Burn Out or Lift Off by Dr Patricia Weslake-Evans

Author:Dr Patricia Weslake-Evans
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Self Publishing Partnership

Fig.5 People Must Come First

A Winning Leadership Approach has several key characteristics:

1) Senior team reflection

2) People First

3) Balance

i. Targets and organisational culture

ii. Operational and strategic thinking

iii. Planning and reviewing

iv. Authority and empowerment

4) A strategy for leadership

Let’s take each of these in turn:

1) Reflection

Do busy leaders know how to reflect? My experience suggests they are too driven by task and process to allow time for reflection. If they have not experienced reflection as individuals, how can they possibly reflect as a team? Is it just a matter of re-aligning priorities to make more time to reflect and is the time then wisely used? Reflective awareness and subsequent use relies on a creative lead – someone who can raise salient points and facilitate productive debate amongst the senior team.

What areas do you reflect upon and do you include consideration of people, putting people first? What is the quality of your reflection and how can you improve?

2) People First

I was asked to work with a start-up organisation which had spent over 3 years reorganising its policies, structures, systems, processes and procedures. After this time, it finally decided to consider its people but the harm done by not putting people first was extensive, resulting in many costly disciplinaries, high staff turnover and an unhappy, disenfranchised workforce. It is so important to take the workforce with you, to address their ambitions and qualms and to develop through this a credible leadership. Whilst aiming to develop leaders ad-hoc, this organisation had no strategy for leadership.

3) The Balance Between Targets and Organisational Culture

The highest performance is gained when leaders ‘keep a finger on the pulse’. They touch base (not in minute detail but having an overview of key indicators both behavioural and task-driven), keeping an eye on people and targets but putting people and their behaviour first. Targets are achieved through people loyalty ( Chapter 4 ) which is built through A Winning Leadership Approach. People are trusted, motivated, supported, engaged and targets are reached as a result.

I once encountered an organisation which gave over 36 objectives to individuals as part of their appraisal system. The thinking was that performance management was linked to the detailed job description but the stress on the individual was unbelievable! No consideration was given to the behaviours required in order to achieve quality outputs, or to timely priorities.

It is important to balance prioritised tasks with the behaviours of people which in themselves should mirror the beliefs and values of an organisation. I have often been in organisations which have their values advertised in reception areas, in training rooms and on office walls, in glossy documentation and on websites but the culture demonstrated has been very different. It is people’s understanding of values and their aligned behaviour which result in the culture of an organisation. I describe this as the ‘feel’ of the organisation. How can the desired culture be achieved? It depends very much on the activity of leadership – its consistency, role modelling and the balance with management processes to keep values and behaviours alive.

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