Karlie Cremin, CEO, Dynamic Leadership Programs Australia | The CEO Magazine

You can have the most well-oiled machine in the world at your disposal, but if the right leadership isn’t in place, it can all grind to a halt. Alternatively, the greatest leader can only go as far as their decision-making power will let them. A leader constrained isn’t truly able to lead at all.

The fact that this broad spectrum exists demonstrates why getting the leadership formula right is so important. A degree off this way or that can end up missing the mark: indecisive or ineffective leaders that can fill their days but fail to launch when required.

Karlie Cremin has built her career around shaping effective leadership. As CEO of Dynamic Leadership Programs Australia, Cremin has helped organizations develop stronger leaders through award-winning programs and strategies. And as she tells The CEO Magazine, sometimes doing the unexpected can deliver the strongest results.

“It frustrates me when people say their problem is that the workforce isn’t resilient enough,” she says. “I’m not panning resilience training, but there’s a dominant belief that if we train the individuals to be more resilient, it’ll fix the bigger problem.

“That’s a piece of it, but it’s very rarely the whole issue.”

Instead, she says, companies end up doing a lot of training that doesn’t provide any real fix.

“It kind of tarnishes a whole industry when we’re doing that,” she adds.

The human element

Dynamic Leadership Programs Australia was established to empower leaders with the skills they need to thrive in the business world in a way that’s commercially savvy, but respectful to the human element.

“The market can forgive your pricing being a little bit off, your marketing not quite hitting the mark or weaknesses in other elements of your strategy,” she explains. “But through running a management consultancy, I became aware that the only piece of the puzzle having a major impact was the people piece.”

Cremin says there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution for business leadership, which is why the organization’s methods challenge so many pre-conceived notions.

“When we look at how we can build systems where people thrive, where we’re productive and profitable and people get to do great work, that’s when we start to see really meaningful outcomes,” she says.

One of the foundations of such a construct is systems thinking, which can assess a company’s culture as a whole and determine why certain problems exist or persist.

“It’s important to have accountability, not blame,” she says. “When you start thinking and unpacking the ways that you work, you start to see the friction points to performance come out.

“When people are free to experiment, innovate and challenge key assumptions, they’re going to cope better with change on a fundamental level. Organizations become much more robust when they do that.”

Dynamic Leadership Programs Australia practices what it preaches in this regard. Cremin says one of her growth strategies is saying no to the wrong client.

“Particularly when people are starting a business, there’s a lot of power in saying no to something you know is not right,” she says. “That’s hard to do when you don’t have a full client book, but if you take on work you know won’t be successful or you can’t add value to, it consumes so much energy and focus.”

By making shrewd decisions about where to focus their company’s energy, a leader can hone a team that’s great at what they do, populated by people who want to succeed.

“Your energy’s up, your focus is up and you don’t end up as a burnout case study,” she insists.

That’s not to say being choosy should come at the expense of the bottom line – or your reputation.

“The first step is always pay your bills,” Cremin says. “But once that’s done, you should be very clear on how you add value to people and build a network of specialists that allow you to be respectful to whoever’s asking you for work.

“You don’t have to say, ‘No, you’re a bad client.’ You can say, ‘No, that’s not our bread and butter.’

“You’re articulating your value proposition in a much more effective way.”

It’s an extension of Cremin’s belief that being profitable and respecting the people in your orbit can coexist in the world of leadership.

“That’s one of the things I think we do very well, bridging the gap between those two elements,” she says.

Learning from experience

Cremin’s approach to leadership comes from experience. Earlier in her career, the ‘command and control’ style of management was her go-to.

“And I think people who knew me then would say that was quite the understatement,” she admits. “It was a different time, but I became aware that it wasn’t terribly effective, despite the energy it took up.

“Everything was by force, so you have to maintain the force to get things done. There was no momentum or inertia within the group.”

When some of her colleagues delivered some very direct feedback, Cremin took it on board and began to change.

“I don’t even know how much I spent on courses. I really did the work around looking at my core beliefs and identifying where that behavior was coming from,” she acknowledges. “I had some great coaches and then it was a matter of incremental changes so you don’t blow everything up.”

But change, no matter how small, is still change, and Cremin says that counts for much in today’s world.

“We’re at a very important societal point, giving our agency to computers that are owned and run by corporations and people we don’t know. What we’re trading away – and how much – hasn’t been fully thought through and that’s changing how we interact as humans,” she points out.

“But I believe that people are fundamentally good and I think we want good things. So if we give people space to be good, we’ll all be better.”