Transcript
Transcript: Deputy Minister Leadership Reflections Series: Defining Leadership
[00:00:00 Video opens with CSPS building blurred in the background. Text on screen: Deputy Minister Leadership Reflections Series. Inspiring music plays.]
[00:00:03 Cassie Doyle, Malcolm Brown, Jocelyne Bourgon, Anil Arora, Louis Ranger and Daniel Quan-Watson are blurred in the background. Text on screen: Defining Leadership]
[00:05 A text appears on screen: Anil Arora]
Anil Arora: It's something that is completely and always evolving as a concept. I mean, there will never be enough books written about leadership and there will never be enough people trying to define it. So, I'll kind of give you a lens of how I view leadership. And so, to me, leadership is all about the ability to take people towards a vision with a purpose, and in the process, they grow beyond their wildest expectations. To me, that's the ultimate kind of definition of leadership.
[00:50 A text appears on screen: Jocelyne Bourgon]
Jocelyne Bourgon: I always find that there's a risk of confusion between management and leadership, and allow me to disentangle that, because it's hard to answer one if you've not positioned the other. Managers have authority for a purpose. So, managers should be able to manage, they should know the extent of their authority, and they should be prepared to use it to its limit. So, management and the exercise of authority is one thing. Leadership is something else. Leadership gets you where authority cannot. And leadership is not related to your seniority in the organization. Leadership is the power of ideas that mobilize others in moving with you, in tandem, in a converging way to achieve something that you judge to be better than what existed before. And therefore, it's a collective sport. It's not, I have authority. It's a collective sport that aligns knowledge; know how; capabilities to a purpose; and that can only be celebrated as a team effort. So, the distinction between the two is significant in my mind, because by confusing the two, we lose both.
[02:11 A text appears on screen: Malcolm Brown]
Malcolm Brown: It's actually, it's a hard question but it's really simple when you think about it. And at the end of the day, it's simple things like can you look at yourself in the mirror and say, "Did I, this week or today, make things a little bit better?" Or sometimes even, "Did I not make them worse?" And some days, we're going to say we made them worse. But being honest with yourself, and with your colleagues and your subordinates is authentic. Being a good leader, I think, is also someone who's authentic.
[02:42 A text appears on screen: Cassie Doyle]
Cassie Doyle: You know, I've always seen myself as a leader within a context. So, I feel like I really believe in myself as a leader that, in connecting with others, that that's an important part of leadership. I, perhaps, grew up in a time when there was a sort of rejection of the great man, you know, a kind of model of leadership, it was more participatory. So, leadership, for me, means being able to actually have the art of being able to get things done through other people. And that's why you need the connection. So, that was a big emphasis of mine, as a leader, is just how I'm connecting.
Anil Arora: You know, as I said before, leadership is all about people, and people do get hurt, and how do you go about taking people who are hurt and inspire them to now move forward, is tricky business.
[03:46 A text appears on screen: Louis Ranger]
Louis Ranger: It means doing your homework; knowing what you're talking about; getting results. In the so-called leadership competencies, there's six competencies, but some are more equal than others. Results, for me, is number one. If you are known to deliver results, it creates a relationship of trust with your supervisors and with your staff. They know you're determined to get results. So, commitment to results.
Malcolm Brown: My approach to leadership was to mimic the people I thought were good leaders. I saw, as I worked my way through the public service, good leaders and not good leaders. For me, it was trying to emulate those things that good leaders I thought would do, doing the right thing, not taking the easy decision but making the right decision, sharing responsibility not abdicating it.
[05:00 A text appears on screen: Daniel Quan-Watson]
Daniel Quan-Watson: Leadership is the ability to get people to do the things that they need to do when they might not otherwise do them, might not otherwise do them because they don't want to, they might not otherwise do them because they don't know how to do them, they might not otherwise do them because they don't have the tools or resources to do them. And leadership to me is filling in the gaps of those things. You'd see filling in of the gap about, "What is it that we're trying to do again here? " It's the filling in of the gap, "Why is it that we want to do that? " It's the filling in of the gap, "But I don't know if I can do that." And I think if you can start answering questions like those, and those are some of the most important ones, and people understand, okay, I understand why we're doing this. In some way, it's important. Might not even agree with it, but I understand why it's important. I understand what we're doing, I understand what we're supposed to get here, and okay, I didn't think I could do this, but now that I look around and now that we've had this conversation, okay, I'm going to be able to do it. To me, that's leadership. I also think that leadership is helping people believe in themselves in a different way.
Anil Arora: As I mentioned, my simple definition of leadership, if you've got a really enthusiastic and willing, off they go, you don't have to apply that much grease, if you like. But when there is real pain, when there is real, a sense of disconnection, it becomes very difficult. It becomes difficult for employees who don't see their voice being heard, they don't see their concerns being addressed, they don't see leaders in the bureaucracy removing obstacles, they see the exact opposite. So, I think we have to rethink this, the language, command and control, chain of command. We have to rethink hierarchies, we have to rethink this kind of power differential. Today's leadership is how do you lead with amazing listening, with empathy, the sense of being a servant to your leadership team and really understanding the system within which they work, and to actually lead, and inspire them and trust them.
Cassie Doyle: As a Deputy Minister, it's not who you are as a leader, it's how your team leads together. To try to understand how we work together and to really aim to be exemplary together, because I think that everyone is looking at the team, so if two ADMs are not talking to each other, their staff will never work together. And the kind of issues that we're facing right now are so complex that it really does require a collaborative approach. So, I guess that's one of my more important learnings: how we lead, it really is collective. We're an organism, if you will, and it doesn't matter what individual does. I guess I would recommend that as something that deputies invest their time in thinking about.
Jocelyne Bourgon: You know, one of the most powerful questions public sector leaders can ask of their team is, how does it all fit together? The magic is not in the pieces. The magic is in the weaving, the knitting of many pieces that amount to a different way of thinking, a different view of the future, a different possibility, a different way forward. So, the coming together of the deep knowledge and the broad perspective is when you come up with an ambitious, transformative agenda.
[09:03 The CSPS animated logo appears onscreen. Text on screen: canada.ca/school.]
[09:10 The Government of Canada wordmark appears.]
