Practice makes perfect

By MARK STORY

Since taking over Air New Zealand's reins two years ago, managing director Ralph Norris has declared war on the command and control leadership style that once characterised the airline. Under his guidance the airline's metamorphosis from an authoritarian leadership model is well under way.

But Norris won't call the battle won until the national carrier is a lot closer in behaviour and culture to the ASB leadership model he helped to create as former chief executive.

"Companies can no longer get away with telling staff to check-in their brains along with their lunch in the morning, then simply tell them what to do," says Norris.

For too long, he says, Air New Zealand focused on flying planes, not people. His efforts to refocus on customers is redefining the airline's leadership requirements as he replaces the former dictatorial leadership model with people power.

"I'm trying to get more behavioural than prescriptive," says Norris. "I want to see people being more adaptive and using much greater discretion. The key is to get the right people into the right roles."

And for Norris, and many business leaders like him, experience and common sense are the greatest instructors - not management themes repackaged by academics.

Having concluded they do little more than glorify their author, Norris has relegated most self-help leadership books to his bottom-drawer.

Results of a recent United States leadership study of 100 business leaders from 92 multinational firms suggest companies the world over have reached similar conclusions. The research by recruitment consultants Lee Hecht Harrison concluded that off-the-shelf leadership models popularised during the 1980s by self-appointed gurus, consultants, books and courses are all past their use-by date.

What management is left with, says Diane Willis, national director of Lee Hecht Harrison's Australian leadership development practice, is a hybrid of conventional thinking and a gut instinct for what works, based on personal experience. An admission by most respondents that there's no time to do anything more than make it up as they go along, proves to Willis that organisations struggle to develop leadership, and that no single model has all the answers.

"I rarely come across leaders with significant long-term vision," she says. "When asked about their own leadership development programme, we usually get a blank."

Today's academic leadership thinking lacks credibility, argues Norris, because while the managers of so many organisations say the right things according to all the theory, they behave completely differently.

He instantly dismisses suggestions that Air New Zealand could be accused of doing just that, given its stand on drug and alcohol testing.

"It's spurious to draw any parallel between our move away from authoritarian leadership and random drug and alcohol testing. The six dismissals (four drugs and two alcohol) we've had in the last 18 months gave me real cause for concern.

"Ensuring zero drug and alcohol tolerance during the workplace applies to everyone, even me. It's in the best interests of staff and customers. This is about stakeholder safety, it's not a privacy issue."

Results of a recently released New Zealand Institute of Management/Wevers study into human resources management and organisational effectiveness suggest there is indeed a gap between business leaders' rhetoric and practice. By their own admission, New Zealand managers are only 60-65 per cent effective.

The survey identifies a gap between the leadership that managers say their organisations need and their ability to deliver it. It also suggests companies are too focused on short-term financial results, struggle with staff development, and are short-sighted when it comes to developing long-term vision and values.

Former institute chairman Doug Matheson suspects this is because many CEOs refuse to acknowledge that a lot of leadership is situational and requires more staff participation than they're comfortable with.

But he says CEOs are replacing the academic model with a willingness to come together to share proven experiences. "Learning sets", as such meetings are called, are popular in Australia, while in New Zealand it tends to be done less formally, through networking breakfasts and lunches.

"Effective leadership is not about the tough guy at the top who knows everything," Matheson says. "The average organisation needs a CEO who's a conductor as opposed to a sergeant major. The role of leadership is creating an environment that enables others to perform."

Norris believes CEOs must realise their behaviour becomes the hallmark of the organisations they represent. Instead of donning a personality suit, he says CEOs should learn to be themselves.

"If they lose their reputation, they lose everything. That's why it's so important to be open, highly accessible, and stand behind mistakes when they're made - these are the hallmarks of true integrity."

But he doesn't believe leadership through delegation, empowerment and teambuilding will ever deliver fully on outcomes, unless it's based on the golden rule. After all, he says that's where real judgment, integrity, humility, vision and a genuine concern for others really comes from.

What forced Norris to re-think Air New Zealand's leadership model was a realisation that in today's business landscape, a traditional approach to authority, decision-making and planning is impotent.

And Willis agrees. The agility with which organisations need to move between ambiguous and often uncertain demands, she argues, is forcing their migration from dictatorial to more behaviour-driven leadership models.

"The business schools still have a good slice of the leadership development market because they're seen as low-risk," says Willis. "But it's value for money CEOs want, and I'm not seeing any long-term commitment to programmes.

"The search for a different approach to leadership development recognises a gap between the theory covered in most academic programmes and the transfer of skills back into the workplace."

While business school theory is useful for base knowledge, Matheson believes CEOs and managers are progressively looking to each other for real-life case-studies of what works.

Also forcing a rethink of command and control leadership, explains Matheson, is the emerging demand from workers for self actualisation and work-life balance.

With most of his staff well under 40, Vodafone CEO Tim Miles admits the new thinking about work has significantly influenced his own approach to leadership. What traditional leadership models fail to recognise, says Miles, is that in the age of the individual, leadership is about people. "It's more about horses for courses and deciding what action's right for any given time."

Like Norris, Miles doesn't follow any particular leadership philosophy. The closest he's got to formal reading on the subject lately is autobiographies by South African leader Nelson Mandela and the former soviet boss Mikhail Gorbachev.

With no real interest in formal leadership stuff, Miles looks to fellow CEOs and other business networks for insights into what works. He says more enlightened thinking is around balancing the hard side of business with the human and emotional element - at Vodafone he calls this "being in zone".

In an attempt to match existing leadership capability with the leadership required, Miles, together with his Australian colleagues, recently invested more than $4 million developing an inhouse training programme, Leadership in Action. Over the 19-day course, leaders at varying levels within the organisation get to grow their leadership capacity through personal development.

More practical than academic, the course is being delivered by numerous sources, including an actor and consulting firms.

Miles is convinced it's customer experience that differentiates Vodafone in the marketplace. That's why two-thirds of his leadership programme focuses on personal development.

"We want our people to be empowered to make a lot of the calls themselves," says Miles. "We can't measure a profit and loss against it but we know it's the right thing to do.

"There's a lot more room for companies to be people-focused - that's where competitive advantage comes from."