Leadership With Attitude by Kirsty Hayes

Leadership With Attitude
By Kirsty Hayes

"When it comes to attracting, keeping, and making teams out of talented people, money alone won't do it. Talented people want to be part of something they believe in, something that they can believe in, something that confers meaning on their work and their lives." - John Seely Brown, Xerox PARC

Business leaders today need more than MBA's and technical qualifications to optimise business results. They need a tenacious attitude, a defined set of values, and an ability to engage people.

Although management practices are important leadership is vital to an organisation's success. So what is leadership?

Kirsty Hayes, founder of The Performance Attitude, a leadership and organisation development company based in Victoria, Australia defines leadership as the ability to engage people in creating a legacy of excellence through environmental and socially responsible practices.

A lofty definition you may think, but considered it incorporates important elements of both the function of leadership and the practices of management.

A leader does not achieve results without the engagement of people, and people only deliver when they believe in what they are doing. A leader today is expected to engage people in evolving and refining the organisation so that it is meaningful for and meets the needs of all stakeholders.

As a generalisation, commonly people want to be involved in creating things that live on after they have gone, regardless of whether they are a leader or not. Part of being human is the desire to be remembered for something one has achieved in one's life. And it is through the process of creation that ownership is applied; the same ownership that leaders around the globe desire in their followers. With ownership comes commitment.

Commitment is more than simply buying-in. Buy-in is transactional, conditional and often short-lived. People are inclined to withdraw their buy-in much like they do money from an investment if they are not happy with the current state of play. That is to say, buy-in occurs when there is direct benefit to the person, and is only maintained while that benefit continues.

Commitment however has longevity. It can only be achieved once a person is enrolled in the activity, and people will only enrol when their values are aligned with the activity and values of the organisation. Enrolment is unconditional and therefore the commitment that ensues is lasting and remains despite challenges presented over time.

What is achieved is no more important than how it is achieved. The "what" must be something that the achievers are proud of. It must be to a standard that they consider to be "excellent" so that over time it is easy to deliver more, and if required defend that which was achieved.

"How" something is achieved often distinguishes between sustainability and fad, between quality lasting relationships and superficial relationships, between repeat business and one-off transactions. The age-old cliché "how you act speaks so loudly people can't hear what you are saying" sums it all up according to Hayes. It is not enough to just deliver the easily recorded metrics for an organisation. If this is the organisation's sole focus then it will always be caught in the cycle of trying to recruit and retain staff, trying to deliver more with less and getting less, low morale, resistance to change, and many other human related issues that stunt performance.

In this day and age where the profession of leadership no longer exists but where managers are expected to fulfil the function of leadership, in addition to the tasks of management, how they go about the business of leading is vital.

As eluded to earlier, business leaders face many challenges, not least how to retain quality employees; how to ensure employees are committed to the organisation and its activities; how to transfer knowledge throughout the organisation; how to have a minimal footprint on the planet's ever dwindling natural resources; how to sustain and grow the business; and how to please all stakeholders, to name but a few.

With such challenges pressing there is a greater need than ever before for leaders to develop their personal skills at least as much if not more than their professional/technical skills.

Daniel Goleman coined the phrase Emotional Intelligence in his book by the same name. Since then there has been a huge focus, a significant amount research done, and a vast amount of material penned on the topic of emotional intelligence. Simply put leaders today are expected to develop the type of thinking an intelligent and emotionally aware person demonstrates, because the research is overwhelming in demonstrating how much more effective such leadership is over the traditional command and control management styles of the past.

According to Goleman and his associates the skills of emotional intelligence are (briefly):

Self-Awareness: Knowing one's internal states, preferences, resources, and intuitions.
Self-Management: Managing ones' internal states, impulses, and resources.
Social Awareness: Awareness of others' feelings, needs, and concerns.
Relationship Management: Adeptness at inducing desirable responses in others.

The application of these skills ensures the leader evolves their organisation into one that is not solely results and objective driven, but that also has a strong set of values, which employees commit to and which customers respect. The culture created by an emotionally intelligent leader far outperforms those that are created by task-masters and bottom-line junkies.

"Staff are loyal not to a particular boss or even to a company but to a set of values they believe in and find satisfying", says Goran Lindahl, CEO of Asea Brown Boveri.

There are many organisational factors that impact achievement of objectives. Some are related to lack of skills and knowledge, and some to process. Both of which can be addressed relatively easily. Other factors relate to the attitudes of people within the organisation and the ensuing culture.

Successful business leaders harness the attitudes of people, and encourage the right attitudes to dominate. Skills and knowledge it is understood can be taught, values and attitudes are more intrinsic, yet often the things that make the biggest difference in performance. Attitude is in the control of the individual, and generally considered not something easily trained. It is for this reason leaders today are being encouraged to recruit for attitude and values more than aptitude.

Figure 1 illustrates four different types of business cultures.

The Quadrant 1 Culture: The organisation is in trouble. Its staff turnover is likely to be high. Error rates are likely to be increasing. Business results are below expectation and trending downwards. People are not engaged by their work and burn-out is rife. This organisation needs a complete review. As per the cliché if you want to change the culture then you either change the leader or you change the leader! At least then you can begin afresh. This type of organisations needs to review and redefine why it is in business, what it wants to achieve, how it wants to grow, and therefore how it needs to go about achieving such objectives in a sustainable way.

The Quadrant 2 Culture: In this organisation results are being delivered and only outputs are rewarded. How the results are achieved is irrelevant. Just deliver! In this type of organisation people are not valued but are treated like machines and are expected to deliver maximum performance consistently. There is no room for the normal acceptable variances of human behaviour. There is little teamwork, a lot of competition within the teams and across the organisation, and performance is transactional - if you do X, I will give you Y.

In quadrant 2, business units act as if their results are more important than the collective and if they are achieved at the cost of another business unit they do not care. Of course they fail to realise in such a case the organisation does not actually gain! Burn-out is common in this type of organisation. Loyalty is transactional. Results are unsustainable. Skill development will not help the culture of this organisation. To achieve optimal performance and maximise the outcomes leadership needs to be reviewed, human resource systems changed to put an equal weighting on how results are achieved (the values), as well as what gets achieved (the objectives).

The Quadrant 3 Culture: The values are clearly defined, understood and demonstrated but the businesses objectives are not being achieved. In short it is a great place to work, people are living the organisation's values, demonstrating the right attitude. However in a quadrant three culture objectives are not being achieved. The solution may be to review the 'performance support systems' within the business to identify what part of the business system or process is hindering performance, or what skills and knowledge are absent and what training or development will address the skill deficiency. Not an ideal culture but workable as people in this type of organisation have the right attitude and are committed to perform.

The Quadrant 4 Culture: The ideal organisation. The values are clearly defined, understood and demonstrated, and the business is achieving its objectives. In short it is a great place to work, people are living the organisation's values, people are engaged, and outputs are optimal. People recognise objectives have to be achieved and how they go about achieving the objectives is vital to the performance and sustainability of the business. Employee turnover is optimal, knowledge is being transferred across the entire organisation, people are committed to the values and reputation of the organisation.

Leaders today ought aspire to build the type of organisation outlined in Quadrant 4; a values-based business delivering optimal results.

Values are not a soft issue. Too many are quick to dismiss them as fads or corporate gestures-likening them to mission statements that state the boringly obvious; but used in the right way, values are a vital tool to bring about unity and a sense of purpose in a working world full of change and ambiguity.

Organisational goals (specific targets that help to realise a vision) are not values; neither are mission or purpose (the fundamental reason for existence); nor should values be confused with vision (a picture of the intended future). All of these are important to the organisation and are what makes that organisation unique. Values are the foundation on which the above are built. Values are the guiding principles that drive the way the company operates - everything it does - at a level that transcends tactical or even strategic objectives.

A values-driven business is an organisation that has an explicitly stated set of values or guiding principles that drive the business, and which take priority over short-term profit maximisation.

With so many of today's businesses focusing on the return to the shareholder, it would seem difficult to quantify the return to the shareholder that a values-driven business could offer. Yet research suggests that values-driven businesses enjoy important advantages over other organisations in a number of areas, including:

Staff selection, development & retention
Motivation, and achieving alignment between organisational & individual goals
Change & crisis management

Jim Collins' book Built To Last provides comprehensive examples of how values-driven businesses outperform the traditional, hierarchical, and silo dominant organisation.

Defining a set of principles is just the beginning. To get the benefits, an organisation has to live and breathe its values. It is necessary to make the connection between what the employee and the organisation are trying to achieve. That requires the translation of the organisation's values into something individuals can put into practice during their everyday working lives. The leader is the most watched person within the organisation and so it is vital he or she model the values in everything they do. The leader ought to hold conversations about values around every context and confront people not demonstrating the values.

Corporate values and individual values must be linked. Companies that use values most effectively invest the time and effort to help employees identify the common ground. The stronger the bridge between organisational and individual values, the more direct the link with business performance.

Organisational values need to become actionable behaviour that individuals can live in their everyday working lives.

In their book "The Leadership Challenge", Barry Posner and Jim Kouzes assert that shared values:

Foster strong feelings of personal effectiveness
Promote high levels of company loyalty
Facilitate consensus about key organisational goals
Encourage ethical behaviour
Promote strong norms about working hard and caring
Reduce levels of job stress and tension
Foster pride in the company
Facilitate understanding about job expectations
Foster teamwork.

As talent management continues to be a challenge for all businesses attracting and retaining the best people is a vital issue for successful companies. As the competition for skills increases, values-driven businesses appear to have an edge. A company that clearly expresses its values enables future recruits to decide whether that organisation would be right for them.

Values have two critical roles: a company that articulates its values enables potential recruits to apply a degree of self-selection. Values also provide a framework to match individual career goals with the organisation's objectives.

Values offer a foundation upon which loyalty and trust can be built. If employees identify with the values of a company they are more inclined to trust the organisation- and to give their active commitment to its objectives.

One attempt to quantify this effect estimated that disloyalty from stakeholders can reduce performance and productivity by as much as half. Research by John Kotter and John Heskett of the Harvard Business School found that companies with a strong culture based on a foundation of shared values outperformed other companies without this type of culture by huge margins. For example:

Their revenue grew more than four times faster
Their rate of job creation was seven times higher
Their stock price grew twelve times faster
Their profit performance was 750 percent higher

Employees care most about what they do every day and who they do it with. They care about the content of their work and whether there are opportunities to stretch and grow in the job and in the organisation. They want feedback, recognition, and respect from their bosses. Employees who are excited by the company values, are people who are highly motivated to work in the company style. This gives the business momentum and competitive advantage.

If the leader does not engage employees at the values level he or she is doing the organisation a huge disservice and may in fact be costing the organisation far more than the returns they deliver.

Alignment holds the key to the values-driven business. There needs to be a degree of alignment between the values of the company and those of employees.

There are two levels to the alignment issue. At one level it is about how our working lives align with the other parts of our lives. The other level is about how employees behave at work.

Companies must pay attention to the values of its employees. However, on the other hand, employees need to be aware of their company's values. A win-win situation needs to be created, where organisational values and individual values mesh. To achieve this the right leadership is vital.

It is not enough for the senior management to simply pay lip service to the organisation's values. To obtain the benefits they must live them every day. Anyone can pluck some values out of the air, write them down and pin them on the wall-some companies have done just this. The hard part to building a values-based business is living the values and standing by them through thick and thin.

Companies should be absolutely clear that the values they articulate are truly the ones they believe in.

Getting organisations to change is a huge challenge. The older and bigger the organisation, the more entrenched the culture, the greater the challenge. And to compound matters, traditional approaches to organisational change are no longer effective in today's dynamic, even turbulent environment.

There is a body of research that indicates change efforts based on the traditional approaches to change management fail 70% of the time, and this is because the "reengineering" focus takes precedence over the people. The problem stems from a few people (usually in senior management positions) trying to 'stamp their mark' and 'control' people, resulting in the change initiative floundering and becoming just another fad.

What gurus, change practitioners, and changing companies alike are learning is that timely and sustainable change requires work in all aspects of the organisation (system), from everyone in the organisation. For change to be effective it must be consultative not imposed, and it must be well communicated.

Being "told by management" how to behave is not enough to carry the organisation's vision through into behaviour change. As American change guru Mark Maletz says of cultural change initiatives, "History shows that managers and frontline workers alike will resist your best laid plan. A few will openly fight it. Many more will ignore or try to sabotage your plan. If you don't have a strategy for winning people over you can forget about your change programme."

The human dimension in every organisation is incredibly important. People provide the greatest opportunity for achieving what is possible. And to achieve what is possible Hayes recommends systematically including people in the change process by engaging them at the values level, and then build their capacity for handling turbulence through personal development.

Hayes uses the metaphor organisations are like bonsais, not machines. She advocates organisations are NOT like machines where mechanics or engineers can enter and remove parts, replace parts, tighten nuts and bolts, and generally tinker with the system. In an organisation this approach stifles performance, creativity and initiative.

She asserts organisations are like bonsais. They need nurturing, feeding, shaping, and fertilising to flourish - and like any living thing they take time to mature. She believes that if more leaders would take on board this metaphor and tend to the organisation like a gardener does a bonsai the organisation will produce fruits in the form of performance, creativity and initiative.

The most successful change programmes are based on the belief that knowledge and wisdom exist in the people. Not just a few people, but all people. Throughout change the values of the collective need to be surfaced and harnessed so people can anchor the things that matter, ensuring the 'baby does not get thrown out with the bathwater' and giving some level of stability in an otherwise chaotic world.

Change programmes that succeed assume the people are responsible human beings who want to learn and create their own futures. Successful change comes from engaging people in the organisation in making choices about what is best for them.

When people see the possibility of contributing to something larger than themselves, they operate differently. They make intelligent, informed contributions to substantive decisions. Leaders that recognise this take time to explore issues and opportunities with employees in the context of the values of the organisation.

For some managers, especially those that are products of a 'command and control' culture, the idea of involving employees in change initiatives is difficult to grasp and often very threatening. Yet this is where a manager really needs to draw on their leadership skills and live up to the values of the organisation. This is nearly impossible if the managers have not for themselves defined what the values mean to them at a behavioural and decision-making level.

Some of the outcomes of involving all levels of the organisation in a change initiative are elusive to measure (breakdown of silos, communication, morale, employee contribution, etc), yet much of the high leverage results come from addressing how people interact, how people perceive, how people communicate, how people behave, and how people process information.

For successful change to occur people must face each other rather than concepts, expert advice, or assumptions about what they lack and should do. Instead of trying to change the world or each other, they must learn to change the conditions in which they interact. Everyone needs to gain an understanding of others assumptions, perceptions and viewpoints by working closely with each other. Assumptions and the status quo must be rigorously questioned and everyone must be active in creating an organisation of their choosing.

With a systematic approach that involves everyone, people will take down the walls, take control of their futures, and take back responsibility for themselves. They will discover that they can learn from and work with people from many walks of life.

How the leader models the way is critical says Hayes. Everyone talks about the bottom line in an organisation but tend to consider this only in financial terms. Hayes challenges leaders to consider that the bottom line is also behavioural and that if people behave "below the line" they are headed out of business.

When pushed to define this jargon, Hayes talks about leadership demonstrating a learning attitude and presents us with a Learning Attitude model of communication, the OAR versus BED model:

In this model, all behaviours can be defined as "above the line" or "below the line". Neither behaviour group is "right" or "wrong" but the results they produce are significantly different.

Leaders must model "above the line" behaviours and support everyone in the entire organisation adopt these. This she says is the distinction between mindful organisations where people engage in thinking as well as delivering, and mindless organisations where people check their brains out when they get to work and go about their day operating similarly to a moth on speed - flitting frenetically achieving little.

Today major changes are necessary to survive and compete effectively in business. Change demands leadership, and this leadership must be at all levels within the organisation. Leadership is not positional; it is a way of being. Often some of the best leaders within an organisation hold no such title but work loyally alongside colleagues turning life's negatives into positives, providing regular and ongoing feedback, by offering legitimate give and take, and by supporting teams through close communication.

Few people are natural leaders. To be a successful leader, one must tap into their values, skills, knowledge, experience, and technique. Each person will develop their own style; each leader has unique qualities. The key is to foster and support those people who show leadership qualities and who demonstrate the values and attitudes of the organisation.

Leaders with attitude can be recognised because they are the ones that hold conversations about values around every context. They ask people what the values are and how they know them without referring to a poster on a wall. They recruit people who are aligned to the organisation's values and only promote people who champion the values and act consistently with them. Leaders with attitude are willing to lose high performers who undermine the organisation's values. And when this type of leadership is "the way we do things around here" customers comment on the unique nature of the organisation and its people, and people want to join the organisation.

Leaders with attitude, according to Hayes, are refreshing and tend to attract people who have tenacious and inspiring attitudes themselves. There is no science or prescription to leadership, no magical formula or witchcraft. Anyone can develop the leadership attitude. It takes a decision, a commitment to that decision, an ability to learn and apply the learning, a deep-seated belief in the capabilities of humans, and good old fashion hard work!

For those of you who are holders of positions called leadership and want to evolve your organisation into a values-based business, Hayes offers some tips to leading the change.
1. Define and be clear about the values that are important to you.
2. Take a systematic view to facilitating the evolution to a values-based business, rather than a piecemeal or segmented view.
3. Engage everyone the process. You do this by working with a microcosm of the organisation and ensuring robust dialogue where all voices are represented and valued.
4. Engage in conversations about the "ideal" and where that is already being lived within the organisation.
5. Focus on the future, the possibilities that pull people toward their desired outcomes, rather than fixing problems that have destroyed their initiative and creativity. Leveraging off success will address many of the problems without having to focus on them.
6. Work with the inherent complexities of the organisation as a whole rather than attempting to identify and fix the component parts. Recognise everything is connected so a holistic approach is imperative.
7. Increase understanding of the whole picture among people who generally start with just their piece of the puzzle. Help people understand how the business works, the business drivers, the value chains, and the matrices within the organisation.
8. Do not start what won't be finished! If you are going to embark on evolving your organisation into a values-based one you must be in for the long haul. There is no such thing as an overnight success. It takes a significant commitment, but wow the results are worth it.

Applying these eight points will result in:

Decision making closer to the related work.
Improved understanding of interrelationships among people, their tasks, and their responsibilities.
Improved conditions for performance as a result of rethinking the way that work happens.
Greater commitment among people to making the business work because of their role in defining it.
Wider, ongoing information sharing and improved communication among organisation members.
Greater capacity to adapt to future changes in the environment.
Reduced staff turnover and increased revenue because employees are committed to that which they have helped create.

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