Want to be a leader?

Google the word ‘leadership’ and be prepared for the deluge. There are websites galore offering you advice on how to be a leader. And that’s just online. Leadership courses have been popping up all over the place and the literature on leadership is expanding at an exponential rate. According to US business magazine Fast Company, there’s been a new book on leadership published every week for the past ten years. We should all be running the country by now. But we’re not.

Despite a big increase in spending on leadership training, there is still a considerable ‘disconnect’ between leadership expectations and effectiveness, says the Hudson Report: Leadership in the Workforce, released late last year. The report identifies the most important features of successful leadership as to inspire and engage people, champion innovation and lead organisational change. However, these three features were rated lowest among the skills those surveyed thought most relevant. It’s pretty obvious New Zealand has some way to go to get the best out of its leaders, says Hudson’s Peter Harbidge.

Good leaders are made, not born. While some people have more innate potential to lead than others, all you need is the desire and willpower to become an effective leader, says Lester Levy, CEO of Excelerator (New Zealand Leadership Institute) at the University of Auckland Business School. Levy reckons natural potential is the least important of three elements that contribute to leadership. The other two are self-motivation and development opportunity, says Levy. “People who are motivated are able to seize on opportunities quicker than others.”

One defining point of the leadership courses Unlimited reviewed is that virtually everyone has the potential to be a leader. The stereotype of the chiselled-jawed warrior chief executive rallying his troops is just that — a stereotype. Not only do most of us have the potential for leadership, you will find grassroots leaders are effective throughout an organisation rather than just at the top.

So what makes a good leader? Having a sense of humility is a key feature, according to Leadership NZ CEO Leslie Slade. “Good leaders are good learners. They listen, they ask questions and they’re respectful of different perspectives that people bring to an issue.”

Self-described “camp mother” of Excelerator’s Future Leaders Programme, Mary Logue sums it up well. When asked to name a leader she most admires, Logue chose her Nana. “She’s very good at bringing our family, which is very spread out geographically, together,” Logue says. “She acts like the centre of the family’s world.”

The primary requirement of a leader is that other people regard you as one, whether you’re the CEO or further down the food chain, says Sir Ron Carter, chief executive of engineering company Beca.

“People who become leaders are often able to understand the way others think about them.”

But can lessons learned the hard way by leaders inside a company over many years of trial and error be effectively replicated in a classroom?

Carter thinks they can, at least to a certain extent. “It’s possible to accelerate the process. The reason that society has developed is that it’s learned from what’s gone before.”

He’s familiar with two of the leadership programmes reviewed here — Excelerator and Leadership NZ — and also rates the New Zealand Institute of Management run by Kevin Gaunt. “Things like Outward Bound courses are also valuable,” he says. Beca runs its own internal leadership programme.

New Zealand has many examples of great leadership — think Sir Edmund Hillary, Stephen Tindall or Peter Jackson. Sir Peter Blake is another leader widely recognised as one of New Zealand’s greatest. As Prime Minister Helen Clark says of Blake: “What I believe people especially warmed to in Sir Peter was his humility. He didn’t blow his own trumpet. He always praised the team.”

Carter is on the selection panel for the inaugural Sir Peter Blake Leadership Awards (we’ll feature the winners in next month’s magazine). The awards are aimed at recognising and celebrating leadership and enabling young New Zealanders to make a difference in the world.

Making a choice
So, to help bring out the leader in you, Unlimited has reviewed three leadership organisations we think are among the best in New Zealand, and we talk to participants on those courses.

The courses run by these organisations seek, to varying degrees, to create an informal alumni network among those attending.

While the old boys’ networks of the past tended to be drawn from a narrow socio-economic group, these courses aim to draw in people from different backgrounds to discuss the challenges facing New Zealand, and develop informal networks that they can utilise later in their careers.

Here are details of the three leadership organisations:

The New Zealand Leadership Institute or Excelerator
It runs four leadership programmes: the Future Leaders for 17 to 25-year-olds; the Excelerator Leadership programme for senior management; an in-house corporate programme (currently being run with Westpac); and a community programme (the Kaipara District Council is the first client).

Evolving from the Knowledge Wave conference, Excelerator is a not-for-profit based at Auckland University. It’s corporate sponsors include Westpac, the Tindall Foundation, DB, Deloitte and Bell Gully. As well as running leadership courses, Excelerator conducts research on leadership in a New Zealand context. “Leadership is not just about developing one person — it’s about building a collective capacity,” says Levy. “You can’t just sprinkle people with fairy dust and expect them to become leaders. It’s an arduous process that requires commitment.”

The aim is for people to be lifelong learners that take an interest in developing other people. Often people have to unlearn things to become good leaders, says Levy. While they are high achievers, the young people on Excelerator’s Future Leaders programme already have set ideas they have learnt at school or university, he says. “Our education system is heavily oriented towards providing answers, but leadership is oriented towards finding the right questions,” says Levy. “Collaboration is critical, but at school and university it’s called cheating.”

Leadership New Zealand
Another not-for-profit, this organisation is funded by a range of sponsors including the ASB Trust, Vodafone, ACC, TelstraClear and Raynish & Partners. It runs a course for mid-career people from public, private and not-for-profit backgrounds which is closely based on a similar course in Victoria, Australia. The organisation wants to build an alumni of people who after completing the course will donate a few hours per week of their expertise to community organisations.

There are 23 people on the course, which is in its first year, ranging in age from late-20s to mid-50s. “They are people who have been through formal learning and work experience but are now looking for something else,” says Slade.

The Victoria course now has 500 alumni who donate time to various community groups. Reflecting the diversity of the community and giving something back to it are key philosophies of this course. “There’s no point growing leadership capability if you can’t put it back into the community,” says Slade. When deciding on course participants, Leadership New Zealand looks for people wanting to make a difference to the community rather than those just seeking to enhance their career prospects. “Leadership is not just about your job. It’s a set of behaviours and qualities that you take into the rest of your life. Doing the course is just the beginning.”

The Institute for Strategic Leadership
Set up in 2000, the institute runs week-long intensive courses for CEOs and other senior management at Queenstown’s Millbrook Resort. It is the only one of the three that aims to make money out of its courses. It also runs in-house courses aimed at middle management for companies and next year is planning to run a course for Kiwi ex-pats in the Croatian city of Dubrovnik.

Institute CEO Geoff Lorigan says the intensive course is very experiential, rather than just being a ‘chalk and talk’ show. Most of the people attending already have a lot of knowledge, he says.

Lorigan says leadership abilities vary among the high achievers taking the week-long course. Often people heading not-for-profits are better leaders because they have to inspire staff who are volunteers, he says. “The worst leaders are those that have been effective John Wayne-types earlier in their careers but struggle to make the transition to effective leaders later on because they have become too arrogant and tend to micro-manage.”

Good leaders have a high level of self-awareness that others don’t often have, says Lorigan. “People look at you and figure out whether you’re authentic and if they don’t think you are, they won’t respect you.”