Articles and Reports

BDO Authentic Leadership

The Shape of Authentic Leadership in New Zealand

Leadership is a "hot topic". No matter what type of business you're involved in, effective leadership plays a vital part in your success. We can see that understanding more about Leadership will enable Kiwi business leaders to make behavioural changes that will help their businesses grow.

In 2006, BDO were involved in a major research project in collaboration with the University of Auckland's Business School. The study was on Authentic Leadership, the results of which are of immense benefit to New Zealand Businesses. Here you can download the research document summary and see how it can be used in a practical way to benefit you and your business.

Download BDO Authentic Leadership Report (PDF 1.4MB)

Time Management

Time management is actually a misnomer. Time has qualities that we cannot manage. Time cannot be stored, time cannot be sped up or slowed down. It is actually managing our personal effectiveness which is our goal.

The good news is everybody has the equal amount of time, so it is the only genuine "level playing field" that we actually have.

So observes Steven Nayda. "Effectively managing time is also a skill that no one can ever totally conquer. There is always room for improvement", said Steven. "So it is worth investing some time in improving our personal effectiveness".

According to him, there are three key components to establishing a sound time management (or personal effectiveness) regime;

1. Be clear about the purpose or goals of your work. These should be documented and displayed so that they can be constantly referred to. The reason for this is that prioritising our work tasks, (or as Covey so ably observed, determining what tasks are urgent and what are important cannot be achieved without having a clear goal as a reference point. Without a clear written and displayed goal for reference, prioritising will be done on an adhoc or random basis, based on personal preferences or our perspective on any given day. This will lead to inconsistent prioritising and poorer decision making.
2. Identify our time wasters. This means being very clear about what ineffective time we spend during each day or week. This may be email checking, drop in visitors, procrastination or other distractions or interruptions. For our top two time wasters we should have a clear goal for improvement. This will free up some time to be more effective.
3. Managing key work relationships is critical to time management. For bosses this means delegation, for staff and other workers, this means managing upwards. Both need to be thought through deliberately and executed in a structured way. An adhoc approach will produce disappointing results when managing work relationships. For both bosses and staff, we must also manage the relationship and expectations of our customers. This means recognising that part of our role with customers is to ensure that we help them make decisions about prioritising and setting realistic time frames for us to complete our service to them and meet their expectations. In other words good service and happy customers is about managing what the expectations are, as well as delivering on them.

This and many more time management tips will be explored in more depth and successes and failures shared in our 'How to Manage Time for Results workshop'.