Analysis of Catherine Livingstone, the President of the Business Council of Australia - Case Study Example

Leadership: Catherine Livingstone Name: Institution: Date: Leader’s Background Catherine Livingstone is the president of the Business Council of Australia. Catherine is an Australian who was born in Nairobi in 1955. Catherine’s parents were British citizens who were living in Nairobi. After living in Nairobi for a period of time, they moved back to Britain and later relocated to Australia in 1960 (Korporaal and Urban 2009). Catherine is a married to Michael Satterwhite, who is a finance chief at Saatchi & Saatchi and together, they have three children (Australian Business Review 2009). Previously, Catherine has served on several organisational boards, including Goodman Fielder, CSIRO, Macquarie, and Rural Press. In March, Catherine quit as chairman of Telstra and joined the board of directors of the Commonwealth Bank. Catherine attended Macquaire University where she graduated with honours in Bachelor of Arts in Accounting. Later in 1992, she attended the International Programme for Executive development in Switzerland where she attained the title o in 1999. Previously, she has earned herself several awards. Catherine was accorded the Centenary Medal for her services in business leadership and for her service to Australian society. In the same year, Catherine was awarded the Chartered Accountant in Business Award. In 2008, Catherine became an Officer of the Order of Australia because of her contribution in the fields of technology, science, and innovation. She has also been awarded severally for her role in management and leadership and as one of the most significant contributors to professional organisations. Many authors have argued that the most important thing about a leader is traits rather than skills (Lussier and Achua 2015). In this section, Catherine’s traits and personality, personality profiles, and leadership traits are going to be explored. Approach to Leadership Zaccaro (2007) based the notion of leadership on the idea that leadership is a characteristic ability of extraordinary people. Leadership has more than 220 different definitions and conceptions. Transformational leadership is the single most debated theory within the field of leadership, including leadership in the military, cross-culture leadership, personality, virtual teams, and middle manager effectiveness among a variety of others. Catherine is one of the individuals who may be celebrated as some of the transformational leaders in Australia and the world over. Some of the organisations that Catherine has held key leadership positions are the ones that are undergoing a transformation, including Telstra, CSIRO, and Cochlear and in each of these, Catherine has been one of the enablers to change and transformation. For example, at the time Catherine joined Cochlear, the company was undergoing transitioning from a ‘department within a department’ to an organisation that would be visible to the public. Before Catherine joined the company, the company had been struggling for a long period to achieve a 20 percent per annum growth. The organisation had also been grappling with ‘fiefdoms’ and agency issues that had been inherited from the previous department structure. When Catherine came in, she changed Cochlear’s people by first aligning what they believed. She acknowledged that peoples’ belief systems guide their actions. Based on Burns’ (1978) definition, a transformational leader enables his/her followers to be conscious of the value and importance of good outcomes and the ways in which they can reach those outcomes. Catherine embedded a value system and made it an integral part of Cochlear’s operations. She changed the mindset of her followers at Cochlear. Through this approach, Catherine was able to depersonalise the human resource at Cochlear. For example, if a certain course of action was proposed in a meeting and it was later found that the proposition would not fit Cochlear’s mandate, all the human resource would refer back to Cochlear’s agreed values. At CSIRO, Catherine gave life to an organisation which was facing an uncertain future. Catherine identified that CSIRO problem was in how the company was communicating what it was producing. This failure had culminated in a lack of advocacy for the organisation. This, in turn, seemed to boil down to minute distinction. The workforce in CSIRO, including the technicians and scientists, considered themselves to be working in the CSIRO rather than working for it. Bass and Riggio (2006) emphasises that every transformational leader possesses each of these four components to induce the desired transformation in every organisation he/she intends to change. In each of the discussed organisation that Catherine has worked in, there have been challenges of different complexities. As a transformational leader, Catherine has had several ways of dealing with these challenges. One of these challenges was changing the mindset of the workers in these companies. At CSIRO, people had got used to working without a uniting mission. As a result, the discussion and influence of workers in the company were limited to their particular discovery. There existed silos which highly fragmented CSIRO’s effectiveness and influence because the organisation is one of the companies with high levels of specialisation and limited engagement. This represents the other challenge that Catherine experienced at CSIRO. However, within a short time, Catherine managed to transform the people and making them have a unifying mission. Workers at CSIRO had for a long period held on to silo mentality. This is the first challenge that Catherine experienced after joining CSIRO team. She used her transformational ability to change people by engaging them in continuous, multilevel conversation, and a unified mission. Catherine focused on making persons understand their workplace and their role within it. Through this approach, Catherine was able to know what her staff believed, and honestly, examine the factors that are conducive to the organisation’s success. Evidence from the two company’s shows that Catherine instals right behaviour in people in order to produce the right results. There are two aspects to idealised influence. First, there are certain qualities in the leader that his/her followers always desire to imitate. Also, leaders influence their followers through displaying good behaviours. On the other hand, inspirational motivation incorporates inspiring and motivating followers by challenging them and instilling shared meaning in them. The key characteristics of inspirational motivation include optimism and enthusiasm (Bass and Riggio 2006). When Catherine joined CSIRO, she increased her followers’ innovative abilities in dealing with problems and challenges, questioning assumptions, applying novel perspectives and approaches to old, established challenges and problems. She displayed openness and this contributed to a turn-around in the company. Her displays was a display of openness without fear of criticism and high level of confidence in solving problematic situations in combination with the follower’s self-efficacy. According to Bandura (1977), increased self-efficacy leads to increased effectiveness. These are the values that Catherine injected in every company she joined. Catherine also possesses individualised consideration which makes her act as a mentor and coach and this has made her be able to assist her followers to reach their full potential. Through individualised consideration, Catherine has been able to provide supportive climate and learning opportunities to her followers. The four components have combined inside Catherine making her one of the most transformational figures in the world. Since her transformation of the bionic ear maker Cochlear making it become known worldwide, Catherine has been widely lauded. Her fame reaches far and wide owing to her leadership capabilities. According to the Australian Business Review (2009), Catherine has dealt even with the government having even led the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation for half a decade. After transforming Cochlear, Catherine was tasked with the role of taking over the leadership of Telstra – referred to by the Australian Business Review as “a beast.” All the people who have worked with Catherine have pointed out that she is a kind of person who takes seemingly large career jumps and succeeds repeatedly. Every organisation she has worked in, Catherine leaves a trail of success starting from Pricewaterhouse in the 1970s to her current organisation. It has been indicated that one of Catherine’s ability and the one that amazed one of her fellow executives at Cochlear was effective communication with investors and the broader financial markets (Australian Business Review 2009). That executive said that Catherine had an exceptional ability to build phenomenal relationships with the people she was supposed to engage especially with the financial community. He further emphasised that Catherine had a great ability to improve the internal processes within the organisation in which she was placed. The success that Cochlear continued to experience even after Catherine left was attributed to her. In 1995, Cochlear was floated for $125 and was generating $70 million in revenue per annum (Australian Business Review 2009). When Catherine left Cochlear five years later, the products were being traded in more than 50 countries globally with the sales having risen to $150 million and its market capitalisation reaching $2 billion. Many important and renowned leaders have indicated their pleasure in working with Catherine. For example, after Catherine appointment to the Commonwealth Bank’s board, Mr. Turner expressed his delight saying that he was very happy that Catherine was joining them terming her as “a respected business leader and a known advocate of innovation” (The Sydney Morning Herald 2016). References Bandura, A. (1977). Social learning theory. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. Bass, B. and Riggio, R. (2006). Transformational leadership (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Psychology Press. Burns, J. (1978). Leadership. New York, NY: HarperCollins. Korporaal, G. and Urban, R. (2009). Big Task for Telstra Chair. The Australian.  Lussier, R. and Achua, C. (2014). Leadership: Theory, Application, & Skill Development. South Western: Cengage Learning. “Catherine Livingstone Joins CBA Board”, The Sydney Morning Herald, March 1, 2016. Available at http://www.smh.com.au/business/banking-and-finance/catherine-livingstone-joins-cba-board-20160301-gn7jtk.html “Risk-Taker Accepts Challenge to Tame a Different Beast”, The Australian Business Review, May 9, 2009. Available at http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/news/livingstone-takes-telstra-chair/story-e6frg906-1225710673145 Zaccaro, S. (2007). Trait-based perspectives of leadership. American Psychologist, Vol. 62, No.1, pp. 6-16. Read More