Lets Talk Leadership

Krishna Kumar is a pioneer in the field of Leadership & Executive Coaching in Asia. A Master Coach and Trainer, he has coached Executives, Entrepreneurs and CEOs and works closely with some of the most renowned organisations in India and abroad. In a career spanning 30 years, Krishna Kumar has donned several hats as a a corporate executive, entrepreneur, independent director, management consultant, B-school faculty and Tennis coach.

He is the founder-director of (ISEC) Intrad School of Executive Coaching, which runs programs for certifying individuals as coaches.

The opening (and, as it turned out, recurring) topic for our conversation was “Being Aware – the Secret to Powerful Leadership”.

Krishna quoted the legendary tennis champion Billie-Jean King (39 Grand Slam titles, including 12 singles, 16 women’s double and 11 mixed doubles) as saying that self awareness is the secret of being a champion.

Connection between tennis and the corporate world. The sports field is like a laboratory, with lessons that can be learnt on the tennis court and transported into the corporate world.

He has long been inspired by the insights and work of Timothy Gallwey, especially in his modern classic The Inner Game of Work.

Many leaders come to their position without experience of serious failure. Even the greatest sports champions experience failure: they learn how to cope with wins and losses, as long as they have more wins than losses. In the corporate world many work not-to-fail rather than to succeed.

Importance of having awareness of the environment in which the business operates.

Challenges for young developers who become CEOs of fast-growing startups. Investors want rapid growth. Krishna’s advice – you as leader are always going to be the visionary and you need to be ok about handing over management to others.

CEO challenge with major change is to create and share a strong story of a bright future – a strategic story of success.

We talked also about:

Active in the coaching community, Krishna is the President of the International Association of Coaching (IAC) and a Member on the IAC’s global Board of Governors. A Board Certified Coach (BCC) by the Center For Credentialing and Education (CCE), USA, he is also a Founding Fellow of the Institute of Coaching Professional Association (ICPA), a Harvard Medical School affiliate.

Krishna is a USPTR certified tennis coaching professional and also the recipient of the USPTR India Coach of the Year award in 2011 and the USPTR President’s 2002 award for contribution to the field of tennis coaching. His passion for the game of tennis led to the establishment of Kinesis Sports, which is rated as India’s premier tennis academy. Kinesis, India’s first and only ISO 9001 – 2008 certifed tennis training institution is supported by a top-notch team of coaches who train around 300+ students every year.

Krishna Kumar is a visiting faculty at the prestigious Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, and his articles are regularly published in leading business magazines.

ISEC India website – ISEC India

Email: [email protected]

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Sharon Hunneybell is the Community Manager for Opmantek, a leading provider of Open Source Network Management and IT Audit software, and has been an active contributor to the Gold Coast startup community for several years.

She has a passion for technology, innovation and collaboration and a keen interest in promoting and increasing youth participation in startups and technology.

In Sharon’s 18 months as Community Leader at Opmantek, the user base has doubled to 100,000 organisations, which could include hundreds of individuals in organisations, with the user base in terms of people being more like 1 million. In around 130 countries, of which some 30% are in the USA. Strong in Latin America.

Startup Apprentice delivers award winning, action based entrepreneurial education programs that teach the ‘Silicon Valley’ lean approach to starting a business to high-school students.

Our experience based learning helps bridge the gap between book-smarts and street-smarts, with a fully immersive, hands-on, experienced based program where students actually launch a new business or social enterprise.

Startup Apprentice grew out of Gold Coast startup weekends, towards the end of 2013. Started with a pilot at Varsity College, Gold Coast, in June 2014. Have now involved some 600 high school students.

The leadership style they promote in the program is very collaborative. The students embrace that really well: accountability plus working better and faster together.

Two different roles. Leader of a startup needs very different skillset from someone leading an established business. Great metaphor of “safari leader” vs bus driver or train driver. Founder-developers need to decide early on whether they really want to become “bus drivers”.

Basic principles of good business will always be the same – still need common sense and good ethics. Business now more social.

Sharon is well known, well liked and highly respected in the local tech and startup community as the co-founder of Startup Apprentice.

At the 2014 Westpac Bank’s Community Leaders Awards, Sharon was one of three finalists in the Start-up Leader category. She was also named by the Queensland Government as an ‘Innovation Champion’ under the Innovation and Science Champions program.

Sharon at Opmantek: http://opmantek.com and click on the Contact us tab

You can subscribe to the Let’s Talk Leadership podcast show via iTunes, Android, Stitcher, RSS, or via email.

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Dr Steve Barlow is a change fitness and change readiness specialist, trainer and change management consultant and has a fascinating career history.

Steve began his career as a teacher of French and English and later ran a high school English department and managed the senior grades. He has managed charter boats on Sydney Harbour, which included running a cruising restaurant and bar and managing cruises. He later served as publicity officer for public schools in the state of New South Wales, Australia.

Working with inmates in maximum security in New South Wales correctional facilities gave Steve insights about change that were to feed into his PhD work and later career and business.

Many prison inmates came to programs with no great deal of hope. Some proved able to make good use of change. What made the difference was not the programs themselves so much as what was going onside the individual prisoners’ heads.

If a change is really difficult it can push us to the limits of our change fitness – just as with physical fitness.

Just because someone has change fitness doesn’t necessarily mean they are ready for change.

Organizations capable of dealing with change have these four characteristics:

Dr Achilles Arminakis identified five factors for what people need to agree and believe to get on board with organizational change. People need to:

We talked about one area which calls on capabilities for change – mergers and acquisitions.

A tendency of managers to focus on areas they can control – for example legal, contractual, financial issues. Other areas, about people, are more challenging and management is often unaware and/or don’t want to know about these aspects. It’s difficult to have that conversation with leadership.

Steve’s company, The Change Gym, works with coaches so they can help leaders in industry. They have programs and tools specifically focused on change readiness and change fitness. Most of their work is done online, with people all around the globe,

The change fit person has the capacity to be their own primary agent of change in their own life.

It’s a complex world and leaders live with this – leaders need to be more like explorers than experts.

Steve has run anger management and conflict resolution groups for maximum security inmates in the New South Wales correctional system and insights he gained there were to inform his PhD research and later career.

He has authored or co-authored four books on the importance of change readiness for organizational change, one of which is now a text for three Masters degree programs at the University of Tasmania.

Steve’s company, The Change Gym, works in the field of organization change and specializes in the psychology of change.

You can find out more about The Change Gym and its services at the website at this link.

Steve’s LinkedIn profile. Email address is provided at the end of the podcast.

You can subscribe to the Let’s Talk Leadership podcast show via iTunes, Android, Stitcher, RSS, or via email.

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The big news of the week for this Let’s Talk Leadership (for the Digital Age) podcast show has been the announcement that the pre-eminent online professional network LinkedIn is to be acquired by the IT heavyweight Microsoft.

Pundits from various fields of interest were quick to hit the social web with their opinions and prognostications about the deal and its potential effects.

Or you can subscribe via Stitcher Radio or via email

Did Microsoft overpay for LinkedIn? by Jennifer Booton

The LinkedIn Curmudgeon on the Big Merger by Andy Brandt

As the deal still has to run the gamut of regulatory authorities in a few regimes, the acquisition process still has some months to run.

I don’t see any material difference in the immediate future for current LinkedIn users.

But it’s fair to say that, with 434 million plus professionals now users of LinkedIn, this announcement is highly significant for business leaders everywhere.

The Emperor is Not Very Well Clothed, in LinkedIn Terms

I was a tad surprised, on reading the announcement and noting the enthusiasm of Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO, to find that his LinkedIn profile was sparse indeed. It didn’t meet even the pretty basic criteria for what LinkedIn calls a “100% complete” profile. I tweeted about it and a colleague pointed me to Bill Gates’ profile. Similar situation.

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Then I thought about a lot of other business leaders’ LinkedIn profiles I’ve seen that have been quite underwhelming.

To me that is at best a branding opportunity lost. So I thought now was as good a time as any to run through just what is needed, not only to have a basic “100% complete” profile but an optimized one.

On a precautionary note, it’s also probably as good a time as any for each of us to export our Connections from LinkedIn to our own location of choice – desktop, laptop, cloud…, and do an updated export from time to time.

The Microsoft + LinkedIn announcement has brought out, in social and mainstream media, a lot of very negative comments about LinkedIn. Sure, some people find it useless, annoying or boring, or all of those and more, but I find that generally they are not people who have made a serious attempt to understand how the platform works  and spend time using the positive features and building business relationships. It pays not to get distracted by the trolls.

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You can subscribe to the Let’s Talk Leadership podcast show via iTunes, Android, Stitcher, RSS, or via email.

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Padraig O’Sullivan is Managing Partner of OSullivanField, a leadership advisory firm that “specialises in accelerating leaders to be effective in their roles and sometimes even brilliant”.

Padraig is a thought leader, leading international business consulting coach and University educator, with over fifteen years’ leadership and coaching experience encompassing Australia, Asia, Europe and the Middle East. Insight publishing called him “one of Asia’s top leadership experts”.

Our conversation opened with the news that Padraig’s firm OSullivanField, is soon to merge with the prestigious US based The Leadership Circle, where Padraig will be Global Head of Coaching.

Expectations of leaders today are too high. We seem to focus on their flaws more than ever before. The 24 hour news cycle now enables closer, more constant scrutiny.

For leadership there is no “one size fits all”.

Some leaders Padraig admires may not be as well known to the general public as Sir Richard Branson and others but demonstrate great leadership qualities.

He mentioned, as exemplifying key qualities of leadership:

Andrew Bassat, Co-Founder and CEO of the phenomenally successful company SEEK Limited.

Michael Ilczynksy, Managing Director Seek Employment, responsible for the company’s online employment business in Australia and New Zealand.

In the government sphere, Daniel Hunter, CEO of the New South Wales state government agency HealthShare, with some 6,000 employees not counting hospital staff.

And one more widely known, the musician and international figure, Bono from U2.

We talked about the monologue leaders have with themselves, when an idea or an issue can’t easily be discussed with others, for example when it is still a “thought bubble” or is a sensitive issue the leader has to try and figure out before it can be shared. Especially as business becomes more complex.

Leaders need input from someone else who does not have an agenda, other than to support the leader in coming to good decisions. There is a series of conversations leaders need to have to help them “get out of their own way”.

We talked about some amazing statistics mentioned in something Padraig had written about expat leaders, as follows:

The typical assignment is for 3 years, the failure rate has been calculated as being somewhere between 25% and 50% and the cost of a failed appointment can be as high as 40 times the base salary of a senior exec on a base salary of $250,000 or more (i.e. minimum $10 million).

Anyone considering appointment to an expat leadership role, or responsible for placing others, should listen to this bit (begins at the 16 minute mark). As well as the impact on the company and the individual when an expat appointment does not work out, there is apparently a high social cost, especially in marriage failures.

Padraig’s firm has developed a program to address these issues and has been able to reduce the failure rate from the “norm” of 25-50% down to 5%.

At an individual level, Padraig works with senior executives with typical assignments include supporting them in transition; usually from functional management to company leadership; leadership effectiveness and in stretch roles.

His work with Executive teams includes newly formed or reformatted teams to guide them from current status to high performance and to develop or change their organisational cultures.

He is an Honorary Fellow of the Sydney Business School (UOW) where he teaches on the Masters of Business Coaching degree, specialising in Innovation and Business Change and Leading teams and groups towards high performance.

Padraig has been published in a range of academic journals and is the published co-author of “Leadership: Helping Others to Succeed” and author of Foreigner in Charge: Success Strategies for Expat leaders in Australia and Foreigner in Charge: Success Strategies for Expat leaders in Singapore, which show expat executives what to really expect beyond the first 90 days.

You can get in touch with Padraig via the OSullivanField website at this link. Just click on the Contact Us tab in the top navigation bar. (Although as mentioned OSullivanField is merging soon with The Leadership Circle, I am assured the current website and links will be staying in place for some time.)

You can subscribe to the Let’s Talk Leadership podcast show via iTunes, Android, Stitcher, RSS, or via email.

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