<div> While corporate leadership is an oft discussed subject, within and outside business schools, there isn't enough research or analysis about the evolution of a good leader and the role of behaviour modification in an organisation; so believes <strong>Gerard Seijts</strong>. An associate professor of organisational behaviour as well as the executive director of the Ian O. Ihnatowycz Institute for Leadership (Richard Ivey School of Business), Seijts' teaching and consulting focus on crisis leadership, goal setting, training and development, organisational justice and performance management.</div><div> </div><div>He is currently in the process of compiling a book on understanding leadership by profiling exemplary leaders from across the globe.. In an interview with <strong>BW Online's Alokita Datta</strong>, Seijts talks about the responsibilities of the leader in the importance of communication within organisational culture, how case studies serve as important learning tools and what global leadership entails; and why we aren't quite there yet. </div><div> </div><div><strong>How do you intend to explore the idea of leadership in the new book you are planning to write? </strong></div><div>The previous project I worked on was the book called <em>Leadership On Trial: A Manifesto for Leadership Development</em> which was based on the financial crisis, how it happened and what we can learn from it. At the end of the book there is a call to action - for business schools, current and next generation leaders, board of directors and people in organisational development. The next generation of leaders is an important group. One of the things that has not been very clear and has been one of my major areas of interest is how good leaders learn to lead; or how they learn to become even better leaders. In business schools typically we don't really focus on that; when they leave school they are faced with a lot of challenges. </div><div> </div><div>That was one consideration. The other is that I have a terrific job; I get to meet a lot of amazing people and tell their stories. Sometimes when people come to our school (to talk to students) you can't help but wonder why someone did something. For example, we had a very unfortunate crisis in Canada a few years ago with a food processing company. The CEO almost immediately took ownership, was very candid in his communication, very transparent, at great cost to himself and the company. How does a person learn to take accountability? We had a general (in the army) come to our school some time ago and it was interesting because he deals with life and death. </div><div> </div><div>Every leader wants to communicate with his/her employees when times are good but it is when times are bad that people need to see the leader the most. I don't there has been a lot of research or guidance on how a leader should develop empathy and the right communication skills. Therefore, I along with a few people, including the dean of the Richard Ivey School Of Business, Carol Stephenson, decided to conduct a series of interviews -between 25-30-with people we consider to be terrific leaders who have done exceptional things; for the most part they are business leaders but we also have people from the government, arts, sports among others. I hope to get some great stories with life and leadership lessons. For each leader there will be a set of specific questions about certain circumstances that I want to find an answer to. I will be talking to three people in India then two leaders in Hong Kong. We have spoken to about 15 leaders in North America as yet. </div><div> </div><div><strong>On what basis did you zero in on the three people in India you have chosen to interview? </strong></div><div>Both aspects are important. In Canada, there are some people who are seen as universally good leaders, whom Canadians admire. To some extent a great story (or not so great story) determines who we talk to. I don't want to talk only to people from the financial or food processing industry so I focus on different industries and people. All stories are unique; there may be similarities. One of the similarities is that leadership requires an enormous commitment, some people made real sacrifices; it takes time to do this right. If all interviews are the same with similar learning it will not make the book very entertaining or informative.</div><div> </div><div>The three people I chose in India are Kiran Mazumdar Shaw (Biocon), Gautam Thapar (The Avantha Group) and N.R. Narayana Murthy (Infosys). Both Narayana Murthy and Kiran Mazumdar Shaw have built their businesses from scratch so I wanted to know how they learned to deal with obstacles and setbacks, disappointments and slowly built things over time. Someone informed me about Gautam Thapar and I started to watch YouTube videos to learn a little bit more about the company. Family owned businesses were not originally in my sample but these businesses also come with their challenges which could make for an interesting story as well. </div><div> </div><div><strong>Your first book dealt leadership in the time of crisis. Post crisis, under changed (economic) circumstances and disillusionment what should corporate leaders focus on most when managing employees?</strong></div><div>I would say that the biggest challenge, the way I see it is communication: to make people understand what is happening, why it is happening as well as when and what to expect in terms of outcomes. Transparency, candour and building trust are essential. I learnt a very interesting lesson from Rudy Giuliani once: he had come to the Ivey school several years ago to share his leadership insights based on his career and the 9/11 attacks. Something that stood out for me was what he said: Weddings optional, funerals mandatory. The leader has to be omnipresent when things are bad; he can't send his second-in-command to do the hard work of leadership that you should be doing. At times many of our leaders have missed this crucial point and seem autocratic. People want to get a sense of hope that whatever happens there is a plan, a vision behind it and they need to be involved with it. If that doesn't happen questions will linger. If the leader doesn't provide information, people will invent things themselves and what they come up with maybe be farfetched from reality. </div><div> </div><div><strong>Communication could prove to be tricky as well since transparency can only work up to an extent; not all info should or can be made available to employees. How can a system of dialogue be established? </strong></div><div>In the Ivey Leadership Institute website we feature many interviews with leaders. One of them is with Peter Aceto, the CEO of ING Direct, Canada. When the financial crisis occurred and people were concerned and worried about the bank, in his words, he found this crisis a 'galvanising opportunity' because it really brought people together. He was in constant contact with the other CEOs, in Europe, Australia and the US to talk about what is happening in the industry and to ING Direct and Aceto very much communicated this email correspondence to his employees which created a great sense of trust and community was built. Often in a crisis situation, we ask for people's trust and followership but we have done nothing in the years prior to the crisis to build credibility. So why would people trust you suddenly? People like Peter Aceto are visible, in contact with his employees over Twitter. This is relatively easier to do in an outfit where there are 1000 people or less because chances are if you travel, people will see you, but he made it part of his behavioural repertoire. There aren't too many leaders I know like Peter.</div><div> </div><div>I have heard and read very good things about Narayana Murthy who is very humble and people write a lot about how he relates to people within the organisation and communicating with them. I am sure there are other examples of autocratic leaders in India, as anywhere else and sometimes they are successful as well. There is a distribution of practices across North America, Hong Kong, India and elsewhere and it is difficult to single out and label them.</div><div> </div><div><strong>How is the style of leadership determined by the industry to which a company belongs? Also, is it subject to change along with changes in the business cycle? </strong></div><div>To a certain extent the industry ( a company belongs to) dictates what the leader does because they follow the standard, common practice. But there are moments when people are faced with experiences that leave a profound, resonating impact which sometimes revolutionises their style of leadership. If people have a failure and afterwards they take the time to really learn from it by reflecting on it. Having said that though, you would think that those seminal events would have some kind of effect but it is like when someone has a heart attack: they do things differently for maybe two or three months and they get back to their old habitual routines, so constant reinforcement is required. I study behaviour and also have a background in health education and I know that behaviour modification is one of the most difficult things to achieve. We need people around us who can be candid but it is difficult because who is going to tell the boss that things are not going the way they should? </div><div> </div><div>I am working on a case study in Iceland. No society can operate without banks yet people lost all trust in the Icelandic banks, recently. All the old CEOs and board of directors were fired and the new leadership were put in place. The new leaders faced the same problem even though they were not in charge when the bank dropped a ball. So it is almost as if the institution suffers a lack of trust and not just the individual leaders. So, one also needs to examine the culture of leadership, the system. Car manufacturing units in North America used to have very strong unions. In northern Ontario there was a plant of the company manufacturing company Caterpillar who recently closed a plant after a lot of confrontation between workers and mangers.</div><div> </div><div><strong>The difficulty then lies in the process of rebuilding organisational structure after a conflict…</strong></div><div>You need to start from scratch but it isn't like that either because remember the past , it's not a clean slate and then how do you do things differently? Every leader should know what (s)he stands for and therefore what employees can expect from him/her. People don't like unpredictability. Soon people will evaluate whether there is consistency between what a leader promised and what (s)he delivers. Hopefully over time the leader starts building some credit. But people will often hold you accountable for things you weren't even responsible for. Reputation management becomes important. </div><div><strong><br /></strong></div><div><strong>It is very much in vogue to talk about the concept of global leadership, how can one define such a leader and what would the facets of such leadership? </strong></div><div>Nobody really knows what global leadership is. I was at a conference about three weeks ago in Boston and one of the conclusions was that very few people actually know what it means because if you read 10 papers about it and the skills required, you get 10 very different results. It has become a fashionable term, everybody is using it and because of that it starts to lose its significance. Just as it is with leadership, we use this term for everything but what does it really mean?</div><div> </div><div>But one would think that when it comes to the global leader, there are a number of common traits and characteristics: an observation was made that that's not there yet. One would expect the global leader to have a broad interest and outlook where (sh)he is flexible and understanding of local customs and habits. When I go to teach in Hong Kong, they are always interested to know how people in the US would do the same things they are talking about. I try and tell them that before we go there , it is important to realise that may not necessarily be the right approach; it might very well be the approach that fits with their context. There is no one theory of leadership, it is very contextual. To me, you are a global leader if suppose you are on your way from the UK to Shanghai, Jordan and you're able to work , you understand the context and are able to function in those systems, but that is quite a challenge. </div><div> </div><div><strong>In the event of a merger or acquisition, the cultures of the (old and newly formed) organisations change invariable. How does the leader tackle this challenge? </strong></div><div>First of all I hope that the 2 companies in question do a lot of work prior to the actual merger to see to what extent their cultures are even compatible. I worked on a case with Arthur Andersen and Deloitte Touche in Toronto and when Arthur Andersen went kaput and Deloitte picked up some of the pieces. Before that they really assessed the differences between the two companies and where they would need to work on and where overlaps exist so there would be very little to work on. What has worked with a lot of companies is the notion of creating common history. Some people consider it best practice to put teams of different people together, watch, support and see them develop. It helps people realise that what I contributed and you contributed both has merit and that helps build momentum towards a common goal. It is vital to monitor things and always jump in when things are derailed and provide feedback. </div><div> </div><div><strong>Does it become necessary to hire a management consultant therefore? </strong></div><div>Yes and no. I have seen companies who are able to negotiate with their employees without the need for consultants and there are others who attribute their success to management/performance consultants. The risk with consultants often is that, best practice is to train the trainer. We need to trained the people who own the company because if you rely only on a consultant then after he goes things derail. Yet consultants can serve a very useful purpose in many companies; sometimes consultants act as facilitators and sometimes the internal people do so. </div><div> </div><div>break-page-break</div><div> </div><div><strong>Could you elaborate on your involvement with companies such (Deloitte, Air Canada, ING Direct) . Do you conduct leadership workshops or approach them for case study collaborations? </strong></div><div>One of my favourite cases is WestJet, an airline company in Canada; I found them to be an interesting company. I wrote to them that I wanted to write a case on their corporate culture, no problem. We have had an ongoing contact with them; I've spoken at their annual general meeting. I had asked them for an hour in their flight simulator where their pilots are trained. They (WestJet) routinely come to our classes: to improve public relations, second, there may be an interesting insight and third they can benefit from faculty expertise. It is very much a two way street: they benefit from us and we from them. A company such as Maple Leaf Foods is a client of Ivey in the sense that we hold executive development programmes with them and sometimes they present us with interesting cases, they have a challenge and we write a company specific case which we only teach in the Maple leaf programme and talk about the challenge featured in the case. So it can be a problem solving session for a company as well. Some companies believe it is important to document their success but they have no illusions that somehow this is going to benefit them. Thus, there are different motivations and different ways in which we run into case opportunities. The bottom-line for us is that they must be a great teaching tool and cases are in fact just that.</div><div> </div><div><strong>In terms of building your pedagogy what are the things you look for, when designing a corporatecase study?</strong></div><div>It has to be a great story, to begin with, which is compelling, interesting and has some hard hitting lessons in it. I want full disclosure for the company because a case which only has 40 or 40 percent relevant information isn't very helpful; it needs to have actionable information for debriefing. Here is the case and the learnings, here are the two, three things that we can do differently. It would be nice if we can have some theory inform our course of action. It helps to have the CEO of the company on which the case study is written be present in class or address the students over video. </div><div> </div><div><strong>What have been some of the major shifts you've been able to observe in organisational behaviour, over the years?</strong></div><div>There are some people who are trying to do things differently but it is hard to change organisational culture, because of the pressures of a system people are compelled to act a certain manner. When the BP oil crisis in the Gulf of Mexico (2010) happened, everyone noticed what went wrong with communication. For a lot of executives in the oil industry it was a watershed moment where they realised that is not how we should act because it gives the organisation and the industry a bad name. Less than a year later there was an oil spill in Michigan and the CEO of the company, Enbridge went straight to where the oil spill had occurred, was very visible, hands-on was empathetic and took accountability. One could say that he looked very carefully into what had happened in the Gulf of Mexico and realised what needs to be done differently. That's the great aspect of crisis management: you learn from how other people mess up. But it isn't always that these actions translate into concrete action. In the cycle of a crisis people pay attention for a year or two and then the lessons fade away. Performance goes up, people start taking risks and eventually that turns into recklessness and before you know it there is a crisis again. </div><div> </div><div><strong>This is where risk management comes in…</strong></div><div>From a behavioural aspect I think risk management to a large extent is about asking the right questions with confidence: even if isn't a great question or to want to know how to articulate doubts or require explanations. But that didn't happen a lot; people started to underestimate the amount of risk involved and a false sense of security is created. In the banking industry one may not want to be labelled risk averse by asking questions. Often senior people may not understand what their comples financial structure mean and how it works. </div><div> </div><div>I<strong>n what ways can leaders influence employee behaviour (corformity) to get desired results? What are the most effective methods of conditioning?</strong></div><div>What people reward gets done in an organisation (not necessarily monetary rewards) gets done in an organisation. If you want people to act a certain way but you don't talk about or measure that behaviour or don't celebrate it that sends one message to the employees: it is not important. If it doesn't become part of the vocabulary it is lost. </div><div> </div><div><strong>There is often a discrepancy between what an employee is expected to do and what (she) actually does, in the corporate context..</strong></div><div>That's because no one talked to them or frankly couldn't care to direct them and we end up seeing crazy behaviour. What is the CEO or the upper echelon of management doing? Are they sanctioning what employees are saying or doing? I always ask people, particularly in service oriented companies, how big do you think the marketing department of your company is? Someone would say 150 and someone else would say 5,000 which is in fact the correct answer because all employees in their role are the company. You are the company and people make generalisations based on their experience with you. Behaviour is everything, therefore.</div><div> </div>
