maria

Good morning, my name is Maria and this is my team Jac and Cookie. WHAT EACH OF US WILL FOCUS ON – 1.  I’ll be convincing you of the importance of relationships in organisations and the importance leadership influential 2.  Jacqui –People skills andThe Shepherd Metaphor 3.  Catherine – what is your foci? My team and I are sure that you will walk away from this debate this morning with no questions in your mind that for REAL change to occur in any organisation it is ESSENTIAL for strong relationships to be formed. The abilty to form connections with other people in an organisation and maintain these relationships supercedes the structural elements within orgainsations, that is, the tasks, functions, roles and positions. If we take away the people in an orgainsation we would remove all relationships and the only thing that would be left is the structure and how useful would this be??? Jus to highlight this point - if we were to remove the structure of an organisation we would still be left with PEOPLE thus RELATIONSHIPS who are still able to work together and achieve their goals and outcomes. Within any organisation a multitude of relationships exist. For instance at St Peters there are the relationships we have within our PLT’s, level teams, with parents, students with friendship groups and really this list endless. Regardless of the organisation - the most vital of these relationships are those that exist between a leader and others. For at the heart of every organisation - the people within it need to believe in the vision and in their leader to feel as though they are a part of something great. As Dwight D Eisenhower observed, “Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it” We have seen organisations be successful or ineffective because of poor relationships and bad leadership. Even though at times we are lead to believe that the success or failure of organisations is due to structural elements I would argue that if the relationships were effective within the organisation then structural elements could be modified, improved or developed. Let’s look at Google. This is a multi billion dollar company who builds a work place culture that promotes relationships – this is evident from the layout of their office, to their recruitment strategies to the strong focus they have on team building. Mind you they are not alone – there is also Virgin Blue, ANZ bank and again this list could go on and on. These organisations NEED to give credit for their success not on their structure but on the positive culture within them, thus the **relationships.** These organisations have the right idea, for they have found the secret, which is that without people and the relationships that exist as a result organisation would not exit. There would be no one to develop structural elements such as functions role position and tasks. In conclusion, I have given numerous examples of why the power and energy in organisations lies with people THUS in relationships. I have explained that leadership is the brain that can either promote or disempower people therefore Relationships and finally I have given examples of companies who have been highly successful because they placed the focus on people thus relationships NOT on structure. AND OF COURSE there are also other ways of building relationships ………………………………