SPEAKER 0

For this video, we're going to be talking about leadership. So as I alluded to

within the previous video, the four kind of sub-processes, as the textbook defines
them, that we're gonna be looking at for leadership is essentially the ability of a
leader to set direction, leverage resources, their suitability and performance.
Now, I'm kind of flipping that around. So I'm gonna spend the first part of this
video talking firstly about, well, what is it? That makes a leader, and that's
gonna encompass elements around suitability and performance as well. Then I'm gonna
talk about, you know, this idea of more leadership in action, so the actual doing
part, which is around setting direction and leveraging resources. These are linked,
um, so, you know, the narrative will kind of blend a little bit, um, but I think
it's really important for us to spend a bit of time at the start talking about
leadership. Now, as I've alluded to in the Moodle videos, I'm kind of, Beginning to
take a bit of a departure from the text in this, um, I, for a number of reasons
don't agree with how part of this narrative is being shaped, um, with some of the
subprocesses and some of the supposed metrics to look at this, um, particularly
with regards to suitability, there's a few things in there that I'm like, this
seems a little bit, Beyond what, uh, long story short, I just don't think it's um
appropriate, um, with how some of this is written. It's been a bit of a theme
throughout the textbook I've noticed some things like that. Um, obviously still
super valuable and we're using it as a framing device, but this week I'm kind of
just, yeah, providing a bit more of a more nuanced perspective on some of these
things. Anyway, that's neither here nor there. If you really wanted to know more,
you can reach out and we can chat about it. So, let's start with by getting you to
think about what is it that makes a leader. So, I want you to take a moment to
think, OK, when you hear the word leader, what do you think of? Now, I'm gonna
preemptively probably guess what a lot of you are thinking. And it could be things
like, you know, you hear leader, you think maybe leader of a country. So maybe like
a president or a prime minister, um, or maybe the leader in terms of a sports team.
Um, often, you know, we use the word leader and the words like boss maybe, a little
bit interchangeably. Um, but I want to have a think about, well, what does, you
know, leader, or importantly, leadership, which is essentially just the phenomena
or the, Action of leading, what does or or action of leader, what does that
actually mean? So I've gone and found a few varying resources and you're gonna hear
probably through the tone of my voice and probably as you're reading through this,
they kind of um, Makes sense, but also there's little parts like, yeah, but it
feels more complex than that, which is totally fine. So, firstly, Google provided
me the least helpful definition of leadership, where it said the action of leading
a group of people or an or an organization. A definition that has the word within
it is a useless definition. Leadership, the action of leading. It doesn't define
what leading is. I'm fairly certain I then looked up what leading was and it said
the ability to lead. And by that stage, I was just about to shut down my computer.
Um, so, that definition, yeah, look, not, not great for us. A bit of an expanded
one, that I got from, you know, the world's most reliable source, Google, um,
includes be a route or means of access to a particular place or in a location. This
is for lead, or leading. Um, OK. Sure, you know, the door led to a long hallway,
you know, that path leads to a river. All of those things make sense, obviously not
the reason that we want, be a reason or motive for someone, obviously not,
culminate or result in a particular event, no. So therefore, you can see within
this definition number 3, be in charge or command of, is generally how we view the
idea of leadership. The traditional top-down sort of hierarchy is there's someone
who is in charge or command of something. So, you would see that commonly in like
an organization where you might have a CEO. They're the leader of that
organization. You might have it with the best example, a country that a prime
minister or a president is the leader of a country. Um, you can also see that these
then do occasionally translate into more social things, um, particularly in more
like patriarchal societies where it'd be like, you know, a male is the leader of
XYZ. So you can see that these definitions of leadership, Ah, you, we can easily
critique them from a number of different lenses. This idea of it needs to be
something in charge or command of, um, when you look at, you know, this subpoint
here, organize and direct. So you know, the quote here I think is really good. The
conference included sessions led by people with personal knowledge of the area.
That to me is a very, very different sort of interpretation than the idea of being
in charge or in command. So being almost this ultimate authority on something. This
is more. The ability to organize, so the ability to come up with ideas and direct,
so shape or move towards a particular direction. Same we'd be the principal player
of a group of musicians, um, You know, think about a band, a band will have a lead
singer. The lead singer isn't in charge or command of the whole band necessarily,
they're just the one who primarily takes the role of singing, um, so. I really like
this 3rd 1, which is set a process in motion. So think about what we talked about
with processes last week, literally just the steps to achieve a particular task.
Leading is setting those processes in motion. Amazing. Chef's kiss, which was me
just giving an air kiss to the screen. I really like that, because then if we take
a more, you know, if we take a bit of an academic lens on it, which is, you missed,
cause you can't see me, my shoulders did like a little bit of a shimmy for that.
Um, we can see that, you know, this definition, which is on supply chain
leadership, is A relational concept involving a supply chain leader and one or more
supply chain follow organizations that interact in dynamic co-influencing process.
Um, this is obviously talking about inter-organizational leadership, so not
individual leadership, we kind of, you know, I want us to think about both, um, but
we can see within that, it's less about, you know, being in charge or command of,
or, you know, this kind of perception of leadership being something where it's
dominance based. You know, the ability to make someone do something because they're
a leader, that for us isn't necessarily useful, it absolutely happens, and I'm not
trying to say that this doesn't exist. This is absolutely the bona fide type of
leadership you're going to see everywhere, but I want to kind of open our minds up
to leadership being viewed across a number of different lenses as well,
potentially. The way then, if we kind of take a lot of these themes that we see in
academic definitions, but also in the ideas that we had within sort of that idea of
setting a process in motion, leadership is essentially there and we can view it as
simple as being individuals involved in managing. Managing, particularly those who
have done management 110, is something that's gonna be defined along the lines of
coordinating action towards achieving goals. Definitions vary, but it's kind of the
same thing. So therefore leader is the same as a manager. Which is the same as a
leader, and that is probably ironically, one of the more controversial of my
statements throughout this subject. I can go on weird tangents about niche
political issues, but no, me saying leaders equals managers is probably the one
that, you know, most academic colleagues might take and learned opinion against.
That's the same thing. If you lead You know, think of a prime minister that's
leading a country and managing a country. It's kind of the same thing. We assume
though, because think of the two, and this is where kind of a bit of our almost
social bias comes into it. For many of you and this, you know, many of you might be
going, actually this isn't how I view it, Johnny, but for many of you, you think of
a leader and you think of a manager. I would take an educated guess that more times
you would view manager as something potentially negative and leader as something
kind of more positive. So we think of manager, we think of like a boss at work,
someone telling us what to do. We think of a leader, we think of someone
inspirational, you know, great leaders of the 21st century. You know, most texts,
most like books you see at the airport. WH Smith are going to be like,
Inspirational leadership for a modern organization, they're not gonna be like
inspirational managing, cos manager sounds like almost a bad word because we over
almost over-romanticize this word of leader, but it's the same thing, it's the same
thing, friends, it is, A manager, he is someone who coordinates actions towards
achieving goals, so let's leave the kind of romantic notions of leadership being
this kind of, I'm it's funny, I'm trying to come up with examples as I'm saying
it's like, I don't actually think of anyone. I'm like, yeah, they're a, they're a
really good leader, cause to me, I naturally think of leader as like this almost
like hierarchy in charge thing. Whereas I think of, you know, people who are
inspirational and people who inspire, you know, me or people I know who, you know,
have a lot of inspiration from other people. You know, we wouldn't necessarily call
them leaders, although they basically are. Within supply chains, let's bring it
back. Often we can look at like supply chain level leaders. So that's where that
academic definition was really focused on. We have like that firm to firm or
business to business
relationships. But also, you're gonna have local area leaders. So for many of you,
you, if you've worked anywhere, let's take a fast food example. Many of you
probably have worked at McDonald's. You know, you're gonna have particular managers
in charge of particular functions. They're the local area leaders. They might be in
charge of teams, they might be in charge of departments, they're gonna report to
someone who is then the then the leader of them, um, but in addition to that,
you're also gonna have leaders which are gonna emerge from positions not under
necessarily the exact remit of an organization. So what I mean by this is anything
that could be as simple as, you know, well-respected staff, union delegates,
sociocultural leaders, like religious leaders, that's a really good one. And that
would exist in many workplaces where you'd have people who are also a religious
leader who would, you know, have a bit of respect afforded to them by people who
follow that religion. So this is where you can see that managers is often something
that's defined in a hierarchy. So we look at a manager in a workplace, it's
probably on an organizational chart that says manager. It doesn't say leader. Cause
we view leader as almost this like sociocultural construct, and by that I literally
just mean it's kind of a phrase that we have created to, Embody a particular
meaning about something. So leaders and leadership then can really emerge from
anywhere within an organization. However, that would be an incredibly difficult
thing for us to then be like, well, how does, how do we set supply chain people
processes up with leaders when everyone's a leader. No. Let's friends, let's just
kind of view this as almost a managing sort of someone who's in charge of achieving
particular organizational processes. So what makes a suitable leader? Um, well,
I've got it all solved for you on one slide. You can, that's it. You don't need to
do any other subjects on leadership. You don't need to read any textbooks, because
Johnny has got it all on one slide for you. I'm being sarcastic, obviously. There
is entire textbooks, entire subjects, entire degrees on, Leadership, an MBA is
essentially an entire degree on leadership. So, I'm trying to really give you a
very brief taste of it. So we can view it and this is really interesting,
particularly for a lot of the more like traditional supply chain industries, so
things around raw material extraction, maybe logistics, etc. is technical
qualifications. Is a leader good because they have a particular qualification?
Particular skills in something, a particular degree, um, in either that field or
maybe in a management field. Think about, you know, you go to university, you go to
university to get a technical qualification. Yes, technical, the word might imply
it's more skills-based, so you know, you think of a TAFE qualification in the
Australian example, um, as being a technical one, it's kind of technical is just,
yeah, the ability to do a particular task. So what I mean is that often we view as
leaders, As you know, they're a good leader if they have particular skills or have
particular qualifications, or it could be that there's particular experiential
requirements. So often, you know, the vast majority of cases, um, particularly ones
that many of you may be familiar with, is that you might have leaders who have
direct experience of the area that they work in. So this is probably gonna be the
case in particularly a lot of like hospitality industries, retail, where it's
people who are promoted up. However, this brings into question something. Um, which
is definitely some of you might have experienced or at the very least you're gonna
experience, um, depending where you, um, go in the world after this, is often you
get people who might not be experienced in a particular exact area, but they might
be experienced, say, managers. How essential is the actual experience with relation
to that job versus the experience of them managing people well. And that is a very
contentious debate, friends. I know for example a really common one is healthcare.
So often within healthcare you have a lot of, like, this is the New South Wales
example, um, this is the New South Wales public hospital example, often you have a
lot of people who are, you know, middle to senior level managers, maybe not senior
managers, definitely middle level managers who might not actually come from a
traditional medical sort of trajectory, so they're not a doctor, they're not a
nurse, um, so you have almost sees as sometimes they, Refer to as like career
bureaucrats, where they are people who might be public servants, um, who get
substantial managing experience and kind of move to different areas, and there's a
contentious debate about whether they need to have experience with the relation to
the actual work they're doing. So again, this is something that's gonna be
contextual, that isn't gonna be easily defined. Same with social requirements. So,
I would envision that many of you who, when you're thinking of managers versus
thinking of leaders, if you're viewing managers as something that might be
negative, I reckon it's because of the social requirements that for you, they might
not have had, you know, the ability to have effective communication, effective
compassion. Some things, fear is actually what makes a suitable leader. Now you're
probably thinking, hang on a second, fear, Johnny, why would fear be an effective
thing? Um, militaries, militaries often run in chain of commands that often will be
based on a degree of fear. You know, there's discipline that's enshrined into
people, not necessarily on that something really bad's gonna happen if they fall
out, but essentially, that's what happens. You go through discipline training,
you're trained in a particular way. Due to, you know, you not falling out, you not
falling out of line because there's gonna be a punishment if you do so. School,
many of you have gone through, you know, different forms of school education. Fear
is essentially one form of leadership within that. Does it make a suitable leader?
Probably not. In the military context, does it? Maybe it does to an extent, but
also, to an extent. Then finally we have performance, which is kind of, I'm not
gonna get into too much detail around performance and how you measure performance
because we just don't have the time, I think I mentioned that last week. um but
performance is essentially a good way of us thinking about leadership because
ultimately does it even matter? Does performance actually, ah sorry, do any of
these other three things matter or does it just matter how well they do the job? So
think about as well, who determines what makes a suitable leader. And that's a
really good thing for you to ponder. Think about anyone that you have worked with
who you've found to be a good leader or a bad leader. What determines their
performance or who determines their performance? And I think what you're gonna
realize is that actually something around performance is actually, Quite
subjective, that yes, you can have matrices about KPIs and everything, but things
like leadership it suddenly gets a little bit, A little bit murkier. So the next
idea then is around how do we actually put leadership into action. So, these ideas,
you're gonna soon realize this is actually bringing together everything we've
talked about in the previous few weeks. So a good leader is one that's able to set
direction. This is goals and strategies. In other words, week 3 and week 4. Right?
We talk about execution. Oh, sorry. No, we don't, we don't. That was week 5. We
talk about strategy. We talk about design. They need to be clearly communicated,
and it is the role of leaders to communicate those things. It doesn't have to be
the one leader at the top, can be many forms of leaders as well. That then leads to
goals and targets. So, what is the actual future vision of the supply chain?
Remember this, back to the vision and goals. And what are the actual identifiable
goals to achieve that. So really, this isn't anything new. Leadership is putting
the ideas we've talked about in the previous few weeks into action, into practices,
which is converting these into practices. Literally, taking the strategies, taking
the designs and converting them into executable plans. Like I said, this isn't
anything new. The leadership is doing. The things we've talked about, identifying
and communicating any risks, including any compliance requirements, in other words,
the things we've defined in PESL. So really then this video is kind of showing you
what, you know, giving you the ideas to think about well what is it that makes
someone a good leader or what is leadership, but then actually doing leadership in
the context of the supply chain is doing the things we've talked about for the
previous few weeks. Another idea then is how then, and this kind of deviates a
little bit, is, uh, you know, effective leadership is around how are they leverage
or, you know, kind of utilize the potential of resources. Resources is just, Things
needed to achieve a task, you know, we think of resources as like raw materials,
but you know, people are a resource. Think about, you know, many of the corporate,
um, functions that deal with people. What are they called? They're called human
resources. So this can range from things include, um, The selection of high caliber
staff, um, so good leadership, done by both individuals but also an organization is
things like effective and fair recruitment techniques, um, but also identifying
partners for collaboration and integration, in other words, what we discussed last
week. Or the week before. Sorry, I think it was the week before my whispering threw
me off. Um, then there's performance and auditing, you're probably thinking,
Johnny, this is the same as the
previous slide, yes, setting direction and leveraging the resources is kind of a
similar way of applying, The strategy through to execution. Then also, staff, um,
development. We're gonna talk about that a lot in the previous video. What I've
really tried to do then in this video is give you a bit of a supply chain lens on
what leadership might be, or at least my lens on this, and I really want you to
walk away from this video going, OK, leadership is literally just putting into
action the main ideas we've talked about in the previous few weeks.