Guest Bio

Robert Newman Robert Newman is an organisational psychologist, executive coach, director and managing partner with Change Focus Group, an advisory and consultancy firm providing organisational psychology services. Robert specialises in board, director and executive dynamics, leadership coaching and change management. A key element of Rob’s work is predicting peoples motives and future actions in corporate settings, using principles from leadership psychology and behavioral economics to influence their decisions, and coaching leaders to apply this for themselves. 

SHOW NOTES In this episode Robert Newman explores the two key trends emerging amongst directors in boardrooms. Directors are getting a clear message that they are going to be held responsible for the performance and behaviour within their organization. There's been historically an expectation that directors were there to support and advise a management team who took responsibility for the organization. But royal commissions of recent years and governance failures of recent years have pointed out very clearly that directors hold a significant amount of liability when it comes to poor behaviour and poor performance by organizations.So directors are being shocked by that, equally, but that's also leading directors to recognize that the community expects them not just to be responsible for ensuring and maximizing profits, and ensuring return for shareholders, which a number of directors thought was their primary role, represent shareholders. But the community doesn't expect just that anymore. They expect the board to represent the long-term interests of the organization, and especially its responsibilities and interactions with the wider community. And so boards are recognizing that their responsibilities are out to a wider stakeholder group than perhaps many of them thought. And many moving and stepping up to that mark. So I think that's important.I think those two dynamics are supported by a third dynamic, so what the hell can these directors do about these responsibilities? They can't lead the organization, manage the organization, that's what they hire the C-suite for. So they recognizing as a collective, that at times, even though we're the smartest people, we hire smart people and capable people, which most of them are, we have good intent, we still make bad calls. So boards are now looking at themselves in the way they make decisions and are aware that they haven't always as an industry, boards and directors haven't always done that job well. So they're wanting to open up that black box of, how do we produce the decisions we have? And how do we ensure that they're the right ones that the community and the rest of the world would expect of us?

Transcript Renee Holder: So, Rob, some of our listeners are coaches with an organizational psychology qualification, but many of them do not. So for those who are curious to understand the connection, could you talk to the application of organizational coaching in the executive coaching work you undertake.Robert Newman: So organizational psychology, everyone would have heard of the term psychology, organizational psychology is the application of that in corporate setting. But let's go right back to what a psychologist does, because all organizational psychologist (org psych) started with a base of psychology training. A psychologist looks at the individual's values, personality, motives, drivers, talents, skills, hopes, fears, intellect, and how all those attributes come together to affect behaviour, and whether the behaviour is effective or inef