Learning to be a leader

By Meera Vijayan

When leadership coach Ross McLelland met one of his clients for the first time, the middle-aged general manager was socially awkward and chronically avoided functions and meetings.

The manager’s lack of interpersonal skills had brought him to the brink of being sacked by the company’s board.

However, within a period of three months and with the right training, he transformed himself so remarkably, he not only kept his job but also earned the directors’ respect.

McLelland, the managing director and principal consultant of Pacific Consulting, says the key to coaching his introvert client was not to change a personality totally but to make small yet critical changes.

Instead of forcing the manager to be more gregarious, McLelland suggested he select several meetings every quarter that he was comfortable attending.

“I then asked him to attend those selected meetings, but to take somebody with him who was really sociable and outgoing to prop him up,” McLelland says, adding that small shifts in the client’s behaviour changed people’s perception of him and in turn gave him more confidence in social settings.

McLelland, who had 25 years’ experience in management consulting before shifting focus to leadership coaching in the past decade, says coaching is a tremendously effective tool if employed in a targeted manner.

He believes leaders can improve their methods by looking at their leadership style through approaches like taking the Hogan Leadership Forecast, an assessment devised by renowned psychologist Robert Hogan, and obtaining feedback from others on management style, behaviour and impact.

“Once we know what makes you tick and what other people see in your behaviour, we can come up with a plan to do things differently to have a more positive impact on people,” he says.

McLelland says this could be as simple as making a 5 to 10 per cent shift in behaviour by picking an important issue on which to focus.

He says for instance, a leader who felt they lacked interpersonal skills could start listening and asking more questions, consulting colleagues instead of deciding alone, informally visiting the factory or even having afternoon tea with workers.

“Even if you really don’t like doing it, start doing a few little things and after a while it will start to pay off,” he offers.

According to him, many coaching leaders believe that it takes just 21 days to form a habit and 90 days to make it stick, so he advises leaders to be patient with themselves and keep at it.

He tells of one case where a client of a large company reported that he noted his managers were 60 to 70 per cent more effective after three months of leadership coaching.

“With good leaders, sometimes the simplest of things are the ones that resonate the most,” he says.

These sentiments for effective management are echoed in the results of a research project released last year by the Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, which surveyed 439 manufacturing firms in the country to examine the link between management practices and productivity performance.

A research team from the University of Technology, Sydney, Macquarie Graduate School of Management and the Society for Knowledge Economics carried out the project as part of a worldwide study led by the London School of Economics, Stanford University and McKinsey & Co.

The study found that good management practices were positively associated with various measures of success, including sales, productivity, employee numbers and market valuation.

Maja Paleka, 31, who won the Australian Institute of Management NSW/ACT Young Manager of the Year award last year, is a firm believer in the importance of establishing good management practices.

For Paleka, the northern region sales manager from UECOMM, a subsidiary of Optus Networks, good engagement with the leadership team and management makes a big difference to productivity in the workforce.

Paleka, who is credited with launching an initiative across her team of account managers to drive engagement and customer advocacy through a scoring system, says she is a big believer in leadership coaching and mentoring.

She feels that although leaders may be born with certain skills or qualities, leadership coaching can assist particularly in developing managerial skills.

“If managers can help their employees feel supported and empowered to do the right thing for their customers or their organisation, the productivity and commitment you would get from people would always be higher,” Paleka says.

Bridget Beattie, regional general manager for Right Management, agrees that leadership coaching generally receives positive feedback and refers to the findings launched in a white paper by her company, Aligning Leader Coaching to Business Outcomes.

In a rapidly evolving business environment, she says, organisations now realise they can no longer rely on time and experience alone to develop talent.

Beattie says this is because there is now a more urgent need to move high potential candidates into positions of greater responsibility with maximum efficiency.

“Coaching is one of the tools they use to build bench strength at the top,” she points out.

However, she observes that there is limited tracking of effectiveness either before or after the coaching, with the focus often on measuring leader satisfaction and the impact on behaviour.

Beattie points out that coaching, while not the only tool to build high-performance leaders, could be particularly useful in executing strategy for leadership development.

“For instance, if you find that everyone walks away from a leadership retreat with great intentions, which they promptly forget about, then a coach can help keep their feet to the fire and make sure they follow through,” she says.

Beattie notes that leadership coaching is still a cottage industry as there is no proven methodology for measuring its return on investment or impact on business. She believes that to mature as an industry, leadership coaching needs to be more effectively measured and better aligned to business outcomes.

Beattie says that moves are presently being undertaken to establish a true profession of coaching by endorsing a set of academic fundamentals and establishing accreditation guidelines.

She points out that besides the one-on-one coaching format, there is also an emphasis on identifying goals in terms of leadership competencies, organisational capabilities and business outcomes.

“Of course the impact on the individual is important, but to really stack up, coaching needs to translate to business outcomes such as increasing market share, revenues and profits.

“We need to anchor coaching firmly in this context,” says Beattie.

Article from The Weekend Australian, July, 2010.