Business 21C - Published by UTS Business

The best leaders give their people enough rope. Associate Professor Julia Connell, Director of the Graduate School of Business, UTS, wonders why more leaders aren’t able to tap into the well of creativity sitting inside their organisations.

One of the best leaders I have ever met is Nigel Whitehead, then BAE Systems Director of the Lead-in Fighter Project at Williamtown, just outside of Newcastle. A business leader responsible for multi-billion dollar projects and 1,000 employees at the time, Nigel developed a charter for the ‘greenfield’ organisation.

Once recruited, a planning team was formed and ‘a blank sheet’ was placed in front of them. The team were given a budget and a timeframe and told: “This is your facility, you design what you want and we will build it for you.” What followed was a tremendous outpouring of creativity. The Williamtown building was built to last; utilitarian, but also aesthetically pleasing. Since the BAE employees created it, there was a great sense of pride in their achievement and they kept it immaculate. If Nigel thought there were too many procedures in place that obscured the strategic vision he rewrote them rather than become bogged down. He was resolute about not working to an organisational chart, arguing that charts can stifle creativity. A major 3-year project was completed without anyone once drawing a chart. “No one ever asked for one,” he said. “Everyone understood their roles and responsibilities, although those roles were often switched day to day as there was a sense of fluidity”.

Nigel believed his role as a leader was to inspire the efforts of others, generate enthusiasm about what could be achieved and create a sense of purpose. He firmly believed that for people to be developed to their full potential they needed to undertake ‘scary jobs’.

“Scary jobs make people opinion makers, show their mettle and get them out of their comfort zone. They get used to the fact that everything is potentially dangerous, live by their wits and get on-the-job training through a voyage of discovery. I might say to someone, ‘you will struggle with the skills you have today but we will coach you and you will do better and eventually be a bigger person’.

A leadership style such as Nigel’s requires an element of risk and trust but the rewards in terms of employee engagement are clear. Others, such as Ricardo Semler, have gone much further as in his organisation Semco employees can decide on their own working hours, choose their own salaries and hire their own bosses among other initiatives.

Yet leadership styles and strategies such as this are the exception not the rule

A 2007 report commissioned by Manpower surveyed more than 16,000 workers. The study measured commitment, pride, advocacy and satisfaction, in order to assess the extent employees felt engaged with their organisation and their job. Over 2,000 Australian workers were included in the survey. It found that 62% of Australian respondents were disengaged at work, with 42% of employees describing themselves as “disconnected” – neither engaged nor happy at work. Only 36% of Australian workers said they felt connected to their job and described their organisation as a great place to work. These figures are similar to those cited in other large surveys on engagement, including surveys by Towers Perrin, The Leadership Council, Gallup and others.

Surveys such as Manpower’s indicate that many Australian business systems are not providing workplace environments where employee engagement is the norm. It seems evident that more Australian leaders need to be brave and seek new ways of engaging their people and tapping into the massive pool of discretionary effort they could offer. After all it may make all the difference between organisational survival or demise.

This is a summary of a presentation given by Associate Professor Julia Connell at a Panel presentation: “Do Australian Business Systems Fail Our Best People?”, at UTS: Business on September 10, 2009.

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