Home-grown best for encouraging and developing company leaders

By VICKI JAYNE

To ensure it has the leadership to fuel its impressive growth, Kiwi Cooperative Dairies Group does its own thing, rather than importing a cookie-cutter model.

It has to do with authenticity.

Leadership is not a quality you can haul from a designer hanger marked "Harvard" - it comes from within. As group chief executive Craig Norgate puts it: "It's not something you can turn off as you walk out the office door, it's about the inner you."

This holistic view of leadership is not the stuff of weekend courses or even a three-month intensive.

"It's a journey and it's about continually growing yourself because the demands will continually change," says Norgate. "It does become self-fulfilling in that, in terms of the Kiwi Group, the greater depth of leadership we create, the more they demand from you. And that's enormously healthy."

Kiwi started working with the Palmerston North-based Centre for Vision and Leadership three years ago to develop a programme that draws on overseas concepts but builds on the company's own culture, adapting to its needs and values.

The company uses the model of a diamond with four points - vision, courage, reality and service. It has a fifth dimension, "inner greatness." The programme aims to extend the diamond along each of its four points, thereby expanding that inner core.

Each dimension is worth an article in itself, and Norgate has already written these for the company in-house newsletter, Milky Whey.

"These are not just four distinct points on a diamond, they're all inter-related," explains Norgate.

"The service concept relates not only to staff but to the wider community and that deeper sense of values fits into both courage and service dimensions.

"Intellectual and personal honesty are key elements in terms of credibility."

Understanding what this model is about helps to create a common language - a vision the company can share in. That's vital given the pace of growth and change in the local and global dairy industry.

Kiwi's own growth has been more than 25 per cent a year compounding over the past eight years.

The proposed mega-merger with New Zealand Dairy Group will create New Zealand's largest corporate entity.

"The biggest issue for us is developing the critical mass of leaders we need," says Norgate.

"Because we are growing constantly and rapidly, our ability to manage an increasingly bigger business is very much dictated by our ability to grow people fast enough.

"And it's a lot easier to grow your own than to bring someone else in and teach them the culture. We have enough new talent coming in with our various acquisitions anyway, so it's more about integrating those people into our leadership programme."

The programme involves several elements. First up is the "diagnosis" to determine an individual's strengths and weaknesses. Then comes a series of workshops based around the personal "foundations" for leadership, including 360-degree leadership practices feedback, leadership project selection and a commitment to developing self and others.

Further workshops focus on the leadership "diamond" and involve an emotional intelligence survey and feedback.

Focus then shifts to "specific leadership skills," addressing such areas as leadership change, leading cultural change, leadership mentoring and communicating as a leader.

A "buddy" system partners each participant with someone especially chosen for challenge rather than comfort. The eight-month programme also includes a specific leadership project initiated within the company or, in some cases, the wider community.

Ongoing elements include mentoring, day-long workshops every quarter, and e-mail support. The programme rollout was top down, with Norgate first in the firing line for his 360 degrees worth of feedback on how he stacks up in the leadership stakes. While the people side of leadership comes fairly easy to Norgate, achieving an "A" on Kiwi's leadership scale is a big task, involving not only applying leadership actions personally, but developing them in others and affecting the organisation as a whole.

Although only 35, Norgate's people skills have already been put to use in several management roles (the first when he was 20), and honed through top overseas business schools.

The latter remain part of leadership development for company employees but are carefully vetted - the content of some just doesn't measure up.

Norgate reckons that while lacking a tradition of corporate culture, New Zealanders are strong in such areas as adaptability (thanks in part to the 80s restructuring) and global perspective.

Experience at overseas management programmes provides people both with learning and the confidence that their home-grown abilities do measure up globally.

"You can read the textbook on what's happening today but that doesn't give us any competitive advantage. What we are aiming to do is create models of the moment, anticipate trends and be ahead of the competition. That's the key to long-term success in business, and that's the way we think about leadership - what will tomorrow's textbook say?"

* Vicki Jayne can be contacted at vjayne@iconz.co.nz.