfectionistic and a control freak all wrapped into one. I tried to remain positive and respectfully challenge his way of thinking on a number of occasions. Crunch time came when he wanted me to implement a plan that he had written and distributed without me even seeing. I’d done my homework and had my plan written for the year ahead and put it to him for his input (being the bigger person I thought). He essentially dismissed it, saying that it wouldn’t work and it couldn’t be put to the senior staff. He then said to me “now here is a perfect example of what I was talking about the other day. You just don’t listen. You need to do what you’re told and implement this plan”. It was an a-ha moment for me.

I had thought ‘this guy probably hasn’t managed people before’, I’ll be patient with him and he’ll warm to my positive responses and he’ll at least meet me halfway soon. After that comment to me all I could think of was that he was a massive egotistical jerk that was not going to listen to anything I had to say.

No. 15 Refusing to express regret

Marshall says that people often think apologising means we’ve lost, its a humiliating process and means we are giving up power or control, however that refusing to apologise causes about as much ill-will in the workplace as any other interpersonal flaw. He says that “People who can’t apologise at work may as well be wearing a t-shirt that says ‘I don’t care about you’”.

After this conversation with Jake, it made me think about all our interactions together. I knew that apologising was important and I thought back to times when I’d forgotten to tell him about something that was happening that he probably should have been across. It was unintentional, but nevertheless it was something that I apologised for. He had never apologised for anything he had ever done, even when he’d majorly stuffed things up.

Once he came in and barked at me that I needed to organise an interview with person X immediately. I did as he asked. Later right before the interview, we received some feedback on this person and the senior staff did not want to proceed with the interview on that basis. He then sent me an email CC’ing in senior staff saying that this is something that I really should have looked into before I organised the interview. There were major things like that, and minor things like constantly booking me into meetings without my knowledge (or even checking my calendar) and leaving me double booked. I was surprised when I reflected that he had never apologised for anything. This led me to my next point.

No. 17 Failing to express gratitude.

He had never said anything positive or even encouraging to me.

Marshall says that “Gratitude is a skill that we can never display too often. And yet for some reason, we are cheap and chary with gratitude- as if it were rare Bordeaux wine that we can only serve on special occasions. Gratitude is not a limited resource, nor is it costly. It is abundant as air. We breathe it in, but forget to exhale”.

I’m really big on this, particularly for staff in typical support or administrative roles in a business. They are often seen as dispensable resources , when in reality they are the engine room that keeps things going. They are often the staff that are not engaged, yet other parts of the business demand discretionary effort from.

It’s not hard to say thank you when someone has done a good job and should be a skill that every leader posses. At this point in time I was thinking ‘why am I putting in so many hours and so much effort when this guy just acts like a jerk and doesn’t appreciate anything I do?’

Which brings me to the question- what would you do in the same position and how have you conquered working with your very own ‘Jake the jerk?”

In creating HR Club Sydney, I’ve been very fortunate to be able to meet a number of very amazing and passionate individuals. I also regularly get invited to events that are happening in Sydney, and am free to write my thoughts on these topics. After all, I don’t make any money from HR Club Sydney, I’m not reliant on boosting traffic to my site and I don’t get paid to say certain things. It’s great because I feel that gives me the ok to say when I think something or someone has done or is doing something cool.

With that said, the week before last I was invited to the Proteus Leadership Networking Breakfast where HR Club Sydney was fortunate enough to be given a table.

I got the opportunity to sit with some of my favourite HR Club Sydney people and it was fantastic to see so many cards being swapped and potential career opportunities being discussed.

I also wanted to write about the presentation because well I thought it was fantastic, and apologies it’s a wee bit later than I would have liked but I wanted to do it justice.

I attended this seminar at a time where I was thinking very much about leadership and what it means to be one. Within HR we know the difference between leadership and management, but it’s important to remember our friends in the business don’t always see it our way. This presentation hit the nail right on the head and I’m hoping many of us can use some of these ideas to create change in our organisations.

These are some of my key take outs (and you’ll probably be nodding your head or shouting hallelujah with me lol!).

Richard started off by talking about how people normally fall into management roles, rather than being selected for their people management skills. Familiar story particularly in areas of technical skills or ability. What happens then is that people with bad managers either leave or try to wait for them to leave. We all know about how employee engagement impacts upon people and the business- so why is it still happening?

I love the Peter Drucker quote that was used, “The only definition of a leader, is someone who has followers”.

It’s so true. Being Gen Y, I have often got the attitude from Managers that I should do exactly what they say because they are the Manager/Senior Executive/Partner/Director/Been here a really long time etc. And that’s not to say that being young means you can walk around doing what you like or thinking you know everything- but it begs the question: without people actually wholeheartedly following what you are doing, how effective are you as a leader anyway?

Richard also mentioned the work of Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones who are Europe’s leading experts on organisational culture, leadership and change.

They are past winners of the prestigious McKinsey Award for the best article in the Harvard Business Review, entitled, “Why Should Anyone Be Led by You?” The huge interest the article generated led to a five-year journey exploring authentic leadership and their book is the culmination of that research.

Just because you have the title or “authority” it doesn’t mean you will have people onboard. It’s not an entitlement- it’s a privilege to be a manager or a leader but some people these days just don’t get it. Some even believe that that is the way people should be treated because “they were treated that way” or “that’s how it is in X industry”.

4 words.

Doesn’t make it right.

Source

Richard talked about how autocratic leadership may have worked in the past, but that Gen Y just simply won’t put up with it. Will they complain? Probably not. They’ll just vote with their feet.

In looking at a definition of an autocratic leader, the wikipedia machine says that:

Under the autocratic leadership style, all decision-making powers are centralized in the leader, as with dictator leaders.
They do not entertain any suggestions or initiatives from subordinates. The autocratic management has been successful as it provides strong motivation to the manager. It permits quick decision-making, as only one person decides for the whole group and keeps each decision to himself until he feels it is needed to be shared with the rest of the group.

In the great words of Dr Phil “How’s that workin for ya?”

So now that we are all nodding our heads in unison, the real challenge is to get this message across to the decision makers of the business. Would love to get some discussion happening in this, and let’s keep it on topic. It’s not Gen Y versus Baby Boomers/Gen X etc.

It’s about leadership and what’s going to be effective.

Also- Richard was a fantastic speaker so check out his presentation here
Breakfast Followrship NSW

2010 Leadership Breakfast Series

Proteus is a leadership and management training organisation which holds regular networking breakfasts which also includes a seminar. A lot of their work is around creating great leaders and positive work cultures.

I’ve been given 6 free tickets (at a value of $49 per person) to share with HR Club Sydney for the next seminar on 14th July in Sydney, at the Hilton. So if you’d like to join my table on the 14th, please leave a comment via this blog and tell me in 25 words or less why you would like to come

You can find more information on the Leadership Breakfast Series here, and it operates in various states- not just Sydney.

Hope to see you there!

Yes well it feels like there is a lot of focus on women and leadership at the moment. Julia Gillard became Australia’s first female prime minister Thursday after Kevin Rudd lost favor over mining disputes and his shelving of climate change initiatives.

So for the Women of NSW we now have a female Premier, Kristina Keneally (@kkeneally), a female Governor-General her Excellency Ms Quentin Bryce AC and now Julia Gillard is our first female PM.

This comes at a time when there is a lot of talk about the level of women in senior leadership roles in Australia, calls for mandatory quotas for women on boards, paid maternity leave for all and again pay equity.

Are we at the point where things are starting to truly shift? Keen to hear your thoughts. I’m not sure to be honest. Sometimes it is hard to differentiate whether people are doing things because they feel obliged or because it looks good, as opposed to believing it is actually important. I think if all these conversations continue to gain momentum, we’ll get there.

On that note, I’d like to share a few things that you might be interested in.

Women, Management and Work Conference

Macquarie University’s Women, Management and Work Conference, on 29-30 July 2010, will be a place to canvas solutions to increasing the number of women elected to parliament, appointed to boards and senior management positions and achieving salary equity.

Leading women speakers will be discussing equal opportunity in the workplace and strategies to achieve higher levels of women in leadership roles throughout Australia. It will encourage and inspire women to succeed in the workforce.

Conference co-chair Melanie O’Connor says, “The conference has been running for 22 years, yet 22 years later we are still looking for solutions to these intractable issues. Although many Australians do not want to hear it, gender continues to act as an insidious barrier.”

“Research by Associate Professor McGraw published in The 2008 Equal Opportunity for Women in the Workplace Agency Census highlights some alarming statistics which show that women do not form the majority in any category of senior job position in any industry in Australia.”

“Not surprisingly, not a single industry in Australia pays women more than they do men and most pay them less.”

“In 2008, there were four female CEOs in the top ASX200 companies in Australia or two percent, down from three per cent in 2006. 106 companies in the top ASX200 do not have a single woman on their boards,” said Ms O’Connor.

The conference will include presentations, round table discussions and workshops encouraging audience participation run by influential Australian leaders.

Topics discussed over the two days include: how to get on a board, how to get on an executive team, coaching and mentoring, promotion and development in your job, balancing the risks and rewards as well as inspiring leadership success stories. This year also includes topics on starting your own business.

There are over 20 inspiring and leading speakers including:
· The Hon Tanya Plibersek MP, Minister for Housing; Minister for the Status of Women

· Brigadier Simone Wilkie AM, Director General Training, Headquarters Forces Command

· Heather Ridout, Chief Executive, Australian Industry Group

· Andrea Grant, Group Managing Director Human Resources, Telstra

· Mia Freedman, Journalist, columnist, author and media consultant

The Conference Directors are Associate Professor Peter McGraw, high profile management consultant Melanie O’Connor and Pam Morpeth.
Date: 29 and 30 July 2010, 9am – 5:30pm
Where: Sofitel Sydney Wentworth, 61-101 Phillip St, Sydney
For more information and program details visit: http://www.lmsf.mq.edu.au/wmwc
To register visit: http://www.lmsf.mq.edu.au/wmwc/register_now

You might also like to follow them online:

Web: http://www.lmsf.mq.edu.au/wmwc
Facebook: Women at Work Australia
Twitter: @womenatworkoz
Posterous: http://womenatworkoz.posterous.com/

New Blog- Coping with Jane

Jane Coupland has started her own blog which aims to share the “boom chicka wah wah of fabulous women”.

Jane says “Imagine if we all had access to what makes female innovators and the most influential women of present day, tick. Who would these individuals be, and is there something they could share with us that we could take away and use?”

She will be working towards providing lifestyle and career insights of modern day heroines from the community.

She is also interested in being a megaphone for fabulous 30+ women!

I encourage you to check it out and provide suggestions to Jane if you know any fabulous women with stories worth sharing.

Women in Business Blog

I recently came across the women in business website (I think on twitter or LinkedIn) and thought that there might be a lot of people interested in this. It’s a pretty cool little community where you can engage by signing up as a member on the blog, you can participate in the discussions on LinkedIn, start chatting with people on twitter or become a fan on facebook.

To give you a better idea of what the site is about, the manifesto below pretty much sums it up:

Embrace doing business online
Connect to a likeminded community
Promote your business by sharing value

Clare Lancaster also runs a five week online training course which teaches you the principles of online marketing strategy, SEO, social media and email marketing and how you can apply them to your business.

Finally, one of my favourite females Christina Aguilera has just launched her new album Bionic and I would like to share one of her songs. It’s just beautiful and she often sings about the strength of being a woman.

Have a fantastic week everyone!

In continuing on from problems that smart, successful people have, Marshall Goldmith talked about adding too much value as a leader recently at the AHRI National Convention.

He said “I’m young and smart and enthusiastic and I come to you with an idea. You think it’s a great idea. Rather than just saying ‘great idea’, our natural tendency is to say ‘That’s a nice idea, why don’t you add this to it’. The problem is the quality of the idea may go up 5%, my commitment to executing this idea may go down 50%.”

Photo Source

Interesting thought isn’t it? Many people often do this with their kids, but it is extremely common in the workplace with younger staff.

Marshall said a good thing David Ulrich has taught him is that the effectiveness of execution is a function of a) What is the quality of the idea? Multiplied by b) What is my commitment to make it work?

We get so wrapped up in trying to improve the quality a little bit, we may damage the commitment a lot.

Something to consider in the way that you mentor staff.

I’m very pleased to announce our next HR Club Sydney Event which will be the third for 2010. It’s great to keep the ball rolling and with so many in attendance last time, I hope we can keep building the local HR Community. Save the date- 8th June- Level 5, 88 Phillip Street, Sydney.

One of the aims of HR Club Sydney was to provide a place where local HR people could meet in a casual environment and share experiences. Another aim for me was to provide access to some of the top HR resources available and provide it to people for free. It may be that you are early on in your HR career or you just don’t have the budget to attend all the conferences you’d like to. My hope is for people to be able to read and hear from others what the key takeouts were and start a discussion, or to provide you with the access to those speakers for free.

This is why I’m excited about this one. In case you don’t have the budget to attend HR Summit this year, I’ve managed to secure Muffy Churches from A.S.K Learning to present a case study around developing the learning roadmap for an award winning program they developed with Siemens Ltd. The award in question is actually the highest honours in the LearnX Asia Pacific Training Awards 2010 for Best Leadership Training Program. Very impressive!

Why should you attend?

Well there will be information shared on the training needs identified, key objectives of the program and how this complete approach provided a long term solution, as well as addressing cultural transformation around people management.

The second half of the presentation will be an interactive session of a simulated training rollout. Muffy will take you inside a sample roadmap and experience two key training moments along that timeline; such as live leadership training activities including: a) Experimentation with the Coaching Model “GROW”, and b) The adaptation of conversation to various personality styles.

The session will be fun and highly interactive and can be used as an example as a model for developing your own internal learning strategies and roadmaps.

Learning Points

• See how a major transformational strategy map can grow organically from one key internal pain point.
• Understand the importance of aligning learning initiatives to business goals and getting buy-in from stakeholders at all levels.
• Move inside the strategy map to experience a critical learning piece.

Muffy Churches Biography (GM, Performance Skills – A.S.K Learning)

Muffy Churches Bio

Muffy is the principle developer, designer and facilitator of A.S.K Learning’s performance skills courses and employee development programs. She combines over 15 years of soft skills training, executive coaching and facilitation across three continents.

She is renowned for her preparation, enthusiasm and the ability to provide the linkage between conceptual models and practical business outcomes for participants and their companies. Muffy’s energetic style and ability to involve all participants in the training journey has delivered outstanding results for an array of blue-chip organisations such as Qantas, Dell, Canon, Siemens, Westpac, Telstra, Bayer and AMEX to name but a few.

A special shout out goes to Jane Copeland for this one, as she’s helped me out with organizing another great speaker for HR Club Sydney (for free!).  To find out more about award winning L&D strategies that are working, for global companies such as Dell, Siemens, Canon, Commonwealth Bank, Toyata and HP you should connect with Jane via LinkedIn. Even if you don’t have the need now, its good to keep up-to-date with what’s going on that space.

Finally, if you have a speaker that you think HR Club Sydney would benefit from, don’t hesitate to contact me. Although I understand everyone works for a business, the idea is to share information and learnings through things like a case study- not a hard sell for your product so please keep this balance in mind if you have a suggestion for a speaker.

Otherwise- I hope to see you there!

Some time ago last year, I blogged about attending the Human Synergistics 11th Australian Conference on Culture and Leadership.

Being fond of the Human Synergistics tools, I love these conferences. They are a half day, they are free and you get to hear real people talk about their personal stories using the tools. Amazing success stories.

One of the main stories I spoke about was that of Mike Shove (former Managing Director and CEO of CSC Australia). You might recall from the post that I said I thought it was possibly the worst circumplex I had ever seen.

Mike was a highly engaging speaker and it’s excellent to be able to share these presentations via Human Synergistics Video Room.

Mike Shove- an honest, funny and descriptive account of the LSI Journey from a CEO's perspective

This is one you really need to watch!

Good morning and happy Wednesday to everyone. Just felt like sharing a recent HR win at my workplace. The Climb isn’t over yet- but it is rewarding to get the feeling that things are starting to shift.

I’ve been working really hard on culture here, and by that I mean how we do things. I could use a number of HR buzz words, but really when it comes down to it- that’s what it is all about. There was room for improvement in the way we did things here so I started with the leader’s onsite.

I started out with an awesome presentation on leadership and management (or so I thought). We had a brief discussion (or ranting session of 1.5 hours) and then I asked them all to volunteer to do an LSI assessment.

Yeah it got shot down and they left frustrated that I didn’t understand what they were experiencing. I did acknowledge the hardships and frustration, but perhaps this didn’t come across very well. Additionally, I was pretty firm on the fact that it didn’t matter what was happening- nothing excuses poor behaviour towards others in the workplace. Many argued that their behaviour was out of their control- personality is all down to brain chemistry and that this was a form of brain washing. Surprisingly, they agreed to do the LSI and I booked in the debriefings.

The debriefings were held in two sessions and again it brought another barrage of complaints. The passive-aggressive were convinced that the culture was fine the way it was and the passive-defensives argued that their angry/hostile behaviour was a product of the environment and conditions they were placed in. I kept on with my stance that they had to work with things that they could control, and find ways to cope with those that they couldn’t.

I really like this point, and try to remember it when I get stressed:

God grant me the serenity
To accept the things I cannot change;
Courage to change the things I can;
And wisdom to know the difference.

However, I did wonder if I was wasting my time at this point.

They did raise an interesting point though in their debriefings. “Why should we demonstrate this behaviour when we aren’t seeing it from the leaders above?”

I responded saying that I agreed it would be good to see it from the top. In absence of that (from their own perceptions) I argued that it would be great to lead as the example here and push this positivity upwards. They left grumpy and I thought about what I could do.

Next steps: I got the very Senior Leaders to complete the LSI and they have agreed to share their results with the others. They will explain what they need to work on, and encourage others to create a development plan based on the findings from the LSI.

Then an executive was going to be onsite for a few days so I asked him to speak to the leaders here. It was amazing. He spoke about all the changes that had been happening and plans for the future. He apologised for the lack of communication and explained how he intended on communicating in the future. He acknowledge things were tough but reemphasized the need to act as role models at all times. Great conversation and the leaders walked away (my own perception) feeling listened to.

Finally, with Bully and Harassment training refresher training due I thought let’s roll with this top down thing I am trying to get happening here. I put together the presentation but didn’t want it to be a HR tick-in-the-box kinda compliance thing. I wanted it to be thought-provoking, sink in and tie into all the stuff we’d been talking about behaviour.

So I asked one of the leaders to present it to the rest of the group and it was a really positive experience. He put it into their language, they talked about their own experiences and then we talked through some cases studies.

At the end of it, I put it to the group on how we would communicate this to the other staff and they volunteered to present the message to their groups with my support.

Such a different attitude to the ones I started with. I’m very excited to see a shift happening and hopefully it’s the start of more changes to come.