|
Jim Clemmer is an expert on leadership and organizational development. Based in Kitchener, Ont., he trots the globe, consulting with private and public sector organizations to improve the performance of their people. Just back from meeting with a major Wal-Mart supplier in Europe, he touched down at a nursing conference in Dartmouth, N.S.
“I have a love-hate relationship with the health care sector,” he told me over a Diet Coke at the Holiday Inn. “Nurses are good people and value driven, and
I love spending time with them. But it's frustrating to see the lack of follow-through in health care management. The focus on quality of the early 1990s saw payoffs. Then politicians started to restructure the sector, but in the process they created turmoil and anxiety.”
At the senior level there has been a loss of strategic focus on quality. “Health economists say the system has enough money, but it's not spent well,” says Clemmer. “There is not enough emphasis on prevention, and too much time is spent fixing problems after they occur instead of asking if these are the right procedures.”
Then he ran down his latest week. The client in Germany is SCM (Supply Chain Management), which manages logistics for Wal-Mart in Europe. Hard to believe, perhaps, but Wal-Mart is struggling there. There was a mining association meeting in Sudbury, Ont., where the leadership “is taking courageous action on health and safety.” Next it's off to Toronto to meet with the Insurance Bureau of Canada and the Ontario Police College.
How did Clemmer get on this unusual path? With a background in sales, at age 24 he found himself the general manager of an international water-treatment company. He became interested in how to get better performance from people and left the company to join a start-up in the training sector in 1981. The Achieve Group went on to become Canada's largest consulting-and-training firm. In 1994 he founded his own company, The Clemmer Group.
To keep himself on track, he starts the day by meditating and is an avid runner. His wife is also with the company. “Life and work is a blurry line,” he admits. What are the common leadership weaknesses he sees on his travels? “The big one is how core issues within the dynamics of the management team ripple out into the culture of the whole company.” |
For example, if a company is struggling with customer service, management may come to him and say they want to develop a training program for staff. “But really the management team itself is not serving the front lines. There is no harmony—no culture of service. So of course it is reflected with customers.”
The core issue is often how the management team sets strategy, not how good the processes are. The art of consulting is to improve the effectiveness of management teams by finding out where they are at the moment. “What is the pain they are feeling? Start there, but it is usually a symptom of a deeper problem,” says Clemmer. “I may try to convince them to go on a two-day executive retreat to find out what the deeper issues are.”
He recalls a recent retreat where, at the end of day one, there had been little progress. Participants wanted to “bolt on” a solution instead of build it into the company culture. “The next morning
I kept pushing back on the disconnects between strategy and procedures—how they have to manage differently. Suddenly they saw that the issues were a lot bigger than they thought. They felt overwhelmed, but they were excited too because they saw how they could improve. It's like the judo principle. Find the opponent's pain, redirect his energy, but don't fight it. I use my intuition here. After a while you start to recognize patterns. On the other hand, as a consultant you can get too confident and screw up.”
In the last 10 years, it has become easier to discuss people issues such as leadership, organizational development, and EQ. “Yet often people have read one book on leadership and think they know it all, but they don't,” says Clemmer. “The challenge is to help them unlearn what they think they know—to give them a shift in perspective. It's easier to work with a green field instead of a brown field, with managers who have been so busy trying to grow a company that they recognize they don't know anything about leading people.”
Clemmer looks at his watch. It's time to catch another flight. “Everyone wants to know, what's new in the field of leadership?” he says, getting up. “But I ask instead, what's working in your organization? Let's find out why and do more of it and stop doing what isn't working. Too often people want shortcuts, a quick fix. They don't want to do the hard work, which is about themselves. That's what is needed to build a strong foundation for their organization.” |
