Gill South: All the right movies offer plenty of cues to better leadership

Just as everyone needs a holiday every now and then to recharge, managers need to experience a fresh way of thinking occasionally - something to make them completely recalibrate the way they do things.

A chance to do that was offered this week, when the Executive Connection (TEC) - an organisation for CEOs and top managers which meets regularly to provide peer support - ran an event with international leadership expert David Hutton.

Simon O'Shaughnessy, chair and counsellor of the Auckland TEC group with which Hutton was doing workshops, says his group of CFOs and GMs were looking for guidance on emotional intelligence.

These leaders, ranging in age from the mid 30s to early 50s, still have 10 to 15 years of "business change" in front of them, says O'Shaughnessy.

They are also looking for ideas on grooming successors. "They have too much work to do, they are interested in learning ways of people around them taking on more responsibility," says O'Shaughnessy, an experienced business mentor who has run large businesses in Britain.

"A lot of these guys can do strategic development, planning, the financial side, but they are interested in, 'How can I communicate and be nimble in my thinking?'," he says.

"They are not after more information, they are looking for practical outcomes, with relevancy to their daily lives. We've got enough data, we've got enough information."

Hutton, a computer science PhD and an experienced former CEO, travels the world talking to groups about adaptive leadership, using film to help managers visualise the concept. He argues "first, leadership is not just about logic, it is also about emotion, about behaviour. Secondly, many of us are visual learners, we learn by observing and imitating. I believe that we communicate leadership largely through facial expression, body language, eye contact - the message is the importance in how we communicate leadership."

Hutton believes leaders who try to be a friend to their teams will not succeed. Using film to illustrate this, he shows groups an old black and white movie, 12 O'Clock High, a Harvard Business School favourite, which features a leader who is too close to his men in a wartime bomber group. He is "excessively" leading by example, says Hutton, trying to lead each mission and manage the organisation at the same time.

He gets replaced by a similar man who chooses different behaviour by organising a process, formation, accountability and consequences leadership to the group, delivering a much higher performance. Most importantly, he holds them accountable when one of the team breaks formation or bombs late, says Hutton.

"One of the problems with the people I work with is the over-identification of employees by leaders," says Hutton. It is common with managers, and an impediment to getting things accomplished, he says. One common situation is when somebody is promoted and has problems managing previous colleagues.

"We are not doing these employees any favours by trying to protect them," says Hutton. The best way to serve them is to distance yourself and focus on getting the job done, he says.

Does this mean a return to a hierarchical structure? Everything is a question of degrees, says Hutton, who does not advocate an isolating form of leadership as used by the explorer Robert Falcon Scott.

He uses another film, Shackleton, which describes how 28 men led by Ernest Shackleton were stuck in ice with no obvious way of surviving their expedition to the South Pole. The film shows how Shackleton creates a mission for the group, not only caring for them but creating a situation where the men are caring for each other. He never loses the respect of his men. The film is excellent at illustrating how to get the best performance out of young people, says Hutton, something today's managers must master.

"One of the huge mistakes being made as a consequence of the recession, is that business leaders are saying: 'These young punks (Generation Y) are going to have to shape up now'." But this tough attitude won't inspire "buy-in", says Hutton.

In his workshops the leadership expert compares the film stories with his own experiences in the corporate world. "Anybody who claims that their career has always been a staircase upwards is fooling themselves." You learn from things not going the way you'd like, he says.

The consultant contrasts Shackleton to a gruelling nine-month period when he was parachuted in to the job of CEO of Terminal Data, a large computer company in Canada, in a bid to turn it round. The company's many problems included a bid for unionisation.

Hutton began what he called the birthday group, taking a cross-section of people who shared the same birthday, and spending a morning in the cafeteria with them, where they could talk about the company. "It was very effective - there was a great curiosity among people about what happened at the birthday meeting," he says.

"People were looking for reassurance in terms of employment, the future of the organisation, but also people wanted to know how come the bathrooms didn't get cleaned often enough."

"In the end, the unions didn't succeed in getting a foothold."

Gill South is an Auckland freelance writer