Developing leaders

People are often promoted to managerial positions because they are technically good. But in the multi- faceted organisational structures of the twenty-first century, this role requires new and complex skills of motivating, influencing and empowering. We don't inherit these skills, we are not taught them at school and many of our work models are inappropriate. Your company may be using state of the art information technology and yet managing its people on outdated principles of leadership psychology; stifling energy and creativity. In effect, wasting the human resource.

To create the leadership culture, where people feel understood , valued, respected and empowered, effectively meeting their lifestyle/workstyle needs involves creating a set of beliefs to support these behaviours. It means providing opportunities for people to under- stand the lifestyle value set of their colleagues and the skills to work respectfully with these differences.

Developing the manager's potential

Shay McConnon's arguments are not only correct, but - as I have insisted earlier - point to the fact that in these complex times we need to be sure that our managers are able to tap into the needs of the individual, understanding both the personal and professional needs. However, it is the chosen lifestyle that rules above all, so line managers in particular must gain the skills to understand how to engage their people by connecting with their overall life expectations. Only through doing that will we be able to build a strong engaged workforce. The difficulty, as has already been pointed out, is that many managers lack good people skills and under- standing the motivations of your team is going to be harder than ever as we go forward. Well, no one ever said it was going to be easy.

In Chapter 6, we'll take a look at the issues surrounding corporate communications and why, if you want to enthuse and gain respect from those employees with their lifestyle/workstyle equation at the forefront of their day-to-day life, it is set to take on a new importance.

Raising the Jolly Roger

Often the people who have the ˜keys' to knowledge in a business are unrecognised and certainly unrecorded. Every company has them. They are the people who cross the usual lines of corporate demarcation and they are the people who transfer ideas - along with the rumours - around a business (we, as managers, should not forget that the reason rumours get such instant credence in business is that they are always more exciting and more interesting than the truth!).

While their lifestyle/workstyle needs are somewhat out of whack with the rest of the employees they constitute a powerful, if minority group . But as you struggle to build an engagement culture you should be aware of these people. Used effectively they can stand you in good stead. So, instead of dismissing them out of hand, perhaps in this new-age world we should be paying more attention to what they are capable of doing - for good or bad.

Every company, every division, every department has their Roger, Ricky or Rita as we shall call them. They are the people to whom others naturally go when they need information. Around the organ- isation, the Rogers, Rickys and Ritas know other Rogers, Rickys and Ritas - together they create an informal, highly effective network through which knowledge is easily transferred and - unbeknown to many - a significant amount of organisational learning takes place.

And it can be a real force for productive work. ˜At one firm where I worked,' explains Swiss-based organisational consultant Patricia Seemann, ˜we created a Yellow Pages directory that listed all the Rogers, Rickys and Ritas. We went around the company and asked where people went to get questions answered - in other words the selection was done by acclamation. Imagine my phone calls the day the directory was published and all the bosses found that they weren't listed? The reason was that no-one felt comfortable asking division heads and the like, and felt their knowledge was inaccessible.'

The Rogers, Rickys and Ritas are people with sharply honed social skills - they move and are accepted everywhere. The downside, of course, is that their influence can be a huge negative if they are not handled correctly. If you want to change the firm you need to get their buy-in early on. Otherwise they know best (and people accept that they know best) and are perfectly positioned (no matter how far down the corporate hierarchy they may be) to block any change they consider to be any kind of threat.

Patricia Seemann adds, ˜If you lay-off any of the Rogers, a lot of the knowledge of the firm gets chopped off. The problem, of course, is how do you measure a Roger's work - it doesn't have tangible deliverables or expected output?'

Many managers regard Rogers as a menace (standing around the water cooler gossiping all day, which of course they also do). But, it may well be that it is on these informal networks (which have always existed and always will) that the people in our organisations may make sense of what is happening to them and help to meet the needs of their lifestyle/workstyle balance within the company.

If this is true, then these people have an ongoing critical role to pay and are indeed a critical resource in any business - especially in those where change is the constant.