Leadership key in halting drift to Aust

Bridget Beattie. Photo / Supplied

Kiwi bosses need to keep their workforces informed and engaged if they want to avoid losing staff overseas, says an Australian-based management expert.

Bridget Beattie, a regional manager for global consultancy firm Right Management, said keeping staff engaged involved a mix of management and leadership.

"You've got to make sure your staff don't have a reason to look offshore," she said. "You've got to keep them happy, and nurtured, and let them know where they are going individually, and where the company is going."

Beattie, who grew up on the North Shore, said many New Zealand companies needed to apply a mix of leadership and management if they wanted to avoid losing staff to Australia.

Management, she said, involved recruitment, inducting and overseeing the performance of employees, while leadership involved motivating, direction-setting and engagement.

"I think leadership in Australia has much more of an emphasis," she said. "Australian corporates really get the difference between leadership and management ... some New Zealand companies probably do pretty well too, but a lot of them don't."

Managers needed to avoid keeping staff in the dark about their career progression, she said.

"It's about painting a picture of where the opportunities are for that individual in the organisation, and how what they do contributes to the overall success of the business."

Younger employees often wanted variety in the tasks they were assigned, she added.

Beattie said management in New Zealand lacked "processes" and was often "outcome focused". "I don't think we have a lot of processes here," she said. "I honestly don't think [New Zealand managers] think it through."

Australian managers paid careful attention to process diagrams and well-considered business methodology. Their Kiwi counterparts, on the other hand, preferred to take the "shortest route between A and B".

Beattie said Kiwi businesses needed to pay attention to their scale if New Zealand's economy was ever to catch up with Australia's.

"Australia is always thinking about scale."

However, the often-mooted Kiwi argument that Australia's seemingly boundless natural resources meant New Zealand would never catch up with its neighbour was a defeatist attitude.

Beattie said there was a flip side to New Zealanders' "outcome focused" tendencies - it made Kiwis some of the best innovators in the world.

"At the end of the day we are the clever country, so let's keep being clever."