Linda Coates:
When you think about those senior leadership groups, the leaders at that level have been leading for an extraordinarily long period of time and how they've led in the past has worked for them. And now you're showing up and saying, "Well actually, it could be better." No one likes that. So how do you take people on that journey?
Tim Spiker:
Helping senior leaders embrace a shift in their thinking about leadership is not easy, but what of great value ever is? I'm your host, Tim Spiker, and this is the Be Worth* Following Podcast, a production of the People Forward Network. On this show, we talk with exceptional leaders, thinkers, and researchers about what actually drives effective leadership across the globe and over time.
Tim Spiker:
Today, we start part two of our summer series called Who Not What: From Research to Application. In our last episode, we learned how the Who Not What principle was discovered and what it says. That is that 77% of our effectiveness as leaders comes from who we are, not what we do.
Tim Spiker:
If you weren't able to catch our last episode, the first in this three-part series, I encourage you to go back and listen to it as it sets the stage for what you will hear today.
Tim Spiker:
Today, we are joined by Linda Coates, an HR executive with exceptional experience. She spent nearly a decade as a human resources director in an ASX 100 company that had manufacturing operations on multiple continents. You may have noticed that I said the word had. It's not that the company ceased to exist, it's that Linda has moved on to become the chief people officer for a multinational startup in the renewable energy industry.
Tim Spiker:
But that experience is not the sole reason Linda is with us today. She is here because in her role as an executive of a global organization, she oversaw the implementation of who-based leadership development. In other words, she oversaw executive development for senior leaders who were applying the Who Not What principle in their leadership development and everyday leadership execution.
Tim Spiker:
One of the things I love about this conversation with Linda is that you are going to get the straight scoop. This is not a sunshine and rainbows discussion. Getting senior leaders to engage with very personal who-based leadership development was difficult; difficult, but worth it. So with that, let's get to the conversation with Linda, where she begins by talking about some well-developed who's that impacted her positively early in her career.
Linda Coates:
I was very fortunate in my early 20s to sit in a corporate office for an ASX top 30 company that had operations globally. And I wasn't in HR at the time, I was actually an executive assistant, which is where I started my life before I went on and did all my degrees and for terribly ambitious. And I sat two desks away from the CEO, and he was an exceptional leader, and what made him exceptional was his humanity. And I didn't realize it at the time, but I was privileged to not only see leadership firsthand as humanity in leadership. But my own leader, the person I actually reported to was also an exceptional leader in his own way. And what made them exceptional leaders for me was their understanding of people.
Linda Coates:
They had absolute clarity of purpose. They knew what they were there to do. They knew what they were shooting for and they never lost sight of it. So I actually worked for the finance director, and he was absolutely crystal clear on purpose, as was the CEO, crystal clear. They also had a lot of trust, so they put a lot of trust in people.
Linda Coates:
My finance director put an enormous amount of trust in me. I think I was 22, and he trusted me. And you felt that you had to kind of not let him down because he trusted me so much. He trusted me enough to give me one of the very first desktop computers with the two floppy disks, because I did a deal with him and said, "If you give me an IBM twin floppy, I will teach myself how to use." I think it was Lotus at that point. "And I can take all that stuff you do by hand and I currently type up and I will do it on this new thing called a spreadsheet."