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If you cannot see this here, you can view it at http://www.peopleempowered.com.au/newsletters |
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| Newsletter July 2009 8 Essential Soft Skills for Leadership |
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Lynelle Briggs, Australian Public Service Commissioner, when asked what she saw as the important leadership and management skills said: I think these days what makes a qualitative difference for leaders, beyond a vision and setting out where they're going, is how you can influence behaviour and attitudes for the good. And a lot of that influencing happens around the soft skills, focusing on the heart and soul of people that work in your organisation.This is an important message coming from someone in Lynelle Briggs's position. I remember Ann Sherry saying some years back, when she was CEO of Westpac, that she wanted her people to bring their hearts and souls to work, rather than leave them in the car park. She was lamenting the fact that so many people just bring their bodies and their minds to work. Our employee's hearts and souls are where the essence of themselves is. This is where their passion, creativity, imagination and their values reside. This is where what they uniquely have to give resides. When people bring these parts of themselves to their work, dynamic, innovative and energised workplaces result. But people will not do that, they will not give their hearts and souls to their work, unless they can be assured that they will not be trampled upon, that their organisation, their leaders and managers and their colleagues will value and respect their unique contribution. The Mission and Value statements of most organisations are full of this stuff. They use words like "integrity", "trust", "respect", "compassion", but most employees would say that they are just words. If any organisation wants to really influence the attitudes and behaviour of their people for good, then the Mission and Value statement is a good place to start - walking the talk. If they make a genuine commitment to work with their people to make the words real, active and alive, then their organisations will begin to become places to which their people want to bring the whole of themselves, including their hearts and souls. In this issue:
Maree Harris PhD  |
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The 8 Essential Soft Skills for Leadership “Even turkeys can fly in a strong wind”. So What Really Are Soft Skills?
What Then Are The Hard Skills?
Why Are Soft Skills So Important For Leadership? Leaders lead people. They need to be able to bring out the very best in their people so they can put that talent at the disposal of the organisation and their own career development. They therefore need to really understand their people well. They need to be insightful and intuitive and be able to tap into the motivations and aspirations of their people. They need to know what makes them tick, what stresses them and what they need to do as leaders to engage their loyalty and commitment. They need to know how to inspire them to commit to the organisation’s vision and make it a reality. They need to be genuine and people of integrity because their people will see through them if they attempt to manipulate them. These are all the skills we don't get taught in our professional or vocational training courses. They are the people skills, the interpersonal and communication skills that see exceptional leaders stay on top, be resilient and manage the change in these challenging times and inspire their people to do the same. At the moment, leaders are challenged. Many businesses have their backs to the wall and there are high levels of stress in leaders and managers of companies. This can easily flow through to employees and before you know it the entire organisation is living the provisional life, doing nothing, just waiting to see what happens, not taking any risks and living on the edge of nothingness. The diagnosis: “Business has drastically slowed”. Much of the problem has been led from the top and the lack of soft skills at the leadership of the organisation to create a more robust and resilient culture. We have 8 Essential Soft Skills that we believe will enhance leadership in these changing and challenging times. They are:
We believe that if leaders have these 8 skills they will manage and inspire their people to greatness. It has never been more important for leaders to look after their people because if they do their people will look after their organisations. These 8 soft skills for leadership are the skills that will help leaders do just that.
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Invitation to Colleagues in Geelong Join me for coffee because I'd really like to share with you what I do and how I and People Empowered can support your career development and the development of your people management in your organisation. This is an informal gathering for about 6-8 people in a cafe bar in the Geelong CBD. I'll buy the coffee. You come and interact with me. Ask your questions and I'll answer them. It is not a hard sell session but rather an opportunity for you to find out, what we do. In fact, you may gain some ideas that you can take away and do yourselves without anyone's help. Thursday, July 9, 2009. Two sessions - 10-11 a.m. and 4-5p.m. Email me with which session you'd like to attend and if you'd like to bring someone with you. I'll then send you details of the venue. ______________________________________________________ Free Teleseminar - Friday, 7th August, 2009 The 8 Essential Soft Leadership Skills with Maree Harris. PhD. 10 a.m. - 11 a.m. This teleseminar will explore the 8 essential soft skills for leadership written about above. It will give practical examples of why each of the 8 skills is important and how each can be developed. There will also be time for questions and discussion. Teleseminars are a great way to get professional development in these challenging times when budget cuts have seen many organisations greatly restrict professional development. They are low cost. You don't have to travel. There are no parking problems. You tune in at your desk. They are short and succinct. The teleseminar will be recorded so if you register and then find you can't make it on the day, you will still get a copy of the recording to listen to when time permits. You must register so you can get the dial in details. You need an international phone card which can be got from newsagents or most places where you recharge a mobile phone. The cost of the hour long teleseminar on the phone card is about $2.00, cheaper than most long distance calls in Australia. For More Information and To Register, go to http://www.peopleempowered.com.au/teleseminars or phone Maree Harris on +61 3 5333 2900.
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Book Review Reviewed by Maree Harris. PhD. If you are interested in change management you probably, like me, have a dozen or more books on your bookshelf, each on one particular dimension of the change management process and none addressing the whole process. You also know you’ll probably buy the next highly acclaimed one to be published as you search for that elusive “answer” that will produce the desired outcomes from your change management initiatives. This is why Leslie Allan’s book is such a gift to executives, leaders, managers and supervisors who want to initiate a change process in their organizations. It’s a complete guide and true to its subtitle a very practical guide. How often have you heard the comment: Change doesn’t work? True, it doesn’t for many people and organizations. It doesn’t because change management initiatives are often poorly conceived, planned and implemented. It is important to note at the outset that Leslie Allan believes that for change management initiatives to be successful in organizations they need to be led by the CEO, executives and managers, not HR. So his book outlines a process these people can go through that gives the best guarantee possible that the change they want and need to implement will provide the outcomes they desire. The book is actually a workbook and that’s why it is so valuable. It takes teams and their leaders through the entire change management process from conception to implementation. It is not, however, the read-chapter-1 and do-chapter-1 and then move-on-to- chapter-2 book. Rather it is a book a change management team, with a commitment to reflective practice, could work through as a group PRIOR to commencing a change process in their organization. This would mean that the leadership team becomes conscious of the possible challenges to the successful implementation of their plan in advance and can address them. In other words, many of the obstacles to success would be addressed BEFORE the process even begins. This is not, however, a book about slick strategies. At the outset it contextualizes change management which is crucially important for any change management team to do to ensure the integrity of their initiative. This is the part that is often neglected or only superficially addressed and therefore results in a poorly conceived and ultimately failed process. Leslie Allan raises the importance, at the outset, of addressing six contextual issues:
It is Leslie Allan’s six phase, innovatively presented CHANGE process, however, that forms the major part of his book.
Each of these phases is addressed in great depth and worksheets are provided for each, allowing people to record and document their ideas and responses as they proceed. While this approach has been presented in a linear fashion so that people can see the process, Leslie Allan makes it very clear that it is not, in practice, a linear process. He makes the point throughout the book that it is people, not machines, that make change happen – or obstruct it – and that those leading the change need to go back and around all the time, re-iterating the vision and repeating the message in a wide variety of ways to gain the support of their people. In fact, one of the most important chapters for me was the G section on Growing the capability of people. After all this is my area of expertise and interest! Leslie Allan stresses the importance of investing in the organization’s people and their training, taking into consideration their various ways of learning and coming to know and understand, if we want change initiatives to be successful. This fitted well with the emphasis he put on the importance of communication in his H section on Harnessing Support. One of the great values of this book is that it does address the important planning issues relating to organizational and business objectives. It does address, for example, the performance metrics in change management, but as well it strongly supports the engagement of the organization’s people in the process of change and offers much support, ideas and suggestions for how to do that in a way that will ensure the success of the change initiative. It emphasizes the need for those leading the process to not only be technically proficient but to also have highly developed soft skills, those all important people skills, interpersonal and communication skills. This book is too comprehensive to review in its entirety. It’s a book, however, that I’d recommend to a whole range of professionals and business leaders, not only to those people initiating a change management process. It has excellent sections for project managers, teams leaders and people engaged in training and development, for example. It also has valuable information on the psychology of resistance and how to win people over to new ideas and change, an excellent section on communication, good information on goal setting and a comprehensive section on team building. While seeing this book as a very valuable book on change management to have on your bookshelf, I’m not promoting it as the magic bullet of change management, because there is nothing magic about change. It is hard work! The book is, however, a very helpful, practical and excellent guide to the change management process. It charts a path to follow; it raises very pertinent questions for consideration; it offers many, many solutions to common problems faced in change management initiatives. The thirteen worksheets it provides to accompany the book mean that, having worked through the book, the readers have a very well-developed draft of a change management process – all in advance of commencement. Author Bio: Mr. Allan is a prolific writer on business issues, with many journal and web articles to his credit. He is also the author of five books on employee capability, training and change management. Mr. Allan currently serves as Divisional Council Member for the Australian Institute of Training and Development and is a member of the Australian Institute of Management and the American Society for Quality. Book Availability: |
