Forster N. - Maximum performance (2005)(en)

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Kelleher took over the airline, it had 27 planes, 2000 staff, high labour turnover and low morale, and revenues of $US270 million. By 2001, it had 344 planes, 30 000 loyal and motivated staff, very low levels of labour turnover, and revenues of $US5 billion. Another interesting feature of SA is that, while it has always had a highly unionized workforce, it suffered far fewer industrial disputes than its major competitors during the 1990s and early 2000s. By the time he stepped down as CEO in 2001, Kelleher had created a unique and fun-loving culture, in an airline that employees wanted to work for and customers wanted to fly with (see Bloomsbury, 2002: 1105). The way it manages its people also played a significant role in this success. As Frank Perez, the baggage handling supervisor at Mineta Jose Airport, commented in early May 2003, ‘This company is 100 per cent for its employees. That’s what makes it really sweet’ (cited by KRT, 2003). In January 1999, Kenneth Hain of Incentive magazine summarized what motivated the relatively underpaid employees of Southwest to perform so well in a single word, ‘happiness’ (cited by O’Reilly and Pfeffer, 2000: 34).

The foundations Kelleher laid down stood SA in very good stead during the global meltdown of the world’s airline industry during 2002–3. While almost every airline in the world struggled during this period (and several went under), SA’s performance was nothing short of remarkable. During 2001–2, SA was the only top ten US airline company to post a profit, and many other airlines were desperately trying to get their operating expenses in line with SA. With more than 2700 daily flights to 58 cities in the USA, SA became the sixth-largest airline company in the USA during 2003 (in terms of passengers carried). It was also declared the best performing US stock of the last decade by Money magazine in December 2002.

In conclusion, these examples indicate that, while humour and fun alone will never create a great company or high-performing employees, they can be powerful tools for leaders and managers to employ at work.7 We will return to the power of humour and laughter again in Chapter 2, in the context of stress management and in Chapter 9, in the context of creativity and innovation.

When people feel good, they work at their best. Feeling good lubricates mental efficiency, making people better at understanding information and using decision rules in complex judgments as well as more flexible in their thinking. Upbeat moods, research verifies, make people view others – or events – in a more positive light. That in turn helps people feel more optimistic about their ability to achieve a goal, enhances creativity and deci- sion-making skills and predisposes people to be helpful. Moreover, research on humour at work reveals that a well-timed joke or playful laughter can stimulate creativity, open lines of communication, enhance a sense of connection and trust and, of course, make work more fun . . . Small

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develop throughout your lifetime. It’s your understanding of your strengths and weaknesses, your purpose in life, your values and motivations and how and why you respond to situations in a particular way. It requires a great deal of introspection and the ability to internalise feedback from others. No one is born a leader; we have to consciously develop into the leader we want to become.

(William George, former Chairman and CEO of Medtronic, 2004)

Because they are self-aware, effective leaders understand their physical and psychological limits, and are able to cope well with pressure and uncertainty. They have a child-like curiosity and enthusiasm for novelty, learning and change. They do not blame others for their mistakes and they learn from these. They are fairly smart, have some emotional intelligence and are very adaptable. Great leaders never rest on their laurels. Whatever success they achieve is in fact the main reason why they change, because they know that organizational leadership today is a race without a finishing line. They do not have a fixed, rigid leadership repertoire, and can adapt as circumstances change. They have some knowledge of the art of political statecraft, combined with high ethical standards. They also recognize that leadership, at times, can be a lonely experience and that being respected is more important than being liked.

They know that it is impossible to lead in isolation, and they understand how to connect emotionally with their followers. Because they are able to inspire and empower their followers, they do not waste unnecessary time ‘managing’ people in an inefficient command-and- control fashion. They are genuinely interested in unleashing the full potential of their employees. As a result, they are not simply taskfocused, and expend a considerable amount of time and energy creating work cultures that enable their staff to run with the ball themselves and perform to the best of their abilities. They are exceptional communicators, because they know that, if people don’t believe the messenger, they won’t believe the message. So they communicate frequently and with credibility, and they listen to their employees, acting as a prism and focal point for their ideas and suggestions. They walk the talk and practise what they preach, and if they make promises to their followers, they deliver on these.

Successful leaders are also risk-taking professionals who are visionary and innovative as well as good planners, educators and team-builders. They are people who may not know everything but who are adept at surrounding themselves with people who know what they don’t. They can see the future, create directions and/or visions for the future and are able to lead their followers down new ways, roads, paths or journeys. In new or fast-growing companies they do not need to rely on

formal positional power and are comfortable leading decentralized, opaque and virtual organizations. They are truly internationalist in outlook, and comfortable with cultural and gender diversity in their workplaces. They often have a good sense of humour and don’t take themselves too seriously. They may sometimes be regarded as charismatic but, as we have seen, this is not an essential prerequisite for successful leadership and people management. Last, all the evidence from history, academic research and the practices of real-life leaders show us that the best leaders, throughout history, have been able to do a number of fairly simple things simultaneously, but (and this is the really crucial point) they perform them well and consistently, even in difficult situations or under crisis conditions.

One question remains to be addressed in this opening chapter. Is there anything new to learn about leadership and people management that our ancestors haven’t already known about for centuries? More than 2300 years ago, the Greek philosopher Aristotle suggested that prospective leaders – having acquired self-awareness and wisdom – needed to develop three additional clusters of competencies: ethos: the ability to convince their followers that they were trustworthy, reliable and fair, pathos: the ability to appeal to their followers’ values, emotions and motivations, and logos: knowledge and expertise. This indicates that the core attributes of effective leaders have been understood for a very long time. Of course, there have been significant changes over the last two hundred years that have influenced the way that leadership and people management are now understood and exercised. These include the impact of industrialization, the emergence of democratic political systems and the decline of the old aristocratic order, the inexorable spread of globalization, the widespread uptake of new technologies, the rapid pace of change in organizations and the impact of the advances that women have made in many different professions and organizations in more recent times. Nevertheless, the ancient leadership attributes described by Aristotle are as relevant today as they have always been.

In addition, as noted in the Preface, becoming a really effective leader/manager requires the development of an eclectic, and evolutionary, personal ‘tool-kit’ that encompasses technical, creative, leadership and people management skills. One example of this kind of leader is David Lilenthal. He rose from humble origins to be an energy adviser to every US president from Roosevelt in the 1930s to Jimmy Carter in the 1970s. He was also the head of the US Atomic Energy Commission for many years, and an early pioneer of interactive communication media. He was often cited by Jerry Levin, former CEO of Time Warner-AOL, as an influential leadership role model. Lilenthal

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believed that ‘The manager–leader of the future should combine in one personality the robust realistic quality of the man of action, with the insight of the artist, the religious leader, the poet who explains man to himself. The man of action alone or the man of contemplation alone will not be enough; these two qualities together are required’ (cited by Charan, 1998).

In a similar vein, Robert Goizueta (Coca-Cola), Jack Welch (General Electric), Alfred Sloan (General Motors), Sam Walton (Wal-Mart), Bill Marriot (Marriot Hotels), Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard (HP), Akio Morita (Sony) and Konosuke Matsushita (Matsushita) are widely regarded as being among the greatest business leaders of the 20th century.9 What qualities and characteristics did they share? They were curious about the world and lifelong learners. They paid attention to their people, realizing that they really were the most important assets that their companies possessed. They all had superb practical business acumen and were tough and pragmatic, but always had one imaginative and visionary eye looking towards the future. They constantly experimented with new business and people management techniques without becoming reactive ‘fad-surfers’. They all led from the front, always led by example and were men of both action and contemplation. They were able to inspire their followers to achieve great things. All, by the standards of their day, operated within clear ethical and moral codes. If we can develop some of these qualities, then we can truly start to make things happen in new and exciting ways. And, as we saw earlier, regardless of any genetic predispositions we may have inherited from our parents, most people can enhance their leadership and people management skills, given self-belief, time, motivation and commitment. The remainder of the book will look in greater depth at the qualities, attributes, skills and competencies of successful leader/managers identified in this opening chapter.

Leaders should have clean hands, warm hearts and cool minds. (Sarros and Butchatsky, Leadership and Values, 1999)

Exercise 1.4

Before turning to Chapter 2, please look back at the answers that you gave to the questions at the beginning of this chapter. Have any of these changed? If they have, what might be learnt from this? Then think about how you can now translate any new insights you have acquired into your day-to-day leadership and management practices. Select the five that you consider to be the most important, and then think of strategies to implement these in your workplace over the next few weeks.

At this stage, it really doesn’t matter if you have difficulties with the strategies part of this exercise (and these will change and evolve over time). You can return to these when you have read through subsequent chapters of the book. Don’t be in a hurry. Allow time for new ideas to sink in and take effect. This will not happen overnight.

1.

2.

3.

4.

Notes

1Paradigm is derived from the Greek word paradeigma, meaning ’model’ or ‘pattern’ (OED website, 2002). The concept of paradigms was first articulated in modern times in Thomas Kuhn’s groundbreaking book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, published in 1962. Over the next 20 years, this word gradually became used to describe radical or revolutionary changes in organizations and business, and in many other contexts to describe accepted ways of behaving and/or dominant modes of thinking.

2For further information on the power of emotional intelligence as a potential people management tool in the workplace, please refer to Appendix 1.

3For further insights into the role of coaching and sports leadership in business settings, take a look at David Parkin et al.’s 1999 book, Perform – or Else!

4‘For decades, the rich and powerful opposed’: the abolition of slavery, sanitation and the provision of clean public water, basic universal health care, universal education, banning the employment of children in factories, basic health and safety legislation in workplaces, pensions, the vote for women, equal pay legislation and many, many other innovations that we now take for granted.

‘Can you name the computer company?’: Rank-Xerox.

5The company is Microsoft, back in 1979. If you look at the bottom left of this old photograph, you’ll spot a youthful Bill Gates. Many younger employees at companies such as IBM and Rank-Xerox jumped ship to join Microsoft and Apple at this time.

6Rather closer to home, many of the traits of real-life toxic leaders can be found in the fictional character of David Brent, manager of Wernham-Hogg, in the comedy series, The Office (BBC Productions, 2002–3). For more on this wonderful take on work and dysfunctional management, visit www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/theoffice.

7In common with other life-skills, this too can be developed. Perhaps you are someone who believes that you can never remember jokes. In fact, anyone can remember jokes if they want to and are willing to make the time and effort to learn them. As with all skill acquisition, the earliest part of the learning process is the hardest. Write down and remember good jokes and one-liners from other people. The more we do this, the more we fire up and start utilizing neglected neurons in the right hemisphere of our brains, and we will then start to remember jokes more easily. We can also learn to spice up dull, drab presentations by using humorous stories, anecdotes, jokes and one-liners (see Chapter 3 for some tips on this). The more we do these things, the

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more our SOH will grow, as thousands of underutilized neurons and synapses in our brains are fired up and put into use.

8For more information on the role of self-awareness in developing leadership capabilities, please refer to Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis and Anne Mckee (2002), The New Leaders: Transforming the Art of Leadership into the Science of Results.

9An omission from this chapter is, of course, some discussion of the emergence of the first large cohort of women business leaders during the 1980s and 1990s. This important development is addressed in Chapter 6.

When you have completed this, please add up your total score ______

Interpreting your score

1–18: You do not suffer from significant levels of occupational stress and can skip this chapter for now if you wish.

19–30: You suffer, to some extent, from occupational stress and may benefit from reading though this chapter.

31–42: You are experiencing above average levels of occupational stress, and this may be affecting your health, work performance and personal relationships. You should find some time to read through this chapter, particularly the sections that deal with personal stress management strategies.

*This may appear to be an odd item to include here. Why might these activities not help in reducing stress levels?

Introduction: occupational stress in context

Towards the end of Chapter 1, we noted that effective leader/ managers are aware of their physical and psychological thresholds. Consequently, they are able to cope well with pressure, multiple job tasks and occupational stress, and can maintain a good balance between the competing demands they face at work and in their personal lives. While there are continuing debates about defining and measuring stress, it is defined here as a natural human response to environmental challenges (stressors) that place physical or psychological demands and pressures on an individual. In 1946, the medical researcher Hans Selye first used this term (derived from the Latin stringere, meaning ‘to stretch’) in the context of how human beings respond to external threats from the environment (Selye, 1974). He described this process as the fight-or-flight response, and this played an essential role in the survival of our earliest ancestors. This primordial survival reaction kick-started a series of pre-programmed responses to an external threat or series of threats. Confronted by a wild animal or some other danger, our ancient ancestors had two options: to stay and fight or to flee. In order to accomplish either of these goals, a series of rapid biochemical changes occurred in the body. These included a strong rush of adrenalin, producing increased arousal, energy and aggression. When under stress, all humans and mammals produce a cascade of hormones, starting in the hypothalamus of the brain, running through the pituitary gland beneath and ending in the adrenal gland above the kidneys. In turn, these biochemical changes trigger further physiological, psychological and behavioural changes, which are described below.

Our hominid ancestors became programmed over hundreds of thousands of years to respond in this way to external threats, and the modern human nervous system still responds to environmental stressors in this essentially stone-age manner (Asterita, 1985). However, while these responses have real benefits in true emergencies or lifethreatening situations, they have the potential to cause widespread physical and psychological damage, and in most work settings a fight- or-flight response is obviously not appropriate. To respond to a stressful event by physically attacking a superior or running away to hide, literally or psychologically, can cause significant problems. Hence, while the adaptive value of the fight–flight response in situations of great danger is obvious, the benefit of this reaction to the psychological stresses of modern life is of questionable value. Some researchers have even suggested that this evolutionary response that helped our ancestors deal with threatening situations may have become ‘a modern-day self-destruct mechanism’ (Driskell, 1996).