People
Issue No. 45 - Feb/March 2009
Tough times - leadership imperative
by Roger Ellis
In today’s competitive environment, leaders are besieged by rapid change, a multigenerational workforce and the need to achieve much more with less time and fewer resources.
Without the right skills, this can result in leaders "micro managing” and forcing compliance rather than gaining willing cooperation.
When the work environment becomes negative or too compliant, people often carry the resultant attitude home with them and have difficulty maintaining life balance because they can’t put work out of their minds.
Good leaders manage the processes and lead the people.
The attached chart shows the Leadership and Management Functions and the Five Drivers common to both.
The paradigm shift from “managing” to “leading” in modern organisations stems from recognition of the dramatic affect leadership principles have on organisational success.
Consensus, teamwork, bottom-up idea generation, alignment, loyalty and commitment are just a few of the benefits of the switch from ‘pushing’ people to achieve, to ‘pulling’ employees to succeed.
This is achieved through setting a positive example and developing skills in areas such as coaching, effective delegation and effective communication.
Employee engagement has become even more important in these anxious times because fear and anxiety can cause people to pull back into their shells and think “do nothing wrong” instead of “do the right thing”; and “don’t rock the boat” instead of “take intelligent risks”.
Disengaged employees focus more on the performance of their superannuation than that of their organizations.
Simply put, ‘engagement’ means winning the hearts as well as the minds of employees. It means creating a culture where employees are intellectually and emotionally tied to the company’s vision.
A recent survey asked employees what they needed from their organizations and their leaders in order to be engaged...
