Leadership: a privilege, not a right

Aged care managers need to view leadership as a privilege and not a right, says a well known management consultant.

The director of the  Proteus Group, Richard Dore told the Aged Care Association Australia (ACAA) Congress in Adelaide that the command and control approach to leadership is now antiquated.

Mr Dore said that instead of demanding respect from their staff, leaders need to ask themselves: “Why should anyone want to be led by me?”

According to the self-confessed “leadership geek”, good leaders reward staff who perform well.

He said that on average, 80 per cent of staff members are positive while the remaining 20 per cent are incredibly negative.

“If I said to all of my positive staff, ‘Can you stay back for five minutes to help me set up the training room for tomorrow?’ they would say yes and when they do it, there would be a positive attitude.

“But if you ask a negative person, they will say, ‘It’s not my job’, or they will roll their eyes. In the end, you end up saying, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll do it anyway’.

“So you end up setting two sets of rules – you reward the negative people and punish the positive people. People only do what they do because we let them.”

Mr Dore said aged care leaders need to set a good example by modeling a positive culture in their work places.

“A great culture occurs when behaviour matches rhetoric,” he said. “Workplace culture really comes down to the unwritten rules of an organisation or the accepted workplace norms.

“You need to start by being aware of the way you do things and then, by demonstrating how you expect things to be done.”