Leadership by Peter Gration
Trinity Papers Number 5
Trinity College
The University Of Melbourne
General Peter Gration is a former Chief of the Australian Defence Force (1987-1993), serving in Malaya, South Vietnam, and overseeing Australian peacekeeping operations in a variety of theatres including the Gulf. He offered this distillation of a lifetime’s experience with the issues of leadership at a Trinity public lecture on 14 April 1999.
This paper represents the fifth in a series prepared by Trinity College which focus upon broad issues facing the community in such areas as education, ethics, history, politics, and science. Copies are available upon request from the Tutorial Office, Trinity College, Parkville, Victoria 3052 Australia.
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Introduction by the Warden of Trinity College, Professor Donald Markwell. General and Mrs Gration, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen – It is a great pleasure to welcome you to the lecture by General Peter Gration on Leadership. It is a particular pleasure to welcome present and old members from all parts of the Trinity College community, from schools, the larger University, and beyond. Trinity College has for over a century and a quarter been nurturing young people who have gone on to positions of leadership in many walks of life – in academia, the Church, politics and public service, the professions, business, and much else besides. As from its founding, so now, the College is keen to encourage its members to develop skills of leadership and commitment to use those skills to help make the world a better place. Few Australians have such deep experience of leadership in service to the community as General Gration. Born in 1932, he was educated at Duntroon, at the University of Melbourne, where he was a student at Ormond College, and as an external student of the University of Queensland; and he earnt degrees in civil engineering, arts, and economics. Amongst many other postings, his army career, which he began as an army engineer, included service in Malaya and as commanding officer of the 1st Australian Civil Affairs Unit in South Vietnam, and – a reflection of his commitment to education – extended periods at staff colleges in Britain and the United States. His leadership positions within the Army culminated in his appointment in 1984 as Chief of the General Staff – the top post in the Army – and from 1987 to 1993 he led the combined Australian services as Chief of the Defence Force. In this position, General Gration oversaw major force reorganization stemming from the 1987 Dibb report. In the wake of the end of the Cold War and a resurgence of United Nations peacekeeping and related multilateral action, General Gration oversaw Australian contributions to UN operations in Somalia, Cambodia, the western Sahara, and elsewhere, as well as Australia’s deployment in the Gulf War. Next month we will have visiting us here at Trinity the Australian who was Military Commander of the United Nations Transition Authority in Cambodia in 1992-93, General John Sanderson. When General Gration retired as Chief of the Defence Force in April 1993, a record number of Australian military personnel were serving abroad on UN peace-keeping operations. In 1972, Peter Gration, then at the Joint Services Staff College in Canberra, had visited Indonesia. As Chief of the Defence Force, he returned several times, and was a strong and effective advocate of Australia’s developing much closer relations with Indonesia, including various confidence-building measures and military contacts between the two countries. His many honours – including as a Companion of the Order of Australia – include an Indonesia medal of merit in recognition of this work.
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We at Trinity also have a particular interest in the development of Australia’s relations with Indonesia, in which General Peter Gration has played such a significant role, because each year we have many scores of Indonesian students studying here in the Trinity College Foundation Studies Program, an important pathway for international students to the University of Melbourne. After his retirement from Australia’s top military position, General Gration’s own contacts in Indonesia made him a natural choice when in 1994 Prime Minister Keating sought a special envoy for the secret negotiation of the Indonesia-Australia security agreement that was announced in December 1995. After the success of this shuttle diplomacy, General Gration visited several of Australia’s other neighbours to explain the new treaty and to reassure them. This has been but one of General Gration’s major contributions in his so-called ‘retirement’. He has chaired the Civil Aviation Authority from 1993 to 1995, the Council of the Australian War Memorial from 1994, and the Management Committee of Transfield Defence Systems from 1994 to 1997, amongst other appointments. Since 1994 he has been Honorary Colonel of the Melbourne University Regiment, with which Trinity has historic links, and in that capacity visited this College last year. It is a great pleasure to welcome General and Mrs Gration back to Trinity, and to call on General Gration to address us and then answer questions on the topic of ‘Leadership’.
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Leadership Introduction Leadership is an art, which many recognise when they see it, but few really understand. There have been many outstanding Australian leaders, and I am sure that everyone here could make up their own list. But to focus our attention here are some well-known names: n In the military, Sir John Monash and Field Marshal Sir Thomas Blamey n In politics, John Curtin and Sir Robert Menzies n In business and industry, Sir Ian McLennan and Sir James Balderstone n In public life, Dame Beryl Beaurepaire and Dame Leonie Kramer n In sport, Sir Donald Bradman and Ron Barassi n In engineering Sir William Hudson and Sir John Holland And of course there have been many other fine Australian leaders, past and present. On the global scene, outstanding 20th century leaders include names like Gandhi, Mao Tse Tung, Roosevelt, Kennedy, De Gaulle, Slim, Macarthur and perhaps Hitler. But in my view, the outstanding leader of the 20th century was undoubtedly Winston Churchill. Think of this. 1940. The darkest days of WW2. The British and French armies have been defeated on the Continent, and the BEF has been evacuated from Dunkirk without its equipment. Most of Europe has fallen and Britain stands alone. Invasion is imminent. Panic and despair could easily have taken hold. But Churchill’s indominatable figure stood firm at the head of the nation – offering nothing but ‘blood, toil, tears and sweat’ and the dogged will to win. ‘You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word. It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be’. That’s leadership. It inspired the nation and the empire, and gave hope when there was no reason to have hope. Today leadership is just as much at a premium Not because there is an enemy at the gate, but because of the bewildering speed of change in just about every aspect of society. We know that we need leaders in every area of our national life – not only to bring us intact through the changes, but to advance our well being as a nation – to harness the full potential of our people in business, industry, academia, the Church, the armed forces and the country. Tonight I am going to give you my personal views on leadership. I make no claim to be an expert, and this will certainly not be a learned treatise – there are plenty of books and pamphlets readily available to do that. Rather I am going to give you my personal views gleaned from a lifetime as a practicing leader. During my 44 years in the Army, I commanded at just about every level from a troop of 50 or so men to eventually the entire Army and finally the Defence Force, the Navy, Army and Air Force of some 100,000 people. Since retiring in 1993 I have chaired a number of Boards including the Civil Aviation Authority, the Australian War Memorial in Canberra, and Tenix Defence Systems, one of Australia’s biggest defence companies. So what I offer tonight is a very personal view that you should consider, accept what seems reasonable and discard the rest. You may be thinking that leadership in the Army is a breeze because people are compelled by law to obey orders. There are no unions, no shop stewards, and you don’t have to make a profit. The image of the Sergeant Major shouting orders is still a popular view of how things get done in the Services. This of course is totally misleading. Leadership of a very high order is required in the modern Army to ensure that people will continue to act resolutely and with initiative in the danger, confusion and often isolation of the battlefield. This is why the Services make such an issue about selecting and training leaders.
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In fact I believe that all leadership at all levels, civil and military, whether it involves 10 people or 10,000 is essentially the same and requires the same qualities. And what’s more, my reading tells me that these leadership qualities have changed little throughout history. You can recognise them in Alexander the Great, in Caesar, in Jesus Christ and in Napoleon as much as in great contemporary leaders. Of course the detail of their methods was different, but the essence of their leadership was the same. Take heart at this rather sweeping assertion. Even though the practice of leadership by the great names in history may seem far removed from your personal situation, if the essence of all leadership is the same, it is indeed worth the effort to analyse how they did it, because it will apply to you also. It is these qualities that I want to talk about – what seems to me to be the unchanging essence of leadership. And I will try to put things in a way that will be useful to those intent on developing their own leadership qualities, or recognising and developing those qualities in others, or simply in judging them in others. Leadership and management Before we turn to the main task, I want to set some definitions in place. There are many definitions of leadership, but I like Field Marshal Sir William Slim’s. For him leadership is ‘That combination of persuasion, compulsion and example that makes people do what you want them to do’. All three elements are important. Persuasion is probably foremost, supported by example. It is better to say ‘come on’ than ‘go on’. But there must always be available an element of compulsion – of toughness or iron – to bring into play when persuasion and example are not enough. You will see that leadership and management are closely related but different. Management is the broader term and is the process of identifying and achieving objectives. Managers are concerned with the optimum use of resources to achieve an outcome, and they plan, organise, coordinate and direct, using the many modern management tools available. Management is sometimes seen as an impersonal process, and more a science than an art. It is not concerned with people except in the sense that they are a valuable resource and you have to get the best out of them. Leadership on the other hand is an intensely personal business, involving interaction between people – the leader and the led. The leader projects his personality to inspire the led to act on his concepts. Leadership is thus an imprecise and qualitative thing – more of an art than a science. Of course in most organisations both leadership and management must go hand in hand. But there is an increasing view that many modern businesses have put too much emphasis on management and not enough on leadership. Jack Welch, the legendary and very successful head of General Electric (the most admired company in the US according to Fortune magazine) goes as far as to say ‘Managing less is managing better’. Having greatly reduced and simplified his company’s management structure, he let the remaining managers know very clearly that they had to stop being bosses and start acting like leaders. I am not going to speak any more of management, and it may be useful to think of leadership as a subset of management. The essence of leadership Enough preliminaries. Let’s turn to the heart of the business – the essence of leadership. There are many styles of leadership and different approaches in different situations and so on, but I repeat that I believe the essentials are the same at all levels, civil and military, in large or small organisations, And furthermore that they have changed little through recorded history. (Quite a claim that – after you have heard what I have to say, test it against the great leaders of history as well as against contemporary leaders that you know personally.) So what are the essentials? I put it to you that there are four pillars of leadership, each associated with a different aspect of the art. They are: n Know your stuff 6
n n n
Look after your people Practice the key qualities Project your personality to inspire action
Again, ‘know your stuff’ deals with the leader’s knowledge of his business, whatever that may be. ‘Look after your people’ is about the leader’s obligation to care for the led in exchange for their following him, creating a bond of mutual dependence. ‘Practice the key qualities’ is about the personal qualities that are essential in a leader. And the fourth pillar ‘project your personality’ is the personal inspiration factor whereby the leader inspires his followers to action. Let’s look at each of these in some detail, but first I want to point out that what I will say applies equally to male and female, and when for convenience I use the male pronoun, please take it to mean both male and female. Know your stuff Firstly, ‘know your stuff’. If people are to have confidence in a leader and to give their willing cooperation, it is axiomatic that they must believe that the leader knows what he is doing – that his plans will get them where they want to go, and that he won’t lead them over a cliff. The leader’s job is to take decisions, and then stick to them, but the troops (the led) must have confidence that the decision is sound in the first place. The more successes the leader has under his belt, the easier this will be.
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Knowledge of the job is therefore essential, and it is something that you can learn. A good leader should aim to be as expert as possible in his particular field. At the more junior levels, this extends to being able to do everything his subordinates can do, and even being able to do it better. But as he moves higher in a large or complex organisation, it quickly becomes impracticable for the leader to be able to do everything his workers can. Instead he should be knowledgeable about the whole undertaking, and should know what sort of outputs he should expect and demand from his team. What about generalists – whose expertise is in managing and leading as skills in themselves rather than in the specialist knowledge of a particular business? Should you appoint someone as CEO of an organisation in which he has no specialist knowledge? Well yes, this is fine, because the area in which he must ‘know his stuff’ is leading and managing, where the essential skills are pretty much the same in every organisation. You may recall David Hill who in recent years successfully ran the NSW Railways, the ABC and the Soccer Federation. When I left the Army in 1993 I was appointed as Chairman of the Civil Aviation Authority. Although I didn’t know much about the technicalities of civil aviation, I knew a good deal about managing large and diverse organisations. Nevertheless my first task was to learn, and I spent much of my first year sitting in with Air Traffic Controllers and Safety Inspectors, travelling the country talking with people in the industry, and even learning to fly. The leader must also have a good working knowledge of people – who are the raw material of leadership. He must understand what makes people tick, how they will react to different approaches, what mixture of persuasion, example and compulsion is needed to motivate different people in different circumstances. I have known some very senior people who work best when driven hard – others bridle at the mildest criticism. Some work best in teams, others flourish when left to run things themselves. You can teach people something of this, but it also requires a good dash of common sense, and improves steadily with experience. Look after your people Let’s turn now to the second pillar – to look after your people – and let’s first think what that really means. The literal meaning is clear enough – look to the wellbeing of those you are leading. But what the leader is actually doing is creating a bond of mutual dependence between the leader and the led. He will demand a big effort from them – they in turn will expect some reciprocity from him. They give him their best effort; he should look after them and look to their interests. Thus from the viewpoint of effective leadership, ‘looking after your people’ is more a matter of the spirit than of material things. The true measure of success is not how much ice cream or whatever the leader can provide, but how convinced the troops feel that their leader will look after them, i.e. how well the bond of mutual dependence is established. How do you do this in practice? In the armed forces, this traditionally involves simply putting your subordinates needs before your own. The officer must ensure that his troops are well fed, housed, clothed and equipped to the limit of what’s practicable in the circumstances. He ensures that his troops are fed before he eats himself. In the paternalistic environment of the Services, he concerns himself with their welfare generally – their families and their commitments, their promotion and their problems. But as with most aspects of the art of leadership, it is possible to go too far and balance is needed. ‘Looking after your people’ certainly doesn’t mean giving everyone an easy time by relaxing standards below what the leader and the troops both know they should be. To do so is a sure short cut to the troops losing respect for both their leader and themselves. Even in armies there are different interpretations of what ‘look after your people’ means. The Americans tend to put a lot of store on material comforts – the ‘ice cream and donuts every day’ approach. On the other hand, Rommel with the Afrika Corps in WW2 believed that the best 8
thing he could do for his troops was to train them well to maximise their chance of survival on the battlefield. The Australian approach is somewhere in between, tending more to Rommel. Material comforts are important, but we don’t believe in mollycoddling people, nor in being unduly lenient with offenders. And we do place a lot of emphasis on the quality of our training, and in the tradition of Monash in World War I, meticulously thorough planning of battles to minimise casualties. Well that’s all very well in the military, but does ‘looking after your people’ also apply to leadership in the wider community? Yes it does, although the way it’s done will be different. Earlier I mentioned General Electric in the US. For GE, looking after their people means rewarding generously success and good performance, a heavy emphasis on training (GE spends $800 million p.a. on training and education of their employees – remember Rommel) genuinely encouraging employees to participate in process improvement, and fostering a pride in belonging to GE. It works there and it works here, and it is not diminished at all by the need to formalise things in an enterprise bargaining agreement. To conclude this segment. These principles of looking after your people apply also at the national level. Recall that Churchill mobilised the British people behind him, when they saw him as their champion, even though he promised them only blood, sweat, toil and tears. On the other hand, our former PM Paul Keating, whom I much admire, somehow let the impression develop that he was too preoccupied with bigger issues and had lost touch with the ordinary people. I don’t believe this was so, but he was seen to be no longer ‘looking after his people’, and this was a major factor in his ‘96 defeat. Practice the key qualities I have spoken about the first two pillars – ‘know your stuff’, and ‘look after your people’. Now I come to the third – ‘practice the key qualities’. What I am referring to is the minimum set of personal qualities which taken in toto identify a person as a leader. I don’t like the label ‘practice the key qualities’ very much. For most of my working life, I called this pillar ‘be a man’, which seemed to me to convey a whole lot more than ‘practice the key qualities’. But that was in the days when the Army was largely a male preserve, and such a label is quite out of place today when many fine leaders are women. Still it’s what’s in the package that’s important, not the label, so let’s look at what we have. Which qualities am I talking about? The immediate problem is one of selection. There are so many desirable qualities around that to list them all would become meaningless. The army’s leadership manual lists 11 and I’m sure you could think of plenty more. So let’s dispense with the ‘desirables’ and come down to an irreducible minimum. I suggest there are four, not counting intelligence and integrity, which I believe are self-evident and need no amplification. Here are my four. n Courage n Willpower n Judgement n Flexibility Courage I put courage first as the virtue in a leader, and the one he may need if he is to practice the others. No one will follow or respect a leader they believe has no guts. Once a view gets around that someone is a coward, that someone is finished as a leader. Even in the Armed Forces, most leaders will seldom be called upon to demonstrate physical courage, but when they are, they had better produce. Physical courage is not the absence of fear 9
but the ability to control it. You can’t train people to be courageous, but you can train them to control their fear and to continue to operate in potentially frightening situations, such as leading a night patrol in no-man’s land. You do this by familiarising them with what to expect and how to deal with it. Moral courage is another matter – the willingness to say or do what you know to be right, whatever the consequences. Leaders at all levels in all walks of life can expect to be called on frequently to demonstrate moral courage. Often the issues are fuzzy, but be sure that a moral coward will quickly be identified and will carry no respect. A common situation is in offering advice to your superiors. To be of value, such advice must be frank and fearless, and not what you think the superior would like to hear. No one likes to be the bearer of bad news, but advice that is not frank and fearless is not helpful and can be downright dangerous. Willpower Put simply, the leader has to have a bit of iron in his make-up. Having had the courage and judgement to make a decision and adopt a course of action, he must have the willpower to see it through against the many obstacles that will undoubtedly arise – against waverers or dissenters in his own organisation, against the enemy or competing firms or parties, and even against natural hazards such as the weather. The bigger and more hazardous the enterprise, the greater the challenge to the leader’s determination. And it goes without saying that a leader needs a good deal of physical and mental toughness and resilience to absorb the blows that will undoubtedly come his way and still maintain his course. However willpower does not extend to block-headedness in persevering with a course of action that is discredited and going nowhere. Judgement is needed to know when and if to change course. Judgement Which brings me nicely to judgement – the wisdom to take the best decisions, to select the best course from the many offering, to know when to act and when to pause. Some people seem to have a knack for doing this well – in ‘Yes Minister’ jargon they are ‘sound’, and their word carries respect. How do they do it? Well as with other aspects of leadership, some of the skill is inherent, but it can be helped along with training in for example, clear thinking and a systematic approach to problem solving (such as the military appreciation) The question of luck is interesting. Some people seem born lucky – they always get it right. I like to have lucky people around me, because I believe that mostly their luck is not pure chance. Lucky people often tend to create their luck, perhaps unconsciously or intuitively. They take the right decisions because they understand the situation better than others do, or perhaps they tend to avoid getting into difficult situations. Whatever the reason, I like lucky people. Flexibility And finally I want to turn to ‘flexibility’ – the ability to change course when confronted with changing circumstances or unexpected developments. At a time when the world is changing rapidly, flexibility is a key attribute of leadership. Today you not only have to live with change; the really successful ones will be those who embrace it as a way forward. This is easier said than done for someone who has risen in an organisation through mastery of the old methods. Suddenly the skills on which he made his name are no longer needed, and he must either change or make way for someone who will. Flexibility and the ability to adapt are at a premium today. Flexibility of course is the other face of what I said a few moments ago about willpower. When a leader is faced with changing circumstances, he must make a judgement whether to stick with 10
the old or to change – between willpower and flexibility – neither pigheadedly persevering with a lost cause, nor descending into vacillation. Easy to say, tricky to do, but the leaders of tomorrow will be the ones who have the flexibility to embrace change. Project your personality to inspire action That brings me to the fourth pillar. But first let me remind you where we have got to so far. I have defined leadership as a mixture of persuasion, example and compulsion that makes people willingly do what you want them to. And so far we have looked at three of the four pillars of leadership – ‘know your stuff’, ‘look after your people’, and ‘practice the key qualities’, which I suggested were courage, willpower, judgement and flexibility. Now if someone has mastered these three pillars, then they are already a leader, and probably a very good one. But somehow that’s not enough is it? Some important dimension is missing. That missing dimension is the ability of the leader to project his personality – to energise, to electrify, and to inspire people to act. It is something very personal and has to do with presence, with image, with inner energy, with imagination, and with the power of persuasion. It is the quality that distinguishes the great leaders from the good, the good from the mediocre. This quality is my fourth and final pillar and I call it ‘project your personality to inspire action’ or ‘personal inspiration’ for short. I want to talk briefly about what this involves – how the leader applies the personal touch to project his personality right through an organisation. I start with two things you must do, and then a number you should do. Firstly what you must do. The leader must have a vision for his organisation – where he wants to take it. It is a truism in today's fast-changing world that organisations must move forward to survive. You can’t aim simply to hold things steady as they go – to do so invites stagnation and failure. The vision should be achievable but ambitious, and expressed in simple enough terms for all to comprehend. And above all, the leader should believe passionately in his own vision, for if he doesn’t he has little chance of inspiring other people to accept it and act on it. The second thing is that the leader must communicate his vision and his concepts right down through the organisation, And not only the words – he must also infuse people with his personal passion and enthusiasm to get them excited and ready to act. How? Well if you want people to know something, the best way is to tell them yourself, although this is not easy in a large organisation like the Australian Defence Force. There are a lot of technical aids to help you communicate these days (such as e-mail, videos, video-conferences and so on), but I believe that the best way to communicate with people is still to talk to them face to face. An occasional personal talk from the top man is worth a hundred memos, relayed messages or rumours. There are of course also risks. The leader will be exposed to some pretty critical scrutiny and questioning, and therefore must be absolutely clear himself on what he wants, and must deliver his message with clarity, conviction and enthusiasm. And the message should be the same every time, simple and concise, no matter which group he is addressing throughout the organisation. When I was Chief of the Defence Force I set myself the target of visiting every major Defence Force base and installation around the country about once a year, and speaking not only to commanders and officers, but to the troops as well. This was hard work, but repaid the effort many times over. Much of the Defence Force could feel that they knew their commander personally and had heard from the horse’s mouth as it were where they were going and what they were supposed to be doing.
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To do this I of course had to prioritise my work very carefully so that I could get away from a very busy desk in Canberra. My rules were: n Avoid detail and concentrate on the major issues n Minimise the paperwork (Churchill’s rule that submissions be limited to a single sheet of paper had a lot going for it) n Delegate as much as possible Directive control The practice of the leader being out and about at the cutting edge of operations, encouraging and exhorting, is commonly known in the military as leading from the front. Rommel was a great proponent of this, often appearing at the critical point of battle and by his actions or even just by his presence, often changing the tactical outcome. This doesn’t mean that the leader should always be interfering with what his subordinates are doing – quite the contrary. This brings me to an important principle that in the Army we call Directive Control. Put simply this requires the commander to tell his subordinates what is to be done but not how to do it. He gives his subordinates their missions, allocates the resources to carry them out, lays down any key restraints, and let’s them get on with it. This not only gives subordinates the opportunity to exercise their initiative; it positively requires them to do so. The same applies in business. The Chief Executive takes decisions and then acts decisively to see they are carried out. Jack Welch, the legendary Chief of GE whom I mentioned before, emphasises this style of leadership rather than management. Instead of bosses who intimidate people and try to do their job for them, he wants leaders who can ‘inspire a clear vision of how things can be done better, and then get out of the way’. As a footnote, I introduced the idea of Directive Control formally into the Army in the mid 1980’s. I plagiarised the concept from the German Army and this brings out another important point. You don’t have to invent good concepts – merely recognise them and adopt them. Image I said that image was one of the traits that contribute to a leader’s ability to project his personality and inspire action. Let’s look at this for a moment. How important is image, and should a leader cultivate an image deliberately? Most of the great global leaders I mentioned earlier thought so, and worked hard at it. General Douglas Macarthur was one who was greatly concerned with his image. General (later President) Dwight Eisenhower served for several years before World War 2 as Macarthur’s staff officer, and he later described the experience as a lesson in theatrics. For Macarthur went to great lengths to create and sustain his public image. Every public appearance, film shot, photograph and public statement were carefully managed with the image in mind. Remember his famous return to the Philippines, where the newsreel footage of him wading ashore from the landing craft was reenacted several times to get it just right. Why did Macarthur do this, and why is image important? Vanity aside, I suppose an heroic and grand public image is useful in making the leader well-known to his own organisation and to the general public, and this may be worthwhile in bringing influence to bear. It also helps in creating a legend if that’s what you want, and hence enlarging your power base. It’s interesting on the other hand that none of the outstanding Australian leaders that I can recall have worried too much about their image. Blamey positively declined to worry about it at all, and many felt that he would have had a much easier time had he done so.
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What do I think? Do it in moderation. Australians can accept and even welcome a bit of eccentricity and character in their leaders. An old Army colleague who became a Major General was well known for literally jumping on his hat when he got really mad at someone. Therefore I suggest that you be conscious of your image, avoid negative impressions, be a little eccentric if you like and in public look the part you have chosen for yourself. And work hard at developing your media skills. But having said that, don’t overdo the image business – keep your sense of humour, don’t take yourself too seriously, and above all remember that the ultimately the substance is far more important than the image. Other aids to personal inspiration And to finish with, let me give you a few more practical ideas, which I have found helpful in this business of personal inspiration. n Directive Control requires trust and understanding between leaders at various levels. Hence an important part of the leader’s job is to ensure that there are quality leaders not only at the top, but right down through the organisation. n The leader must himself embrace change, not only to keep up with a fast changing world, but to get ahead of the game. I constantly drove change in the ADF, and there was plenty of resistance. A very senior officer addressing his Service Staff College referred to me and my staff as ‘the forces of darkness’ who were trying to change the way his Service had traditionally operated. n In setting goals, always go a bit beyond what seems reasonable so as to stretch people’s abilities. n Be accessible and listen. I have always found that it is best to be polite and approachable. Your subordinates should feel there is always a channel to the boss if they have a good idea for doing things better. Listen to their views, although the decision is always yours. n Never seek popularity – it will mar your judgement and be transparent to your people. Respect is a quality more to be pursued, based on taking the right decisions in the right way. n And finally, don’t worry about what people think of you. You will never please everyone, and the higher up you get in an organisation, the tougher the decisions and the greater the chance you’ll upset someone. Ignore them. Take the decisions you believe to be right and stick to them. Before concluding there is one other thing I want to mention – the old question of whether leaders are born or made. The answer is both, and I use the comparison with athletes. Most people have some native athletic ability, and most who wish to do so can become competent athletes with application, coaching and training. So with leaders. But again like athletes, just how competent a person can become, even with the most expert coaching, depends on their native ability. And only a tiny few will have the ability to become the Olympic champions of leadership, the superstars such as Churchill. Conclusion Well that’s all I want to say. We’ve covered a lot of ground, but if someone asks you later, ‘What did he say?’, there are four points I would like you to remember. Here they are. n Leadership is more an art than a science – a very personal matter involving a relationship between the leader and the led. n Leadership at all levels is essentially the same everywhere and requires the same qualities which have changed little throughout history. It is therefore worth studying the great and successful leaders, because you can apply the essentials of what they did to your own situation. n These essentials are expressed in the four pillars of leadership, all of which are necessary if you are to be a successful leader. Remember, they are − Know your Stuff − Look after your People, establishing the bond of mutual dependence. They need you and you need them. 13
− −
Practice the key qualities of Courage, Willpower, Judgement and Flexibility. The last is particularly important in today’s leaders – the ability not only to handle change, but to embrace it. Project your Personality to Inspire Action (the personal inspiration factor where Vision and Communication were the key).
n And finally, you can do it. With application, with training and with coaching, you can lift
your own leadership and that of others to new heights.
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Closing address: Vote of thanks by Dr Damian Powell, Director of Academic Studies. It is a great pleasure, on behalf of the College and all of us assembled here, to offer a vote of thanks to General Gration for his thoughts on the ever-vital topic of leadership. It’s surely testament both to the distinction of the speaker, and the importance of the topic, that such a broad group have gathered here tonight from schools, the university, the Church, defence forces, and all walks of professional life. Thomas Hobbes told us long ago that without some form of leadership life would remain nasty, brutish, and short. In a time of war, but in all times, the quality of leadership, moral, political, intellectual, shapes the aspirations and possibilities of society. Tonight General Gration has offered, in direct and powerful fashion, ways to comprehend the complexities of leadership in an age of rapid change. He has shared with us a wealth of experience gained through distinguished military service, distilling what for him is the essence of leadership through the ages. He has also sailed through one of the toughest question times I’ve ever witnessed… Australia’s most famous citizen soldier, John Monash, to whom General Gration has referred – and, I would add, has been likened – was certain that the university had an important role to play in shaping the values of our leaders, arguing in the University Review that ‘no available means should be spared for affording every opportunity’ to develop the critical faculties the young leaders who would emerge from what he called a powerful institution. From its inception this college has shared, with Monash, the belief that university education should never be value free, but should equip the next generation of Australia’s leaders for service. I’m sure that General Monash would be pleased with this gathering, and I would ask you to join me in thanking General Gration for his thoughtful words tonight.
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