Book Excerpt

Chapter 8 from THE TALENT WAR: Developing a Good ~ Boss Culture

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There is a shortage of effective leadership in all areas of our society and yet many people fail to truly understand the drivers of leadership and ‘Good Boss’ cultures.  In the meantime, billions of dollars are being invested in leadership training every year with not enough regard to how effective it is.

Peiyuan Yuen is a China-based Phd (Public Policy and Manufacturing) candidate who is an expert on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and also holds a Bachelor of Environmental Engineering from Tsinghua University Beijing.  He has some extremely interesting comments to make with regard to emerging leadership trends in China.

“In general, I think Chinese managers and business leaders are becoming better and better, and although they do not totally equate with the economic development, they are learning by doing.”

Leadership Affects Everything

•    Leadership behavior creates the culture or climate that employees work in every day;
•    Employee attitudes are affected by their perception of the culture…or how they feel about coming to work each day;
•    Talented employees won’t stay in what they perceive to be a negative culture;
•    Talented prospective employees won’t choose to join an organisation unless it has a reputation of being a great place to work;
•    Improving workforce performance is not possible without talented employees.

How employees feel about coming to work (their attitude), is primarily influenced by the climate or culture in which they work.  Many managers don’t understand that it is their behaviour that creates that climate—and that climate, or culture, has a direct impact on business results. Bottom-line results.

Rob LeBouw’s work and research refers to the need for shared values which are the key to building a sustainable profitable company or organization. He states there are eight key values, which are:

1.    Truthfulness shared without compromise;

2.    Trust lavished on everyone;

3.    Mentoring shared unselfishly in all directions;

4.    Openness to new ideas regardless of origin—not on individual status;

5.    Risk taking for the organisation’s sake;

6.    Giving credit where due, helping define and raise standards in all areas;

7.    Honesty and ethics in all matters;

8.    Selflessness—putting others first as an intrinsic responsibility.
There is no question about the importance of effective leadership, but with so much being invested in leadership training, why have we not seen the appropriate change in behavior and culture?

I believe there are two primary reasons:

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