Articles

October 2024 – Question Of The Month

October 30, 2024 - By Wendy Lambourne, Director, MA Industrial and Organisation Psychology, Registered Psychologist with SA Medical & Dental Council

Question: How do leaders raise human excellence, according to Legitimate Leadership?

Answer:Leaders, unlike managers, focus not on the achievement of results but on enabling excellence in their people. They do so because they know that sustainable organisational excellence is not possible with mediocre people.
One way to enable excellence in people is to deliberately and consistently raise the bar. No one ever made it to the Olympics by jumping repeatedly, no matter how often, over a height of 1.50m or even 1.80m. Olympic high jumpers need a coach who continually raises the bar – in the case of the high jump, literally.

Similarly, leaders enable their people to be the best that they can be by continually reimagining and then implementing higher standards of behaviour and performance.

For example, an operations director achieved significant improvements in the Total Reportable Injury Rate (from 1.9 down to 0.35), a 40% productivity increase, and an 80% decrease in customer complaints, over a three-year period through the imposition of increasingly exacting safety, quality and efficiency standards.

When it comes to standards there is no truer adage than ‘the standard you expect, you demonstrate and the standard you walk past, is the standard you get’.

Simply put, if you expect only the best from people then, more often than not, the best is what you get. Conversely, when managers set the bar low their people live down to their lesser expectations. They hop over the bar with ease, they are not stretched and they don’t grow.

In addition to challenging their people to be the very best that they can be, exemplary leaders act as role models of the standards they demand from people. They set the example in terms of both the behaviour and performance they want others to emulate; to match and even surpass.

They also insist that the standards they set are adhered to. Leaders do this by holding their people accountable against the standard. They ensure that there are positive consequences for those who meet and exceed the standard and sanctions for those who wilfully choose not to meet them.

Human excellence in any context – at home, in the classroom, at work and in society – does not happen by chance. It is only when those in authority call for, demonstrate and insist on human excellence, that they get it.

Wendy Lambourne
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