How well your teams perform relies on how good your leaders are
This article was produced in partnership with Peter Berry Consultancy (PBC).
Remember that childhood game Follow my Leader? It was fun but also full of learning opportunities for young kids. In adulthood to be an effective leader comes with an automatic question: Why should anyone follow you?
Talented people want to work for talented leaders. So, the task of cultivating leaders who are capable of building engaged and motivated teams around them is crucial to business success.
Peter Berry, managing director of PBC, has spent a lifetime understanding the answers to the question of what makes successful leaders and how leadership skills and behaviours can be developed. The good news is that leadership and team effectiveness are measurable and improvable.
Naturally, leaders must drive commercial success and achieve a balanced scorecard for the business to be sustainable. But increasingly, it is leadership behaviours that are prioritised in hiring and training as this overwhelmingly impacts employee engagement and culture.
“Passion, purpose, and performance are the three ‘Ps’ we want to see in leaders,” says Berry. “More than just managers, leaders are motivational role models, focussing on the purpose of an organisation, asking why does it exist, how does it enrich the communities in which we operate? What value do we add beyond our primary purpose?”
Leaders can improve by up to 50% the culture and engagement of a team. To do this, the best leaders demonstrate high levels of emotional intelligence as well as the right IQ. The leader of a team needs to have true self-awareness and hiring for these ‘soft skills’ has become a priority and the reason why Peter Berry Consulting and many others use Hogan personality assessments. “It’s important that we hire hard and manage easy,” says Berry.
Hogan personality assessments and the Hogan 360 are globally validated scientific assessment tools. In Australia, Hogan is widely used in the private sector, by government and sporting organisations. The tools pinpoint performance and behaviour and, in combination with team surveys have found to dramatically improve under-performing managers – as long as they are willing to put in the hard yards.
“Coaching is growing globally we are spending more time on developing executives and managers - typically more than six months, so we are looking for ROI on this. The big coaching trends are executive presence, that is your gravitas as a leader. Influencing skills and the ability to get results through others in your team are also critical. Leadership is about getting along with people and getting ahead,” says Berry.
As an example, Berry cites engineers who aren’t necessarily taught about EI in their training but when they go to lead a project their interaction with people becomes critical.
Perhaps the biggest leap for a manager to take when moving into a leadership role is around vision and strategy. A typical manager will spend 95% of their time in the business and 5% on the business. “Then all of a sudden, we expect them to set the vision, work at a strategic level and be able to drive the bigger picture,” says Berry.
In many ways this is the easiest area to train, behaviour the most challenging. Getting “the right leaders on the bus” says Berry is the key to higher levels of engagement which in turn, deliver stronger bottom line outcomes.
Dr. Robert Hogan, the world’s most successful business psychologist, puts it succinctly. He says, “Leadership is a resource for the group. I define leadership as the ability to build and maintain effective teams. Leadership should be evaluated in terms of the performance of a team compared to other teams engaged in the same activity.”
Peter Berry
Managing Director, Peter Berry Consultancy
Peter established Peter Berry Consultancy Pty Ltd in 1990. He is an accomplished keynote speaker, facilitator and executive coach. Peter specialises in leadership development, coaching, change management, business performance and team building for leaders within the public and private sector in Australia and globally across various industries. Peter’s competencies include strong leadership skills, sound business acumen, strategic thinking, and strong diplomacy skills. Peter’s most recent book, ‘The CEO Checklist’, is a management guide to excellence in leadership, business and performance. Peter’s passion has been the development and ongoing improvement of the Hogan 360. Peter believes that leadership is consequential, measurable and improvable.
