The need for a common understanding of leadership styles, strengths and challenges is driving the development of a national leadership standard.
A project at the UTS Business School is set to deliver an Australian Leadership Capabilities Standard against which organisations will be able to assess the style of their leaders and leadership models.
The standard, which is the focus of a collaboration between the UTS Business School, the Centre for Workplace Leadership at the University of Melbourne and NOOS Consulting, will be based on the results of a leadership questionnaire that is open to the broader Australian business community.
Director of the UTS Centre for Management and Organisation Studies and project lead, Professor Emmanuel Josserand, says the goal of a national standard is to provide consistency for companies seeking to understand how their leadership approach impacts their business outcomes.
It’s really the idea of having a common tool – hundreds of companies offer different tools, and so there’s no point of comparison.
It will contribute to the development of high performing workplaces, so places where leadership is really in place with the right capabilities for a specific strategy.
This is one of the big gaps in Australia’s performance – the fact that leadership isn’t necessarily at the level where it should be, or at least is not matching the need for specific industries or specific organisations.
— Professor Emmanuel Josserand, Centre for Management and Organisation Studies
Professor Emmanuel Josserand
The standard will be based on nine capabilities that are crucial to business success: professional acumen, goal orientation, judgement, managing change, navigating complexity, focusing on the future, building collaboration and synergies, interpreting and influencing, and developing and empowering.
A pilot version of the leadership questionnaire that will underpin the standard recently attracted 600 responses from individuals seeking to self-assess their leadership capabilities. A 360-degree version, which will enable participants to seek feedback from their peers, bosses and employees, is currently being developed. It will be made available to organisations across Australia through the publicly accessible Leadershift platform.
“We want to make the survey as broadly accessible as we can, to start providing benchmarks to organisations so that they can compare themselves to other organisations in the same industry or of the same size,” says Josserand.
Participants who fill out the leadership questionnaire will receive feedback on their leadership style, strengths and weaknesses, as well as insights into how their performance compares with similar organisations in their sector.
“With a national standard, we can start constructing benchmarks that can be used across the board by different individuals and companies. The other aspect is to provide access to a tool that will help organisations and individuals in Australia better understand the type of leaders they have,” Josserand says.
So there’s a diagnostic aspect to it – do we have good leaders, and how do we want to develop our leadership in this country?
— Professor Emmanuel Josserand
Research team
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Professor of Management and Organisation Studies, Management Discipline Group
Funded by
- Centre for Workplace Leadership, University of Melbourne
Partners
- Centre for Workplace Leadership, University of Melbourne
- NOOS Consulting
