Leadership Matters: 7 skills of very successful leaders

By David Pich and Ann Messenger

Leadership Matters is packed with ideas, research and practical advice for aspiring leaders in Australia and worldwide. It will keep you thinking long after you have finished reading.Authors David Pich and Ann Messenger, together with a team of experts, believe that you need to master 7 skills to become a successful leader in today's complex and challenging organisations. They researched locally and globally to find out why and how these 7 skills are so important.As part of this research, David Pich interviewed several inspiring global leaders - including human rights activist and Nobel Prize recipient, Kailash Satyarthi; Qantas CEO Alan Joyce AC; and Gloria Ai, China's leading independent business host, whose daily talk show attracts an astonishing 8 million listeners and watchers. Their invaluable insights and much, much more are shared in this book, which concludes that leadership really does matter!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Major Street Publishing
• Release date: Jan 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781925282764

Book preview

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First published in 2017 by Major Street Publishing Pty Ltd 

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© Institute of Managers and Leaders 2017

The moral rights of the authors have been asserted 

Ordering information:

Quantity sales. Special discounts are available on quantity purchases by corpora tions, associations and others. For details, contact Lesley Williams using the contact details above.

Individual sales. Major Street publications are available through most bookstores.

They can also be ordered directly from Major Street’s online bookstore at www.majorstreet.com.au/shop.

Orders for university textbook/course adoption use. For orders of this nature, please contact Lesley Williams using the contact details above.

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

Creator: Pich, David, author.

Title: Leadership matters: 7 skills of very successful leaders/David Pich and Ann Messenger.

ISBN: 9781925282764 (eBook)

Subjects: Leadership.

Decision making.

Success in business.

Other Creators/Contributors: Messenger, Ann, 1964- author.

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the Australian Copyright Act 1968 (for example, a fair dealing for the purposes of study, research, criticism or review), no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, communicated or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission. All inquiries should be made to the publisher.

Internal design by Production Works

Cover design by Principle Design

Printed in Australia by Griffin Press

Disclaimer: The material in this publication is of the nature of general comment only, and does not represent professional advice. It is not intended to provide specific guidance for particular circumstances and it should not be relied on as the basis for any decision to take action or not take action on any matter which it covers. Readers should obtain professional advice where appropriate, before making any such decision. To maximum extent permitted by law, the authors and publisher disclaim all responsibility and liability to any person, arising directly or indirectly from any person taking or not taking action based upon the information in this publication.

About the Institute of Managers and Leaders 

In 1939, a small group of managers in Melbourne formed the Melbourne Technical College Foremanship Association which in 1949 became the Australian Institute of Management. In the words of Sir John Storey, the inaugural President of AIM, the Institute wanted to ‘raise the standards of management and to gain acceptance of these higher standards nationally’ (1949).

Over the next 75 years, AIM’s strategy was to raise management standards through the delivery of an increasingly diverse range of training and education courses and programs. These were very much grounded in management practice and on the realities faced by today’s managers in today’s workplace.

In recent years, schools of management and business have proliferated nationally and internationally. Local universities now offer world-class management and leadership education and training through their MBA and other programs. At AIM we very much welcome these changes, not least because they acknowledge what the Institute has always known – that leadership matters!

With the education and training space now very well covered, the time is right for AIM to refocus on our core purpose: the develop ment of management and leadership as a professional discipline in its own right.

In 2015, the Australian Institute of Management divested its educa tion and training business, allowing us to return our energy and resources exclusively to the development of our members – and on the advancement of the profession. While AIM continues to live on as a training and education brand (licensed to another provider), our membership organisation is now known as the Institute of Managers and Leaders, Australia and New Zealand (IML).

Today, the Institute of Managers and Leaders is the only professional membership body that is focused on setting the standard for management and leadership competence in Australia and New Zealand. We do this by offering the Chartered Manager accreditation – the global, gold-standard designation for management and leadership competence and excellence.

Some aspects of our evolution from the Australian Institute of Manage ment to the Institute of Managers and Leaders are captured in this book, and we have intentionally left these as ‘AIM’ to illustrate our recent journey of change.

While the Institute has undergone a transformation, one thing has remained constant since that small group met in 1939 – the belief that sound management and leadership practice has an impact well beyond the workplace.

David Pich — Chief Executive

Ann Messenger — Chair of the Board

Preface

When I joined the Institute in June 2015 it felt in many ways as if I was finally ‘coming home’.

At the start of my career (as you’ll read about in the book) I worked in the human resources team at Hewlett-Packard in the UK. That was in the early 1990s when HP was the place to cut your teeth in HR. ‘The HP Way’ – the company’s much vaunted and globally-respected statement of culture – was, at its heart, a leadership handbook. It instructed thousands of HP’s managers on the art of leadership and on the critical importance of the impact of leadership on the continuing financial health of the business.

It was crystal clear to me then that leadership matters. And my belief in the rights – and wrongs! – of leadership have stayed with me throughout my own career and during my own management and leadership journey. This journey took me from London to Sydney, from HR to sales and marketing, from global accounting and consulting firms (PricewaterhouseCoopers) to local law firms (Gadens), and eventually to the not-for-profit sector (CanTeen and the St George Medical Research Foundation).

When I ‘landed’ at the Australian Institute of Management, I found an organisation with a long and proud history in management education and training. I dare say that many of the people reading this book have at one time or another attended an AIM management training course in one of the many AIM training centres around Australia. But I also found an organisation in significant transition.

AIM’s training and education business had recently been separated from the membership part of the organisation, and sold. While the two organisations shared the same name – and AIM logo – they were in fact two completely separate organisations.

As the leader of AIM’s membership organisation, I very quickly noticed that the national network of Fellows and Members of the Institute were united by one thing – an absolute passion for leadership and for raising the standard of leadership competence in the Australian workplace.

It was the obvious passion for leadership among AIM’s members that was the catalyst for this book. If the Institute is to fulfil its role as ‘the voice of leadership’ in Australia, then a statement on the crucial elements of leadership is a good place to start. This book is that statement.

From the very beginning, the intent of Leadership Matters was to look at the practice of leadership more than the theory of leadership. In many ways this intent mirrors the transition we’ve been experiencing at the Institute. While the education and training business focuses on management and leadership theory, our membership organisation – the newly named Institute of Managers and Leaders – is focused on leadership in action and on the professional development of local managers and leaders.

Of course, a book that seeks to tackle leadership from a practical perspective was always going to require input from actual, real leaders! The interviews I conducted for the book (typically found at the end of each chapter) reflect my personal view that sound leadership is not exclusive to places like Silicon Valley in the US; places that many leadership books are currently focusing on exclusively. Leadership matters just as much in India and in China – and of course in Australia. In fact, in many ways it is in these current and future powerhouse economies that the impact of leadership and of leaders will become increasingly important.

Leadership Matters: 7 skills of very successful leaders is the first book from the newly branded Institute of Managers and Leaders. It sets out the Institute’s stall. Our focus is firmly on raising the standard of management and leadership practice in Australia and New Zealand. The 7 skills are a good place to start for anyone who, like me and like each of the Institute’s members, strives to be a better manager and a better leader.

I hope you enjoy reading Leadership Matters and I hope it helps you on your own personal leadership journey 

David Pich

Chief Executive, Institute of Managers and Leaders

Acknowledgments

We would like to acknowledge and thank the many lovely people who have made this book possible.

To each of the chapter authors and contributors: your insights into leadership, and your willingness to share them, is very much appreciated by everyone at the Institute.

The wonderful interviewees in India, China, England, Germany and Australia who gave up their time to rather bravely allow us to put a recorder on the table while we chatted about their personal leadership philosophy and style.

Sanjeev Dheer (CEO, Beyond West Consulting) the extremely valued Fellow of the Institute who acted as a confidante and fount of knowledge for the book and who made many of the overseas interviews possible through his seemingly endless list of contacts.

The directors, leadership team and staff at the Institute of Managers and Leaders who supported the project from concept to the finished product and who, like us, passionately believe that leadership matters.

To the members of the Institute, all of whom believe that management and leadership excellence is a goal worth striving for, thanks for making the 76-year old Institute what it is today – the voice of management and leadership!

And finally to our families – Eileen, Pearl and Olive and Stephen, Maddy and Isabelle – who allowed us to spend far too many nights away from home so that we could write this ‘leadership story’.

CONTENTS

1. Setting strategy

David Pich

Interviews with Adi Godrej and Vikas Goswami, Godrej Group

2. Defining culture

Jerome Parisse-Brassens

Case study – Unilever

Case study – IRT Group

Interview with Alan Joyce, Qantas

Case study – AIM LIFE

3. Leading people

Elaine Jobson

Interview with Chris van Nieuwerburgh, Henley Business School

Interview with Neelam Dhawan, Hewlett-Packard

4. Making decisions

Kristen Hansen

Case study – A coaching-conversations leadership style will empower your team to make better decisions

Case study – IML decision-making

5. Ethical leadership

Professor Robert Wood and Dr Melissa Wheeler

Interview with Cobus de Swardt, Transparency International

Interview with Kailash Satyarthi, Nobel Peace Prize winner

6. Inclusion matters

Kirsten Lees and Ann Messenger

Interview with Dr Jun Wang, iCarbonX

7. Networking is working

Margot Smith

Interview with Gloria Ai, founder of iAsk Media, Beijing

Case study – Can Too Foundation

Case study – Tour de Cure

Afterword

Index

Join the Institute of Managers and Leaders

chap1

Author note

I suppose I’ve always been just a little bit obsessed with strategy, ever since I first dipped my toe into this thing called leadership at Hewlett-Packard in the UK in the early 1990s.

Over the years, I’ve been very fortunate to work for leaders who have tended to have a plan. And typically, (and quite rightly!) they have expected me to have one too!

When I joined the Australian Institute of Management (as it was then), I was impressed that the Chair of the Board – Ann Messenger – seemed to be equally obsessed with the pressing need for a strategy for the Institute.

These days I tend to think that if you can set strategy you’re already well on the way to being a successful leader. In my experience, setting strategy is where the leadership journey begins.

It stands to reason that it’s where our book about successful leadership starts.

A SUCCESSFUL LEADER has a strategy. But it’s more than that. She knows how to set and implement strategy. She knows how to identify when that strategy needs tweaking, modifying or, in extreme cases, abandon ing for something strategi cally different. A successful leader will make that all-important journey from vision to strategy.

The ability to ‘do’ strategy is the core leadership skill. You can be the very best leader of people; you can be completely immersed in the many nuances of organisational culture; you can make decisions that are proven to be robust and right every time; you can lead your organisation – or your team – from the most solid of ethical foun dat ions; you can understand the importance of a diverse and inclusive workforce; and you can have a broad network of contem po raries, trusted advisers and mentors. Each of these is absolutely critical to your success as a leader, and we discuss them further in this book. But, if you can’t set strategy – and crucially, if you can’t communicate that strategy effectively – you are almost certainly doomed to fail as a leader.

But isn’t culture actually where leadership starts? Aren’t leaders told that their real skill – their raison d’être – lies in their ability to define corporate culture? Aren’t leaders supposed to be first and foremost the ‘culture champions’ within an organisation? Shouldn’t a book that promises to explore the seven core skills of leadership really start over there, with culture?

In answer to this, and before we head down what might be called Strategy Street, let’s start by taking a short walk down Culture Court.

CLASH OF THE LEADERSHIP TITANS – STRATEGY vs CULTURE AT HEWLETT-PACKARD

Ever since the philosophical duel between those two Titans of leadership competence – strategy and culture – began in the early 1980s, Hewlett-Packard and its famed cultural framework, The HP Way, has been held up as the shining example of culture’s place, a peg or two above strategy in the pecking order of leadership skills.

I consider myself very fortunate to have had first-hand experience of the culture versus strategy debate. I joined HP for one reason – The HP Way. I joined the Hewlett-Packard human resources team in its UK Head Office in Amen Corner, Bracknell in 1994. That placed me both at the very heart of the UK’s self-proclaimed Silicon Valley and on the frontline of culture’s battle with strategy for corporate dominance.

If you were an HR professional in the 1990s in the UK, or indeed anywhere in the world, you wanted to work for HP. You wanted to walk the light-filled, plant-lined corridors, see the gleaming, fruit-filled kitchens and the modern, open-plan office floors. You wanted to know if HP’s senior executives really ‘managed by wandering around’ (they did), whether the employee car park was based on the revolutionary egalitarian principle of ‘park where you like’ (it was) and whether the global CEO (at the time Lew Platt) and the UK CEO (John Golding) really did conduct monthly (Lew did) and weekly (John did) all-staff briefings via audio link. You also wanted to know if the fruit in the kitchen was refilled twice a week (it was – on a Tuesday and a Thursday), whether employee performance was, as legend went, ‘managed by objectives’ (it was) and if staff were really ranked against each other and rewarded on the basis of their ranking (they were, and I personally facilitated many of these annual employee ranking sessions).

It was as far from the traditional office environment as it was possible to be. I was certainly in awe of the culture at HP. Some of my obvious awe was probably due to the fact that I had just left Liverpool Victoria Insurance, where they had different entrances to the office for different grades of staff, four different staff canteens depending on your management grade and status and a ‘tea-lady’ who walked the corridors delivering tea to managers in their offices – but only if they were of the requisite grade that ‘deserved’ a cup of England’s finest (alas, I wasn’t). For ‘culture’ reasons, I left Liverpool Victoria Insurance after only two weeks!

As the HR manager for two significantly-sized business units – the Computer Products Organisation and the Finance & Administration Division – at Hewlett-Packard, I was considered to be a guardian of The HP Way. It was right there above my desk in the open plan office, pinned proudly to the desk-divider, the glossy, six-page document, that detailed the ins and outs of The HP Way. The HP Way! It was a living, breathing cultural reference guide, used in meetings with the business unit general managers, in internal HR meetings, in performance meetings, staff appraisals and, of course, in interviews for any and all roles with the company.

The HP Way certainly wasn’t corporate mythology. It was really real, and it was undoubtedly the shining example of progressive corporate culture in action. It was the epitome of the ‘culture trumps strategy’ debate. It was evidence of culture being front and centre. It was Drucker’s¹ dream – right there, to be seen, lived and breathed. The HP Way was culture eating strategy for breakfast right in front of my eyes.

Except it wasn’t.

The reality of Hewlett-Packard was that culture didn’t trump strategy at all. In fact, during my time at HP, it’s safe to say that strategy was everything. It was just that culture – The HP Way – was recognised as being a key element of that strategy. In fact, culture was absolutely integral to the strategy. If HP got anything right – and it certainly got a great many things right – it was the fact that its founders, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, recognised that a fundamental element of the process of setting and implanting strategy was defining the type of culture that was needed to support and enhance that strategy. This philosophy – culture as a fundamental element of strategy – was what made HP unique at the time. It wasn’t that HP’s culture was unique. It was that the leadership at Hewlett-Packard recognised that business success required a cultural framework that supported and enhanced the all-important business strategy. It wasn’t their understanding of corporate culture and employee engagement or inclusion that was central to HP’s leaders and leadership style, it was their ability to set, communicate and change strategy.

Strategy in action –