Raymond O'Hara, Director of Microsoft Scotland, attended SBS to give a talk on leadership on November 19 as part of an event run jointly by SBS and the Association of MBAs (AMBA).
In what was a wide-ranging talk on various issues of leadership, he spoke on the differences between leadership and governance.
"Not everyone can be a John F Kennedy or a Martin Luther King or a Barack Obama, but anyone who is in a senior management or leadership position has a responsibility to do more than just provide governance. Governance is very important. It is vital that we have standards and rules and laws and processes, and that these must be enforced and monitored for all sorts of reasons of health, safety, privacy, security and financial integrity.
"But if all we or our leaders are doing, is standing behind these rules and regulations and processes - or worse still hiding behind them - then we are not behaving as leaders and we do not deserve to call ourselves such, especially in this challenging economic climate."
He went on, "Of course governance is vital. It is an essential element of business and government, and needs to be treated seriously by all of us. Arguably, there has not been enough governance over the last few years in some industries or sectors. If we'd had better governance, we would perhaps not have found ourselves in the global financial crisis that we are currently in. However, governance cannot and does not replace leadership!
"Leadership is about motivating our people, generating passion and excitement in our teams, looking at the future as well as the present.
"It's about making brave, bold decisions and about empowering our people and our teams in every way possible. This is something that we must all keep firmly in our minds as we drive through these current challenging times and into the up-turn which will inevitably come."
He continued, "A 'fear culture' can very swiftly emerge where mistakes have taken place, and this can spread very quickly. It takes very strong leadership to "hold the line" on this and ensure that essential governance is done and is not compromised in any way, but that non-essential, back covering is avoided at all costs because this can be a huge obstacle to motivation, productivity, performance, efficiency and profit."
Mr O'Hara also highlighted the way in which technology drives change in leadership behaviours, and emphasised the necessity for all of Scotland's businesses and people to use the best technology they can afford.
"Our businesses and government need to be incentivised and encouraged to ensure that they are technologically up to date, that they are attracting and retaining the best possible talent into their organisation by offering a great technology infrastructure for their people to work in and with.
"How interesting and satisfying is it for an employee, when every working day, he or she has to use out of date hardware, software and communications technology which doesn't even match up to what they probably have at home.
"So we need to make all of Scotland's businesses technology rich and, most importantly, ensure that this technology is delivering benefit to the people who work there, to the customers and business partners and ultimately to the bottom line. Technology is a differentiator and we must get better at using it - everywhere!"