war on command and control leadership

NEW COMPONENTS OF KNOWLEDGE ABOUT LEADERSHIP

Dublin, Dalglis & Miller 2001

1. Case study: Ralph Norriss
- Since taking over Air New Zealand a few years ago, Ralph Norris has declared war
on the command and control leadership style that once characterised the airline..

- "companies can no longer get away with telling staff to check in their brain in
the morning and then proceed to tell them what to do"

- "i want to see people being more adaptive and using much greater discretion. The
key is to get the right people into the right roles"

- Many CEOs refuse to acknowledge that a lot of leadership is situational and
requires much more staff participation than they are comfortable with. Effective
leadership is not about the tough person at the top who knows everything. The
average organisation needs a CEO who's a conductor as opposed to a sergent major - the role of leadership is to create an environment that enables others to perform"

- More thinking is needed to balance the hard side of business with human and
emotional element that drive people.

- An effective leader is one who helps group members attain productivity, quality
and satisfaction


EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING

IDENTIFY THE ISSUE
Micro management at hitech innovations. Having the accountancy background, I had a predisposition to have a measure for every single project I issued. This was good but the issue is that I came up with the both the measures and the targets. I can't remember an instance where I sought agreement on the measures and on the targets. I guess I generally tried to sell the measures and the targets. I did this well. Understandably people would either overwork to hit them and burn out, diminishing confidence and creating a negative downward spiral or they would agree but deep down not believe the achievability of the targets and take an unethical approach. This strained reporting relationships. Having an idea of the amount of work that would have to go into hitting the targets, I often tracked progress and would step in and interfere by pretending to coach but really preaching.

(2) What were the desired outcomes?
The desired outcome was a stephen covery approach of agreeing on roles, outcomes, measures and consequences - then following through on the consequences.

REFLECT ON THE ISSUE

(1)What did I do well and why?
Getting agreement on the measures and targets.
Non coercive approach.

(2)What didn't I do well? Why?

- Not enought coaching and mentoring, particularly before throwing someone into a
role
- over use of measures and targets, particularly early one before the person had
time to learn the role

- Prescribing a how to achieve the results instead of leaving that to the
discression of the individual

DEVISE A REMEDY

-Agree on measures
-Agree on targets
-Agree on reporting and performance evaluation process and consequences
-Agree on feedback and learning process
-Get out of the way and trust the person to do the job even when certain they're
headed for failure.
-Stick to the agreement...the harder right