Sue Cox is a Learning and Development Consultant and a Tango dancer. She has worked extensively with the public and not-for-profit sectors as well as the corporate world and has developed and led social inclusion projects across the UK.
She is interested in how we develop our own potential and how we connect better with others in order to be more effective in our organisations and relationships.
She will be a keynote speaker at the IMI National Management Conference on 8 October 2015. IMI: Based on your current work – if you only had 6 words of advice to give a business - what would they be?
SC: Want better leadership? Develop your followership.
IMI: What does this mean?
SC: Many organisations invest heavily in developing and recognising good leadership but give little or no thought to actively cultivating good followership. Leadership is, by definition, a relational process however there is no leadership unless there is a leader/follower dynamic. When we focus only on developing leadership, we give visibility and importance to one aspect only, neglecting the contribution of followership and the untapped potential of the relationship between the two. How much do we lose by doing so?
A powerful illustration of what this looks like in practice can be seen in Argentine Tango. There is a misconception in Tango that the leader is in control and the follower is relatively passive. Nothing could be further from the truth. Tango is complex, improvised and co-created in the moment and it depends entirely on the leader/follower dynamic. Good followership amplifies and strengthens leadership; good leadership maximises the followers’ contribution. The quality of their connection elevates the whole dance to a greater level of performance.
Misconceptions about leadership and followership are seen as often in the boardroom as they are in the ballroom. If you want to release potential in your organisation and be resourceful and creative in the way you respond to change and opportunity, the challenge is to develop everybody’s ability as both leader and follower, so that each can play their full part in co-creating the dance.
IMI: Where should we look for further information?
SC: Visit my website at Ballroom2Boardroom.com
Sue Cox spoke at the IMI National Management Conference on Thursday 8 October. This event has now reached maximum capacity however if you would like to be added to the waiting list, please email your contact details and company name to conference@imi.ie.
[post_title] => "Want better leadership? Develop your followership" Six Word Wisdom from Sue Cox
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There are now about two million people who are in work in Ireland. Of these, about half a million work in the public sector in areas such as administration, teaching and health. The rest are employed in the private sector.
Considering its centrality to our everyday prosperity, the private sector is oddly depicted in our culture. The big businessman is always the baddie. Just think: Mr Burns in The Simpsons, Michael Douglas’s Gordon Gekko in Wall Street, or Leonardo DiCaprio in The Wolf of Wall Street.
Source: www.axiomcommunications.com
On that basis, it’s good to see that a movie has just come out that portrays financiers in a more realistic light: as intelligent people who take risks to make money in a complex financial world in which there are winners, but, by extension, plenty of losers.
The Big Short, released on January 22 2016, is based on an adaptation of the adage of “buy low, sell high” among stock market traders. Going “short” simply reverses the sequence by aiming to “sell high, buy low”. To put it simply, you sell a stock that you don’t own and think is overvalued and undertake to close the transaction by buying it back later.
The protagonists of The Big Short, based on the book of the same name by Michael Lewis, realise in the mid-2000s that the US housing market is an accident waiting to happen and that it is a big candidate to be “shorted”.
It examines several different individuals who independently reached such a conclusion and who had the guts to back that insight with their own cash. As one Bloomberg View writer put it: “It isn’t a spoiler alert to say that the financial world collapses, the protagonists get rich and no one lives happily ever after.”
The most compelling story was that of Michael Burry. He was the founder of the Scion Capital hedge fund which he operated from 2000 to 2008. Mr Burry initially qualified as a medical doctor and left work as a neurologist to pursue his hobby and become a full-time investor. In 2001, Mr Burry’s first full year at the hedge fund, the S&P 500 index fell 11.88 per cent but Scion was up 55 per cent, according to Lewis.
The next year, the index fell again, by 22.1 per cent, and yet Scion was up again: 16 per cent.
In 2003, the stock market finally turned around and rose 28.69 per cent, but Mr Burry beat it again — his investments rose by 50 per cent. By the end of 2004, he was managing $600 million and, as Mr Lewis put it, was “turning money away”.
It was at this point that Mr Burry focused on the US housing market. As the market collapsed spectacularly and others lost lots of money, he was still in profit because he had correctly predicted what would happen.
He later said he shorted mortgages because he had to. “Every bit of logic had led me to this trade and I had to do it,” is how he put it. He has also pointed out that he did not benefit from taxpayer-funded bailouts as he liquidated his shorted positions by April 2008.
One thing is clear from all of this. Mr Burry is worth listening to, especially when it comes to issues relating to the financial markets. In a recent interview with New York magazine, he gave some hints about where the next big-short trading opportunities may come from. He said that he had hoped after the crash that the world would enter a new era of personal responsibility, but instead we “doubled down on blaming others and this is longterm tragic”.
On this basis, the Irish response might not impress Mr Burry. Our reaction to our own banking crisis has been to blame bankers for lending to us rather than to reflect on whether we were wise to borrow and to invest in overvalued property.
Instead of learning lessons, it would appear that we have simply sought out scapegoats to evade personal responsibility. Mr Burry’s comment that “if a lender offers me free money, I do not have to take it” is not one that sits easily in Irish public debate even if it is little more than a statement of the obvious.
The hedge fund manager is not happy either with the current state of global financial markets, which he believes are once again trying to stimulate growth through easy money. “It hasn’t worked, but it’s the only tool the Fed’s got,” he said.
Mr Burry is worried that the markets are using interest rates to “price-risk”, but that mechanism is broken as the interest rates of central banks have been kept for many years at close to zero.
Worse still, he thinks that by using low interest rates to fight the aftermath of one bubble going bust, central banks may just support the development of more bubbles. That’s the big risk today, but it’s also how the US housing market developed into a bubble a decade ago.
In combating the economic decline after the internet bubble went bust in 2000, Mr Burry argues that the Fed kept US interest rates too low for too long.
He argues that we are building up “terrific stresses in the system” and any fault lines will harm the outlook.
The problem with this conclusion is that, despite our progress, Ireland remains one of the most heavily indebted countries in the world. We would face a heavy cost if they were to rise again.
Let us be grateful then that Mario Draghi, the head of the European Central Bank, doesn’t agree with Mr Burry and that eurozone interest rates are likely to remain low for several years to come.
Cormac Lucey is the Programme Director of the IMI Diploma in Business Finance. Cormac is also a Financial Services Consultant and Contractor who has previously worked with PricewaterhouseCoopers, Rabobank Frankfurt and the Department of Justice.
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[post_title] => ....“If a lender offers me free money, I do not have to take it”
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In my opinion there are three organisation wide people focused initiatives that I have found particularly helpful in creating high performance cultures:
The result: A workforce with the right capabilities, willing to go the extra mile (engaged) and enabled to perform at their best. An organisation where strategic priorities and culture are aligned and working together to deliver an exceptional customer experience and, in turn, impact / profits and shareholder value.
Building Capabilities:
Capability building is central to organisational performance. There is a need to identify and focus development interventions on those competencies that add the most value to the organisation’s business performance i.e. those that enable the effective execution of the organisation’s strategy. A recent Economist study reported that “61% of respondents acknowledge that their firms often struggle to bridge the gap between strategy formulation and its day-to-day implementation".
Moreover, in the last three years an average of just "56% of strategic initiatives has been successful.”1. Companies can improve on this track record by paying far greater attention to the capabilities they need to successfully implement their strategy.
C.K. Prahalad and G Hamel, in their HBR article “The Core Competence of the Corporation” argue that “the real sources of advantage are to be found in management’s ability to consolidate corporate-wide technologies and production skills into competencies that empower individual businesses to adapt quickly to changing opportunities”. They go further to state that unlike products, technology and processes which can be easily copied and replicated, core competencies are difficult for competitors to imitate and therefore can become a unique source of long term competitive advantage.
Caution:
A common mistake organisations make is to over-focus on today’s capability needs at the detriment of important longer-term capability needs that might end up not being addressed. This requires organisations to look into the external environment to identify future threats, challenges and opportunities and their impact on the capability requirements of the organisation going forward.
Engagement
There is a growing body of evidence over the past decade that validates (1) that engaged employees outperform their non-engaged co-workers and (2) the quantifiable relationship between levels of organizational engagement and financial performance
Engagement is an employee’s willingness to expend discretionary effort / to go the extra mile at work
Towers Watson’s Global Workforce Study 2014 found that only 4 in 10 employees are highly engaged; that close to a quarter (24%) are disengaged, and another 36% can be described as either unsupported or detached. A full 60% of employees lack the elements required to be highly engaged.
This engagement gap presents a great challenge but also a great opportunity to improve organisational performance
Organisations need to make engagement an organisational priority led from the top, assess current employee engagement levels and, develop and implement engagement plans.
Supportive Work Environment
Capability building and staff engagement, however, can take a company only so far. Factors specifically related to the work environment also play a critical role.
That is, organisations need to provide employees with the support they need to do their work efficiently and effectively. E.g. providing people with the tools, resources and support to do their job effectively, giving them meaningful work and creating an environment that promotes employees’ physical, social and emotional well-being. In these environments:
People are clear on the strategic direction of their organisation and what they are expected to deliver and the way in which to deliver it (Role Clarity)
People understand how their job contributes to the success of his/her department and organisation (Task Identity)
People understand the positive impact their work has on others within or outside the organization (Task significance)
People are trusted, empowered and given the right level of autonomy to perform their role (Autonomy)
People are given enough on the job learning and growth opportunities to improve themselves and achieve their potential (Mastery)
People receive on-going constructive feedback on performance from customers, colleagues and the manager for development
While an organisation’s culture can become its main source of long term sustainable competitive advantage, proactively managing, improving or changing is one of the most difficult leadership challenges.
Can your organisation’s leadership opt out?
If so, do they run the risk of their organisation becoming less and less attractive to employees and shareholders? Becoming irrelevant?
What do you think? Would love to hear your views on this blog as well as your thoughts on things / initiatives that can enable the creation of a high performance culture.
1“Why Good Strategies Fail: Lessons for the C-Suite,” Economist Intelligence Unit, 2013, http://www.pmi.org/~/media/PDF/Publications/WhyGoodStrategiesFail_Report_EIU_PMI.ashx
Pedro Angulo is the new Programme Director of the IMI Diploma in Strategic HR Management and contributes on the IMI Diploma in Executive Coaching.
Pedro is an Organisational Effectiveness Business Partner in AIB and Chairperson of the Irish EMCC (European Mentoring and Coaching Council).
He is a motivational speaker and regular presenter at HR, coaching, change and business conferences / events._____________________________________
[post_title] => And the result: A workforce with the right capabilities & willing to go the extra mile
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Edwin O’Hora
26th Nov 2018
Edwin O’Hora is the Programme Director for the IMI Diploma in Organisational Development and Transformation.
Related Articles
"Want better leadership? Develop your followership" Six Word Wisdom from Sue Cox
....“If a lender offers me free money, I do not have to take it”
And the result: A workforce with the right capabilities & willing to go the extra mile
The Ultimate in Business Development & Continuity – Building a Leadership Pipeline
The element of success that is making yourself somewhat ‘redundant’ is a difficult element for many leaders to grasp – particularly leaders who are quite ego driven.
A key aspect of this is an interesting one; when you are no longer in the business, that performance continues despite your absence. In effect, this should put a huge focus on your talent and leadership pipeline and the management of succession.
The element of success that is making yourself somewhat ‘redundant’ is a difficult element for many leaders to grasp – particularly leaders who are quite ego driven. At an executive level a significant element of your people plan should focus on successor management and development across the spectrum for your ‘marquee’ roles (those roles that have the potential to disproportionately both drive and sustain the success of your business in the future).
A succession pipeline is crucial for a sustainable business model (Picture Source)
Putting yourself out of business
Most businesses have a degree of formality around this with talent development programmes allowing promising people in the organisation to move around the organisation and experience different challenges, get external support to do this effectively and ultimately, develop better and more senior capability.
However, as an executive it’s critical to combine the strategic business element and an element of personal integrity and consistency. The art of running a strong talent programme is akin to what every good tightrope walker needs in abundance – balance.
Ideally you have a balance of focus on the capabilities required to deliver your strategic imperatives coupled with a genuine concern and regard for the individual in the pipeline.
Too much focus on the ‘pure’ capability development and it can seem like a production line and people can lose that personal and emotional engagement with the manager and the organisation.
Too much focus exclusively on the individual aspirations and they can get ‘split’ from what the business requires for the sustainable delivery of the future strategy. This can sometimes lead to personal development plans which are not aligned to the business strategy and, at that point, both the person themselves and their manager/HR business partner risk compromising the credibility of the programme.
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Think differently
In working with companies across the spectrum, I am always reassured to meet insightful and forward-thinking leaders that actively seek out people who are capable, ambitious and think differently to them.
Strong leaders want their teams to bring divergent opinions to the table and to feel comfortable to articulate their opinions without fear or favour. Simon Sinek (probably best known for his book ‘Start with why’) has recently talked about the importance of ‘cognitive diversity’ as a core element of high performing teams – the ability of a team to harness the power of divergent thinking rather being challenged by it. This might seem pretty obvious from a common-sense perspective, but I’m constantly surprised by senior teams having no real insight or awareness of this in their own settings.
However, managing a large group of diverse individuals in a complex and fast moving environment is very much a dynamic process – it’s not about writing a once yearly submission for the board – it’s a day to day personal commitment on the part of the leadership group to challenge, support and engage with the people they want to run the business next at all levels.
Lots of organisations have a great narrative around development but, unless the leadership behaviour is aligned to that narrative, then you may have an issue.
A number of elements help to support progressive talent development:
Know your people – the better you know what is driving your people’s behaviour the more likely it is you will work with them to pick the right development options for the business and for them.
Actively support talent development – don’t just give it lip service – as a senior leader you need to dedicate time and commitment to your people, even if that’s uncomfortable or not your first instinct.
Listen and be as flexible as you can. Groups of great people have lots of things going on in their lives and it’s likely you have a hugely diverse range of circumstances in your team – be aware of them and deal with them like a real person when they arise, not as an automaton.
Manage performance consistently and fairly – nothing disenfranchises good people like non-performance going unactioned. Deal with underperformance fairly and proactively. It’s much more likely to work out successfully.
Create a roadmap for senior development rather than a highly prescriptive set of roles to be occupied – in order to create truly diverse teams, we need to be attuned to the value of different types of developmental experiences in the organisation rather than just the one that has got the CEO to where they are.
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Creating a functioning talent pipeline is a challenging, dynamic and ever-changing challenge but, in a work of work that seems to be changing extremely quickly – there has never been a time when best in class people management has a more tangible effect on the bottom line.
Thankfully, we are starting to see this increasingly at board level with better and better critique and insight on talent development from board members. If your board aren’t asking you tough questions about succession already it probably isn’t too far away – better talent development is better for business.
(This article was originally published in the Sunday Business Post)
Edwin O’ Hora is the Programme Director for the IMI Diploma in Organisational Development and Transformation. Edwin works with a range of clients in different sectors in the areas of growing organisations, making them scalable and developing and sustaining high performance.
Whether you are looking to develop the capabilities of your people in areas critical for growth or are considering a deeper organisational transformation, the IMI Customised Solutions team can partner with you at every step.
The result: A workforce with the right capabilities, willing to go the extra mile (engaged) and enabled to perform at their best. An organisation where strategic priorities and culture are aligned and working together to deliver an exceptional customer experience and, in turn, impact / profits and shareholder value.
