How many leaders does it take to change a light bulb?

Jan, 11 – BY SHALINI GONSALVES – How many leaders does it take to change a light bulb in your workplace? Chances are, they’ll delegate it.

But you can’t delegate leadership. In fact, especially in 2012, you shouldn’t be running a business where leaders deflect responsibility.

It’s impossible to plan for 2012 – there’s game changing carbon legislation in July, dangerous surf conditions for our manufacturing and retail sectors and the wild rodeo ride of mining. And yet, everything hinges of China and Europe behaving well.

Wherever you are in Australia’s two-speed economy, your leaders need to be ready to engage employees to improve productivity and deliver exceptional customer service in the face of disappointing business results, or ready to reward and retain employees in strong performing industries. The Australian Financial Review (6 January 2012) reported recently that leadership is moving from the old concept of command and control to more intelligent leadership. Leaders need to learn and exhibit skills that include:

• Conflict in the workplace
• Cross-cultural communication
• Presentation and plain language communication
• Managing through change and uncertainty
• Working with a global, dispersed workforce
• Communicating with employees in a digital world

From our experience in employee engagement consulting and advice over the years, we sense that more than half of those in middle management and senior leadership positions are exceptional business managers, and have been promoted for those skills – rather than the inspirational and important employee engagement and internal communication skills required at that level to engage employees to be advocates, strive for performance and retain the best performers. So more than half your leaders are not fulfilling the basic requirements of their role – and you, and they, may not even know it.

All it takes is three steps to turn this around:

1. Benchmark what your people think about their leaders’ communication competency; how well they articulate and contextualise company goals and strategy; how they give and receive feedback that changes business outcomes
2. Determine the gaps between your leaders’ competency and ideal leadership skills
3. Invest in leadership communication skills training

Communication Skills Training

In 2002 the NSW Government was in the process of selling the state’s largest rail carrier, FreightCorp. This created uncertainty for thousands of employees and the company faced big challenges in communicating effectively with its decentralised, shift-based, 24-hour workforce.

In this period of significant change, management felt frontline employees were not sufficiently informed of organisational goals and initiatives. Operational requirements needed to continue, but employees needed to hear about and ask questions on the issues. Driver coordinators and driver trainers came in regular contact with train drivers and were well positioned to communicate to frontline employees if provided with the appropriate skills and confidence.

Impact conducted 17 one-day communication skills workshops for 160 FreightCorp employees. Training was made relevant by the inclusion of key findings from qualitative research with employees. Foundation skills were covered including presentation skills; negotiation; counselling; and team dynamics. Follow up check-ins with workshop participants were completed to keep the training front of mind and to offer additional support to individuals if required.

The training paid off. For the first time in NSW, employees voted in favour of a privatisation. The sale totalled AU$1.172 billion for the NSW Government.