If you want to lead, read this

Kate Southam
Thursday, May, 17, 2012

I met an ex-British army officer who had commanded 100 troops in Iraq during 2003. He said a big part of his role was caring. That might mean arranging elder care for a soldier’s mum or getting Christmas present to children.

The army during live conflict is a pretty macho workplace but the boss caring was crucial to efficiency. Soldiers needed to focus all their attention on their duties and staying alive – not worrying about their family back home. It is an interesting concept: caring for workers as a way of creating a more productive workplace. Works for me.

Jennifer Garvey Berger works with senior executives around the world across a range of industries. When she asks them what they reckon a good leader is all about their answers are mostly variations on the same theme. “”A leader who thinks about, and cares about you as a person. Good leaders don’t treat their employees as widgets or problems to be solved but as people,” she says.

Garvey Berger has and a masters and doctorate from Harvard University. She is based in New Zealand but travels the world coaching and training senior leaders. Today she is a speaker at a conference in Sydney called Wisdom at Work: Developing Leaders for a Complex World.

She says to cope with the increasing speed and complexity of today’s working world, we need employees who can develop at a much faster rate than at any time in human history so leaders have to be able to support their people to be constantly growing.

I tell Garvey Berger the story about the British officer and she says the military are experts in the area of growing people because they need them to keep a cool head in a crisis. If you ask me, what I rate in a leader it is exactly that: someone who can stay calm during times of high stress. It really ticks me off when a manager starts shouting and belittling others as their way of coping. In nearly 30 years of work, I’ve had only three managers who could keep calm in a crisis.

Garvey Berger says many people are promoted on their technical skills not their ability to lead or even work with other people. As a result, they struggle to solve the people issues within the bigger problems they face. I have heard this constantly over the last 11 years but it is still the norm in Australia is to promote on technical skills.

To be successful as a leader “isn’t so much about what you know but how you are with other people,” Garvey Berger says. Garvey Berger helps leaders to develop over many months. Her training programs are not one-off training days arranged by HR but long-term programs.

Here are some of the other leadership qualities participants develop.

1. A good leader has a way of challenging you to reach further than you thought you could but then supports you if you screw up.
“The companies I work with totally want [to do this] but they don’t know how to do it. As a leader you are dealing with your own anxieties – you don’t want someone screwing up on your watch. As a result, leaders send out mixed messages,” Garvey Berger says.

2. A good leader will take the time to “learn” to care.
Garvey Berger says it takes many leaders up to six months to go from having to remember to care to caring automatically.
“They cannot treat people as problems that have to be solved but as thinking partners, as human beings, people who are expanding growing and changing.”

3. To listen when they feel defensive.
“This is a practice of a lifetime. It is about getting in the habit of listening to others first before building your ideas.”
[Note to everyone. Garvey Berger is not talking about leadership by consensus here.]
Garvey Berger says it is challenging for a manager to remain open to their team having the answers particularly during times of crisis. She challengers her course participants to ask questions and at first they struggle to come up with questions because they have lost this ability.
“Some ask, ‘how do I ask questions without sounding like a wanker?’”

4. A good leader knows what he or she doesn’t know.
Garvey Berger says the training in this area is not new but remains confronting. “We are unconscious of our [areas of] incompetence so that is the first step. The next step is to operate knowing you are now conscious of your area of incompetence without yet being able to do whatever it is well.”

What are the leadership qualities you want to see in a manager?

Garvey Berger and her team work on helping senior people develop their capacity to survey the whole terrain when making decisions in times of stress rather than rely on their default thinking. The feedback from participants is that they can solve problems faster and handle stress far better when they can manage people better.

“We need a lot of optimism right now. It is really easy to be negative. The old systems are showing us that our established ways are broken. We need whole lot of people that are growing faster than at any other time in human history.”
“Workplaces would benefit enormously by thinking about how the grown ups that live inside them are growing and changing.”