Leadership Qualities & Training

• personally pursuing excellence and encouraging your employees to do so;

• maintaining a constructive workplace dynamic;

• fostering teamwork and cooperation;

• sharing information appropriately;

• securing equipment and resources;

• optimising policies, procedures and structure to give the team maximum agility;

• facilitating collaboration between departments/teams, suppliers and customers; and

Empowerment in this context further focuses on enhancing the 'environment' in which operational excellence is enabled. It is also where a ‘culture of leadership’ is ultimately catalysed. Specifically this requires a focus on:

• encouraging ‘response-ability’ in our people, where they routinely look for opportunities and/or issues and respond appropriately to them rather than waiting for permission or, worse, ignoring them;

• reinforcing performance standards and understanding that each employee’s performance is an outcome of what you are prepared to settle for;

• driving continuous improvement—in both employee capability and in the processes you use in your business;

• making sound and timely critical decisions; and

In the last six months we have been measuring the levels of E3 which exist in businesses around Australia and New Zealand, using our E3 ‘Culture of Leadership’ Profile. The likelihood of employees ‘committing autonomous acts of leadership’ currently averages only 71 percent, with some organisations reporting scores in the 50 percentile band. We also measure how effectively leaders/managers perform the 22 competencies described above, through our online 360-degree feedback tool and the current average scores are 63 percent for engaging, 69 percent for enabling and 73 percent for empowering. Notably the consistently lowest factor is ‘Developing the professional capability of each individual within the team’, which currently sits at an average of only 51 percent. Sadly, it seems many managers believe it is somebody else’s responsibility to develop their people’s capabilities.