This breakfast workshop introduces the New Psychology of Leadership - a scientific explanation of leadership that, whilst radically challenging conventional views of leadership, is easily understood, supported by research and readily translated into practical solutions.

Randal Tame of Insight & Influence has had great success in using the New Psychology of Leadership in promoting leadership and followership in his client organisations. His teaching of the approach at MGSM has received rave reviews.

He will lead a discussion about the social identity view of leadership and provide case studies of its application in a major Australasian utility.

This workshop is intended for all executives who are frustrated with the old models of leadership and want a simple, practical and ethical approach to developing influence and power.

“A simple but profound theory underlies the New Psychology of Leadership, and that theory seems so very right that it may come as a surprise that this is not already the concept of leadership everywhere. This captures the true structure of what leadership is all about.”

George A. Akerlof, Nobel Laureate in Economics, University of California, Berkeley USA

To register please click on this link

We look forward to seeing you there

We aim to correct this over the next few months.

As you will see in our imminent next blog entry, Randal and I are proposing a radical new approach to leadership based on the social identity approach as championed by eminent authors such as Alex Haslam and Michael Platow  which in turn is based on the earlier work of Henri Tajfel and John Turner.

Randal has been using this model with great success, both in his teaching at Macquarie Graduate School of Management and in working with his clients in the field. We are going to become much more active in promoting our use of this model and the first step will be a breakfast workshop on 8 December at the American Club in Sydney.

Further details to follow.

I (David) met Stephen at last year’s Coaching Psychology Conference in London and invited him out to Australia on behalf of the APS Interest Group in Coaching Psychology. Luckily he was already coming out to New Zealand in November and being in the neighbourhood, agreed to a national tour of workshops. It been a remarkable amount of work putting the tour together so I’m going to be really glad when it gets underway in Sydney on Saturday 24 October at the Establishment.

Stephen is one of the world thought leaders in coaching. He is one of the most energetic and accomplished people I have ever met. My impression was that he either started or is involved with nearly every coaching organisation in Britain. These include the Centre for Coaching, the Stephen Palmer Partnership, and the Centres of Expertise. He is head of the Coaching Psychology Unit at City University London and has authored or edited 35 books and over 150 articles. A brief bio can be found here.

He will be presenting advanced techniques in the assessment and active management of stress and anxiety with coaching clients. The workshop is targeted at experienced coaching psychologists rather than executive coaches, but anyone who has clients who has problems with stress and anxiety will be able to get something from the workshop. You can find out more about the content and book for the Sydney workshop on Saturday 24 October here. Stephen will also be presenting the workshop in Adelaide on 27 October, Brisbane 29 October and Melbourne on 31 October.

If you are coming along to the Sydney workshop, come up, say hello and let me know you found out about the workshop via this blog. I’ll be hosting the event and introducing Stephen so you shouldn’t be able to miss me.

See you there

Previously he sparred with Peter Zarris but this time he is paired against Dr Elizabeth Allworth. Elizabeth is a prominent and accomplished organisational psychologist who this year won the prestigious Elton Mayo Professional Practice Award. Elizabeth is a principal at Allworth Juniper and will take the position that measureable personal attributes and qualities do make a difference in leadership. Randal will again argue that leadership is a social phenomenon and it is the leader’s  relationship with the group that determines the quality and effectiveness of leadership and not the personal qualities of the leader.

These debates are always fun and informative so if you are lucky enough to be in Canberra (☺) Tuesday 13 October come along to  Unit 8 / 9 Sydney Ave, Barton. You can book online here or find out more here.

Ulrich’s study identified three key sets of competencies that HR professionals need to demonstrate to be seen as adding value to the business.These three areas are:

1. HR functional expertise – knowing and being able to deliver state of the art, innovative HR practices,
2. Knowledge of business – understanding how their organisation operates so they can adapt HR practices to local conditions, and
3. Managing change – being able to match internal adaptive change to that in the external environment.

Functional expertise was important to discern best practice, business knowledge enabled one to join the executive team, but the greatest impact on how they were perceived was their competence in managing change. This emphasis rose with the seniority of the HR role; ie HR professionals at the GM level were valued less for their knowledge of the business and technical knowledge and more for their knowledge and ability in managing change.

This study was conducted in the mid 90s. Do you think anything would be different now? Or would the capability to manage change would be even more important now?

To all the HR professionals out there – how strong is your knowledge of and skills in change management? What could you do to improve this? Who could you talk to who has a deep knowledge of change, influence, and the leadership of change?

Randal and I will be waiting for your call. ☺

I resurrect it here after being part of a discussion during an AHRI workshop on the differences between coaches and mentors.

My contribution was to the effect that managers shouldn’t try to be a coach (noun) but they certain need to coach (verb).

I like the ambiguity in the title; are the tips for managers who coach or for coaching managers?

Both; but I think I meant the former when I wrote it.

Seven Tips for Coaching Managers

We are often asked “what do coaches do differently to managers?”
The answer we give is that there shouldn’t be very much difference at all.  But in practice there often is a wide gap. Of course the full range of responsibilities for a manager is much broader than just coaching their staff. However, taking a coaching approach will help you as a manager to do a better job across all your responsibilities, not just with developing your people.
Looking at the following seven tips for coaching managers, how might you be a more effective manager if this was what you did?

1. Ask questions. One trap many managers make is to think that they have to be the expert and know everything.  The best performing teams are the ones that make full use of all the expertise and talent in the team. One of the key responsibilities of the manager is to identify and utilise the strengths of their team. The best and simplest way to do this is to ask questions rather than give answers.
2. Listen to the answers. If you are going to ask questions, you might as well listen to the answers.  And then, do something with the answers. Enter into a discussion about the topic, ask your staff to follow up your discussion, do something yourself with the information. Whatever you do, don’t ignore their response.
3. Collaborate. Another trap managers can fall into is to keep working as an individual when the whole idea is to get things done through and with others. The strength of a team comes from making use of the skills and expertise of the team members. The performance of a team comes from its members applying their strengths towards a common goal. Both a good coach and a good manager aim to make this happen.
4. Stop and think. There is always too much to be done. This puts pressure on managers and their staff to leap straight to action without enough (if any) thinking, planning, investigation or questioning. A good coaching manager will both model a “think then do” approach as well as encouraging their staff to stop and think before they act.
5. Focus on relationships. Research suggests that the quality of the relationship between a coach and coachee is about three times more important to the outcome than which technique is used. What might happen if you put more effort into nurturing relationships with your team rather than managing process issues? We think you’ll find that you’ll get a lot more engagement, initiative and less resistance to change.
6. Let go. A pattern we see all the time, especially with managers from a technical or professional background, is letting go of doing the work they love doing. They fail to delegate this hands on work to their team members. This has two consequences; they don’t have enough time to manage and their staff don’t gain experience and develop their professional skills. The best thing you can do as a manager and coach is to assign your staff lots of challenging and stimulating work. You’ll have more time to do what you should be doing and they’ll get better at what they do.
7. It’s not about you. A theme running through all the previous six tips and our whole approach to developing leadership, management and coaching, is that the focus should be on the followers, team members and coachees, not on the leaders, managers or coaches. It’s not what you do but what the other person does that matters. This is why we say you as a manager and coach need to ask questions, listen, understand your people, get them involved, give them work. True success as a leader, manager or coach is about getting others to do more than would have been possible without you and for them to think they did it themselves.

“No coach has ever won a game by what he knows; it’s what his players know that counts”
Paul Byrant 
American College Football Coach

I particulary like the final quote. I have no idea who Paul Byrant is or how successful he is/was as a coach but its always nice to hear someone else expressing what you think.

Cheers

David

I thought I’d leave a link here on the blog to make it easy to download.

Cheers

David

The publicity blurb for the event was:

The NSW APS Interest Group in Coaching Psychology invites you to join us for what promises to be a lively and controversial evening.

Live Debate: Natural born leader v The developed leader

“Not everyone deserves or will benefit from leadership development. It should be reserved for a select few who can show that they have what it takes to be a leader”.

In the red corner (affirmative), we have Peter Zarris, IGCP National Convenor and CEO of Opic Consulting, a Melbourne consultancy that provides a range of on-line psychological assessment and development products and services. Peter’s approach to leadership development starts with assessing participants’ leadership potential using personality and aptitude tests. He believes that “leadership development is so far ranging that you have to measure the target development. It’s a waste of time for those who don’t have the potential.”

In the blue corner (negative), we have Randal Tame, the CEO of Insight & Influence, a leading Sydney change leadership consultancy and an Adjunct Lecturer at Macquarie Graduate School of Management. Randal believes too much leadership development follows the 19th Century’s “Great Man” approach which suggests that leaders have special personal qualities which set them apart from their followers. He holds that research instead shows that leadership is a group based phenomena and that anyone can be a leader.

Do you agree? Disagree? Both schools of thought have their supporters and the evening will be an opportunity to hear each side argue their case as persuasively as possible, present evidence, anecdotes and examples to support their claims. The debate will then move into the audience with small group discussions and will conclude with a moderated open discussion of the issues. We expect discussion to continue well into the evening as audience members pick up the batons and continue the debate over a cold drink.

If you work in the area or are interested in leadership, join us for what should be both an entertaining and informative evening. Please feel free to invite friends or colleagues that may like to join us and be part of the evening. We look forward to seeing you there!

I wrote the debate proposition to be deliberately provocative.

It all came from a conversation I had with Peter about leadership development where he said;

“You know, the more I do this the more I realise that some people just aren’t meant to be leaders and it’s a waste of time putting them on leadership development programs. ”

“In fact, ” he continued, ” it’s like trying to teach a pig to sing”.

“What do you mean?” I asked, not getting the connection.

“It sounds like crap and annoys the pig, so just don’t try it in the first place.”

“You really need to have a good talk with Randal about this because that’s the opposite of what he believes.” I replied, “In fact, we should get you two guys up on stage and slug it out.”

“Sounds like fun” said Peter.

From tiny acorns ….

The debate itself was a great success with over 90 attendees at the Royal Automobile Club in Sydney on April 6.

We have also just repeated the event in Brisbane last Friday night May 29 and attracted over 40 people to the Mill Hotel.

One of the participants said it was the best event she had been to in years.

If any of you attended either of the two events let us know what you thought.

We recorded the Sydney debate and if you would like to listen please click on the below link.

Warning: it’s a big mp3 file (about 36Mb) and runs for 1 hr 22 minutes.

It includes my introduction, the debate and the subsequent audience discussion.

Here’s the link to the recording of the Sydney debate.

After Sydney and Brisbane, we intend to take the show to Canberra in the near future.

If you would like Peter and Randal to present the debate at your conference, convention, wedding or bar mitzvar let us know. Happy to travel.

Cheers

David

So I thought I’d start my blog proper by listing some of my favourite authors and other influences upon my professional work.

Henry Mintzberg

Nearly everyone interested in management and leadership will know Mintzberg. He embodies the “think different” ethos and continues to make valuable contrarian contributions on classrooms being poor places to learn management, what managers really do, leadership, airlines and what ever else catches his gaze.

A great thought leader.

http://www.henrymintzberg.com/

Bandura

Albert Bandura is one of the great under-recognised psychologists. His greatest contribution in my opinion has been the concept of self efficacy. I have found this to probably be the single most useful concept in my practice of coaching and leadership development. I suspect his popularity has suffered from his particularly impenetrable writing style but repeated readings are rewarded with brilliant ideas that can make a great difference to people’s confidence in themselves and their capability to succeed.

This site is probably the best introduction to his ideas and how they can be used:

http://des.emory.edu/mfp/self-efficacy.html#bandura

Morgan W McCall Jr

I’ve only recently rediscovered Morgan McCall‘s work on the importance of experiential learning in developing leadership capability. His work at the Centre for Creative Leadership ( a great institution that has been a strong influence on our own approach to leadership development) in the mid 80s created the now famous 70 20 10 rule which we constantly refer to in our work. This rule says that in developing leadership:

70% of the learning comes from challenging workplace experiences

20% comes from supportive and encouraging relationships – supervisors, mentors, coaches and colleagues, and just

10%  is from traditional sources of learning such as training, reading and education.

Our conundrum is that if this is true (most people accept this at face value but the research seems to also support it) why do most leadership training and development program focus on the 10% at the expense of the 70%?

This is something we address in our latest newsletter “Leader Training – A waste of time and money”. We hope this is provocative and we would love to start a debate on this. Have a read and let us know what you think.

That’s enought for now. I’ll list some more authors in my next post.

We started off full of hope and excitement for our new blog but it turns out it was only a trial version.

Our webmaster had to set up the system within our website and have a baby, all at the same time.  So the delay.

But we’re up properly now and we’ll  be posting regularly from now on.

See you all soon.