Leadership in the Age of Purpose QANTAS_AGSM_FINAL | Page 2

THE “NOW” OF WORK
“The future of work is already here,” says Wailes. “We’re
already having to work differently, our industries are changing
quickly, we need new talent and if you’re not across all that,
you’re going to struggle to keep up.”
AGSM alumnus Michael Priddis (see story opposite)
agrees. “The future of work is the worst possible term and
it’s a barrier to action – nine out of 10 CEOs will say, ‘That’s
the next CEO’s problem,’” he says. “But it’s happening now.”
Priddis is focused on the pressing need to realign the skills
of workers with the march of automation – a task he’s
making more precise with his software startup, Faethm.
As well as ensuring staff are reskilled for modern jobs,
leaders need to keep human standards in mind. “Ironically,
the more digital our businesses become, the more human
we have to be,” says Wailes. “Automation and the increasing
influence of AI will see a lot of data-driven decisions become
automatic. When that happens, you don’t get a chance to
check if a determination aligns with your standards, so you
have to put a strong ethical human framework at the
forefront of the design.”
“Leaders need to have a vision: what’s our
purpose, how will we ensure we’re doing
right by customers and society?”
Nick Wailes, director, AGSM @ UNSW
Business School
PURPOSE, PROFIT AND POSITIVE CULTURE
“In the past, it was possible to say that commercial success
and social impact were separate,” says Wailes. “That’s no
longer the case; today they are closely interrelated and
leaders need to know how to create the right cultures
and systems that can do well and at the same time do good.”
This includes hot-button issues from the environment to
human rights. “Organisations are having to report on
their social impact.”
More than customer expectation drives this. There’s a “war
for talent,” says Wailes. “To have the best and the brightest
come and work for you in the emerging areas of skills, you’ve
got to stand for something. When young people with
high-quality skills decide who they’re going to work with and
with what brand they want to associate themselves, it’s about
the impact they’ll be making. So leaders need to have a
long-term vision for the business: what’s our purpose, how
will we ensure that we’re doing right by our customers and
the society in which we’re operating?”
Hanrahan says nurturing a transparent culture that
permeates the whole organisation is paramount, too. “Leaders
need to think about what’s going on on the shop floor, not just
what’s going on in the boardroom,” she says. “Part of that is
encouraging all people to lead change and instilling trust and
openness so that people do speak up if they think something’s
not right and they know they will be taken seriously.”
REGULATION, INNOVATION AND
CONSIDERATION
Balancing regulation with robust innovation is another
challenge for leaders. “Poorly designed regulation in Australia
has an enormous impact on innovation,” says Hanrahan, who
laments that some industries have an interest in sticking to
this status quo. “It’s tempting to go for black-letter law
regulation that makes it easier to systemise compliance
process but that comes at a cost: it can harm competition,”
she explains. “If a company works within a complicated set of
regulations and has a big sunk cost in the systems to comply
with it all, why would it want to dismantle them and make it
easier for nimble competitors to enter the market?”
Hanrahan says this is an urgent problem for Australian
innovation and that AGSM equips MBA students to make an
impact. Knowing that “business leaders participate in policy
and law-reform debates, we encourage our students to think
about how changing the law must take into account what’s
going to be beneficial for the whole community, not just an
exercise in getting the outcome that best suits them
or their business.”
LEARNING TO LEAD
“Leadership starts with knowing yourself,” says Wailes
of the AGSM approach. “It’s always been a tradition in
our programs: have a good, hard look at yourself and
your leadership capabilities, identify strengths and then
work on those.”
If command-and-control leadership is so last century,
so too, says Wailes, is the idea that “the solution to all of
this complexity can be held in the head of any one person”.
Collaboration has never been more important. “The ability
to work in teams and with people at all levels of the
organisation, including people who are not like you, and being
able to bring diverse stakeholders together is another element
we really emphasise.”
Next up, says Wailes, students are given frameworks to
problem-solve and navigate all this complexity. “Problems
often present themselves as a tidal wave of challenges; a
strong MBA program gives you a set of tools and techniques
to break them down to their constituent elements.” It doesn’t
reduce the complexity but it makes it manageable.
“We call this an accelerating world, which means that what’s
challenging now will likely be different in the future and the
pace of change is likely to be quicker than it was in the past,”
says Wailes. “The core underlying skill area is adaptability: to
be able to look at new challenges, learn new things and apply
your insights to those new things.”
Understanding your own strengths and weaknesses,
acquiring the skills to break down multi-pronged problems
using frameworks and mastering adaptability all “equip
you for a more complex world,” says Wailes. “Those three
attributes differentiate people who will be successful leaders
from those who won’t.”