Building Leadership Management Strength – Southern Cross
By Vicky Jayne, Editor, Management Magazine
How do you keep members of your management team engaged, motivated and participating at their full capacity? As CEO of Southern Cross Travel Insurance, Craig Morrison believes his leadership style is very much about creating an environment in which everyone can give their best.
“An organisation’s strength is the strength of its management team. You can have the best product or service in the world but if the management team is dysfunctional, you won’t get the job done and sooner or later, you’ll damage organisational performance and erode brand equity.
“But with a great management team, you can sort out the worst mess-ups. Historically I’ve had those sort of jobs and my first move is get a good management team sorted, then tackle the problem.”
Leadership management development through coaching
Hiring good people is an obvious first step – but the trick then is melding those people into a strong, focused and coherent team.
And that requires work. When Morrison was promoted to a COO role, the problem of both retaining good staff in a competitive labour market and of developing stronger team leadership became priorities.
He decided to run a team coaching programme.
“It’s a good method of providing the glue that keeps everyone together and working on common issues even when they’re in different functional areas. It’s also one way of sending a signal that we care enough about our staff to invest in their development.”
But he warns that not all coaching programmes are created equal. “Coaching per se is not the answer – but finding the right coach is. There has to be a good fit – a sense of mutual respect…or you end up wasting the coach’s time, the employee’s time and the company’s money.”
Having previously had a negative experience of personal coaching, he explored a few options before settling on Stepshift later using the same company for some personal leadership development. One of the most valuable aspects for him was the process of identifying gaps between where he wanted to be – and where he actually was in terms of leadership abilities.
“There were things in there that I found surprising – some I didn’t like – but it was incredibly valuable because it gave levels of feedback that provided all the ammunition or data evidence needed to embark on a coaching programme”
Regular sessions proved a good way for both him and his team to “get their heads out of the swamp” of day-to-day management.
“We’re doing the classic fire-fighting management stuff all the time. This helps us plan ahead – to make time for the important things.
“Qualitatively, it provides a way to get us constantly improving and it gets people on board in a different, more embedded way.”
In Morrison’s management team, there is no room for passengers.
“In addition to being experts in their functional areas, team leaders are also expected to be fully participating “cabinet ministers”. Even if the discussion is about breast cancer and your role is running the call centre, you can’t just show up and shut up – you have to have an opinion about it. There are no silent people on my management team and the coaching facilitates that.”
Return on investment
Coming from a financial background, Morrison is interested in measuring return on investment and for him the benefits of the coaching programme easily outweigh the costs.
Losing a manager in whom he hasn’t invested is just part of it.
“The recruiting cost alone is measured in thousands before you look at the intellectual property loss. My view is that the loss of a single manager would pay for an entire year of coaching for the entire team. So it’s pretty simple maths to me though I think those issues are often overlooked.”
A benefit of having high calibre people on his team means the coaching time is not spent dealing with fundamental behaviour issues. These are already passionate, committed people, says Morrison.
“What we’re trying to do is move these teams to the next level in a fundamental sort of way – to move into levels of performance that I’ve never experienced before. That, to me, is the essence of the value we’re getting.”
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