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Units:	BSBLDR801 Lead personal and strategic transformation
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Declaration: I declare that: · These tasks are my own work · None of this work has been completed by any other person · No part of these tasks has been copied from another person’s work, except where document or work is listed/ referenced. · I understand that if I am found to be in breach of policy, disciplinary action may be taken against me
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Student Name:
Unit Name:	BSBLDR801 Lead personal and strategic transformation
Circle result
Activities and Written Questions 1-23	Satisfactory	Not Yet Satisfactory
Section A: written tasks 1-10	Satisfactory	Not Yet Satisfactory
Section B: practical Task 1 -3	Satisfactory	Not Yet Satisfactory
Section C: POE and Journal	Satisfactory	Not Yet Satisfactory
The Student’s overall result was:	Competent	Not Yet Competent
Trainer/Assessor Comments/Feedback Activities and written questions 1-23 Feedback Section A Feedback Section B Task1 Task 2 Task3 Feedback Section C Reasonable adjustments provided to the candidate List and explain in detail
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Student has received feedback for the above unit from trainer/assessor

About BSBLDR801 Lead personal and strategic transformation

Application

This unit describes the skills and knowledge required to analyse and improve personal leadership style and professional competence and to lead organisational transformation and learning for strategic outcomes.

It covers leading transformational practices, cultivating collaborative practices, completing ongoing professional development and providing strategic leadership in a dynamic context.

It applies to those who use cognitive and creative skills to review, critically analyse, consolidate and synthesise knowledge, in order to generate ideas and provide solutions to complex problems. They use communication skills to demonstrate their understanding of theoretical concepts and to transfer knowledge and ideas to others.

No licensing, legislative or certification requirements apply to this unit at the time of publication.

Unit Sector

Management and Leadership - Leadership

Elements and Performance Criteria

ELEMENT

PERFORMANCE CRITERIA

Elements describe the essential outcomes.

Performance criteria describe the performance needed to demonstrate achievement of the element.

1. Reflect on personal efficacy

1.1 Identify and apply strategies to create a climate that encourages and allows for the receiving and giving of constructive feedback

1.2 Regularly review own performance in terms of personal efficacy, personal competence and attainment of professional competence outcomes and personal development objectives and priorities

1.3 Review own capacity as a role model in terms of ability to build trust, confidence and respect of diverse groups and relevant individuals

1.4 Evaluate personal effectiveness in building an effective organisational and workplace culture

1.5 Analyse and evaluate personal effectiveness in developing the competence required to achieve operational accountabilities and responsibilities

2. Lead in a transformational manner

2.1 Apply transformational and transactional leadership practices

2.2 Demonstrate empathy in personal communication, relationships and day to day leadership role

2.3 Lead consistently in an inclusive manner that is respectful of individual differences

2.4 Monitor and regulate own potentially disruptive emotions and impulses

2.5 Manage work based relationships effectively

2.6 Integrate own emotions with cognitions in personal leadership style

2.7 Evaluate personal leadership style and adjust for different contexts

3. Model and cultivate collaborative thinking

3.1 Apply judgement, intelligence and common sense when undertaking day to day leadership role

3.2 Analyse relevant legislation, information and intelligence sources when evaluating business opportunities

3.3 Draw upon personal expertise of self and relevant individuals to achieve strategic results

3.4 Seek and encourage contributions from relevant individuals

3.5 Model and encourage collaborative communication and learning approaches in the workplace

3.6 Cultivate existing and new collaborative and participative work relationships

4. Provide strategic leadership during change processes

4.1 Positively convey organisational direction and values to relevant individuals and relevant stakeholders

4.2 Analyse the impact and role of leadership during organisational change

4.3 Analyse and confirm capacity and competence of relevant individuals to contribute to change processes and plans

4.4 Develop learning and communication solutions to address problems and risks arising for individuals during organisational change

4.5 Identify leadership styles and develop approaches to best respond to the impact of change on people and processes

Foundation Skills

This section describes language, literacy, numeracy and employment skills incorporated in the performance criteria that are required for competent performance.

Skill

Performance

Criteria

Description

Learning

1.2

· Develops insights from previous experience to improve personal performance

Reading

1.1, 1.2, 3.2, 4.5

· Sources, evaluates and critiques ideas and information from a range of complex texts to assist with decisions, choices and to manage organisational requirements

Writing

1.1, 1.5, 4.4, 4.5

· Records results of analysis using clear and comprehensible language and layout

· Researches and prepares plans for relevant stakeholders incorporating appropriate vocabulary, grammatical structure and conventions

Oral communication

2.2, 2.3, 3.4

· Expresses opinions and information and responds to other people's views using language appropriate to audience

Navigate the world of work

1.4, 1.5, 3.2, 3.3

· Considers own role in terms of its contributions to broader goals of the work environment

· Takes full responsibility for identifying and following policies, procedures and legislative requirements

Interact with others

1.1-1.5, 2.1-2.7, 3.1, 3.4-3.6, 4.1

· Understands impact of own behaviour on others, reflecting on personal strengths and limitations and implementing strategies to regulate behaviour

· Influences and fosters a collaborative culture facilitating a sense of commitment and workplace cohesion

· Uses a variety of communication tools and strategies to build rapport and maintain effective working relationships

· Uses appropriate interpersonal skills to encourage contributions and elicit ideas from others

· Adapts personal communication style to build a positive working relationship and show respect for the opinions, values and particular needs of others

Get the work done

1.1, 2.1, 4.2, 4.3, 4.4, 4.5

· Develops plans to manage complex activities with strategic implications that involve a range of personnel with diverse skills, knowledge and experience

· Systematically gathers and analyses all relevant information and evaluates options to inform decisions with the potential to affect organisational outcomes

Unit Mapping Information

Code and title

current version

Code and title

previous version

Comments

Equivalence status

BSBLDR801 Lead personal and strategic transformation

BSBLED701A Lead personal and strategic transformation

Updated to meet Standards for Training Packages

Recoded to meet AQF Standards

Equivalent unit

Assessment requirements

Modification History

Release

Comments

Release 1

This version first released with BSB Business Services Training Package Version 1.0.

Performance Evidence

Evidence of the ability to:

· reflect on and improve own development, personal leadership style and self-management skills

· demonstrate the application of leadership styles and approaches appropriate to individuals involved, the outcomes being sought and the context

· model and encourage collaboration

· provide strategic leadership during a change process

· effectively manage workplace relationships

· analyse relevant legislation, information and intelligence sources.

Note: If a specific volume or frequency is not stated, then evidence must be provided at least once

Knowledge Evidence

To complete the unit requirements safely and effectively, the individual must:

· outline the relevant legislative and regulatory context of the organisation

· state the organisation’s mission, purpose and values

· outline organisation’s objectives, plans and strategies

· describe a range of leadership styles

· describe personal development planning methodologies

· outline data collection methods

· explain the process for external environment scanning relating to social, political, economic and technological developments

· explain emotional intelligence and its relationship to individual and team effectiveness

· explain organisational transformation and the management of the stages of change

· explain organisational design and building in responsiveness of operations to change in customer or market conditions.

Instructions to Learner

Assessment instructions

Overview

Prior to commencing the assessments, your trainer/assessor will explain each assessment task and the terms and conditions relating to the submission of your assessment task. Please consult with your trainer/assessor if you are unsure of any questions. It is important that you understand and adhere to the terms and conditions, and address fully each assessment task. If any assessment task is not fully addressed, then your assessment task will be returned to you for resubmission. Your trainer/assessor will remain available to support you throughout the assessment process.

Written work

Assessment tasks are used to measure your understanding and underpinning skills and knowledge of the overall unit of competency. When undertaking any written assessment tasks, please ensure that you address the following criteria:

· Address each question including any sub-points

· Demonstrate that you have researched the topic thoroughly

· Cover the topic in a logical, structured manner

· Your assessment tasks are well presented, well referenced and word processed

· Your assessment tasks include your full legal name on each and every page.

Active participation

It is a condition of enrolment that you actively participate in your studies. Active participation is completing all the assessment tasks on time.

Plagiarism

Plagiarism is taking and using someone else's thoughts, writings or inventions and representing them as your own. Plagiarism is a serious act and may result in a learner’s exclusion from a course. When you have any doubts about including the work of other authors in your assessment, please consult your trainer/assessor. The following list outlines some of the activities for which a learner can be accused of plagiarism:

· Presenting any work by another individual as one's own unintentionally

· Handing in assessments markedly similar to or copied from another learner

· Presenting the work of another individual or group as their own work

· Handing in assessments without the adequate acknowledgement of sources used, including assessments taken totally or in part from the internet.

If it is identified that you have plagiarised within your assessment, then a meeting will be organised to discuss this with you, and further action may be taken accordingly.

Collusion

Collusion is the presentation by a learner of an assignment as their own that is, in fact, the result in whole or in part of unauthorised collaboration with another person or persons. Collusion involves the cooperation of two or more learners in plagiarism or other forms of academic misconduct and, as such, both parties are subject to disciplinary action. Collusion or copying from other learners is not permitted and will result in a “0” grade and NYC.

Assessments must be typed using document software such as (or similar to) MS Office. Handwritten assessments will not be accepted (unless, prior written confirmation is provided by the trainer/assessor to confirm).

Competency outcome

There are two outcomes of assessments: S = Satisfactory and NS = Not Satisfactory (requires more training and experience).

Once the learner has satisfactorily completed all the tasks for this module the learner will be awarded “Competent” (C) or “Not yet Competent” (NYC) for the relevant unit of competency.

If you are deemed “Not Yet Competent” you will be provided with feedback from your assessor and will be given another chance to resubmit your assessment task(s). If you are still deemed as “Not Yet Competent” you will be required to re-enrol in the unit of competency.

Additional evidence

If we, at our sole discretion, determine that we require additional or alternative information/evidence in order to determine competency, you must provide us with such information/evidence, subject to privacy and confidentiality issues. We retain this right at any time, including after submission of your assessments.

Confidentiality

We will treat anything, including information about your job, workplace, employer, with strict confidence, in accordance with the law. However, you are responsible for ensuring that you do not provide us with anything regarding any third party including your employer, colleagues and others, that they do not consent to the disclosure of. While we may ask you to provide information or details about aspects of your employer and workplace, you are responsible for obtaining necessary consents and ensuring that privacy rights and confidentiality obligations are not breached by you in supplying us with such information.

Assessment appeals process

If you feel that you have been unfairly treated during your assessment, and you are not happy with your assessment and/or the outcome as a result of that treatment, you have the right to lodge an appeal. You must first discuss the issue with your trainer/assessor. If you would like to proceed further with the request after discussions with your trainer/assessor, you need to lodge your appeal to the course coordinator, in writing, outlining the reason(s) for the appeal.

Recognised prior learning

Candidates will be able to have their previous experience or expertise recognised on request.

Special needs/Reasonable Adjustments

Candidates with special needs should notify their trainer/assessor to request any required adjustments as soon as possible. This will enable the trainer/assessor to address the identified needs immediately.

Assessment requirements

Assessment can either be:

· Direct observation

· Product-based methods e.g. reports, role plays, work samples

· Portfolios – Journals annotated

· Questioning

· Third party evidence.

If submitting third party evidence, the Third Party Observation/Demonstration document must be completed by the agreed third party

Third parties can be:

· Supervisors

· Trainers

· Team members

· Clients

· Consumers.

The third party observation must be submitted to your trainer/assessor, as directed.

The third party observation is to be used by the assessor to assist them in determining competency.

The assessment activities in this workbook assess aspects of all the elements, performance criteria, skills and knowledge and performance requirements of the unit of competency.

To demonstrate competence in this unit you must undertake all activities in this workbook and have them deemed satisfactory by the assessor. If you do not answer some questions or perform certain tasks, and therefore you are deemed to be Not Yet Competent, your trainer/assessor may ask you supplementary questions to determine your competence. Once you have demonstrated the required level of performance, you will be deemed competent in this unit.

Should you still be deemed Not Yet Competent, you will have the opportunity to resubmit your assessments or appeal the result.

As part of the assessment process, all learners must abide by any relevant assessment policies as provided during induction.

If you feel you are not yet ready to be assessed or that this assessment is unfair, please contact your assessor to discuss your options. You have the right to formally appeal any outcome and, if you wish to do so, discuss this with your trainer/assessor.

Observation/Demonstration

Throughout this unit, you will be expected to show your competency of the elements through observations or demonstrations. Your trainer/assessor will have a list of demonstrations you must complete or tasks to be observed. The observations and demonstrations will be completed as well as the activities found in this workbook.

An explanation of observations and demonstrations:

Observation is on-the-job

The observation will usually require:

· Performing a work based skill or task

· Interaction with colleagues and/or customers.

Demonstration is off-the-job

A demonstration will require:

· Performing a skill or task that is asked of you

· Undertaking a simulation exercise.

Your trainer/assessor will inform you of which one of the above they would like you to do. The observation/demonstration will cover one of the unit’s elements.

The observation/demonstration will take place either in the workplace or the training environment, depending on the task to be undertaken and whether it is an observation or demonstration. Your trainer/assessor will ensure you are provided with the correct equipment and/or materials to complete the task. They will also inform you of how long you have to complete the task.

You should be able to demonstrate the skills, knowledge and performance criteria required for competency in this unit, as seen in the Learner Guide.

Third Party Guide

You should supply details of the third party to the assessor before you commence the activities (see below), unless the assessor has already selected a third party themselves. The assessor can then contact the third party in instances where they require more evidence to determine competency, or they cannot observe certain tasks themselves.

The reasons to use a third party may include:

· Assessment is required in the workplace

· Where there are health and safety issues related to observation

· Patient confidentiality and privacy issues are involved.

If you are not employed, or able to complete demonstrative tasks in the workplace, you will need to inform the assessor. They will be able to provide you with a simulated environment in which to complete these tasks.

We would prefer that, wherever possible, these be “live” issues for your industry and require application of the principles that you are learning as part of your training. Where this is not possible, you and your third party should simulate the activity tasks and demonstrations that you believe would be likely to arise in your organisation or job role.

Third party evidence can also be used to provide “everyday evidence” of tasks included in your work role that relate to the unit of competency but are not a part of the formal assessment process.

The third party is not to be used as a co-assessor – the assessor must make the final decision on competency themselves.

Documents relevant to collection of third party evidence are included in the Third Party section in the Observations/Demonstrations document.

Third party details (required information from the learner)

A third party may be required for observations or demonstrations; please provide details below of your nominated third party and obtain their signature to confirm their agreement to participate. This information will be required by your trainer/assessor in advance of arranging any future observations or demonstrations.

Third party name: ______________________________________________________________

Position of third party: ______________________________________________________________

Telephone number: ______________________________________________________________

Email address: ______________________________________________________________

Declaration for nominated third party

I declare my intention to act as third party for (learner’s name here) __________________________

Third party signature: _____________________________________ Date: ___________________

Business Transformation

It can sometimes seem like many organisations are in a permanent state of business transformation. The word sits alongside innovation, agile, disruption and pivot as business buzzword of the decade. Yet “transformation” is such a broad term, what does it really mean? Particularly, as is increasingly likely, if you find yourself assigned to a business transformation program or hiring a business transformation manager, what can you expect?[footnoteRef:1] [1: Source: Expert 360, as at https://expert360.com/blog/role-of-a-business-transformation-manager/, as on 20th June, 2017.]
This article considers the nature of change, typical phases of work, personal attributes for success and the factors that typically determine success and failure of transformation projects. This should help you better prepare if you are starting a role as a business transformation analyst and assist you in performing in this role. This piece will also be beneficial if you are responsible for setting expectations and outcomes when hiring a business transformation consultant.

What is business transformation?

Since this is such a broad-ranging term, it follows that there’s no single definition that applies to major change management programs across organisations. The nature of finance transformation will be inherently different to transforming customer experience, for example.

To truly change, the end state must be radically different to the starting point. This is not tinkering around the edges. Perhaps the clearest analogy to hold in mind is a caterpillar turning into a butterfly. Not only is a butterfly a thing of beauty but it is far less constrained in where it can go and what it can do than the caterpillar that is confined to creeping around slowly. In a business context, the table below provides examples of projects that would embody true transformation.

So if you’re assigned to a business transformation project, the first thing to check is whether the scale of targeted change is similar to the examples above. This is important for many reasons:

Branding a program as transformation is not just semantics. It sets higher expectations so the risks and consequences of failure are also greater. Determinants of success and failure are discussed later but one of the first traps to avoid is calling a program transformation when it’s not.

Let’s deal with the transformation program itself.

This paper assumes that you’re a mid-level, external consultant assigned to work on a business transformation plan for which the business case and initial planning have already been undertaken or you’re looking to hire for such a role.   However, all of the considerations below also apply if you’ve been seconded internally as an employee. While you may have less experience than a consultant, that is balanced by an insider’s knowledge of your organisational culture, and possibly different communication paths if needed. You may want to consider presenting a business case to key stakeholders to have an experienced external consultant assist you in your transformation program. Your internal knowledge, balanced with their external experience, will make a near unbeatable team.

Four critical areas for a business transformation manager to cover are detailed below. These include the planning, execution, determinants of success and personal attributes of a successful transformation analyst.

1. Planning

Planning is critical to be successful as a business transformation manager. There are some essential factors to get right when planning a high quality business transformation strategy.

Rationale and motivation

Is it clear as to why organisational transformation is being undertaken and are those reasons compelling?

The scale of project is large.

It demands additional cost for consultants, potentially new technology and will draw staff away from their day-to-day roles.

There’s significant opportunity cost as some current activities will need to be cut back or back-filled with contractors.

There is risk to BAU operations.

If the business drivers, business case and Board and C-suite commitment are not all complete and clear, you should raise questions. In particular, a “me too” following a competitor; a slick and convincing sell from a technology vendor; or a desire to dress up a regular project as “transformation”, are all situations where red flags should go up.

Scoping and budget

Have objectives, scope, timeframe and budget been clearly set? As you join the project, you should generally expect to be given a Project Charter or similar. This is a single document (or documents accessible on a shared platform for the whole team) that sets out all these areas. It will also typically include the background, context and approvals given by the Board, identify the Sponsor and senior leaders and governance arrangements and preferably, include key risks and potential mitigations.

Whether there’s a Charter or not, you should also try to form your own objective judgement on the overall risk of the project. Rightly or wrongly, it’s a good idea to assume that your immediate career prospects and reputation will at least partially be tied to the outcome of the program.

For example, if the company has six divisions and two have already been through a business transformation process successfully, that’s far less risky than a first-timer looking to transform the whole enterprise in one big bang (which is now, for good reason, less common than it has been in the past).

People and skills

Is there a fully detailed Project Plan with allocated resources? Does it look to you as if there are enough people allocated? Do they seem to have the right blend of skills and experience?

Depending on the type of transformation, you may reasonably expect to see people who, collectively, can: project manage; analyse, map, redesign and test business processes; research markets and customers; undertake functional analysis and organisational redesign; design technology architecture (and implement and test if required); do business and financial modelling; design and execute communications plans; undertake change management; and importantly, lead and inspire teams!

As if this isn’t enough, as you get to know the broader team, form your own judgement on the diversity represented by gender, age, ethnicity, skillset and also personality type. When undertaking transformation, the stakes are far too high to have any risk of groupthink.

For example, it may be tempting to populate a team to discuss business transformation solutions exclusively with effervescent optimists. That’s like having an orchestra with on oversupply of cellos: balance is critical. In fact, if you do see a team that’s too skewed towards optimists, think seriously about taking on the role of devil’s advocate even if that’s not your natural personality type (and vice versa).

Is there an appropriate mix of internal and external resources? External perspective and experience is valuable but expensive and doesn’t have to run the business when transformation is complete. Internal resourcing certainly has benefits, not least for the staff seconded themselves.   However, if you are an internal secondee, try as hard as you can to ensure that it is a total shift from your regular role for a defined period of time e.g. a full-time secondment for 9 months. Then look to see how your previous role is to be covered and other than the odd word of friendly advice to the person back-filling, DO NOT get drawn back in to help out. Check that the cost of employing contractors is included in the transformation budget. If it’s not, build a business case to get some budget. Expert360 has a great guide, here.

Leadership

Committed, visible leadership from the top of the organisation is a non-negotiable for any transformation.   While you have no ability to influence this, it is definitely helpful to know if the most senior person has real skin in the game e.g. a performance bonus resting on the outcome.

Communications

Closely allied to the prior point, is the communications plan. This relates to both the project team but also staff across the broader organisation. Genuine business transformation services will affect many people who have no ability to influence the outcome.   Assume there will be nay sayers and even some who will actively undermine the project. While communication alone can’t prevent that, it helps counter it by keeping as many people on-board as possible.

2. Execution

There are just about as many approaches and methodologies for transformation as there are consulting firms. This article doesn’t advocate one over another as it’s not about the specific business transformation methodology.   The sections below are typical but not necessarily exhaustive, stages in a major transformation program with tips or areas to be watch out for in each.

Establishing the baseline

· Evidence – if someone tells you customer queries are resolved in 24 hours on average, that’s helpful but you need to get the data. It may be 24. It may just as easily be 72.

· Metrics – since the future state may be very different from the baseline, think about the ongoing applicability of the metrics you use. For example, a retailer may be planning to close the worst-performing 40% of its stores and drive traffic online and to other stores. If the historic metric has been revenue per sales person, it could improve but won’t be telling the whole story. Find metrics for before and after that will give apples to apples comparisons.

Developing the Future State

· Exemplars – if you have to do the research, look beyond your industry. If you are being truly customer-centric, think about your target customers and the best customer experience they are likely to have anywhere in their life. If you think that is with a surf retailer but you’re a utility, go find the best in surf retail. Disney deliver incredible experiences by the million every day – what can you learn from them?

Undertaking Gap Analysis

· Operating model – as a transformation manager it is critical to consider how your organisation works and is structured internally. This will likely guide which business transformation framework you choose. For example, if your company has been largely State-based with replicated back office infrastructure and processes but is moving to an outsourced, single platform, many aspects of operations including reporting lines, key metrics, capabilities will change. Don’t underestimate the extent of change and how personally challenging and concerning it will be to many people.

Designing the Future State

· Provide constructive challenge – as in the design phase, find exemplars and refer to them. If you’re redesigning a payment process, think about the various contactless payment methods that now exist (in stores and toll roads, for example) and challenge any manual intervention being proposed even if it proves to be a necessity in the end.

· Technology vendors – by their nature are good salespeople who know their product well. However, don’t be afraid to push back on their suggestions for upgrades, additional capacity, and extended service contracts. If the business doesn’t need it, you need to recognise it in your role.

Implementation Planning and Execution

· Resourcing – as a business transformation manager you can’t let scheduled team members be pulled off the project at this point. Once the future state is designed, people have the vision and can foresee the benefits. There can be a tendency to ease off and think the job is 90% done. Even if it is, ensure the planned level and quality of resourcing is maintained. Don’t allow yourself as an employee to start picking up parts of your old role as a favour.

· Sequencing – as a transformation manager this is where detailed project management, GANTT charts, and so on, really come into their own. Inter-dependencies and critical paths come to the fore. Ensure that your workstreams remain fully integrated and in sync with all the others.

· Switch-over – it must be clear as to how switch-over is happening and that it is communicated across the organisation. If there is major process change or a shift from one technology platform to another, how is it to occur? A single big bang? Parallel running for a defined period? Product by product switchover following pilots and testing? There’s no right answer but everything must be planned with a single approach that has been risk-assessed and has backup plans in place.

Changing the Culture

· Lead the change – it doesn’t matter if you’re not a change expert, or you don’t yet understand business transformation principles. By your words and actions every day, you can help drive change. For example, if a main objective is to drive HR processes onto tablets and mobile and away from physical forms, you need to be in the vanguard of doing and coaching the new way.

3. Fly Or Fail?

There are many frightening statistics out there suggesting that up to 70% of major corporate projects fail. In which case it’s tempting to ask, “why bother?” It’s a fair question. However, what that statistic doesn’t tell you is the number of companies that chose not to transform – and paid an even bigger price!

McKinsey have undertaken research into business transformation case studies that identifies three primary attributes of transformations that succeed:

McKinsey’s primary attributes of successful change

While the latter two attributes are self-explanatory, the first is multi-faceted.   It covers both planning and execution phases and encompasses all relevant stakeholders from the Board and C-suite to the most junior person on the project team and the broader organisation.

It combines good planning and accountability with a totally invested leadership group where the program objectives are 100% aligned to the most important business objectives. A common attribute is that the best available staff are assigned to the hardest areas.

Conversely, surveys from down the years point to a depressingly consistent list of reasons for failure:

So if you’re assigned to a program that looks more like this list than the attributes of success, refer to my point on integrity. Even if it’s incredibly difficult and potentially risky for you, I strongly suggest you need to raise your concerns and do so as early as possible.

4. Key Attributes Of A Great Transformation Manager

Clearly, it’s no easy thing taking on a core role as a transformation manager in a major transformation program. It isn’t for everyone. There will almost certainly be days when you’re preferred path isn’t chosen, or someone has a go at you or indeed, you just want to quit.

So perhaps before you commit yourself, you may like to reflect on the attributes that my research and 25 years of experience tell me are important in a transformation manager.

Confident – this is essential to convey to everyone that you’re in control of what you’re doing and believe in the outcome you’re working towards. Yes, you may have to fake it on occasion but if you’re fully committed to the future state, then instilling confidence around you is an important part of the business transformation management journey.

Lateral thinking – you won’t need this every day but it’s a critical skill at key points. It doesn’t come naturally to everyone so practice if you need to. Bring observations you’ve seen from different industries.   As a customer, think about your best ever experiences and ask why your client can’t be as good. Don’t be afraid to draw on analogies from sport or from the arts. I’m a big fan of using the analogy of orchestras (as above); they’re complex, intricate networks that create beauty in real-time.

Organised – this is non-negotiable. If you’re not naturally disciplined and organised, undertake training and practice until you are. No-one will want to carry the load for you not being prepared.

Good communicator – is natural for some and a hard, panic-inducing grind for others. A great transformation manager must be aware that they are selling as well as executing the program every day.

Integrity – this is non-negotiable for any consulting career. It’s not just about being trustworthy and honest. If you see someone taking a shortcut that is too risky or an assumption that goes beyond heroic in to la-la land, you can’t turn a blind eye. You need to call it out. If everything goes belly up and it is found out that you knew but didn’t act, you’re complicit. Don’t risk being put in that position.

Flexible – is another given for a successful transformation manager. It would be a rare program indeed that went 100% to plan. Things will change and you need to be able to adapt and flex as necessary.

Self-motivated – as with being organised, a high achieving transformation manager needs to be up for it every day without someone else having to worry about whether you’re pulling your weight.

Emotional intelligence – the longer my career goes on, the more I’m convinced that EI (or EQ) is a core attribute of successful people. It combines so many of the skills required of a successful business consultant; being a good listener, being able to read the mood of both individuals and group dynamics, being empathetic and building rapport (without compromising the technical work you’re doing) and being genuinely able to understand the perspective of others be that a customer or staff member.

This may seem like a long and perhaps daunting list, however, if you become highly competent in all of these attributes, you’ll be more than a high-performing transformation consultant. You will be very close to the leadership profile that most organisations are now looking for as you contemplate your longer-term career aspirations. That’s in addition to your experience in a successful, major transformation.

Identify and apply strategies to create a climate that encourages and allows for the receiving and giving of constructive feedback

Giving and receiving feedback is part of life. Sometimes the feedback you give or get is neither useful, nor meant to be. ("You're a jerk!" comes to mind, for instance.) Other feedback, however, is a sincere attempt to help the recipient improve his performance, behaviour, understanding, relationships, or interpersonal skills. This is corrective feedback, and all of us need it from time to time[footnoteRef:2]. [2: Source: Community Tool Box, as at http://ctb.ku.edu/en/table-of-contents/advocacy/encouragement-education/corrective-feedback/main, as on 19th June, 2017.]

In community advocacy, both advocates and their targets need corrective feedback. Individual advocates and advocacy organizations need to know how they and their efforts and messages are perceived by and affecting both the targets and beneficiaries of their work. The targets of advocacy - legislators and other policy makers, agencies that deliver services, interest groups, the general public - need to understand both the perception and the real results of their actions, or inaction, on people who are affected by the advocates' issue. In this section, we'll discuss feedback in general, and look at how to provide corrective feedback in productive and effective ways.

What is corrective feedback?

Corrective feedback is information provided to an individual or group about how her or its behaviour, actions, style, strategies, etc. are perceived by and affecting others. It is meant to lead to positive change, and, in the case of community advocacy, to more effective advocacy or public policy.

To have any real power, corrective feedback must be delivered in such a way and by such a person that it will be attended to, rather than simply arousing defensiveness, denial, or anger. That means that the ideal provider of feedback is someone the recipient trusts and respects, and that the provider conveys the feedback as sensitively as possible.

"Feedback" is not the same as criticism, constructive or otherwise. It is meant, rather, to be a reflection of what has been put out by the person or group receiving it. Since other people aren't mirrors, however, that reflection is really their perception of what the feedback recipient intended or did.

It's important for the recipient to know whether the perception and her intention are the same. If not, she may be putting out messages - either in words or actions - that are unclear, misinterpreted, or in fact very different from what she intends, or thinks she intends. The intent and the perception need, in some way, to be brought together if she is to accomplish her purpose, whether that's to change social policy or to cement a personal relationship.

Feedback in general may have a number of possible purposes:

· To help individuals in their personal development

· To improve relationships between and among individuals and groups

· To improve communication between and among individuals and groups

· To help individuals or groups improve their performance

· To improve the climate within an organization

· To increase the effectiveness of an activity or initiative

Who should provide corrective feedback?

Who should provide feedback depends, to a large extent, upon where that feedback is directed. If its recipient is an individual advocate or advocacy organization, then appropriate providers of feedback would include anyone who has an interest in the success of the advocacy or anyone at whom the advocacy is aimed. These can include:

· Supervisors

· Colleagues

· Others who work with the same or a similar target population

· Interested community members

· Beneficiaries of the campaign

· The general public

· Policy makers

· All of the above (see 360-degree feedback below)

If the corrective feedback is directed at the targets of advocacy, it should be provided, to the extent possible, by those directly affected by the issue or by advocates who actually have the knowledge and understanding of the issue that allows them to speak for those affected. It can be relatively easy to gather people in support of a cause, but unless they have a very clear understanding of what they're advocating, it's unlikely that they can either provide useful feedback, or that they will be listened to.

When should you give corrective feedback?

Any time can be a good time for corrective feedback, but there are some situations in which it's particularly appropriate.

When it's requested. The ideal is that an individual or organization asks for feedback, either on a regular basis, or in a particular situation. If the recipient has sincerely requested the feedback, he's much more likely to take it to heart and act on it than if it's offered out of the blue.

As an advocate, you'd do well to build a feedback loop - a mechanism for getting feedback on what you're doing - into any activity or initiative. It will make your organization as well as your advocacy campaign more effective, and having a formal structure for feedback will make it easier to accept.

One example of a feedback loop would be an evaluation of the week's accomplishments - or of the meeting itself - at weekly staff meetings. Here, people can get feedback on what they've done, and help on doing it better or on going in a slightly different direction.

Sometimes, objects of advocacy build in feedback to their projects or campaigns as well. Government agencies or private corporations subject to government regulations usually have to hold public hearings about projects that will affect the public environmentally, economically, or in any other significant way. These hearings are opportunities for providing corrective feedback.

At the beginning of an advocacy campaign, especially in the planning stage. The more quickly feedback can point out potential mistakes or inappropriate messages, the less chance there is of the campaign being damaged by them.

When the preliminary effects of the campaign can begin to be analyzed. If there are areas of the campaign that don't seem to be working well, corrective feedback could help to put them back on track by identifying the problem.

When the actions of advocates or of a target of advocacy have had, or are about to have, unintended consequences. Unintended consequences aren't always visible. Corrective feedback can point them out and help make clear what steps to take to prevent or eliminate them.

A well-meant policy that has had clear unintended consequences, for instance, is that of the de-institutionalization of U.S. mental patients. The policy was intended to remove people from dehumanizing and, in some cases, brutal situations in state mental hospitals, and succeeded in that. Too often, however, former patients have ended up homeless, because the advocates and policy makers who formulated de-institutionalization laws and regulations made some incorrect assumptions about how patients would get care and where they would live when they left the mental health facility.

There were some who foresaw these consequences, but they weren't able to give feedback to de-institutionalization advocates and policy makers in such a way that it could be heard and attended to. They were branded as short-sighted, anti-human, or fascist, and the substance of their feedback was lost in the ideology of the moment. If they had been able to couch their feedback as having the patients' best interests at heart (which may, in fact, have been impossible in the politics of the time), the situation might have turned out differently.

When there's a danger of the campaign's or the advocate's alienating potential allies or the public. Corrective feedback can identify attitudes, language, or other elements that could offend or put off important segments of the community.

When damage has already been done. Corrective feedback can help to explain what happened and either repair the damage or - if that's impossible - at least keep it from recurring.

When you're monitoring or evaluating a campaign or specific actions, strategies, tactics, or phases of it.

What are some methods of feedback?

Feedback obviously can take many forms. It can be directed from individual to individual, or flow between and among individuals and groups. It can be formal or informal, mutual or one-way, written or verbal, personal or impersonal, requested or unsolicited, embraced or unwelcome. We'll examine some of the more common forms here, and concentrate on one in particular - 360-degree feedback - because we believe it can be particularly useful in the context of advocacy.

Although feedback, as we discussed earlier, is different from criticism - both more and less subjective, in that it is based on the provider's perception of reality, rather than his opinion - it nonetheless often feels like criticism, or even like an attack, to the recipient. One dimension of the forms of feedback below is the extent to which they tend to make the recipient - whether an individual or a group - feel defensive, and therefore less likely to take the feedback seriously and act on it.

One-on-one feedback

An individual delivering feedback to another, face-to -face, is probably the most common form, and also the one most commonly abused or mishandled. Its great disadvantage is that, no matter how sincere the intent of the provider, it's easy for the recipient to feel personally attacked. This is compounded when the provider is a supervisor or other person with some power over the recipient. For this reason, any provider of one-on-one feedback has to be aware of the possible and actual reactions of the recipient, and to be careful to deliver feedback sensitively.

Intra-group feedback

In this situation, individuals in a group provide feedback to the group and/or to one or more individuals within the group. If the feedback is directed to the performance of the group, it can be particularly effective, with one person's ideas stimulating others', and with everyone focused on improving the group's or their own performance or functioning. If the group's focus is on one individual, however, it can seem extremely threatening.

Group-to-group feedback

This might take place between two groups or organizations that are working together and having some difficulty doing so, or between two groups both working with the same population or toward the same goals. Although less common, it might also take place between opposing groups that agree to meet to try to work out differences. The feedback may go in one direction or both.

The feedback might be directed at particular individuals or at the group as a whole. All or several members of each group might be involved, or only one representative of each. In the latter case, both giving and receiving the feedback is somewhat eased by the fact that the provider is representing a number of people, and therefore not setting herself up as the direct target of whatever defensiveness or anger her feedback engenders. The recipient, on the other hand, is not himself the only object of the feedback, and might for that reason be less likely to be defensive or angry about it.

Consultative feedback

In this situation, an individual or group serves, by request, as a formal or informal consultant to another (usually to a group, but occasionally to an individual). The advantage here is that, since the feedback was requested, there's a better chance that the recipient will listen to it. The disadvantage is that the recipient has no obligation or compelling reason to listen to it, as she might if the community, armed with torches and pitchforks, were beating down the door.

Another possible type of feedback is impersonal - in writing or by e-mail, anonymously, in the media, etc. As feedback, this is generally much less useful than one of the other forms discussed here, because it lacks the immediacy of being presented directly by the provider, with the opportunity to explain or enlarge on it so that it's clearly understood. Impersonal feedback generally feels much more like a personal attack, and is therefore less likely to be effective.

360-degree feedback

360-degree feedback is so called because it involves feedback from every direction: supervisors, peers, subordinates, the community, etc. The idea is that people with different relationships to the recipient may see her in different ways, and it's only by looking at all those ways that she can get an accurate picture of how she's perceived and of what effects her actions actually have.

This method is often used in business as a means of employee or organizational development, but it's equally relevant to non-business situations. We'll examine the standard model of 360-degree feedback, and then discuss how it can be used in advocacy.

The following paragraphs look at how 360-degree feedback is used with an individual recipient. The procedure for organizations is similar, but sources of feedback may include more organizations than individuals, and discussion of the results will probably be internal to the organization, perhaps with the assistance of a hired consultant.

Note that 360-degree feedback is a tool for improvement, not evaluation. 360-degree feedback works best as an aid to the improvement of individual and group performance, rather than as an evaluation tool. The information gained from the process is almost always used to help generate new strategies and strengthen areas of concern, not to judge past performance.

· 360-degree feedback starts with the recipient. She may, with the assistance of a supervisor or other consultant, identify the areas she most wants to know about, and then make up a feedback form concentrating on them. In many cases, however, the organization may have its own form, or may hire a consulting firm - with its own form - to administer the process.

· Next, the recipient may choose her own sources of feedback (ideally a group of 7-10), with at least one each from among:

· Supervisors

· Peers

· Supervisees or subordinates

· Customers (i.e. the target population)

· Others within the organization who don't fall into any of these categories, but who have a working relationship with the recipient

· Each source completes a feedback form. Most standard forms are multiple choice, but often include spaces for comments if sources want to add them.

· Someone - usually either the supervisor or the hired consultant - tabulates the results and puts them in a form that will provide the most useful information to the recipient. (Consulting firms often use computerized forms that produce graphs and other printouts. While these can be useful, they may also tend toward standardized explanations of results that are less helpful than analysis based on actual familiarity with the recipient and her work.)

· After the recipient has seen the feedback results, someone - usually the supervisor or hired consultant - discusses them with her. This discussion has to be conducted sensitively, especially if some or much of the feedback is negative. (In most cases, the feedback itself remains with the recipient, and is not made public in any way unless she chooses to do so.)

· The recipient may choose to confer with her sources about what they meant, how they arrived at their conclusions, what specific behaviour of hers gave rise to specific comments, etc. They, on the other hand, may have the option of remaining anonymous, and may only volunteer the broadest interpretations of the feedback data.

The question of anonymity raises an issue that always exists in feedback situations. The recipient is not the only one risking something here, especially if she's a supervisor of many of the feedback sources. If she has in the past shown herself to be insensitive or vindictive, people may be unwilling to give honest feedback for fear of reprisals, or of having to deal with her possibly uncivil reactions. It can be difficult to strike a balance between the recipient getting the feedback she needs in order to change her behaviour for the better, and feedback sources being protected from unreasonable reactions.

· The recipient, either alone or with the help of a supervisor or mentor, formulates a plan to address the issues identified by the feedback.

· The supervisor or mentor works with the recipient over time to support and assist her in carrying out the plan for change.

In a community advocacy context, 360-degree feedback would mean an advocacy organization receiving feedback from other organizations and individuals (both those that advocate for the same or similar causes, and those that work with the beneficiaries of advocacy), from the community at large, and from both the beneficiaries and targets of advocacy themselves.

If the feedback is directed at the targets of advocacy, then 360-degree feedback means that they need to get information from as many segments of the community as possible - beneficiaries of advocacy, businesses, agencies, advocates, the community at large, etc. Targets of advocacy need to hear from a broad cross-section of the population about the effects of their actions and policies.

When it's possible to conduct it, 360-degree feedback can be tremendously effective. It can give a nearly complete picture of how well an advocate or advocacy organization is doing his or its job, and of how he or it is perceived by the community. The targets of advocacy are more likely to take feedback seriously if they hear it from a broad range of people and organizations. Perhaps most telling, 360-degree feedback can identify the exact sources of problems with an advocacy campaign, making clear which segments of the community aren't being reached or are being offended, and thereby suggesting ways to improve the situation.

How do you give and accept corrective feedback?

Feedback of different kinds and from different sources all try to convey information to the recipient, but they carry different emotional weights and different (implied or actual) levels of coercion. An employer may give what she sees as supportive feedback to an employee, but often - depending upon their relationship and the character of the organization - there lurks beneath the surface the suggestion that if the employee doesn't shape up, he'll lose his job. A consultant may be hired to provide feedback to an organization or the individuals within it, but unless both the organization and the individuals are committed to taking that feedback seriously, the consultant may as well not have bothered.

Feedback from the community to an organization may be ignored as well. (They don't understand what we're doing; they don't see how much we're helping them; they don't care about the people we serve.) Feedback that comes from a friend may be taken more seriously than feedback from someone with no particular relationship to the recipient, or from someone who's seen as hostile. As both a provider and recipient of feedback, you have to be aware of the relationships involved, and of how they affect you and the other person.

Whether you're addressing a policy maker, a fellow advocate, a colleague or supervisee, or another organization as a whole, there are some general rules for providing feedback so that it will be heard. Even if you follow these rules, however, it's important to be aware of how you couch your feedback and the impact it will have.

Make your feedback formative, rather than summative. Formative feedback aims toward helping the recipient improve his effectiveness. Summative feedback sums up the recipient, making a judgment about his competence or personal worth. Thus, providing formative feedback means:

· Feedback should focus on developing skills and strengthening areas that need improvement, rather than criticizing or judging the recipient for inadequacy.

· The provider should suggest some possible alternatives to what the recipient has been doing.

· Feedback should help the recipient set reasonable goals for changing and improving performance or behaviour.

Be supportive.

· Start with the positive. Emphasize what really went well, and praise what the individual or group is doing right.

· See if the recipient is aware of the issues or concerns that the feedback addresses before stating them directly. If it comes from the recipient himself, he's much less likely to be defensive, and apt to be more constructive and creative in discussing alternatives.

· Don't look for expressions of guilt or responsibility, but rather for changes that will improve the effectiveness of an individual's or organization's efforts.

· Especially if you're dealing with the opposition, or with the targets of advocacy, assume - or, better yet, identify and describe - common ground and your common interest in making things better.

Focus on the specific issue, and don't point fingers.

Identify the issue or problem as clearly and specifically as possible. Once you've done that, stick to exploring it. The question is not "Who's to blame?" but "How do we make this work as well as possible?"

Be honest.

Providing formative feedback, being supportive, and not blaming don't mean not being honest. To the contrary, they require honesty, or the feedback will be useless.

· Deal directly with the real problem or issue. Identify it clearly. If you know, explain how it became a problem, and help the recipient work out strategies for fixing it now and preventing its recurrence in the future.

· If the issue is a personal one, identify it clearly and help the recipient understand how to address it.

Doing this well calls for a certain amount of sensitivity and the use of "I-statements." Again, don't point fingers looking for blame: instead, use statements that talk about the effect of the other person's behaviour or actions on you or those who've talked to you.

Finger-pointing means saying "You're a jerk because you do X." An I-statement starts with "I": "I feel attacked when you do X." The difference is that the second statement focuses only on your response to the other's actions, not his character or intent, and leaves room for him to explain that he doesn't mean to cause that reaction. Then you can discuss how alternative behaviour can change the situation.

Listen to the recipient's reaction to your feedback. This is part of being supportive, but it's also part of the basic feedback process. You may learn something important about why a particular situation arose, or why things were done in a certain way. You may find that changing the situation is more complex than you expected, or that it needs to be done in a way different from what you assumed.

At the same time, although it's important to be understanding about the recipient's reaction, you need to stay firm and focussed on the issue. The issue is real, and you have to deal with it, or it's going to be a bigger problem in the future.

Help to formulate a plan to address the issues your feedback raised, and offer assistance to carry it out. This is equally true whether you're providing feedback to an individual advocate, to a staff member in your organization, to an organization as a whole, or to the target(s) of advocacy. Corrective feedback is useless unless it actually helps to correct a problem. The best way to assure that there's a good solution is to be part of it yourself.

In many ways, the guidelines for accepting feedback are similar to those for giving it:

· Try to listen objectively to what the provider has to say. The first step is simply to hear what's being offered. To the extent that you can, try to control your emotional reaction and your defensiveness, and simply hear the statement.

· Be honest with yourself. This is also at least partially a matter of putting your emotional response aside. Does the feedback address something actual? If you truly believe the provider is mistaken, is that at least partially your doing? What are the advantages of acting or not acting on this feedback? The disadvantages?

· If you truly believe the provider's impression is mistaken, discuss it with her. Find out what caused her to think or feel the way she did. Even if her impression is mistaken, it's important that she, and perhaps others, have that impression, and it may need to be corrected. On the other hand, she may know things you don't, or you may simply not be facing reality... and may need to.

· Discuss with the provider ways to address the issues raised. Work out a plan that speaks to the difficulties she and others have had with your plans, actions, behaviour, etc. Then ask for help in implementing that plan.

· Thank the provider. True corrective feedback is meant to be helpful, not critical. Most of the time, the provider is actually doing you a favour, and it may have entailed a certain amount of courage on her part. Her feedback may help to extract you from a difficult situation, or head off a disaster. She deserves your gratitude.

Activity 1

What is constructive feedback?

How can corrective feedback help an advocacy campaign?

In addition to the general reasons above, corrective feedback is particularly important to an advocacy campaign. If it's to be successful, such a campaign has to have a powerful message that speaks to both the emotions and the intellect, that's clearly understood by its targets, and that doesn't scare or otherwise drive potential allies away. Timely and accurate feedback can help both advocates and the objects of advocacy, and can bolster success in several ways.

Advocates

Feedback can help advocates recognize and acknowledge errors, problems, and issues that could derail the campaign. As painful as it often is to admit that you 're doing something wrong, you can't correct a mistake until you acknowledge it. Corrective feedback can help to identify issues so that they can be dealt with.

Feedback can flag potential errors before they become problems. Sometimes a plan contains elements that would inevitably lead to failure if they're put into place. Corrective feedback from the right sources could help advocates identify and eliminate such elements before they bring disaster.

Feedback can help to avoid alienating potential allies. If an advocate or advocacy effort is seen as elitist, extremist, or out of touch with the mainstream, it can drive away people who would otherwise support the cause. Corrective feedback can alert individuals and groups when they are perceived, or are in danger of being perceived, as unacceptable to some potential allies.

Feedback can help advocates claim the moral high ground. It's difficult to be seen as morally superior if you're perceived as largely engaged in bashing opponents. Having a clear sense of how the world sees their campaign can allow advocates to adjust it to keep the moral advantage.

Targets of Advocacy

Corrective feedback can also be a useful tool when directed at the targets of advocacy. It can be useful to advocates in helping to change or focus the thinking of policy makers and others, of course. But it can also be useful to the targets themselves, in helping them to accomplish their goals, which may include some of the advocates ' goals as well.

Feedback can help the targets of advocacy avoid unintended consequences. Many policies that seem mean-spirited or vindictive are actually meant to benefit the people who are hurt by them. Their originators simply didn't allow for effects that weren't immediately apparent when the policies were formulated. Corrective feedback from advocates or from the community can help policy makers to understand when this is the case, and to change policies in ways that will correct the situation.

Feedback can help the targets of advocacy improve their image with various constituencies. Politicians, agency heads, hospital administrators, corporate CEOs and others responsible for policy or social conditions often seem - and may be - removed and uncaring. By listening to and acting on corrective feedback, the targets of advocacy can show that they are responsive to the needs of the community, and that they care about doing the right thing, thus making accomplishing all their goals easier.

In Summary

Corrective feedback is information on how the recipient and/or his actions are perceived by the provider or others who have confided in her. It is meant to lead to positive change for the recipient, and, in the context of this chapter, to improve his effectiveness as an advocate.

Advocates and others need to provide and accept corrective feedback in order to deal as objectively as possible with reality. In advocacy particularly, feedback can help to avoid or correct potential or real errors, to avoid alienating potential allies or the community, and to make it possible for advocates to claim the moral high ground. It can also allow targets of advocacy to avoid unintended consequences, and to gain credibility with their constituents and the community.

Corrective feedback can be provided by anyone with an interest in the issue. When providing feedback to targets of advocacy, however, it's important that the providers be people who have some credibility - either long-term, knowledgeable advocates or people directly affected by the issue.

Although important at any time, feedback can be particularly appropriate when it's requested, or when it's necessary to prevent or correct an error in the planning or implementation of an advocacy campaign (or any other initiative). It's especially helpful as a preventative - in the planning stages of an initiative, for instance - but can also serve to minimize the effects of disaster.

Feedback can take several forms: one-to-one, intraorganizational, interorganizational (group-to-group), impersonal, or 360-degree. This last, which is often the ideal, consists of feedback from all directions. In the case of advocacy, this means everyone interested in the initiative, from beneficiaries to colleagues to supervisors to the community at large.

Some general guidelines for giving feedback:

· Make your feedback formative, not summative.

· Be supportive.

· Focus on the issue, not on guilt or blame.

· Be honest.

· Listen to the response of the recipient.

· Help to formulate a plan to deal with the issues you raised, and offer help in carrying it out as well.

Some general guidelines for accepting feedback.

· Listen objectively to what the provider is saying.

· Be honest with yourself.

· If you think the provider's impressions are mistaken, discuss that with her.

· Ask for and use the provider's help to formulate and implement a plan to address the issues her feedback raised.

· Thank the provider.

Follow these guidelines, use 360-degree feedback where possible, and be sensitive to others' feelings and needs whether you're giving or accepting feedback, and it will benefit you and make your work more effective.

Embedding Constructive Feedback into Organisational Culture

The way you handle feedback tells a lot about your character and being able to learn from both positive and negative feedback is crucial for success. As well as being an important part of personal development, a strong feedback culture can also help companies and organisations to grow[footnoteRef:3]. [3: Source: Cleverism,, as at https://www.cleverism.com/how-to-implement-feedback-culture-in-company/, as on 19th June, 2017.]

But a great feedback culture doesn’t just happen – it must be implemented and fostered. It can be a bit tricky to get it right and you won’t be able to change the organisation’s feedback culture overnight. But once you get started, the benefits are going to be evident immediately.

Here is a look at the benefits a strong feedback culture can provide for your business and the steps you need to take to create it. You’ll also learn the key characteristics of a great feedback culture to guarantee your organisation makes the most of its employees.

In the following, we will explore 1) why a great feedback culture is important to a business, 2) the steps to take to encourage feedback and create feedback culture in company, and 3) some final thoughts.

WHY A GREAT FEEDBACK CULTURE IS IMPORTANT TO A BUSINESS

It is easy to wonder whether a strong feedback culture is important to determine how your business operates. If the overall job satisfaction is above average, why should managers care about implementing a feedback culture?

The truth is there are plenty of benefits for having a strong feedback culture. If both employees and the employer are able to provide constructive feedback on what is going on, the organisation and the employee will feel more rewarded.

A recent infographic by the Officevibe found that employee dissatisfaction rate has increased in recent years. In fact, nearly 40% of employees feel they aren’t appreciated at the workplace. This leads to active disengagement from the job. Four out of ten employees admit they aren’t engaged actively at work if they don’t receive any feedback. Without a good feedback structure, people tend to start self-regulating and often end up being much more critical towards the work they do. By providing feedback, you are essentially providing more guidance for the person.

According to the evidence, as soon as you implement a feedback culture that works, employee satisfaction goes up. By focusing more on the strengths of the specific individual, managers can improve employee engagement by nearly 30 times. Well over 40% of employees who obtain regular feedback say they are highly engaged with work.

This is mainly to do with helping to clarify the person’s position in the business. With regular feedback, it is much easier to clarify the person’s role in the organisation and to ensure they are aware of the tasks and responsibilities of the job. It can also help clarify how the employee’s input is affecting other people.

Acknowledgement of employees’ hard work and input will help them stay on the right track and it gives them that extra bit of motivation. 78% of employees in the survey felt they are more motivated when recognised by managers.

Feedback isn’t just a managers’ way of telling off workers – employees themselves want to be told how they can improve. 65% of the survey’s respondents said they want more feedback, although only 58% of managers felt they provide enough feedback.

Furthermore, a strong feedback environment also helps to improve and develop the company. Your employees often have the best insight into how your company operates and a strong feedback culture can make it easier to pinpoint areas that require development. In fact, companies with strong feedback culture tend to have a better financial performance.

Finally, one of feedback culture’s strengths is the ability to solve problems. If you have a big project coming up, it is better to continuously evaluate the effort and see what works and what doesn’t, rather than to go through the project first and then analyse what worked. Small problems and issues in employee satisfaction could quickly turn into a bigger problem. As the old saying goes, “it is better to fix the roof while the sun is shining”.

THE STEPS TO TAKE TO ENCOURAGE FEEDBACK CULTURE IN COMPANY

Feedback has plenty of benefits for any business, but it won’t come about without effort. You cannot suddenly add more feedback to your organisational structure, as you need to create the right environment for feedback to flourish.

So how to go about implementing a stronger feedback culture? Here are the key steps you should take in order to encourage feedback.

Step 1. Creating a regular system for feedback

The first thing to do is make sure you have a regular system in place for feedback. You don’t want feedback to be a side thought or something that only happens when you happen to think about it. Feedback must become an integral part of how your business operates.

The most successful feedback cultures are the ones where feedback is part of the organisational structure. You might have times when there isn’t much feedback to give, but you still want to have a system in place. As mentioned above, feedback can help you solve issues before they turn into problems.

As you’ll find out later on, you want to make sure the feedback system is part of your business operations. Of course, it doesn’t necessarily mean you need to have a regular daily feedback session, but you do need feedback to be part of your operations – whether as weekly meetings or even daily conversations.

Step 2. Making it secure and safe

Once you have a regular feedback routine in place, you need to focus on efforts that make the system feel safe and secure. You don’t want the feedback moments feel forced and your employees should never feel like they are harassed into giving feedback.

Furthermore, it is crucial employees feel safe to give honest feedback. There is no point in having a feedback system in place if employees are only telling you what you want to hear. They need to feel secure enough to outline even the most critical viewpoints.

One way of adding more feeling of security is by creating a work environment where everyone knows each other. You want to ensure colleagues at every level of the organisation know each other. This doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone must disclose every imaginable personal detail or reveal things that they don’t want to. It is just about being aware of the person as an individual and being interested in knowing about their lives.

It is also crucial to have an atmosphere where talking about emotions comes naturally. You could even organise fun group activities that teach employees to be more in tune with their emotions.

Create a flexible feedback culture. You want the employees to feel free to postpone the feedback conversation to a later date. In fact, you don’t want to ever force them into having the conversation, especially if they feel they aren’t emotionally able to handle a conversation at that moment. Only organise the feedback sessions when everyone present at the meeting is willingly there.

Step 3. Establish a balance

You need to strike a balance with feedback in your workplace – every work environment is different, so what works in one company might not work in your company.

The most important thing is to start small. If you’ve not had any type of feedback culture at your company previously, you can’t suddenly have weekly meetings where people are expected to share their thoughts.

Furthermore, don’t instantly change everything your employees might suggest you to change. You don’t want to make major changes right from the get-go, but implement them slowly and start with little tweaks. If you focus on small tweaks first, you can also establish better trust between the managers and the employees.

Make sure you don’t focus just on rewarding positive feedback. The key is to strike a balance with valuing the feedback on its own and then rewarding people for good feedback. It is crucial to understand that different people have different ways of communicating. Therefore, you need to value every effort of giving feedback, whether or not the actual feedback itself proves to be valuable or useful.

Step 4. Implement the feedback culture as a Normal case

As mentioned above in the first step, you want the feedback culture to become a regular part of your routine. The best feedback systems are the ones where feedback culture operates as ‘Normal case’.

According to Harvard Business review, you need to avoid having the feedback sessions laid out like a special occasion. You don’t want to make it cumbersome and time-consuming. You want the feedback sessions to be a normal part of the workday and something that won’t take longer than a few moments.

Normality also equals to transparency. You don’t want the feedback structure to be implemented in secret. It might be a good idea to start it slowly and simply letting your employees know you are looking to implement a new system, you can help instil a feeling of normalcy about the process.

Step 5. Have a number of feedback channels

Finally, you should make sure the feedback environment doesn’t focus solely on one channel. Depending on employee personalities different feedback structures might suit their style better than others. That is why you need to make sure you have different channels to support different styles of engagement.

You should not only focus on having individual feedback sessions, both face-to-face as well as written forms. You can also have a mixture of anonymous feedback together with personal feedback. This can help build more trust and create a more open environment.

Furthermore, it is a good idea to have a mixture of individual sessions combined with group feedback opportunities. A proper feedback outing with the whole team can be a good idea and group conversations can help bring out aspects that might not arise in individual sessions.

The key is to ensure the feedback system in place is transparent and public, even if all of it doesn’t take place out in the open. You don’t want certain employees to have private meetings without others knowing about them. So, whether you are mixing up anonymous, group or one-on-one sessions, ensure everyone in the organisation knows about the structure.

Step 6. The right environment to flourish feedback culture

Overall, the above steps will help you implement a strong feedback culture in the workplace. If you want it to flourish and remain successful, then you need to make sure you have the right environment to support your employees, managers and the whole business.

The following are the key themes to focus on in order to ensure the environment is supportive of feedback.

Step 7. Foster both negative and positive feedback

The right environment for negative and positive feedback is a lot about creating a safe and secure environment for feedback. On top of this, you need to ensure you don’t just reward positive feedback. Whether or not you receive negative or positive feedback, employees need the feel their input is welcomed.

Naturally, we tend to prefer positive feedback, but you should be especially focused on channelling an environment where employees aren’t afraid to voice the negative opinions. It isn’t that positive feedback would be bad for your company, but more about negative feedback often being a better way to grow, develop and improve your business. In fact, negative feedback shouldn’t be viewed as a bad thing. A 2009 poll found that employees who receive negative feedback are over 20 times more likely to be engaged with their work compared to employees who didn’t receive feedback!

It’s a good idea to consider when and how negative feedback is given and received. As mentioned earlier, it is important everyone feels free to speak their minds at feedback sessions and you need to give people the room to move the feedback session to a different time if they aren’t ready. If you know you are going to focus on tough areas where negative feedback is likely to arise, think carefully what situation is the best for the conversation.

As a general rule, it is better that employees and managers focus on negative feedback in one-to-one sessions or smaller groups rather than out in the public.

Step 8. Explain measures behind decisions regarding feedback

The feedback you receive will naturally often result in actions. You might change the workflow or introduce a new bonus structure for your business due to employee feedback. Whatever the actions are, you need to make sure you explain the changes to your employees.

This must be done in a way that doesn’t pinpoint any individual – they need to be guaranteed feedback remains between them and the company, even when not anonymous. You also want to ensure you are positive about the changes.

As well as explaining when changes do occur, you do need to make sure you also make employees understand inaction. If your employees feel the management structure isn’t appropriate, for instance, you should be able to explain to them why the structure remains as it is.

Your employees cannot know your thought process and if you don’t explain your decision making to them, they can be left second-guessing your motivations. This could make them feel less willing to share ideas in the future, as they can feel you aren’t open to new ideas.

As mentioned above, don’t start mixing and changing everything straight away. If you feel a certain change might not work, you could run a trial period. This shows your employees that you value their input, but also guarantees you don’t undergo a costly change in business operations only to change it back a few weeks later.

Step 9. Accountability

Finally, there has to be a strong accountability culture to support a successful feedback culture. You don’t want your feedback structures to be clouded in mystery or people to feel there isn’t anyone responsible for the changes you might be implementing.

The first thing to do is to focus on transparency. Everyone from the managers to employees needs to be aware of how the feedback system works and what the purpose of it is. It might be a good idea to let the employees know about the benefits of feedback and what your business hopes to achieve from the new system. You also want to outline the benefits for the employees.

It is important that everyone gets the same information – whether you are providing feedback guidelines for colleagues or superiors, the information must be the same.

Furthermore, feedback culture is always about an equal communication between the business and the employees. You need to setup an environment where your company is responsible for its part of the deal and the employee is accountable for his or her actions. Your feedback should never be one-sided and your employees must be accountable for the changes you implement as well. Creating an environment of mutual respect, trust and accountability is the key to feedback success.

A strong feedback culture will provide benefits to organisations of all types. Whether you are a small business or an established institution, the benefits of feedback can boost employee motivation and streamline business operations.

The above steps will be useful in creating a strong feedback culture. It is important that you start small and focus on making feedback a regular and normal part of your everyday operations. Make sure every member of your team understands the benefits and goals of your system.

Be upfront about what you hope to achieve from the feedback system and the way your actions are impacted by the feedback you receive. Explaining and justifying your actions regarding the feedback is as important as taking in the feedback.

Finally, a great way to boost your feedback culture is by openly asking your employees to help you in the implementation process. You can’t just expect the culture to kick in overnight – you need to ask each member of the team to support you as you implement the above steps in your organisation.

Activity 2

Describe one way constructive feedback can be embedded into organisational culture.

Strategies for Sharing Constructive Feedback[footnoteRef:4] [4: Source: Business Performance, as at http://www.businessperform.com/workplace-communication/constructive_feedback.html, as on 19th June, 2017.]

"What can you say to your employees and how can you say it?"

"Where can you give and receive feedback?"

"How can you bring out the best in your staff?"

"How do you handle difficult issues without inflaming the situation?"

"How do you respond to negative feedback yourself?"

These are common questions, many of them reflecting frustration and fear of dealing with the "hard stuff" of managing people. But giving constructive feedback to employees doesn't have to be difficult.

Positive feedback, when you tell people they've done well, should be easy. For example:

· thanking people for doing a job well

· commending them for solving a problem for you

· discussing progress with teams and praising their commitment

· celebrating successes when everyone's combined efforts have paid off

This is the kind of feedback that everyone likes; the kind that motivates people to perform well consistently. Here are some more practical strategies for improving feedback at work.

Give Feedback to Encourage Employees

Give feedback to encourage people to continue "putting-in" great effort, or to help them through setbacks, or when people lack confidence or skills. Respect people for the value of their time, their work and their commitment. Show your respect with words that make employees feel good.

Try saying, "You're right!" when someone successfully challenges an idea or work practice. Ask, "Can you spare a few minutes?" when you need to interrupt someone at work. Then wait for the positive reactions.

Use Feedback to Overcome Negativity

A leader must remain optimistic at all times, but how can you convert negativity into something positive? When someone says, "That's a stupid idea!" you could respond, "How could we change it to make it more realistic?"

Coaching Is the Best Feedback

Coaching is the best kind of feedback. Coaching is based on mutual respect, strict confidentiality and trust. A coach believes that people are able to change the way they operate and achieve more if they are given the opportunity and are willing to do something about it.

Questioning is a fundamental skill of coaching. A coach asks questions to:

· assess where the person might need help

· discover how s/he can best help

· help people find solutions for themselves.

Turn Criticism into Constructive Feedback

Avoid feedback that however unintentionally criticizes the employee rather than their actions. If you leave them feeling humiliated and resentful, they will be even more reluctant to change. You can't ignore the problem if something is obviously wrong, but there is a difference between criticism and constructive feedback.

Talking about a "bad attitude" is unlikely to be helpful because the person won't know what they need to change. Telling someone they are incompetent or lazy is a personal attack on their character and will probably lead to an emotional response.

Constructive criticism means starting from a different position. Your criticism should be factual, impersonal and timely. The value of changing their behavior must also be clear. You might say, "This week I've noticed you've been late to three sales briefings and now you want to leave early today for a dental appointment. When you behave so casually the rest of the team feel resentful and tomorrow someone will have to do your work for you. So what can we do about it?" Now here's a chance for the person to respond.

Giving Feedback in Really Difficult Situations

Some situations may have you feeling anxious and finding the right words to say at that moment may not come easily. So, next time you are about to face a really difficult situation, try this four-step plan:

1. Prepare yourself – checking facts and positions, dealing with feelings.

2. Approach the situation constructively – using the right words that you have prepared.

3. Deal with excuses – respectfully.

4. Make sure people can do what they say they will.

Encouraging Feedback from Others

Do you listen when your staffs complain about a customer or a situation? Or do you dismiss their comments because they haven't happened to you? As a business owner or manager you need feedback to find out immediately if something is wrong, or to hear what a customer has said, or if relationships are growing tense.

How do you encourage that kind of feedback? Listen to what people have to say. True listening isn't all that easy; however, our book, 2 Way Feedback, shows you how to really listen – actively listen. Try listening to your staff, actively listening, even though your schedule is full and business is frantic, and see how trust develops.

Accepting Negative Feedback

Negative feedback? It's a little like letting the genie out of the bottle and then finding you can't put it back. However, accepting negative feedback gracefully and gratefully is a skill of great leadership. Remember, though, other people may not know how to give negative feedback diplomatically, like you have. So take a deep breath and swallow your pride.

You may find these guidelines useful when receiving negative feedback.

· Listen without interruption – you may learn something of real value.

· If you hear something you don't agree with, simply say, "That's interesting!" and discuss it at the end.

· Ask questions to clarify what exactly went wrong; what you did or didn't do.

· Acknowledge what is true, but don't necessarily change your position – you may have good reasons for your actions.

· Before taking any action, ask for time to think and then get back to the person.

Can feedback really help to improve working relationships and productivity? Remember, feedback doesn't always have to be negative. Start by looking for occasions when you can give positive feedback and remember to plan carefully for the occasions when you have to give negative feedback – and make it constructive. Try some of these ideas and see what happens.

What strategies can we use for effective feedback?[footnoteRef:5] [5: Source: TAFE NSW, as at http://lrrpublic.cli.det.nsw.edu.au/lrrSecure/Sites/Web/leadership/strategic_transformation/index.htm, as on 19th June, 2017.]

One important way to reflect upon your own efficacy is to have the ability to identify and apply the right strategies that encourage the giving and receiving of effective feedback. This means being proactive with your feedback strategy.

Feedback should be encouraged, even when everything appears to be going well. It can provide a better understanding of needs and wants, and helps to raise the standing or reputation of you as a leader. Feedback can be verbal or in a written document which may form part of the business plan, quality control system or as a part of good risk management practice.

Everyone has the capacity for giving useful feedback. Some people use feedback to better effect than others. The skills involved in giving and receiving feedback can be developed if attention is given to worthwhile feedback, and how it can be provided to enhance learning.

Providing another person with positive suggestions about their work indicates that you care enough to spend time considering their work and that it is worthy of your attention. You are both affirming the worth of the person and offering them your views on something they have put some effort into.

The desirable characteristics of peer feedback are no different from those of any other type of feedback. In general such feedback is specific, descriptive, non-judgmental in tone and form, and is directed towards the goals of the person receiving it. Helpful feedback makes a conscious distinction between the person (who is always valued) and the particular acts or specific work which may be subject to critical comment.

What is the difference between good and bad feedback?

Some of the basic characteristics of bad feedback are that it is directed globally at the person; it is unhelpful because it does not suggest what otherwise might be; it is ill-judged, it comes from the needs of the critic rather than the needs of the person receiving it; and it can provide a weight of destructive comment from which it is difficult for a person to surface: it is dehumanising.

Useful feedback, on the other hand, affirms the worth of the person and gives support while offering reactions to the object of attention. Thus the person providing the feedback shows that they value the person who is receiving it and that the provider is sensitive to their needs and goals. This does not mean that only praise should be given, but that any critical matters should be raised in an overall supportive context in which the parties can trust one another.

How should we offer feedback?

There are many characteristics of worthwhile feedback but the most important is the way in which it is given. The tone, the style and the content should be consistent and provide the constant message: ‘I appreciate you and what you have done and whatever else I say should be taken in this context’.

How can we give helpful feedback?

Be realistic. Direct your comments towards matters about which the person can do something. Don't make suggestions which are entirely outside the scope of the matters at hand.

Be specific. Generalisations are particularly unhelpful. The person should be given sufficient information to pinpoint the areas to which you are referring and have a clear idea of what is being said about those specific areas.

Be sensitive to the goals of the person. Just because the other person's contributions have not met your goals doesn't necessarily imply that something is wrong. The person produced the work for a specific purpose and you should be aware of that purpose and give your views accordingly. This is not to say that you can't make comments from your own perspective but that you should be clear when you offer views in terms of your own goals and you should say that is what you are doing. Link your comments to their intentions; listen carefully to what they have to say.

Be timely. Time your comments well. It is no use offering feedback after the person receiving it has put the work aside and moved on to other things. Respond promptly when your feedback is requested—to be effective feedback must be well timed.

Be descriptive. Describe your views. Don't say what you think the person should feel. Don't be emotionally manipulative; you are offering your considered, rational views which should have the characteristics described here and it is up to the other person to accept or reject them as they see fit.

Be consciously non-judgmental. Offer your personal view without acting as an authority (even if you may be one elsewhere). Give your personal reactions and feelings rather than value-laden statements. One way of doing this is to use comments of the type ‘I feel ... when you ...’

Be diligent. Check your response. Is it an accurate reflection of what you want to express? Have you perceived the contribution accurately? There is nothing more annoying than to receive criticism from someone who clearly hasn't bothered to pay attention to what you have done.

Be direct. Say what you mean. Don't wrap it up in circumlocution, fancy words or abstract language.

How should we receive feedback?

There is no point in asking others to give you feedback unless you are prepared to be open to it and to consider comments which differ from your own perceptions.

If you wish to receive feedback, try the following:

Be explicit. Make it clear what kind of feedback you are seeking. If necessary indicate what kinds you do not want to receive. The feedback from others is entirely for your benefit and if you do not indicate what you want you may not get it.

Be aware. Notice your own reactions, both intellectual and emotional. Particularly notice any reactions of rejection or censorship on your part. If the viewpoint from which the other is speaking is at variance with your own, do not dismiss it; it can be important to realise the misapprehensions of others. Some people find it useful to partially dissociate or distance themselves in this situation and act as if they were witnessing feedback being given to someone else.

Be silent. Refrain from making a response. Don't even begin to frame a response in your own mind until you have listened carefully to what has been said and have considered the implications. Don't be distracted by the need to explain; if you really need to give an explanation do it later after the feedback session.

How can feedback be communicated?

There is no difference in principle between feedback given in written form and that in person. However, with written feedback there is normally no opportunity to resolve misunderstandings and it is necessary to be very explicit in specifying what types of feedback are desired and in formulating responses. In the written form more attention needs to be given to tone and style than would usually be the case in person.

Follow up feedback

It is good business practice to follow up feedback, whether positive or negative. This includes developing a plan about responding to feedback and to reward people for their feedback and be grateful for it.

Encourage feedback

It is very important that feedback be encouraged. Sometimes this can be difficult but your office should encourage an ‘open door’ policy, and members of staff should know that their opinion is valued. To encourage positive feedback you must be prepared to answer additional questions and to clarify topics that someone doesn’t understand. If you make it seem like this is a chore then you will discourage further feedback.

Feedback between management and staff, as well as between an organisation and its customers, is also a mandatory prerequisite of any business situation. This encourages harmonious relationships within your department and with clients. It also improves staff/management performance and maintains the aims and goals formulated in any quality policy manual.

Try this 5-step strategy to manage feedback in the case of a complaint or problem.

Step 1

Listen actively

Listen for clues to what the priorities are:

· Are there real fears?

· Are there urgent needs?

· What would they like to happen?

Step 2

Ask questions… lots of questions

It puts you in control immediately. It lets everyone know that someone cares about their problem and is prepared to do something to help.

Step 3

Repeat the complaint/problem back

Repeat the complaint/problem back and get acknowledgment that you heard it properly.

Step 4

Apologise

Apologise without admitting liability, eg ‘I’m sorry that this has happened to you’ or ‘I’m sorry that you have been inconvenienced like this.’

Step 5

Make specific suggestions

Explain what can be done at this time. If there are policy limitations, explain them assertively.

Feedback activities

Here are some suggestions for activities to give or receive feedback:

· regular or irregular interviews

· periodic performance reviews

· regular staff meetings

· informal discussions

· invite written responses on specific topics, eg with questionnaires or surveys

· publications or broadcasts, such as an electronic newsletter or blog posts.

Further opportunities for building feedback into business activities could include:

· team brainstorming and problem-solving forums (online or face-to-face)

· professional development activities (online or face-to-face)

· project management meetings

· reviewing/debriefing discussions.

Activity 3

Consider ways you could provide opportunities in your workplace to give and receive effective feedback. For example, you may find ways to integrate feedback within a specific project development process, or ongoing mechanisms for day-to-day feedback or consultation.

Develop and implement a feedback strategy.

Establish the goal of the strategy and include feedback activities, the purpose or objectives of the feedback and tools/methods to use. To devise the activities get input/suggestions from staff and/or stakeholders, and check what organisational tools/methods are available to use. Will your strategy be consistent with best practice and new organisational approaches?

An implementation process could include the following steps in the case of a written questionnaire:

1. Design/develop the questionnaire

2. Gather responses

3. Document results/responses

4. Analyse what the feedback means

5. Follow up feedback

6. Develop performance standards, or benchmarks

Work toward continuous improvement.

Regularly review own performance in terms of personal efficacy, personal competence and attainment of professional competence outcomes and personal development objectives and priorities

Review personal efficacy and personal competence

The theory behind personal efficacy

Research in the area of personal efficacy has grown out of social cognitive theory. This theory asserts that perceived self-efficacy can be explained as people's beliefs about their capabilities to produce designated levels of performance that exercise influence over events that affect their lives, and that these beliefs determine how people feel, think, behave and motivate themselves. People with a strong sense of efficacy set themselves more challenging goals and maintain stronger commitment to those goals than do people with a poorer sense of efficacy.

Self-efficacy refers to the extent to which leaders believe they can bring about change and impact on staff behaviour and outcomes. Leaders who have a high sense of efficacy about their capability can motivate and enhance their cognitive development.

Studies have demonstrated the importance of self-efficacy and its association with a wide range of outcomes. These outcomes include organisational behaviours, effort and goal-setting, openness to new ideas and willingness to try new methods, planning and organisational competence, persistence, resilience, commitment, enthusiasm and longevity in their chosen career. In addition, self-efficacy has been shown to influence achievement, attitude and emotional growth and is related to the health of the organisation, atmosphere, decision making and staff self-efficacy.

Time for reflection

Forethought involves two subordinate categories: task analysis and self-motivational beliefs. People do not engage in tasks or set learning goals and plan and work strategically if they are not motivated by strong personal agency. In particular, self-efficacy—personal beliefs about having the means to learn or perform effectively and that the outcomes will be worthwhile—are key features of personal agency.

Thinking about your actions and performance includes the capacity and attitude to instruct yourself and seek help to learn, the self-management of tasks, the production of creative processes and the structuring of the environment to optimise learning.

Self-observation involves the cognitive monitoring of performance and the conditions which surround and influence it.

Self-reflection involves both self-judgements and self-reactions to those judgements. The two key self-judgement processes are self-evaluation and attributing causal significance to the results. Self-evaluation involves comparing your own performance with a standard, criteria or goal. It might also involve comparing your own perceptions of performance with the feedback given from peers. Attribution judgements are pivotal to self-reflection because attributions to a fixed ability prompt learners to react negatively and discourage efforts to improve. By contrast attributions of poor performance to inappropriate learning strategies sustain perceptions of efficacy.

A plan to review your own personal efficacy

Upon feedback in relation to personal efficacy you can review your capability and create objectives and priorities to grow your personal development and attain further professional competencies. There are several ways to do this including:

· formally documenting/diarising and regularly reviewing objectives and development

· identifying weekly or monthly actions you are responsible for achieving

· creating an overall picture of each outcome or activity you will be involved in

· developing a plan.

Goals—the things you are aiming for. Your goals should reflect the wider goals of the organisation as well as yourself.

Objectives—the measurable goals you aim to achieve. Your objectives contribute to achieving your goals.

Targets—the measurable outcomes indicating whether your objectives are being achieved.

Tasks and activities—the actions you undertake to reach the targets and objectives.

Team member responsibilities—the allocation of tasks to individuals or groups.

Resources—the items you need to meet your responsibilities, such as tools, communication equipment, computers, vehicles and other items specific to the work undertaken.

Timelines—each target and task should have a time element so that you know when you should carry out and complete tasks.

Milestones—the major points within a plan that are measurable and signify that a stage of the plan has been completed.

Priorities—the relative importance of the various objectives and tasks within the plan.

Did you know…?

Realising objectives and priorities in relation to competence and personal development are strategies for success if they can:

· improve your ability to undertake your job

· help you keep pace with changing technology and knowledge in the dynamic education and training sector

· ensure you maintain a competitive edge

· build self-esteem and enhance your career opportunities

· provide assurance that you are keeping yourself up-to-date.

Activity 4

Consider the following and reflect upon your own competence, motivation and self-efficacy:

· self-reactions include self-satisfaction and adaptive inferences

· self-satisfaction involves perceptions and associated effects regarding one’s own performance

· courses of action that result in satisfaction and positive effect should be pursued

· actions that produce dissatisfaction and have negative effects should be avoided

· self-regulated learners condition their satisfaction on reaching their goals, and these self-incentives motivate and direct their actions.

Journal

You have an obligation to yourself to keep up-to-date, develop new skills, knowledge and confidence to ensure you have a successful and rewarding career; demonstrate your commitment to being the best you can be; provide professional service to your staff and employer and enhance the profession's image.

In your journal, make notes about your review your own personal efficacy and personal competence.

· What are some of your own professional competencies?

· What are your goals, objectives and priorities in relation to your personal development?

Review own capacity as a role model in terms of ability to build trust, confidence and respect of diverse groups and relevant individuals

Review your capacity as a role model

A role model is someone who has a special interpersonal influence that gets an individual or group to do what they want because the groups and individuals have trust and confidence in, and respect for, the person. This is often the case when the process of exercising influence meets the needs of others. A role model is a person who serves as an example of the values, attitudes, and behaviours associated with a role. Role models can be persons who distinguish themselves in such a way that others admire and want to emulate them.

Are you a role model?

A role model may also be defined as someone who uses their power to influence the behaviour of others, or alternatively, one who guides and inspires others and who shows the way.

Being a role model plays a crucial part in the achievement of one’s own personal efficacy and the achievement of organisational goals and strategies, as well as building trust, confidence and the respect of peers.

Review yourself as a role model. Do you:

· evoke or empower to your full potential

· integrate streams of knowledge and expertise

· create a vision

· anticipate, think and plan

· motivate and empower others

· develop and use appropriate communication networks

· effectively coordinate your own and others’ work activities?

Do role models have common characteristics?

Almost all of us can recognise and point to people we consider successful role models, or people that were successful role models for a specific time. We note that role models do not have common physical characteristics; they do not all exhibit common psychological traits and they are not all highly educated. What they all seem to possess is a judgement that allows them to behave in a way that seems appropriate to that situation and they are characterised by their followers’ acceptance of them as role models. They do not all possess formal authority in the situation; hence they are not all managers. However, effective managers are usually people who are successful role models or are able to manage the leadership role by constant reflection on their own personal efficacy and effectiveness and to achieve the trust, confidence and respect of diverse groups and relevant individuals.

How do role models behave?

The behaviour of a role model is often directive, supportive, achievement-oriented and they are usually participative. They also place a strong emphasis on group facilitation; they are often self-confident and display an articulated vision. Role models are often charismatic by force of their personal attributes and they have the ability to motivate followers, build trust through expertise, success and risk taking and they also demonstrate how to achieve vision by empowerment.

Activity 5

In your own words answer the following questions:

1. How could you improve your capacity as a role model?

2. Suggest three strategies you would use to review your ability to build trust, confidence and respect within your organisation?

Journal

Analyse your ability to build trust, confidence and respect with diverse groups and relevant individuals. For example, do you treat people with integrity, respect and empathy, and communicate to develop trust and confidence?

Evaluate personal effectiveness in building an effective organisational and workplace culture

Build an effective organisational and workplace culture

Why is workplace culture so important?

A supportive workplace culture has been associated with a variety of benefits, including higher levels of affective commitment to the organisation, lower intention to leave the organisation, higher levels of job satisfaction, lower levels of stress and the experience of less conflict between work and family responsibilities.

In addition to the direct positive effects of a supportive workplace culture, perceptions of a supportive workplace culture are associated with greater utilisation rates of work-life balance policies. The culture in the organisation is crucial for determining whether people use the policies and for their general attitudes towards the organisation. To enjoy the benefits of work-life balance, the culture and work environment need to be addressed.

How can we change workplace culture?

The development and implementation of policies is a gradual process which requires dealing with certain behaviours, attitudes and expectations held by employees and management within the organisation.

Three ways of changing workplace culture may include:

· education and communication

· getting management behind the culture change

· altering key values, norms and cultural artefacts.

Educate and communicate

Changing the workplace culture does not happen overnight and requires commitment. It is important to build consensus for cultural change from the top down as well as from the bottom up. Education about the importance of work-life balance, the benefits provided by work-life balance policies and the role of workplace culture is necessary to convince managers and employees of the importance of a supportive ‘work-life balance’ culture.

Discussions between management and staff may increase understanding of mutual expectations and develop solutions to work-life balance issues. Discussions on how they can help each other with work-life balance should be encouraged, as this provides employees with a feeling of ownership of the problem-solving process.

Gather support

It is vitally important that both senior and middle management get behind the culture change. Active and visible support from senior management is crucial to the effective introduction of work and family policies. Managers supporting a traditional organisational culture, which emphasises the pursuit of work goals and ignores employees’ personal lives, undermine the success of work-life balance policies.

Managers should be role models by using work-life balance policies themselves. It is very important to use policies in an appropriate way, so employees are given accurate information on how the policy is supposed to work.

For example, under the Industrial Relations Act 1999 employees have a right to use up to ten days paid sick leave per year to care and support family or household members who are ill. If a manager then stays at home to care for a sick child, but uses annual leave, they send out a wrong message that while it is OK to stay at home due to caring responsibilities, it should be at the detriment of your own recreational leave. The manager has a right to ten days paid carer’s leave and should set the right example by using the right type of leave.

Change key values, norms and cultural artefacts

An important issue that should be addressed when trying to change the workplace culture is the role of ‘cultural artefacts’. The most important cultural artefact is the organisation’s key values and norms. Other cultural artefacts are myths and sagas about company successes and heroes and heroines; symbols, rituals and ceremonies; and use of physical surroundings. It is important when changing the workplace culture, to change the existing cultural artefacts as well. New cultural artefacts can enhance the change process. To help change the key values and norms of an organisation consider changing some of the cultural artefacts.

Myths and sagas

A common myth about work-life balance issues is that they are only relevant to women. Educating people about the benefits of these policies for both women and men may help change this common myth. Give profile to people who are high performers and who also use the policies to create new heroes and heroines.

Symbols, rituals and ceremonies

Organise some social functions at times suitable for children as well as adults and specifically invite the family members.

Introduce awards nominated by employees. Try award ceremonies for those who are playing an important role in changing the workplace culture.

Use of physical surroundings

Allow people to have pictures or other personal objects in their work area.

Activity 6

Identify and consider a new or emerging business goal impacting your organisation or work unit.

· What will be the desired characteristics of the workplace culture to align processes, norms and values to meet the business objectives?

· Assess the current cultural artefacts and the gaps to achieving desired performance.

· What role will feedback and modelling strategies play in developing cultural changes?

· Devise an action plan to close the gaps.

Portfolio

Develop your own workplace culture checklist for your workplace.

Journal

Review your personal development goals in relation to organisational and workplace culture, and where you need to be.

Analyse and evaluate personal effectiveness in developing the competence required to achieve operational accountabilities and responsibilities

Develop competence to achieve operational accountabilities and responsibilities

The drive and enthusiasm to develop competence for yourself and others ensures the growth of those areas of management which you are responsible for. You must also respond to the need for professional development to build competence where required. This ensures continuous improvement and positive growth in the areas in which you are accountable and responsible.

This means taking responsibility to demonstrate and review performance and the results achieved, including the means used. Performance measurements allow us to determine how well we are going, taking into account inputs, outputs and outcomes.

Standards provide a clear guide for levels of performance and achievement and they are established through comparison of results. Improvement targets measure improvement based locally on a set of agreed standards. Performance improvement is the practice of applying critical reflection, based on the evidence of success and failure, to achieve better results.

What are we aiming to achieve with standards?

The following elements state how to evaluate personal effectiveness in developing the competence required to achieve operational accountabilities and responsibilities.

Standards provide expectations for performance and direction for improvement. What standards do you use in your daily management? How can you measure the achievement of these standards? For example: safety (OHS) standards and regulations; national quality training framework; professional codes of conduct; and organisational policies and procedures. Additionally standards may address:

· complaints and grievances

· legislative requirements

· privacy

· risk management

· equal employment opportunity (EEO)

· records management

· financial management.

Self-review: How are we doing? How do we know?

All organisations should undertake rigorous self-review processes annually. Leaders should validate the quality of the self-review process, outcomes achieved and actions on a regular basis. Approaches are:

· ongoing

· contextual

· standards driven

· evidence based

· inquiry focussed

· ethically conducted

· collaborative

· well managed

· comprehensive

· actioned

· communicated

· validated.

How are we doing? How do we know?

This will involve:

· a comprehensive analysis of performance and management information

· working with other leaders and mentors to better understand performance

· identifying where to best target and support improvement efforts.

Improvement planning: What more do we need to do? Where to from here?

Leaders are accountable for:

· the development of improvement plans that address priorities

· updating plans in response to self-review and emerging issues

· developing performance agreements that reflect priorities in improvement plans.

Managing improvement planning

Intervention and support

When improvement planning strategies don’t achieve desired standards we need to:

· identify concerns through self-review processes

· provide effective intervention and support strategies

· make strategic resource decisions to target support

· monitor actions taken, progress made and outcomes achieved.

Routine interventions

Routine interventions may include:

· providing additional support, attention and professional development

· considering alternative practices, programs or approaches

· referring learners to support programs.

Targeted interventions

· Targeted interventions are whole-organisation interventions.

· They may be identified by leaders in discussion groups.

Specialised interventions

· These may include the provision of resources, a financial review or change of personnel.

Performance reporting: Who will we inform and how?

Performance reporting involves:

· documenting and reporting upon our performance

· keeping stakeholders fully informed

· setting up clear communication processes

· reporting on performance and operations

· complying with reporting requirements.

Roles, responsibilities, accountabilities

Leaders are responsible for:

· focusing on achievement and wellbeing outcomes

· monitoring and improving staff and organisational performance

· delivering quality service with sound management practices

· developing strategic relationships

· working effectively within legal policy requirements

· taking necessary action to improve performance.

Activity 7

Research the following websites which provide information on TAFE and VET standards and policies.

TAFE Strategy, Business and Operations – DET NSW intranet - https://detwww.det.nsw.edu.au/tsss/index.htm

Guidelines for Course Developers – Australian Quality Training Framework - http://www.tac.wa.gov.au/Documents/AQTF-GuidelinesCourseDevelopers.pdf

Portfolio

Regarding decision making and management of tasks within your work area, are you clear about the accountabilities and responsibilities for yourself, your managers and your staff?

Identify areas for further research and consultation in order to clarify accountabilities and responsibilities regarding all your business activities.

Review your methods to keep up-to-date and identify legislative requirements, guidelines and policy for new business activities or projects as they arise.

Apply transformational and transactional leadership practices

Transformational leaders are usually charismatic leaders. Some well recognised transformational leaders include: Professor Fiona Stanley AC, 2003 Australian of the Year; the former CEO of Qantas, Geoff Dixon; Greg Clarke, CEO of Lend Lease; Mark Scott, Head of the ABC; and Ardyce Harris, recipient of the AUSTAFE Award for Educational Leadership. They pay attention to the concerns and development needs of individual followers; they change followers’ awareness of issues by helping those followers to look at old problems in new ways; and they are able to excite, arouse and inspire followers to put extra effort into achieving group goals.

Transformational leadership is built on top of transactional leadership. Transformational leadership produces levels of subordinate effort and performance that go beyond what would occur with a transactional approach alone. Moreover, transformational leadership is more than charisma. The transformational leader will attempt to instil in followers the ability to question not only established views but eventually those established by the leader. Transformational leaders have been found to be evaluated as being more effective and more strongly correlated with lower turnover rates of staff, higher productivity and higher employee satisfaction.

Honesty is a common characteristic of a transformational leader. Other characteristics include an ability to build trust, integrity, competence, consistency, loyalty and openness. Given the importance of trust to leadership, leaders also build trust by practising openness, being fair, speaking with feelings, telling the truth, showing consistency, fulfilling promises, maintaining confidence and demonstrating competence.

To measure leadership more specifically one may assess the extent of influence on the followers, that is, the amount of leading. Effective leaders generate higher productivity, lower costs, and more opportunities than ineffective leaders. Effective leaders create results, attain goals, realise visions and other objectives more quickly and at a higher level of quality than ineffective leaders.

Apply leadership practices

Conceptually there are two factors to differentiate 'ordinary' from 'extraordinary' leadership; or ‘transactional’ from ‘transformational’ leadership. Transactional (ordinary) leadership is based on an exchange relationship in which follower compliance (effort, productivity, and loyalty) is exchanged for expected rewards. Transformational (extraordinary) leaders raise followers' consciousness levels about the importance and value of designated outcomes and ways of achieving them. They also motivate followers to transcend their own immediate self-interest for the sake of the mission and vision of the organisation. Followers' confidence levels are raised and their needs broadened by the leader so they can support development to higher potential. Such total engagement (emotional, intellectual and moral) encourages followers to develop and perform beyond expectations.

Transformational leadership can be identified by distinct behavioural constructs:

· idealised influence (attributes)

· idealised influence (behaviour)

· inspirational motivation

· intellectual stimulation

· individualised consideration.

Three behavioural constructs identify transactional leadership:

· contingent reward

· management by exception (active)

· management by exception (passive).

The conception of transformational and transactional leadership contrasts with that of some theorists who considered transformational and transactional leadership practices as opposite ends of a continuum. Some theorists contended that most leaders display transformational and transactional leadership in varying degrees. Transformational leadership augments transactional leadership. Transactional practices do little to bring about the enhanced commitment and extra effort required for change compared with the results of transformational leadership. In reality transformational and transactional leadership practices are interwoven. Transformational leadership is relatively effective when it manages to incorporate transactional leadership practices in a way that is sensitive to staff and accepted by them.

Reflection

Reflect on your own workplace in relation to the following statement:

The transactional factors are active management by exception and passive management by exception. Active management by exception consists of items that suggested the leader focused on monitoring task execution for any mistakes or complaints that were likely to occur, before problems arise. Passive management by exception consists of items which showed that the leader only intervened after problems arise. The difference between active and passive management by exception is that active management by exception involves proactive leadership, whereas, passive management by exception involves reactive leadership.

Do you agree with this statement? Why?

Leadership models

James MacGregor Burns introduced a normative element known as Burnsian leadership which unites followers in a shared vision that will improve an organisation. Burns calls leadership that delivers true value, integrity, and trust transformational leadership. He distinguishes such leadership from ‘mere’ transactional leadership that builds power.

The functional leadership model conceives leadership as a set of behaviours that help a group perform a task, reach their goal or perform their function. In this model effective leaders encourage functional behaviours and discourage dysfunctional ones.

In the path-goal model of leadership, developed jointly by Martin Evans and Robert House and based on the ‘Expectancy Theory of Motivation’, a leader has the function of clearing the path toward the goal/s of the group, by meeting the needs of subordinates.

David McClelland saw leadership skills, not so much as a set of traits, but as a pattern of motives. He claimed that successful leaders will tend to have a high need for power, a low need for affiliation, and a high level of what he called ‘activity inhibition’ (one might call it ‘self-control’).

Situational leadership theory offers an alternative approach. It proceeds from the assumption that different situations call for different characteristics. According to this group of theories, no single optimal psychographic profile of a leader exists. The situational leadership model of Hersey and Blanchard, for example, suggest four leadership styles and four levels of follower development. For effectiveness, the model posits that the leadership style must match the appropriate level of followership development. In this model, leadership behaviour becomes a function not only of the characteristics of the leader, but of the characteristics of followers as well. Other situational leadership models introduce a variety of situational variables. These determinants include:

· the nature of the task (structured or routine)

· organisational policies, climate, and culture

· the preferences of the leader's superiors

· the expectations of peers

· the reciprocal responses of followers.

The contingency model of Vroom and Yetton uses other situational variables including:

· the nature of the problem

· the requirements for accuracy

· the acceptance of an initiative

· time constraints

· cost constraints.

However one determines leadership behaviour, it can be categorised into various leadership styles. Many ways of doing this exist. For example, the managerial grid model, a behavioural leadership model, suggests five different leadership styles based on leaders' strength of concern for people and their concern for goal achievement.

Kurt Lewin, Ronald Lipitt, and R. K. White identified three leadership styles—authoritarian, democratic, and laissez-faire—based on the amount of influence and power exercised by the leader.

The Fiedler contingency model bases the leader’s effectiveness on what Fred Fiedler called ‘situational contingency’ (later called ‘situational control’). This results from the interaction of leadership style and situational favourableness.

What do these leadership models teach us?

Studies of leadership models have suggested qualities that people often associate with leadership. They include:

· technical/specific skill at the task at hand

· charismatic inspiration; attractiveness to others and the ability to leverage this esteem to motivate others

· preoccupation with a role; a dedication that consumes much of leaders' life-service to a cause

· a clear sense of purpose (or mission); clear goals, focus and commitment

· results orientated; directing every action towards a mission; prioritising activities to spend time where results most accrue

· cooperation; working well with others

· optimism; very few pessimists become leaders

· rejection of determinism; belief in one's ability to ‘make a difference’

· ability to encourage and nurture those who report to them; delegate in such a way as people will grow

· role models; leaders may adopt a persona that encapsulates their mission and lead by example

· self-knowledge (in non-bureaucratic structures)

· self-awareness; the ability to ‘lead’ (as it were) one's own self prior to leading others similarly

· awareness of environment; the ability to understand the environment they lead in and how they affect and are affected by it

· with regards to people and projects, the ability to choose winners; recognising that, unlike with skills, one cannot (in general) teach attitude

· empathy; understanding what others say rather than listening to how they say things

· integrity; the integration of outward actions and inner values

· sense of humour; people work better when they're happy.

A charter for leaders

In 2008 Burman and Evans published a 'charter' for leaders:

1. Leading by example in accordance with the company’s core values

2. Building the trust and confidence of the people with which they work

3. Continually seeking improvement in their methods and effectiveness

4. Keeping people informed

5. Being accountable for their actions and holding others accountable for theirs

6. Involving people, seeking their views, listening actively to what they have to say and representing these views honestly

7. Being clear on what is expected, and providing feedback on progress

8. Showing tolerance of people’s differences and dealing with their issues fairly

9. Acknowledging and recognising people for their contributions and performance

10. Weighing alternatives, considering both short and long-term effects and then being resolute in the decisions they make.

The approach of listing leadership qualities, often termed ‘trait theory of leadership’, assumes certain traits or characteristics will tend to lead to effective leadership. Although trait theory has an intuitive appeal, difficulties may arise in proving its tenets, and opponents frequently challenge this approach. The ‘strongest’ versions of trait theory see these leadership characteristics as innate, and accordingly label some people as ‘born leaders’ due to their psychological makeup. On this reading of the theory, leadership development involves identifying and measuring leadership qualities, screening potential leaders from non-leaders, then training those with potential.

Activity 8

You will have known people you admired as leaders, role models and mentors.

1. What was it about those leaders you admired? What made them good leaders?

2. The world has produced some outstanding leaders. Not all have been considered good people, although they were successful leaders of their time. Choose one recognised leader and list what you consider to be the leadership qualities that led to their success.

3. Do you consider leadership qualities of prominent people the same leadership qualities needed by workplace leaders at all levels?

4. Which qualities and skills are important for workplace leadership and which do you consider not to be relevant?

Journal

Record your reflections and research notes in your journal.

Demonstrate empathy in personal communication, relationships and day to day leadership role

Demonstrate empathy in personal communication

How can we use empathy?

Empathy is the understanding, awareness or vicarious experience of sharing the feelings and thoughts of another. The key to developing a good rapport is the ability to listen well and empathise. This means being able to:

· have an understanding of the other person’s or side’s position

· put yourself in their shoes; try to see things from their perspective

· recognise their needs and wants

· use active listening techniques as they speak.

For your part…

Your responses should be positive and enthusiastic, showing that you have concentrated on what was said and focusing on the content of the discussion. Empathy enhances the exchange of information. The tone of communication tends to be positive and concentrates on the needs and expectations of the parties involved.

Put it into practice…

Techniques for showing concern and empathy, for example, using terms like ‘I see’ and ‘I understand’; if people feel someone cares and understands it may reduce their anger.

Employ empathy to try to understand the issues of the problem from the other person’s point of view.

What is empathetic listening?

In his book The seven habits of highly effective people Stephen Covey focuses on the importance of listening with the intent to understand. He calls this empathetic listening because you attempt to get into the other person’s frame of reference in order to truly understand. According to Covey, we are usually listening at one of four levels:

Ignoring—this is when we’re not truly listening at all.

Pretending—again, we’re not listening but only pretending to listen by responding glibly with ‘yeah’, ‘uh huh’ or ‘right’.

Selective listening—this is when we hear only what we want to hear.

Attentive listening—we’re paying attention and focussing on the words that are being said.

We listen through our own filters

We listen through our own filters and as a result we tend to respond in four ways:

We evaluate—either agree or disagree.

We probe—we ask questions from our own frame of reference.

We advise—we give counsel based on our own experience.

We interpret—we try to figure people out, to explain their motives and behaviour, based on our own motives and behaviour.

Reflect upon your own listening techniques

The highest form of listening is to pay attention and listen without any bias or judgement. Empathetic listening is listening with your eyes and heart because much of the meaning is conveyed through body language. Your intention is to really understand what the other person is saying and to see things from their perspective.

How can we develop empathetic listening skills?

Mimic content—you listen and repeat.

Re-phrase the content—this requires some logical cognitive process.

Reflect feeling—in this instance, you do not pay attention to the words of the speaker but how the speaker is feeling.

Re-phrase the content and reflect the feeling—you are reflecting on the content as well as the emotions contained within the spoken words.

By understanding the emotion that accompanies words, you encourage others to open up. This is one of the most important habits to cultivate open communication channels with others. Remember that it is easy to feel empathy for someone with a similar world view. The challenge is to feel empathy when someone thinks in a very different way.

Activity 9

Empathy is about the act of imaginatively entering into the experience of another person and understanding their situation, feelings and motives.

1. Can you think of a situation that would have benefited through greater empathy?

2. Identify a communication solution where empathy may be lost during non-face-to-face encounters.

Journal

Reflect on your empathy and listening skills in the workplace and practise techniques for active listening and empathy.

Simply stated, empathy is defined as the ability to identify and understand another’s situation, feelings, and motives. As a naturally empathetic person I never really paused to consider this personality trait as a professional asset. However, as I began to reflect on the fabric of my current business relationships, I realized that my natural, empathetic communication style has been a major factor in the majority of my most successful, meaningful, and profitable business relationships[footnoteRef:6]. [6: Source: Reuben Metters, as at https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/role-empathy-business-communications-reuben-metters, as on 19th June, 2017.]

"Empathy is the #1 soft skill that you can develop." - Forbes Magazine

There seems to be no coincidence that empathy can be directly associated with the 'hard skill' of Customer Knowledge, as it applies to taking a customer-centric approach, understanding the needs of the customers, and tailoring products and services to fulfill them. In my own experience, having an empathetic approach to my communication style has served me extremely well throughout two decades of leading and directing small-large, teams and organizations.

Could a shift in the way that you view this soft skill benefit you? I challenge you to ponder how applying a dab of this 'mystical', relational tool could positively benefit your business communications.

Here are a few suggestions that may contribute to a more empathetic approach...

Develop Your Self-Awareness

Communicating with others in a way that reflects more empathy requires you to have a heightened level of self-awareness. What is your natural disposition, and how does that translate to others during interactions? How you are perceived, oft times determines how you are received; thus, having a thorough understanding of ‘where’ you are mentally and emotionally during interactions, is vital.

Smile and Greet Others With Genuine Enthusiasm

Your smile (or lack thereof) is one of the most powerful forms of non-verbal communication! Smiling and greeting others with genuine enthusiasm will contribute to you appearing to be more approachable and open by other's that wish to share their ideas or concerns with you. Research has shown that the act of smiling is contagious! Personally, I find it EXTREMELY difficult not to return a bright, genuine smile from anyone...including my 10 lb, miniature Schnauzer! Additionally, other studies have concluded that something as simple as seeing a friend or family member smile can involuntarily activate the muscles in your face to make that same expression, without you even being aware of it! Crazy, right? Time to work on your 'smile mojo!'

Lead the Way

Take the lead during initial conversations with prospective connections, clients, colleagues, etc., and communicate with confidence, professionalism, and an awareness for the setting, that you might properly adjust your tone, and style of your approach. The Invitas Group has so accurately written, "Conversational leadership emphasizes keen attention, self-discipline, and a certain kind of artistry in engaging and communicating with others." We must lead others through conversation with ways that are engaging; dismiss 'small-talk', in favor of insightful and meaningful exchanges, in order to establish authentic dialog.

Remember Other’s Names

I admittedly struggle with this one, but there is something quite special about a new acquaintance who remembers your name at your next meeting! When I am remembered by-name, I feel as though our previous interaction was significant and memorable, and that is how I desire others to feel when they depart from me!

Listen, and Show Sincere Interest

Actively listen in conversations, and ask thoughtful, open-ended questions to provoke thought, and generate good dialog. Great initial conversations can be inspirational, and plant the seed of a long-term business interest. Take time to listen to customers, employees, managers and stakeholders; quite often, it is their ideas that develop the pathways to future success. Additionally, as you are conversing with others, take note of their body language; much of what we communicate with one another is non-verbal. Signs of irritation, offense, and disinterest are sometimes subtle, but rarely undetectable, as are signs of interest, curiosity, and excitement.

Advocate for Other’s Needs

"We should continually strive to focus on providing, dynamic, flexible, solution-based services to our customers, that not only fulfills their requirements, but demonstrates an understanding of the challenges or exposures they may be experiencing."

This is an area in which I feel that having an empathetic disposition truly makes a difference! From a service provider perspective, we are called upon to fulfill the wants, needs and desires of our customers, but the true value of our service is hidden within their ‘customer experience!' How does the customer feel, when they are in receipt of our services, and what impression are they left with in conclusion? How they feel can sometimes be the determining factor of their decision to do business with us again; therefore, we should continually strive to focus on providing, dynamic, flexible, solution-based services to our customers, that not only fulfills their requirements, but demonstrates an understanding of the challenges or exposures they may be experiencing. This approach communicates that we are not only concerned with just the monetary value of their business, but we are also concerned with their success and satisfaction with our products and services.

Find Common Ground

Connecting with others on a personal level, possibly through a shared interest, hobby, or personal anecdote, may ultimately contribute to a deeper connection. It is amazing to watch how others truly unfold when they begin to speak about the things that they are truly passionate about, including family, friends, travel, dreams, or life-long aspirations. In those moments, capitalize on sharing in their enthusiasm; take the joyride, in reflection of what makes them happy!

Withhold Judgment

Judge not, lest ye be judged…or something like that? Reserve your judgment, and cultivate healthy respect for the diversity found within the thoughts, views, and opinions of others. Resist the urge to let your personal biases cloud your professional judgment, or cause you to dismiss the value of another's perspective/contribution. We all have something unique to offer.

Provide Encouragement

My Father used to say, “Endeavor to leave people better than how you found them.” I understood that to mean that as I encountered others in my life, it was my personal responsibility to actively contribute to them in a positive way. In the professional realm, we can positively contribute to each other's growth and well-being through encouragement, and constructive feedback. These important contributions need not only be reserved for times of low morale, discipline or correction; this method of sharing can be applied liberally, generating an exponential return on investment!

Share Professional Resources

This is another powerful way to communicate an investment in others. Sharing your professional resources may involve sharing a contact, providing a referral, facilitating an introduction, becoming a mentor, or simply sharing the gift of your insight with someone. Sharing your resources also communicates the traits of humility, and generosity; never forgo the opportunity to exercise these two very important traits!

There is little proof to the contrary that an empathetic approach to business communications will enhance your personal brand, potentially generate increased revenue, and improve your viability in today's marketplace. I leave you with a popular business quote to ponder that reads, "Empathy allows you to understand what customers want, and giving customers what they want is the key to winning business ".

Lead consistently in an inclusive manner that is respectful of individual differences

Lead consistently

Child psychology experts will tell you that children, in order to feel secure, require parents who are consistent and can be trusted not to send conflicting or confusing signals. And so it is with your employees. If you are prone to irrational actions, conflicting orders and inconsistent behaviour, the lack of a stable environment will lead to poor productivity, as well as insecurity, and that is counterproductive. Employees have families who depend on a steady income and if your actions and words create a feeling of impending disaster or chaos, don't be shocked when they start looking elsewhere for work.

It is important you act and manage with consistency otherwise you are planting the seeds of confusion, distrust and lack of respect. It can be tempting to make a promise you do not really intend to honour, or to make an exception to your policies, or use your verbal skills to patch over a difficulty. If such behaviour becomes routine your staff are never sure of what you mean or what is real and your words may disappear from mind as quickly as they appeared.

As a successful leader, your word must be trusted

You must be looked up to as someone who makes a promise and keeps it. To be less than honest—to play favourites and bend rules for ego or selfish reasons—is to undermine your reputation and the faith which staff must have in your leadership and judgement. After all, faithful, dedicated and productive staff are an asset not easily replaced.

Be consistent

Consistency, a simple concept, is vital to building your business. Promise only what is possible. Keep your promises or do not make them. Treat all your staff equally; playing favourites becomes a liability. If you have rules, don't disregard them. To do so sends the wrong message. To be a leader you must set the example of behaviour. Remember, respect is earned not bestowed.

As you manage and develop a team of staff that are efficient and productive, remember your leadership is based on your personal behaviour.

In order to realise all the benefits that come with a diverse workforce you first need to establish an environment where the impact and value of ‘difference’ is understood, celebrated and captured through key influencers, change agents and organisational structures. You won’t be able to reap the full rewards of diversity unless you establish a culture of openness, championed by inclusive leaders[footnoteRef:7]. [7: Source: Hays, as at https://social.hays.com/2016/06/23/how-to-encourage-inclusive-leadership-in-your-organisation/, as on 19th June, 2017.]

So let’s look first at what we mean by an inclusive leader. To borrow a quote from one of the speakers at the event, Laure Fraval, Managing Director and HR Consultant at Citi, “Inclusive leaders are very good at getting the best out of all their people”.

Dan Robertson, Diversity and Inclusion Director at ENEI, developed this further, explaining that “Inclusive leadership is to be aware of your own biases and references, to actively seek out and consider different views and perspectives to inform better decision making and to see diverse talent as a source of competitive advantage”.

As Dan went on to explain, whether knowingly or not, organisations generally hire people that look the same, sound the same and come from the same background. We are all guilty of making judgements on someone’s talent based on our views of how they appear, sound or behave – something Dan aptly termed the ‘The Susan Boyle Effect’. A focus on inclusive leadership aims to quash this unconscious bias; making your business diverse and, in the process, opening it up to all the clear benefits that come with diversity.

Essentially, if your business desires higher staff productivity, satisfaction and engagement then it needs to become more diverse, and in order to become more diverse you need inclusive leaders to inspire change from the top down.

Why should we care?

This is a key question that needs to be answered for all those looking to build a more inclusive environment. Liz Bingham OBE, Managing Partner at Ernst & Young, summed this up well in her remarks, referencing a direct correlation between company growth and serial innovation. The report cited observed that a company cannot serially innovate if it has ‘groupthink’, and concluded that diverse teams enable innovation but only when they are led by inclusive leaders.

Liz went on to say that while we all ‘get it’ intellectually, it isn’t until we really ‘feel it’ and ‘engage with it emotionally’ that we will make change on this agenda. Laure also mentioned being able to ‘feel’ a change in culture as a result of some of the actions they have taken in this regard; noticing a difference in conversations in corridors and how people interacted with each other.

What are the characteristics of an inclusive leader?

Here are the four most common qualities that identify inclusive leaders, taken from Catalyst’s ‘Inclusive Leadership: The View from Six Countries’ report:

· Empowerment – Enabling direct reports to develop and excel.

· Humility – Admitting mistakes. Learning from criticism and different points of view. Acknowledging and seeking contributions of others to overcome one’s limitations.

· Courage – Putting personal interests aside to achieve what needs to be done. Acting on convictions and principles, even when it requires personal risk-taking.

· Accountability – Demonstrating confidence in direct reports by holding them responsible for performance they can control.

There are also more specific actions, provided by Dan, which you should cascade through your organisation, and which your leaders should take responsibility for. Here are some suggestions:

· Schedule meetings at times which ensure maximum participation

· Invite everyone to contribute to discussions

· Monitor who attends social events, and find out why some don’t

· Allocate a challenging piece of work to someone you wouldn’t classify as a ‘high performer’

· Have a coffee with someone who is very demographically different to you

· Ask for the ideas and suggestions of others before giving yours

· Create a culture where no one fears being ignored, side-lined or ridiculed for their ideas

· Introduce ‘blind’ decision-making

For many more tactics and practices your leaders can adopt to become more inclusive, download ENEI’s report, ‘Inclusive Leadership – driving performance through diversity’.

How can we inspire inclusivity?

Now that you’ve established the qualities that you need to look for and foster in inclusive leaders, the next step is to put this knowledge into practice.

Laure Fraval spoke about Citi’s experience of looking to build a community of change agents, identifying people at executive level and further down the organisation who demonstrated the quality and ability to get the best out of their people – as Laure said, “It can’t stay in the boardroom”. The core qualities around which they built a tool-kit were the ability to:

· Relate – To go out of their way to relate to people

· Adapt – To be able to adapt their style to their audience and not the other way round

· Develop – To develop their people every day.

The tool-kit built by Citi was actively referenced and embedded through recruitment, on-boarding, promotion and management processes.

Getting buy-in from the rest of your team, and having them understand the importance of inclusive leadership, can be tricky, but it’s absolutely essential for success. Change agents can be found throughout an organisation, but a key element for sustained commitment and success is of course the leadership at the top.

Liz Bingham recounted a story of how she had to really change tack when addressing the leaders within her organisation in order for them to understand what it means to be excluded – for it takes “real conscious thought” from your leaders to grasp what it is to be an insider vs. an outsider. The example that Liz used for her senior managers – many of whom were privileged enough to have never felt true exclusion – was to ask whether any of them had ever been to a friend’s wedding alone. Instantly it clicked, and the stories of exclusion began to flow.

Laure waited for her the senior leaders to come to her. Instead of forcing them to participate in something they might feel was peripheral, she decided to wait for the most senior employees within the company to realise the importance for themselves, and to then approach her. As soon as they expressed an interest, she would then provide these individuals with a tool-kit of actions and suggestions which was made available throughout the organisation.

It’s important that you keep tabs on developments by holding regular performance appraisals with your leaders and encourage them to do the same with their teams – all the while acting upon the three broad steps in the previous section. You really need to be leading from the front to guarantee inclusivity is embedded in your recruitment and promotion criteria, management development and reward programmes, and cultural changes programmes.

Get the culture right and the diversity will follow

The building of a more inclusive culture needs to be routed in truly inclusive leadership, a shared vision, education and encouragement. If you get the organisational culture right then the significant benefits that come from true diversity will follow.

Monitor and regulate own potentially disruptive emotions and impulses

Control emotions and impulses

Controlling emotions and impulses means you must be able to identify emotions and impulses, understand them and then manage them to promote personal growth. Controlling emotions and impulses requires a certain degree of emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence is defined as the ability to monitor one's own and others' feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them and to use this information to guide one's thinking and actions. Emotional intelligence is an ability to recognise the meanings of emotions and their relationships, and to reason and problem-solve on the basis of them.

What is your level of emotional control in the workplace?

Studies have demonstrated that people who report higher levels of emotional control also report higher levels of attending to health and appearance and more positive interactions with friends and family.

People with greater emotional control are less aggressive and more pro-social than their peers and rated as more effective. Also, the more emotional control employees had the higher levels of job satisfaction and greater commitment they have to their organisation.

Is gender relevant in relation to emotional control?

In relation to gender, females have significantly higher emotional control than do males. However, studies have found that males’ overall self-motivation estimates of emotional control were significantly higher than were female estimates. Studies suggested males score higher on self-estimates of emotional intelligence than do females because females may tend towards self-derogation on self-report measures.

Is age relevant in relation to emotional control?

Emotional control should increase with age and experience, or at least vary with age, as is the case with other cognitive abilities. Emotions are positively correlated with age, especially for women.

Activity 10

Do you control your emotions and impulses in the workplace? In your journal, over a week, record your own emotions and impulses.

· Are you someone who has a high level of emotional control?

· Do you have a high level of self-efficacy?

Observe and analyse colleagues in your own workplace: is a relationship between emotional control and self-efficacy, gender and age, length of experience and current status?

Professional conversation

Share tips and strategies with peers for regulating disruptive emotions and impulses.

Journal

Make a list of challenging or difficult situations where you anticipate the need to practice emotional control. Identify areas for personal improvement, further learning and development related to this skill.

Manage work based relationships effectively

Manage work-based relationships

Managers who establish and maintain positive relationships at work have a career advantage over those who do not have such relationships and one’s ability to form such relationships is an important aspect of individual development.

Many leaders are perceived to underperform against the expectations of their superiors. A consistent feature of individual managers is their apparent low level of belief in their capability to perform their role linked with problematic relationships at work.

This belief in one’s capabilities to organise and carry out tasks required to manage forthcoming situations is known as self-efficacy. A strong sense of self-efficacy enhances human accomplishment and personal wellbeing. People with high confidence in their capabilities approach difficult tasks as challenges to be mastered rather than as threats to be avoided. In contrast, those with a lack of self-efficacy will doubt their capabilities and avoid difficult tasks, which they view as personal threats. Generally they have low aspirations and a weak commitment to the goals they choose to pursue.

The source of these self-efficacy beliefs often seems to be linked with perceptions about the relationships and expectations of a few individuals at work. An individual’s perception about a specific relationship may influence personal beliefs about self-efficacy, regardless of their actual or potential ability.

Work-based relationships where people share similar norms are more likely to support the maintenance and development of self-efficacy beliefs. Similarities can be defined by the extent to which people interpret a range of events in similar ways and then ascribe similar meanings. This suggests that a close, friendly, supportive and trusting relationship allows the development of personal autonomy. A supportive work-based relationship enables individuals to cope with the vicissitudes of working life whilst retaining and developing their sense of self-efficacy.

Activity 11

Do you control your emotions and impulses in the workplace? In your journal, over a week, record your own emotions and impulses.

· Are you someone who has a high level of emotional control?

· Do you have a high level of self-efficacy?

Observe and analyse colleagues in your own workplace: is a relationship between emotional control and self-efficacy, gender and age, length of experience and current status?

Professional conversation

Share tips and strategies with peers for regulating disruptive emotions and impulses.

Journal

Make a list of challenging or difficult situations where you anticipate the need to practice emotional control. Identify areas for personal improvement, further learning and development related to this skill.

Integrate own emotions with cognitions in personal leadership style

Integrate emotions with cognitions in leadership style

People who can integrate emotions with cognitions in leadership are said to be happier, healthier and more successful in their business, work and personal relationships. Cognitions are the mental processes of knowing, having awareness, perception, reasoning and judgement. Leaders with these competencies and abilities are said to:

· inspire others and be excellent leaders

· work in harmony in a team environment

· practice flexibility and proactively change

· maintain optimism in the face of adversity

· persist in challenging roles and are more stable in employment

· collaborate better with others to achieve results

· obtain the right balance between emotion and reason

· recognise and be aware of their own feelings and those of others

· demonstrate empathy and compassion for others

· display high tolerance to discomfort and stress

· manage impulses and delay gratification in pursuit of their goals

· immunise themselves against rejection

· demonstrate more self-discipline

· overcome and manage negative emotions like anger, fear, and sadness

· be highly tolerant of the differences in others

· manage conflict and soothe the emotions of others

· display strong character and temperament

· influence the feelings and behaviours of others.

Which of the above qualities do you have? No one would have all these qualities, but we can aspire to some or many of them.

Activity 12

Mentor feedback

Meet with your mentor or role model. From the above list what competencies and abilities do they possess? Ask your mentor for feedback on your ability to integrate emotions with cognitions in your leadership style.

Journal

Seek feedback and reflect upon your own leadership style in relation to integrating emotions with cognitions. Record your findings in your journal.

Evaluate personal leadership style and adjust for different contexts

Evaluate your personal leadership style

What type of leader are you?

The following summaries of leadership styles are somewhat broad in definition. However, they do capture the differing styles of leadership that exist today. No person fits into a specific style of leadership. Some leaders overlap into two or more. Study the following leadership styles, which should motivate, inspire and assist with some self-analyses.

The opportunist

The opportunist is aimed at controlling their environment in order to survive. Typically development has been blocked by a legacy of mistrust, egocentrism and manipulativeness. The title for this denotes a tendency to focus on personal wins and to see relationships as opportunities to be exploited. For the opportunist, the world is highly competitive. Only the fittest individuals survive and, since the opportunist assumes everybody else is also operating from this frame of reference, competition rather than collaboration is the only viable course of action.

The diplomat

The diplomat appears as more benign than the opportunistic leader. The focus has shifted from gaining control of the external environment to control of one’s own behaviour in relation to others. The title is not meant to denote a high level of sophisticated diplomacy, rather it refers to the desire to please people and not upset them. Loyalty to a group is valued highly because the focus is on affiliation.

As team members, people who have developed to this create the social glue that is highly valuable for the organisation. They pay attention to the needs of others and may perform well in customer-facing roles.

It is in leadership roles that problems begin to emerge. Being polite and friendly does not sit well with the need to give honest and direct feedback to team members. Avoidance of conflict leads to consensus decision making, shelving of difficult issues, avoidance of performance management and ultimately failure in the leadership role.

The expert

This represents the largest category of leaders. The expert is characterised by the pursuit of excellence (and sometimes perfection) in both professional and personal life. Control is exercised through superior knowledge and skill. Secure in their expertise, professionals operating from this frame of reference present hard facts and logic in an attempt to achieve buy-in. Conflict around ideas is acceptable if the leader can win on the facts but conflict arising from ambiguity can not be managed.

People who predominantly make use of this can be major contributors to their organisation if their knowledge and skills are appropriate. Exercising tight thinking around the detail of processes, continuous improvement, efficiency and perfection, they can apply their discipline to the products and services of their organisation. The expert is often prevalent in organisations with technical cultures, such as engineering firms. The recent graduate who implicitly relies upon technical or discipline-based knowledge to resolve a problem is an example of someone operating predominantly from the expert.

The achiever

Leaders who have developed this behaviour can be both challenging and supportive, creating a positive atmosphere both inside the team and external to the team. They represent approximately 30% of the general managerial population and are tightly focussed on deliverables. People whose developmental focus is on the achiever behaviour have a more complex and integrated understanding of the world than do managers. They are open to feedback and realise that many of the ambiguities and conflicts of everyday life relate to differences in perspective. They know that creatively transforming or resolving issues requires sensitivity to relationships and ability to influence others in positive ways. Leaders operating from the achiever behavioural style can reliably lead others to implement new strategies over one to three year time frames, balancing immediate and longer-term objectives.

The tight focus on goals and objectives means that leaders working from the achiever behaviour can be clear and decisive. They may consequently clash with people who are focussed on the expert frame because they recognise the practical time constraints whereas the expert is more concerned with getting it right. Achievers operate to the 80/20 rule whereas experts want it 100% correct.

At the pinnacle of conventional society, people with a focus on achiever behavioural style populate the highest levels of organisations. They get things done. If a board wants a strategy implemented, the achiever will deliver. They are, however, less likely to ask whether it is the best strategy.

The individualist

The individualist behavioural style is the point where the subjectivity of earlier action-logics becomes apparent. The unique individuality of people can be appreciated. The understanding that the previous (and later) action-logics are all constructions of oneself and the world enable people at this stage of development to contribute uniquely and practically to their organisations. At this stage, the individualist becomes aware of the possible conflict between their principles and their actions, or between the organisation’s espoused values and the implementation of those values. This tension becomes a source of creativity and a desire for further development. For these reasons those operating from the individualist behavioural style can engage with design of new systems that change the culture of the organisation and the behaviour of people in it.

On the other hand this creativity can be a challenge for achievers. Individualists tend to ignore the rules and be high maintenance. They are apt to be wild cards in a situation. It may be that these ‘out-of-the-box’ thinkers provide as much stimulation as can be tolerated by people in the earlier stages.

The strategist

People who have developed to this behavioural style are likely to be found in less conventional settings. They are likely to have developed a reputation as transformational leaders. They distinguish themselves from individualists through their focus on organisational constraints and perceptions, which they treat as discussible and transformable.

When they operate out of the strategist action-logic, people who have developed to this stage can create shared vision across action-logics, engaging with people in an iterative, developmental process that encourages both personal and organisational transformations. Strategists deal with conflict more comfortably than those with other action-logics and they are better at handling people’s instinctive resistance to change. As a result they can be highly effective change agents.

The strategist behavioural style has a broader view than earlier action-logics. Strategists tend to take into account social and environmental impacts across a wider range of stakeholders and recognise the importance of collaboration for achieving valuable outcomes in a dynamic, interrelated world. The strategist behavioural style operates more from a principled morality than an instrumental morality.

How do leaders develop?

Although development can’t be forced, it can be supported. Development depends on internal and external processes becoming mutually engaged with each other. These are:

· loss of faith in the adequacy of one’s current meaning making system

· attraction towards the positive potential of the next developmental perspective

· entering a new work, family or community role that demands capabilities

· a change in the overall organisational system or context.

Powerful developmental challenges

Obviously the most powerful developmental challenge occurs when all four of these interact at the same time to cause the individual to experience a gap between the current way of making meaning and its effectiveness in the new context. It is also obvious that without these forces at play there is no need to explore a different world view, the current one may well be providing considerable happiness and satisfaction and need not be disturbed.

Meaning making

Meaning making is not the only capacity that is important for leadership. When combined with other aspects of leadership capability such as cognitive power, emotional intelligence, valuing the work role and skills and knowledge, it can be seen that ‘meaning making’ fills a critical niche. Difficulties experienced in the past and those that are predictable in the future can be explained in terms of the ‘action-logic’ used by managers when they exercise leadership. Relatively few leaders examine their own behavioural style, let alone explore the possibility of changing it. Leaders who undertake a voyage of personal understanding and development can transform their own capabilities and those of their organisations.

Activity 13

Professional conversation

How can you seek feedback from colleagues about your leadership style(s)? Discuss leadership styles and ways of getting feedback from others about what they think about your style.

Ask colleagues to help you to identify your leadership style(s) and shifts in style which would be effective for different situations.

Portfolio

Describe a leadership style you have applied and why it was effective for you, your team and the business needs.

Describe the characteristics of your dominant leadership style; the importance of switching styles to accommodate individual differences; the importance of empowerment in your workplace and the importance of a shared vision to organisational development.

Journal

Evaluate your own leadership style(s) in relation to workplace situations to develop a self-awareness of your leadership style(s).

Review your personal development goals regarding the leadership qualities you will aspire to, and ways in which you will develop and improve your leadership style.

Apply judgement, intelligence and common sense when undertaking day to day leadership role

Managers and leaders are realising that more efficient collaboration is the key to their teams being more effective. When human beings are involved, the solution is not going to be solely technological. Many companies have realised that everyone having a Blackberry has not solved more problems. With the high levels of employee stress reported, it appears that the human portion of the equation has not benefited much; we just have to run a little faster it seems. Helping teams tap into greater levels of collaborative intelligence at work promises many things at the least making it possible for us to enjoy our work more which has to be a good thing.

Teamwork is essential for competing in today's global arena, where individual perfection is not as desirable as a high level of collective performance. In knowledge-based enterprises, teams are the norm rather than the exception. A critical feature of these teams is that they have a significant degree of empowerment or decision-making authority. There are many different kinds of teams: top management teams, focused task forces, self-directed teams, concurrent engineering teams, product/service development and/or launch teams, quality improvement teams, and so on.

A team should not just be diverse; it has to make the most of its diversity. Involve everyone, facilitate cross-pollination of ideas, and build and empower cross-functional teams if you wish to harness the power of diversity. Challenge people from different disciplines and cultures to come up with something better together and achieve creative breakthroughs.

Fostering an inclusive team culture

Collaborative thinking means to work together, especially in a joint intellectual effort. The cooperative potential within teams is huge; tapping into collaborative thinking is something all leaders aim for. The question is: how can we model, cultivate and build greater collaborative thinking? Consider the following ways to harness greater collaborative thinking through an inclusive team culture.

Establish a ‘higher calling’ for the team

This is a common purpose that represents a higher calling and brings context to the significance of the team’s existence. For example, Apple Inc. stating that they ‘educate the world’. Providing a service to society is the simplest way that an organisation can isolate a higher calling for its existence. This process must be entered with full sincerity. A ‘true’ higher calling is reflective of the culture and intentions of the organisation as a whole and therefore is core to what the organisation is ‘for’ and how it plans to achieve that.

Provide opportunities for sharing ideas during the project planning phase

People do not argue with their own material. When everyone has taken an active part in the planning process then creating the buy-in for the project is much simpler. It belongs to them; they are much more likely to give the project their full support.

Plan to use all of the experience within the team

Think of the years of life experience represented in a room of 15 people with an average age of 35. It represents over 500 years of life experience. That’s a lot of wisdom to tap into. Great team leaders and managers know how to harness and tap into those years of experience and wisdom.

Raise awareness of the importance of shared assumptions

Assumptions cause us to run on ‘autopilot’. Supported by assumptions that go unchecked and unchallenged, teams can continue to run the same old routines for a long time without anyone noticing. If the same old routine is getting you and your team the results you need, then that’s a good thing. If not, maybe it is time to lift the hood and have a peep into what’s driving the team’s behaviour—look at the assumptions.

Encourage team members to find out about each other’s roles

The more they know about others’ perspectives, the more likely they will be able to empathise with them when the going gets tough. In the past, empathy has been considered a ‘soft skill’ that has no place in the business arena. In reality empathy is an important business skill. The ability to put ourselves in another’s shoes helps us understand what others’ needs and motivations are.

‘Intention’ is the keynote

Just as a team’s attention is important, so is intention. Intentions have an eerie way of manifesting into reality. Setting intention causes our attention to notice specific aspects of our environment. Intention directs attention so we must plan that very carefully. Having the team form a positive intention around an objective is one of the best ways of doing this.

Celebrate successes along the way

Celebration acts to reinforce the progress a team has made and empathises the importance of the team process in reaching desired objectives. The rituals observed in different cultures, such as Ramadan, Christmas, Honokaa and graduations, are a testament to how important celebration is to us. Making celebration an integral part of the life of a team/organisation helps the individual feel more deeply connected.

Invest resources in learning

Continuous improvement is only possible when individuals and the team as a whole are learning new things. By publicly demonstrating support for the learning process, leaders model the importance of building ‘learning organisations’. This serves everyone in the long run. Creating ‘learning teams’ is a core strategy used to build an organisation that is highly adaptive and responsive to change.

Establish a reward system for innovation and creativity

Ensure that rewards are equally available for ideas and innovations that don’t work as for those that do. Rather than the practical results of any particular idea, the focus will be on the level of innovation, even those that don’t result in successes in a conventional sense. History is piled high with examples of ‘mistakes’ that became innovations of great value. When we reward attempts at innovation we are stating that it is the intention that is important.

Activity 14

Research collaborative communication and learning approaches and consider appropriate strategies for your business needs, staff, work environment and available resources.

Portfolio

For a specific business or project development needs, identify:

1. three new approaches or systems you plan to implement using an inclusive approach

2. obstacles you or the team may face along the way

how you or the team will know when you have achieved effective results.

The leadership role

Leadership is influence

Any time you try to influence the behaviour of another person, you are engaging in an act of leadership. It usually involves influencing employees, members or ‘followers’ of some sort to carry out the goals of the organisation or group. The knowledge, attitudes, and behaviours used to influence people in order to achieve a desired mission must be carried out consistently on a day-to-day basis. Consistent leadership is about the organisational vision, planning, communication and the creative action that has a positive unifying effect on a group of people around a set of clear values and beliefs to accomplish a set of measurable goals. The transforming approach simultaneously impacts the personal development and organisational productivity of all involved.
Leaders take actions to:

· have a positive, unifying effect (help establish vision, values, beliefs)

· lead to the accomplishment of goals (help set goals and create an empowering environment where others can succeed in the work and activities)

· enhance personal development and organisational productivity (remove obstacles and assist followers to use their empowerment).

Leaders take on the responsibility to:

· Create a vision with the followers (team players, partners, members, associates).

· Facilitate and take action to assist the group in defining activities and goals to move toward the stated vision.

· Help others develop commitment, skills and behaviours that increase personal and organisational productivity toward reaching goals.

Effective followers are those who engage in enthusiastic, intelligent, and self-reliant participation in the pursuit of organisational or group goals.

Leaders develop and foster other leaders. It is the leader's job on a day-to-day basis to make sure that the organisation is a place where the members can use their power. They not only allow and encourage others to take on leadership roles but create a climate and opportunity for them to do so.

Be an effective motivational leader

To be a successful leader, you must first understand that you cannot motivate anyone; you can only create an environment that encourages and promotes the employees’ self-motivation. Motivation is getting people to do what you want them to do because they want to do it. The challenge is to give them a reason to want to do it because doing it will satisfy a need they have. You have to tune in to their needs, motives and reasons, not yours.

You must also know what kind of behaviour you want staff to demonstrate. In other words, what do you want the employee to do differently? For example, do you want your staff to be punctual, more committed to work, coordinate with others in a friendly manner, meet deadlines, assume more responsibilities etc? You must first be clear about your objectives and expectations before you can communicate them to your staff.

Are you a motivator?

The most important thing to keep in mind is that you are the most critical component in the motivation process. Your actions set the tone, trend and tempo of the process. Many managers/leaders embrace a ‘carrot-and-the-stick’ approach to motivate. These practices take the form of incentive programs, promises of promotions, rewards and bonuses. Some others employ the symbolic ‘whip or club’ by emphasising the negative results of their behaviour. All these methods are just short-term and create no permanent behaviour change.

Leaders whose management style is dictatorial, uncommunicative and non-participative need to revise their work style. Today’s environment requires them to be more empathetic, communicative and more trusting. Leaders must be a ‘difference-maker’ to make their teams feel important and successful. Therefore, they need to create a positive and caring workplace that encourages employees to become the best they can be. When staff feel good about themselves, they will perform better and be more productive.

There is no quick fix solution to a behavioural problem. Changing attitudes takes time and patience. You will notice that what works well for one person may not work for another one. You may have to use ‘trial and error’ until you identify and match the right method, or a combination of methods, to the relevant employee.

Create an environment to promote self-motivation

In order to become an effective leader, use the following techniques to create an environment which excites people at work.

Use appropriate methods of reinforcement. Rewards should be tied directly to an individual’s performance.

Provide the staff with flexibility and choice. Whenever possible, give employees a chance to make decisions, particularly when they affect them in some way.

Provide staff with support when it is needed. One key characteristic of the achievement-oriented staff is the willingness to use help when it is needed. Employees should be encouraged to ask for support and assistance.

Encourage employees to set their own goals and objectives. Let them participate actively in the goal-setting process.

Demonstrate to the employees how their tasks relate to personal and organisational goals. Routine work can result in passivity and boredom unless employees are aware of how the routine tasks contribute to their own development and the success of the organisation. Point out how their task fits into the big picture.

Design tasks and environments to be consistent with the employee’s needs. What may satisfy one employee may not satisfy another.

Clarify your expectations and make sure that employees understand them. Regardless of the size of your organisation, you should have a job description for every position, clearly outlining qualifications and responsibilities. Also identify the expected standards of performance.

Have a flexible management style. Many supervisors/managers pride themselves on treating everyone the same. This misconception can be dangerous. Employees are individuals with individual needs. You need to treat everyone fairly but not necessarily the same.

Provide immediate feedback that will help staff improve their performance in the future. Feedback is most effective when it follows performance. Feedback should be relevant to the task and should indicate to employees how they might improve their performance.

Identify and help eliminate barriers to individual achievement. Some staff members who are labelled ‘failures or incompetent’ are simply being hindered by relatively minor obstacles that their managers or supervisors have not recognised. It may lead the employee to accept the failure label as a fact.

Exhibit confidence in employees. There is a great deal of research to support the contention that people who are expected to achieve will do so more frequently than others.

Establish a climate of trust and open communication. Productivity is highest in organisations that encourage openness and trust. Trust and openness are created by the way we communicate.

Listen to and deal effectively with employees’ complaints. It is very important to handle problems and complaints before they go out of proportion.

Point out improvement in performance, no matter how small. This is particularly important when employees are beginning work on a new project. Frequent encouragement is very effective in improving the staff performance; however, it should be reduced as the employees become more confident and proficient.

Demonstrate your own motivation through behaviour and attitude. Nothing turns employees off faster than a leader who does not practice what they preach. Actions speak louder than words; be a role model.

Criticise performance, not personality; judge behaviour, not the staff. An individual can do a task poorly and still be a valuable employee. Always remember to respect the staff. What goes around comes around.

You can motivate through self-esteem

Employees do want to make a difference at work; they want more meaning and fulfilment from their job. A manager or leader motivates by getting them involved and committed to the tasks that need to be done, not by forcing them. Use the natural desires to make a difference at work and mould it into focused activity. Consider the following points of validation, information and participation.

1. Validation

Validation means:

· respect for employees as people

· flexibility to meet personal needs

· encouragement of learning, growth and skills.

2. Information

Information means:

· knowing why things are being done

· getting inside information about the organisation.

3. Participation

Participation means:

· involvement in decisions that affect you

· employees having control over how they do their work.

Activity 15

Professional conversation

Describe your leadership role to others, in terms of your jurisdiction, goals, responsibilities and accountabilities. After listening to everyone’s self accounts, discuss appropriate styles for a day-to-day leadership role for a motivational leader. Compare approaches.

Journal

Evaluate your own day-to-day leadership style and reflect on your analyses according to the different organisational goals and priorities demanded in your workplace. Consider these three aspects of leader self-examination: personal style, leadership style, style flexibility.

Review your personal development goals in terms of:

· improving and adapting your leadership style

promoting self-motivation amongst staff or team members.

Analyse relevant legislation, information and intelligence sources when evaluating business opportunities

Evaluating business opportunities

The following model for evaluating business opportunities highlights the sorts of questions and solutions that benefit from collaborative or participatory thinking and contributions.

In analysing your business opportunities you must be able to pass them through a test to determine if they truly are valid opportunities. All of your ideas must have a demonstrated need, ready market, and ability to provide a solid return on investment. Developing new business, products and/or services will need to involve a range of intelligence sources, stakeholders and your staff to help identify opportunities, test the feasibility of ideas, strategies to overcome barriers and develop innovative and achievable solutions.

For an identified business opportunity, involve your team in answering the following questions and undertake the business feasibility tasks.

Assess the concept

· Is the business opportunity feasible?

· What legislations apply?

· Is there demand?

· What research needs to be carried out?

· Can it be done?

· Are you able to pool together the persons and resources to pull it off before the window of opportunity closes?

Develop the business idea

Analyse the market to determine industry issues, market structure, market size, growth rate, market capacity, attainable market share, cost structure, the core economics, exit strategy issues, time to breakeven, opportunity costs, and barriers to entry.

1. What is the need you fill or problem you solve (value proposition)? Eg merge with another department

2. Who are you selling to (target market)? Eg Upper management or Directors

3. How would you make money (revenue model)? Eg more students as well as cost savings

4. How will you differentiate your services and products from what is already out there (unique selling proposition)? Eg TAFE vs university offerings

5. What are the barriers to entry? Eg financial

6. How many competitors do you have and of what quality are they (competitive analysis)? Eg other training providers and universities

7. How big is your market in dollars (market size)? Eg student demand

8. How fast is the market growing or shrinking (market growth)? Eg skills shortages leading to a demand in enterprise training

9. What percentage of the market do you believe you could gain (market share)?

10. How much would it cost to get started (start-up costs)?

11. Do you need an exit strategy?

12. Does the business opportunity require investment and, if so, how much money will the business get back in return (return on investment)?

Consider the advantages of business opportunities

· Look at cost structure.

· Barriers to entry (large competitors, regulations, large capital requirements). If there are many barriers to entry, it will be difficult to enter a market. The higher the barriers to entry, the more disadvantaged you will be.

· Intellectual property—do you have a proprietary advantage?

· Distribution channel—how will you be selling your service? Will you sell it direct to the consumer via the internet or sell it to businesses? If you can develop a unique distribution channel this can surely be an advantage.

Consider the marketplace

· The need—is there a big need for this service? Make sure your service fills a need or solves a problem.

· Analyse target market—who are you selling to? Businesses? School leavers? What demographics?

· Pricing—what will be the price? Will there be a high enough mark-up?

· Analyse market size.

Finally, consider the potential

Risk vs reward—how risky is the opportunity? If it is very risky, it there a chance for the business to do very well. Will there be a high reward?

The team—is the team right for the business? Do you have enough knowledge in this area?

Timing—is the market ready for your service? You may have a great idea, but if you are not ready for it you may not be able to turn your idea into a successful business.

Goal fit—does the business concept fit the goals of the team to create a high potential?

Activity 16

Develop an action plan to evaluate business opportunities for your work area/department. Include methods to ensure ideas will align with organisational and team goals and objectives, be inclusive of staff ideas, expertise and capability for innovation, and promote high motivation for the ongoing implementation of ideas.

Draw upon personal expertise of self and relevant individuals to achieve strategic results

Achieving strategic results

Management experts agree that the most important factor for success is the management team that makes the decisions, yet it is the factor most often overlooked in determining the feasibility of a venture. So how do management teams achieve strategic results?

Consider the following:

· Manage alliances to strategically sustain value.

· Identify and train a rapid response team to operate in collaborative, relationship-centric alliance.

· Identify criteria for targeting alliance, and measure all potential alliances against the criteria.

· Determine your critical success criteria and then measure and monitor value.

· Develop infrastructure to strategically manage the relationship throughout the life of the alliance.

· Measure, monitor, develop a lessons learned component throughout and transfer of that knowledge.

· Discovery: compliment financial and strategic due diligence, with business culture and leadership team assessment.

· Implementation: focus on integrating people, processes and systems.

· Create collaborative work systems: embed leadership, communication, and organisational integration.

· Measure, monitor: build functional capability to transfer knowledge.

· Identify and build team capability to manage outsourcing process.

· Identify communication strategies throughout process.

· Provide team development to sustain value.

· Measure and monitor value.

· Develop lessons learned and knowledge transfer component.

Now consider aligning project management with team development:

· provide team training and facilitation

· conduct cross-cultural competency training

· align stakeholders.

Internal collaboration and capability building

Improve knowledge worker productivity across functions by developing collaborative work systems. Using organisational development tools and leadership strategies, achieve value by aligning the systems and building the culture to support your strategy.

How do we develop collaborative work systems?

Discovery—meet with leadership team members and groups to identify individual and team issues.

Design and Implement—based on results, develop a series of half-day to five- day workshops that focus on the team understanding their work style preferences, clarifying their charter, goals, roles and responsibilities and success factors.

Measure, monitor and knowledge transfer—evaluate success factors, and build functional capability to continuously develop.

Consider a course of action

· Audit business culture and assess the degree of professional/life integration experienced in the organisation.

· Design and implement collaborative thinking based on audit results that create synergy with your culture and strategy.

· Align performance management and measurement to sustain collaborative thinking that achieves life integration and business results.

· Develop and delivery training, coaching, and redesign of work systems to promote professional/life integration.

· Coach individuals to achieve professional/life integration, and navigate mid-life career and/or life transitions.

Activity 17

Portfolio

Summarise ways you could empower staff within your department. How would you encourage contributions from staff? What types of rewards and incentives could you provide?

Journal

Review your personal development goals in terms of your development as a role model for collaborative thinking and work practices.

Seek and encourage contributions from relevant individuals

Knowing our colleagues and ourselves[footnoteRef:8] [8: Source: TAFE NSW, as at https://sielearning.tafensw.edu.au/MCS/9362/Sterilisation%20disk%203/lo/7378/7378_00.htm, as on 19th June, 2017.]

Colleagues

How well do you know the people you work with? For a team leader or supervisor, this awareness is particularly important as they are supposed to be leading the team. However, if you are a team member and not a team leader or supervisor, it is still important for you to be aware.

What do you need to be aware of? It is important to have knowledge regarding abilities, personality, attitudes and work ethic. For example, you may have a case where people aren’t actually confronting each other, but there is a simmering conflict. How do you recognise that?

By looking for deviations from someone’s usual behaviour pattern, you may be able to anticipate and deal with problems before they occur or become of major proportions.

For example, someone you work with might be:

· unable to speak calmly to others

· uncooperative

· avoiding others

· working at a level below their capacity

· suffering stress or absent from work more often than usual

· critical, moody, or easily upset.

There may be a number of reasons why an individual is unable or unwilling to focus on work. We have examined how work-related conflict may affect an individual’s work ethic. However, there may be a number of other reasons for declining performance including relationship problems, family issues, health difficulties, financial worries, depression, drug or alcohol abuse or stress.

In this situation, we must be able to recognize these signs and manage problems before they affect the team morale and performance. In the case of most personal problems it will be necessary to refer the person concerned to the supervisor who will them to a counsellor.

From time to time the team leader may not be able to resolve a difficulty and may have to seek the help of his or her immediate superior. This may be difficult to do, but is far more preferable than having a problem get larger and larger and eventually ‘blow up’.

Reflect on the people that you work with:

How well do you know your team members? Do you know when they are upset or troubled? Do they withdraw from the group and become quiet or do they become argumentative?

Knowing ourselves

Just as need to have an awareness about the people we work with, we need to be aware about our personal attributes and values. Think about your own personality traits. Reflect on the personality traits, views or prejudices that other team members may consider a problem.

Support colleagues in resolving work difficulties

People who work closely together expect and need each other’s loyalty. Mutual support is an important part of this. Relationships that are beneficial to the team and organisation will be ones that are supportive.

What comes to mind when people say that at work that they ‘cover for one another’? Possibly you have the rather negative thought that they protect one another by covering up mistakes that could draw criticism from managers and customers. We can and should look at work relationships in a more positive light.

On the football field, players will cover for one another and back each other up. The game is often dynamic, changes rapidly and requires players to be flexible and creative. The same is true in organisational life. Teamwork requires us to cover for one another, not in order to give the lazy and incompetent comfortable jobs, but to ensure that organisational goals are reached.

If you are a team leader, your mindset should always be directed towards offering the best level of support to your staff as possible. It is reasonable to expect the same in return. If you are a member of a team and not the leader, you still need to offer the best level of support to your colleagues as possible.

For team leaders, supervisors or managers, support takes a number of forms:

· Managers should offer support to their staff—human and technical—for them to be able to carry out their work effectively.

Each manager should present their team to higher level management when the opportunity arises. This opens up opportunities for staff to be recognised and advance in the organisation. It also offers opportunities to seek additional resources for a team or section.

· Managers should provide support when problems occur. There are many situations where continuing good relations depend on the manager being supportive in critical moments. Without this support, staff can become very fearful of exercising discretion or initiative, passing difficult problems back to their managers as too difficult because of their fear of the consequences of their decisions not working.

Supporting your manager or team leader

Here are some of the ways in which a worker can be reasonably expected to support and defend their immediate managers.

· They should provide the appropriate level of professional support.

· They should be loyal. This takes a number of forms. Firstly, they should not do or say anything to other staff or other managers that suggests that their manager is incompetent or in some way doing an inadequate job.

· Secondly, they should not place the blame for unpopular instructions to workers on more senior managers. For example, it would be counterproductive to say to staff, ‘I’m sorry to have to ask you to do this. I know it’s stupid and won’t achieve anything. But old Jonesie in his wisdom says we must do it and he is still the boss.’

· They should be willing to undertake constructive criticism. Managers should not ignore mistakes being made by their immediate managers, adopting the attitude that it is not their concern or that their managers should have the experience to look after themselves.

· Instead, they should discuss their concern with their manager, pointing out potential problems and other possible courses of action.

Supporting your peers

Mentoring has long been regarded as an effective means of support for your peers. It also fosters the development of workplace relationships.

Mentoring can be a formalised, eg if you are an experienced employee, you might take on a regular advisory role with a less experienced employee. Or your supervisor might provide you with special training about, say, how to operate the latest equipment and you would be like a resident expert who can do trouble-shooting.

Mentoring can also be informal where a less-experienced colleague might ask you a question or you to show them how to do something.

The process has a simple purpose: skill and knowledge transfer.

It is important to identify the qualities required to make a good mentor.

A good mentor:

· is committed to mentoring

· has experience at leading and managing people

· engages in formal management development training

· has an interest in developing others

· has a willingness to set goals, coach and give feedback

· has strong interpersonal skills

· has an awareness of resources available to mentoring others

· has a knowledge of the company

· has a willingness to share experiences

· What outcomes would you expect from the mentoring process? To best answer this question, think about your organisation or one you are personally aware of.

Review workplace outcomes regularly and improve them in consultation with relevant personnel

Why conduct a workplace review?

The primary objectives of reviewing outcomes are to:

1. assess performance

2. identify opportunities for improvement

3. develop recommendations for improvement or further action.

As you can see, reviews examine existing problems with the intention of rectifying them now and preventing problems in the future. Hence is future orientated.

Remember, the purpose of a review is not confined to meeting corporate objectives, such as profits. They also relate to meeting workplace processes and procedures such as in the areas of OHS or industrial relations. As a society, we also strive for social and environmental goals. Reviews are instrumental in auditing for the public interest.

What do we review?

A review of workplace outcomes can be broad or narrow in scope.

A really broad review would be organisation-wide, including a review of the objectives of the organisation, the environment within which it operates, its operating policies, personnel and physical facilities.

A review might be confined to a specific function within an organisation. For example, if a problem is occurring with chemical sterilising then a review may find the fault and recommend a solution.

A review might be even more specific, focusing on the individual staff member’s performance (performance appraisal).

How do we find out?

In other words, what evidence do we gather?

A review, in contrast, will first have to define the relevant operational standards or criteria to be applied. The standards will rely on who is doing the review and management decisions, and are very subjective.

Benefits of reviews

Reviews of current workplace outcomes assist management to improve future outcomes through better control over their systems, activities and decision-making. Waste, inefficiency, and excessive costs would be reduced by introducing or improving operating controls.

Management would hope to receive a report that assesses the performance of the operation in question, identities opportunities for improvement and includes recommendations for improvement or further action. In a health care setting, it will mean being able to provide better services to patients. If it’s the sterilising unit being reviewed, it might mean finding ways to better control infection. In a profit-making company, a review would aim to find ways to increase profits in the future.

A review is most effective when there is open and frank communication between the audit group and line management. When this is the case, the manager responsible for the operations can initiate any desirable corrective action, should weaknesses become apparent.

Your role in the review

If you are part of a work team, ie a member or team leader, you might be asked questions about your work processes by the person or team undertaking the review.

Review of your performance

You may have heard the terms ‘performance appraisal’, ‘employee appraisal’, ‘performance management’ or ‘work performance review’—these more or less mean the same thing, basically a review of an employee’s performance.

The manager would usually provide you, the employee, with feedback on your work performance, ie, whether it is aligned to the objectives of the organisation. The manager might also provide you suggestions for improvement. This can be quite sensitive if it not entirely positive feedback—you might be thinking that you are already doing a good job and do not know why you have to receive feedback.

Outcomes of performance review

If done correctly, performance management has many positive outcomes for maintaining good working relationships including:

· building your confidence

· establishing ground rules for work

· improving relationships between you (as member of a team or team leader) and your managers

· establishing goals and objectives for you to achieve

· building stability in a work team.

A good performance appraisal also gives you the chance to communicate your ideas on how work processes as well as OHS can be improved. It also gives you the opportunity to let your manager know about your training needs.

Step

Desired outcome

1. Outline the purpose of your role

You are clear why your job was created and the context in which this role fits into the overall organisation’s purpose.

2. Agree key result areas

You understand the main areas where you are required to perform and what your performance will be measured against.

3. Set performance objectives

Negotiated goals and objectives for the period under review

4. Agree core competencies

You and your manager agree on core skills, knowledge and abilities the employee needs to develop in that will enable you to meet the performance objectives

5. Negotiate development goals

Agreement on training required by the employee supported by the manager over the period under review

6. Feedback

You and your manager discuss your performance over the period of review. This step is undertaken at the end of the period.

Following procedures for performance management is an excellent strategy for showing commitment to building relationships with staff. It provides opportunities for clear communication and clarification of goals and objectives in a consistent manner with all team members.

Receiving feedback

It is best to have a positive attitude and not consider feedback as criticism. You might be able to use this as an opportunity to discuss ways in which you can develop your skills or get more experience. In the end it is your decision how you want to use the feedback.

The benefits from feedback are very much underrated but managers and their organisations are becoming more inclined to adopt performance feedback as a primary method for improving performance than ever before. This is generally because of the growth of working relationships formed in team-based structures.

Performance feedback has the potential to advance people beyond their current level of performance, even exceptional levels of performance. Performance feedback also has the potential to remedy and halt unacceptable performance, if necessary.

Providing regular feedback, in a formal or informal manner is an effective strategy for maintaining workplace relationships. Performance feedback reinforces team achievements. Teams that are empowered have organisational encouragement and support for accepting responsibility for their own goal achievements.

Regardless of the composition, structure or function of a team, an empowered team will work to set and meet its own targets in line with identified organisational goals.

Employees like to have their good work performance highlighted and recognised. When individuals achieve their goals, when they extend their effort to do well, when they exceed all of their expectations and possibly the expectations of others, it is good practice to give positive feedback by offering a pat on the back, a compliment, and possibly a bonus in pay. Positive feedback has a motivating effect.

Modelling regular and appropriate (sincere) feedback to your team can encourage team members to do the same for their colleagues and helps maintain supportive relationships.

Building a Positive Workplace Culture[footnoteRef:9] [9: Source: Mindful Meditation, as at http://www.mindfulmediation.com.au/building-positive-workplace-cultures/, as on 19th June, 2017.]

Creating a positive workplace culture is often considered expensive, time consuming, and a drain on company resources. It doesn’t have to be.

It is a myth that all organisational cultures change slowly. Cultures change slowly when initiatives are ineffective, introduced slowly, or when staff loose trust and confidence in their leadership.

Cultural change can happen quickly when the opposite is true. Effective initiatives and leaders that instill trust and confidence in their staff can bring about fast change.

The speed of cultural change is directly related to the speed at which company leaders demonstrably get on board and support the change in their own and their team’s daily behaviours.

One of the main reasons cultural change programs fail or are slow to take effect in some organisations is that leaders are not consistently demonstrating the new behaviours. This leads to some staff adopting the attitude, “why do I have to do it if she / he doesn’t do it?”

Aside from the attitude of leaders and the effectiveness of initiatives, how you reward change, and the size of the organisation, can affect the speed of cultural change.

In some cases organisational cultural change can be immediate. It depends on how you measure it, what you are looking for, and what you see. For example, small changes can occur immediately through increased discussion and demonstration of the new cultural behaviours. Some times those measuring the change do not notice the subtle yet significant changes, which need to be nurtured to grow.

For some people merely shining a light on values and behaviours can lead to immediate changes. The difficulty can be in sustaining these behaviours.

Great leadership is the key to sustained positive cultural change. Leaders who build trusting environments, communicate effectively, are consistent in their behaviours, and role-model desired behaviours, create sustained positive cultural change.

What Do Positive Workplace Cultures Involve?

Leaders who meet the identified the needs of their staff can bring about huge changes very quickly, building a trusted and reliable positive workplace culture.

One of the most effective ways of creating positive workplace culture is through fulfilling human needs. Like any relationship when our needs are met by those around us we feel comfortable, confident, and motivated to stay in the relationship, and do what we can for our relational counterparts.

7 Keys To Positive Workplace Culture

There are 7 keys to positive workplace culture.

1.   People Matter

The most important part of any organisation is it’s people. Getting the right people is essential to positive workplace culture. That’s why successful companies spend so much time and money on attracting, retaining, and developing people with the right values, cultural fit, and attitude.

Organisations that focus on people create positive workplace cultures effortlessly. Think of organisations like Google, which pride themselves on the creative workplace environments, their free food, health and dental, even haircuts and dry cleaning, on-site gyms, swimming pools and gaming areas. Google even employs people who’s sole responsibility is to keep people happy and productive.

People with aligned values and behaviours create positive workplace cultures.

2.   Positive Communication

Consistent positive messages can change organisational culture quickly, particularly if employees trust their leaders to bring about the promised changes.

Research by the author conducted in 2010 showed that participants changed the way they responded to workplace scenarious after hearing a little over a minute of a monologue about compassionate behaviour (compared with the control group who didn’t hear any monologue). This research indicates that in as little as a minute organisational leaders are able to positively influence workplace behaviour.

Communication is an essential human need. When we communicate effectively we build strong, supportive relationships that can thrive in challenging circumstances, creating positive workplace cultures.

3.   Employee Feedback

One of the most effective ways of changing organisational culture is by implementing an employee feedback system, where all employees are able to provide feedback to the organisation’s leadership team. The feedback is heard, acknowledged, and responded to.

Vineet Nayar, former CEO of HCL Technologies believes that implementing an employee feedback system was a huge contributor to the change in company’s revenue increase from $0.7 billion in 2005 to $4.6 billion in 2013.

New Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer implemented a similar system, upon taking up her new role. Among other strategies designed to make Yahoo! “the absolute best place to work”, the culture has already begun to change in the year she has been with Yahoo!

Two of the most important human needs are to feel heard and understood. Employee feedback systems meet both of these needs quickly and effectively.

4.   Showing You Care In All Actions

John C. Maxwell, internationally recognised leadership expert’s famous saying “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care” is evident. Brendon Burchard of the High Performance Academy, similarly says genuinely caring is one of the most important ways of increasing performance and sales.

When people know you care, they are likely to go out of their way to also show care in what they do. Caring involves thought, foresight, and consistency. Companies all too often implement token changes that do not get to the heart of what employees really want and need. Caring involves lifestyle, an integrated approach to health (involving physical well-being, as well as relationships inside and outside of the workplace) and treating employees as individuals, meeting their individual (as much as possible) and collective human needs.

5. Purpose, Vision, and Each Knowing Their Part

Viktor E Frankl’s seminal book, Man’s Search For Meaning, explains how important a sense of purpose or meaning is for survival, even in the harshest, most challenging environments. Purpose or meaning is a fundamental human need.

Mike Steger, psychologist and meaning of life researcher also points out that people have still committed suicide when they have had social support networks or relationships with intimate partners. People do not often commit suicide when they have had a sense of purpose or meaning in their lives.

Contribution is a human need. When people feel they are serving others or contributing to a meaningful goal, they feel happier, more positive, and satisfied with their lives. Seligman, one of the founders of positive psychology, says that a meaningful life contributes to an overall increased sense of well-being.

Leaders who understand, engage in, and effectively communicate a shared vision build positive workplace cultures where employees know why they are turning up to work everyday, and what their role is in the shared vision.

6.   Showing Appreciation

People want to feel appreciated when they come to work. People spend long hours at work, forgoing time with their families and friends, or doing activities they enjoy. When they feel recognised, and appreciated for what they do at work, workers are more inclined to feel satisfied at work, and more motivated and engaged to work harder.

Appreciation can be shown in many ways through awards, promotions, pay increases, and internal communications. These formal ways of showing appreciation are important. They cannot, however, replace daily acts of gratitude and appreciation from leaders. Regular and sincere “thank you’s” create positive relationships and cultures within the workplace.

A 2012 study by Waters of the University of Melbourne showed that those who work in a culture of gratitude where workers are regularly shown appreciation had significantly higher job satisfaction.

7. Humour

A recent 5 year UK study by Thomas and Maskati has shown that workplaces that involve fun and humour are more productive. Staff that spent time laughing and interacting were found to create quality work in a fraction of the time it took others who were not taking time to laugh and interact with co-workers.

This makes sense. Other emotions research by Isen and Forgas over the last few decades shows that positive emotions tend to increase creativity and innovation, and facilitate the development of relationships. When people laugh and joke, they build relationships. Positive workplace relationships promote positive workplace behaviours such as knowledge sharing, informal training, and empathy in times of need.

The Benefits of Creating A Positive Organisational Culture In Your Workplace

There are numerous benefits of positive workplace cultures. Here are a few:

1. Workers can get on with their jobs, improving productivity, rather than focus on what is going wrong with the organisation, and the leadership team

2. Workers are proud to work for positive organisations and share their experience with their social networks, enhancing your company brand

3. Knowledge and experience is shared between workers which improves efficiency, productivity, and performance

4. People enjoy coming to work and are more committed to your organisation, reducing the huge costs of turnover

5. Workers go home happier and more satisfied, and this impacts their families and friends and spreads to others, and you have a positive impact on society.

Building a positive workplace culture is highly beneficial for organisations. When organisations employ initiatives that focus on people and meeting essential human needs, they build positive workplace cultures that thrive in challenging times.

Model and encourage collaborative communication and learning approaches in the workplace

Collaboration in the Workplace

If you asked several CEOs or human resource professionals what goals or elements were important to their success, you would probably get some phrases and corporate terms that kept coming up. Collaboration in the workplace would certainly be one of the more common answers. It is often the key to much of your success in the corporate world. So what is workplace collaboration?[footnoteRef:10] [10: Source: Study, as at http://study.com/academy/lesson/what-is-collaboration-in-the-workplace-definition-benefits-examples.html, as on 19th June, 2017.]

Collaboration in the workplace is when two or more people (often groups) work together through idea sharing and thinking to accomplish a common goal. It is simply teamwork taken to a higher level. Teamwork is often a physical joining of two people or a group to accomplish a task. With the changes and advancements in technology, such as high speed Internet, web-based programs, file sharing, email and video-conferencing, collaboration has become a more productive way of doing things. Collaboration in the workplace incorporates teamwork and several other aspects, such as the following:

· Thinking and brainstorming ideas to provide solutions - This key element brings groups together to offer different perspectives and expertise to solve for common problems. The phrase 'putting our heads together' would be a good example of this important element of collaboration.

· A strong sense of purpose - Groups and individuals who truly collaborate see the value in working together. Collaboration is not forced upon someone. There should be a meaningful reason for working together, and it should benefit both parties or the company as a whole.

· Equal participation - In corporate America, a collaborative manager or leader may often say, 'leave your titles at the door.' Treating everyone as equals when collaborating can open up communication and encourage ideas from all levels of the company or department, not just the managers or directors.

Activity 18

What does the term collaboration refer to and what benefits does collaborative communication provide to organisations?

Collaboration in the workplace is nothing new. However, it is becoming increasingly important in the modern world as we become more connected around the globe. Cloud computing and faster internet connections has given rise to tools enabling employees to collaborate with colleagues effectively, producing a more educated, skilled and engaged workforce. Moreover, this collaboration is increasingly happening online, rather than in person. In this article, we delve into why collaboration in the workplace is important, key benefits and what you need to know[footnoteRef:11]. [11: Source: Elcom, as at https://www.elcomcms.com/resources/blog/the-importance-of-collaboration-in-todays-workplace, as on 19th June, 2017.]

Why collaborate? The benefits of collaboration

When working on a project, an individual often needs the input of other employees. By collaborating with others - different departments or even different offices, skills can be pooled to make the project more successful than it might otherwise be.

Employee collaboration not only equals a happier workforce, it represents an educated one. A collaborative workplace naturally cultivates a sense of community within an organization, with employees feeling almost like they are a part of a family. This compels them to go beyond the expectations of their role, absorbing as much organisational knowledge as possible and driving the business forward with informed and sound decisions.

The Digital Workplace

In today’s digital age, effective collaboration is increasingly achieved via the digital workplace.

Step Two Designs defines a digital workplace as a holistic set of workplace tools, platforms and environments, delivered in a coherent, usable and productive way. A digital workplace is a place, that empowers individuals, teams, colleagues, clients and partners to share, communicate and collaborate with little to no friction, delay or challenge; allowing all these stakeholders to perform their jobs more effectively.

There are a range of digital collaboration platforms, systems and tools an organisation can and should utilise, whether it be a standalone enterprise collaboration tool or a full content management system (CMS) with a range of functionality to achieve additional business goals, such as a corporate intranet hub, with social intranet tools.

Here are some examples of enterprise social networking tools that you can consider:

· Team workspaces

· Company wiki

· Forums

· Blogging

· Instant messaging

· Facebook-like profile pages

The benefits of collaborating using the above are fairly obvious.

Employees from different departments can add to the company wiki pages, offering a comprehensive and easily accessible resource for everyone within the organisation.

Blogging is useful internally for similar reasons to a wiki; employees with expertise in varying fields can share insights on the company blog, allowing other employees to access the information at their fingertips. Blogs are also a great way to promote internal news, events and achievements, helping employees gain a greater understanding of what the company is doing and cultivating a positive company culture.

Online team workspaces enable members to easily participate in conversations, quickly share the most up-to-date documents and collaborate anywhere, anytime, on any device.

Fortunately these tools and many more are offered as part of a good CMS and can be utilised to create a thriving digital workplace, resulting in a happier, more collaborative and engaged workforce.

Understanding Enterprise apps

The business world is changing, whether it likes it or not, and soon we will also begin to see organisations building bigger communities which can be accessed from apps by the workforce. According to a Gartner survey, 79% of surveyed organizations plan to increase their mobile spending by 36%. Not surprising considering mobility results in increased employee output, less inventory and fewer operational expenses.

The great news is a good CMS can help bring this about. Whilst it's thought that many enterprises will eventually have their own app stores, this isn't essential. There are many reputable app developers around who are creating white label apps, which can be added to the company CMS, complete with branding and the addition of bespoke content.

The Rise of Remote Workers

Another consideration for using collaboration tools is that more employees are choosing to work from home. According to research carried out by Dell and Intel, more than half of all global employees believe that they are more productive when working from home than their office-based counterparts. 46% of those that work from home also said that they suffer less stress than they do when working in an office.

For example, with one simple, secure login, an employee can connect to the office and work just as effectively as if they were there in person.

Again, this leads to a happier workforce, which leads to greater productivity and that feeling of being a part of a larger family, which all have the same interests.

The Need for Knowledge Management

To facilitate knowledge sharing is to ensure that it is retained within the workplace, and shared among employees to help them work more effectively together. According to Gartner, “Knowledge management is a discipline that promotes an integrated approach to identifying, capturing, evaluating, retrieving, and sharing all of an enterprise's information assets. These assets may include databases, documents, policies, procedures, and previously un-captured expertise and experience in individual workers.”

It ensures all relevant information and resources can be access by employees when they need it. Organisations must give employees the tools to ensure that they can share the knowledge they possess. This all leads to faster and more effective decision making and easier collaboration.

Enterprise Branding

Branding is one of the most important aspects of any organisation. A brand represents the sum of people’s perception of the organisation, including those of their employees. A great brand not only communicates the organisation ethos instantly to employees, it can inspire them to go the extra mile as they are proud of the organisation they work for.

Therefore, collaboration tools within a CMS should be fully branded with the company logos, text, colours and so on, offering uniformity across the board. If there are a number of offices using a CMS, it is a good idea to ensure that the solution is consistently branded so that employees share the same experience regardless of where they log in from.

Of course, functionality is even more important, but in today’s world, it pays to develop a strong brand.

Document sharing

Likewise, document sharing is so much easier than it used to be and it’s no longer necessary to shuffle important documents backwards and forwards with edits by email or hard copy. A cloud-based CMS will mean that documents and projects can be stored so that they are accessible to everyone working on the project at the same time. This is great news for today’s workplace, where employees and partners tend to be scattered around the globe.

Video conferencing

Video conferencing is again, rising in popularity and has a number of uses for the larger company and small organisations alike. Not only can it be used effectively for collaboration, it can be used for board meetings, webinars, video content management and more.

Basically, it’s another tool organisations have at their disposal that can make everyone’s job easier while reducing costs. Expensive business trips for conferences and meetings can be reduced and productivity increased as workers are capable of doing everything from the office.

It can’t be emphasised enough how much CMS and collaboration tools can benefit workplace collaboration. They save time and money and lead to better growth for any organisation which uses one.

Activity 19

Select and describe one collaborative communication tool.

Highly Collaborative Organizations[footnoteRef:12] [12: Source: Forbes, as at https://www.forbes.com/sites/jacobmorgan/2013/07/30/the-12-habits-of-highly-collaborative-organizations/#5787ebb93683, as on 19th June, 2017.]

When it comes to the future of work and collaboration I've worked with and researched hundreds of companies. Collaboration is indeed a top priority for many business leaders but knowing what makes organizations successful can be a tricky thing. After all no two companies are like and their strategies and technologies can be quite different. In addition collaboration initiatives come from different departments with different budgets, they have different uses cases and corporate cultures, and different approaches, goals, and measures of success. So if there is so much variety here then how do we know what makes organizations successful? The answer lies in chess.

I happen to be a big fan of chess, so much so that my business partner and I named our company Chess Media Group. Did you know that there are more possible moves in a game of chess then there are atoms that exist in the universe and more moves then there are seconds that have elapsed since the big bang? Chess is virtually an infinite game yet somehow we have grand-masters who are always at the top. How do they succeed in this infinite game? They identify patterns and look for identifiable scenarios. This same approach is applicable for collaboration. So having said that, here are the 12 common habits or success factors for collaborative organizations.

Lead by example

If leaders at your organization don’t use and support collaborative tools and strategies then why should the employees? Leaders are very powerful instruments to facilitate change and encourage desired behaviours.

Example: Oce is a large printing and outsourcing company. The culture at the company was such that those who asked questions or admitted they don't know something were perceived as weak or stupid. To solve this problem the team that led the collaboration efforts were the first to make themselves vulnerable. Others saw this and become more receptive.

Individual benefit vs corporate benefit

Don’t focus on the overall corporate value and benefit when communicating collaboration to employees. Employees care about how this will impact them on an individual basis. How will this make their jobs and lives easier?

Example: AMP Bank in Sydney spent time with employees side-by-side understanding how they work and explaining to them how new technologies and strategies can positively impact their lives at work.

Strategy before technology

Before rushing to pick that shiny new collaboration platform focus on developing a strategy which will help you understand the “why” before the “how.” This is crucial for the success of any collaboration initiative. You don’t want to be in a position where you have deployed a technology without understanding why.

Example: Penn State University Outreach needed a way to connect and engage all of their employees. They used to do this at an annual conference which would only hold a fraction of the employees, so it was first come first served. Having a clear strategy in place before deciding on a technology helped them realize what they needed, why they needed it, and how they were going to make it work. Now they are able to engage and connect with the whole company instead of with just a few hundred employees.

Learn to get out of the way

By trying to enforce and police everything, you stifle collaboration within your organization. Some best practices and guidelines are fine to have but let your employees do what they need to do.

Example: ING Direct Canada does a fantastic job of empowering employees. The employees have no job titles and no offices. Anyone can talk to anyone and leaders focus on removing obstacles instead of creating them. Their CEO welcomes any feedback and input from the team whether it be negative or positive and employees aren't policed on their collaborative environment.

We are always so adamant about listening to the voice of the customer, what about the voice of the employee? When going down the collaboration road within your organization it’s important to make employees a part of the decision making process from step one. Listen to their ideas, their needs, and their suggestions and integrate their feedback in your technology and strategy.

Example: Booz Allen Hamilton used to have fantastic employee engagement. They worked on 2-week iteration cycles to their collaboration platform based on employee feedback. They were the case study that everyone talked about at the conferences. One day this project was passed over to IT and listening to the voice of the employees ceased. Engagement levels and employee adoption levels plummeted.

Integrate into the flow of work

Collaboration should never be seen as an additional task or requirement for employees. Instead collaboration should fit naturally into their flow of work. For example instead of having employees use multiple usernames, passwords, and log-in sites; create a “front-door” to the enterprise accessed through your collaboration platform.

Example: TELUS is a telecommunications company based in Canada which integrated collaboration into the core of how employees work. All of their technologies can be accessed via a central navigation bar, collaboration is one of their core values, and they have collaboration scavenger hunts for new employees in addition to employee off-sites and many other things.

Create a supportive environment

If your organization focuses on rewarding employees for individual performance as the main driver of success then it will become quite hard to encourage employees to share and communicate with each other. Why would they want to? There is nothing wrong with rewarding employees for great performance but it’s also crucial to reward teamwork. For example organizations can make a percentage of an employee’s bonus tied to how well they collaborate with their co-workers. A supportive environment also means having training and education resources available for employees as well as evangelists within the organization.

Example: The Motley Foll is the only company I've met that has a Chief Collaboration Officer. The employees play collaboration games to help work as a team, have mobile desks that they can relocate in their office, and feature a popular blog on their corporate culture.

Measure what matters

There are a lot of things that an organization can measure but that doesn’t mean that all of these things should be measured. Focus on the metrics that matter to your organization and the ones that are tied back to a business case. Some organizations focus on “busy” metrics such as comments submitted or groups created. Others focus on metrics such as engagement (defined as how connected and passionate an employee feels about the company and the work they do).

Example: Intuit is one of the many companies that readily has access to all sorts of data from their collaboration platform. However, instead of focusing on all of the metrics Intuit looks at things such as how many new product ideas are generated for employees and how the time to market for new products is decreased.

Persistence

I believe that collaborative initiatives shouldn't be pilots they should be corporate initiatives. These efforts can certainly take time but if the organization makes the decision that collaboration is the direction they want to go down then that’s it. No giving up and no turning back. Moving forward, organizations cannot succeed without connecting their employees and their information. Making collaboration work isn’t an option it’s THE option.

Example: Children's Hospital first started their collaboration efforts over a year ago and their first attempt was a huge failure. They deployed a technology and found that nobody was using it. They went back to the drawing board, selected a new vendor and put a new strategy behind it.

Adapt and evolve

It’s important to remember that collaboration is perpetual. It’s a never ending evolution as new tools and strategies for the workplace continue to emerge. This means that it’s important for your organization to be able to adapt and evolve as things change. Keep a pulse on what’s going on in the industry and inside of your organization. This will allow you to innovate and anticipate.

Example: Lowe's Home Improvement is completely changing the way employees communicate and collaborate with each other. Internally the company recognized the shift that is happening in the consumer web and is adapting their company to the point where they recently hosted their own internal "social business" conference. Collaboration technology is how many employees at Lowe's do their day-to-day-work.

Employee collaboration also benefits the customer

While customer collaboration and employee collaboration do solve very different and unique problems, employee collaboration has tremendous value to your customers. Employees are able to provide a better experience and superior support by being able to tap into internal experts, information, and resources which can be used to help customers. Consider a customer that is working with a support representative who unfortunately does not know how to solve the customer’s problem. The employee however has access to the entire organization to find the right information and share it with the customer.

Example: Cisco leverages a collaboration environment to crowd source issues and requests; these enables them yo find the best and fastest solution which makes for a better customer experience.

Collaboration can make the world a better place

Perhaps the most important principle of collaboration is that it can make the world a better place. Sure, collaboration can make our employee more productive and benefit our customers. But collaboration also allows employees to feel more connected to their jobs and co-workers, reduces stress at the workplace, makes their jobs easier, allows for more work freedom, and in general makes them happier people. This means less stress at home, less arguments with spouses, and more time to spend with loved ones. Collaboration not only positively impacts the lives of employees at work but also at home.

Cultivate existing and new collaborative and participative work relationships

Watching his employees use a new social technology, Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce.com, had an epiphany. His company had developed Chatter, a Facebook inspired application for companies that allows users to keep track of their colleagues and customers and share information and ideas. The employees had been trying it out internally, not just within their own work groups but across the entire organization. As Benioff read the Chatter posts, he realized that many of the people who had critical customer knowledge and were adding the most value were not even known to the management team[footnoteRef:13]. [13: Source: Harvard Business Review, as at https://hbr.org/2011/07/are-you-a-collaborative-leader, as on 19th June, 2017.]

The view into top management from the rank and file was just as obscure, Benioff knew. For instance, the company’s annual management off-site was coming up, and he could tell from talking to employees that they wondered about what went on behind closed doors at that gathering. “They imagined we were dressing up in robes and chanting,” he says.

What could he do to bring the top tier of the company closer to the workforce? Benioff asked himself. And then it hit him: Let’s use Chatter to blow open the doors of the management off-site.

What greeted the 200 executives who attended that meeting was atypical. All 5,000 Salesforce.com employees had been invited to join them—virtually. Huge TV monitors placed throughout the meeting room displayed the special Chatter forum set up for the off-site. Every manager received an iPod Touch, and every table had an iPad, which attendees could use to post to the forum. A video service broadcast the meeting in real time to all employees, who could beam in and instantaneously express their views on Chatter, too.

The meeting began with the standard presentations. The managers watching them weren’t quite sure what to do. Nothing unusual happened at first. Finally, Benioff grabbed the iPad on his table and made a comment on Chatter, noting what he found interesting about what was being said and adding a joke to spice it up. Some in the room followed with a few comments, and then employees watching from their offices launched a few comments back. The snowball started rolling. “Suddenly, the meeting went from a select group participating to the entire company participating,” Benioff says.

Comments flew. “We felt the empowerment in the room,” recalls Steve Gillmor, the head of technical media strategy.

In the end the dialogue lasted for weeks beyond the actual meeting. More important, by fostering a discussion across the entire organization, Benioff has been able to better align the whole workforce around its mission. The event served as a catalyst for the creation of a more open and empowered culture at the company.

Like Salesforce.com’s managers and employees, businesspeople today are working more collaboratively than ever before, not just inside companies but also with suppliers, customers, governments, and universities. Global virtual teams are the norm, not the exception. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, videoconferencing, and a host of other technologies have put connectivity on steroids and enabled new forms of collaboration that would have been impossible a short while ago.

Many executives realize that they need a new playbook for this hyperconnected environment. Those who climbed the corporate ladder in silos while using a “command and control” style can have a difficult time adjusting to the new realities. Conversely, managers who try to lead by consensus can quickly see decision making and execution grind to a halt. Crafting the right leadership style isn’t easy.

As part of our research on top-performing CEOs (see “The Best-Performing CEOs in the World,” HBR January–February 2010), we’ve examined what it means to be a collaborative leader. We’ve discovered that it requires strong skills in four areas: playing the role of connector, attracting diverse talent, modelling collaboration at the top, and showing a strong hand to keep teams from getting mired in debate. The good news is, our research also suggests that these skills can be learned—and can help executives generate exceptional long-term performance.

Play Global Connector

Do you attend conferences outside your professional specialty?

Are you part of a global network like Young Presidents’ Organization?

Do you regularly blog or e-mail employees about trends, ideas, and people you encounter outside your organization?

How often do you meet with parties outside your company (competitors, consumers, government officials, university contacts, and so on) who are not directly relevant to your immediate job demands or current operations?

Are you on the board of any outside organizations?

Engage Talent at the Periphery

How diverse is your immediate team in terms of nationality? Gender? Age?

How much time do you spend outside your home country?

Have you visited your emerging markets this year?

Does your network include people in their twenties (who aren’t your kids)?

Collaborate at the Top First

Do members of your team have any joint responsibilities beyond their individual goals?

Does the compensation of your direct reports depend on any collective goals or reflect any collective responsibilities?

What specifically have you done to eradicate power struggles within your team?

Do your direct reports have both performance and learning goals?

Show a Strong Hand

Have you killed any collaboration projects in the past six months?

Do you manage dynamically—forming and disbanding teams quickly as opportunities arise?

Do the right people in your organization know they can “close” a discussion and make a decision?

Does your team debate ideas vigorously but then unite behind decisions made?

Play Global Connector

In his best-selling book The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell used the term “connector” to describe individuals who have many ties to different social worlds. It’s not the number of people they know that makes connectors significant, however; it’s their ability to link people, ideas, and resources that wouldn’t normally bump into one another. In business, connectors are critical facilitators of collaboration.

For David Kenny, the president of Akamai Technologies, being a connector is one of the most important ways he adds value. He spends much of his time traveling around the world to meet with employees, partners, and customers. “I spend time with media owners to hear what they think about digital platforms, Facebook, and new pricing models, and with Microsoft leaders to get their views on cloud computing,” he says. “I’m interested in hearing how our clients feel about macroeconomic issues, the G20, and how debt will affect future generations.” These conversations lead to new strategic insights and relationships, and help Akamai develop critical external partnerships.

Connecting the world outside to people inside the company is crucial to Kenny. He uses a number of tactics to do this. “First, I check in on Foursquare often and post my location to Facebook and Twitter,” he says. “It lets employees in different Akamai locations know I’m in town so that anybody at any level can bring me suggestions or concerns. Second, every time I go to one of our locations, I have lunch or coffee with 20 to 40 people. We go around the room, and people ask questions on topics they most want to address. Often my answer is to connect them with others in Akamai or even people at other companies who have expertise on the topic. Third, if I see a big opportunity when meeting with a customer or colleague, I will schedule a follow-up visit and bring along the right experts from Akamai. Fourth, whenever I travel, I try to make room to meet with two to three people I know in that location. Whenever possible, I bring someone else from Akamai with me to those meetings.”

Kenny’s networking recently resulted in an important strategic alliance with Ericsson. Akamai is now working with the mobile giant to change consumers’ internet experiences on mobile devices. The partnership evolved out of a conversation Kenny had with a midlevel Ericsson executive two years ago at the Monaco Media Forum. “It really changed my idea of what Ericsson could be, and I saw that we were both trying to solve a similar technical problem,” Kenny says. “Then I worked through mutual friends to meet their CEO and arranged for the right people on his team to meet with their Akamai counterparts.”

Presidents and CEOs aren’t the only executives building bridges between their organizations and the outside world nowadays. Take Beth Comstock, the chief marketing officer of General Electric. She is famous for her weekly “BlackBerry Beth” blog, in which she shares what she has learned in her external role for busy (and perhaps more internally focused) GE managers. The pithy and provocative blog goes out to thousands of GE’s sales, marketing, and technology leaders. In it, Comstock passes along interesting information that people might have missed, taking care to tie it back to challenges and opportunities GE faces. For example, in a recent post from the World Economic Forum, she reported that a panel of scientists had come to the same conclusion that a GE survey had—that technology alone cannot ensure innovation and that more training in creativity is needed.

“I work hard to curate information that I don’t believe many at GE will have heard and to translate information in a way that is relevant to our challenges,” says Comstock. “I probably spend half of my time immersed in worlds beyond GE. I hope this encourages my colleagues to be more externally focused. The message is ‘If I find it important to spend some of my time this way, maybe you will, too.’”

To connect their organizations to the wider world, collaborative leaders develop contacts not only in the typical areas—local clubs, industry associations, and customer and supplier relations—but beyond them. Networking in adjacent industries, innovation hot spots like Silicon Valley, or emerging economies or with people of different educational or ethnic backgrounds helps open their eyes to new business opportunities and partners. For example, Comstock’s external contacts in the innovation space led GE to NASA, with which the corporation has shared insights and best practices. The two organizations have also begun discussions about space technologies that might have applications in health care.

Engage Talent at the Periphery

Research has consistently shown that diverse teams produce better results, provided they are well led. The ability to bring together people from different backgrounds, disciplines, cultures, and generations and leverage all they have to offer, therefore, is a must-have for leaders. Yet many companies spend inordinate amounts of time, money, and energy attracting talented employees only to subject them to homogenizing processes that kill creativity. In a lot of multinational companies, for example, nonnative English speakers are at a disadvantage. To senior management, they don’t sound as “leader-like” as the Anglophones, and they end up getting passed over for promotions. At a time when innovations are increasingly originating in emerging markets, companies that allow this to happen lose out.

France’s Danone, one of the top performers in our research, makes sure its executives don’t encounter such obstacles. When all the managers worldwide get together for the company’s annual strategic review, many choose to present in their native tongue. Says CEO Franck Riboud: “We spend a fortune on interpreters so that being less articulate in English is not a barrier. Some of our executives have even presented their business case in native dress. This helps us steal away talent from competitors where those who don’t speak perfect English get stuck.”

Reckitt Benckiser, the UK-based producer of home, health, and personal care products and another top performer in our research, considers the diversity of its workforce to be one of its competitive advantages—and a key reason it has seen net income grow 17% annually, on average, from 1999 to 2010. No nationality dominates the company’s senior team. Two executives are Dutch, one is German, two are British, one is South African, two are Italian, and one is from India. According to (soon-to-retire) CEO Bart Becht: “It doesn’t matter whether I have a Pakistani, a Chinese person, a Brit, or a Turk, man or woman, sitting in the same room, or whether I have people from sales or something else, so long as I have people with different experiences—because the chance for new ideas is much greater when you have people with different backgrounds. The chance for conflict is also higher—and conflict is good per se, as long as it’s constructive and gets us to the best idea.”

As Becht suggests, nationality isn’t the only kind of diversity that matters. Research on creative industries shows that the collaborations that are most successful (whether in terms of patent citation, critical acclaim, or financial return) include both experienced people and newcomers and bring together people who haven’t worked with one another before. Leaders need to make a concerted effort to promote this mix: Left to their own devices, people will choose to collaborate with others they know well or who have similar backgrounds. Static groups breed insularity, which can be deadly for innovation. Nokia’s former executive team, for example, was 100% Finnish and had worked closely together for more than a decade. Many believe homogeneity explains why the team failed to see the smartphone threat emerging from Silicon Valley.

Left to their own devices, people will choose to collaborate with others they know well—which can be deadly for innovation.

Collaborative leaders ensure that teams stay fresh via periodic infusions of new players. Including employees from Generation Y—those born from the mid-1970s to the early 2000s, who have grown up sharing knowledge and opinions online—is another obvious way to enliven collaborations. A number of leading companies have begun using technology to harness Gen Y ideas and perspectives. Salesforce.com, as we have seen, brought them in from the periphery by using Chatter to open its management off-site to all staff. At India’s HCL, employees throughout the company join virtual conversations on topics that are important to them, and CEO Vineet Nayar reaches out personally through a popular blog that allows him to interact with a broad cross section of employees. In a market where the competition for engineering talent is fierce, the ability to attract the best and brightest helped HCL grow 30% annually from 2008 to 2010.

Collaborate at the Top First

It’s not enough for leaders to spot collaborative opportunities and attract the best talent to them. They must also set the tone by being good collaborators themselves. All too often, efforts to collaborate in the middle are sabotaged by political games and turf battles higher up in the organization. Consider that Microsoft, according to a former company executive writing in the New York Times last year, developed a viable tablet computer more than a decade ago but failed to preempt Apple’s smash hit because competing Microsoft divisions conspired to kill the project.

Part of the problem is that many leadership teams, composed of the CEO and his or her direct reports, actually don’t operate as teams. Each member runs his or her own region, function, or product or service category, without much responsibility—or incentive—for aligning the organization’s various projects and operations into a coherent whole.

Collaboration Does Not Equal Consensus

Collaborative leadership is the capacity to engage people and groups outside one’s formal control and inspire them to work toward common goals—despite differences in convictions, cultural values, and operating norms.

Most people understand intuitively that collaborative leadership is the opposite of the old command-and-control model, but the differences with a consensus-based approach are more nuanced. Below are some helpful distinctions between the three leadership styles.

Read more

At Brazil’s Natura Cosméticos, CEO Alessandro Carlucci has instituted a comprehensive “engagement process” that promotes a collaborative mind-set at all levels and has helped the firm win a top spot on Fortune’s list of best companies for leaders. The process was implemented after Natura’s highly successful IPO in 2004, when competing agendas among the senior managers began to threaten the company’s prospects. Carlucci decided he needed to reorganize the executive committee to unify its members around common goals and stop the power struggles. He asked the members of the top team to make a commitment to self-development as part of their stewardship of the company.

Each executive embarked on a “personal journey” with an external coach, who met with everyone individually and with the team as a group. “It is a different type of coaching,” Carlucci explains. “It’s not just talking to your boss or subordinates but talking about a person’s life history, with their families; it is more holistic, broader, integrating all the different roles of a human being.”

Roberto Pedote, Natura’s senior vice president for finance, IT, and legal affairs, adds: “I think that the main point is that we are making ourselves vulnerable, showing that we are not supermen, that we have failures; that we are afraid of some things and we don’t have all the answers.”

Since the engagement process was adopted, Natura’s executives have become much better at teaming up on efforts to improve the business, which grew by 21% in 2010. The collaborative mind-set at the top has cascaded down to the rest of the organization, and the process has been rolled out to all the company’s managers.

If leaders are to encourage more innovation through partnerships across sectors and with suppliers, customers, and consumers, they need to stop relying heavily on short-term performance indicators. According to the psychologist Carol Dweck, people are driven to do tasks by either performance or learning goals. When performance goals dominate an environment, people are motivated to show others that they have a valued attribute, such as intelligence or leadership. When learning goals dominate, they are motivated to develop the attribute. Performance goals, she finds, induce people to favor tasks that will make them look good over tasks that will help them learn. A shift toward learning goals will make managers more open to exploring opportunities to acquire knowledge from others.

At HCL, CEO Vineet Nayar demonstrated his commitment to collaboration by adopting a radically different 360-degree evaluation for his top managers—one that invited a wide range of employees to weigh in. Although the company had done 360-degree reviews before, each manager had been assessed by a relatively small number of people, mostly within the manager’s immediate span of control. As Nayar recalls in his book Employees First, Customers Second (Harvard Business Review Press, 2010), “most of the respondents operated within the same area as the person they were evaluating. This reinforced the boundaries between the parts of the pyramid. But we were trying to change all that. We wanted to encourage people to operate across these boundaries.” Nayar set the tone by posting his own 360 degree evaluation on the web. Once executives got used to the new transparency, the 360-degree reviews were expanded to a broader group. A new feature, “Happy Feet,” was added, allowing all employees whom a manager might affect or influence to evaluate that manager—regardless of their reporting relationship.

Depoliticizing senior management so that executives are rewarded for collaborating rather than promoting their individual agendas is an absolute essential. At Reckitt Benckiser, there’s little tolerance for politics. Says Bart Becht: “We go out of our way to make sure that politics get eradicated, because I think they’re very bad for an organization. I think they’re poison, to be honest with you.” Becht’s direct, no-nonsense style and the expectation that people should openly disagree with one another in meetings also help keep politics to a minimum, allowing real teamwork to take hold.

Show a Strong Hand

Once leaders start getting employees to collaborate, they face a different problem: overdoing it. Too often people will try to collaborate on everything and wind up in endless meetings, debating ideas and struggling to find consensus. They can’t reach decisions and execute quickly. Collaboration becomes not the oil greasing the wheel but the sand grinding it to a halt.

When people try to collaborate on everything, they can wind up in endless meetings, debating ideas and struggling to find consensus.

Effective collaborative leaders assume a strong role directing teams. They maintain agility by forming and disbanding them as opportunities come and go—in much the same way that Hollywood producers, directors, actors, writers, and technicians establish teams for the life of movie projects. Collaborative efforts are highly fluid and not confined to company silos.

Effective leaders also assign clear decision rights and responsibilities, so that at the appropriate point someone can end the discussion and make a final call. Although constructive confrontation and tempered disagreements are encouraged, battles aren’t left raging on. This is exactly how things work at Reckitt Benckiser. When teams meet, people know that it is OK—in fact expected—to propose ideas and challenge one another. They debate loudly and furiously until the best idea wins. If no obvious agreement is reached in time, the person chairing the meeting normally makes a decision and the rest of the group falls in line. This ensures vigorous debate but clear decisions and quick action—diversity in counsel, unity in command, as Cyrus the Great once said.

Loosening Control Without Losing Control

In the old world of silos and solo players, leaders had access to everything they needed under one roof, and a command-and-control style served them well. But things have changed: The world has become much more interconnected, and if executives don’t know how to tap into the power of those connections, they’ll be left behind.

Leaders today must be able to harness ideas, people, and resources from across boundaries of all kinds. That requires reinventing their talent strategies and building strong connections both inside and outside their organizations. To get all the disparate players to work together effectively, they also need to know when to wield influence rather than authority to move things forward, and when to halt unproductive discussions, squash politicking, and make final calls.

Differences in convictions, cultural values, and operating norms inevitably add complexity to collaborative efforts. But they also make them richer, more innovative, and more valuable. Getting that value is the heart of collaborative leadership.

Working at best practice[footnoteRef:14] [14: Source: Fair Work Ombudsman, as at https://www.fairwork.gov.au/.../Consultation-and-cooperation-in-the-workplace-best-..., as on 19th June, 2017.]

Best practice is about developing and implementing effective consultation mechanisms which encourage cooperation and engagement of employees and management. In some instances, consultation is not a choice, but required by law.

There are significant benefits associated with implementing and maintaining a culture of consultation and cooperation in the workplace. Businesses working to best practice recognise the benefits of regularly seeking opinions and views from employees, whether that be through consultation with individuals, groups or unions, or a mixture of all three.

This is because employee awareness of, and involvement in, decision-making regularly leads to:

· more productive workplaces as a result of greater cooperation and collaboration

· better and more informed decision making and successful implementation of ideas

· attraction and retention of skilled and positive staff

· workplaces that are better able to cope with change

· minimisation of employer/employee disputes

· minimisation of employee claims against the employer.

All modern awards contain consultation provisions, and the Fair Work Act 2009 (FW Act) requires that consultation provisions are set out in all enterprise agreements. In addition, the FW Act requires employers to consult with employees in other situations, whether or not a modern award or enterprise agreement applies.

This Best Practice Guide explains the various advantages and requirements to consult in the workplace, including:

· advantages of working at best practice

· where employers intend to make significant changes at the workplace

· where employers intend to dismiss more than 15 employees at once workplace health and safety

· when employees request flexible working arrangements

· when this happens in the context of good faith bargaining.

It also provides practical suggestions for ways to introduce a more participatory and cooperative culture at your workplace.

This guide illustrates best practice when it comes to consultation and cooperation in the workplace. For specific information regarding your minimum legal obligations, contact the organisations listed under the ‘For more information’ section at the end of this guide.

Why work at best practice?

Consultation generally – best practice employers

Successful change involves consultation and cooperation with all parties involved, including managers, employees and any employee representatives. In addition to any matters where consultation is mandatory, employers should consult with their employees on workplace issues that may impact on the welfare and productivity of employees. As a matter of best practice, consideration should be given to the value that consultation could add to any business decision making. Consultation can identify opportunities, assist decision making and help ensure any new ideas work effectively in practice.

Consultation may take the form of:

· establishment of employer/employee (and employee representative) committees

· regular staff meetings and communication with employees

· regular performance and training reviews

· regular written communications such as newsletters

· encouragement of employee feedback on business and administrative decisions.

These practices may be implemented through administrative structures, company policies, enterprise agreements, or - where appropriate - may be set out in employees’ contracts of employment.

When consulting in the workplace, remember to respect everybody’s opinions and backgrounds. Depending on your workplace, you may need to take into account cultural and language differences and make sure that everybody understands the consultation process.

Consultation regarding workplace change

Modern awards

Every modern award contains a standard consultation clause dealing with the requirement for employers to consult with employees and their representatives where the employer intends to implement significant changes at the workplace. The clause requires consultation where an employer has made a decision to introduce major changes in production, program, organisation, structure or technology that are likely to have significant effects on employees, or where the employer proposes to change an employee’s regular roster or ordinary hours of work.

In these cases:

· employers must notify employees and their representatives who may be affected by the proposed changes

· employers must discuss the changes with the affected employees and their representatives, and provide information in writing to them, as soon as practicable after a definite decision has been made about:

· the nature of the changes — effects the changes are likely to have on employees, and

· measures to prevent or reduce the adverse effects of such changes on employees

· employers must then give prompt consideration to matters raised by the employees and their representatives in relation to the changes.

While an employer must give consideration to the matters raised by the employees, an employer does not have to obtain the consent of employees or their representatives to implement changes to the business. However, best practice employers understand that achieving real and sustainable workplace change is best realised by cooperative and open change management processes.

Employers with employees that are regulated by modern awards, enterprise agreements or other industrial instruments should be aware of, and familiarise themselves with, the dispute resolution procedure set out in their relevant award, enterprise agreement or industrial instrument.

Enterprise agreements

When making an enterprise agreement, the FW Act requires the parties to include a consultation term. Enterprise agreements lodged with the Fair Work Commission without such a clause will be taken to have included the ‘model consultation term’ as a term of the agreement. This term is set out in the Fair Work Regulations 2009.

Parties are not required to use the model consultation term if the parties have agreed to a different consultative procedure to be set out in the agreement. However, the FW Act states that a consultation term in an enterprise agreement must:

· require the employer or employers to which the agreement applies, to consult with employees about major workplace changes that are likely to have a significant effect on the employees, and

· allow for the representation of those employees for the purposes of that consultation.

A person representing the employees could include an elected employee or a representative from a union.

Consultation regarding termination of employment In addition to any consultation term under an award, enterprise agreement or industrial instrument, the FW Act provides that an employer must consult with a union regarding dismissals in certain circumstances. Consultation must take place with the union(s) whose members are affected by the decision where an employer has decided to dismiss 15 or more employees (but before the dismissal occurs) for all or any of the following reasons:

· economic

· technological

· structural or similar reasons.

This requirement applies even if no award or enterprise agreement applies to the employees.

The Fair Work Commission can make orders requiring compliance with this requirement if there is noncompliance and the employer can be reasonably expected to know that one or more of the employees affected by the decision are members of a union. If employees are not members of a union the employer is not obliged to inform a relevant union, however there may be benefit for the business in doing so to assist the re-employment of the affected employees elsewhere.

Consultation in practice

This flowchart sets out a recommended step by step approach for best practice consultation.

Consultation regarding occupational health and safety

Employers should also be aware that they may have additional consultation duties with employees on health, safety and welfare issues in the workplace under state or territory occupational health and safety laws. An employer working at best practice will routinely consult with its employees on these important matters.

Other situations

The FW Act sets out other situations where an employer must engage with its employees or their representatives including:

· when bargaining in good faith in the context of negotiating the terms of an enterprise agreement (see Best Practice Guide No 11 ‘Improving workplace productivity in bargaining’)

· where an employee requests flexible working conditions under the National Employment Standards

· under provisions for flexible working arrangements set out in a relevant modern award, or

· in the course of negotiating an individual flexibility arrangement under an enterprise agreement (see Best Practice Guide No 3 ‘Use of individual flexibility arrangements’).

Positively convey organisational direction and values to relevant individuals and relevant stakeholders

Mission, Vision, and Values[footnoteRef:15] [15: Source: Flat World Knowledge, as at https://catalog.flatworldknowledge.com/bookhub/5?e=carpenter-ch04_s01, as on 19th June, 2017.]

Mission and vision both relate to an organization’s purpose and are typically communicated in some written form. Mission and vision are statements from the organization that answer questions about who we are, what do we value, and where we’re going. A study by the consulting firm Bain and Company reports that 90% of the 500 firms surveyed issue some form of mission and vision statements. Moreover, firms with clearly communicated, widely understood, and collectively shared mission and vision have been shown to perform better than those without them, with the caveat that they related to effectiveness only when strategy and goals and objectives were aligned with them as well.

A mission statement communicates the organization’s reason for being, and how it aims to serve its key stakeholders. Customers, employees, and investors are the stakeholders most often emphasized, but other stakeholders like government or communities (i.e., in the form of social or environmental impact) can also be discussed. Mission statements are often longer than vision statements. Sometimes mission statements also include a summation of the firm’s values. Values are the beliefs of an individual or group, and in this case the organization, in which they are emotionally invested. The Starbucks mission statement describes six guiding principles that, as you can see, also communicate the organization’s values:

1. Provide a great work environment and treat each other with respect and dignity.

2. Embrace diversity as an essential component in the way we do business.

3. Apply the highest standards of excellence to the purchasing, roasting and fresh delivery of our coffee.

4. Develop enthusiastically satisfied customers all of the time.

5. Contribute positively to our communities and our environment.

6. Recognize that profitability is essential to our future success.

Similarly, Toyota declares its global corporate principles to be:

1. Honor the language and spirit of the law of every nation and undertake open and fair corporate activities to be a good corporate citizen of the world.

2. Respect the culture and customs of every nation and contribute to economic and social development through corporate activities in the communities.

3. Dedicate ourselves to providing clean and safe products and to enhancing the quality of life everywhere through all our activities.

4. Create and develop advanced technologies and provide outstanding products and services that fulfill the needs of customers worldwide.

5. Foster a corporate culture that enhances individual creativity and teamwork value, while honoring mutual trust and respect between labor and management.

6. Pursue growth in harmony with the global community through innovative management.

7. Work with business partners in research and creation to achieve stable, long-term growth and mutual benefits, while keeping ourselves open to new partnerships. [

A vision statement, in contrast, is a future-oriented declaration of the organization’s purpose and aspirations. In many ways, you can say that the mission statement lays out the organization’s “purpose for being,” and the vision statement then says, “based on that purpose, this is what we want to become.” The strategy should flow directly from the vision, since the strategy is intended to achieve the vision and thus satisfy the organization’s mission. Typically, vision statements are relatively brief, as in the case of Starbuck’s vision statement, which reads: “Establish Starbucks as the premier purveyor of the finest coffee in the world while maintaining our uncompromising principles as we grow.” Or ad firm Ogilvy & Mather, which states their vision as “an agency defined by its devotion to brands.” Sometimes the vision statement is also captured in a short tag line, such as Toyota’s “moving forward” statement that appears in most communications to customers, suppliers, and employees. Similarly, Wal-Mart’s tag-line version of its vision statement is “Save money. Live better.”

Any casual tour of business or organization Web sites will expose you to the range of forms that mission and vision statements can take. To reiterate, mission statements are longer than vision statements, often because they convey the organizations core values. Mission statements answer the questions of “Who are we?” and “What does our organization value?” Vision statements typically take the form of relatively brief, future-oriented statements—vision statements answer the question “Where is this organization going?” Increasingly, organizations also add a values statement which either reaffirms or states outright the organization’s values that might not be evident in the mission or vision statements.

Roles Played by Mission and Vision

Mission and vision statements play three critical roles: (1) communicate the purpose of the organization to stakeholders, (2) inform strategy development, and (3) develop the measurable goals and objectives by which to gauge the success of the organization’s strategy. These interdependent, cascading roles, and the relationships among them, are summarized in the figure.

Figure 4.4 Key Roles of Mission and Vision

First, mission and vision provide a vehicle for communicating an organization’s purpose and values to all key stakeholders. Stakeholders are those key parties who have some influence over the organization or stake in its future. You will learn more about stakeholders and stakeholder analysis later in this chapter; however, for now, suffice it to say that some key stakeholders are employees, customers, investors, suppliers, and institutions such as governments. Typically, these statements would be widely circulated and discussed often so that their meaning is widely understood, shared, and internalized. The better employees understand an organization’s purpose, through its mission and vision, the better able they will be to understand the strategy and its implementation.

Second, mission and vision create a target for strategy development. That is, one criterion of a good strategy is how well it helps the firm achieve its mission and vision. To better understand the relationship among mission, vision, and strategy, it is sometimes helpful to visualize them collectively as a funnel. At the broadest part of the funnel, you find the inputs into the mission statement. Toward the narrower part of the funnel, you find the vision statement, which has distilled down the mission in a way that it can guide the development of the strategy. In the narrowest part of the funnel you find the strategy —it is clear and explicit about what the firm will do, and not do, to achieve the vision. Vision statements also provide a bridge between the mission and the strategy. In that sense the best vision statements create a tension and restlessness with regard to the status quo—that is, they should foster a spirit of continuous innovation and improvement. For instance, in the case of Toyota, its “moving forward” vision urges managers to find newer and more environmentally friendly ways of delighting the purchaser of their cars. London Business School professors Gary Hamel and C. K. Prahalad describe this tense relationship between vision and strategy as stretch and ambition. Indeed, in a study of such able competitors as CNN, British Airways, and Sony, they found that these firms displaced competitors with stronger reputations and deeper pockets through their ambition to stretch their organizations in more innovative ways.

Third, mission and vision provide a high-level guide, and the strategy provides a specific guide, to the goals and objectives showing success or failure of the strategy and satisfaction of the larger set of objectives stated in the mission. In the cases of both Starbucks and Toyota, you would expect to see profitability goals, in addition to metrics on customer and employee satisfaction, and social and environmental responsibility.

A frustrated CEO recently shared with me that her employees had lost their edge. They were internally focused, their speed-to-market was down, and they couldn’t find a good balance between serving customers well while making healthy margins. The result was slow progress against the company strategy and an inability to profitably deliver on the value proposition. She had attempted to motivate employees and be clear about the strategy, but she was falling short and was looking for answers on what to do next. The solution in many cases is to overhaul internal communications strategies in order to convince employees of the authenticity, importance, and relevance of their company’s purpose and strategic goals. Here are just a few communications approaches that will help you effectively reach your employees and encourage behaviors that advance your strategy and improve your results[footnoteRef:16]. [16: Source: Harvard Business Review, as at https://hbr.org/2011/08/eight-ways-to-energize-your-te, as on 19th June, 2017.]

1. Keep the message simple, but deep in meaning. Most organizations have a deeper meaning as to why they exist. This tends to influence strategy, decision-making and behaviors at executive levels, but often isn’t well articulated for employees. What you call it doesn’t matter, your purpose, your why, your core belief, your center. What does matter is that you establish its relevance with employees in a way that makes them care more about the company and about the job they do. It should be at the core of all of your communications, a simple and inspiring message that is easy to relate to and understand. Strategy-specific messages linked to your purpose become tools to help employees connect their day-to-day efforts with the aspiration of the company.

2. Build behavior based on market and customer insights For employees to fully understand how your strategy is different and better than the competition they need to be in touch with market realities. The challenge is in how to effectively convey those realities so that your people can act on them. By building internal campaigns based on market and customer insights, you bring your strategy to life for your employees through this important lens. Package your content so that it can be shared broadly with all departments in your organization, but in a hands-on way. Expose managers first then provide them with easy-to-implement formats for bringing their teams together, with toolkits that include all the materials they’ll need. The purpose is to encourage their teams to develop department-specific responses, and to generate new ideas and new behaviors based on what they’ve learned.

3. Use the discipline of a framework. Not all messages are created equal. They need to be prioritized and sequenced based on their purpose. I suggest using an Inspire/Educate/Reinforce framework to map and deliver messages on an annual basis.

· Inspire. Messages that inspire are particularly important when you are sharing a significant accomplishment or introducing a new initiative that relates to your strategy. The content should demonstrate progress against goals, showcase benefits to customers, and be presented in a way that gets attention and signals importance. The medium is less important than the impression that you want to leave with employees about the company. Whether you’re looking to build optimism, change focus, instill curiosity, or prepare them for future decisions, you’ll have more impact if you stir some emotion and create a lasting memory.

· Educate. Once you’ve energized your team with inspiring messages, your explanations of the company’s strategic decisions and your plans for implementing them should carry more weight. To educate your teams most effectively on the validity of your strategy and their role in successful execution, make sure you provide job-specific tools with detailed data that they can customize and apply in their day-to-day responsibilities. It is most important for these messages to be delivered through dialogues rather than monologues, in smaller group sessions where employees can build to their own conclusions and feel ownership in how to implement.

· Reinforce. It isn’t enough to explain the connection between your company’s purpose and its strategy — and between that strategy and its execution — once. You’ll need to repeat the message in order to increase understanding, instill belief and lead to true change overtime. These reinforcing messages need to come in a variety of tactics, channels, and experiences and I’ve highlighted some approaches below. Ultimately, they serve to immerse employees in important content and give them the knowledge to confidently connect to the strategy. You’ll also want to integrate these messages with your training and your human resource initiatives to connect them with employee development & performance metrics. Recognize and reward individuals and teams who come up with smart solutions and positive change.

4. Think broader than the typical CEO-delivered message. And don’t disappear. Often corporate communications has a strictly top-down approach. I’ve found that dialogue at the grassroots is just as important, if not more so. Employees are more likely to believe what leaders say when they hear similar arguments from their peers, and conversations can be more persuasive and engaging than one-way presentations. Designate a team of employees to serve as ambassadors responsible for delivering important messages at all levels. Rotate this group annually to get more people involved in being able to represent the strategy inside the company. And when the message comes from leadership, make sure it’s from your most visible, well-regarded leaders. Another mistake is the “big launch event and disappear” approach. Instead, integrate regular communications into employee’s daily routines through detailed planning against the messages mapped in your Inspire/Educate/Reinforce framework.

5. Put on your “real person” hat. And take off your “corporate person/executive” hat. The fact is, not many people are deeply inspired by the pieces of communication that their companies put out. Much of it ignores one of the most important truths of communication — and especially communication in the early 21st century: be real. “Corporate speak” comes off hollow and lacking in meaning. Authentic messages from you will help employees see the challenges and opportunities as you see them and understand and care about the direction in which you’re trying to take the company.

6. Tell a story. Facts and figures won’t be remembered. Stories and experiences will. Use storytelling as much as possible to bring humanity to the company and to help employees understand the relevance of your strategy and real-life examples of progress and shortfalls against it. Ask employees to share stories as well, and use these as the foundation for dialogues that foster greater understanding of the behaviours that you want to encourage and enhance versus those that pose risks. Collectively these stories and conversations will be a strong influence on positive culture-building behaviour that relates to your core purpose and strategic goals.

7. Use 21st-century media and be unexpected. The delivery mechanism is as important and makes as much of a statement as the content itself. Most corporate communications have not been seriously dusted off in a while, and the fact is, the way people communicate has changed tremendously in the past five years. Consider the roles of social media, networking, blogs, and games to get the word out in ways that your employees are used to engaging in. Where your message shows up also says a lot. Aim to catch people somewhere that they would least expect it. Is it in the restroom? The stairwell? On their mobile phone?

8. Make the necessary investment. Most executives recognize how important their employee audience is. They are the largest expense to the company. They often communicate directly with your customers. They single-handedly control most perceptions that consumers have about the brand. So if this is a given, why are we so reluctant to fund internal communication campaigns? I suggest asking this question: What am I willing to invest per employee to help them internalize our strategy and based on that understanding, determine what they need to do to create a differentiated market experience for our customers? Do the math and set your hoped-for ROI high whether it is financial performance or positive shifts in behaviour and culture. If you choose not to invest be certain of the risk. If you don’t win over employees first, you certainly won’t succeed in winning with customers, as they ultimately hold that relationship in their hands.

Analyse the impact and role of leadership during organisational change

Analyse leadership during organisational change

Good teachers and leaders share a secret in their ability to communicate specific ideas or actions to students and employees. They know different people learn and respond in different and varied ways.

An exceptional leader can vary their management or leadership style to best suit an individual employee, work group or business situation. There are six leadership styles that can be employed in the workplace. These styles are coercive, authoritative, affiliative, democratic, pace-setting and coaching. Research conducted also shows that the more of these styles a leader exhibits, the better they perform as leaders in their organisation. The very best leaders can utilise four or more these styles.

Change generates conflict within an organisation. Successful leadership styles should vary with managerial implications of change and the amount of time needed to accomplish the needed revision.

Directive approach

Groups with few resources and limited time are likely to use a directive approach (coercive or authoritative styles) to accomplish the desired goals. This is a top down approach that would be familiar to those in the military or law enforcement fields.

Mixed directive approach

An organisation with a little more in the way of time and resources may use a mixed directive style that might include affiliative or democratic styles to accomplish their goals. This can be done when there is time for bargaining and negotiation among those involved in the required change.

Developmental directive approach

Finally, if change is planned and viewed in the long-term, a developmental directive type style can be used. Developmental directive leadership styles would include pace-setting and coaching. The developmental directive style offers the most opportunity for growth of a learning organisation and employee development. This type of planned change is for groups having substantial time and robust resources to facilitate the process.

Putting it together

An effective leader has a guiding vision or purpose for the organisation, passion or enthusiasm for the work being done, personal integrity, curiosity about the world and the daring to try something new. The skill of integrity is subdivided into self-knowledge, candour and maturity.

Activity 20

Consider a recent organisational change which affected your work area or department. Which of the following variables were affected: task, technology, people, and/or structure? Diagnose the forces for and against change; the results of the change and how the resistance to change was managed.

Portfolio

Identify, analyse and monitor the impact of organisational change within your department. Analyse your leadership role during the change process.

Journal

Review your self-development goals in terms of developing leadership skills for responding to the impact of change on people and processes.

Leadership Styles[footnoteRef:17] [17: Source: ALA-APA, as at http://ala-apa.org/newsletter/2010/06/08/spotlight/, as on 20th June, 2017.]

Leadership has a direct cause and effect relationship upon organizations and their success. Leaders determine values, culture, change tolerance and employee motivation. They shape institutional strategies including their execution and effectiveness. Leaders can appear at any level of an institution and are not exclusive to management. Successful leaders do, however, have one thing in common. They influence those around them in order to reap maximum benefit from the organization’s resources, including its most vital and expensive: its people.

Current leadership theories describe leaders based upon traits or how influence and power are used to achieve objectives. When using trait-based descriptions, leaders may be classified as autocratic, democratic, bureaucratic or charismatic. If viewing leadership from the perspective of the exchange of power and its utilization to secure outcomes, leaders are situational, transactional or transformational. Understanding these different tropes can provide a vocabulary for discussion that can lead to meaningful, desired results. It bears noting that not all leaders are created equal, and leadership quality may vary enormously across industries or simply within an organization. In addition, identifying an individual leader’s style is central to evaluating leadership quality and effectiveness especially as it relates to organizational goals. Below is a brief examination of each common leadership style listed above and their potential impact on a group as well as their relative usefulness.

Autocratic

Autocratic leaders are classic “do as I say” types. Typically, these leaders are inexperienced with leadership thrust upon them in the form of a new position or assignment that involves people management. Autocratic leaders can damage an organization irreparably as they force their ‘followers’ to execute strategies and services in a very narrow way based upon a subjective idea of what success looks like. There is no shared vision and little motivation beyond coercion. Commitment, creativity and innovation are typically eliminated by autocratic leadership. In fact, most followers of autocratic leaders can be described as biding their time waiting for the inevitable failure this leadership produces and the removal of the leader that follows.

Bureaucratic

Bureaucratic leaders create, and rely on, policy to meet organizational goals. Policies drive execution, strategy, objectives and outcomes. Bureaucratic leaders are most comfortable relying on a stated policy in order to convince followers to get on board. In doing so they send a very direct message that policy dictates direction. Bureaucratic leaders are usually strongly committed to procedures and processes instead of people, and as a result they may appear aloof and highly change adverse. The specific problem or problems associated with using policies to lead aren’t always obvious until the damage is done. The danger here is that leadership’s greatest benefits, motivating and developing people, are ignored by bureaucratic leaders. Policies are simply inadequate to the task of motivating and developing commitment. The specific risk with bureaucratic leaders is the perception that policies come before people, and complaints to that effect are usually met with resistance or disinterest. Policies are not in themselves destructive, but thoughtlessly developed and blindly implemented policy can de-motivate employees and frustrate desired outcomes. The central problem here is similar to the one associated with autocratic leaders. Both styles fail to motivate and have little impact on people development. In fact, the detrimental impact could be significant and far outweigh any benefits realized by these leadership styles.

Democratic

It sounds easy enough. Instead of one defined leader, the group leads itself. Egalitarian to the core, democratic leaders are frustrated by the enormous effort required to build consensus for even the most mundane decisions as well as the glacial pace required to lead a group by fiat. The potential for poor decision-making and weak execution is significant here. The biggest problem with democratic leadership is its underlying assumptions that everyone has an equal stake in an outcome as well as shared levels of expertise with regard to decisions. That’s rarely the case. While democratic leadership sounds good in theory, it often is bogged down in its own slow process, and workable results usually require an enormous amount of effort.

Charismatic

By far the most successful trait-driven leadership style is charismatic. Charismatic leaders have a vision, as well as a personality that motivates followers to execute that vision. As a result, this leadership type has traditionally been one of the most valued. Charismatic leadership provides fertile ground for creativity and innovation, and is often highly motivational. With charismatic leaders at the helm, the organization’s members simply want to follow. It sounds like a best case scenario. There is however, one significant problem that potentially undercuts the value of charismatic leaders: they can leave. Once gone, an organization can appear rudderless and without direction. The floundering can last for years, because charismatic leaders rarely develop replacements. Their leadership is based upon strength of personality. As a result, charismatic leadership usually eliminates other competing, strong personalities. The result of weeding out the competition is a legion of happy followers, but few future leaders.

Situational

Situational leadership theory suggests that the best leaders constantly adapt by adopting different styles for different situations or outcomes. This theory reflects a relatively sophisticated view of leadership in practice and can be a valuable frame of reference for experienced, seasoned leaders who are keenly aware of organizational need and individual motivation. Most importantly, it allows experienced leaders the freedom to choose from a variety of leadership iterations. Problems arise, however, when the wrong style is applied inelegantly. Also, considering our earlier discussion regarding some of the more ineffective leadership styles like autocratic and bureaucratic, this style requires a warning or disclaimer related to unintended or less than optimal results when choosing one of these styles. With that said, situational leadership can represent a useful framework for leaders to test and develop different styles for various situations with an eye towards fine-tuning leadership results. Situational leadership, however, is most effective when leaders choose more effective styles like charismatic, transactional, and transformational.

Transactional

The wheeler-dealers of leadership styles, transactional leaders are always willing to give you something in return for following them. It can be any number of things including a good performance review, a raise, a promotion, new responsibilities or a desired change in duties. The problem with transactional leaders is expectations. If the only motivation to follow is in order to get something, what happens during lean times when resources are stretched thin and there is nothing left with which to make a deal? That said, transactional leaders sometimes display the traits or behaviors of charismatic leaders and can be quite effective in many circumstances while creating motivated players. They are adept at making deals that motivate and this can prove beneficial to an organization. The issue then is simply one of sustainability.

Transformational

Transformational leaders seek to change those they lead. In doing so, they can represent sustainable, self-replicating leadership. Not content to simply use force of personality (charismatic) or bargaining (transactional) to persuade followers, transformational leaders use knowledge, expertise and vision to change those around them in a way that makes them followers with deeply embedded buy-in that remains even when the leader that created it is no longer on the scene. Transformational leaders represent the most valuable form of leadership since followers are given the chance to change, transform and, in the process, develop themselves as contributors. Organizationally this achieves the best leadership outcome since transformational leaders develop people. Transformational leadership is strongly desired since it has no artificial constraints in terms of buy-in and instead is focused on getting followers on board based upon their own evolving thought process and changing responses to leadership challenges. It is particularly suited for fast-paced, change-laden environments that demand creative problem solving and customer commitment.

The Role of Leadership in Organisational Transformation[footnoteRef:18] [18: Source: Khoo Ee Wan, as at https://www.cscollege.gov.sg/Knowledge/Pages/The-Role-of-Leadership-in-Organisational-Transformation.aspx, as on 20th June, 2017.]

Much research on leadership and organisations point out that organisations are operating in an increasingly complex and dynamic environment. This challenge is often cited as a reason for organisations to undergo transformation so that they can continue to stay relevant in the face of a potential crisis or an actual crisis that has already taken place (e.g., Kotter, 1995). Increasingly, transformations are being perceived to be a critical driver of organisational success as well as an essential factor in creating organisational competitive advantage (e.g., Gilley, McMillan & Gilley, 2009). Similar challenges are encountered by public sector agencies in Singapore and they, too, are turning to organisational transformation to define a way forward.

Transformations require leadership. As Kotter (1995, p.60) expressed it, "change, by definition, requires creating a new system and then institutionalising the new approaches". Organisational leaders, by virtue of their influence in the organisation, are in a good position to play a role in bringing this about. People also frequently expect leaders to take responsibility for an organisational transformation. Indeed, there is empirical evidence that the role of leaders in the change process does have a significant impact on the success of a change effort (Higgs & Rowland, 2005).

Thus, the objective of this review is to promote a shared understanding of the nature of organisational transformations and shed light on the role of leadership in these transformations. This understanding has implications for how we select and develop leaders for leading transformations in the Singapore public service.

DEFINING TRANSFORMATIONS

A transformation is a specific kind of change

People used to discuss the importance of "organisational change", but "organisational transformation" has become the latest buzzword. In their review, Tosey & Robinson (2002) noted that the term has many different connotations and is used to refer to a range of change efforts that meet various ends and that are achieved through various means. At the same time, it is clear that "transformation" is not just a synonym for "change". "Change" is an overarching term referring to the process or result of becoming different, while "transformation" is a specific kind of change.

Transformations involve paradigm shifts

When we examine several definitions of the term (e.g., Burke & Litwin, 1992; Cacioppe, 2000; Dehler & Welsh, 1994; Gilley et al., 2009; Tosey & Robinson, 2002), it emerges that "transformations" tend to refer to changes that are more radical and of a larger magnitude. These are not incremental and transitional changes that involve merely fine-tuning the status quo. Instead, they are discontinuous changes or paradigm shifts that involve redefining the organisational values, purpose, attitudes and beliefs, and they frequently require a qualitatively different set of organisational habits, such as in terms of strategy, leadership and culture. These qualitative changes in turn bring about changes to existing organisational systems, structures, management practices, organisational climate—what Burke & Litwin (1992) termed transactional changes.

As an example of an organisational transformation, Nokia, during the Finnish recession of the 1990s, changed its core focus to stay profitable: it transformed itself from a conglomerate with diverse businesses to a manufacturer of mobile phones (Francis et al., 2003). Another example is IBM, which underwent a transformation, also in the 1990s, when it changed its individualistic culture to one that emphasised teamwork, creativity and innovation to bring about customer-focused solutions (Lagace, 2002). Closer to home, the Singapore libraries have transformed from being mere repositories for books to being a key national institution that expands the learning capacity of the nation (Chia, 2001).

Transformations are complex
In addition, some emphasise that the change process brought about by a transformation is complex, non-linear, full of uncertainty and open-ended (e.g., By, 2005; Gilley et al., 2009; Higgs & Rowland, 2005; ; Tosey & Robinson, 2002). This means that the changes may happen at uneven rates at different points in time, that there may be progress towards the desired objectives followed by regression and then progress again, and that a simple action may lead to unintended consequences. In support of this, there is some empirical evidence that the transformation process may unfold in unpredictable ways and lead to unintended outcomes. For example, Harris & Ogbonna (2002) described the case study of a large restaurant chain which, having recently introduced a new series of customer-oriented values, had come up with a number of new rules and regulations to ensure behaviour compliance with these advocated values. However, what unfolded was that these seemingly logical and reasonable management actions led to employees putting on an act in front of managers—they displayed the expected behaviours when management was around, but when no one was watching, they did things the way they had always done them.

This perspective of change as a complex phenomenon is in contrast to the prevailing, more traditional, theoretical paradigm of change as a simple and linear process which is typically represented by a three-stage model by Lewin (1951) that involves unfreezing the current system, changing, and then refreezing the new system. In the first step, the current equilibrium is disturbed such that the status quo is recognised to be undesirable and there is the motivation to change. In the second step, resources are mobilised to make the necessary adjustments. In the final step, the system is stabilised at a new equilibrium so the new behaviours are safe from regression. This model assumes that change takes place neatly and predictably in a linear movement through the three steps.

The complexity of transformations also suggests that they could be thought of as an ongoing journey requiring adaptation to changing circumstances, rather than a destination or a predetermined outcome (Kuepers, 2011; Tosey & Robinson, 2002). Indeed, transformations may also be distinguished from other changes by being about more than material changes. Transformations are sometimes associated with the spiritual development of the organisation. Though there are many different definitions of spirituality, it is generally described as having to do with meaning, purpose, and a sense of community (Ashmos & Duchon, 2000). At the organisational level, soul searching involving these spiritual issues is part of the transformation process, and may trigger the personal spiritual development of some of its members (Tosey & Robinson, 2002).

HOW PEOPLE EXPERIENCE TRANSFORMATIONS

People are at the heart of an organisation. Thus, a good understanding of how transformations are typically perceived and experienced by people will help leaders of transformations play their role more effectively. Importantly, leaders cannot assume that others share their perspective of the transformation—what research has uncovered is that the same transformation is experienced differently by different people, even those who are within the same organisation. This appears to be influenced partly by one's position in the organisation, which is related to the degree of perceived control one has over the situation.

Leaders' perspective of transformations

Transformations are typically initiated by top management, and this implies that they are convinced of the necessity of the transformation. (Those who are not may have been removed from their position or have resigned.) Thus, not surprisingly, these leaders tend to see the positive aspects of change, both for the organisation and for themselves: for the organisation, change provides the opportunity for renewal and refocusing, which might help it be more successful; for the top leaders themselves, leading an organisational transformation represents exciting professional challenges (Diefenbach, 2007; Karp & Helgo, 2008). A more cynical view is that top leaders perceive change favourably because of the strong personal interests at stake: leading such transformations allows top leaders to align the organisational agenda with their personal ideology, to strengthen their position in the organisation, to increase the amount of power and influence they have, and to further their careers (Diefenbach, 2007).

Others' response to transformations

In comparison, the rest of the organisation, who are typically at the receiving end of the change, tend to be less enthusiastic and even negative about change. Such sentiments may also be felt by middle managers who have to implement the change agenda (Karp & Helgo, 2008). While proponents of change typically emphasise the rational benefits of transformations, and try to address the cognitive challenges people may face, such as a lack of know-how and a lack of conviction that change is needed, the primary reasons why people resist change are emotional (Dehler & Welsh, 1994; Kubr, 2002). People dislike having the status quo disrupted, they fear the unknown and are anxious about possible adverse consequences, such as their inadequacy in adjusting to the change (Kubr, 2002). They may also be sceptical about the motives and capabilities of those initiating the change, and resent having change imposed upon them (Diefenbach, 2007; Kubr, 2002). The bottom line is that there tend to be chaos and confusion in change situations (Nixon, 2003) and change is uncomfortable for people because they are likely to lose their current role and relationships in the organisations (and with that, their sense of identity and control), and they need to put in the time and effort to deal with the new situation.

In such change situations, people need to engage in sense-making to figure out what is going on and what to do next (Colville & Murphy, 2006). In sense-making, people draw on information available through the formal organisational structure and, more importantly, they rely on the shadow system of the organisation. The shadow system refers to the network of social and political relations that are spontaneously and informally established by people within the organisation (Stacey, 1996). Through the personal networks that make up the shadow system, people can hold private dialogues to exchange unofficial ideologies and uncensored emotions that may be inappropriate in public, to share their interpretations of events and decisions, and to test out new ways of relating and talking to one another, which will help them to change and adapt (Donovan et al., 2007; Higgs & Rowland, 2010; Karp & Helgo, 2008; Nixon, 2003). Sense-making is an iterative process and, gradually, people will begin to figure out what the new situation means for them, how they relate with others and how they are situated in the organisation, what their new identity is, and how their personal interests fit in with the organisational agenda introduced by the transformation.

THE OUTCOMES OF TRANSFORMATIONS

Organisational transformations are often a means to an ends. Many organisations initiate transformations with particular objectives in mind, but evaluating the success and effectiveness of transformations is not all that straightforward, and these are issues that the leader needs to note.

Performance indicators

Simply put, a successful transformation is one that achieves the stated objectives (Higgs & Rowland, 2010). Unpacking this a little, we find that change goals typically have an economic angle—such as increased performance, increased profits, and reduced costs—and this is generally because when organisations need to provide a justification for investing in transformations, they often rely on economic reasons (Neal et al., 1999). In the public sector context, though the focus is less on the financial aspect, change goals tend to be similarly based on achieving results, such as whether particular initiatives have been successfully implemented or whether particular systems have been set up. While these measures may serve as a rough gauge of the performance of an organisation, their usefulness as indicators of the success of a transformation is debatable. For one thing, transformation is a lengthy and, at times, discontinuous process; changes often take time to unfold and people need time to acquire new habits. Consequently, organisational behaviours may not change immediately and it may be hard to determine if particular initiatives have been successfully implemented.

Non-performance-based indicators

Moreover, the transformation process in and of itself, and the spiritual aspects of the transformation (such as focusing on core values or empowering the employees) may be just as valuable, and these are critical for organisational learning and longer term sustainability (Neal et al., 1999). Furthermore, organisations are complex, self-generating systems with many inter-relational dynamics and so, transformations cannot be wholly controlled but may lead to unpredicted outcomes. Thus, multiple dimensions should be considered when identifying the objectives of a transformation effort, these should be sufficiently broad but not too broad, and emphasis should be given to the transformation journey as well as the destination, and appropriate indicators need to be used to evaluate its success. In addition to measures of organisational performance, these may include a range of indicators reflecting affective, behavioural or cognitive changes. Just to list a few, these may include the extent to which people feel involved in the change process, the extent to which the organisation has learnt from the transformation process, and the extent to which people find the organisation's new purpose to be meaningful.

Successful vs. effective transformations

Another point to consider is that a transformation may be successful but not necessarily effective, as it is not in the best interests of the organisation. Kuepers (2011), for instance, noted that transformations may sometimes be implemented simply for the sake of change, with little regard for costs and consequences. Some leaders may be introducing transformations to pursue their personal agenda at the cost of the organisation (Diefenbach, 2007). Thus, it is critical to evaluate, first and foremost, why the organisation is seeking transformation (Kuepers, 2011).

THE ROLE OF ORGANISATIONAL LEADERSHIP IN TRANSFORMATIONS

Issues to manage

The issues leaders need to manage during an organisational transformation can be broadly categorised as the instrumental/technical aspect and the people/emotional aspect. Leaders tend to focus their efforts on the instrumental/technical aspect of transformations (Dehler & Welsh, 1994; Gill, 2003). This is about having the proper systems, structures, technologies, processes and rewards in place, such that the work setting supports, motivates and sustains people in their transformation efforts (Dehler & Welsh, 1994; Graetz, 2000). The issues here can typically be addressed through a rational and technical approach.

Dealing with the instrumental/technical aspect alone is not sufficient; this must be complemented by a consideration of the people/emotional aspect of change (Appelbaum et al., 1998; Graetz, 2000). In reality, the people aspect is often less well thought through (Dehler & Welsh, 1994; Gill, 2003). Yet, organisations are made up of people and so, Branson (2008) argued that the consideration of people should precede the non-human parts of the organisation in any change effort.

Different leaders have different beliefs and values about leadership, change, and people in general. These lead them to adopt different roles to manage the instrumental/technical aspect and the people/emotional aspect of change.

Leaders as shapers

Within the traditional management and leadership paradigm, it is thought that the leader should control everything, so that everything turns out according to plan and there are no unwanted outcomes (Mintzberg, 1994). Moreover, the assumption that everything can be controlled leads to the thinking that change is a predictable process and leaders can choose how a transformation effort will turn out (Higgs & Rowland, 2005), and this premise underlies much of the organisational change literature emphasising the steps that leaders should take or the behaviours they should display to drive transformations (Herold et al., 2008). Within this paradigm, in a transformation context, the leader plays the role described by Higgs & Rowland (2005) as "shaper", one who personally controls what gets done, sets the pace for others, and expects others to follow their example. The leader is expected to be responsible for shaping a transformation through a top-down process and managing it according to a detailed step-by-step plan. The leader is thought to know what is right and necessary for the organisation, and it is thought that people will embrace the change agenda if they are similarly informed. Thus, resistance of the people to making the changes they are told to, is interpreted as the need for stronger leadership in the form of more guidance and education (Diefenbach, 2007). This is largely in line with the view of leadership that the leader plays a directive role and holds much influence over his followers (Bolden, 2004).

Essentially, for a shaper, change leadership is equated with pushing through the leader's change agenda and overcoming resistance from the people in order to make them think and act differently. The people are considered to be the targets or recipients of change initiatives. Research has found that the shaper role tends not to be effective in a transformation. Even though the leader may have set up the right processes and structure to support the transformation, and have provided direction and a clear strategy for the way forward, the transformation is likely to fail because the people are not emotionally invested in the change. There may be compliance at best, but not emotional alignment. Furthermore, when a leader tries to shape change, he may end up taking on too much personally, and thus prevent people from growing and transforming (Higgs & Rowland, 2010). Add to this the fact that transformations are complex and chaotic and cannot be dictated to meet predetermined outcomes (Gilley et al., 2009; Nixon, 2003), it is not surprising that empirical evidence shows that leader-centric behaviours are associated with less successful changes (e.g., Higgs & Rowland, 2011; McNaughton, 2003).

Leaders as enablers

Higgs & Rowland (2011) noted that the focus of change efforts needs to be more on "doing change with people rather than doing change to them" (p.331, italics added). This alternative paradigm is where leaders play an enabling role in a transformation, creating the conditions that encourage and energise people to contribute to and grow from the transformation process. Such leaders provide the instrumental/technical framework for change, and seek to engage people, facilitating sense-making and bringing about emotional alignment. Given the complex and emergent nature of change, some conclude that it may "elude or defy managerial and organisational control" (Kuepers, 2011, p.22). However, this does not mean there is no need for leadership. It means that there is no need for strictly planned and controlled management interventions and that it is all the more important for leaders to play an enabling role. In such a context, it is still possible for leaders to influence the direction and development of the change, and this is by focusing on key issues the people are facing (Karp & Helgo, 2008).

Specifically, Karp & Helgo (2008) emphasised the need for change leaders to facilitate the formation of identity and relationships in the organisation, as these sense-making processes are at the heart of why people change. Leaders can do this through various methods, such as role-modelling the necessary behaviours, communicating the values and purpose of the organisation, paying attention to relationships and the communication of stories and symbols that are important for the organisation. Within this environment, people have the opportunity to experience the uncertainty and conflict in a transformation process, and through this, create meaning for themselves.

Essentially, the crux of the people aspect of transformations is emotional alignment. Gioia & Thomas (1996) described change as "primarily not a technical but a political issue" (p.378), as it is largely about personal interests and agendas. When people perceive that there is alignment between themselves and the organisation's agenda, and there is a new identity for them that they are willing to accept, they become emotionally invested in the change (Dehler & Welsh, 1994). They then slowly begin to modify their behaviours and how they relate with themselves and others, and collaborate in determining how the transformation will proceed (Dehler & Welsh, 1994; Kuepers, 2011). Collectively, when there is a critical mass of people who are prepared to change, transformation will occur at the organisational level (Branson, 2008). Such organisational energy, where everybody in the organisation is motivated and enthusiastic and committed to the shared goals, is important for successful transformations (Aiken & Keller, 2007). Summing up the various sources in the literature, we conclude that leaders can create emotional alignment by providing:

• A shared vision of the future

A compelling vision provides direction and a sense of purpose and inspiration (Dehler & Welsh, 1994; Eisenbach et al., 1999; Gill. 2003). When leaders frame the vision in a way that appeals to people's need for meaning and achievement, people understand the need for change and will be aligned with the organisational purpose, and hence, intrinsically motivated to change their behaviours (Dehler & Welsh, 1994). Importantly, this is not a vision that is thrust upon people, but one which they jointly create (McNaughton, 2003).

• Clarity about and ownership of the strategies

Leaders need to ensure there is clarity about the strategies to bring the organisation's vision into reality, so people know what is to be done and how they contribute to the whole. Crucially, people should be involved in the development of the strategy and be empowered with the necessary skills and resources to carry out the strategy (Gill, 2003).

• A supportive culture and shared values

An organisation's culture strongly influences how people behave, from the way they interact with each other, to how they work and how they think (e.g., Branson, 2008; Fry & Cohen, 2009). Only when the organisational culture supports the new vision can there be sustainable changes (McNaughton, 2003). Values underlie an organisation's culture. During a transformation, it is important that leaders provide the opportunity for the organisation to clarify its values and encourage people to embrace them in their everyday organisational behaviours (Branson, 2008). Leaders also need to be aware of negative group norms which can undermine the transformation effort (Higgs & Rowland, 2010).

• Motivation and inspiration

A compelling vision, empowerment in the change process, and a supportive culture and alignment with the organisational values all serve to motivate and inspire people (Gill, 2003). Beyond that, leaders can find other means of inspiring people, such as planning for and creating positive outcomes that people can attain and celebrate in the near term while working towards the longer term goals of the transformation (Kotter, 1995), so that people can continue to feel a sense of movement and progress in the transformation.

While the above efforts all contribute towards aligning people emotionally with the organisation's transformation agenda, leaders need to remember that people cannot develop emotional alignment on demand and in accordance to a rigid schedule. This means that leaders have to decide how best to balance the need for people to be given enough time and space to discover their emotional alignment against the competing need to meet organisational timelines and milestones for their transformation journey.

As a final point to note, while enabling leaders may provide the direction and approximate definition of the destination for the transformation, the transformation process may take a different route from what they had in mind and achieve unexpected outcomes. This is especially likely when leaders nurture conflict, making use of the diverse points of view raised by different people to improve decisions made for the organisation (McNaughton, 2003). Karp & Helgo (2008) expressed this well when they wrote that, "leaders may find that they have to live with the paradox of being in control and not being in control simultaneously" (p.91). But for these leaders who display more facilitating behaviours that frame the change and create capacity in people and the organisation, they are likely to be rewarded with greater change success (Higgs & Rowland, 2011).

WHO IS THE LEADER OF ORGANISATIONAL TRANSFORMATIONS?

Positional leaders at different levels of the organisation

Even though the word "leader" has been used in a fairly generic manner in this paper, in an organisation where there is a hierarchy of leaders from top leaders to line managers, the role played by leaders at each level might have a somewhat different emphasis. In general, top leaders are expected to play a more significant role in creating the vision and driving the change agenda, while middle level and line managers play a more significant role in operationalising and implementing the change initiative (Caldwell, 2003; Gilley et al., 2009). These are complementary roles, working together to help bring about the organisational transformation.

Non-positional leaders

Another consideration is that the leadership role may be played by positional leaders as well as other members of the organisation. According to Pye & Pettigrew (2006), the power to influence others is at the heart of leading transformations. The leader needs to acquire sources of power and be able to use his power skilfully, in order to get people to change their behaviours. Typically, organisational transformations are led by positional leaders, especially top management. These are the people with ready access to many sources of power, including positional power, control over resources, as well as networks of relationships both inside and outside the organisation (Pye & Pettigrew, 2006). Power may also be derived from control over information flow, one's expertise, and other social, human and intellectual capital such as one's track record, credibility, personality, and relational abilities (Pye & Pettigrew, 2006; Rost, 1964, 1991; French & Raven, 1968). As positional authority is not necessarily needed to influence others, it is possible that non-positional leaders could possess the power to lead transformations. These may be people who are highly influential in the organisation's informal network. Positional leaders could find ways to tap on these informal leaders to guide or catalyse organisational transformations. For instance, these informal leaders could help to explain management's ideologies to the people and garner their support for new initiatives, and at the same time, they could get a good feel of ground sentiments and provide relevant input to management to guide decision-making.

In addition, bottom-up efforts in driving the change can make a difference, as change may sometimes be so rapid that it is impossible for senior management to know and plan everything (By, 2005). It may even be possible that an organisational transformation is initiated through bottom-up efforts rather than a top-down direction, in which case the experience and role of the positional leader will be somewhat different from what is typically presented in the literature. Importantly, regardless of who the leader is, it is important that the power is exercised in an empowering manner. As Rooke & Torbert (1998) contend, it is only such power that can generate whole-hearted transformation.

Collective leadership

Much of the literature on leading transformations (and leadership in general) tends to adopt the perspective of the positional leader as an unusually talented hero, with a strong emphasis on individual behaviour in initiating and leading organisational changes. However, "the most successful organisations are not those led by a single powerful, charismatic leader, but are the product of distributive, collective, and complementary leadership" (Kets de Vries, 2007). Similarly, the significance of distributed leadership in bringing about organisational transformation cannot be underestimated (Caldwell, 2003). Organisational transformation could possibly be brought about more effectively by a leading coalition with complementary skills. Thus, even if a single positional leader is put in charge of a transformation effort, it may be worthwhile for him to consider bringing on board other people to collectively lead the changes.

CRITICAL FACTORS FOR LEADING TRANSFORMATIONS

Leaders' personal qualities

The question of what factors are critical for leading transformations has been approached from different angles. One perspective is offered by change-oriented models of leadership. These explore what types of leaders are effective in bringing about change in their people and organisation. The focus is more general and longer term, and is not specific to any change initiative. Some of these models of leadership refer to the leader as a transformational leader who raises "followers' aspirations and activate their higher-order values (e.g., altruism) such that followers identify with the leader and his or her mission/vision, feel better about their work, and then work to perform beyond simple transactions and base expectations" (Avolio et al., 2009). These leaders inspire their followers by providing a desirable vision, articulating how it can be reached, acting as a role model, setting high standards of performance, and showing determination and confidence. They also pay individual attention to the development of their followers, and stimulate them intellectually, helping them become more innovative and creative (Bass, 1999). There is some evidence that transformational leaders have greater success with change initiatives (e.g., Herold et al., 2008).

Another perspective of factors critical for leading transformations is offered by the change leadership literature, which has explored the leadership characteristics and behaviours that are associated with the successful implementation of a change initiative. These studies tend to view the change initiative as a specific event requiring particular behaviours from the leader. The focus is on the here-and-now and the leader's behaviours are tactical (Herold et al., 2008). Some of these studies propose a comprehensive list of competencies covering all aspects of a change process (e.g., Higgs & Rowland, 2000), while some focus on a few critical competencies (e.g., Graetz, 2000).

In summary, the qualities that are identified to be important can be broadly clustered as follows:

(i) Interpersonal skills

Interpersonal skills frequently emerge as an essential quality for leaders to possess (e.g., Graetz, 2000), which is not surprising considering that people issues are at the heart of leading transformations. This is supported by empirical evidence—for instance, a study by Gilley et al, (2009) largely corroborated previous studies when it found that leaders who effectively implemented change possessed a set of multidimensional interpersonal skills, including the abilities to motivate, communicate, build teams, coach, involve others, and reward them appropriately.

Beyond these, leaders need to be astute about others' interests and resources, as this will help them tap more effectively on the different strategic actors in the transformation process and consider how best to strategise an intervention (Pye & Pettigrew, 2006). Astuteness about the organisation dynamics is also important, as that will help leaders have a clear understanding of the underlying systems that are influencing people's behaviours and decision whether to change (Higgs & Rowland, 2005).

(ii) Cognitive skills

Cognitive skills are important too, as a certain degree of intelligence is needed to understand issues, make judgements, solve problems, make decisions, and come up with a vision (Gill, 2003). Leaders' judgement about the change approach to be adopted is particularly important when the change is more complex (Higgs & Rowland, 2011). In sum, cognitive skills are essential for strategising and planning the change.

(iii) Self-awareness

Leaders who are self-aware are more likely to be aware of their own needs, biases and agendas, and the impact of their own behaviours on the transformation process. This helps them to raise difficult issues clearly (Higgs & Rowland, 2010) and to make more considered decisions (McNaughton, 2003). This is because such leaders tend to be more aware of their impulses and struggles and to reflect on what they could have done differently. They also seek feedback regularly and consider how their leadership is experienced by others, and this helps them learn how they can improve (Higgs & Rowland, 2010).

If we examine this list of qualities, we find that they are not very different from generic competencies for effective leadership; the only difference is that they are applied to the transformation context. Some researchers contend that managing change is a core role of leadership (e.g., Colville & Murphy, 2006; Gill, 2003), and this is not limited to leadership from the transformational leadership point of view. Furthermore, it takes time for a leader to build a trusting relationship with his followers. Thus, transformations should not be regarded as an isolated event where the leader demonstrates a particular kind of leadership behaviour only in this instance and expects to be effective. As Herold et al., (2008) found, change-specific leadership practices were less strongly related to followers' commitment to a change initiative, compared to general perceptions of the leader's leadership. Moreover, as change is becoming a more frequent aspect of organisational life (Higgs, 2003) and change takes time to unfold, it is difficult to make the distinction between effective change leadership and effective leadership. Colville & Murphy (2006) even equated effective leadership with change leadership, as they contended that "leadership has no meaning in a steady-state environment. Only when we enter a new territory, when we don't know the way, do we need people to step forward and lead."

Leaders' world views

Possessing certain skills and competence is essential for effective leadership and effective change leadership. No less important are the set of beliefs, mindsets and values that underlie a leader's behaviours. Our world view, or mental model, shapes how we perceive, interpret, and respond to the world around us (Argyris & Schön, 1977). Some of these that are particularly relevant to leading transformations are examined in the following paragraphs.

(i) World views that are more complex

Whether leaders adopt an enabling, facilitative role or a shaper role in the transformational process depends in part on the complexity of their world views. In their review of different models of adult constructive development, McCauley, Drath et al., (2006) noted that people who have developed world views that are more complex perceive:

the world more in terms of dynamic, mutually-transforming systems rather than in terms of dichotomies;

the self as revisable as a result of interaction with others and self-assertion.

Torbert and his colleagues (e.g., Rooke & Torbert, 1998; 2005; Cook-Greuter, 2004) proposed that leaders with these perspectives are more effective in leading organisational transformations because they are open to thinking about their assumptions and purposes. They also have a broader, more flexible and imaginative perspective, and like to cultivate relationships with many stakeholders. All these help them handle people's instinctive resistance to change better as they are genuinely open to engaging in mutual exploration of differences with other organisational members in order to discover new shared understandings, which is an important part of the transformation process. In their review, McCauley et al., (2006) noted that there is some empirical support for this proposition, with such leaders putting more emphasis on their role as an agent of cultural change. This suggests that leaders operating from this frame of mind are arguably more likely to adopt an enabling, facilitative role in the transformation process, which makes them a change catalyst. In contrast, leaders who rely primarily on their self-generated values and standards when acting, and who examine the opinions of others with the intent to help clarify and improve their own ideologies, are more likely to adopt a command-and-control perspective of leadership, which means that they are more likely to play the, ineffective, role of shaper when leading an organisational transformation.

Some studies have linked complexity of world view with authentic leadership (e.g., Eigel & Kuhnert, 2005), in which the leader shows balanced processing of relevant information before making a decision, has an internalised moral perspective for self-regulation, demonstrates relational transparency through openly sharing information and feelings as appropriate for the situation, and possesses self-awareness (Avolio et al., 2009). Similarly, McNaughton (2003) noted that leaders who have a transformational influence on their followers have undergone self-transformation themselves. Having gained self-mastery, they are authentic, and behave according to the highest principles of moral reasoning and integrity. They are able to deal with others openly and with compassion, and sincerely want to help develop others. People trust them, and this helps to generate whole-hearted transformation.

(ii) Perspective of change as a complex event

At a more micro level, a leader's handling of an organisational transformation is also influenced by his mental model of change. Some people view change as a complex event while others view change as a linear and predictable event, and this has implications for how they understand the situation and what strategy they formulate to deal with it (Higgs & Rowland, 2005). As discussed above, transformation is a complex event, and those leaders who recognise this tend to adopt a change approach that leads to greater success (Higgs & Rowland, 2005). Conversely, when leaders underestimate the complexity of change, they adopt an ineffective approach, focusing on the technical aspect rather than the issues that their followers are experiencing (Karp & Helgo, 2008).

Situational factors

Leaders do not act in a vacuum and the situational context should be considered as another factor that influences the success of an organisational transformation. A social environment where followers are hostile or an incompatible organisational system could render the leader powerless (Bolden & Gosling, 2006). For instance, while a leader might be willing to play an enabling role in an organisational transformation and is open to the possibility that the transformation could follow a different route from planned, such unpredictable outcomes might not be wholly acceptable to the management and/or executive board—the more fluid transformation process might conflict with the more traditional ideology of management and leadership adopted by some people, who expect a predictable and controlled transformation process, and expect certain broad goals and objectives to be achieved by the transformation. The temporal context is important too as notions of what constitutes an effective leader are tied to the prevailing social norms and expectations. Thus, while an engaging, empowering leader tends to be more acceptable to followers in this day and age and would thus bring about greater organisational success, such ideas may evolve over time as society changes.

IMPLICATIONS FOR LEADERSHIP SELECTION AND DEVELOPMENT

As effective change leaders are essentially effective leaders, the considerations when selecting and developing a leader to lead an organisational transformation are not that different from the considerations for the selection and development of effective leaders. A few points do warrant further emphasis though.

Pay attention to leaders' world views

Fundamentally, in selecting and developing leaders who can facilitate transformations, it is important to pay attention to their mindsets as values and attitudes drive behaviours. Sustainable changes in behaviour only come about when there is a shift in values and mindsets (Charan et al., 2001). In development, the emphasis is generally on lateral development, which is about learning new skills, behaviours and knowledge, and how to apply these to widening circles of influence (Cook-Greuter, 2004), and there is certainly a place for such learning. However, more emphasis needs to be placed on vertical development, which is about helping people to interpret their experiences through an expanded and more integrated perspective (and thus develop more complex world views). Cook-Greuter (2004) pointed out that development occurs through the interplay between the individual and his environment, and this can be facilitated by providing the appropriate challenge and support. Self-reflection, action inquiry, and learning from others who show a greater degree of development, have all been shown to be effective, and such interventions to support leaders' vertical development could viably be part of a leadership development path.

At a change-specific level, it is important to encourage leaders to adopt the perspective of change as a complex process and to accept the need for a more enabling and facilitative style of leadership, as both these world views are associated with greater success in organisational transformation (Higgs & Rowland, 2005; 2011).

Help leaders gain the necessary skills and knowledge

It would also be important to help leaders to understand how the transformation is experienced by the members of the organisation and to clarify leaders' role in an organisational transformation, and to help them acquire the skills necessary for them to be effective in this role. In particular, people-related skills, such as the ability to communicate, facilitate, and involve others, are important as a large part of leaders' role is about dealing with people and helping them find alignment with the organisational agenda.

Consider collective capacity

Beyond focusing on positional leaders, it is important to explore how the organisation as a whole can work together to bring about transformations. Bottom-up efforts, for instance, could be tapped on for new ideas and to drive certain initiatives, and leadership for the organisational transformation could appear anywhere in the organisation. Tapping on these different resources may provide better ideas for and generate greater emotional alignment with the transformation efforts.

CHALLENGES AND LIMITATIONS

A limitation of the literature on leading organisational transformations is that it is mostly theoretical and conceptual, with few empirical studies. Furthermore, the empirical research that has been done is largely descriptive and based on observations of a leader's competencies and effectiveness by his managers, peers, or subordinates (Gilley et al., 2009). The studies conducted on constructive-developmental theory have similarly been criticised for using restricted samples and research designs that are limited (McCauley et al., 2006). Thus, more robust research is needed. Nonetheless, the findings that are currently available do suggest important areas of focus for leadership development that may lead to greater success in implementing organisational transformations.

Activity 21

Can leadership style effect organisational transformation? How?

Analyse and confirm capacity and competence of relevant individuals to contribute to change processes and plans

Analyse and confirm change processes and plans

Change management entails thoughtful planning and sensitive implementation and above all, consultation with, and involvement of, the people affected by the changes. If you force change on people normally problems arise. Change must be realistic, achievable and measurable. These aspects are especially relevant to managing personal change.

Before starting organisational change

Before starting organisational change, ask yourself: what do we want to achieve with this change, why, and how will we know that the change has been achieved? Who is affected by this change, and how will they react to it? How much of this change can we achieve ourselves, and what parts of the change do we need help with? These aspects also relate strongly to the management of personal as well as organisational change.

Check that people affected by the change agree

Check that people affected by the change agree with, or at least understand, the need for change, and have a chance to decide how the change will be managed, and to be involved in the planning and implementation of the change. Use face-to-face communications to handle sensitive aspects of organisational change management. Encourage your managers to communicate face-to-face with their people too if they are helping you manage an organisational change. Email and written notices are extremely weak at conveying and developing understanding.

If you think that you need to make a change quickly, probe the reasons—is the urgency real? Will the effects of agreeing on a more sensible time frame really be more disastrous than presiding over a disastrous change? Quick change prevents proper consultation and involvement, which can lead to difficulties that take time to resolve.

Actions, objectives and processes

For organisational change that entails new actions, objectives and processes for a group or team of people, use workshops to achieve understanding, involvement, plans, measurable aims, actions and commitment. Encourage your management team to use workshops with their people too if they are helping you to manage the change.

Consultation strengthens people

You should even apply these principles to very tough change like making people redundant, closures and integrating merged or acquired organisations. Bad news needs even more careful management than routine change. Hiding behind memos and middle managers will make matters worse. Consulting with people, and helping them to understand does not weaken your position, it strengthens it. Leaders who fail to consult and involve their people in managing bad news are perceived as weak and lacking in integrity. Treat people with humanity and respect and they will reciprocate.

The responsibility for managing change

The employee does not have a responsibility to manage change—the employee's responsibility is no other than to do their best, which is different for every person and depends on a wide variety of factors (health, maturity, stability, experience, personality, motivation, etc). Responsibility for managing change is with management and executives of the organisation. They must manage the change in a way that employees are able to cope with it.

Facilitate to enable change

The manager has a responsibility to facilitate and enable change and all that is implied within that statement, especially to understand the situation from an objective standpoint (to 'step back', and be non-judgemental). They need to help people understand reasons, aims, and ways of responding positively according to employees' individual situations and capabilities. Increasingly the manager's role is to interpret, communicate and enable, not to instruct and impose, which nobody really responds to well.

Change must involve the people

Change must involve the people—change must not be imposed upon the people. Be wary of expressions like 'mindset change', and 'changing people's mindsets' or 'changing attitudes', because this language often indicates a tendency towards imposed or enforced change. Re-locations, etc, all create new systems and environments, which need to be explained to people as early as possible so that people's involvement in validating and refining the changes themselves can be obtained.

Whenever an organisation imposes new things on people there will be difficulties. Participation, involvement and open, early, full communication are the important factors.

Workshops are very useful processes to develop collective understanding, approaches, policies, methods, systems, ideas, etc.

Staff surveys are a helpful way to repair damage and mistrust among staff provided you allow people to complete them anonymously, and provided you publish and act on the findings.

Empowerment

Management training, empathy and facilitative capability are priority areas; managers are crucial to the change process. They must enable and facilitate, not merely convey and implement policy from above, which does not work.

You cannot impose change; people and teams need to be empowered to find their own solutions and responses, with facilitation and support from managers, and tolerance and compassion from the leaders. Management, as well as leadership style and behaviour, are more important than clever process and policy.

The leader must agree and work with these ideas, or change is likely to be very painful, and the best people will be lost in the process.

Change management principles

At all times involve and agree to support people from within the system (system = environment, processes, culture, relationships, behaviours, etc, whether personal or organisational). Understand where you/the organisation is at the moment. Understand where you want to be, when, why and what the measures will be for having got there. Plan development towards appropriate achievable measurable stages. Communicate, involve, enable and facilitate involvement from people, as early, openly and as fully as possible.

John P Kotter's 'Eight steps to successful change'

John Kotter's highly regarded book Leading Change (1995) and the follow-up book The Heart of Change (2002) describe a helpful model for understanding and managing change. Each stage acknowledges a key principle identified by Kotter relating to people's response and approach to change, in which people see, feel and then change. Kotter's eight step change model can be summarised as:

1. Increase urgency—inspire people to move, make objectives real and relevant.

2. Build the guiding team—get the right people in place with the right emotional commitment, and the right mix of skills and levels.

3. Get the vision right—get the team to establish a simple vision and focus the strategy on the emotional and creative aspects necessary to drive service and efficiency.

4. Communicate for buy-in—involve as many people as possible, communicate the essentials simply and appeal and respond to people's needs.

5. Empower action—remove obstacles, enable constructive feedback and lots of support from leaders; reward and recognise progress and achievements.

6. Create short-term wins—set aims that are easy to achieve and break them into bite-sized chunks and manageable numbers of initiatives. Finish current stages before starting new ones.

7. Don't let up—foster and encourage determination and persistence and ongoing change. Encourage ongoing progress reporting—highlight achieved and future milestones.

8. Make change stick—reinforce the value of successful change via recruitment, promotion, and new change leaders. Weave change into culture.

Ideas on illustrating change management issues

When people are confronted with the need or opportunity to change, especially when it’s 'enforced', as they see it, they can become emotional. So can the managers who try to manage the change. Diffusing the emotional feelings, taking a step back and encouraging objectivity, is important to enabling sensible and constructive dialogue. To this end, managers can find it helpful to use analogies to assist themselves and staff to look at change in a more detached way.

Develop learning and communication solutions to address problems and risks arising for individuals during organisational change

Develop learning and communication solutions to change

The four emotional stages of change

How often do we make false assumptions about other people based on our own culture and experiences? And even more importantly, how often do we fail to recognise and understand how individuals deal with grief and change in their personal lives or at work?

When organisations go through change (for example a restructure, downsizing, the installation of new information technology, or relocation) many employees experience a sense of loss. This is obvious if it means losing a job. Yet often the reasons for the sense of loss are not clear but the effects may be just as profound—both for the individual and on the organisation's bottom line.

Imagine working with the same people for a number of years. Without warning, their roles, but not yours, are outsourced. Or your team is disbanded and you find yourself in a new department and location.

For some of us, still having a job would be a relief and we may even be excited about the future. But the impact of unexpected and unwanted changes like these varies from person to person and is often mixed.

What we know is that most people go through four emotional changes when they experience a major shock. Test these stages against how you experienced a major change, for example the death of a family member or friend, a divorce, the loss of your job, a major change at work or a confronting medical procedure.

1. Disbelief and denial

Initially the change is met with disbelief and denial. ‘It won't happen to me.’ ‘If I just keep my head down, it’ll be business as usual soon.’

2. Anger and blame

Next, it is common to see anger and blame. In workplace change at this time some employees will actively resist the changes saying things like, ‘Why should I change? Is this how they treat us after we've worked our butts off?’

What is more risky is withdrawal and lack of concentration. In this high-risk period, watch out for an increase in accidents; drop off in quality, absenteeism, corruption or fraud.

3. Reluctant acceptance

As people work through their anger, they move to the third stage where they reluctantly begin to accept the changes and start to explore their role in it. You'll hear things like, ‘There's just too much to do now. How am I going to get it all done?’, ‘OK let's try it but who's doing what now?’ or, ‘I’ll never learn this new system. I need training.’

4. The final stage

When employees commit to the change, they start focussing on the future instead of dwelling on the past. They have a clear sense of their roles and where they are going.

What are the implications of these emotions when we are planning and implementing organisational change?

1. During denial

Do everything you can to minimise the shock. Plan ahead. Give staff plenty of information—let them know what the changes will be, who will be affected by them and how. Give them your best estimate of the likely time frame, remembering that these things always take longer than originally planned. Give them a chance to prepare themselves and let the changes sink in. You cannot over-communicate now.

2. During resistance

Listen to what people have to say. Empathise. Don't tell them to snap out of it or pull themselves together. People don't want your solutions; they just want their responses and reactions acknowledged. Denying their feelings will only drive the resistance deeper and make it last longer.

3. During exploration

Now people need practical encouragement and support. Provide training. Involve them in planning and setting goals. Focus on some short-term wins to get early runs on the board—show the benefit of the changes. People will respond well if they can see the positive impact of the change.

Watch out if the changes do not provide any immediate observable benefit. Then there is a real likelihood that people will sink back into resistance and may even undermine your change strategy completely.

4. During commitment

Now that you are through the transition, set about consolidating the change. Implement an appropriate cultural change program. Recognise and reward people who are responding well to the change. Be careful to not inadvertently reward any behaviour that is inconsistent with what you're aiming for.

People move through the emotional stages of change at different rates. That's why these transitions can be hard and counterproductive. Sometimes it is impossible to tell people much ahead of the change because of market forces. But if people are in denial or are angry or resistant productivity will be low. You might see a short-term spike in response to the change but it is likely to be short lived until these stages are worked through.

Activity 22

Analyse the problems and risks arising for individuals you will lead during organisational change. In response to these, how can communication and learning solutions reduce or eliminate problems and risks?

Portfolio

Outline a process to develop effective communication and learning solutions to reduce or eliminate problems and risks as part of a change management strategy.

Journal

Review your personal development goals to include strategic leadership skills for leading change processes or change projects.

Identify leadership styles and develop approaches to best respond to the impact of change on people and processes

Leadership is an instrumental factor in an organisation’s failure or success. Research has shown that the quality of leadership can account for at least 30 per cent of a company’s bottom line[footnoteRef:19]. [19: Source: Deakin Prime, as at http://deakinprime.com/news-and-publications/news/different-leadership-styles-and-what-they-involve, as on 20th June, 2017.]

There has been considerable research done on the impact of leadership qualities on teams and organisations, and it’s safe to say that leadership needs are situational. That is, there’s no single leadership practice or approach that is the best at all times. Great leaders today are responsive rather than autocratic and monotone: they adapt by leveraging different qualities to propel their teams forward depending on the situation. Strong leaders are best placed to identify effective leadership practices for a particular point in time by analysing the demands of the context, reviewing the needs of the team, and considering the strategic goals and challenges.

Classic leadership styles

Leadership research has been around for many decades. One of the most prominent early researchers in the leadership field was Kurt Lewin, a social researcher who conducted research on leadership styles.

Lewin uncovered three key leadership styles: autocratic, democratic, and laissez-faire.

Autocratic

Democratic

Laissez-faire

make quick and final decisions close oversight total control, with little or no input from group members group members are rarely trusted with decisions/important tasks

distribution of responsibility empower group members to contribute aids group decision-making processes medium control, with lots of input from members

minimal control, with total input from members empower group members to take responsibility decisions are made by the worker, not the leader autonomy is encouraged

Autocratic

The autocratic model sees one single decision maker who directs the others in their actions. A modern example of this leadership style is Steve Jobs, who was well known for his authoritarian approach and reluctance to delegate. For Lewin’s youth-group research group, this style was the least effective.

Democratic

The democratic leadership model also has a single leader making decisions, but this leader takes on a guidance role and receives group input. He or she and will allow the group to make decisions as a collective, rather than prescribing action. Also known as participative leadership, this style was used by the founders of Google when they were first developing the now ubiquitous search engine. This was the most successful for Lewin’s research sample.

Laissez-faire

The laissez-faire model has no leader, and Lewin’s research found that the youth group lacked direction and guidance. As a result, the group was unfocused and unproductive. However, in certain situations the laissez-faire approach could be an effective leadership style if a high degree of delegation benefits outcomes. For example, Warren Buffet’s hands-off management style is so successful because he focuses on hiring very capable people, and the autonomy of these executives is essential to Berkshire Hathaway’s structure and operations.

While Lewin’s leadership models could be viewed as being simplistic given how far leadership research has since progressed, his work establishes a starting point for just how critical the quality of leadership is for teams and organisations. It also underscores the idea that leadership can in fact be taught, learned, and adapted.

Modern leadership-style categories

In more recent times, psychologist Daniel Goleman identified six key types of leadership styles that work because they draw upon experience, inference, and instinct rather than quantitative data. According to Goleman, who explores these six types in depth in his book Primal Leadership, effective leaders move across these styles in a situational manner and uses the style that works best for the context.

Visionary

Coaching

Affiliative

Democratic

PaceSetting

Commanding

open to new information good communication skills big-picture focus forward-looking

open communication good listeners flexible with making strategies/ decisions instructional in style

positive feedback system improve morale promote team building

strong loyalty bonds

invite discussions and opinions encourage ideas from others Communal decision-making increase equality

set high performance standards quick response more micromanagement complete work on schedule

driven and focused autocratic in style quick response more micromanagement

Visionary

Visionary leaders successfully mobilise teams and organisations towards a specific vision. Visionary leadership becomes most in demand when a company or team needs to shift in a new direction. In this context, the leaders can inspire teams to shared goals, and he or she does so by outlining where the organisation is going, but not how it will get there.

According to Goleman, visionary leadership best practice involves identifying shared goals while leaving teams and staff to innovate, experience, and take calculated risks, thereby utilising the skills and resources of the team to enrich the means of achievement. For example, while Steve Jobs was often an autocrat, he demonstrated elements of visionary leadership by communicating his unique vision for Apple. Similarly, John Mackey of Wholefoods has shown the ability to mobilise large teams to achieve shared goals.

Coaching

The coaching leadership style is one-on-one and intimate. The objective of the coaching leader is to develop people for the future. The successful coaching leader not only guides the staff member on how they can improve, but also clarifies how the staff member’s goals are linked to the overall strategic goals of the organisation.

The coaching leadership style is best suited where you have an employee with strong initiative who has already demonstrated that they do want to develop professionally. At the same time, coaching leaders should work to avoid the impression they are micromanaging employees. One example of coaching leadership is Robert Patterson, the CEO of National Cash Register, who successfully mentored IBM Founder Thomas Watson.

Affiliative

Affiliative leadership is designed to create strong emotional bonds and collaborative conditions among teams and organisations. When an affiliative leader has been successful, they will have helped develop connections between people. According to Goleman, this type of leadership style is highly valuable when the organisation seeks to improve harmony, morale, and communication, as well as to repair trust. The danger with the affiliative approach, says Goleman, is that it can erroneously communicate the message that mediocrity will be tolerated.

Goleman has cited Joe Torre, who used to manage the New York Yankees, as an example of an affiliative leader. Torres successfully held together a team of egocentric players and built a culture of harmony that made the team stronger and more successful as a whole.

Democratic

Goleman expanded on Lewin’s concept of democratic leadership by clarifying that democratic leaders build consensus by encouraging participation. He or she does so by leveraging the skills of staff members and generating commitment to the organisation’s goals. According to Goleman, the democratic style is most effective when direction is weak and the organisation can benefit from tapping into the skills, talents, and opinions of staff.

Goleman suggests that this type of approach is inappropriate for crises and other urgent situations when rapid decision making is necessary. Not surprisingly, great democratic-style leaders can be found in the political field, with legendary politicians such as John F Kennedy and Dwight D. Eisenhower showing how to build consensus and regain direction by listening to the group. In the business world, Microsoft founder Bill Gates has also spoken about the importance of being encouraging and building trust with employees while staying open to creative solutions.

Pacesetting

The pacesetting leadership style leads by example to extract performance from employees. He or she emphasises high standards for performance and constantly asks for improvements while demanding stricter deadlines. Pacesetting leaders lead by example and expect team members to be self-directed. They demand the same outstanding quality from themselves as they do from the others. According to Goleman, pacesetting can “poison the climate”. He says this type of leadership approach should be used sparingly given its potential to affect morale and team members’ sense of achievement. A great example of a pacesetting leader is Jack Welch of GE, a demanding CEO who prided himself on leading by example.

Commanding

Commanding leadership is often likened to the classical military style of leadership where the leader demand compliance. Commanding leaders rarely offer praise to staff members and is instead focused on criticism, coercion, and prescription. This leadership style can create resentment and dependency among staff. Commanding leaders are generally less effective and, for best practice, Goleman suggests that this approach should be used only in crises requiring rapid redirection and change. An example of commanding leadership could be Margaret Thatcher, who uncompromisingly led as ‘the Iron Lady’ and, according to some, renewed Britain by saving it from a period of economic decline.

Other modern leadership styles

Other leadership styles do exist beyond Goleman’s extensively researched and widely cited six styles. These can be useful for leaders to keep in mind as they develop their situational management style, however some of these may overlap with those already mentioned above.

Bureaucratic

Bureaucratic leaders, like commanding leaders, emphasise the need to follow every rule. They are most concerned about adherence to processes and fulfilment of defined roles. Bureaucratic leaders insist on lines of authority and conformity. Bureaucratic organisations can be inflexible and rigid, but can be effective when routine tasks are being performed continuously.

There are few examples of bureaucratic leaders as they tend to be more middle-managers than leaders of organisations or businesses.

Charismatic

Charismatic leaders are similar to visionary leaders, but they are often more focused on the self than the team. Charismatic leaders have the power to influence and motivate through their personality. Like pacesetting leaders, they can lead by example through demonstrating their enthusiasm.

Charismatic leadership can be useful when you need to boost team morale and to drive achievement through inspiring more passion for team goals. However, charismatic leaders can sometimes encourage dependency and passivity through hero worship. An example of a charismatic leader is Oprah Winfrey, who has successfully built and led an enduring business empire based on her personal brand and personality.

Task-oriented

Task-oriented leaders are focused solely on getting the job done. As such, they can adopt a very narrow focus when it comes to providing the team with interactive guidance. This approach can be a strength if time is of the essence, and it can lead to process optimisation because the leader is so focused on the specific steps required to achieve the goal. It can help poor time-managing employees do better.

However, task-oriented leaders can have the same weaknesses as autocratic leaders, who can neglect staff wellbeing, reduce motivation, and restrict innovation. Examples of task-oriented leaders are line managers who oversee highly defined tasks in factories and manufacturing facilities.

People-oriented

People-oriented leadership is often explored as a contrast to task-oriented leadership. Instead of being solely focused on the task and processes, this leader is concerned with organising, supporting, and developing team members to ensure their needs are met. They might be focused on incentives, and they often conduct one-on-one meetings for feedback. They are also usually be highly personable.

Similar to affiliative leaders such as Joe Torre (as mentioned above), people-oriented leaders are successful at building morale and enthusiasm, and they can have a strong impact on the professional development of employees. For example, sports coaches such as Bear Bryant are considered people-oriented leaders.

Transformational

Like visionary and charismatic leaders, the transformational leader works to inspire the team to perform at their best. For transformational leaders, the goal is to effect change, whether this is at the individual, team, organisational, or strategic level. Nelson Mandela is a prime example of a transformational leader who spearheaded change on a very large scale by inspiring others.

Transactional

Like the task-oriented leader, the transactional leader sets out a clear chain of command and motivates through a simple reward-and-punishment system. This leadership approach can be narrow and inflexible in producing results, whether it is at the team or organisational level. Transactional leaders are often found in military environments, where roles and tasks are strictly delineated and rewards and punishments are regularly used to enforce standards.

Innovative

Innovative leaders are creative, dynamic, and risk-taking individuals who go beyond the standard vision and are often successful at delivering improved results, new products, or change by applying new methods and ideas.

Innovative leaders will reassess situations and develop new ways to address problems. As such, this leadership style is useful when the organisational environment is stultified or needs an injection of creativity. Virgin founder Richard Branson is a well-known example of an innovative leader.

Servant

The servant leadership style is characterised by an employee and customer focus. Delivering quality services and goods to customers is more important than self-interest, and teams are included in decision making. Rather than taking centre stage, the servant leader lets the team take the credit and works supportively and collaboratively.

Herb Kelleher, former CEO of Southwest Airlines, is an excellent example with his emphasis on respecting and supporting employees so that they in turn will be better placed to serve the airline’s customers.

Level 5

Leadership expert Jim Collins identified Level 5 leadership by researching 1,435 companies and identifying the top 11 organisations - all of which, he found, had outstanding leaders. Level 5 leaders are highly capable, diligent, and humble, and they value success for the sake of the team and the company. Fearless in making decisions, they possess a strong will, ferocious resolve, and the tendency to blame oneself while giving credit to others. This “faceless boss” is the opposite of the charismatic leader in that they are self-effacing and self-denying.

Situational

The situational leader model is based on the idea that one size indeed does not fit all. First conceived by Dr Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard and later strengthened by Daniel Goleman with his six-style model, this concept values the leader who can combine different managerial styles in response to different people and contexts in the organisation. Situational leaders are extremely adaptable and versatile above all else.

There are four core leadership styles to be used by leaders within the situational model: telling, selling, participating, and delegating - with no single style being better than the others but to be used as required by the context.

These leaders demonstrate four key competencies: diagnose, adapt, communicate, and advance. That is, they fully understand the situation they are trying to change or influence, they adapt accordingly, they communicate and interact with others effectively, and they successfully manage the movement. George S. Patton, a general in the American Army during WWII, is often referenced as a great situational leader.

Cultural leadership paradigms

It’s also worth noting that culture can also have a strong impact on the success of a leader. According to linguist Richard D Lewis, national norms are unlikely to change because of the globalised economy. Leaders that work with international teams can benefit from understanding different leadership style.

For example, British leaders tend to more diplomatic, compromising, and traditional compared with North America leaders, who can be more assertive and aggressive. From French and Turkish, to Estonian and East Asian leaders, Lewis suggests that there is a distinctive leadership style for each country that can be understood for leadership best practice across borders.

Traits and qualities

Nine key traits

Leadership is often understood in terms of overarching styles, but exploring individual traits and qualities can also be an effective way to identify what it means to be a successful situational leader. Beyond core skills that are vital to all executives – such as strong communication skills, exceptional technical knowledge, the ability to resolve conflict, having a strategic focus, persuasiveness, and supportiveness - what are some of the less self-apparent traits that great leaders have?

According to Peter Economy, also known as The Relationship Guy, there are nine traits that help leaders and their teams succeed:

· decisiveness

· awareness

· focus

· accountability

· empathy

· confidence

· optimism

· honesty

· inspiration.

Strong leaders are decisive and are good at making decisions. They make decisions on the basis of what is best for the organisation as a whole and necessarily not out of self-interest. They are aware of their environment, team, and context, and they have strong focus.

They’re also accountable in that they understand their responsibilities and purpose, and they are able to empathise with others, including staff members. Great leaders are confident as well, says Economy. They are optimistic and they are always honest to others. Research has shown that most people consider honesty to be an essential trait in leaders. Finally, great leaders have a strong ability to inspire team members and staff to achieve better outcomes.

Finding hidden leaders

In their book The Hidden Leader, consultants Scott K Edinger and Laurie Sain suggest that great leaders possess four key traits. They consistently demonstrate integrity, and are consistent and dependable with a strong ethical code. These leaders lead through relationships, and they are able to get along with and interact with others successfully, thereby inspiring the group through their relationship building rather than position.

These hidden leaders are also results oriented. They work outside established methods and processes to achieve results. They are responsible and accountable for outcomes. Finally, hidden leaders are customer purposed in the sense that they have a strong awareness of how individual actions and processes affect the customer. They review actions by asking how it will impact the customer.

Many people have a dominant leadership style. The path towards great leadership involves being aware of one’s dominant style and learning about other styles, so that you can adopt different approaches according to the particular context in the same way that successful situational leaders do.

This involves a consideration of team members and their skills and attributes, organisational strategy and goals, and external factors such as industry and economic environment. It involves demonstrating the traits and qualities in an adaptive and responsive way, so that you can bring out the very best in your team and fully leverage the resources of your organisation to achieve strategic goals.

Activity 23

What are the characteristics of the Authoritative (Visionary) style?

Managing change requires strong leadership and an understanding of how organizational change occurs. Leaders are in the unique role of not only designing change initiatives but enacting and communicating them to subordinates. Managing change requires more than simple planning: the significant human element of change resistance needs to be addressed to ensure success[footnoteRef:20]. [20: Source: Boundless, as at https://www.boundless.com/management/textbooks/boundless-management-textbook/organizational-culture-and-innovation-4/managing-change-for-organizations-39/managers-as-leaders-of-change-209-10717/, as on 20th June, 2017.]

Leadership Strategies for Change

Successful change management is more likely if leaders:

· Create a definable strategy - Define measurable stakeholder aims, create a business case for their achievement (and keep it continuously updated), monitor assumptions, risks, dependencies, costs, return on investment, and cultural issues affecting the progress of the associated work.

· Communicate effectively - Explain to stakeholders why the change is being undertaken, what the benefits of successful implementation will be, and what how the change is being rolled out.

· Empower employees - Devise an effective education, training, or skills upgrading scheme for the organization.

· Counter resistance - Identify employee issues and align them to the overall strategic direction of the organization. Adapt the change initiative when necessary to mitigate discontentment.

· Support employees - Provide personal counselling (if required) to alleviate any change-related fears.

· Track progress - Monitor the implementation and fine-tuning as required.

These six components of change are the responsibility of management to create and implement.

The reengineering process

Change management is often termed a "re-engineering process." This flowchart shows the reciprocal relationships involved in each step: the mission defines and is accomplished via work processes, which execute and are guided by decisions, which consider and are supported by information, which employs and are processed via technology.

Six Leadership Styles for Change

Conner (1998) identified six distinct leadership styles related to change: anti-change, rational, panacea, bolt-on, integrated, and continuous. Each leadership style "represents a unique set of perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors regarding how organizational disruption should be addressed." Stopper (1999) characterizes each of Conner's leadership styles in this way:

· The anti-change leader - A leader embracing this style seeks to avoid change as much as possible. The message is, "Stay the course. Keep adjustments small. No need to change in any major way."

· The rational leader - This leader focuses on how to constrain and control change with logical planning and clearly defined steps.

· The panacea leader - The panacea leader believes that the way to respond to pressure for change is to communicate and motivate. These leaders understand the resilience to change they are likely to encounter as well as the inevitability of change as organizations evolve. They tend to focus on fostering enthusiasm for change.

· The bolt-on leader - This leader strives to regain control of a changing situation by attaching (bolting on) change management techniques to ad-hoc projects that are created in response to pressure for change. This manager is more concerned about helping others change than creating a strategy for the actual change itself.

· The integrated leader - The integrated leader searches for ways to use the structure and discipline of what Harding and Rouse (2007) called "human due diligence" (the leadership practice of understanding the culture of an organization and the roles, capabilities, and attitudes of its people) as individual change projects are created and implemented. The concept is simply to combine, or integrate, human and cultural concerns with the strategy itself.

· The continuous leader - The continuous leader works to create an agile and quick-responding organization that can quickly anticipate threats and seize opportunities as change initiatives are designed and implemented. Continuous leaders believe that to disruption is continuous, and adaptability a necessary organizational competency.

Conner says that these six leadership styles are related to two different types of organizational change: first-order change and second-order change. First-order change is incremental, piecemeal change. According to Conner, second-order change is "nonlinear in nature and reflects movement that is fundamentally different from anything seen before within the existing framework."

Conner identifies the first four leadership styles as appropriate for managing first-order change. When an organization is engaging in discontinuous, transformational change, however, integrated and continuous leadership styles are more appropriate.

What is most effective in leading change?[footnoteRef:21] [21: Source: Strategies for Managing Change, as at http://www.strategies-for-managing-change.com/leadership-styles.html, as on 20th June, 2017.]

What are the leadership styles that are most effective in leading change and especially in the current environment?

The key themes that emerges from a brief review of the research and literature on styles of leadership are outlined below.

Good management alone is not enough

Key additional factors are:

· The realisation that a focus on people before process is in the long run more productive than a job or task centred focus

· Getting the balance right between a task orientation and a people orientation and knowing when and where to move to the most appropriate position on that spectrum

· Having the flexibility to adopt leadership styles that are appropriate to the level of development or maturity of the people involved

“Leaders are people who do the right thing; managers are people who do things right.”

Bennis

Leadership is required

Leadership is required - in the form of leadership styles:

· That in some way transcends short-term goals and focuses on values and higher order needs and provides meaning for people

· That also addresses their deepest fears.

The importance of a people-centred leadership styles

The importance of a people-centred leadership that:

· Addresses people’s anxieties and fears:

· Generally about the uncertainties of the current environment and:

· Specifically about the impacts and consequences of a step-change initiative.

· Realising that this is important because people cannot work effectively if they are experiencing emotional turbulence - and that their ability to get work done depends on their emotions being under control.

· A leader has to address those often unconscious and unexpressed fears along the way in order to help people keep them under control.

Recognising the emotional dimension of leadership styles

Recognising:

· That emotions are essentially contagious, and that the leader's attitude and energy "infects" a workplace either for better or for worse

· The importance of the leader’s ability to articulate a message that resonates with their followers’ emotional reality and their sense of purpose, and thus motivate them to move in a specific direction

· The leader’s style determines about 70% of the emotional climate which in turns drives 20-30% of business performance

Ultimately, the quality of leadership that you provide is one of the top 5 factors that will determine whether you really do succeed and realise the benefits with your step change initiative - or whether -to put it bluntly - you join the long list of 70% failures.

The other 4 factors are:

(1) Determining that you are embarking on a step change that sits outside of business as usual and needs to be handled as a specific initiative.

(2) Using a programme management based approach to your step change initiative

(3) The thoroughness of your pre programme review and planning process

(4) The extent to which you identify and address the cultural change in your organisation that is required to deliver the step change and the desired business benefit.

Leading your people through change and managing the whole messy business

By convention we speak of change “management” but the reality is that change involves leadership as well as management. Leadership styles matter, as the primary causes of failure in change initiatives are all people related, and to do with emotions. So change leadership requires some very special qualities in the person[s] leading the change.

This is more to do with “being” than “doing”. What you do, and how you do it will be largely determined by how you are as a person.

Change is an emotional business. The failure to address the human impacts of change is at the root of most failed change initiatives. It is not enough just to “manage” change; people need to be led through change.

ASSESSMENT
BSBLDR801 Lead personal and strategic transformation

Written Tasks

1. Define ‘situational leadership’.

2. How is transactional leadership different to transformational leadership?

3. Why is transformational leadership important for organisational functioning?

4. How do transformational leaders behave?

5. What Is Self-Efficacy?

6. As a Leader, how can you increase your personal effectiveness?

7. There are several qualities associated with servant leadership. With regard to leadership and role models, outline 3 of the following qualities: Awareness, Commitment, Empathy, Foresight, Listening, Persuasion.

8. As one goes up the higher ladders of organisational positions, responsibilities widen in scope, authorities increase, and people management becomes more exacting. As a consequence, competencies will have to change or the mix of it will have to be altered in order to adjust to the requirements of the job. These competencies could include the following:

Administrative Competencies which involves "management of the job" and this includes more specifically:

1. Management of Time and Priority Setting

2. Goals and Standards Setting

3. Work Planning and Scheduling

Communication Competencies that comprise of:

1. Listening and Organising

2. Clarity of Communication

3. Getting Objective Information

Supervisory or Building Teams Competencies that encompasses:

1. Training, Mentoring and Delegating

2. Evaluating Employees and Performance

3. Advising and Disciplining

And, Cognitive Competencies which involve:

1. Problem Identification and Solution

2. Assessing Risks and Decision-Making

3. Thinking Clearly and Analytically

Define and describe each of these competencies.

9. Outline two ways to strengthen and cultivate work relationships

10. Refer to the article “Determining your own Leadership Style”, available at: http://samples.jbpub.com/9781284109412/9781284132458_CH02_Interactive.pdf.

Using the information in the article and other sources, outline and describe your leadership style, including your reasoning for the profile selections.

Practical Tasks

ASSESSOR NOTE

These instructions must be followed when assessing the student in this unit. The checklist on the following page is to be completed for each student. Please refer to separate mapping document for specific details relating to alignment of this task to the unit requirements.

This competency is to be assessed using standard and authorised work practices, safety requirements and environmental constraints.

Assessment of essential underpinning knowledge will usually be conducted in an off-site context.

Assessment is to comply with relevant regulatory or Australian standards' requirements.

Resource implications for assessment include:

• an induction procedure and requirement

• realistic tasks or simulated tasks covering the mandatory task requirements

• relevant specifications and work instructions

• tools and equipment appropriate to applying safe work practices

• support materials appropriate to activity

• workplace instructions relating to safe work practices and addressing hazards and emergencies

• material safety data sheets

• research resources, including industry related systems information.

Reasonable adjustments for people with disabilities must be made to assessment processes where required. This could include access to modified equipment and other physical resources, and the provision of appropriate assessment support.

What happens if your result is ‘Not Yet Competent’ for one or more assessment tasks?

The assessment process is designed to answer the question “has the participant satisfactorily demonstrated competence yet?” If the answer is “Not yet”, then we work with you to see how we can get there.

In the case that one or more of your assessments has been marked ‘NYC’, your Trainer will provide you with the necessary feedback and guidance, in order for you to resubmit/redo your assessment task(s).

What if you disagree on the assessment outcome?

You can appeal against a decision made in regards to an assessment of your competency. An appeal should only be made if you have been assessed as ‘Not Yet Competent’ against specific competency standards and you feel you have sufficient grounds to believe that you are entitled to be assessed as competent.

You must be able to adequately demonstrate that you have the skills and experience to be able to meet the requirements of the unit you are appealing against the assessment of.

You can request a form to make an appeal and submit it to your Trainer, the Course Coordinator, or an Administration Officer. The RTO will examine the appeal and you will be advised of the outcome within 14 days. Any additional information you wish to provide may be attached to the form.

What if I believe I am already competent before training?

If you believe you already have the knowledge and skills to be able to demonstrate competence in this unit, speak with your Trainer, as you may be able to apply for Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL).

Credit Transfer

Credit transfer is recognition for study you have already completed. To receive Credit Transfer, you must be enrolled in the relevant program. Credit Transfer can be granted if you provide the RTO with certified copies of your qualifications, a Statement of Attainment or a Statement of Results along with Credit Transfer Application Form. (For further information please visit Credit Transfer Policy)

Task 1 – Research and Discussion - Relationship between Transformational and Change Leadership

Using the following journal article[footnoteRef:22], as a basis together with your own research, discuss the relationship between transformational and change leadership. [22: Source: Researchgate, as at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/5490025_The_Effects_of_Transformational_and_Change_Leadership_on_Employees%27_Commitment_to_a_Change_A_Multilevel_Study, as on 19th June, 2017.]

In your discussion, include:

· Ways in which an organisation’s objectives, plans and strategies are driven by Transformational and Change Leadership

· Description of a range of leadership styles and the effects these have on responding to the impact of change on people and processes

· Role of collaboration in change processes

· Outline of data collection methods utilised in the journal article and their findings

· Explanation organisational design and building in responsiveness of operations to change in customer or market conditions based on the findings of the journal article and your own research.

Note: This assessment task requires a substantive discussion and the production of a written report.

Observation Checklist

Observation Criteria

S

NS

Identified strategies to create a climate that encourages and allows for the receiving and giving of constructive feedback

Outline data collection methods

Applied transformational and transactional leadership practices

Stated the significance of the organisation’s mission, purpose and values

Evaluated leadership styles and adjust for different contexts

Examined ways to encourage collaboration

Draw upon personal expertise of self and relevant individuals to present methods to achieve strategic results

Discussed methods to seek and encourage contributions from relevant individuals

Modelled collaborative communication and learning approaches in the workplace

Outlined approaches to cultivate existing and new collaborative and participative work relationships

Discussed importance of positively conveying organisational direction and values to relevant individuals and relevant stakeholders

Analysed the impact and role of leadership during organisational change

Explained organisational transformation and the management of the stages of change

Developed learning and communication solutions to address problems and risks arising for individuals during organisational change

Identified leadership styles and develop approaches to best respond to the impact of change on people and processes

Task 2– Leadership Capability Framework Self Evaluation

This assessment task requires you to improve own development, personal leadership style and self-management skills. In order to do so, you are required to complete the attached Leadership Capability Framework Self Evaluation and note the findings.

1.

Leadership Capability Framework

Self-Evaluation

1. INTRODUCTION

Self-assessment can help you be clear on areas where you want to improve, and how you can develop skills in those areas. This tool is optional but does allow you to be proactive in your own development! The purpose of this self-assessment tool is to help you think about your current role and the capabilities required to perform that role with the aim of identifying areas where you have strengths or require development. Then using that knowledge, think about development opportunities to address your identified areas for improvement. You can complete this self-assessment at any time and then discuss with your manager or you can complete and take along to your Performance and Development discussion when you are developing or reviewing your Performance Management Plan.

2. INSTRUCTIONS

Read each item in the Leadership Capability Framework. Ask yourself ... “How important is this activity to my current role?” Alongside each item in the Importance column, rate the item as:

A. Very Important to my current role, or

B. Of some importance to my current role, or

C. Of little importance to my current role

In the Capability column, using a scale from 1 – 5 give yourself the score that best describes your current level of skills, knowledge or ability .

1. Extremely confident in this capability and believe my ability, skills and knowledge in this capability are outstanding

2. Very confident and see this capability as a significant area of strength for me

3. Comfortable in this capability and consider my ability, skills and knowledge to be around average

4. Gaining confidence in this capability and some improvement needed

5. Not confident in this capability and need development

3. THE QUESTIONS

Question 1. How important do you think the following capability is to your current role?

Question 2.

How do you rate your abilities in the following capabilities?

Importance

A. Essential to my current role, or

B. Significant to my current role, or

C. Less significant to my current role

Capability

1. Extremely confident in this capability and believe my ability, skills and knowledge in this capability are outstanding

2. Very confident and see this capability as a significant area of strength for me

3. Comfortable in this capability and consider my ability, skills and knowledge to be around average

4. Gaining confidence in this capability and some improvement needed

5. Not confident in this capability and need development

4. A QUICK REVIEW AGAINST THE CAPABILITIES:

Question 1. How important do you think the following capability is to your current role?

Question 2. How do you rate your abilities in the following capabilities?

Importance

A. Very Important to my current role, or

B. Of some importance to my current role, or

C. Of little importance to my current role

Capability

1. Extremely confident in this capability and believe my ability, skills and knowledge are outstanding

2. Very confident and see this capability as a significant area of strength for me

3. Comfortable in this capability and consider my ability, skills and knowledge to be around average

4. Gaining confidence in this capability and some improvement needed

5. Not confident in this capability and need development

Shapes Strategic Thinking

· Inspires a sense of purpose and direction

· Focuses strategically

· Harnesses information and opportunities

· Shows judgement, intelligence and common sense

Achieves Results

· Builds organisational capability and responsiveness

· Harnesses professional expertise

· Steers and implements change and deals with uncertainty

· Ensures closure and delivers on intended results

Cultivates Productive Working Relationships

· Nurtures internal and external relationships

· Facilitates cooperation and partnerships

· Values individual differences and diversity

· Guides, mentors and develops people

Exemplifies Personal Drive and Integrity

· Demonstrates professionalism and probity

· Engages with risk and shows personal courage

· Commits to action

· Displays resilience and adaptability

· Demonstrates self-awareness and a commitment to personal development

Communicates with influence

· Communicates clearly

· Listens, understands and adapts to audience

· Negotiates persuasively

5. A MORE DETAILED REVIEW AGAINST EACH CAPABILITY:

SHAPES STRATEGIC THINKING

Capabilities

Behavioural Descriptors

Capabilities required for role

Current level of capability

Priority for Development

A transformative leader …

Less Significant

Significant

Essential

Needs significant development

Needs development

Confident

INSPIRES A SENSE OF PURPOSE AND DIRECTION

Contributes to, shapes and champions the organisation's vision and goals, relating these to government requirements.

Translates broad strategy into practical terms for others, and creates a shared understanding of what has to be achieved.

Within the overall strategic context, presents others with an integrated picture of the actions and priorities that will be required.

Provides a clear sense of direction and strives to achieve common understanding among all levels within the organisation.

FOCUSES STRATEGICALLY

Develops expert advice to government on potential outcomes, and develops a long term perspective on organisational success.

Integrates a 'big picture' view of community and government goals with how to achieve them.

Operates on the basis of a 'whole of government' framework and takes the broader context into account.

Ensures portfolio effort contributes to cross-government priorities.

Envisages what might be and how future possibilities balance with the 'here and now'.

HARNESSES INFORMATION AND OPPORTUNITIES

Seeks to acquire appropriate and expert knowledge, and is open to new information and different perspectives.

Values and actively finds out about Australian and international best practice (public and private sector) and considers the workings of the organisation within this context.

Demonstrates business acumen by thoroughly researching the market that the organisation operates in (and opportunities offered and constraints imposed) to achieve greater efficiencies and improve quality of service.

Keeps abreast of major technological changes and advancements and their impacts.

SHOWS JUDGEMENT, INTELLIGENCE AND COMMONSENSE

Grasps complexity and identifies issues that tend to be overlooked by others.

Thinks through problems from various viewpoints and analyses them objectively.

Critically evaluates information before applying both intellect and experience to final judgment.

Willing and able to question traditional assumptions and practices.

Capacity to provide originality of thought and develop innovative solutions.

ACHIEVES RESULTS

Capabilities

Behavioural Descriptors

Capabilities required for role

Current level of capability

Priority for Development

A transformative leader …

Less Significant

Significant

Essential

Needs significant development

Needs development

Confident

BUILDS ORGANISATIONAL CAPABILITY AND RESPONSIVENESS

Initiates fluid and flexible resourcing options based on an appreciation of emerging requirements in a constantly changing environment.

Works across organisational boundaries to identify what resourcing combinations will deliver the best outcomes.

Responds flexibly to stakeholder requirements and changing circumstances as they arise, varying deployment of resources within imposed constraints.

Uses the advantages offered by information technology.

Takes action to ensure sustainability.

HARNESSES PROFESSIONAL EXPERTISE

Values specialist/technical expertise and places emphasis upon creating an environment which facilitates the sharing and effective use of professional knowledge and skills.

Ensures relevant professional input from others is obtained and shared.

STEERS AND IMPLEMENTS CHANGE AND DEALS WITH UNCERTAINTY

Develops and oversees the implementation of change initiatives in a sometimes uncertain environment and often in the face of organisational resistance.

Defines high level objectives and ensures translation into practical implementation strategies that are monitored and evaluated.

Undertakes both long and short term planning phases and sets timeframes and allocates resources for completion.

ENSURES CLOSURE AND DELIVERS ON INTENDED RESULTS

Engenders a culture of achievement, by ensuring ideas and intended actions become reality and that planned projects actually result in expected outputs and outcomes.

Establishes systems and processes to measure and evaluate accountabilities.

CULTIVATES PRODUCTIVE WORKING RELATIONSHIPS

Capabilities

Behavioural Descriptors

Capabilities required for role

Current level of capability

Priority for Development

An engaging leader …

Less Significant

Significant

Essential

Needs significant development

Needs development

Confident

NURTURES INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL RELATIONSHIPS

Builds relationships with Ministers and with key people within the organisation, across the State Service and with external organisations.

Proactively creates a professional network and develops mutually beneficial relationships based on respect and trust.

Models commitment to customer service and delivery.

FACILITATES COOPERATION AND PARTNERSHIPS

Supports and guides the development of a work environment where people work together and value collaboration and teamwork.

Works in partnership with colleagues across the Service and creates a sense of ‘interconnectedness’ with other departments and agencies, ensuring opportunities to share views and ideas.

Demonstrates strong interpersonal skills by encouraging and modelling 'team-player' behaviour, including a willingness to consult, engage and listen.

VALUES INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES AND DIVERSITY

Supports and respects the individuality of others and recognises the benefits of diversity of ideas and approaches.

Recognises different skill areas and levels of expertise.

Understands others and responds in an appropriate and respectful manner.

GUIDES, MENTORS AND DEVELOPS PEOPLE

Inspires ongoing learning and development in others.

Gives timely recognition for good team/individual performance.

Motivates and supports others with enthusiasm by setting challenging goals, as well as supporting and encouraging them when they need assistance to overcome problems.

Helps others to address areas of weakness by encouraging them to take an active role in their own learning and development, and creating a climate with right opportunities to do so.

Understands when it is appropriate to confront issues and takes action to deal with difficult performance situations.

EXEMPLIFIES PERSONAL DRIVE AND INTEGRITY

Capabilities

Behavioural Descriptors

Capabilities required for role

Current level of capability

Priority for Development

A self-aware leader …

Less Significant

Significant

Essential

Needs significant development

Needs development

Confident

DEMONSTRATES PROFESSIONALISM AND PROBITY

Adheres to and promotes State Service Principles and the ethical framework as set out in the State Service Code of Conduct and through Agency Values.

Serves the government of the day irrespective of personal preferences.

Implements policies and programs based on corporate decisions.

ENGAGES WITH RISK AND SHOWS PERSONAL COURAGE

Is prepared to be forthright and 'tell it like it is'.

Is independently minded and willing to challenge ideas and confront issues.

Is prepared to acknowledge when in the wrong, and learns from mistakes.

Is prepared to ask for help and values advice from others.

COMMITS TO ACTION

Is determined, highly motivated and action-oriented.

Takes responsibility for getting things done, and for the success of the organisation.

Handles issues proactively and shapes events.

Doesn't procrastinate but seeks to take the initiative and make things happen.

Readily invests energy and initiative into progressing work.

DISPLAYS RESILIENCE AND ADAPTABILITY

Deals resiliently with work pressures and negative criticism by maintaining an optimistic outlook and developing and applying effective wellbeing strategies.

Remains focused on the objectives even in difficult and uncertain circumstances and in a rapidly changing environment or changing priorities.

After setbacks, remains positive, motivated and focussed.

Maintains energy and willingly invests extra effort when required.

DEMONSTRATES SELF AWARENESS AND A COMMITMENT TO PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT

Shows strong commitment to continued learning and development and looks for opportunities to enhance own skills.

Actively seeks feedback from a wide range of sources and acts on this.

Takes responsibility for own development and for managing self to enable sustained performance.

Values continuing learning and development.

COMMUNICATES WITH INFLUENCE

Capabilities

Behavioural Descriptors

Capabilities required for role

Current level of capability

Priority for Development

A self-aware leader …

Less Significant

Significant

Essential

Needs significant development

Needs development

Confident

COMMUNICATES CLEARLY

Produces user-friendly verbal and written communication that is clear and concise.

Ensures unambiguous delivery of the message, and checks that it has been understood as intended.

Keeps people up to date and fully informed of any changes to the original communication.

LISTENS, UNDERSTANDS AND ADAPTS TO AUDIENCE

Listens actively to ensure views and information are properly exchanged.

Checks with others to ensure their views have been accurately understood.

Uses and adapts style as necessary to meet the requirements of the audience.

Creates opportunities to listen to those whose input can add value.

NEGOTIATES PERSUASIVELY

Establishes credibility and approaches negotiations persuasively.

Offers a convincing rationale which has been thought through in advance and carefully positioned with reference to desired organisational outcomes and/or Service goals.

Allows for a genuine contest of ideas and pulls disparate views into a coherent position, and finds common ground to facilitate agreement and acceptance of mutually beneficial solutions.

Reaches negotiated positions, through compromise, which lead to the achievement of the required outcomes.

6. ASSESSMENT OF MY REVIEW AGAINST THE CAPABILITIES:

What are my major strengths?

What are my areas for improvement / development?

Activities to assist my development in my identified areas for improvement:

(*Remember development opportunities do not always mean attending a workshop, they could consist of a number of things including mentoring, shadowing, stretch projects, acting up, sideways moves etc.)

7. POSSIBLE LEARNING OPPORTUNITIES

E-learning and technology

· Many agencies have online and technology based development opportunities available that can be completed in your own time

Visits and observations

· Visits and observation can allow your staff to observe examples of good practice and/or work with experts in their area of interest.

Shadowing

· Shadowing an experienced Senior Executive or equivalent can allow your employees to learn from the experience of others in the workplace.

Courses

· Formal education (such as certificates, diplomas and degrees) and training courses (such as workshops, seminars and conferences).

New projects

· Getting involved in new or more complex projects can be an opportunity to develop more complex techniques and learn from more experienced colleagues.

Coaching and mentoring

· Having experience employees provide feedback and assistance to less experienced employees can be a valuable source of development.

Secondment

· Employees looking to broaden their career experience may be interested in a secondment in another agency.

Rotations

· Rotating around a range of different positions is a good opportunity to learn about different functions within the agency and develop a broad understanding of business functions

Committees and working groups

· Taking part in specialised committees and working groups allow employees to broaden their experience outside of their job role.

Networking

· Capitalising on networking opportunities and joining professional associations can provide opportunities for further development.

Reading

· Book, journals, discussion papers and professional magazines can be a valuable source of up-to-date research, information and resources.

Job rotations

· Rotating job duties is a simple way to broaden the possible development experiences and share knowledge and resources.

Observation Checklist

Observation Criteria

S

NS

Reviewed own performance in terms of personal efficacy, personal competence and attainment of professional competence outcomes and personal development objectives and priorities

Reviewed own capacity as a role model in terms of ability to build trust, confidence and respect of diverse groups and relevant individuals

Evaluated personal effectiveness in building an effective organisational and workplace culture

Analyse and evaluate personal effectiveness in developing the competence required to achieve operational accountabilities and responsibilities

Determined own potentially disruptive emotions and impulses

Evaluated personal leadership style and adjust for different contexts

Analysed the potential impact and role of own leadership during organisational change

Analysed and confirmed capacity and competence of relevant individuals to contribute to change processes and plans

Identified leadership styles and develop approaches to best respond to the impact of change on people and processes

Task 3– Lead Organisational Transformation and Learning for a Strategic Outcome

Utilising a simulated business or an actual work environment, you are required to analyse and improve your personal leadership style and professional competence to lead organisational transformation and learning for strategic outcomes. The strategic outcome will be dependent on the business in which this assessment takes place and must be negotiated and confirmed by with your Assessor.

This activity covers leading transformational practices, cultivating collaborative practices, completing ongoing professional development and providing strategic leadership in a dynamic context. It applies to those who use cognitive and creative skills to review, critically analyse, consolidate and synthesise knowledge, in order to generate ideas and provide solutions to complex problems. They use communication skills to demonstrate their understanding of theoretical concepts and to transfer knowledge and ideas to others.

The final deliverable on this assessment task is a summary report that outlines the leadership approach to manage and implement the strategic outcome. The report should clarify who is to be accountable for a decision or action prior to its execution and identifying groups, individuals and activities for which each person is responsible for managing.

Throughout the assessment task, you are to assume that you hold a senior management position within the organisation and you should engage with relevant individuals, which may be role played or actual depending on the practice environment. These may include:

· employees, staff

· employers

· government agencies and departments

· industry associations and employer bodies

· industry representatives

· national Industry Skills Councils

· professional associations

· regulatory, licensing and compliance authorities

· research agencies

· students

· state and territory industry training advisory bodies

· subject or technical specialists and experts

· trade unions

· universities,

and relevant stakeholders which may include:

· administrative and regulatory bodies

· coordinators, teachers, assessors, coaches, mentors and support staff

· experts

· industry, employees, employer, professional and peak bodies or associations

· other employers

· public or private sector enterprises

· students

· suppliers and business partners

· training and assessment organisation.

The report should present strategies for controlling and appropriately regulating disruptive emotions and impulses such as:

· avoiding personal responses that may be insensitive or inappropriate in a given context

· managing disruptive emotions and impulses

· positively shaping interpersonal relationships

· self-control.

And for

· emotional and decision making intelligence

Your presented report should also account for any potential risks, including:

· issues, concerns or actions likely to result in a negative outcome, for example preventing the organisation to meet its objectives

· likely consequences of such an event on organisational performance and business continuity management.

8.

Observation Checklist

Observation Criteria

S

NS

Identified and applied strategies to create a climate that encourages and allows for the receiving and giving of constructive feedback

Regularly reviewed own performance in terms of personal efficacy, personal competence and attainment of professional competence outcomes and personal development objectives and priorities

Reviewed own capacity as a role model in terms of ability to build trust, confidence and respect of diverse groups and relevant individuals

Evaluated personal effectiveness in building an effective organisational and workplace culture

Analysed and evaluated personal effectiveness in developing the competence required to achieve operational accountabilities and responsibilities

Applied transformational and transactional leadership practices

Demonstrated empathy in personal communication, relationships and day to day leadership role

Lead consistently in an inclusive manner that is respectful of individual differences

Monitored and regulate own potentially disruptive emotions and impulses

Managed work based relationships effectively

Integrated own emotions with cognitions in personal leadership style

Evaluated personal leadership style and adjust for different contexts

Applied judgement, intelligence and common sense when undertaking day to day leadership role

Analysed relevant legislation, information and intelligence sources when evaluating business opportunities

Drew upon personal expertise of self and relevant individuals to achieve strategic results

Sought and encouraged contributions from relevant individuals

Modelled and encouraged collaborative communication and learning approaches in the workplace

Cultivated existing and new collaborative and participative work relationships

Positively conveyed organisational direction and values to relevant individuals and relevant stakeholders

Analysed the impact and role of leadership during organisational change

Analysed and confirmed capacity and competence of relevant individuals to contribute to change processes and plans

Developed learning and communication solutions to address problems and risks arising for individuals during organisational change

Identified leadership styles and develop approaches to best respond to the impact of change on people and processes

MIA_BSBLDR801 Lead personal and strategic transformation_Learner Workbook V1.1 6 | Page

ELEMENT	PERFORMANCE CRITERIA
Elements describe the essential outcomes.	Performance criteria describe the performance needed to demonstrate achievement of the element.
1. Reflect on personal efficacy	1.1 Identify and apply strategies to create a climate that encourages and allows for the receiving and giving of constructive feedback 1.2 Regularly review own performance in terms of personal efficacy, personal competence and attainment of professional competence outcomes and personal development objectives and priorities 1.3 Review own capacity as a role model in terms of ability to build trust, confidence and respect of diverse groups and relevant individuals 1.4 Evaluate personal effectiveness in building an effective organisational and workplace culture 1.5 Analyse and evaluate personal effectiveness in developing the competence required to achieve operational accountabilities and responsibilities
2. Lead in a transformational manner	2.1 Apply transformational and transactional leadership practices 2.2 Demonstrate empathy in personal communication, relationships and day to day leadership role 2.3 Lead consistently in an inclusive manner that is respectful of individual differences 2.4 Monitor and regulate own potentially disruptive emotions and impulses 2.5 Manage work based relationships effectively 2.6 Integrate own emotions with cognitions in personal leadership style 2.7 Evaluate personal leadership style and adjust for different contexts
3. Model and cultivate collaborative thinking	3.1 Apply judgement, intelligence and common sense when undertaking day to day leadership role 3.2 Analyse relevant legislation, information and intelligence sources when evaluating business opportunities 3.3 Draw upon personal expertise of self and relevant individuals to achieve strategic results 3.4 Seek and encourage contributions from relevant individuals 3.5 Model and encourage collaborative communication and learning approaches in the workplace 3.6 Cultivate existing and new collaborative and participative work relationships
4. Provide strategic leadership during change processes	4.1 Positively convey organisational direction and values to relevant individuals and relevant stakeholders 4.2 Analyse the impact and role of leadership during organisational change 4.3 Analyse and confirm capacity and competence of relevant individuals to contribute to change processes and plans 4.4 Develop learning and communication solutions to address problems and risks arising for individuals during organisational change 4.5 Identify leadership styles and develop approaches to best respond to the impact of change on people and processes

Skill	Performance Criteria	Description
Learning	1.2	· Develops insights from previous experience to improve personal performance
Reading	1.1, 1.2, 3.2, 4.5	· Sources, evaluates and critiques ideas and information from a range of complex texts to assist with decisions, choices and to manage organisational requirements
Writing	1.1, 1.5, 4.4, 4.5	· Records results of analysis using clear and comprehensible language and layout · Researches and prepares plans for relevant stakeholders incorporating appropriate vocabulary, grammatical structure and conventions
Oral communication	2.2, 2.3, 3.4	· Expresses opinions and information and responds to other people's views using language appropriate to audience
Navigate the world of work	1.4, 1.5, 3.2, 3.3	· Considers own role in terms of its contributions to broader goals of the work environment · Takes full responsibility for identifying and following policies, procedures and legislative requirements
Interact with others	1.1-1.5, 2.1-2.7, 3.1, 3.4-3.6, 4.1	· Understands impact of own behaviour on others, reflecting on personal strengths and limitations and implementing strategies to regulate behaviour · Influences and fosters a collaborative culture facilitating a sense of commitment and workplace cohesion · Uses a variety of communication tools and strategies to build rapport and maintain effective working relationships · Uses appropriate interpersonal skills to encourage contributions and elicit ideas from others · Adapts personal communication style to build a positive working relationship and show respect for the opinions, values and particular needs of others
Get the work done	1.1, 2.1, 4.2, 4.3, 4.4, 4.5	· Develops plans to manage complex activities with strategic implications that involve a range of personnel with diverse skills, knowledge and experience · Systematically gathers and analyses all relevant information and evaluates options to inform decisions with the potential to affect organisational outcomes

Release	Comments
Release 1	This version first released with BSB Business Services Training Package Version 1.0.

Activity 2
Describe one way constructive feedback can be embedded into organisational culture.

Step 1	Listen actively	Listen for clues to what the priorities are: · Are there real fears? · Are there urgent needs? · What would they like to happen?
Step 2	Ask questions… lots of questions	It puts you in control immediately. It lets everyone know that someone cares about their problem and is prepared to do something to help.
Step 3	Repeat the complaint/problem back	Repeat the complaint/problem back and get acknowledgment that you heard it properly.
Step 4	Apologise	Apologise without admitting liability, eg ‘I’m sorry that this has happened to you’ or ‘I’m sorry that you have been inconvenienced like this.’
Step 5	Make specific suggestions	Explain what can be done at this time. If there are policy limitations, explain them assertively.

Activity 3
Consider ways you could provide opportunities in your workplace to give and receive effective feedback. For example, you may find ways to integrate feedback within a specific project development process, or ongoing mechanisms for day-to-day feedback or consultation. Develop and implement a feedback strategy. Establish the goal of the strategy and include feedback activities, the purpose or objectives of the feedback and tools/methods to use. To devise the activities get input/suggestions from staff and/or stakeholders, and check what organisational tools/methods are available to use. Will your strategy be consistent with best practice and new organisational approaches? An implementation process could include the following steps in the case of a written questionnaire: 1. Design/develop the questionnaire 2. Gather responses 3. Document results/responses 4. Analyse what the feedback means 5. Follow up feedback 6. Develop performance standards, or benchmarks Work toward continuous improvement.

Activity 4
Consider the following and reflect upon your own competence, motivation and self-efficacy: · self-reactions include self-satisfaction and adaptive inferences · self-satisfaction involves perceptions and associated effects regarding one’s own performance · courses of action that result in satisfaction and positive effect should be pursued · actions that produce dissatisfaction and have negative effects should be avoided · self-regulated learners condition their satisfaction on reaching their goals, and these self-incentives motivate and direct their actions. Journal You have an obligation to yourself to keep up-to-date, develop new skills, knowledge and confidence to ensure you have a successful and rewarding career; demonstrate your commitment to being the best you can be; provide professional service to your staff and employer and enhance the profession's image. In your journal, make notes about your review your own personal efficacy and personal competence. · What are some of your own professional competencies? · What are your goals, objectives and priorities in relation to your personal development?

Activity 5
In your own words answer the following questions: 1. How could you improve your capacity as a role model? 2. Suggest three strategies you would use to review your ability to build trust, confidence and respect within your organisation? Journal Analyse your ability to build trust, confidence and respect with diverse groups and relevant individuals. For example, do you treat people with integrity, respect and empathy, and communicate to develop trust and confidence?

Activity 6
Identify and consider a new or emerging business goal impacting your organisation or work unit. · What will be the desired characteristics of the workplace culture to align processes, norms and values to meet the business objectives? · Assess the current cultural artefacts and the gaps to achieving desired performance. · What role will feedback and modelling strategies play in developing cultural changes? · Devise an action plan to close the gaps. Portfolio Develop your own workplace culture checklist for your workplace. Journal Review your personal development goals in relation to organisational and workplace culture, and where you need to be.

Activity 7
Research the following websites which provide information on TAFE and VET standards and policies. TAFE Strategy, Business and Operations – DET NSW intranet - https://detwww.det.nsw.edu.au/tsss/index.htm Guidelines for Course Developers – Australian Quality Training Framework - http://www.tac.wa.gov.au/Documents/AQTF-GuidelinesCourseDevelopers.pdf Portfolio Regarding decision making and management of tasks within your work area, are you clear about the accountabilities and responsibilities for yourself, your managers and your staff? Identify areas for further research and consultation in order to clarify accountabilities and responsibilities regarding all your business activities. Review your methods to keep up-to-date and identify legislative requirements, guidelines and policy for new business activities or projects as they arise.

Activity 8
You will have known people you admired as leaders, role models and mentors. 1. What was it about those leaders you admired? What made them good leaders? 2. The world has produced some outstanding leaders. Not all have been considered good people, although they were successful leaders of their time. Choose one recognised leader and list what you consider to be the leadership qualities that led to their success. 3. Do you consider leadership qualities of prominent people the same leadership qualities needed by workplace leaders at all levels? 4. Which qualities and skills are important for workplace leadership and which do you consider not to be relevant? Journal Record your reflections and research notes in your journal.

Activity 9
Empathy is about the act of imaginatively entering into the experience of another person and understanding their situation, feelings and motives. 1. Can you think of a situation that would have benefited through greater empathy? 2. Identify a communication solution where empathy may be lost during non-face-to-face encounters. Journal Reflect on your empathy and listening skills in the workplace and practise techniques for active listening and empathy.

Activity 10
Do you control your emotions and impulses in the workplace? In your journal, over a week, record your own emotions and impulses. · Are you someone who has a high level of emotional control? · Do you have a high level of self-efficacy? Observe and analyse colleagues in your own workplace: is a relationship between emotional control and self-efficacy, gender and age, length of experience and current status? Professional conversation Share tips and strategies with peers for regulating disruptive emotions and impulses. Journal Make a list of challenging or difficult situations where you anticipate the need to practice emotional control. Identify areas for personal improvement, further learning and development related to this skill.

Activity 11
Do you control your emotions and impulses in the workplace? In your journal, over a week, record your own emotions and impulses. · Are you someone who has a high level of emotional control? · Do you have a high level of self-efficacy? Observe and analyse colleagues in your own workplace: is a relationship between emotional control and self-efficacy, gender and age, length of experience and current status? Professional conversation Share tips and strategies with peers for regulating disruptive emotions and impulses. Journal Make a list of challenging or difficult situations where you anticipate the need to practice emotional control. Identify areas for personal improvement, further learning and development related to this skill.

Activity 12
Mentor feedback Meet with your mentor or role model. From the above list what competencies and abilities do they possess? Ask your mentor for feedback on your ability to integrate emotions with cognitions in your leadership style. Journal Seek feedback and reflect upon your own leadership style in relation to integrating emotions with cognitions. Record your findings in your journal.

Activity 13
Professional conversation How can you seek feedback from colleagues about your leadership style(s)? Discuss leadership styles and ways of getting feedback from others about what they think about your style. Ask colleagues to help you to identify your leadership style(s) and shifts in style which would be effective for different situations. Portfolio Describe a leadership style you have applied and why it was effective for you, your team and the business needs. Describe the characteristics of your dominant leadership style; the importance of switching styles to accommodate individual differences; the importance of empowerment in your workplace and the importance of a shared vision to organisational development. Journal Evaluate your own leadership style(s) in relation to workplace situations to develop a self-awareness of your leadership style(s). Review your personal development goals regarding the leadership qualities you will aspire to, and ways in which you will develop and improve your leadership style.

Activity 14
Research collaborative communication and learning approaches and consider appropriate strategies for your business needs, staff, work environment and available resources. Portfolio For a specific business or project development needs, identify: 1. three new approaches or systems you plan to implement using an inclusive approach 2. obstacles you or the team may face along the way how you or the team will know when you have achieved effective results.

Activity 15
Professional conversation Describe your leadership role to others, in terms of your jurisdiction, goals, responsibilities and accountabilities. After listening to everyone’s self accounts, discuss appropriate styles for a day-to-day leadership role for a motivational leader. Compare approaches. Journal Evaluate your own day-to-day leadership style and reflect on your analyses according to the different organisational goals and priorities demanded in your workplace. Consider these three aspects of leader self-examination: personal style, leadership style, style flexibility. Review your personal development goals in terms of: · improving and adapting your leadership style promoting self-motivation amongst staff or team members.

Activity 16
Develop an action plan to evaluate business opportunities for your work area/department. Include methods to ensure ideas will align with organisational and team goals and objectives, be inclusive of staff ideas, expertise and capability for innovation, and promote high motivation for the ongoing implementation of ideas.

Activity 17
Portfolio Summarise ways you could empower staff within your department. How would you encourage contributions from staff? What types of rewards and incentives could you provide? Journal Review your personal development goals in terms of your development as a role model for collaborative thinking and work practices.

Step	Desired outcome
1. Outline the purpose of your role	You are clear why your job was created and the context in which this role fits into the overall organisation’s purpose.
2. Agree key result areas	You understand the main areas where you are required to perform and what your performance will be measured against.
3. Set performance objectives	Negotiated goals and objectives for the period under review
4. Agree core competencies	You and your manager agree on core skills, knowledge and abilities the employee needs to develop in that will enable you to meet the performance objectives
5. Negotiate development goals	Agreement on training required by the employee supported by the manager over the period under review
6. Feedback	You and your manager discuss your performance over the period of review. This step is undertaken at the end of the period.

Activity 18
What does the term collaboration refer to and what benefits does collaborative communication provide to organisations?

Activity 19
Select and describe one collaborative communication tool.

Activity 20
Consider a recent organisational change which affected your work area or department. Which of the following variables were affected: task, technology, people, and/or structure? Diagnose the forces for and against change; the results of the change and how the resistance to change was managed. Portfolio Identify, analyse and monitor the impact of organisational change within your department. Analyse your leadership role during the change process. Journal Review your self-development goals in terms of developing leadership skills for responding to the impact of change on people and processes.

Activity 21
Can leadership style effect organisational transformation? How?

Activity 22
Analyse the problems and risks arising for individuals you will lead during organisational change. In response to these, how can communication and learning solutions reduce or eliminate problems and risks? Portfolio Outline a process to develop effective communication and learning solutions to reduce or eliminate problems and risks as part of a change management strategy. Journal Review your personal development goals to include strategic leadership skills for leading change processes or change projects.

Autocratic	Democratic	Laissez-faire
make quick and final decisions close oversight total control, with little or no input from group members group members are rarely trusted with decisions/important tasks	distribution of responsibility empower group members to contribute aids group decision-making processes medium control, with lots of input from members	minimal control, with total input from members empower group members to take responsibility decisions are made by the worker, not the leader autonomy is encouraged

Activity 23
What are the characteristics of the Authoritative (Visionary) style?

Observation Criteria	S	NS
Identified strategies to create a climate that encourages and allows for the receiving and giving of constructive feedback
Outline data collection methods
Applied transformational and transactional leadership practices
Stated the significance of the organisation’s mission, purpose and values
Evaluated leadership styles and adjust for different contexts
Examined ways to encourage collaboration
Draw upon personal expertise of self and relevant individuals to present methods to achieve strategic results
Discussed methods to seek and encourage contributions from relevant individuals
Modelled collaborative communication and learning approaches in the workplace
Outlined approaches to cultivate existing and new collaborative and participative work relationships
Discussed importance of positively conveying organisational direction and values to relevant individuals and relevant stakeholders
Analysed the impact and role of leadership during organisational change
Explained organisational transformation and the management of the stages of change
Developed learning and communication solutions to address problems and risks arising for individuals during organisational change
Identified leadership styles and develop approaches to best respond to the impact of change on people and processes

Capabilities	Behavioural Descriptors	Capabilities required for role	Current level of capability	Priority for Development
A transformative leader …	Less Significant	Significant	Essential	Needs significant development	Needs development	Confident
INSPIRES A SENSE OF PURPOSE AND DIRECTION	Contributes to, shapes and champions the organisation's vision and goals, relating these to government requirements.
	Translates broad strategy into practical terms for others, and creates a shared understanding of what has to be achieved.
	Within the overall strategic context, presents others with an integrated picture of the actions and priorities that will be required.
	Provides a clear sense of direction and strives to achieve common understanding among all levels within the organisation.
FOCUSES STRATEGICALLY	Develops expert advice to government on potential outcomes, and develops a long term perspective on organisational success.
	Integrates a 'big picture' view of community and government goals with how to achieve them.
	Operates on the basis of a 'whole of government' framework and takes the broader context into account.
	Ensures portfolio effort contributes to cross-government priorities.
	Envisages what might be and how future possibilities balance with the 'here and now'.
HARNESSES INFORMATION AND OPPORTUNITIES	Seeks to acquire appropriate and expert knowledge, and is open to new information and different perspectives.
	Values and actively finds out about Australian and international best practice (public and private sector) and considers the workings of the organisation within this context.
	Demonstrates business acumen by thoroughly researching the market that the organisation operates in (and opportunities offered and constraints imposed) to achieve greater efficiencies and improve quality of service.
	Keeps abreast of major technological changes and advancements and their impacts.
SHOWS JUDGEMENT, INTELLIGENCE AND COMMONSENSE	Grasps complexity and identifies issues that tend to be overlooked by others.
	Thinks through problems from various viewpoints and analyses them objectively.
	Critically evaluates information before applying both intellect and experience to final judgment.
	Willing and able to question traditional assumptions and practices.
	Capacity to provide originality of thought and develop innovative solutions.