Sorry about the delay in posting but I have been recuperating from the leadership conference last Thursday and Friday that was then followed by the IPAC Board of Directors meeting on Saturday and Sunday. I’ve been trying to catch up on a number of things this week.
Anyway, we held a very successful leadership conference on December 6th & 7th here in Toronto. The agenda was packed with incredible speakers who have had experience leading organizations in the public and private sector. If I wrote about what every speaker said, I would be writing a book on leadership!! That’s not a bad idea, but I think I will save that ambitious endeavour to another time and mind-space. Instead, I will focus on just a few of the speakers and what they said in this post and I will add other posts in the future about some of the other speakers.
For those who missed the conference, you missed a fantastic event – that’s not just me saying that. I had one of the participants say to me that “this is the best conference I’ve been to in 15 years”. He said I could quote him, so thank you Steve Burnett from the Ontario Ministry of Transportation for that quote!
The conference started off with a talk by Jean-René Halde, the head of the Business Development Bank of Canada. Mr. Halde has experience in both the public and private sector. He spoke on the three levels of leadership – Societal, Institutional and Personal. Most of his discourse was focused on institutional leadership. In these rapidly changing times, where globalization is impacting everything we do and where skills are commodities, Mr. Halde laid out 12 tools that he has used in his leadership of organizations. This includes the ability to listen to employees and the market; having a clear mandate for the organization; a value system; a code of conduct and ethical behaviour; hiring practices and a competency model that codifies behaviour; training; succession planning and career planning and a corporate scorecard. On the personal leadership front, Mr. Halde said it was time to discard the notion of the “heroic” leader and focus on the ability to solve problems, to listen, to combine strategic, financial and policy analysis and to communicate both verbally and non-verbally. He spoke about the need to build leadership capacity and to enhance the ability to collaborate. To enhance collaboration, Mr. Halde laid out 5 points: 1) know yourself and remain yourself – be transparent; 2) make sure your employees understand their task; 3) foster collaboration by allowing disagreement and discussion; 4) Organizational goals are what really matters; and 5) Use the right sequence of questions – What, Why, How and Who.
The closing speaker that day was Margaret Bloodworth, who is the National Security Advisor to the Prime Minister and Associate Secretary of Cabinet. Mrs Bloodworth spoke about her experiences leading the Department of Transport on 9/11 and the role of Canada in evacuating Canadian citizens from Lebanon in the summer of 2006. What incredible leadership! As a fall-out of 9/11, the skies were closed in both Canada and the US. This meant that 33,000 passengers en route to the US were diverted to Canadian airports. Communities all across Canada showed what they were made of during these events, including Stephenville, Newfoundland that screened 1700 passengers versus their normal load of 37 passengers per day! Mrs Bloodworth laid out some of the leadership lessons that she has retained from these events: 1) Leadership can be found and demonstrated at all levels not just at the senior levels; 2) Planning matters – the act of planning creates structures and processes that quickly come together at the time of a crisis; 3) Build relationships before a crisis – this creates understanding and trust - a crisis is not the time to get to know your colleagues; 4) No one can do it alone – listen to others and work with them; 5) Leadership is knowing when to decide – you can’t wait to gather all the information before making decisions. What a powerful speech!
There are a few more speakers that I want to highlight – in my next post – people such as, Roméo Dallaire, John Furlong (CEO of the Vancouver Olympics), Shelly Jamieson (the newly named Ontario Secretary of Cabinet) and Neil Hetherington (CEO of Habitat for Humanity – Toronto). Stay tuned.....hope the suspense is not too much for you!
No comments:
Post a Comment