To access a copy of the Australian Business Journal Article please click on thus  link:  The Top 20 Leadership Experts to Watch Out for in 2021

Leadership takes on many dimensions and encompasses many definitions. Organizations of all kinds focus on leadership as a vital concept necessary for success. Everyone talks about leadership, everyone says they want leadership, everyone prioritizes leadership.

But, why is leadership important?

​​Leadership is an important function of management which helps to maximize efficiency and to achieve organizational goals. Effective leaders Initiate action, motivate and guide others, create confidence whilst boosting morale, and work to build better working environments. 

Great leaders, however, also need someone to guide them to become so. Below we outline 20 of Australia’s best leadership experts and coaches to watch out for in 2021.

By now, you’ve hit your stride in operating under bizarre and unprecedented circumstances. But we won’t be just coping forever. This guide will help you plan for what comes next as we move beyond the grips of a pandemic and turn our thoughts to growth and development once again. You’ll learn four key trends that are shaping the learning and development landscape, what they mean for your organization, and how you can address them in order to strike the ideal balance between nurturing your leaders, fulfilling executive mandates, and spurring renewed growth and innovation in your business.

To Down load a copy of the report please click on this link:  Four Trends That Will Shape the Next Normal in Leadership Development

In late 2020, The Regis Company commissioned the 2020 State of Business and Leadership Development Survey, including input from both customers and learning leaders across the globe. What they found were four key trends that will shape leadership development as we move into the next normal.

Summary:

By now, you’ve hit your stride in operating under bizarre and unprecedented circumstances. But we won’t be just coping forever. This guide will help you plan for what comes next as we move beyond the grips of a pandemic and turn our thoughts to growth and development once again. You’ll learn four key trends that are shaping the learning and development landscape, what they mean for your organization, and how you can address them in order to strike the ideal balance between nurturing your leaders, fulfilling executive mandates, and spurring renewed growth and innovation in your business.

For a free comprehensive 14 page strategic leadership assessment report please click on this link now: Strategic Leadership Assessment Report

The post COVID-19 world will act as a catalyst for business transformation like no event in our economic history. The above video contains excerpts of Richard Kelly facilitating the kick-off meeting for the Business Simulation Tournament 2020.  Richard speaks firstly about his strategic leadership model and then about what the tournament is designed to achieve particularly about how leaders will need to challenge their current orthodoxies if they are going to thrive in a post COVID world. Have you really got the ability to transform?

For a free comprehensive 14 page strategic leadership assessment report please click on this link now: Strategic Leadership Assessment Report

My youngest son recently passed his driver knowledge test and was officially a “Learner Driver”. In NSW you have to get a 95% pass rate to attain your leaners permit, so it’s fair to say you need to have a comprehensive knowledge of the road rule and their application. The test has many scenario situations where you need to choose the correct alternative, it’s not just a regurgitation of rote learnt knowledge.

The First Drive

So, off we go for our first drive (in a local vacant car park!). My son has spent hundreds of hours playing car driving games that simulate what he thinks will be an easy transition from  driving a car in a game to the real-world application of driving a 1 tonne motor vehicle.

The first issue is the force and sensitivity needed to operate the brake and accelerator (thank God it wasn’t a manual car!). My son was starting to have a dawning sensation that this is going to be a lot harder than he thought. He was challenged by the sensory overload of merely driving around a vacant car park and was literally unable to comprehend driving on an open road with other cars about.

So Just to Recap

So just to recap, we have just gone through how to start the car. The standard stuff, seat belt fastened, adjusted the seat, check mirrors, foot on brake, make sure car is in Park gear and handbrake on, start ignition (3 clicks), select Drive, take off handbrake, take foot off brake and hit accelerator. Simple?

We slowly lurched forward as he tentatively put his foot on the accelerator only to quickly retreat to the safety of the brake. This we did for the first 20 metres until…. we needed to turn!

“Turn, turn, turn the wheel!” came my urgent instructions! You probably guessed by now, the quarter turn on a gaming console to navigate a corner, just doesn’t cut it in the real world. When we started the day, I hadn’t thought too much about what was required in teaching my son to drive. I had an older boy that I had successfully instructed to drive and I have over 30 years of driving experience. I’m a seasoned professional or so I thought. We got through the first lap and stopped.

Instructor to Coach

“That was a lot harder than I thought it would be” said my son. (Just to reiterate we had driven an 80m circuit around a vacant car park!). Now I instinctively flipped from instructor to coach, and all I did was ask “why” and listened. I reaffirmed to him that everybody finds it hard to start with and that with practice it would become much easier. So, around the car park we went again and again, with the same debrief after each circuit and by the next afternoon he was able to drive around the back streets near our house.

Now the next morning I had an epiphany. What if our business simulations only really got you to think a quarter turn around the corner, not the full turn required to successfully navigate a corner in the real world? Was that still useful?  In some way, shape or form, better than not having attempted it in a simulated environment? Have I been wasting my time for the last 15 years? I was somewhat in a state of distress.

Then I reflected on what had actually occurred.

That Would Make it a Game

Those of us who have been in the business simulation game for a long time know that the simulation itself is the means to the end, not the end itself. That is, it is not  just about playing the simulation that imparts the learning.  That would make it a game where the  learning is tacit at best. The art of a business simulation workshop is in its skillful facilitation and debrief where issues and challenges that are encountered in the simulation are related to the real world challenges of your business. This leads you to a new path of action with clarity, focus and urgency.

That was my Simulation!

So, as I unpacked this all in my head: the carpark, that was my simulation! A simplified model of reality, which had enough reference points to give it face validity to the learner (ask my son). Obviously, the car was a real car, just in the same way we create a thinking environment as a vehicle that replicates the real tensions and trade-off in both qualitative and quantitative business decision making.  However, the key to the learning was in the debrief at the end of each circuit. We progressed through the driving challenges in much the same way as you progress through the rounds of a simulation, overwhelmed at first but as each new challenge becomes progressively harder we find ourselves being able to rise to the occasion. The experience (aka learning) in prior rounds leads to confidence in participants to attempt these harder challenges. That is, they are able learn and grow in a risk-free environment. The car park was my risk-free environment!

Impact on Society

The stakes are high in learning how to drive. We as seasoned drivers sometime forget that the margins of error for a collision and potential tragedy are slim. So, are they in the business world. You may not get the direct loss of life, but poor business decisions can have a monumental impact on the quality of life of thousands of people and the associated economic impact of job loss and consequential social upheaval. Think of a broken business model and the resulting impact the industry disruption has on people who are directly (and indirectly) affected.

So, I am now reinvigorated on the pivotal role that business simulations have in preparing our future business leaders. I would be really interested in people’s thoughts and comments on the above.

Please Take the Survey

If you would like to participate in my research on this topic, please click on the link below to complete a quick 5-minute survey. You will receive a comprehensive 13-page report benchmarked to over 1000 respondents so far.

https://teamstrategicthinking.com//take-the-survey/

Further Reading

To understand Edgar Shein’s view on the “anxiety of learning” and its impact on change you may be interested in this seminal 2002 interview he did with Diane Coutu and published by Harvard Business Review.

https://hbswk.hbs.edu/archive/edgar-schein-the-anxiety-of-learning-the-darker-side-of-organizational-learning

“Your organisation is perfectly designed for the results that you achieve” – W.Edwards Demming

After 19 years Dick Smith has announced the closure of his Eponymous food brand. Mr Smith is quoted as saying in AFR (27/7/18)  “this is terrible on a personal level….I’ve failed, I’ve failed” as he held back tears.  Why?  His business model is broken and in fact had been for a long, long time.  He had just failed to realise it.  Dick seems to have blamed everyone else accept himself. Apparently it’s all Aldi’s fault and in particular the reclusive children of the founder Karl Albrecht , Karl Jr & Beatie . Mr Smith accuses them, in an open letter to the CEO of Coles, Woolworths and Metcash, of “extreme capitalism”.  He actually encourages Coles & Woolworths to move towards the Aldi system if they want to remain competitive.  This would be a disaster for them!  Why did Dick Smith Foods fail?  Fundamentally they did not have clarity around their value proposition and the market segments they were targeting.  It relied on vague and ambiguous notions of national pride.  On the other hand Aldi leverage their Germanic heritage of engineering precision in the articulation and execution of their business model.  Extreme capitalism Mr Smith, I would say smart capitalism! 

Since the advent of the modern industrial economy post WWII, KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators) have been used to measure and guide management performance and rewards.  Organisations spend literally millions of dollars in identifying and then measuring the KPI’s that support their strategy execution.  They systematically ensure that these KPI’s cascade down to all position description and individual goals and objectives.  Achieve your KPI’s and you’ll get that promotion you have been coveting or that bonus you have been chasing .  Here lies the problem.  It is assumed that if an individual optimises their performance as measured by their KPI’s, they will be maximising organisational performance.  In fact nothing could be further from the truth.  Any cursory review of role and goal congruence indicates that a significant portion of your workforce is actually set up in competition with each other.  This leads to dysfunctional team behaviour and stifles real collaboration.  The current mess the banking industry is a case study in point of KPI’s driving the wrong behaviours with disastrous outcomes.

It’s always a special time when a new super hero is born.  After two week of intense testimony and questioning Australia has found a new Super Hero. This has come in the form of the mild mannered “senior council assisting the commission” Rowena “Shock and” Orr.  Her outward demeanour is of a public librarian but her tongue is a sharp as a scalpel.  Rwoena may not be Wonder Women but somewhere she possess a golden lasso of truth.  It appeared that  Daniel Huggins was going to burst into tears as “Shock and Orr” questioned him about broker commission paid by the Commonwealth Bank.  Lynda Harris form Aussie Home Loans was visibly petrified and looked ready to vomit under Rowena’s intense gaze.  Have a look at the video clip of her testimony! 

Aussie Customers Kept in the Dark

So what we know it that Round 1 has kept up to my promise of lifting the lid on habitual practices that border on corruption let alone misconduct.  Where are the leaders, where is the culture.  How will they fix this.  Stay tuned for future episodes!

It is fair to say that up to 80% of bank profits go back to the big four banks shareholders. It does not take too much deduction to work out that this is not the same as 80% of profits going back to ordinary Australians. This claim is outlandish and surely must be investigated by the ACCC as deceptive and misleading.

Why would the banks fell the need to tell us this?

Well it tells me, that with the spectre of the Royal Commission hanging over their heads, the banks are embarrassed by the amount of profit that they make and felt the need to justify this to everyday Australians. They have robbed the Gotham Treasury and in true arch villain style are offering to share the loot with us to buy our silence.
James Fernyhough, writing in the NEW Daily, (article) has saved me the time in doing the calculations. It would appear that (as approximations need to be made), that at 8-9% of Australian benefit from the profits generated by the major banks. He summarises by saying “while we may all own shares in the banks through our super, those shares are distributed about as equally as wealth is in general – i.e. supremely unequally.
What is fair to say is that 80% of adults Australians are customers of the big 4 banks and as customers they have been systematically deceived, mislead and ripped off. This is no more highlighted then the CBA’s admission yesterday that it had been selling “junk” insurance. This was after late last week asking to keep “oversold” insurance products submissions confidential. It has agreed to voluntarily refunded $16 m to over 140,000 customers! Will it surprise you to know that the Royal Commission’s first order of business when it reconvenes on the 13th March will be to look at Consumer Credit and Lending practices? The commissioner will have a field day with these Jokers.

I thought when I started with my Batman motif on misconduct and corruption in the financial services industry I would have to leverage a lot of poetic licence!  But as I read Patrick Durkin’ article in the AFR (26th Feb18) they are just laying the stories up for me.  This is in relation to the ongoing scandal over rate fixing by the big four banks of the Bank Bill Swap Rate  BBSW.

The BBSW is the short-term interest rate used to set interest rates of hundreds of billions of dollars of bonds, loans and hybrid securities. The rate is also influential in determining the rate banks offer on mortgages, personal and corporate loans.

Durkin goes on to elaborate how the wife of CBA’s Chief Swap Trader tells her children “Daddy’s very sad” as he has been “ambushed” by ANZ and Westpac traders who were working in “cahoots”.

Key players according to Durkin are CBA traders Mark ‘The Powerful Owl’ Hulme and Garfield ‘Bad Kitty’ Lee, who were highlighted in ASIC’s case against Westpac where Westpac traders Colin ‘The Rat’ Roden and Sophie ‘The Perfumed Steamroller’ Johnston became key witnesses.

I could not make this stuff up!

Oh my message:

click here for full AFR Article