Business Mentor: Leaders share skills and perspectives

Q. I own a small business which is growing quickly. I am aware that I need to retain my fabulous staff and to grow them with the business. Where do I go to learn about leadership, and how other organisations do this?

Sarah Trotman, small-business sector specialist, replies:


A. You can go about increasing your leadership skills in several ways.

Leadership is about relationships and people, while management is about systems and processes.

A range of leadership programmes is offered by the various universities and management organisations.

Auckland University has Excelerator, its Leadership Institute which runs a programme for mid-career leaders. The Business School at the university also has short courses on leadership and different aspects of management.

The NZ Institute of Management also has a range of courses, and the Chamber of Commerce and Employers and Manufacturers Association also provide opportunities for skill development by small-business people.

One of the more interesting programmes was launched this year by Leadership NZ. It is for mid-career leaders across the sectors and across New Zealand, bringing together about 25 mid-career leaders for 22 days over the year.

It is focused on a series of conversations with leaders about issues of importance to the country, and differs from any other programme in that it is issues-based rather than skills-based.

The programme offers the opportunity to reflect on the conversations and share skills, experience and perspectives with other mid-career leaders and with many key leaders. It will give you a lifelong network of similar leaders.

In the recent publication of Leadership NZ called Leaders, one of the participants, Chris Fogarty, who is business development director for Bell Gully, says:

"Debating the merits of New Zealand's economic, cultural or social development in a room that consists of people ranging from the CFO of one of our largest organisations to an Anglican vicar has proved more educational than any academic case study pored over in a lecture theatre ever could.

"I've learned a lot about different leadership styles and approaches that would have taken me years to be exposed to, if at all. It's clear Leadership NZ will also give you a fantastic legacy of a diverse network of opinions and views to draw upon in the future."

The challenge is to ensure that we each take the responsibility to identify the potential young leaders for such programmes.

There is also a need to have leadership development programmes within every school.

And there is a need to identify opportunities within the community for development of leadership capability.

In the US, many successful leaders had been involved with the Peace Corps. We need similar opportunities for our young leaders overseas and within the community.

Mentoring programmes such as the Future Leaders Programme run by the YWCA have also proved to be highly successful. We need many more such programmes, accessible each year to thousands of young New Zealanders.

We then need to ensure that our recruitment programmes are capable of identifying leadership skills. We need to stop promoting those with technical skills into leadership roles that require quite different skills and experience.

We also need to ensure that our workplaces are environments that nurture leadership - we need to get rid of the hierarchy, to push out responsibility and accountability, to unleash the leadership potential of our young people coming through.