Issue 4
ASIA-PACIFIC LEADER The E-Magazine for Leaders
Preparing For The Unexpected A practical guide for handling disaster
5 things highly eective leaders do
Are great leaders doing something that you are not?
Why poor leadership is a $5bn problem The true cost of poor leadership in New Zealand
The 4 stages of success The guide to going from failure to success
New Zealand Leadership Courses
Email NZ@EliteLD.co.nz to reserve your place today 2
From the editor The true cost of poor leadership? Everyone understands that leadership is important but how many people truly appreciate how elite leadership can influence the profitability of a business?
In this edition we look at research that attempts to quantify the cost of not having quality leadership within an organisation and the results may surprise you.
This month I had the pleasure of visiting Dunedin and what became perfectly clear was just how blessed I am to be able to do a job that I love and also be able to visit such beautiful places at the same time.
On the subject of beautiful places by the time you read this I will be visiting Fiji again, a place that is starting to feel like a home away from home. This time I will be in Nadi
in order to deliver a leadership workshop.
Fiji has become such an important part of my life that I've decided to launch a Fiji specific website. www.Leadership.com.fj will contain details of a series of leadership and business workshops that are specifically designed for the Fiji market. The aim is to provide Fiji businesses with the tools to compete not just domestically but in the international market. More courses will be announced in the coming months.
Have a wonderful month.
Email: mark@eliteld.co.nz Twitter: Mark_wager
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Inside Asia-Pacific leader magazine
Preparing For The Unexpected 07
Five Things Highly Effective Leaders Do 10
The $5bn Cost of Poor Leadership 12
The Four Stages of Success 15 Images courtesy of:
alexisdc at FreeDigitalPhotos.net Chaiwat at FreeDigitalPhotos.net masterisolatedimages at FreeDigitalPhotos.net freedooom at FreeDigitalPhotos.net 4
Inspirational quotes
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Preparing For The Unexpected By Mark Wager
Considering how much work it takes to prepare for what we expect to happen in business it's not a surprise that we find it difficult to deal with the unexpected yet it's when we have to deal with the unexpected that we look to our leaders for guidance. Nothing is more unpredictable than nature. When nature decides to make us aware of her presence, whether it's in the form of an earthquake, a cyclone or floods, nature presents leaders and businesses the challenges to overcome. Like every challenge the probability of success increases in proportion to the amount of preparation you commit to.
Businesses have to make very difficult decisions about how to deal with any crisis and while business is not first on anyone's thoughts during these times it does raise some interesting questions as to how businesses need to plan for not only natural disasters but any event that could jeopardise it's future. In this article I look at what leaders can do in order to prepare for the unexpected.
No matter how important your business may be to you, people have to come first. Any decision you make during a crisis has to have the welfare of people at its very centre. Even if there's a 1% chance of danger to people then as a leader you have to take it as an absolute certainty and act accordingly.
Update your contacts list When Christchurch in New Zealand was struck by a serious earthquake five years ago I know several businesses who couldn't react effectively because the contact details of their employees were out of date. They couldn't get hold of their employees to confirm if they were ok and to advise what was happening with work. Ensure that you have the contact details of all your staff and emergency contact details and more importantly that these details are regularly updated.
People come first
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Information is the key Decisions can only be made effectively when you have access to the correct information. During times of crisis information is the key. Ensure you have access to the radio, television and if possible the internet. Social media tools such as Facebook and Twitter are invaluable as you are able to access information in real time. I recall being in one office and we had received an alert about a tornado heading our way. When we checked the usual met service websites they had crashed due to the large amounts of people visiting their sites. It was at this time that I went onto Twitter and found all the information I needed and it was in real time.
Clarity of communication During a business crisis you don't want your organisation to have many voices as the situation can change so rapidly that you need to limit the possibility of false information being released. Keep the communication coming from a single source and this information is being disseminated through various channels. Again social media can be invaluable to utilise tools like Twitter and Facebook to provide regular updates to your employees and your customers. Also ensure communication is regular as in stressful situations if there are gaps in communication people tend to fill their gaps with their own fears and concerns.
plan for any eventuality. Not only do they plan but they prepare as well. They have emergency plans in place that are available around the organisation and these plans are in place in order to ensure that the welfare of the staff is of paramount importance and the business can return to business as usual status as soon as possible. A lot of businesses have details of what to do in case of a fire but when was the last time you ran a drill? I know businesses who run through crisis scenarios in order to test their systems and to highlight any risk areas.
Ask yourself what would your business do in a crisis situation, how could you cope? What if there were no communication channels available? No electricity? Even if there's no leader? What happens to your customers, your staff? Don't wait to answer these questions until you have no option but to answer them. Take time and answer these crisis questions now and hope that you never have to action them but in an extremely rare case, if you find that you do then you might find that not only can you save your businesses but more importantly the welfare of your staff as well.
Plan and prepare Quality leaders do not become quality leaders by accident they have the ability to see ahead and 8
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Five Things Highly Effective Leaders Do By Mark Wager
They are the people we admire, they inspire their teams and take their organisations to levels that their competitors can't. We put these leaders up on a pedestal but they are just like the rest of us, I know this as I have the honour of working with world-class leaders and they have the same fears, concerns and self-doubts like the rest of us. They wake up, go to work and come home again but what they do while at work is different to other leaders.
Effective leaders do what other leaders won't in order that their teams achieve what other teams can't.
They Influence the influential The best leaders focus on their organisations greatest resource, their people. They spend 80% of their time talking to the 20% most influential employees. Note that I said the most influential employees because the most influential are not always the most senior. People are influenced in different ways. In 1959 psychologists John French and Bertram Raven produced the definitive study on influence. This study showed that the most influential people possess both expertise and strong personal qualities e.g. honesty,
integrity, trust worthy etc. It's worth noting that these qualities are not exclusive to management roles so the most influential people within an organisation may not necessarily be the management team. The best leaders recognise this and adapt their communication and manage their time accordingly.
They never stop learning If people think that leaders who approach me for personal coaching are leaders who are struggling in their roles and have issues that they need help with, then this is not true. In fact the typical person who approaches a Leadership coach is someone who is already successful and is already a good leader but has a desire to become a great leader and that's where someone like me steps in to help people to go from good to great. You would never find a top athlete without a coach and the same applies to world-class leaders. The beauty of knowledge is that the more you learn the more there is left to learn. Leadership is a complex topic and one in which new lessons are learnt every day. 10
You will never know everything but what you can achieve is to become a better leader today than you were yesterday. This is what highly effective leaders do
They don't criticise they offer solutions Leaders are responsible for the performance of their team and it's inevitable that there will be times that the team doesn't meet the expectations of their leader. In these circumstances it's common for leaders to criticise individuals. This is natural because the most prevalent way that we learn through our life is by reward and punishment. If we do things well we get a reward so we repeat the behaviour and if we don't do things well then we get punished so we don't repeat the behaviour. We were raised this way but this is how society operates as well. Highly effective leaders approach this differently. They never start by telling people off. If performance is poor, an effective leader only truly earns credibility by correcting rather than shouting about it.
They lead themselves before they lead others Highly effective leaders understand that in order to inspire people they themselves need inspiration. We all have had days when we wake up still tired, feel down with just no motivation. It's on these days that good leaders dig deep within themselves and find the motivation to walk onto the office with a smile on their face and desire and determination in their heart because they know their role as a leader means that it's not about what they say that counts but rather it's what they do that matters. For a team to be successful the team has to have complete trust in what
their leader says and this trust can only be built when they see their leader demonstrating the same behaviours that they want to see in the team. The best leaders lead the team by walking alongside them and not in front of them. They lead by example.
They create a purpose that's more valuable than money Money is a very effective motivator. Its a clear indication of how much the employer values the employee and everyone likes money. Yet highly effective leaders realise that there is a limitation to how far money motivates people. They know that by providing the team with a purpose that is greater than themselves they can encourage people to work way harder than what money can do. You see this in successful rugby teams like the All Blacks and the Chiefs the same can be found in the business world. Just over a decade ago, Microsoft, one of the worlds biggest companies, set out to create an on-line encyclopaedia for the Internet. They had all the correct financial incentives for their team and had access to all the best resources, yet despite all this they failed. Their model called Encarta closed down because of the popularity of Wikipedia. Wikipedia was formed by Jimmy Wales who attracted a worldwide collection of volunteers who committed hours of their time for no money whatsoever. For them the purpose was more valuable than money. They believed in what the leader believed which was that knowledge should be made available for everyone regardless of money, location or background.
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The $5bn Cost of Poor Leadership By Mark Wager A recent survey shows that poor leadership in the workplace is costing the New Zealand economy approximately $5 billion dollars a year.
In New Zealand there is a big disconnect between what we know leadership can be and the leadership employees experience in the workplace everyday. It's this disconnect that is costing companies money everyday and costing New Zealand as a country $5 billion dollars a year in lost productivity.
I've just completed a survey of employees in New Zealand and it showed that just over one in four employees (26%) rate their immediate manager or supervisor as a poor leader. They feel unmotivated, uninspired and not valued. In larger companies the situation is worse, within companies that have over 100 employees the number goes up to a third. The challenge that New Zealand companies face is that poor leadership impacts the productivity of their employees.
The National Bureau of Economic Research in the United States released a study entitled "The Value of Bosses" by Edward Lazear, Kathryn Shaw and Christopher Stanton. In a study of 23,878 employees and 1,940
Managers, it was found that there was a direct link between a manager's leadership skills and productivity. The top quality performing individuals were led by managers who had strong leadership skills. These individuals were 10% more productive than those whose managers were ranked as having poor leadership skills. The dierence was just over 10% in productivity. The better quality managers also had higher retention rates of employees which in turn reduced the cost of replacing employees. When you take into account recruitment costs, time for recruitment and lost productivity during training, the cost of replacing an employee is estimated to be around 1.5 times the departing employee's salary depending on their role within the company.
If you look at an economy that is losing a minimum of 10% productivity of 26-33% of the workforce then for a country the size of New Zealand poor leadership can be quantified as a $5 billion dollar problem, but why does this problem even exist?
The reason why so many poor leaders exist is not due to a lack of eort. 12
In fact in the same survey employees generally rated their immediate manager or supervisor as hard working with 58% of respondents rating their boss as extremely hardworking and only 2% as lazy. Managers in New Zealand work hard but fail to have the skills that motivate people. The issue is that people know about leadership but don't actually understand it and people can never become something that they don't understand.
We all recognise leadership when we see it. Whether it's a civil rights campaigner that stands up for what they believe in, a teacher that ignites a passion for learning in their students or when we watch our All Blacks win the World Cup against sides with much larger populations and resources than we have. We all know what leadership is but the majority of people don't understand it. There has been and currently is a lack of quality leadership training which not only has failed to develop quality leaders but also has masked the extent of the problem. Several managers in New Zealand don't believe that they are not leading their teams eectively, they are at a stage of competency called unconscious incompetence and they are unaware of what they don't know. They work hard and don't fully comprehend how much better they can be. In my experience of delivering leadership workshops around 9% of Managers rate themselves are being a poor leader, this 9% is at the second stage of competency which is conscious incompetence where they are aware of their weaknesses and once they are aware they can do something about it. This is the stage we need to get Managers in New Zealand up to and in order to do that we need to change how we develop our leaders.
How we train leaders is wrong. Traditionally leadership training was delivered like other training by identifying
the behaviours that will produce the results you want and teaching leaders those behaviours but these are based on old outdated leadership theories because in practice many find it hard to implement new behaviours or habits because of unconscious fixed beliefs, fears or ingrained habits so what happens is that when managers get back into the workplace they want to implement new behaviours but this change generally lasts just a few days. Ask anyone who has ever tried to lose weight just how diďŹƒcult it is to implement a set of new habits. Research has shown that if you don't implement your learning on a regular basis then there's a 90% chance that you will forget that learning after a month.
Learning leadership is not like learning anything else. Our behaviours and habits are so engrained in our psyche that in order to change you have to work on what drives those behaviours. For individuals you need to understand and work with their underlying psychology and with companies the culture in which they way their leaders to work within. If you can create the right culture then the behaviours will drive themselves. When this happens remarkable results occur and there is a great example within New Zealand. The All Blacks have created a culture that encourages leadership at all levels and as a result have achieved prolonged success. Legends have come and legends have gone but the All Blacks remain the leading rugby team in the world.
New Zealand is a beautiful country that regularly punches above its weight but we need to be aware that we can still achieve more. Eective leadership is the key to unlock this untapped potential. How we develop leaders within in the workplace is not just a question, it is in fact the $5 billion dollar question. 13
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The Four Stages of Success By Mark Wager
I'm honoured to be able to coach people to achieve success in their lives. While everyone has dierent goals and ambitions I've seen a similarity in what stages people progress through when they start their journey to success. There are four crucial stages known as the hierarchy of competence designed by Noel Burch in the 1970's. Each stage has their own challenges for the individual to overcome. In this article I want to explore each of these stages and what you can expect to face on your journey.
Unconscious incompetence
The biggest obstacle to success is people not knowing what they don't know. The vast majority of people do not live a life that is all it could be, each of us have the potential to live a great inspirational life but people rarely do. The reason for this is that people don't know what's possible so they settle for what they know and what they know is the ordinary. This is the challenge of the first stage of success, the stage of unconscious incompetence.
It's diďŹƒcult to know what you don't know. We view the world based on the frame of reference that we create ourselves, this includes the boundaries that limit our ambitions. These self imposed boundaries stay in place until
we challenge them ourselves or we are forced to reevaluate them because of someone else's achievements.
Don't wait until someone else achieves the success that you seek yourself by challenging your limitations. Once you do you find how far away your goal is and most importantly what the goal will cost you. By cost I don't necessarily mean money but more the extent and nature of sacrifice that you will have to make in order to become successful. Success is never an easy path and requires a level of sacrifice that is due every day. Once you accept this then you will be ready for the second stage.
Conscious incompetence
The second stage is conscious incompetence. You are aware of the areas that you need to improve. This is a diďŹƒcult stage as many times you realise you are not as close to success as you thought you were but instead of seeing this as a negative it's a huge positive as now you will truly be able to start your journey to your goals. This has the potential to be the longest stage of the four and you will be tempted many times to give up. This feeling will be a regular visitor to your conscious mind. The only thing that separates the people who give up and the people who don't is belief.
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You will never consistently achieve beyond your limit of self belief. You need to believe you can be a success before you can be a success. While a certain level of self belief is natural it is something that can be worked on and improved. I won't be able to go into the mental performance techniques that I use with my clients but I will provide you with an overview of how to become a highly confident version of yourself.
The two key ingredients of confidence are planning and preparation. The more you plan and the more you prepare the more confidence you will have to achieve your goals. The thought of climbing a mountain may seem daunting, so daunting in fact that you may never start but once you see it as a series of single steps then it becomes realistic and then once you map out every step and then visualise what will happen with every step including the challenges and risks that may arise, this will provide you with the opportunity to minimise risk and to be prepared for the unexpected.
Conscious competence
The stage of conscious competence is the third stage of success and this is when you now reach the stage of your development that you have developed the necessary skills and you are implementing them on a daily basis. The long hard days of training have paid o and your goals are within reach. It's easy to think that your development has ended because you are starting to see success but in fact your journey has only just begun.
Unconscious competence
The final stage of success is unconscious competence. This is
when you are implementing the skills required for success without knowing you are doing so. The habits that success requires are now instinctual. Even if you haven't heard the terminology you would certainly have already encountered this stage. The most common example I have encountered is driving. Imagine when you first learned to drive, you were cautious and you had to think about every action yet several years later you are now a confident driver and you instinctively know what you do when you get into your car, in fact when you drive to work the journey doesn't feel like it takes so long and time passes more quickly even if your car is slow.
In this stage when we are performing a task and time melts away, minutes feel like seconds and seconds are nothing but a blink of an eye. You feel full immersion in a task to such a degree that the task is no longer a separate entity you are the task. You do not notice the world around you and distractions don't exist. All we feel is the marriage of excitement and energy. This feeling is known by many names. In the United States it's commonly called "flow state" while in Japan it's referred to as "Mushin". Technically it's when your actions move from the conscious part of your brain into the non-conscious part of your brain. This is where success exists
Everyone's journey to success is dierent but what ever your end goal, the journey goes through these four stages. Knowing this doesn't guarantee that you will reach your end goal but it will put you in the right direction. The success you seek is there waiting for you and you just need to know how to get there.
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