From Here To Reality
AUTHOR: Deborah Tarrant DATE: 06.09.07 ISSUE 1, 2007
Julie Mavraidis admits her first experience as the CEO of Insurance Australia Group (IAG) was a little nerve-wracking. Standing in front of a team of people she barely knew, being videotaped as she presented her vision and purpose for the company really tested her mettle.
It was challenging. Mavraidis' emotional intelligence was on the line and exposed for all to see, but the feedback on her presentation skills was valuable. In her everyday working life, Mavraidis is the National Relationship Manager in the Value Added Products and Services division of IAG.
AGSM's Accelerated Learning Lab (ALL) helps talented individuals fast-track their careers into leadership roles. |
Her quick step into the company’s top executive job was a role-play, testing her ability to create a compelling story and generate a sense of common purpose as she took the team – a group of fellow employees from across IAG – with her. For a brief interlude, Mavraidis found herself in the role of marketing manager, as well.
These are two hats she’s not expecting to wear imminently, but managers need transferable skills as they move rapidly through the corporate ranks.
“Previously, when addressing people I’ve had the mindset that in business everyone is busy, so you need to get to the point straight away. I learned from watching my presentation – and the feedback – that you actually need to take them on a journey,” says Mavraidis who spent 10 years in call centres prior to moving into a business development role with IAG in 2005.
As one of a group of emerging IAG managers, Mavraidis has been selected to participate in the pioneering Accelerated Learning Laboratory (ALL) launched by AGSM in late 2006 with the aim of fast-tracking talented individuals for leadership roles.
The project has been designed to develop managers’ flexible expertise and the skills required to help them negotiate the complexities of the rapidly changing 21st century business environment.
Through a combination of simulations, role-plays, strategy exercises, coaching and team-building exercises, cohorts of managers from a diverse range of organizations, including IAG, Qantas, Brambles and ANZ, are now taking part in the initial phases of the project. Their involvement, in three-day residential stints every six months, will span five years, during which time researchers will not only help them to hone leadership capabilities, but will also monitor and measure the outcomes. The project has been hailed as a world first, and is expected to produce groundbreaking research and deliver insights and new methods to speed leaders into executive ranks.
Managers need transferable skills as they move rapidly through the corporate ranks.
One of the great benefits of the ALL environment, according to Mavraidis, is that it provides “a safe environment for early learning, to experiment, take risks and make mistakes”. Mavraidis subsequently found herself, in computer-generated simulated environments, making decisions about stock levels, resourcing and distribution channels for a bookstore and an airline. Experimenting and learning how one decision can impact on another provided revelations that she believes will prove useful back in the workplace.
Meg Jeffreys, a talent adviser in the corporate human resources division at Qantas, found her early learnings and experiences following her first three-day session in the ALL program were already resonating at work.
“For a start, I was challenging myself not to fall back into my old ways,” Jeffreys says. “I wanted to keep the momentum and energy flowing. In my first week back at the office there was a task that I normally don’t enjoy that I pushed myself to do…and it just happened.”
As one of a cohort of nine emerging leaders from Qantas (the airline currently has two cohorts participating in the ALL), Jeffrey’s found the fast-moving program at once “exhausting, challenging, energising and refreshing”. Her key learning to date has been to “give it a go, put yourself out there – even if there’s a risk of falling over.”
Jeffreys' current role at Qantas involves identifying and working on the further development of talented and high potential people. Previously she worked in human resources in the high performance culture of professional services firm, PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Like Mavraidis, Jeffreys appreciates the chance to learn in a “safe environment”. This speeds up the learning process, she says. For example, when told she had five minutes to prepare a presentation on the day’s activities, while initially confronted by the short notice, there was a tangible difference in her presentation skills between the first and second days, she says.
Similarly, in the simulation exercises, the chance to jump in and just try things out, “even when you have no idea what it’s about”. “In a normal work situation, it’s rare to have the opportunity to take different angles and directions and challenge your own ideas without consequences.”
Working on team perspectives, the Qantas cohort also participated in a rowing exercise with the benefit of instruction from Olympic rower, Bo Hanson, an exercise which took many out of their comfort zone. “Some of us certainly weren’t naturals,” recalls Jeffreys, “but we learned from watching and copying others, and we saw the effect of our efforts on the rest of team.”
In a normal work situation, it's rare to have the opportunity to take different angles and directions, and challenge your own ideas without consequences. |
Stephen Everett, the Commercial Lines Underwriting Manager at IAG New Zealand, runs a team of 12 with five direct reports. Despite 14 years on-the-job experience in the insurance industry, to some extent he was thrown in at the deep end when he first took on his first management role, he says. Through participating in the ALL, he anticipates developing behaviours to become a more effective leader with the capability of inspiring and facilitating his team towards achieving great results.
After attending two sessions of the ALL, his major learnings have been around managing growth and change in products and in team management, including the varying effects of goal setting, providing guidance and appropriate rewards. The insights on both products and people have a ready application in his current role encompassing IAG’s New Zealand’s NZI and State insurance brands.
Immediately after returning to work following his second session, Everett says he found himself drawing on his ALL learning while conducting a performance review. “I found it easier to have the conversation,” he says. “In just a couple of hours practising on a simulation, I had improved and learned to understand the variables,” he says.
Role-plays in the sessions, Everett found, became intense as the competing goals of group members in different roles surfaced as they worked towards meeting their key performance indicators, which were not always aligned. Where the sales manager was seeking a growth outcome, Everett, in the role of CEO, required a profit and growth outcome, and in one situation exerted his over-riding power.
Despite the mock scenario, the lesson was memorable. “The complexity developed as your understanding of the situation developed,” observes Everett.
Between sessions at the Accelerated Learning Laboratory, participating managers also undertake coaching and individual projects to further support and develop their learnings.
The circumstances of a day-to-day management role clearly differ from those rehearsed in a computer simulation, a role-play or even a presentation. However, when confronted by a ‘real life’ management dilemma, the rehearsed knowledge stored in long-term memory comes to the fore and helps to generate appropriate behaviours. “There’s a sense that you’ve been there before,” Everett says.