Leadership .........Keep It True and Simple

This past week I have been very lucky to chair a number of sessions at CPA Australia’s congress (www.cpacongress.com.au) and two particular sessions brought home the idea that to deliver good leadership for your staff and your organization, you need to keep things simple.

Amanda Gore led a very fun and interactive on the need to connect your "head to your heart" when you are making decisions, and to make sure you keep them connected. Not having these linked, lead to a poor decisions, often a disgruntled staff (and family) and stress for everyone. She also advocated the need to have fun at work and to celebrate success, as she said "they don’t teach that in today’s MBA programs!"

The second session was with Michael Choudhury who presented "Effective Communicating Financial Data" sound very dry but it wasn’t. He gave a number of great examples of how to do this in a very simple and easy manner. The key is to strip away the noise and give people the information they can understand and make decisions on – keep it simple, use colour and diagrams rather than a mass of numbers. One outstanding example (and very funny) he used was on Professor Hans Rosling worth taking a look. (http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen.html#)