The crumbling myths about leadership

If you have not read Piers Paul Read's novel, Alive, and a movie by the same name, here is a brief recap of the true story of a jetliner crash in the Andes in 1972.

The 28 survivors of the crash found themselves hopelessly marooned in an isolated, snowbound mountain valley, with only a broken section of the airplane fuselage for protection.

Several of the crash survivors with considerable leadership experience were, ironically, the first to perish as cold, hunger, and fear gripped the group.

A previously shy, self-conscious boy named Parrado emerged as one of the most trusted and loved leaders among the trapped passengers, and the leader perhaps most responsible for their eventual survival.

The lesson: no myth about leadership really matters and leaders like Parrado can emerge from the unique circumstances of the moment. This is story-telling at its best "" no sermons on leadership and no quick fix solutions like 10 must-dos.

Mick Bennett and Andrew Bell, the two veteran management consultants with Hewitt Associates, obviously believe in this genre of story-telling, and have written what is essentially a collection of war stories of men who have been in the trenches and how they have been able to motivate their teams to deliver extraordinary performance.

The crucial lesson the book tries to convey, quite successfully, is this: respecting people is not some warm and fuzzy New Age management fad. At its heart, the idea is that you are respecting people enough to demand their best.

The first reaction that a book with a mundane title like Leadership and Talent in Asia can evoke is quite predictable: give me a break from another treatise on the much-written and endlessly discussed topic of leadership.

The authors are obviously aware of this, and hence the book's opening paragraph raises a fundamental question that no chief executive can ignore: "Your company's most valuable assets will walk out of the door at the end of today. What makes them want to come back tomorrow?'

The answers "" none of which require complex strategy and convoluted people practices "" make fascinating reading. The best part of the 224-page book, which draws on the findings of Hewitt's Best Employers in Asia studies, are narration of simple things like how great leaders bring people together to celebrate their company's unrelenting focus on performance and results.

For example, consider the practice of Birthday Breakfasts at Cisco Systems in Australia. Once a month, the managing director invites all employees who have had a birthday that month to breakfast.

These sessions achieve multiple goals: they celebrate a personal milestone, they help to build an opportunity for the managing director to communicate key messages around strategies and goals, and they encourage and allow for interactive feedback.

Where the book scores is in its ability to remove doubts over the payoffs of being a best employer. Consider the wealth of data culled from Hewitt's surveys covering 250,000 employees in 10 countries since 2000.

The compound average annual growth rate for the best employers in Asia compared to the rest was almost 50 per cent higher between 1999 and 2001. A striking piece of data is headcount, which increased significantly at the rest, but not at the best.

The rest increased headcount by 8.87 per cent in the two-year period while the best actually reduced headcount by 0.53 per cent. Also, nearly double the percentage of employees in the best trust their leaders to balance the interests of the organisation with those of employees.

Reasons like this would surely help convince those organisations that wonder why they should strive to become best employers, other than the fact that it sounds good.

If you want to create a compelling work experience, Bennett and Bell provide many answers. For example, how do the best employers find their employees? On average, they receive about twice the number of applications as do their competitors.

In the case of Infosys, for example, for every 100 application for a position, 13 are tested, 5 are interviewed, and 1.6 are offered a position. The best employers obviously work very hard at selection.

Consider yet another example of a corporation in Australia. The company was selecting a senior marketing manager and had gone through several rounds of interviews.

They had identified the person they thought was the right one for the job and were on the verge of making an offer. The HR head took him out to dinner and, during the meal, the prospective marketing manager was particularly rude to a waiter, in front of his potential future peers.

The company reversed its decision. If he could be rude to a waiter in such a setting, how would his behaviour reflect the company's image and culture if he was in charge of marketing? He did not get the job.

What one misses, however, are some examples of failures "" of leaders who look only at the mirror in times of success. An otherwise interesting read, Leadership ... also gets carried away at times and makes the mistake of arriving at too simplistic conclusions.

For example, the authors talk admirably about a 'best' employer that downsized 15 per cent of its staff in one day "" a day on which the company held a special celebration to thank departing employees for their efforts.

Rather than morale diving, it became stronger, the authors conclude, and enthusiastically quotes one of the employees as saying how he was "proud to have been part of an organisation that treats its people like this." Thankfully, the authors have not narrated too many of such 'best employer stories'.

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Leadership And Talent in Asia
How The Best Employers Deliver Extraordinary Performance

Mick Bennett and Andrew Bell
John Wiley & Sons (Asia) Pte Ltd.
Pages: 224