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Leadership is the capacity to unleash the energy and potential of people to achieve individual and business goals through sustainable change while demonstrating value and respect for employees, customers and investors

Why are Leadership and Culture Critical?

1. Organisational Performance is Driven Through Leadership

Leaders create the environment and context for people to fulfill the organisation’s mission and goals. It impacts culture, employee engagement, and ultimately, organisational performance.

2. The War for Talent

Numerous surveys and data now confirm that attracting and retaining talented people is the number one business challenge, which is being heightened by a growing skills shortage. The quality of leadership and the culture created are key in determining an employee’s experience at work, effort expended and ultimately, their decision to remain or leave.

3. Corporate Culture is Your Business

A strong organisational culture is associated with strong leadership and organisational performance. Culture is not something separate to business - rather, every action, decision, conversation and dollar spent is symptomatic and reinforcing of the current culture.

For too long, many academics and commentators have described leadership in narrow terms around the achievement of results. Leadership is indeed about results - however, it is also about people, energy and sustainability.

People will only deliver results for so long before energy and engagement diminish, or they place more emphasis on external rewards such as remuneration, or worse still, they look for another place to work.  People are increasingly looking for purposeful work and one that provides meaning and nourishment.

The link between leadership, culture and high performance organisations

Corporate culture, like personal character, is an amorphous quality that exerts a powerful influence. It is the hidden force that shapes behaviour -it's like gravity, you can't see it, but you can feel its pull.

Every company has a culture that drives the way its employees behave. When a new person joins an organisation they will adapt to the prevailing corporate culture in order to assimilate with their fellow workers, or alternatively, the 'corporate immune system' - as it has been called - will reject the 'foreign body' failing to comply.

If the culture is poor, rather than bringing a breath of fresh air to the business, they will merely adopt the bad practices. Research suggests that corporate cultures, and not just the strong ones, influence employees' leadership styles more than any other aspect of their jobs.

The unexpected potency of culture can be both a blessing and a curse for organizations as they ponder strategic and human resource issues.

Increasingly, in order to become a high performance organisation, leaders need to focus on being:

• The Provider of Choice
• The Employer of Choice
• The Investment of Choice