Leadership from the Centre by Lionel Boxer

Lionel Boxer, KSJ is Managing Director of Intergon, a Melbourne based leadership development and consulting business. He has worked in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South East Asia. Lionel is currently researching aberrant success in leadership at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (R.M.I.T.).

Perhaps the greatest threat to the stability of any organisation is ineffective leaders. This is true of small teams and it is true of entire nations. In fact, Sir William Slim, then Governor General of Australia, opened his 1957 Australian Institute of Management lecture with this idea.

Leaders do not sprout out of thin air. Slim went on to say that leaders need to be given the opportunity to lead when they are young. When they have developed leadership skills to the stage that they habitually do the right thing to inspire people, they can lead any organisation. Habits come from the centre of one’s personality.

Sadly, Australia has suffered an absolute dearth of real leaders for generations. Slim noted this in 1957 and the situation has become worse over the past forty years. This is a bold and dogmatic statement, but people who understand leadership are equally concerned.

Before the 1960's, respected institutions offered young people the opportunity to develop leadership skills. However, the radical 1960's created an atmosphere of distrust towards these institutions. Rather than recognising the benefits of being a member of establishment organisations, young people chose to create their own groups. These groups had "high" ideals, but they did not base them on principles of morality, nor were they necessarily led by people with any great integrity.

The children of the 1960's are now running -- not necessarily leading -- parts of organisations. A former Australian Regular Army lieutenant-colonel, when asking for leadership theories, admitted that he should know better than to ask for that. Leadership is not something that we can reduce to a theory. Sadly for him, he was in the position of satisfying the request of a partner in a Big Six firm, that was being contracted to provide leadership training. Soon afterwards the lieutenant-colonel left the firm. Several years later, the client realised that the firm had nothing to offer concerning leadership development, and went on to develop a very effective series of internal programs to address various levels in the organisation.

Several organisations have reported that they are unable to identify their next CEO. Some industry spokespeople have even commented that their next CEO must come from overseas. Perhaps the reason that succession planning has not been a high priority in many businesses is that there have been no appropriate candidates. Continuity of leadership development ended thirty years ago.

Continuity in a society is a very important feature. It leads to stability and success. Continuity is one thing that contemporary Australians admire about the Aboriginal culture. Furthermore, there is similar interest in Eastern philosophies; travelling through Nepal, China and India provide opportunities to witness how their cultures have sustained. Yet, there is little interest in maintaining the continuity of Australia’s culture. As demonstrated above, that continuity was broken in the 1960's.

Programs like the Johnson and Johnson New Leaders Forum and Telstra’s CEO’s Leaders Program are attempts to return to some sort of community-based leadership development. In these programs, successful leaders should be passing on their skills to participants. However, we need to ask ourselves if there are any truly successful leaders left these days or are the messages being presented simply theories of academics disguised as industry experts.

General Norman Schwarzkopf, during his Australian tour, recently suggested that a truly successful leader can inspire anyone in any situation to do the right thing. This idea seemed to be the common theme shared by Dr. John Tickell, Ricardo Semler, Stephen Covey and Lee Iacocca who also participated in this road show. So, who can do this? Who in today’s society has the opportunity to develop these skills and where can these skills be found.

Eastern philosophy provides the following model: I hear — I forget. I see — I remember. I do — I understand.

But what does that mean? Attending a day at the Sports and Entertainment Centre will provide opportunities to hear ideas that will be forgotten unless they are put into action. Put into action, not just by someone, but by the person who wants to develop those skills. Covey knows that most people will not do anything; how many of his books remain unread on shelves? So, in his courses he requires people to go through exercises during the courses to apply techniques. Furthermore, he requires participants to go home at night and apply the same exercises on family and to return the next day. Why? He is trying to create new habits in people.

Habits come from the centre of an individual. They are not superficial, nor are they contrived. Habits result in meaningful gestures that will be perceived as genuine expressions from one person to another. Where courses provide an opportunity to develop these habits, they cannot be done continually for ever and the lessons they are attempting to pass on will be forgotten, because people will stop doing and that will be the end of new habits.

The only way to develop and sustain stable leadership skills is to associate with other leaders who display those leadership qualities. From interviews with people like Sir John Holland (founder of John Holland Group), Dr. John Connell (founder of Connell-Wagner), Cr. Wellington Lee (a small businessman and community leader) and other similar people, a pattern begins to emerge. These people founded their leadership ability not in formal training courses dedicated to leadership. Rather, they owe their success as leaders to having associated with mentors who passed on invaluable attributes of leaders. Whereas these leaders display certain attributes, similar attributes seem absent from those entrepreneurs who initiate and merge organisations these days. Furthermore, these new organisations do not seem to have the same degree of stability or success. What are the right attributes for a leader to pursue?

It seems that each individual leader relies on different attributes to become a good leader. Slim stated that the first thing a leader needs to be a leader is a personality. From that he suggested that the attributes a leader requires depends on the personality that person possesses.

A few years ago a popular book reported that the most sellable commodity these days is a short cut. People do not want to make an effort if they can avoid doing so. Otherwise, everyone would be slim (as they want to be) and free of all vices. Yet there is an industry devoted to providing "easy" solutions all the problems that people have an ability to deal with, including leadership. Yet, there is no short cut to the development of a personality, nor is there a shortcut to the development of leadership attributes.

Personality is at the centre of a person’s soul. The R.M.I.T. M.B.A. Program requires participants to complete a three-semester Management Competency subject. This subject attempts to take participants to the "centre" of what they are and then build appropriate leadership attributes or competencies on that foundation. The most important message of this subject is that the journey does not end on the conclusion of the subject. Where there are established theories of competencies, these theoretical ideals may be inappropriate for each person to apply. Instead, understanding yourself by doing what you want to be is necessary. In this case lead from the centre.

Sir Weary Dunlop expressed that his concerns are not my concerns and that I should not live through his hardships. He said that we needed to learn to live in the world as it has become not as it was. Interestingly, although he remained a Christian all his life, he was also very involved in Buddhism and had considerable empathy with people of a surprisingly wide range of backgrounds. Weary understood himself. He had the benefit of learning from mentors and the sense to listen to them. He certainly became a person of considerable influence throughout many communities all over the world. We should all be so lucky to find appropriate teachers, who will help us find our centres. Furthermore, we should learn to listen to them.

You may rightly ask, "what is a centre?" Some of us know.