One of the greatest challenges facing any manager or leader in organisations is to establish and maintain a focus amongst workers, employees or team members on of the needs to continually moving forward and improving the organisation.

How a leader establishes and maintains this desire to continuously improve is the source of much debate amongst academics and practitioners.

There are many leadership theories and models and much debate as to the best model or leadership style. However, The key ingredients for a successful leader are a vision, ability to motivate followers, desire to continuously improve or change to achieve greater personal and team performance and empowering their team to achieve results.

There is a saying often heard in today’s dynamic business climate, ‘if you’re standing still you’re going backwards. The basic message is that unless you and your organisation are focused on continual improvement, more than likely your competitors are passing you by.

A number of questions then arise. How does a leader motivate his team to initially agree on a clear goal or vision, get his teams or followers to move towards that vision, and

The next step for an effective leader is to develop an understanding of his team – its skills, goals, personalities and motivators. Understanding the skills of the team enables the leader to begin to develop an understanding as to the ability of the team to achieve the task, goals or process of the organisation. Particularly important is the fact that this will enable the leader to determine the readiness and capacity of the team to embark on the journey with the leader.

A leader must understand his team so that he can communicate with them, develop an appropriate reward system and understand their personal motivations. A model that can be used to understand people’s motivating factors is Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs. Maslow’s hierarchy proposes that there are eight human needs. Categorised into two major groups of needs - basic and meta needs. The basic needs (or levels 1-4) must be met before an individual pursues the higher level of needs. It is important to note that Maslow suggests that an individual may not necessarily pursue the higher level or meta needs, but that they cannot be pursued successfully if the four basic levels of needs are unmet.

A CEO of a large corporation will be dependant upon his management team to spread the word to subordinates, through the various divisions and branches. This is one of the key areas that many large organisation fail to achieve. A classic example is the Commonwealth Department of Employment Education and Training, which operated the CES network. In the mid-1980’s a major review was undertaken which resulted in all offices restructured to focus on ‘case management’ of clients. Few resources were made available to servicing employers. At no time during, or after, this review did the Canberra-based Senior Executive staff visit other states, meet with or communicate (other than in writing) with the thousands of staff in the CES. The senior managers from WA al went to Canberra to hear the new vision and rationale and were expected to communicate the message back to the workers. As a result, few operational staff clearly understood the changes espoused by the ‘faceless’ leaders. Numer!

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