Speaking Up Without Fear

Elizabeth Ticehurst and Hoda Nahlous investigate what part a ‘speaking up’ and ‘whistleblowing’ culture plays in rebuilding corporate trust.

 

In this current era where trust in corporations is low, there is demand for organisations to develop an ethical corporate culture to control and minimise, to the extent possible, corporate misconduct. As a result, organisations are focusing on better understanding and improving their internal culture and practices. As part of this process, an effective ‘speak up’ and ‘whistleblower’ culture is becoming a prominent benchmark in measuring whether an organisation has a good corporate culture.

The benefits of ‘speaking up’

An effective ‘speak up’ culture is one where employees are encouraged to raise concerns and feel comfortable in doing so without fear of persecution. This requires the board and senior executives of the organisation to clearly articulate to staff what is ‘good’ corporate behaviour, so that ‘bad’ corporate behaviour can be easily identified. In addition, it also requires an organisation’s leaders to encourage a culture of dialogue and openness so that employees feel that management is trustworthy, accessible and well-equipped to handle their concerns.

If ‘speaking up’ is embedded into an organisation’s corporate culture and is effectively managed, then it provides opportunity for the organisation to deal with employee concerns in advance of these concerns escalating into any form of crisis.

What is a ‘whistleblower’?

‘Speaking up’ is sometimes fused with the term ‘whistleblowing’. Although a ‘speak up’ culture must also be a culture that encourages whistleblowing, ‘whistleblowing’ has specific meaning under law. In particular, ‘speaking up’ often involves an employee raising concerns with respect to their own personal circumstances within the organisation. By contrast, a ‘whistleblower’ is an insider within an organisation, who reports misconduct or dishonest or illegal activity that has occurred within that same organisation.

Whistleblowing has often been associated with negative connotations, most prominently that it is used as a tool by aggrieved employees to make a ‘nasty’ complaint against particular individuals, or that it is an act of disloyalty to the organisations (or ‘backstabbing’ of any relevant individuals involved in the whistleblower disclosure).  However, effective whistleblowing is key to eliciting trust among employees as it demonstrates that the organisation actually wants to know and cares about any misconduct or dishonest or illegal activity occurring within the organisation.

In any case, the proposed amendments to the whistleblower laws look to enforce the implementation by certain organisations of internal whistleblower policies, and to further strengthen whistleblower protections.

The law

Currently, a whistleblower is protected under law if they:

  • are a current officer, employee, contractor (or employee of a contractor) of the company that they are making the disclosure about;
  • disclose the information to any of: the company’s auditor (or a member of the audit team); a director, secretary or senior manager of the company, or a person authorised by the company to receive whistleblower disclosure; or ASIC;
  • provide their name to the person or authority that they have made the disclosure to;
  • have reasonable grounds to suspect a breach by the subject of their disclosure; and
  • make the disclosure in good faith.

Certain protections are afforded to whistleblowers under law, including protection of information provided by the whistleblower and protection for whistleblowers against litigation and from victimisation.

Proposed changes to whistleblower laws

Late last year, the federal government introduced a Bill aimed at improving protection for whistleblowers in the corporate, financial, credit and tax sectors. The Bill proposes various changes to the current whistleblower protection laws, including a requirement that public companies and large private companies implement internal whistleblower policies. Notably, it also proposes extending protection to a whistleblower who makes a report to a journalist or politician in circumstances where they reasonably believe there is an imminent risk of serious harm or danger to public health or safety, or to the ‘financial system’, if the information is not acted upon immediately, and a “reasonable period” has passed since the whistleblower first made a protected disclosure.

The whisleblower’s right to confidentiality is a key feature of the Bill. If enacted, these rules would potentially lead to significant civil penalties, and even criminal charges, for individuals and entities who breach the confidentiality of a whistleblower, or who engage in detrimental conduct towards an individual because that person has been, or is suspected of being, a whistleblower.

The changes were to take effect from 1 July 2018, however, the Bill is still pending in Parliament at the time of writing this article (August 2018). In any case, there is an expectation that most (if not all) of the proposed changes will be passed.

 

Hoda Nahlous is Director and Elizabeth Ticehurst is special counsel – Employment at KPMG Law.

 

Blending The Four Personality Types of Leadership

You have a great bunch of people, everyone’s working hard, but you’re just not quite hitting the mark as a team. The problem may not lie with the mix of skills but rather the blend of personalities.

 

By Nicola Field

Building a like-minded team can seem like a strategy for success. However, it could leave you short on a key ingredient – a diverse blend of personalities.

As a leader you’re probably aware of the technical strengths and weakness of those who report to you. And you know you need a high calibre group of people. But a strong group isn’t the same as a strong team, and all organisations need the right mix of personalities to achieve maximum productivity.

Are you dominant, or an influencer?

Teams are typically made up of a variety of personality types. This inherently creates scope for friction and even poor performance. The challenge for managers and leaders is not to resolve “personality clashes” but rather to understand the strengths, weaknesses and quirks that each person brings to the table – and help them work together more cohesively.

So what are these personality types? Charles Go MIML, Research Product Manager at the Institute of Managers and Leaders (IML), explains that a key resource for use in this area is a behavioural profiling tool, such as Everything DiSC.

A variety of psychometric tests are available that centre around the DISC concept. They are based on the work of US psychologist William Moulton Marston, who identified four primary emotions and associated behavioural responses. DISC itself is an acronym that reflects the four different personalities of dominance, influencer, steadiness, and conscientious.

A “D” or dominant personality, for instance, is strong willed, outgoing, direct, fast-paced and task-oriented. “I” personalities – the influencers – are sociable, talkative, lively and people-oriented. Those steady “S” personalities are kind-hearted, supportive, accommodating and prefer things to move at a moderate pace. The “C” people on your team are logical, private, cautious and analytical.

Go says that we each have a personality that can broadly be slotted into one of these four categories. However, as complex beings, few of us will fall absolutely into a single category. We aren’t just one style – people tend to be a blend of styles. DISC profiling recognises this. For example, a “CS” personality type may have a cautious disposition, and be careful, soft-spoken, and self-controlled.

Go explains why it is worth knowing where your personality sits within DISC, saying, “Once you find out which category you fall into personally, it is much easier to recognise the different types of personalities within your team.” From here, leaders can form a clearer view about the way their team interacts.

Juggling diverse personalities

A report by the Stanford Graduate School of Business noted that diversity in a team can be a plus. It found the mere presence of diversity – even something as simple as race or gender – can cue differences of opinion. This cueing can enhance a team’s ability to handle conflict. A more homogeneous team, on the other hand, may not be able to handle conflict as well because the team doesn’t expect it.

That said, Go believes having a team filled with, say, D types is not necessarily a bad thing. “It’s easy to assume the team should have a balance of personality types,” he says. “But if one particular personality is dominant it doesn’t mean the team is weak. It can be a strength, because everyone has a similar way of doing things. The key is to look at how you can manage these people as a team.”

It would be easy to assume that leaders need a blend of each personality type, and Go points out that “leaders do need a bit of everything in the sense that in some situations you need to be an influencer, while in others you may need to be more dominant.” This, he believes, is where the value of DISC lies: “It encourages self-reflection as a leader, and makes you aware of situations where you need to think differently”. If you’re a strong D for instance, you might have to make a more conscious effort at moving slowly and methodically on a project than would,
say, an S.

None of us like to feel we can be pigeonholed into a certain personality type. To avoid this, and to allow team members to better understand the dynamics of the group as a whole, DISC testing is typically followed by a debrief session with a trained facilitator. “This helps to create a common language among the team,” says Go. “It also reduces the possibility of individuals being branded as a certain type of personality, and avoids the risk of people looking at their own DISC report in isolation.”

Understanding the personalities on your team can deliver multiple benefits. It helps to build a sense of trust and encourage team members to tap into each other’s skills and experience. It saves time and energy that is otherwise wasted on office politics and conflicts. And cohesive teams are more productive, which can ultimately create a competitive advantage.

Increasing use of psychometric tests

Of course, there is nothing especially new about these sort of psychometric tests. According to Hudson’s The Hiring Report: The State of Hiring in Australia 2015, 54 per cent of senior executives value psychometric testing as part of the recruitment process. And 40 per cent say they’re seeing more psychometric testing being used now than in the past.

What’s different this time around is the recognition that psychometric testing doesn’t have to be limited to the talent acquisition stage. As the Hudson report points out, most senior executives have been through an assessment process themselves and understand the value it can add. Test results help leaders understand more about themselves: who they are, what drives them, and the strengths they can play on.

Having a grasp of what motivates people is one of the most critical levers of leadership – and organisational success. A review of psychometric tests by the London School of Economics and Political Science found that they deliver “significant correlations between personality scales and measures of job performance”. Nonetheless, knowing how to make the most of what you learn from psychometric testing still hinges on your ability to lead and manage people.

Most personality psychologists believe that traits and situations are interactive. This is one reason why DISC can be so helpful — you can learn to adapt your own responses depending on the DISC style of individuals in your team. The bottom line is that as a manager and leader, you may choose not to behave in a way you’re most comfortable with, but instead use one you know will be more effective for your entire team. It takes conscious effort but as the motto for DISC goes: “It’s not all about me. It’s about us.”

About Everything DiSC

Everything DiSC is part of a suite of analytical people tools offered by IML to members and non-members. A number of Everything DiSC tools are available, and depending on the version, an Everything DiSC survey can take as little as 15-20 minutes to complete. It measures personal tendencies and preferences. It does not measure intelligence, aptitude, mental health or values.

For example, the Everything DiSC questionnaire asks about how you respond to challenges, how you influence others, how you respond to rules and procedures, and about your preferred pace of activity. It does not measure every dimension of personality.

Managers are discouraged from completing the test and interpreting the results themselves. Facilitators available to conduct a debrief with follow-up activities. IML’s Charles Go MIML says that learning outcomes tend to be better when smaller groups are involved, but Everything DiSC can work for larger teams of up to 25 people.

Read full details on Everything DiSC at managersandleaders.com.au/people-analytics

Understanding where each team member fits in the work wheel

Leaders can also tap into another important IML resource, the TMS Team Management Profile (TMP). The TMP uses the Margerison-McCann Team Management Wheel to identify the individual’s work preference from eight core activities (starting from the creation of an idea, assessment of the idea, planning and so on).

IML’s Charles Go MIML notes, “The TMP tool works on the theory that when individuals are matched with what they do best, they are more likely to perform at a high level in their role.”

The TMP is based upon self-assessment and identifies where in the eight-stage process each person is best suited. Go adds, “It’s a great way to discover the preferences of each member of the team and enables leaders to successfully and confidently assign people to projects and tasks.”

Full details on the TMP can be read at managersandleaders.com.au/people-analytics

How to present and build culture and your competitive advantage

Everywhere you look these days there’s some kind of change on the horizon. Companies are restructuring, offshoring and battling to stay ever present in consumers’ minds to stay ahead.

The result? Battle scars that get left on teams and team members, that if not fixed, continue to eat away at your company’s culture, productivity and profits.

More and more clients and departments are waking up to the fact that a company’s performance is driven by an engaged team and culture. As Gallup states on their website: “A strong culture makes employees want to perform better and makes customers want to spread the word about you.”

But building a strong culture isn’t easy. It doesn’t mean having ping-pong tables and bean bags. It does mean making sure that everyone in the company is aligned and eager to work towards the same values and vision.

The best way to do this is to focus on how you communicate internally, whether you are a manager, leader, a CEO, or an executive.

Everyone in your company needs to feel part of the equation. They need to be clear on how their role fits into the puzzle and fulfils a greater purpose. This needs to be more than words on the wall, on posters or coffee cups.

Often, it’s up to management to communicate and motivate teams towards a new vision or higher purpose through a presentation at a town-hall style meeting. This is usually supported through crowded and boring slides full of flashy org charts, mission statements and goals that do anything but leave your team feeling energised.

If you look at the majority of presentations, the content is presenter centric. The speaker talks about how good they are, shows off all the data they have, and how much growth the organisation is undergoing.

This kind of approach instantly alienates our audience. They are left thinking, but what about me? Why is that important? How will my world be affected as a result? In a nutshell, why should they care?

Thanks to the digital world we live in, our audiences’ needs and demands are constantly changing, which is what makes communicating so hard! In general, people want a more personalised approach, a more intelligent approach, and that is why it’s crucial to put your audience and their needs first.

Your presentation is your opportunity as a speaker to connect with your audience and create a united front. This only happens when you write, design and deliver a message in your presentation that puts your audience first and includes these 3 vital things:

  1. Being honest

    We need to remember we are connecting with our teams and employees, human to human. Unfortunately, we often think that as leaders we need to be different and that can translate to being cold and insincere.Instead, just be honest. Start with the reality of the situation – what is the situation right now, how are people feeling and what challenges is everyone facing? Don’t hide any bad news. Lying or covering up the truth only makes things worse. But make sure you move to the solutions and positives, show the future opportunity that everyone can be a part of.
  1. Sharing common ground
    You need to create common ground with your audience, to really address their key concerns and show them that you understand where they are coming from. The best way to do this is by sharing stories that show emotion, that show you understand where they are at and what they are faced with, perhaps because you’ve been in a similar situation before.
  1. Putting your audience’s needs first

    Do your homework and actually research the people in the room – why are they there? What challenges are they facing? How can you help them?

Resist the temptation to just read from slides and talk profit. Help your audience to feel that you are equally invested in the same outcome, whether that is company success, profitability, or future job security. Show a weaker side and your audience will really feel like you are all part of the same journey.

 

Learning to communicate well internally is your key to communicating well externally. After all, your greatest advocates are those people working with you, alongside you, every day, always.

 

Emma Bannister is passionate about presenting big, bold and beautiful ideas.

She is the founder and CEO of Presentation Studio, APAC’s largest presentation communication & training agency, Microsoft MVP, and author of the book ‘Visual Thinking: How to transform the way you think, communicate and influence with presentations.’ Emma will be speaking at IML’s Sydney TEL Talk: Enhancing Innovation and Creativity – How to make an impact.  

https://linkedin.com/in/emmabpresents

https://www.presentationstudio.com/

From wilderness to CEO: how I started my first company

When I left my last job at Logica, it was a tough decision to make as I had to survive without income in order to achieve my dream of setting up a successful startup. But that’s what 88% of the entrepreneurs do. My parents kindly invested in the new business.

In 1995 – two years after the first web browser was released, I spent all my money on a high-speed internet connection (only 64K then) and headed out to research what business would benefit from the Internet. I’d been using the Internet since the 1987 when I did a research trip to the USA with my University. The Internet was a great solution but what was the problem?

I then tried my hands into real estate business but turned out that it was challenging as agents kept all their prices hidden and only revealed them to clients who walked in the door. The next on my list was to get into travel accommodation. After testing the market for a while I realized that people were taking a punt. I could foresee an income of around 1,000 GBP per year, but little prospect of any increase soon. So I was back to the drawing board.

After several more abortive ideas I realized the real problem was staring me in the face. Communication on the Internet was a real challenge for most companies. What was the point of a website if you couldn’t get email? I created an email solution and within a year I had seven people working for me. I remember the first customer well, like every entrepreneur does – Falmouth College of Arts. Within a few years Telstra, the US Army, and NASA made to our customer list. I ran the world’s forum for email – anyone with a question about setting up email came to me. I owned the problem to which I  happened to have a great solution.

Looking back, I was young and able to take the risk of jumping before I had an income.

But what was really  required for my success was to get out of my comfort zone and test my ideas with strangers.  I walked into shops, called people, sent them letters to discover what my potential customers thought and listened to the response before I built anything.

It was a great learning for me as I got to dive deep into their world and   understand  how they looked at things. By doing this I was able to quickly narrow down ideas that would really work at the end. Only after contacting and speaking to many hundreds of people did I eventually hit on a problem I could solve. That of providing communication on the internet.

The same process works now!

Statistics show that entrepreneurs over 40 have a significant advantage over the younger generations. The reason being  they already know an industry and so they can see how things can be improved. They already have a network of people who’d benefit, the confidence to go and ask open questions and listen to the response. And because they already have an income, they are not financially stressed.

When you know how, testing an idea to see if it can become a source of revenue costs very little – just a pack of business cards, some time and a little thought. Some people stumble on the process, others stand on the shoulders of the greats. Many start in their spare time and their passion takes over and customers start arriving.

Knowing you have to ask open questions and listen is the key. Listen to the answers and find others with a passion to solve the same problem as you.

Then you have the dream team…

By Brian Dorricott

Founder of two businesses exited through multi-million MBO and sale to Cisco Systems, speaker and  guide to hundreds of Entrepreneurs.

4 KEY FINDINGS THAT DEMYSTIFY OUR BRAINS

NEUROSCIENTIST DR HANNAH CRITCHLOW SAYS THAT MANAGERS AND LEADERS HAVE A DUTY TO GET THEIR HEADS AROUND HOW THE BRAIN WORKS.

By Lachlan Colquhoun // Photograph by Paul Musso

OF ALL THE ORGANS, the brain has always been viewed in a different way, and with special reverence.

Weighing only 1.5 kilograms, or around 2 per cent of our body mass, the brain is seen as the driver of our personalities, the home of our soul, the repository of memory, and the computer that keeps the whole body ticking over so that we can function in society.

While medical science has gone a long way to demystify the physiology of other organs, such as the liver and the heart, our understanding of the brain and its 86 billion neurons has remained comparatively limited until recently.

Breakthroughs in neuroscience over the past decade, however, are rapidly lifting the veil on our understanding of the body’s most complex organ and, in the process, helping us understand more about human behaviour.

“This is a great time to be a neuroscientist, we are peering into the mind as never before,” says Dr Hannah Critchlow, a British author, neuroscientist and fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge. “We are learning about the brain at an exponential rate now — there are as many as five to ten thousand new research papers coming out each month.

“We still have a lot to learn of course, and there are still major problems, as we can see with mental health, but we are discovering the real underpinnings of the brain’s operation and this information will help us to better treat some of the debilitating conditions of the mind.”

1. Reality check

Dr Critchlow is at the frontline of neuroscience and is on a mission to communicate its findings to the world. Nominated as one of the UK’s Top 100 Scientists by the Science Council, she is about to follow up her first book Consciousness with a second publication on the theme of “the science of fate”. Many of the insights from neuroscience, Dr Critchlow says, have come from understanding the brain as a physical organ. Advancing technologies such as optogenetics, which uses light to stimulate specific circuits in the brain, are revealing more about the physiology of behaviours that were previously considered part of the mystery of personality. Entrepreneurs and drug addicts, for example, have particular brain anatomies, as do people with ADHD and those who enjoy socialising more than others. For managers and leaders, the challenge is to work with an understanding that everyone has a different perspective on reality and that certain acts that were previously considered voluntary may, in fact, be hardwired. Although exercise and meditation can help us grow new brain cells and the connections between them, just as chronic stress and depression can kill them off, there may be limits to the ultimate “plasticity” of what a person can achieve with the particular brain they are born with. The old adage that “you can do anything you want if you put your mind to it” may prove to have clear scientific limitations. “We can literally see how the circuit board of the mind — this amazing machine comprised of billions of nerve cells, with trillions of connections between them — shifts and changes as we make decisions and experience the world around us,” she says. “We can switch feelings of pleasure on or off, and feelings of anxiety and even addiction, so we are really starting to understand how these discrete circuit boards in our brain give rise to very particular behaviours.” Part of this is a more holistic understanding that the brain does not exist in isolation at the top of the body, and that its interactions are strongly linked with the immune system, to our gut, and to organs such as the heart.

“At its most basic, when you have a cold or the flu you feel down in the dumps and depressed, and there is a physical reason for that because your brain is almost in a depressed state at that point,” says Dr Critchlow. “There is also a lot of emerging evidence which suggests that people with chronic depression might have altered immune systems as well, so their immune system is attacking the brain. An altered immune system has even been linked to the terrifying symptoms of psychosis, and in some patients simply clearing their blood of the faulty immune cells can stop the symptoms for good.”

2. Performance enhancing drugs

These new understandings of the brain have created new treatments for depression and addiction, and perhaps controversially, opened up the potential to enhance our creative capacities through the use of smart drugs. “There is lots of information coming out now about how creativity and problem-solving in the brain is formed, and there are drugs called cognitive enhancers which seem to boost certain aspects of our alertness, or our reasoning and our concentration skills,” says Dr Critchlow. “There’s also psychedelics, which previously people were mainly interested in from a recreational viewpoint, but now small doses of these drugs have been implicated in boosting creativity and problem-solving skills, raising all sorts of considerations around whether we want people in the workplace to be taking small amounts of drugs, even if it does boost their performance.” Alongside research into drugs, there has also been work done on “brain helmets” that use mild electrical currents to stimulate specific areas of the brain to see how this can foster particular behaviours like, for example, creativity.

3. Plasticity has limits

But while this research shows that capabilities can be enhanced, and that we do each hold the scope for plasticity and flexibility within our brains, Dr Critchlow says a key finding of neuroscience is that many of our behaviours are “ingrained” because of how our brains process the vast amounts of information from the outside world, and accepting this has particular relevance in the workplace. “So rather than trying to make somebody fit into a role and a set of expectations, it may be more productive to just create the environment that will help them to flourish and make use of the skillsets they bring,” she says. “Although our brain has a huge scope for plasticity and we can learn new things, emerging neuroscience is showing that people have specific strengths and weaknesses that sometimes you just can’t change.” People whose brains have a larger prefrontal cortex, for example, with many “slots” for beta-endorphins, are “almost hardwired” to need a wide number of different friendship groups. “They are like conduits which let information be exchanged from clique to clique, so that is a very important role within society,” says Dr Critchlow. “And then there are people with a much smaller prefrontal cortex and they have a much smaller group of friends, or they spend more time with each of their friends in closer relationships. “There is a hypothesis that because these people have fewer beta endorphin spots they don’t need to go around filling them up by meeting lots of other people.” These two types of people respond differently to the workplace. The first type, with the larger prefrontal cortex, may be more comfortable working in an open plan office where they can mix with larger number of colleagues, while those with the second brain type may prefer to work in smaller groups.

4. Entrepreneurial thinking

Neuroscience is also beginning to understand the brains of entrepreneurs, which can sometimes be similar to people with ADHD. “People who are entrepreneurs and who are thriving in taking risks in business have an evolutionary drive to do so and that is based around their brain biology,” says Dr Critchlow. “Much of this is intuitive, of course, and we have talked about this for decades but neuroscience is now demonstrating how this has a basis in the brain.” In her next book, Dr Critchlow is focusing on the subject of “the science of fate,” looking at the extent to which our behaviours are predetermined by the brains we are born with. “I am interested in understanding how much of our behaviour is ingrained,” she says. “We are seeing now that a lot of what we do is predetermined, so that opens up the question on whether we actually have any agency, or any free will at all. We have been sold this concept that the brain is highly plastic and that we have the power to change our behaviours if we can put our minds to it, but this may not necessarily be the truth.” The take out from all this is one of acceptance and tolerance. People have strengths and weaknesses and need to work with them, but at the same time environments need to be sensitive to this to help a diversity of people flourish. “For leaders and managers there is a responsibility for acceptance, but also to use this to be the best person they can be and look after the mental health of their teams,” says Dr Critchlow. She says that she personally has “appalling spelling” as a result of dyslexia, “but I’m okay with that.” Everybody is on a spectrum for every different kind of behaviour, and although there is some wriggle room for moving, we must accept that we need an environment which can nourish us. “Our individuality is a beautiful thing, and it’s the brain which produces that individuality.”

MINDBLOWING EVENTS

Dr Hannah Critchlow will be speaking at a series of IML Leadership Impact events, exploring the neuroscience behind leadership. To find out more and book your seats in Brisbane (8 November), Melbourne (13 November), Sydney (14 November), and Canberra (15 November) visit managersandleaders.com.au/leadership-impact-series/

LEADERSHIP IN 60 SECONDS:

FACEBOOK, TWITTER, INSTAGRAM, SNAPCHAT OR LINKEDIN?

Facebook.

PHONE, EMAIL, TEXT OR FACE-TO-FACE?

Face-to-face. No question! Interesting face-to-face communication helps to synchronise brain waves. Your brain takes snapshots of the world at regular intervals.

WHICH LEADER HAVE YOU LEARNED FROM MOST DURING YOUR CAREER?

Trevor Robbins, Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at Cambridge. He is good at long-term strategy. A junior chess champion, he places people like chess pieces, to make sure his ultimate aim is realised. It’s beautiful to watch. He’s also very kind and generous with is time.

WHICH LEADERSHIP BOOK DO YOU MOST RECOMMEND?

My next book! It will be about the science of fate.

WHAT IS THE BEST PIECE OF LEADERSHIP ADVICE YOU WERE GIVEN EARLY IN YOUR CAREER?

Always have a Plan A, B and C.

NAME THREE QUALITIES THAT A LEADER CAN’T SUCCEED WITHOUT

The ability to take other people’s thoughts and perspectives on board; pragmatic and practical problem solving; to know when to relax and stop stressing.

COMPLETE THE SENTENCE. LEADERSHIP MATTERS BECAUSE…

Looking to the future, as a species, we are going to be exposed to many problems. We need leadership to help solve them so that we can survive.

SNAKES AND LADDERS: What not to do when taking a sideways or downward career step

FIVE THINGS NOT TO DO WHEN TAKING A SIDEWAYS OR DOWNWARD STEP IN YOUR CAREER.
Margot Smith

Careers can sometimes be like Snakes & Ladders. You take on a high profile project and overachieve, and you climb up the ladder. Next thing, you realise you are becoming too technically specialised, and you decide to take a step down to get more experience in a broader range of management and leadership skills, and down the snake you go.

When people take a step down or sideways, even if it’s for very strategic reasons, the biggest success factor is attitude. As in Snakes & Ladders, different roles (both paid and voluntary) are steps towards your ultimate destination. This is never a straightforward path.

If you’re faced with a sideways or downward career step, my advice is to put you big girl (or boy) pants on and make the most of it. See it is an opportunity. After all, many other people would probably be grateful to have the role you’ve just secured.

LONDON CALLING

I moved to the UK at the start of the global financial crisis. I considered myself quite the catch from an employer’s perspective and thought it would take me days, not weeks or months to land a role in London. But it took me two months to secure a three-month contract position. I went from managing a team of 20 in Australia to flying solo in a project-based role. But I embraced it and, before long, I was offered another, meatier role.

It’s fair to say that I went to London to add global experience to my CV and also to enjoy living and working in Europe. During these two years, I travelled more than I have ever had the pleasure of doing before or after. I also met some lifelong friends.

So my priority was living life to the fullest, not just career development. But it took me several years to get back to the responsibility levels of my pre-London role.

FIVE TIPS

Informed by my experiences, and also those of friends and colleagues who have also taken a perceived sideways or downward career step, I can share the following tips.

  1. Don’t remind everyone repeatedly that this is a step down for you. Whether or not the decision to take this career move was your choice, be mindful of those around you. Reminding everyone around that you are “better than this” doesn’t reflect well on you. If you are humble and show colleagues what you can do, they will see how much value you can add.

2. Don’t treat the role as beneath you. Give the role 100% and approach it with a positive and proactive attitude. That is the best way to demonstrate that you can add more value. You have made a choice to take this role (whether or not the path that led you here was of your choosing), so do your best and overachieve, if that’s what you have the potential to do.

3. Don’t fail to respect the people around you in similar roles or circumstances. Be aware of those around you, and how your language and behaviour could be interpreted by them. If they are both fortunate and happy with their role and position within the organisation, your comments about this role being a step down (for you) is not particularly sensitive. So zip it, and get on with it.

4. Don’t ditch the role as soon as you can. I can think of too many circumstances where people have taken a role for the right reasons at a point in time, only to resign within a few weeks when something else comes up. Yes, you have your career to think about and you are only answerable to yourself, but think about the organisation you have made a commitment to. They have inducted you, spent time and resources to get you up to speed and, if you make a fast exit, you’re leaving them in the lurch. Think carefully about your reasons for taking the role in the first place. Are they still valid? If so, don’t jump ship for the sake of it. Consider if there is still growth in this role.

There are times when the role advertised doesn’t match the reality you find once inside (and probation exists for both parties). But if you made a choice to take this role and if it’s exactly what they advertised it to be – you should consider honouring that commitment for a reasonable period of time.

5. Don’t be smug when you move onto the next opportunity. Okay, so you’ve given the role a red hot go, and a new opportunity has opened up internally or externally. Everything is finally falling into place. Be gracious, be grateful for the opportunity and thank everyone who supported you in this role. Time for your next adventure!

 

Margot Smith is the General Manager Membership at IML.

The Neuroscience Behind Leadership

In just a matter of weeks I’ll be taking to the sky, travelling from Cambridge UK to the other side of the world, visiting Australia for my first time. I’m incredibly excited about my trip hosted by the prestigious Institute of Managers and Leaders. I’ll be visiting the East Coast cities: Brisbane, Melbourne, Sydney, and Canberra. There I will be unlocking the mysteries of the mind to discuss how neuroscience findings can help better inform leaders and managers for business.

How do our minds operate? How does our unique perception of the world shape our decision-making? How do fear and stress affect our behaviour? How can neuroscience knowledge help promote creativity and problem solving? What can we do to refine our focus and attention? We’ll be answering these questions and more during the sessions.

Knowledge is power, I strongly believe! And so, as we understand more about the brain, how it shapes our behaviour, we can be empowered and flourish, as both individuals and as companies. During my visit I’m also hoping to literally dive into the minds of leadership professionals, reading their brainwaves live on stage using an EEG machine, to help unravel the thinking behind our decision-making.

So, why now? We currently live in the era of the brain: a recent revolution in technology allows us to peer into the mind as never before. We can visualise the architecture and operation of the brain, in fine detail, as the world is navigated and our sense of self formed. As a result, we are discovering that certain complex behaviours are ingrained, whilst others are skills that can be built on and improved. Neuroscience is also helping us to understand more precisely the nature of what it means to be conscious, and to live with the ability to form a subjective view. We’ll explore the ramifications of this, how it can sometimes lead to conflict, and how to help prevent it. We’ll also discuss the emerging fields studying the science of altruism and compassion and the relevance for business environments. Through neuroscience, we are learning how to open minds to more productive collaborations. These findings build on research from the disciplines of theology, psychology, sociology and philosophy and provide the lens through which we can have a mechanistic understanding of the very nuts and bolts that makes us, well, us! The results and have vast implications at the level of both the individual and society.

I’m really looking forward to my trip. I’m hoping to also discover new ways of thinking about the brain from you, the business leaders, learning from your perspective.

On that note I would love for you to take part in little experiment! Listen to the below audio track.

It’s tricky to understand, right? In fact, it’s complete gobbledegook! Now listen to this second track. Poor camel! Now play back the first track again. Suddenly it makes sense, right?

First Track:

Second Track: 

The cadence of both sentences is the same. This happens because our brains are both awe inspiringly sophisticated and mesmerising in their action, but also inherently lazy, always trying to take short cuts in their processing in order to make assumptions about the world. As a result the brain superimposes your previous experience of making sense from the sentence with the similar cadence onto the first gobbledegook track. This simple audio illusion helps us to understand how our perception of the world is built from a culmination of our highly individual life experiences. It also helps us to appreciate how we can each hold such wildly conflicting views of the world and why consensus building can be so tricky. Such consensus building, taking onboard other people’s perspectives, is vital for leadership and management and we’ll be exploring how neuroscience can also help us achieve that. I’m really looking forwards to discussing this and more, meeting you shortly in Australia!

Dr Hannah Critchlow is an internationally-acclaimed neuroscientist with a background in neuropsychiatry. She is best known as the presenter of BBC’s Tomorrow’s World Live as well as for her work demystifying the human brain on regular radio, TV and festival platforms. Hannah’s work in science communication saw her named as a Top 100 UK scientist by the Science Council and one of Cambridge University’s most ‘inspirational and successful women in science’. During her PhD she was awarded a Cambridge University Fellowship and as an undergraduate received three University Prizes as Best Biologist.

KNOWING WHAT WE DON’T KNOW – AT LEAST SOME OF IT

In my consulting work one of the areas that perplexed managers raise with me is a variation of the following: “I know there are parts of the business where we could equip everyone better but I’m not sure how to get a grip on these areas. Our management team has been tossing around little straws in the wind that are telling us that we should be doing better but we’re not getting much traction. The general mood across the business doesn’t seem to be as positive as it used to be.

“There’s really nothing we can measure that’s helping here, except our overall performance measures aren’t kicking along as well as I’d expect.”

This is a ‘soft’ management facet of the business. So I question along the following lines:

“What are you hearing from your people?” “Have you done staff satisfaction feedback work?” “Any 360° surveys at various responsibility levels?” “A customer health check?” “How much formal coaching and less formal mentoring are in place?” “In practice, do your people readily bring up new ideas – whether valuable or not?” “Do you and your team regularly review whether you demonstrate the values of the business?” “Do your staff adhere to these values?”

Often it seems that the areas with which managers are struggling to be better in touch are intangibles: facets of culture, processes (not technical processes) and structure.

“So what have you and your management team done in the last little while, to get in touch with these three important elements in the working of your business?”

Sometimes, I hear comments such as, “We did a staff satisfaction survey earlier this year but honestly, I don’t completely trust it. Every time we do this survey, the responses we get don’t line up with what we experience day-to-day with our staff. Survey results are bitterly disappointing, for instance only 23% are satisfied whereas day-to-day interactions in practice show the reverse; the great majority show as positive, enthusiastic, willing when we call on them.”

So at this point, frequently-asked question back to me is disarmingly simple, “How do I find out more about what’s really going on in these areas?”

A business can deploy tools to evaluate culture. Well-informed people can gain insights into structural effectiveness by reviewing and revising the org chart. Again, there are consultants with insights who can review and advise on management and relational processes. However, how often do we hear from the people working at all levels in the business, that the structural effectiveness or process remapping exercise seems to have been sold well to the CEO and board – after all, these advisers often have an international name and a substantial fee attached – but missed a lot of the point?

Untapped Sources of Insight

The people working in a business know a lot about how it is travelling and how the innards are functioning. If carefully and respectfully asked, they contribute a lot to understanding what can beneficially be done to get things working better. The staff collectively don’t know it all but they work in the business and are familiar with the innards.

There’s some interesting work being done to examine within which business model a business operates and to test correlation between the business model and its performance data. ¹

The advantage of a business model approach is that it enables clustering of intangibles and drawing valuable granulated guides to action from considering them together and in a business model context. Rather than numerous studies of culture, effectiveness, communication, and delegation; all of necessity performed in an uncoordinated manner, a well-structured business models approach examines such facets of the business in a coordinated manner which generates insights for improvement in specific elements of operation.

There are various categorizations of business models; here are overviews of three business models which I use.

Isolation Model

People work in silos, isolated from each other and customers. Hierarchical, authoritarian structure. Production orientation, rather than the customer’s requirements. Vendor outlook.

Cooperation Model

People consult each other and the customer but with lesser focus on customer requirements. A loosely-defined ‘family’ in a largely isolation-type structure. Service outlook.

High Engagement Model

The business functions as a whole, organically, energized; it embraces flexibility and complexity. Shared authority within a performance framework. Discovery and full engagement with (‘line of sight to’) the customer. Performance outlook.

There’s a set of characteristics associated with each of these Models.

Typically, most businesses operate differently between Models in most of these characteristics, for instance being stronger in client engagement (tending towards the High Engagement Model) and less strong in optimizing opportunity for talented staff (tending towards the Isolation Model). As well, typically most businesses also vary their application of any one characteristic depending on circumstances – for instance having a bigger appetite for business risk when competition is strong and the order book is short.

An Example of Insights Gained

Here is a summary of points revealed in a recent business models study, from the overview section of the report to the client.

We recommend attention to several facets of the business, designed to transition from a passive and reactive leadership and management style to an informed one. This will require leadership, effort and change on your part; your senior people tell me they are ready for such improvement. Here are some specific things to do.

  1. Examine your desires and options as owner/director, settle a strategy to optimise your exit from the firm, develop and implement a plan to better prepare the firm for transition. Expand this into a full strategic plan.
  2. Approach strategy as a dynamic. Engage your team in regular broad reviews, environmental scans and futures discussions; evolve strategies, goals and action plans as the environment and events change.
  3. Develop a pattern or performance reports to keep you and your senior people in touch with key operations and deliverables of the firm. Don’t report for reporting’s sake; identify those specific functions where value will be added in an active and positive management system, explore this with your senior team. There will be some trial and error in this; we have some information about performance reports and templates which we can discuss with you.
  4. Set up a framework of accountability, authority and responsibility; in a firm of your size, this doesn’t need to be heavily-structured or overly-formal. Your senior people recognize the need for this and are ready to take on more responsibility. This will be an important plank in your transition.
  5. Make a capability and capacity review of your senior team and use this to inform the framework of responsibility and authority. Engage with your senior staff on their personal growth and development, in the context of a new management model. Let them work with you to design delegation models and resource flexibility processes.
  6. Devolve client engagement; you can no longer be the anchor. Train your staff in the three levels model and active High Engagement Client Relationship Management.
  7. The firm as a whole isn’t risk-averse but its approach is based on informal and intuitive elements. Develop a risk model and engage your senior staff in this.
  8. Engage your seniors about their aspirations and intentions, develop a feeling for their interest in a potential buy-out. If this progresses, engage a third-party business adviser to develop the concept with the individuals and possibly collectively.

¹           Frederic Laloux. Reinventing Organizations: a Guide to Creating Organizations    Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness, apra, 2014.

About the Author

Ian Mathieson – Managing Director, MATHIESON MANAGEMENT PTY LTD

Drawing on his experience and learning as consultant, business owner and manager, Ian Mathieson has developed, helped by other experienced professionals, the Data+Scorecard® Instrument.

 

 

Data+Scorecard®: The complete package solution to create a highly engaged organisation

The Data+Scorecard® Instrument identifies areas in your business that you can focus on to effectively manage the shift towards the High Engagement Model, which supports longer-term performance and sustainability. This simple yet powerful three-step analysis and recommendation package gives you valuable insights to drive positive change in your business.

Find out more here.

4 reasons to trust (valid and reliable) psychometric assessments

It goes without saying that human behaviour is incredibly complicated. It’s determined by an intricate combination of factors, and – as you can imagine – trying to predict how a person is going to behave, or react, or perform is no easy task.

Enter psychometrics, whose goal is to get accurate and unbiased insight into people’s mental abilities, personality, and behaviour. But how on earth is this possible?

1. There’s a lot of evidence that they work

Organisational Psychologists have spent over five decades researching, creating and rigorously testing psychometric assessments that are robust enough to predict when and why a given person will be successful or not in a given job. And as someone who is working towards becoming an Organisational Psychologist, let me tell you that these folks are an extremely hard to impress, detail-focused and highly sceptical bunch.

There’s now a large body of highly credible scientific evidence that demonstrates that a person’s results on a (valid and reliable) psychometric assessment can strongly predict a number of different work-related factors, including:

  • Future job performance: how well they will learn new tasks, solve complex problems and perform on the job
  • Organisational fit: whether they’re likely to share the organisation’s values and feel more committed and engaged in their job
  • Safety behaviours: how likely they are to accept personal responsibility for safety at work and avoid risky behaviour
  • Behaviour and personality: how someone naturally prefers to behave at work, the kinds of behaviours they have adopted, and how difficult it is to sustain behavioural changes
  • Emotional intelligence: how well they can identify, understand, manage and use their own and other people’s emotions.

These kinds of assessments also give employers a standardised, fair and equitable way to compare candidates for a role, based on criteria that have been scientifically proven to predict success in a particular role.

2. They need to demonstrate reliability and validity

The next question has to be: how do we actually know that these assessments can really do what they say they will? It all comes down to two little words: reliability and validity.

These two properties are the foundation of psychometric assessments, and are the reason you can have confidence that psychometrics will help you identify and select the right people for a role.

So, what do we mean when we talk about reliability and validity? Let’s take a look at each concept on its own.

Reliability refers to the ability of an assessment tool to produce stable and consistent results. For example, a personality assessment should produce very similar results for the same candidate each time they complete it within a similar time period.

We can break reliability down a little further as well, into sub-categories that include test-retest reliability and internal consistency.

Test-retest reliability happens when we administer the same test to the same group of people several times, and achieve similar results each time. So, if someone is assessed as being a top performer in their first test sitting, a reliable test will give us a similar result the second time they complete the same test.

Internal consistency reliability examines the consistency between the different items within a test. This means that if there are two or more items in an assessment that measure the same construct – for example, in a safety assessment, there might be multiple items that assess a person’s locus of control – we would expect that the same person will answer all of the items in a similar way.

Validity refers to the extent to which an assessment measures what it is intended to measure. For example, a measure of intelligence should measure intelligence, and not something else, such as memory. Like reliability, validity has a number of sub-categories which all need to be met for a test to be considered a legitimate psychometric measuring tool.

A particularly important sub-category is predictive validity. This concept is all about how well a test score can predict performance on a set of future criteria.

A nice example of predictive validity is the incredibly strong and rigorous scientific evidence that a person’s score on a cognitive ability test predicts their future performance at work. In other words it is very likely that the higher a candidate’s score on a (valid and reliable) cognitive ability assessment, the better their job performance will be.

There are many other cases of strong and rigorous associations between people’s scores on a particular construct and their subsequent performance at work, including:

  • A robust association between a candidate’s score on a measure of work reliability or integrity and their rate of absenteeism from work
  • A clear association between candidate’s score on a measure of safety and their likelihood of suffering a workplace injury or accident.

3. They go through an extremely stringent development process

Developing a psychometric test is not the kind of endeavour that can happen overnight. While anyone can pull together a quiz or questionnaire and deliver some results to people (certain magazines do this very well – and they’re fun to complete), constructing a proper, valid and reliable psychometric assessment is a whole other world of complexity.

Because they do have such stringent criteria to meet and need to prove that they can provide genuine information about a candidate’s suitability or ‘fit’ for a particular role, psychometric tests can take up to 10 years to develop.

To be taken seriously, the test developers have numerous hoops to jump through. One of these is making sure that the items in the test are measuring the construct they’re supposed to measure – and just that particular construct – as precisely as possible.

This involves conducting an intricate statistical analysis to determine which items should be eliminated from or retained in the item pool, and whether additional items need to be developed.

Yet another challenge is ensuring that psychometric assessments remain up to date and relevant. This usually means that tests need to be continually updated over time, based on feedback and new research in the field.

4. They have safeguards to prevent faking or response distortion

‘But wait!’ you may say. ‘This is all very well and good, but what about candidates giving the answers they think you want in an assessment?’ And that’s a really good question.

Obviously, when candidates are applying for a job, they’re motivated to show you their very best side. This also means that they’re likely to be tempted to give fake or distorted responses on an assessment, such as telling you they’re more reliable than they really are.

This is a question that psychologists have pondered for many years, and there’s a whole body of psychological literature dedicated to it. From all of this research, there are a number of different – and effective – ways we can reduce the opportunity for candidates to fake their responses, including:

  • Verification testing: candidates complete the same assessment (with different questions) a second time under supervised conditions to verify their original results
  • Validity scales: checks are built into the assessments (by certain questions or algorithms) to detect whether candidates are trying to present an overly positive image of themselves or their behaviour

Making candidates aware of the consequences of faking: some psychometric assessment providers (Revelian included) also collect some fairly sophisticated forensic data behind the scenes, and are alerted when candidates exhibit suspicious behaviour. Alerting candidates of this before they begin the assessment and that their results may be deemed invalid if they do not respond honestly is a useful and effective method of reducing faking. So, as you can see, developing and delivering a valid, reliable and robust psychometric assessment is no mean feat and there are some extremely stringent guidelines attached.

And while this is a burden that we – as psychometric assessment developers – must bear, the great news for employers is that these same stringent guidelines mean you can be confident that tests meeting these requirements will give you accurate, fair and reliable predictions of how candidates will behave and perform at work.

Take short courses to tailor your leadership to your employees’ psychometrics

In addition to using psychometric tools to help find top talents for your business, it’s important to have the skills to manage and work with a range of personality types. We know this and have developed a range of short courses to help you communicate clearly with employees and make decisions effectively so that each individual is catered for and can get the support they need to work effectively and deliver results. 

About the author:

Jarrah Watkinson is a provisional psychologist undertaking a Masters of Organisational Psychology at Macquarie University. Jarrah is presently completing an internship at Revelian with the Sydney team, and during her time at Revelian Jarrah has been involved in a number of projects to deliver assessment and selection solutions across a range of industries. Jarrah is passionate about employee health and well-being, user-experience, and creating innovative ways to select and assess employees.

The Institute and Managers and Leaders have just partnered with Revelian, an Australian-owned company trusted by top employers around the world to provide psychometric assessments that reveal powerful insights about people, organisational culture and development. Revelian helps leaders to improve their HR metrics and find the best people for their organisation.

Find out more about how Revelian’s psychometric tools can help you recruit top talent here.