My Birthday

I've just celebrated my fortieth birthday with some of my family and best friends at a pub in Melbourne. It was a terrific party as the photo will attest, but what really struck me was a billboard that I read early this week that said:

How old would you act if you didn't know how old you were?

So this got me to thinking. At first blush, it seemed to be saying something similar to the expression that was sometimes hurled at me as a child to ... act my age. But there's something else going on as well, isn't there? And it's also more complicated than the cliched expression that says ... you're only as old as you feel.

I don't know if it was just that I had turned 40 and was feeling perhaps a little more introspective, but the more I thought about this billboard, the more inspirational I found it.

Of course our upbringing, our educational opportunities, our luck, the friends we make, the jobs we have, they all impact on our lives to greater or lesser degrees. This conditioning goes a big way in shaping how we think about ourselves, and how others think about us. Age is but one component. But think about it, if you didn't know how old you were, how old would you act?

But it's more, so much more ...

If you didn't know how smart you were, how smart could you be? If you didn't know that you had failed before, how brave would you be that next time? If you didn't know how happy you were, how happy could you be? If you didn't know what your job was, what job would you do?

All of these questions have been important questions for me to answer at some point in my life. As I was thinking about this advertising billboard, it also provided a springboard for what I wanted to say to my friends and family who could come along to my birthday party.

The billboard reminded me of another quote that I had read somewhere that basically said that if we celebrated the anniversary of our death instead of the anniversary of our birth, how differently would we look at our lives?

Now, I've always been a big fan of wakes - it must be that Irish heritage that lurks a couple of generations ago. And it seems to me that wakes often provide the forum for everyone to remember someone's life, often the funny moments, over a few drinks. So I thought that a wake - turned on its head - would provide me with a wonderful opportunity to tell some stories about the people most close to me.

As I celebrated my birthday, I told a range of stories about funny moments in the lives of my friends and family and how what these friends and family members meant to me. We may not always get the chance to say those sorts of things to the people close to us, and I'm old enough now to realise that.

What would you say?

Directive Leadership

A couple of weeks ago I was speaking to a PhD researcher doing some work comparing the leadership styles of Australians and Americans. She asked me if I had ever given a direct order while I was in the military.

I had to think pretty hard about that question. I had certainly given a number of direct orders on the parade ground, and in contexts similar to that - ie when controlling large groups of people in synchronised activities. But otherwise I have never had to use that phrase so beloved in the movies " ... that's a direct order".

The researcher told me that my recollections were pretty similar to many other Australian military leaders, but very different to those from an American military leader background. Why was this the case?

At the risk of over-simplification, let me try and explain it through the use of situational leadership.

Paul Hersey and Kenneth Blanchard popularised the model of situational leadership in the 1960s. Even if you don't like the One Minute Manager series of books, you have to admire the skill of Blanchard and others in distilling some pretty complex skills down into readily understood - and therefore used - models.

One of the four basic leadership styles defined in situational leadership is the "Directive" style. This type of leadership style sees the leader providing specific instructions and then closely supervising the accomplishment of any task. It is the classic case of providing a direct order.

Of course this kind of leadership style is entirely appropriate ... in some situations, and with some teams. Unfortunately, in my experience, it is also frequently over-used. If your team are highly competent professionals, then constantly directing them is likely to get right up their noses pretty quickly. Similarly if they are highly committed and enthusiastic about their tasks, then the directive style is likely to quickly diminish that commitment.

Situational Leadership suggests that the leadership style must be relevant to the specific circumstance in which the leader is working. In other words, your leadership style must relate directly to the level of competence and commitment your team members exhibit. Directive leadership is only appropriate when the team has both low competence and low commitment, otherwise the coaching, supporting or delegating leadership styles will be much more effective.

From my experience, most of the teams in Australia that I have worked with are both competent and committed. Some of the military teams I have worked with have been exceptional in both areas. In these instances it's been much more important to engage the team members to take advantage of their experience, their professional skills, their initiative and their drive so that we could develop a collaborative plan. This quickly became "our" plan, not "my" plan, one where success and responsibility were shared.

That's part of the reason I have never had to emphasise a task by stating ... that's a direct order.

Bad Bosses

Here's a headline ... there's a lot of bad bosses, managers and leaders in businesses and organisations worldwide.

Well, it's probably not such a headline. It doesn't surprise many of us really, does it?

Does it matter? Bad bosses can still get good results can't they?

It depends ...

Certainly it depends on what and how you measure good results. A bad boss may indeed be able to get some good business results - but not over time, and certainly not in the same organisation.

But the bottom line question is probably, will having good bosses in the business or organisation get better results?

Now, defining what a boss, a manager and a leader needs to do in a short blog is another challenge of brevity. But let's condense the role of a boss into two perhaps overly simplistic generalisations. For this blog's sake, let's assume that the role of a boss involves:

* managing tasks (the "technical" management skills: setting objectives, planning, implementing, controlling); and,
* managing people (the "relationship" management skills).

And let's make another assumption, that the business schools, universities and vocational training providers can do a reasonable job in training bosses in the first of these two roles - technical management.

So my question becomes, if a boss is good at managing people, does that mean that business results will improve?

An article in the Australian Financial Review on Friday 20 April 2007 (page 68) provides part of the answer. The title of the article? 'Staff flee bad bosses, not companies'. (http://www.afr.com/home/)

The article opens by stating:

The historically low unemployment rate that is making it difficult for all sectors to find quality candidates, especially among the small pool of accounting and finance professionals, should encourage organisations to focus on their internal culture'.

In an Australian context, not only is the labour market tight - particularly for young professionals, knowledge workers and specific trade qualified workers - demographics point to the fact that the labour market is only going to become even tighter. The implications should be obvious. Attracting talented workers will be challenging enough, retaining them in a work culture of bad bosses will be impossible.

The executive general manager of Chandler Macleod's Recruitment Solutions (http://www.chandlermacleod.com.au) discussed a recent survey in the Australian Financial Review article that found that a whopping 82% of workers resigned from their jobs because of bad bosses!

How do we get good bosses from bad bosses?

My perspective is that many organisations spend a lot of time either providing in-house training on the technical management and job requirements - or focusing on these skills at the recruitment stage. But, very little time is spent on developing or selecting for the relationship management skills.

To me it's clear. Leadership, team and emotional intelligence skills are critical if an organisation is going to develop its bosses. If the business chooses not to, then its increasingly valuable team members will almost certainly choose to work somewhere else.

What's your organisation choosing to do?