Macquarie Institute Australia - Article Library

Article: It's All Rumble In The Corporate Jungle

Australian Financial Review, July 23, 2002
BYLINE: Helen Trinca

Corporate bullying, or just pressure to win at any price? Call it what you will, but Australian executives, by their own admission, struggle with the mismatch between the demand to exhibit good values and the realities of workplaces where the performance ethic is the only one that counts.

As one told researchers from Monash University: "We are in the decades of deceit where deception from high level has become an art form." Another described senior management as "rapists of the company".

These quotes are from research carried out early last year but released for the first time today in the second stage of the Australian Business Leadership Survey, http://www.aim.com.au/news_ablsf2.htm one of the biggest carried out here since the mid-1990s work for the Karpin report into leadership and management skills. In the current climate of what US Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan calls "infectious greed", the comments have lost none of their potency.

The survey, carried out jointly by the Australian Institute of Management and Monash, gives a snapshot of the issues playing on the minds of our senior business people. Some 524 of them, in fact. They were among almost 2,000 executives polled by researchers but who also provided written comments.

Results of the quantitative research were released last year but the Monash team has now analysed the qualitative material.

What emerges from the exercise, says Carolyn Barker, CEO of the AIM in Queensland and the Northern Territory and a co-ordinator of the survey, is a sense that Australian managers are "growing up" and have a new confidence in talking about the way they do their job.

In Karpin, our managers stacked up badly against international competitors when it came to focusing on the so-called soft skills the ones to do with people. But, says Barker, the fact that they now talk "so openly, so eloquently, so passionately, in some cases, about their people, is a really good sign".

James Sarros, who heads the project, says the survey which will include a third phase based on a follow-up questionnaire shows Australian business leaders are now adept at distinguishing between management and leadership skills, and the need to apply them differently in different parts of their work.

"Managers have also recognised very clearly that they have to develop interpersonal skills," Sarros says.

"The most important thing managers see, after the fact that they have to work hard, is the need to communicate clearly and unambiguously."

Both Sarros and Barker are wary of making too much of the "corporate bullying" atmosphere in corporate Australia, although it is a phrase used in the report, arguing that it is just part of the picture. But they concede that there is certainly a feeling that "performance is everything" in the modern workplace.

"There is the most extreme pressure to perform, and this is connected to bonuses," says Barker.

Another outcome of that pressure is an executive class strongly focused on professional development. Education is seen as crucial to getting ahead in your career, and the report reflects that pressure when it quotes American guru Gary Hamel: "Are we learning as fast as the world is changing?"

"Today's Australian leaders are expected to stretch and grow, to learn and unlearn for themselves," the report says.

"At the same time, managers are seeking support from those above and below them in the chain of command."

If there is, at times, a sense of panic among executives about the need to keep up with education, there is a similar urgency about being nimble when it comes to strategic leadership.

According to one male executive working in the mining industry, the old adage of "If it ain't fixed, don't break it" has disappeared, to be replaced by a new leadership attitude of "If it ain't broken, break it."

The pressure to change just to prove that you are a real leader is perhaps more revealing about what really goes on in our workplaces than what executives say about the strategic capabilities that are required.

There are no surprises here: strategy requires you to be flexible, agile, innovative. You also have to take other employees with you and to see strategy as an ongoing process, not something you do in a crisis.

When it comes to communication, the report sets the bar high: "As dealers of hope, leaders must be superb communicators inside and outside the organisation.

"Good communication skills are seen as the ability to produce, in the words of management philosopher Charles Handy, 'the 'e' factors within people energy, enthusiasm, excitement, excellence and endurance'."

But perhaps here, too, there's no rocket science. As one male executive in a big consulting company says: "Leading by example is just as important as it has ever been. Recognition, encouragement and reward are the greatest motivators. Talk the walk, walk the talk and do what you promise."

Which brings us back to the topic du jour and the rather poor examples set by certain CEOs as they walk out the door of imploding companies with hefty options, still talking the talk.

Sarros sees some cause for hope in the way respondents volunteered comments about the struggle to resolve ethical dilemmas and disseminate good values, saying Australian managers are much more aware than they were a decade ago about their social social responsibilities.

Corporate greed is wearing thin with the community, he says. Or, as the report puts it: "The longing for good leadership is essentially the longing for leadership with integrity."