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A little while ago I learned a great lesson in Board selection from an executive chair of a listed mining company, while we were working on the placement of two new directors. He told me that his focus was on FIT: the assessment of whether another could find their place and make a contribution that worked for all.
My job was to get the funnel of good applicants narrowed so that efficient and effective selection of preferred candidates could take place. His job was to use all the background information and add impression, intuition and a bit of guesswork to make the final choice. This is the mysterious area where values, interpersonal connection, and the like are tested and validated as best they can be.

The reservoir of potential company directors and senior executives is large in total.
It doesn’t necessarily result in sustainably successful placements. Often, the expectations for a new recruit wear off too soon. Often, important factors in performance and relationships start to emerge that cause friction, dysfunction and tears. Sometimes even the internally placed applicant becomes problematic.

Why is it so?
Way back in the last century (1969) a little book called “The Peter Principle” revolutionised the nascent world of managerial science. One short story concerned recruitment. Peters postulated that if there was a huge pool of potential applicants, the ideal recruitment process would be to so expertly craft the requirements and the places where the advertising was done that only one prefect applicant applied, was interviewed and hired.
Today recruitment is a science involving competencies, background checks, targeted interviews and many other tools. All good, but have the results improved?
(In a test of the Peter Principle that won the 2010 igNobel Prize, three researchers found that the best way to improve efficiency in an organisation is to just select randomly between the identified best and worst candidates!)

From my long experience as an interviewer, employer and occasional applicant for professional jobs and board roles, I have to say that too little attention is still being paid to one vital area. For want of a better descriptor I am calling it character.

An applicant may submit a well crafted covering letter with their CV, perfectly suited to the requirements for the opportunity. They are short listed because of their stated relevant knowledge skills and experiences. They are interviewed, where these factors are elaborated, tested through skilful interview techniques. They are invited to a final interview where amongst other things, FIT is to be assessed and gauged.
All goes well initially but within several months relationships are stressed and results are sub optimal. Sometimes it’s a speed bump; too often it’s carnage. What is missing?
The assessment of character is often what makes the difference. Character includes the ability to lead one’s self before seeking to create opportunities in others to follow. It includes being a functional human being. It means having the capacity to move situations forward. It means being courageous enough to pay attention to tensions and seek at least to understand if not deal with them. It means showing deep, real care for others. More time an attention needs to be given to assessing character. It is the quality that makes the difference between joy and upset for all concerned.

If you are interested in progressing in this domain of life and would like to discuss how to refine your character, demonstrate it to others or find it in those you seek to work with, please feel free to contact me at ianrs@iansampson.com.au

Management is about organising systems to work faster, better, cheaper and produce more, reflecting the principles that underlie them: Quality, Cost, Rate and Quantity.
Of course, management must occur in a context of legal compliance and risk management.

Management is about control.
People who work in organisations are part of management systems and are therefore subject to managerial control.
This is the work of managers today: controlling others. If it is done effectively morale, engagement, job satisfaction and the like are all high.
Much of management today is about manipulation. Done well, manipulation is the handling of a person or thing with care. Chiropractic manipulation is a good example, when done well. Poor manipulation occurs when managers control others as an end in itself. This is the reason why so many support functions in organisations are struggling to make a difference: they exist to control others for their own professional, personal or organisational ends.
Control of others is also the reason why so many organisations are failing as sustainable entities: people increasingly don’t want to work in organisations where procedures and systems make them servants of the system rather than enable them to do productive, high quality work safely, legally and cost effectively.

Leadership is about organising people to enable them to work faster, better, cheaper and produce more. Leadership therefore overlaps with management, at least in relation to the people component of organisational systems. Managers manage things; leaders lead people. This might be called managerial leadership.

But. Organisations thrive not just through great management. They also require great leadership. Leadership is about calling followers to clarify who they are in a situation, to create a future that they can be part of, to give them an opportunity to choose what to do next and to do all that with high regard for the welfare of their followers.
Leadership is about creativity, purpose, intention and care.

Good leaders take whatever training, experience and self awareness they have and use it to create leadership opportunities. Great leaders learn to continually improve their effectiveness through reflection, coaching and by constantly putting themselves in places of opportunity.

If you would like to build on whatever foundations of leadership you already have and experience the satisfaction that comes to leaders who constantly work on their capacity to create leadership, come to an event at The Leadership Foundation. Details are at: www.theleadershipfoundation.com.au.

There is no fixed definition of excellence in leadership, but we all know it when we see it; when we feel it.
There is a different skill set required in managing a project, than there is in leading the team and we all manage and lead in some capacity – whether it’s our children, our family, our community, or our workplace.
We all influence others.
This opens up a conundrum for us – what kind of leaders are we? What is the trail of afterthought we leave behind? Do we inspire people? Would we challenge people to be more than even ourselves?
What kind of leader do we want to be?
In knowing where we are, and knowing where we want to be as a leader – how do we walk towards it in a real, experiential, practical manner -using our own lives as the template for our own improvement?
Large corporates seek to build capacity as a leader by assessing their employees who are judged to be “high potential.” High potential leaders have a suite of leadership experiences, competencies, values and fit with their organization. They identify your specific areas for development and act to build your capacity (Study by Aon Hewitt).
Not all of us work for an organization where we are a good fit. Not all of us will be assessed as high potential and not all of us work well in this environment of support; but the beauty of leadership is that we do not need to be any of these things all the time – we only need to the right person in the moment and practice. Anyone can do that if they are willing to step forward to create change.
Leaders who want to build their total performance will be seeking opportunities to develop and practice their leadership in their lives. Being a leader occurs one moment at a time – sometimes we lead and sometimes we follow. We all build our mastery of leadership in the tapestry of life and our strength as a leader is defined by how we weather all moments in our lives. By playing 100% in life, we hone our leadership skills, and hopefully we evolve into the leader we hoped we would be.
At The Leadership Foundation, we support you to answer these questions for yourself, and provide opportunities for you to be exposed to leadership across a smorgasbord of professions. We create an environment where leaders can reflect on their leadership moments and explore their leadership style. From there, we can build our personal resilience and confidence as a leader, and better our performance as a leader.
We help people to understand the people that follow them, so that they can help create the leaders of tomorrow.
We welcome all new attendees, so if you are:
a person newly appointed to a leadership role and want to learn how to be more effective
a captain of a sporting, project or work team
a board member
a person who wants to influence a difficult situation or relationship
a new or experienced manager
a recent graduate of any kind of program
an office bearer of a community organisation
a leader who wants to develop a group of colleagues
a person who has just been nominated as being high potential,
Please join us at one of our events.
For more information go to www.theleadershipfoundation.com.au or contact Ben Baldwin or Ian Sampson.
Ben Baldwin–CEO benlbaldwin@gmail.com

Ian Sampson- ianrs@iansampson.com.au


Is your entrepreneurial spirit, creativity and ability to develop, sell and close new business opportunities being used to its fullest and making the kind of difference you want to make in the world? If not, consider the following opportunity:

Vanto Group is establishing operations in the Australia/New Zealand region and looking for experienced and motivated professionals, interested in building a business to join us as contracted partners in the region. If you are a team player, passionate about the work of transformation, interested in being developed in a unique and powerful methodology and see yourself working for an empowering and ethical company that delivers work that makes a real difference in business, consider partnering with Vanto Group!

We are a boutique global consulting firm serving corporations, organizations and institutions in a variety of industries and fields. We have a proven track record of enabling our clients to produce unprecedented business results and an exceptional quality of life for their people at work. Vanto Group specializes in large, complex engagements that bring together diverse and sometimes adversarial groups to align on a shared future for the organization. In short, we deliver breakthroughs in organizational performance and high performance teams.

The ideal profile for someone interested in this opportunity will include a combination of the following elements:

Successful entrepreneurial background, track record or comparable experience
Business development and/or successful sales experience in complex selling environments with CxO level prospects
Significant business contacts
Financial independence/stability and desire to build a practice
Experience with or strong interest in ontologically based, transformational methodologies (i.e., Landmark Forum, etc.)
Strong sense of personal and professional integrity and ethical business practices
Ability and desire to focus on the opportunity (money is important, but not the driver)

To learn more about this unique opportunity contact:

David F. Brown
Vanto Group Practice Leader – ANZ
+61 452 553 621
dbrown@vantogroup.com

Are you a good leader? How do you know? Here is a test you can take that will tell you and teach you a lot as well.
In a recent post (How “Leaders” Learn to Transmit Fear) there was a story of the power of culture to shape all kinds of organisations. The central idea was that once a cultural artefact (in this case “Don’t touch the bananas because horrible things will happen to you”) is set up it will endure until something or someone stronger supplants it.
The test is simple: alter just one aspect of your organisation’s culture.
Pick something that you really have the ability to alter. For example, it’s not likely to be successful to attempt to alter your organisation’s global practice of not recruiting certain types of candidates if you are a call centre manager.
Pick an artefact that is within your area of accountability and that it would make a real difference (hopefully positive) to alter. For example, the call centre manager might want to test her leadership by seeing if she can change the unspoken rule that it’s not “safe” to seek a pay rise until employees have notched up 12 months in the job.
Think about the test carefully. Culture is hard to define and cultural practices are often difficult to identify; like fish in water, we are often not aware of the elements that define and determine us. If you are struggling, think about the unspoken ways of doing things that apply in your organisation that don’t in others. A slightly funny one that I noticed recently is the unspoken rule that, if there are three urinals in the male toilet, you should never use the middle one if you are the only person there at the time! (Can you work out the cultural logic??)
The idea behind the test is that real leaders can influence action. Since cultures are so hard to supplant, it is a real test of leadership to be able to change an aspect of culture in an enduring way.

If you are baulking at taking the test, consider the possibility that your leadership needs further development and that something might be holding you back. Even just looking to see what that might be and what you could choose to do about it will help your leadership capacity grow. The Leadership Foundation (http://www.theleadershipfoundation.com.au) is one place where you can take action to build your leadership resilience.

If you take the test, it would be great to hear from you about how you went and what you learned.

I learned many of my meagre organisational design and development skills through the mentorship of a great friend, Tim Dalmau ( http://www.dalmau.com).
Tim has taught hundreds of the world’s great company leaders about how cultures really work. He teaches that cultures lie deep within all organisations. They are immensely hard to alter. This is because altering them involves trying to meddle with their identities: who they are, what their meaning in life is and so on.

From this perspective “Culture Change” and “Business Transformation” programs can be seen for what they really are: attempts to change practices but which won’t alter the underlying culture in any enduring way.

Just how hard it is to “change” cultures can be seen from the famous Apes In The Cage experiment, reported widely some years ago.
The research involved putting a monkey in a cage with a bunch of bananas. The monkey grabbed bananas and ate them, until the bunch was electrified. The monkey of course recoiled, tried again, got a shock and eventually sat in the corner. Another monkey was added. The first one tried to stop the second one from doing what monkeys do: eat the bananas. Eventually the second one touched the bananas and of course got a shock. It retreated too.
Then a third monkey was added and the first two succeeded in preventing the third from touching the bananas at all.
A fourth was added. The first three also stopped the fourth. (Just to recap: we now have two monkeys that have had direct experience of the shock and one that hasn’t but joins in transmitting the knowledge of the first two to the fourth monkey.)
Then they take the first out and add a fifth. Same story: don’t touch the bananas.
Then they take out the remaining monkeys one by one, adding in new monkeys, in the meantime having turned off the shock. No new monkeys touch the bananas, even though every instinct tells them to!

The story shows how culture is created, how it survives and how pervasive it is. It doesn’t intuitively matter that the research was subsequently found not to be real, because we can all relate to experiences from real life in organisations that back up the “research.”

Tim also teaches that for every complex problem there is usually a simple solution…and it is usually wrong! It would be tempting to think that the Volkswagen debacle can be explained in simple terms. However, I can’t help but think that underneath all the duplicity, lying, fear, cover-ups, insincere apologies and the like there lies a cultural basis for what happened. Somewhere in the early history of that great company, someone in leadership experienced a lack of integrity in his dealings with others. That so called leader “taught” others that it was OK not to be true to one’s word, presumably if it served the company’s financial goals. And so the culture of “espoused integrity” but “no-integrity-in-action” has continued to the present day.

Regular posters to blogs lament these kinds of cultures and practices in modern workplaces. Organisational leaders who want to tap wisdom need organisational design and development advice that goes to the deep roots of how organisations really run.

The Leadership Foundation is Brisbane-based and runs events where leaders explore the implications of these great kinds of issues for their own leadership. In a safe environment, leaders develop their understanding of how leadership actually works and how to navigate potentially explosive situations like the Volkswagen case, before they happen. Go to:http://www.theleadershipfoundation.com.au for details.

A couple of weeks ago I met with one of my mentors. He was describing his approach to the current phase of his life, which he is calling “Liberation”; liberation to do the things he wants and liberation to be the person he wants to be.

I mentioned that in my current phase of life I regard private service as a key for me. His ears pricked up and he asked me to say more. I said something like this: “Well, I think that we may be entering into a new phase of society. Just as we are transitioning from the industrial age to the digital age, I am finding more and more leaders transitioning from beliefs about the importance of public service to what I am calling Private Service. By that I mean that people are abandoning political leadership and the notions of governments controlling every aspect of life. Instead, thoughtful people are just getting on with what they can do in a private way.”

My thinking about Private Service is rooted in my intuitive understanding of leadership and what happens in the moment when leaders actually lead.

When leaders emerge who combine:
their understanding of their surrounding situation with
some personal thoughts, learning, understanding, models and the like and they translate them into
an intention to move ahead and
genuine care for others,
something transformational happens.

A group in this situation doesn’t just transition from inaction to action; its character transforms. The leaderless group members choose to give up being victims and bystanders, rationalising their immobility with thoughts like “It’s not my fault.”
In the moment when leadership emerges, a transformation occurs and both leader and followers now begin to follow a clear pathway to action.

There seem to be four steps on the pathway.
The first is to combine everything they have experienced up to that moment into a new context for action.
The second is that they take on a new role and accountability. In clarifying their purpose (Like Simon Sinek’s “WHY”) and accepting personal responsibility, they begin to find new meaning.
The third is that they begin to act, usually with a new awareness of what they are doing
Finally they notice the results.

As I think about, refine and practise this approach to leadership in my everyday interactions with others I am seeing transformations take place in who both others and myself are being.

Leadership practised in this way provides access to transformation of lives and activities. It may also provide new frameworks for those involved in industrial age Public Service and help them rekindle their leadership and help societies they serve transform into the Digital Age.

Since that meeting with my mentor we’ve done a bit more thinking together about this and started to involve others. What do you think? What understanding of leadership works for you? What do you think about a Private Service approach to being a leader?

If you have read this far you might like to attend an event run by The Leadership Foundation (www.theleadershipfoundation.com.au). The Leadership Foundation provides opportunities for leaders to reflect on their own understanding of leadership and to practise their further development in a supportive environment with other leaders.

Ian Sampson, BComm, LLB, FAICD,
www.iansampson.com.au

Invitation

GROW Your Coaching:
Breakthrough Coaching Event
3rd September 2015
8:45am-12:45pm

The Brisbane Club

241Adelaide St, Brisbane

Early Birds to 14th August
Cost incl gst: $200
Teams of three: $500 Teams of four: $600

After 14th August
Cost incl gst: $250
Teams of three: 600
Teams of four: $700

If you want to be a great coach, come to this event. No matter how good a coach you are now, you will improve your coaching ability so you can be the best leader.

Good LEADERSHIP requires great COACHING.
“I”m trying to work out where to take my business next year.”
“My team has lost motivation because of a difficult staff member.”
“I want to build my ability to coach a high performer to new levels.”
“I want to find a new job.”
“We want to be able to have effective problem solving.”
“I would like to build coaching into our culture.”

In this powerful 3 hour session you will:

Learn how to coach straight away
Discover insights you can use immediately
Meet experienced coaches and newcomers
Develop new skills that will build your coaching confidence and capacity.

Bring a coaching issue that you would like to achieve a breakthrough in and that is costing you dearly in dollar, emotional or productivity terms.
Easy registration process:
Email ianrs@iansampson.com.au to reserve you places.
Remit funds to BSB: 124 121
Account number: 90613549
Account name: Ian R Sampson
LOOKING FORWARD TO SEEING YOU!
If you are a coaching novice, you will gain the ability to begin coaching right away.

We all mess up. Some of us recover better than others.
A couple of years ago I learned a great approach, called “The Anatomy of a Great Apology” from Prof John Galtung. I carry it on a small card in my wallet; perhaps because I need to apologise a lot!

We all mess up. Some of us recover better than others.
A couple of years ago I learned a great approach, called “The Anatomy of a Great Apology” from Prof John Galtung. I carry it on a small card in my wallet; perhaps because I need to apologise a lot!

There are four parts in “The Anatomy of a Good Apology.”
1 Take the blame
2 Accept responsibility
3 Detail the wrong
4 Announce the program for reforming yourself.

Last week I worked with an executive who was shattered because he had lost the trust of a close colleague. The relationship is damaged. Both are feeling bad. Gossip is spreading. 
He saw that, unless he acted with genuine leadership, things would, at best, stay unpleasant and at worst, deteriorate further.

We had a coaching conversation to work through a plan and this is what he came up with:

“I am sorry for not keeping my promise about X.

“It was my responsibility to do what I said I would do and I didn’t do it.

“I promised you that I would do X (activity) by Y (time) and include A,B and C (other people) in developing the plan to do X. I didn’t do that. Instead I was late doing it and I only talked to A and B. I missed the agreed time and I didn’t talk to all of the players. As a result Z (consequence) has happened and that has caused B (damage) to you. All that has left you with S (flow on consequences) and it has caused you to lose trust in me keeping my promises in future.

“My plan is to redo X by Y when it comes up again next month. I will include A, B and C. I will repay the loss in the the next month. I am talking with A,B and C to explain what I should have done and ask for their cooperation again. I will detail each of the key steps in the plan and I will make sure the key pieces are scheduled in our diaries.

How did the apology go? The other person was initially taken aback. He started to get aggressive and then quickly became thoughtful. When the exec had finished, his colleague took a deep breath, offered his hand and they got on with the next thing.
Small miracles like these occur every day when good leaders plan well, carry forward their intentions well and apologise well when they mess up. As we all do.

Is this Coaching? Mentoring? Advising? Joint Problem Solving? Professional Development? Friendship? It’s what I do. And, it is a great privilege to help others.
Is this Coaching? Mentoring? Advising? Joint Problem Solving? Professional Development? Friendship? It’s what I do. And, it is a great privilege to help others.