Leadership Qualities & Training

Ironically, start-up businesses are often prepared for success on many levels but not on one of the most important: leadership. James Michael explains the principles of his three-e style of leadership training.

From innovator to entrepreneur to marketer and employer, and then, inexorably, to manager and leader. What a journey! And for many small to medium enterprises (SMEs), it’s a journey they aren’t necessarily fully prepared or trained for. What began for many as a good idea possibly kicking off in the garage or the spare bedroom, eventually becomes a living breathing organism (called ‘a business’) with as many demands as raising children.

Over the decade or so that I’ve been working with them, for many SMEs this ‘leadership thing’ can be a challenge. Where, in the early days, you may have been able to rely on yourself, once the business gets to a certain critical mass, sustained success means relying on others—the things that need to be done on a daily basis can no longer be handled by you alone. And so you have a new body of knowledge, skills and behaviours you have to be able to use, around securing results with and through others. And that of course means trusting and delegating: letting go.

The typical small or medium businessowner is often spurred into action as a subject-matter-expert; somebody that either had a stroke of creative genius around a new product or service, or somebody that was already in the area of expertise—probably as somebody else’s employee—and decided they could do it better in some way. Often as not passion, enthusiasm and dedication are the key ingredients in getting a new business to gather momentum. So now, when we fast-forward and there are four, 12, perhaps even 30 or more employees working around you, it’s easy to see that those early passions—even the business acumen you’ve picked up along the way—may not be enough. So what do you need to know?

The truth is, an article like this will never do the subject justice—I’ve been a student (and subsequently teacher) on the subjects of leadership and management for over twenty years and I wouldn’t lay claim to possessing all of the knowledge on the subject. But let’s start here: engage, enable, empower.

Most managers we meet with share a desire to foster a ‘high-performance’ culture within their businesses. A good number however are not entirely sure how. For in excess of twenty years I have been largely preoccupied with just how high-performing teams/organisations/cultures come to be—and endure. Over the last half-decade, we have surveyed thousands of employees working with dozens of client organisations using an online benchmarking tool. In almost every situation where the ‘culture’ results were sub-optimal there was a corresponding low to be found in the specific driver of ‘leadership style and behaviour’—the five-year average currently sits at only 53 percent effectiveness. Post-survey focus workshops conducted with hundreds of employees, across all business functions, revealed that many ‘managers’ were seen to be either a significant cause of poor overall culture scores, or, were failing to adequately address cultural issues within their teams or organisations.

The good news though has been that we have also discerned that the consistent theme found in every high-performing team is the fostering of what we have come to describe as a ‘culture of leadership’—where team-members are ‘self-actualising’, performing consistent ‘acts of leadership’ to the benefit of all stakeholders, without waiting to be instructed by management. For Australians to consistently operate at the high-performance end of the bell-curve and demonstrate a ‘culture of leadership’, our experience and research reveal that they need to be firstly engaged, next enabled and subsequently empowered. We call this ‘E To The Power of Three’ or, E3.

Engaging is focused on the need to first ‘win the hearts and minds’ of each member of the team—engaging them fully in the pursuits of the organisation, overcoming resistance to change and the natural cynicism which forms a deeply ingrained part of the Australian cultural psyche. This entails:

• knowing and explaining ‘the situation’ which dictates the business’ current focus—giving them a clear sense of ‘why’;

• creating ‘purposeful’ organisational objectives which respond to the ‘situation’—the ‘what’;

• developing sound strategies and plans which give employees confidence—the ‘how’;

• appropriately allocating initiatives, tasks and resources in alignment with all of the above;

• acting with authenticity and competence;

• creating a sense of worth for all members of the team; and ultimately

• engendering a sense of purpose, confidence and action.