Dear Human Resources

Our regular columnist, Aidan Stoate, CEO New Zealand at Inspire Group, shares his heartfelt insights into leading people.

What is always close but never actually arrives?

The answer is not, in this case, the public transport you’ve been patiently waiting for on your morning commute.

It is, of course, the ‘future’. This often-abstract concept of the ‘yet to come’, the promise of change. Something new, different, improved.

Even though it can never truly ‘arrive’ in a literal sense, the prospect of a brighter future is important in a workplace context. It enables organisations to continually optimise by identifying and implementing initiatives that strive for better outcomes than might be possible in the present day. This is what drives operational efficiency, enhances culture, elevates performance and inspires a more positive employee experience.

But building a better future, much like that morning commute, is never just a simple case of leaving where you currently are to be transported seamlessly to a new location. Aiming for better is typically a messier process, characterised by a sequence of delays, detours, traffic jams and breakdowns: factors that are traditionally outside of our sphere of control.

Even when everyone is on the bus, and the vehicle is moving, it can feel like slow and painful progress edging towards our destination. So how do we shift focus to incremental progress rather than an unrealistic endpoint that might not be within reach through a simple (or single) journey?

Using the concept of performance may be a helpful way to address this question. Let’s say we want our bus to have the best opportunity to reach its target destination safely, on time and without major incident. Certain protocols will influence this goal, for example: a skilled driver with adequate experience in navigating the roads; a vehicle that has been regularly serviced and maintained; a ticketing system that operates accurately and efficiently. These, along with several other factors, help to ensure the performance of the service through regular incremental initiatives, even if they do not guarantee that the destination will be reached in the way that was initially intended.

Performance, in this context, can be thought of as your best opportunity to reduce risk, rather than a watertight method of mitigating it completely.

When we shift this thinking to an organisational context, it can be an empowering motivator for people’s development. High performance in the workplace is directly attributed to your organisational resilience. When that unplanned road closure threatens to ruin the entire journey, a capable driver with the knowledge to find a different route will ensure a potentially major issue is reduced to a more manageable inconvenience.

Unlike the ‘future’, developing teams to perform at their best is not an abstract notion. The optimum time to grow your people is in the here and now. Find the tools and techniques that will incrementally build their capability, so they are able to respond to constantly changing conditions, whatever the future may hold!

Aidan Stoate is the New Zealand CEO of Inspire Group, an award-winning learning design consultancy that delivers worldclass solutions to organisations globally. Aidan has a passion for helping organisations improve their culture and performance through innovative learning and development interventions. As an ICF-accredited organisational coach, Aidan provides subject-matter expertise for the design and delivery of leadership programmes, while leading the Inspire Group New Zealand business across all projects and disciplines. Having led organisations and teams in the United Kingdom, South-East Asia, North America and Australasia, Aidan brings a nuanced perspective while promoting inclusive, engaging and contextualised solutions that drive genuine behaviour change and strategic benefits.