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September 2019
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Do subcontractors or temporary employees give or take more than permanent employees?
In an underground mining operation, a section engineering manager with underground managers reporting to him, made a few Legitimate Leadership changes which resulted in machine availability rates rising by 9% in a few months …
I have been an executive coach since 2007. I have loved working with people in this way – it is a privilege to hold up a clear, mostly-untainted mirror …
Dr Zein shares a number of insights which are supported by our experience at Legitimate Leadership. When we work with leaders from varied industries …
Question of the Month
By Wendy Lambourne
Question: Do subcontractors or temporary employees give or take more than permanent employees?
Answer: There is a view that temporary employment arrangements are a wholesale “take” by employers because they allow employers to get the job done on the cheap. They also allow them to dispense with excess or troublesome people at will, because the labour broker does the “dirty work”.
Such behaviour, it is said, is the antipathy of caring for people at work. Temporary employment arrangements allow those in authority to exercise power over people without paying the price of power – which is to care for and grow people.
Clearly, keeping people on temporary contracts without the benefits which full time employees enjoy when they are actually doing the job for a considerable period of time is not right. But to ban flexible work arrangements is not appropriate. Firstly, such a move flies in the face of reality. There are industries, like Legitimate Leadership’s (the consulting industry), where the work is seasonal or unpredictable. Secondly not everyone wants a full-time job – many people like the autonomy, the flexibility, the option to work less than X days a month.
But more importantly, I think that the antagonism over other-than-full-time employment arrangements is a red herring…
VIGNETTE CASE STUDY: ADDRESSING AN UNDERGROUND FAILURE TO COMMUNICATE
By Stefaan van den Heever, associate, Legitimate Leadership.
In an underground mining operation, a section engineering manager with underground managers reporting to him, made a few Legitimate Leadership changes which resulted in machine availability rates rising by 9% in a few months.
The problem was that there was no communication at shift hand-over between underground managers about machine breakages, problems, etc. Managers would routinely go home from their shifts without having communicated at all to the next shift. Because they were underground where there was no signal, they could not even communicate by radio.
In other words, there were silos between different shifts.
This resulted in shift information being lost and, more importantly, in machine breakages being carried over from one shift to the next. It often took a long time for an engineer to diagnose the reason for a machine fault, but then this information was not handed over at the end of the shift. This often resulted in machines standing unrepaired for days.
READ THE FULL CASE STUDY BY CLICKING HERE
ARTICLE: COACHING AND THE LEGITIMATE LEADERSHIP FRAMEWORK
By Stefaan van den Heever, associate, Legitimate Leadership.
I have been an executive coach since 2007. I have loved working with people in this way – it is a privilege to hold up a clear, mostly-untainted mirror for someone to come to terms with places/areas where there are gaps or incoherence in authenticity.
However, in the past few years I have realised that coaching can have only a limited impact if the system and culture of an organization, for instance, is not conducive to a coaching or learning way of leading.
During coaching, the client can gain great insights and can then go and implement new behaviours based on those insights. But then something can happen – almost as if the new frame of reference “collides” with what is going on within the organization (and often an organization has an inspirational mission statement and values but they are only words).
An example: I was part of an intervention at a manufacturing plant. We were there to teach people to lead in a coaching way – to get people to engage with each other in a “learning” way where listening and asking questions were key competencies. The training was successful and most people connected to this new way of engaging.
Unfortunately, when the pressure was on, most people also reverted back to their old style of “control and command”.
VIDEO: BAD BOSSES ARE INEVITABLE … RIGHT?
By Dr Axel Zein, CEO of WSCAD, which delivers CAD software for electrical engineering. In three years he turned the company around, grew revenues 57% and achieved number two status in Central Europe. He had previously achieved similar growth in another German CAD software company.
COMMENT BY IAN MUNRO, LEGITIMATE LEADERSHIP, ON THIS VIDEO EXCERPT: Dr Zein shares a number of insights which are supported by our experience at Legitimate Leadership. When we work with leaders from varied industries and organisations around the world we frequently hear stories from people who have had the most horrendous ‘bad boss’ experiences. Many of these individuals cite their ‘bad boss’ as the reason for finding a new job. But, as Dr Zein points out, it doesn’t need to be that way.
No one is born a ‘bad boss’. Bad bosses are created when organisations simultaneously neglect to prepare new managers adequately for their leadership roles, and reward success and punish failure in ways that encourage control rather than empowerment. As long as we see our leadership roles as being here to deliver predictable results, the risk-taking and innovation referred to in Dr Zein’s excerpt will continue to elude us.
Fortunately, as much as people leave bad bosses, they also stay for good ones. As often as we hear horrendous ‘bad boss’ stories, we also hear amazing ‘great boss’ ones. The difference: understanding that true leaders are here for their teams, and that making sure that leaders have the education and training they need to succeed is just as important as making sure that engineers are fully qualified in their engineering fields.
OUR EDITED EXCERPT FROM THIS VIDEO: Three things in life are certain: death, taxes and a bad boss. As human beings we spend 40-50 years of our lives at work. It’s almost certain that during this time we’ll encounter a bad boss.
An American study found that 60% of American workers were not engaged in their jobs. Why? The main reason was not low pay, insufficient vacations, or a poor work place. The main reason was because of a bad boss.
So why do we have so many employees unsatisfied with their bosses?
Two reasons: firstly, the day you become a manager your job changes totally; secondly, we are simply not educated to become managers.
READ THE FULL SUMMARY OF THIS VIDEO BY CLICKING HERE
