Leadership of value
Professor Tom Frame addressed ILAC in Canberra. Here is a condensed version of his presentation.
What actually is leadership? Can I suggest leadership has three critical elements that seem to be common to all situations.
- Leaders enable a group of people to go together where the group’s members want to go individually;
- Leaders motivate a group of people to go where they would not go alone or unaided;
- Leaders inspire a group of people to want to go to places they didn’t even know existed.
Leadership requires certain in-built character traits and specific personality types but, in my view, it is possible to train, nurture and equip leaders. They are not all born; they are also made.
In my generalised depiction of leadership – one thing is critical andstands alone – the possession, promotion and protection of values. In the exercise of leadership, we need to pay attention to the values of the individuals in the group, the shared values of the group, the values apparent in the group’s activities and the values implicit in the things for which the group strives.
We see values being expressed within all facets of life among all types of groups. But what kinds of values ought to be present in the general community and promoted by public organisations? This brings me to what has been described as the ‘values debate’.
Let me explain some of my anxieties about the values debate before I suggest to you a way of approaching the identification and articulation of values in the hope that you can at least promote a few of them with confidence in your organisation.
Until relatively recently (perhaps the 1970s) the churches provided the meta-narrative – an all encompassing story about our existence. At the time of Federation, 96 per cent of the population indicated membership or affiliation with one of the major Christian denominations in Australia.
According to the 2006 census, 63.9 per cent of the Australian population declared that Christianity was their religion although the majority did little about that profession on a regular basis.
Without religion providing a unifying story and producing some shared values, it has been difficult to achieve consensus in the values debate in recent times. After all, what privileges one set of values over another?
In its broadest conception, the values debate concerns the origins and destiny of human beings, the point and purpose of human life, what we believe is crucial to living and what we think is merely preferable. The question is this: how do we articulate a set of values in a multi-cultural and religiously pluriform society which tends to reject all meta-narratives and which seems to prefer personal constructions of meaning and attributions of value? Let me go a little further and ask you whether values are principally about what is good (ie. desirable) or just about what is right (ie. moral)?
Let me simply say, then, that values are important and that their origins and foundations are worth debating without despair because I do believe it is possible for people from diverse backgrounds in a religious plural, politically liberal society such as ours, to generate a consensus on shared values.
We sometimes exaggerate the extent to which we are different while overlooking the fact that we inhabit the same public spaces. For instance, we all deplore torture and theft, we denounce abuse of children and cruelty to animals. There is an almost universally held view that corruption and intimidation are despicable and we are, at least publicly, determined to resist cronyism and nepotism. So, we are off to some sort of start.
Armed with a suite of positive values, such as honesty and integrity, charity and compassion, tolerance and transparency, as individuals and as groups we can work against poor performance in the workplace.
Values need to be stated. Sometimes a single word will suffice. We might say: this community values loyalty, that organisation values truthfulness. Values should be listed and never be ranked or prioritised. Why? Because values cannot be sacrificed or compromised.
If you lead, you must be quite clear about your own personal values and be determined to live by them in addition to upholding the values of the organisation you have agreed to lead. These values should never be in conflict. If you don’t declare and uphold personal and organisational values; don’t be surprised when those who are led act poorly.
I am arguing, as you will have noticed, that the most powerful form of leadership is exemplary leadership. Many organisations gain their ethos and corporate culture from the leader and the senior leadership group. Of course, identifying and observing values is about more than legality and morality. Law should never be a guide to morality. Why? Two reasons: first, some things might be moral but illegal; some things might be legal but immoral.
Morality concerns an individual’s conduct: that they will embrace virtue and avoid vice. Values are bigger. They provide not only principles that guide an individual’s behaviour but enunciate the goals for which they will strive. The more exalted values can reflect a person’s aspirations and embody human excellence. The importance of leadership cannot be over-estimated and I commend ILAC for the prominence it gives to discussion of leadership and how it might be enhanced.
Professor Tom Frame
Tom Frame joined the Ran College, HMAS Creswell, as a 16-year-old midshipman in January 1979. After serving as Research Officer to the Chief of Naval Staff and completing a PhD on the HMAS Voyager disaster, he resigned from the RAN in late 1992 to complete a masters degree in theology and training for the Anglican priesthood. Ordained in 1993, he held parish appointments in Australia and England. He was Bishop to the Australian Defence Force (2001-07), a Visiting Fellow in the School of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the Australian National University (1999-2003), Patron of the Armed Forces Federation of Australia (2002-06), a member of the Council of the Australian War Memorial (2004-07) and judged the inaugural Prime Minister’s Prize for Australian History (2006-07). He is the author or editor of 21 books and has been Director of St Mark’s National Theological Centre, Professor and Head of the School of Theology, Charles Sturt University since January 2007.