As you undoubtedly would know by now, the person who had the biggest influence on my career as an executive was the late Dr Pill Harker. Whilst Phil helped me understand the basic psychology of human beings, he was sometimes naïve about the politics of organisations. Nevertheless I will be eternally grateful to him for his insights about what it means to be human.

Among the topics which we discussed was organisational culture. It is probably the chief role of an executive (particularly the CEO) to establish a positive organisational culture that facilitates productivity. I can unequivocally assert that the enterprises I led were far more productive than those led by my peers. Typically I managed enterprises that had half the number of staff than they had, yet our outcomes were demonstrably better. Much of that was due to the care we took to develop productive organisational cultures. In assessing people for employment we spent more time trying to ensure the applicants had the right cultural attributes as we did assessing their technical skills.

But apart from the cultural issues, there were many other factors that contributed to this success as well.

For a start I was always prepared to confront the union movement, whose chief ambition was to ensure that enterprises employed as many people as possible and thus enhance their membership. But this did not lead to secure employment or satisfying jobs. When things get tough it is the least productive organisations that go under.

Unions relied on the award system which tended to pigeon-hole people into narrow roles that didn’t allow people to exercise all their talents to not only advance the productivity of the workforce but to also provide more fulfilling jobs thus helping to create job satisfaction. To overcome this malaise it was necessary to negotiate extensive enterprise agreements that supplanted the traditional awards.

As a result of this influence, in the electricity generating industry where I worked most enterprises were grossly over-staffed. As the good Dr Phil was prone to tell me, as an organisational consultant he found many more people stressed at work, not because they were overworked but because they had too little to do! The working day is indeed long and unfulfilling when you have little meaningful work to do!

It used to irk me then as a manager (and later as a management consultant) to go to an enterprise where the management boasted they had a good relationship with the unions.  Mostly, this reflected that they had neglected the most important relationship management needed to have, and that was with its own employees. When there is hostility between management and the workforce unions begin to have disproportionate influence and it is only such conditions that union domination is allowed to flourish.

There is a role for unions in the workplace but not at the expense of the management/workforce relationship.

I was once charged with the task of trying to restore a workplace that was under the thrall of the union movement and hence unproductive. We made great strides in rehabilitating that workplace but in the end it became unviable and I was forced to partially close it, resulting in many people being made redundant. That was soul destroying. I spent months trying to find alternative employment for those that had to go.

This spurred me on to ensure that any future workplace I managed should be as productive as possible for this was the best way of ensuring the job security of my employees. In essence I wanted my workplaces to be good places to work but they had also to be very productive.

But as I said at the beginning, perhaps the chief role of a CEO is to set the culture of the organisation. How might you do that? Well you could do no better than listen to the advice of Mahatma Ghandi who said:

I must first be the change I want to see in my world.

In essence the leader needs to model the behaviour he wishes to see in the organisation.

In the seventies and eighties there were debates about the difference between Management and Leadership.

The principal difference always seemed to me about Vision.

Managers concentrate on the status quo. They are good at refining and enhancing existing systems and processes. They increase efficiency and bring stability and predictability to organisations. They can enhance many of the features of an existing organisation. When I was in the Electricity Industry managing power stations, I would have to admit some of my peers, who I respected immensely, were far better managers than I was.

But leaders are more than refiners of the status quo. Leaders want to shape the future. And to do that, a leader needs to envision and articulate a desirable future which will engage and inspire followers.

In later years when I was an executive coach, I taught those that I mentored that leadership was built on three particular foundations,

Vision

To begin with a leader should be able to articulate a view of the future that should engage employees so that they are aligned with the purpose of the enterprise. The leader needs to articulate a future that employees can buy in to..

Culture

As intimated above it is essential that the leader promotes a culture where people not only feel included but understand how it is they can contribute to the purpose of the enterprise. This makes work meaningful.

Productive cultures recognise the humanity of the workforce by treating people well, displaying trust but having high expectations of employees.

I have often said that people are seldom better than you expect them to be, so it is wise to start with high expectations.

Focus

Finally, organisations need to concentrate their energies on doing the things that really matter. I have seen many high-energy, well-meaning organisations that run off trying to do twenty seven different things at once. That is a recipe for disaster. Cool heads need to prevail to ensure that the organisation doesn’t dissipate its energies in this way. Good organisations find the four or five initiatives that they feel will make the most difference and single-mindedly pursue those objectives.

Unsurprisingly when organisations make headway on these key objectives many other achievements follow in their wake.

In my career as a leader, two of the most influential writers on leadership were Peter Senge,  the founding chairperson of the Society for Organizational Learning, and Warren Bennis who was an organisational consultant and author, widely regarded as a pioneer of the contemporary field of Leadership studies.

I will share with you some of their thoughts.

Peter Senge wrote:

Because of our obsession with how leaders behave and with the interactions of leaders and followers, we forget that in its essence leadership is about learning how to shape the future. Leadership exists when people are no longer victims of circumstances but participate in creating new circumstances. When people operate in this domain of generative leadership, day by day, they come to a deepening understanding of, “How the universe actually works”. This is the real gift of leadership. It’s not about positional power; it’s not about accomplishments; it’s ultimately not even about what we do. Leadership is about creating a domain in which human beings continually deepen their understanding of reality and become more capable of participating in the unfolding of the world. Ultimately, leadership is about creating new realities.

In my career, in order that I could articulate what a desirable future might look like I frequently consulted with futurists and academics who interrogated the future, When I was appointed in 1986 to manage a new power station Callide “B“I instituted a study to envision what the ideal power station might look like in the year 2,000. We named this futuristic concept PS 2000. It became the vehicle for progressing our thinking about management concepts and the appropriate use of technology. It helped me shape the direction of Callide “B”.

But then in 1991 I was appointed to lead the next new Queensland Power Station, Stanwell Power Station. PS 2000 then became our template. This power station was destined to have the best management practices and the most constructive use of technology of any power station in Australia. Indeed we even received international accolades for our productivity and culture.

That was largely because we had devoted considerable resources towards creating a transformational view of the future and had a cogent model (PS 2000) to articulate it and inspire our employees.

As I have intimated, conventional management is about refining the present whereas leadership is about manufacturing the future.

For example I have always had doubts about the Total Quality Movement (TQM) which was so popular in the 80’s and 90’s. As suggested TQM provides managers with a useful refining tool and its strict application will no doubt improve organizational performance. But TQM locks you into refining what you’ve got and it provides few insights into how engage the future. So in essence applying TQM would likely make you the most efficient 1990’s organisation but it is virtually blind the future. There is not much point being the best 1990’s organisation when the world has moved on to 2025 and now has other imperatives.

But in essence leadership is about getting employees aligned with the purpose of the enterprise. Good things happen when employees want to do their best to help the organisation succeed.

This is such a different environment form that where people feel compelled to undertake their tasks because of fear of an authoritarian management.

As the old aphorism asserted “One volunteer is worth ten pressed men”!

What differentiates leaders from managers is the ability to influence others – not the ability to direct, to coerce or to manipulate, but the ability to gain the voluntary commitment of employees to the purpose of the enterprise. There is no comparison between the enthusiasm, dedication and productivity of a volunteer who has bought into the ideals and the vision of the organisation and a conscript who at best is a reluctant follower of orders. The volunteer has internalised motivation, whereas the conscript only contributes whilst there is someone directing them.

Finally, I mentioned Warren Bennis above as an inspirational writer on leadership. Here is what he had to say:

An essential ingredient in organisational leadership is that the leader pulls rather than pushes people along. A pull style of influence works by attracting and energizing people to enrol in an exciting vision of the future. It motivates through our identification, rather than through rewards and punishment. The leaders in an organisation articulate and, if possible, embody the ideals towards which the organisation strives. They enrol themselves in a vision of that idea, as attainable as their behaviour displays, and exemplify the idea in action.

But it would be remiss of me to suggest that my success as a leader was entirely my own doing. I was fortunate enough along the way to co-opt a dozen or so wonderful colleagues who were prepared to take the risk with me of breaking from the orthodoxy to promote a new way of leading and managing.  They have my eternal gratitude and it gives me some satisfaction to observe how their own careers have subsequently prospered.