EDITOR’S LETTER : Wanted: Great leaders

Jane McCann of Thought Partners consultants tells me she’s clocked CEOs completing 300 transactions before morning tea each day. We may be answering the emails and going to the meetings, but how are we shaping up as leaders? The statistics tell worrying story.
The first blow was the government-sponsored research Management Matters which told us our managers were consistently underperforming and were merely ‘middling’ (‘Oops – our slip is showing’ – July issue).
Then IBM’s latest global CEO study (page 41, this issue) shocked us again. It told us more CEOs in New Zealand and Australia than anywhere else in the world admit they aren’t ready to cope with the complexity of modern business.
When associate professor Roy Stager Jacques of Massey University’s management department told me he’s observed that much of Kiwi business culture has not yet realised the importance of the fact that people are not machines, (‘Caring CEOs of the future’, page 34) I thought it was time to re-evaluate leadership and what it means in the modern world.
So for the third part of our Top 200 campaign ‘Understanding the New World’, we’ve themed this issue on what it means to be great leader.
It’s become clear that there are some fundamental changes happening in workplaces that require new kind of leader and new kind of direction. Words like ‘caring’, ‘transparency’, ‘spirituality’ and ‘authenticity’, which would seldom have been heard in business decade ago, are common now I found as I researched how leadership is changing. And I discovered whole new area where CEOs can damage workplace morale and productivity – by overachieving, as Hay Group’s researchers found in ‘The curse of the overachiever’, page 38, reprinted from the Harvard Business Review.
If you’re leader in New Zealand today or if you aspire to be one, there’s lots in this issue to make you stop and think. I hope it helps you consider new ways of leading people into this new and challenging business environment as we prepare to take New Zealand to the next level.

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