I have just read an interesting article about Carey Smith – CEO of the Ray White Real Estate Group, who has some very clear views on leadership. The article states that Smith’s success is due to his “thoughtfulness, focus and his ability to relate to people – rather than aggression and a ‘win at all costs’ attitude to business.” He has been described by John Wall – CEO of Sugar International as someone who “has a very focused style of leadership. Really sitting down and having very full and deep relationships…there is no self in that conversation, it’s always “What are you doing?”” says Wall. “I think that he respects the whole person. He understands that his job is a commercial job, but people are whole people and there are other things going on in their lives that will affect their commercial lives.”
In his upcoming book – ‘Deliver’ – Smith says that the most important ingredient of business success is people. “Many people think that people join a company for values and what the company stands for and they leave the company because there’s no direction and those sort of things. The biggest lesson for me is that people join people, they don’t join companies. And people leave because of people as well. They don’t generally leave because of issues… they leave because they’ve lost trust in the person they work for.”
So what are the messages to be found in this article? Well, it seems to me that once again we are looking at a successful leader who recognises the value of their team and of the importance of developing a culture of trust and respect. The choice of words used to describe Smith’s style of leadership says a lot – “thoughtfulness, focus and an ability to relate to people.” Once again this looks like the character traits of Servant Based Leadership and is in stark contrast to hierarchical based models.
