NZ managers can foot it with best

BY VICKI JAYNE

As a nation, New Zealand is only just starting to discover and explore its own unique voice - a reality that applies to business as much as the arts.

A mix of cultural cringe, self-effacement and lack of confidence means we are more likely to eagerly ingest the latest management theories and stories from Britain or the United States than explore and appreciate our home-grown versions.

It took a couple of newly arrived business academics to spot this gap and recognise we have some interesting stories to tell - as Canadian Brad Jackson explains.

He arrived in 1999 to take up a position as senior lecturer with the School of Business and Public Management at Victoria University in Wellington.

"Our first day in New Zealand, my family visited Te Papa museum and I thought: this is interesting. Then we discovered The Warehouse, picked Hubbard cereals off the supermarket shelf and realised that a lot of this stuff was well ahead of what was happening in North America.

"What struck me was how progressive many organisations here were - which wasn't how New Zealand had been positioned to me."

He found common ground with another new arrival, Australian Ken Parry, associate professor of management at Victoria and director of the Centre for the Study of Leadership.

The result: a book entitled The Hero Manager: learning from New Zealand's top chief executives (Penguin, $34.95).

It tells the stories of nine CEOs. Picking them wasn't hard.

The same names just kept popping up: Dame Margaret Bazley (former chief executive of the Ministry of Social Policy); Roderick Deane (former head of Telecom); George Hickton (Tourism NZ); Dick Hubbard (cereal king); Peter Hubscher (Montana Wines); Ralph Norris (ASB); Sir Gil Simpson (Aoraki Corporation); Dame Cheryll Sotheran (Te Papa); and Stephen Tindall (The Warehouse).

As Parry points out, this is a book about New Zealanders as much as about managers.

All different people, with disparate philosophies, politics and management styles, they have a distinctive made-in-NZ flavour.

All grew up here and have a strong allegiance to the country, says Jackson.

"It's not like there's a subset of values they all share, but there are common influences around hard work, sticking to things, not wanting to shout about their achievements.

"They were all uncomfortable with the hero manager appellation."

The latter perhaps links with an identified characteristic of the local management scene: its low level of "power distance" from employees.

Partly a function of scale, partly the Kiwi sense of egalitarianism, it can be a two-edged sword, says Parry.

"Where there's a greater reliance on titles and formal distance between positions, you're less exposed.

"In New Zealand, you really have to earn the respect of your staff."

The plus is that it gives Kiwis a certain advantage in the new management order where informality, flatter corporate structures and more visible leadership are lauded.

Kiwi managers seem to do naturally what American managers have to learn in order to be more in touch with employees, says Parry.

It makes this country a great training ground for overseas managers, he says.

"Here, you can't be anonymous and impersonal even if you want to be."

George Hickton opts for very visible management by instituting a completely open-plan office.

Sir Gil Simpson creates an environment in which a whole range of individual creatives can thrive: "We need a society in New Zealand which is about not just being tolerant of difference but embracing it.

"Diversity is how we make our living."

It is a quote the authors say typifies one of five themes explored in the book, that of fostering personal, organisational and national growth.

%The others are: building compelling visions for your employees; blending corporate ambition with commercial discipline; managing creatively the competing needs of demanding stakeholders; and working constructively with the media.

%Within this framework, they tease out interesting local angles on global management themes.

Peter Hubscher on vision, for instance: "A vision is a direction, not the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. You know you'll never get there but you keep moving towards where you would like it to be".

This belief in positive outcomes and a "cup half-full" approach to future direction is a mark of the transformational leader or hero manager.

These are people who can inspire and motivate while channelling their ambitions into the organisation rather than self.

They are traits of people American researcher Jim Collins calls "level-five" leaders, the most effective at achieving organisational success.

The New Zealand environment may help nurture level-five leaders by knocking out excess narcissism.

The me-first leaders don't have the staying power of the book's subjects, all of whom put in the hard yards on the way up.

How they did it and what they learned are business stories worth the telling.

Forget the cultural cringe. There is some very good management material being made here - a realisation the book's authors hope will boost confidence in the future.

%We may not be able to afford top overseas managers but we do have a good internal resource to draw from.

%"Sure, we need to be open to new ideas and bring new talent in from offshore," says Parry. "But we also need to recognise we have a system here that generates some top-level managers who also have a passion for New Zealand."

* vjayne@iconz.co.nz