Posts belonging to Category leadership development

OK, first off, this is not a political post. Not in the least. I had simply heard about these rules for government, business and life that former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had scripted and decided to take a look.

Which prompted me to share.

Not to mention the fact that HRE also just received a complimentary copy of his book, Rumsfeld’s Rules: Leadership Lessons in Business, Politics, War, and Life … more fodder for sharing (though I’ll let you go find it on Amazon.com if you’re prone to purchase).

Not sure I agree with absolutely every one of his rules, but there are enough in there under his “business” banner that seem to resonate with what we’ve been reading and writing about over the years to make it worth a scroll. Here are his top six for business leaders:

When you initiate new activities, find things you are currently doing that you can discontinue — whether reports, activities, etc. It works, but you must force yourself to do it. Always keep in mind your “teeth-to-tail ratio.”

Watch the growth of middle-level management. Don’t automatically fill vacant jobs. Leave some positions unfilled for six to eight months to see what happens. You will find you won’t need to fill some of them.

Reduce the layers of management. They put distance between the top of an organization and the customers.

Find ways to decentralize. Move decision-making authority down and out. Encourage a more entrepreneurial approach.

Prune — prune businesses, products, activities, people. Do it annually.

Know your customers!

In fact, if you go through all his tips, a.k.a. “rules,” for success, you can come away with some real gems to lead your HR organization simply by replacing the words “White House,” “government” and “secretary of defense” for “HR leadership” and “business leadership” in general.

Take his first five under “Serving in the White House” and tell me these aren’t great rules to operate by in a corporate setting (you’ll need to replace “president” with “CEO” and “administrations” with “CHRO positions”):

Don’t accept the post or stay unless you have an understanding with the president that you’re free to tell him what you think “with the bark off” and you have the courage to do it.

Visit with your predecessors from previous administrations. They know the ropes and can help you see around some corners. Try to make original mistakes, rather than needlessly repeating theirs.

Don’t begin to think you’re the president. You’re not. The Constitution [or, in your case, company bylaws] provides for only one.

In the execution of presidential decisions work to be true to his views, in fact and tone.

Know that the immediate staff and others in the administration [i.e., workforce] will assume that your manner, tone and tempo reflect the president’s.

I’m leaving a ton of good ones out.

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Leaders, it turns out, can actually be a little too good at leading.

At least that’s the premise of Fear Your Strengths: What You Are Best at Could Be Your Biggest Problem. In the new book, authors Robert Kaplan and Robert Kaiser “address a glaring oversight in the field of executive development—namely the lack of attention paid to the danger of leaders taking their strengths too far,” according to a press release issued by Kaplan DeVries Inc.

Kaplan and Kaiser culled from years spent working with executives to provide examples of leaders for whom the strengths that helped push them up the ladder have ultimately undercut their effectiveness once in the boss’s seat.

For instance, one such go-getter—a division president at a large healthcare technology company—is apparently “so adept at wielding his intellectual firepower and charisma that he shuts down people around him,” according to a colleague. As a result, he explains, “people then seek to be in agreement with him rather than bringing their best thinking,” effectively disengaging team members and hampering their ability to contribute.

The authors conducted “thousands of assessments” of senior executives, in an effort to determine when these leaders’ greatest strengths could betray them. Kaplan and Kaiser identified a set of what they describe as fundamental leadership qualities—strategic leadership, operational leadership, forceful leadership and enabling leadership—that can be detrimental when overemphasized.

Many executives are “lopsided,” the authors say, and favor certain qualities at the expense of others, without even realizing it.

The notion that many leaders have a tendency to overplay their strengths is often overlooked in leadership development, according to the authors, who provide a few tips for tempering executives’ excesses.

For instance, they say, asking a leader’s colleagues whether the leader displays too much, too little or just the right amount of a certain characteristic can be instructive, and help a manager or executive find the right balance of the aforementioned qualities.

“If you literally don’t know your own strength, you have no way to calibrate or modulate it. In a relentless effort to be better, you have no way of knowing if you are going too far.”

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Josh Bersin, principal, CEO and founder at Bersin by Deloitte, delivered a content-rich, provoking opening keynote at Bersin’s Impact 2013 conference in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., Tuesday morning. The message was, in essence, that businesses and their HR functions need to do business and HR completely differently than even just a few short years ago if they’re going to compete in the global marketplace.

His vision, if you will, involves a more distributed network of HR expertise, localized for every state, country and culture. No more preaching HR from above.

Some of the top drivers of change, he said, are clear gaps in leadership, skills and education — borne out by research, Bersin’s and others’; an explosive role of technology; and disparities in economic growth and opportunity, country to country.

“Successful global interconnectedness,” he said, “means understanding what true localization really is.” He offered some examples of companies that have learned the importance of understanding what doing business in a different culture really means. Ford, for instance, before it introduced its highly successful Ford Figo in  India, knew its people had to learn what the road conditions were, what colors would sell, etc.

For HR leaders, embracing the challenges of doing business globally will mean understanding and transforming the learning culture, optimizing local talent acquisition and localizing the leadership pipeline. “High-performing leaders in certain cultures have characteristics specific only to those cultures,” Bersin told attendees.

From a business standpoint, he told me privately after the keynote, HR leaders need to embrace a more distributed HR, veering away from the old Centers of Excellence model toward one involving Networks of Expertise. The future of HR, competing in a global business world, he said, needs to “be a model where local HR specialists are trained enough to tweak [programs and initiatives] at a local level and HR leaders are creating standards based on integrating skills and information” throughout the corporation, not innovating and then passing it on down the chain.

In fact, he even went so far as to say that the concept of the HR business partner needs to be rethought and redefined. “Business partners need to be held more accountable,” he said. “They need to be more powerful and [need to be] experts locally,” much the same way houses aren’t built by generalists, but by specialists — each contributing the best of what he or she can do.

To help HR-leadership expertise along, his company introduced at the conference its Bersin by Deloitte Playbooks, step-by-step programs to help business leaders and their teams tackle current HR, talent and learning challenges — locally throughout the world — based on Bersin’s WhatWorks research.

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A new report from the Economist Intelligence Unit confirms that most chief executive officers value HR’s counsel: 70 percent of the 135 CEOs surveyed said they want HR to be involved at the highest levels of planning. However, just over half of those CEOs (55 percent) actually consider the head of HR to be a key player in strategic planning. Many of the CEOs are also concerned about their HR chiefs’ lack of business acumen, with 37 percent reporting the head of HR doesn’t “understand the business well enough.”

The EIU report is based on two surveys, one of the CEOs and the other of 100 chief financial officers, along with a series of in-depth interviews with executives and outside experts from around the world. The report was sponsored by IBM and Oracle.

The CEO survey focused on how they view the contributions of HR leaders across organizational strategy, planning and executive team management. More than half of the CEOs (55 percent) said insufficient talent within the organization is a key challenge that might harm the company financially within the next 12 months.

The CFO survey revealed that although their desire for HR to be a strategic player in key planning is even stronger than among CEOs (75 percent, compared to 70 percent), far fewer of them consider their HR counterparts as such (30 percent) than do the CEOs (55 percent).

The report notes that HR leaders can strengthen their bond with the C-suite by fostering personal relationships with them, “cultivating the chemistry of the senior management team” and finding opportunities to demonstrate their understanding of the business. With respect to CFOs in particular, the report suggests HR share goals and results “in a qualitiative way through HR metrics” and help CFOs improve their internal finance team.

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New research from the Center for Creative Leadership suggests that integrity, bravery and social intelligence are important predictors of performance for top-level executives. The research, including a poll of 246 middle managers and 191 top executives along with an analysis of feedback data from direct reports, bosses and board members, found a positive relationship between the direct report ratings of leaders’ character strengths and the boss/board member ratings of performance; the more integrity, bravery, perspective and social intelligence leaders have, the higher their performance ratings.

The research also uncovered a disconnect between C-suite executives’ perception of their own integrity vs. that perceived by their direct reports. It found that top executives tended to overrate their integrity in comparison to ratings provided by their direct reports. Meanwhile, middle managers’ ratings of their own integrity tended to hew much closer to the ratings provided by their direct reports.

For top executives, integrity was the biggest predictor of performance, accounting for just more than one-third (34 percent) of the total variance explained by all four character strengths, followed by bravery (33 percent) and social intelligence (23 percent).

Ambitious middle managers may want to focus on their own integrity and bravery: Although integrity and bravery best predict performance of top executives, social intelligence is the most important performance predictor for middle managers. In other words, the characteristic that most helped middle managers succeed in their current positions may not be enough to help them at the executive-level.

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When we regularly ask HR executives to list what keeps them up at night, keeping talent engaged is almost always at (or near) the top of the list.  So you’d think it would be in employers’ self-interests to do more about those behaviors that prevent that from happening, right?

Well, at least in the area of civility (or lack of it), it appears many employers aren’t doing nearly enough.

Of course, it’s no surprise incivility exists in today’s workplace. I’m sure you’ve personally crossed paths with it on more than a few occasions. But a just released study by Professors Christine Porath of Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business and Christine Pearson of Thunderbird School of Global Management suggests such behaviors may be a lot more  prevalent than you might think.

Indeed, Porath and Pearson, who authored an article on their findings in the Jan.-Feb. edition of the Harvard Business Review, found that nearly half of the 800 managers and employees polled report they were treated rudely at least once per week, up from a quarter of those polled in 1998.

“We heard of one boss who was so routinely abusive that employees and suppliers had a code for alerting one another to his impending arrival (‘The eagle has landed’),” they write.

But what’s even more disturbing than the rise in rude behavior is the price employers appear to be paying.

Of those surveyed, 48 percent intentionally decreased their work effort as a result of uncivil behavior, 47 percent intentionally decreased the time spent at work, 38 percent intentionally decreased the quality of their work and 12 percent left their jobs.

So what should leaders be doing about it?

Here are a few of the suggestions Porath and Pearson put to paper in their HBR
piece:

• Manage yourself.  “If employees see that those who have climbed the corporate ladder tolerate or embrace uncivil behavior, they’re likely to follow suit,” they write, noting that 25 percent of managers who admitted to having behaved badly said they were uncivil because their leaders—their own role models—were rude.

• Manage the organization, including the way you hire. “Avoid bringing incivility into the workplace to begin with,” they write, pointing out that companies like Southwest Airlines and Four Seasons put civility at the fore of their interview processes.

• Teach civility. “One quarter of the offenders we surveyed said that they didn’t recognize their behavior as uncivil,” they say.

• Reward good behavior and penalize bad behavior.

I have no idea whether these steps—and others offered by Porath and Pearson—are enough to reverse the trend. But the data suggests leaders better try something.

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It’s well understood that being president of the United States is one of the toughest jobs in the world. And from the time he entered the Oval Office, President Barack Obama was presented with a series of dizzying challenges that would’ve severely tested the most capable and experienced of leaders. That said, his administration would have had more success were it not for one thing, according to an opinion piece that ran in the Sunday New York Times: President Obama is a lousy manager.

In the essay, David Rothkopf, chief executive of the FP Group and visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, argues that Obama’s skills as a chief executive warrant only a “C” — and then “only if graded on a curve that takes into account his predecessor’s managerial weaknesses.” Despite some notable achievements in his first term — the elimination of bin Laden, the healthcare law, equal-pay legislation, financial-services reform — the administration has some shortcomings that are traceable to the way Obama has chosen to run the government, Rothkopf writes:

The administraiton has not done a good job of delegating to and empowering cabinet officials. Nor does it seem to have built necessary teams and coalitions or anticipated and planned for likely challenges. The Obama team’s failure to make the most of stimulus fudning, to make progress on climate change, to react swiftly to international crises in Egypt, Libya and Syria, and to maintain good relations with allies on Capitol Hill and beyond stem from lack of managerial skill.”

The seemingly united Obama presidency is, in fact, “a fractitious group whose members are often at odds with one another,” writes Rothkopf. Part of the problem is that unlike most previous presidents, Obama didn’t have any executive or leadership experience that would have served as a template for running a government effectively, he writes. Then, there’s the president’s aloofness and the “stranglehold” that long-time associates allegedly have over his time and attention, which leaves many top advisers feeling shut out and disconnected from him, according to Rothkopf. The president’s allies in Congress feel that he doesn’t consult with them, he writes, and the nation’s CEOs don’t feel listened to, either:

Chief executives who have visited the White House for much-publicized consultations with the president and senior staff report that Mr. Obama appears to be more interested in delivering his message than in listening to others. This, too, speaks to Mr. Obama’s management weakness. Selecting a diverse team, creating a system in which ideas surface, listening to those ideas and then empowering others to put them into action are the cornerstones of good management — and of effective leadership.”

Rothkopf is fair enough to note that Obama has been stuck with one of the most unpopular and dysfunctional Congresses in recent history. He further notes that part of the problem is the American public: “The American electorate doesn’t ask questions about management skills.” And neither does Congress, when it comes to scrutinizing appointees to run large government agencies, he writes.

Rothkopf’s essay does not note the general consensus that Obama’s two presidential campaigns have been some of the most effective and well-run in recent history – feats that surely speak to some level of management skill. And, plenty of other observers feel that Obama is a skillful manager and leader. A survey conducted last spring by the University at Buffalo School of Management of 100 professors who specialize in American politics and the presidency, asking participants to rate Obama and Republican nominee Mitt Romney on leadership skills, gave a significant edge to Obama. Participants, who were asked to rate both men on the School of Management’s LeaderCORE program, gave Obama signficantly better scores than Romney on seven of the 10 competencies.

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The ability to recognize one’s own faults is in itself considered a positive personal attribute.

Many bosses, however, seem to lack the self-awareness and/or introspective powers necessary to look inside themselves, identify shortcomings and start working to overcome them.

Or at least some of their employees think that’s the case.

A recent poll of 2,700 North American workers, conducted by leadership consulting and research firm Healthy Companies International, found that more than one-third (37 percent) of employees said their managers “lack openness around personal strengths and weaknesses.”

Leaders are largely judged on – and rewarded for — results, which leads to a sharper focus on the strengths that lead to achievement rather than the weaknesses that may somehow diminish them, says Stephen Parker, president of Arlington, Va.-based Healthy Companies International.

“Also, the more senior a leader becomes, the less authentic feedback he or she is likely to get,” he adds.

But, while managers may find fewer and fewer equals to provide honest appraisals as they climb the ranks , HR leaders can step in to fill that gap, says Parker.

HR should model a personal development process that speaks directly to [leaders’] strengths and weaknesses. It’s also crucial that reward systems include the use of 360-degree feedback, and that leaders be held accountable for developing and executing robust development plans for themselves and members of their teams. Effective reward systems balance the focus between short-term financial and operational goals with leadership behaviors that support a healthy culture and encourage lifelong learning for both leaders and their teams.”

HR should also ensure that strong leadership development programs are in place for future managers and executives as well, continues Parker.

“In addition to offering a key competitive advantage in terms of attracting and retaining talent, high-potential programs are critical to sustaining organizational capability. They also offer the opportunity to develop a basic leadership skill from the very beginning: The ability to both give and receive constructive feedback. Mastering this skill will not only propel the individual, but the company as well. Viewed this way, understanding and appreciating the balance between one’s strengths and weaknesses becomes a clear competitive advantage.”

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The top companies for developing leaders build innovation and idea-sharing into their corporate systems. This, according to the seventh annual Best Companies for Leadership Study, released today by the Philadelphia-based Hay Group. (Here’s a release from Business Wire about the study, and here are the top 20 companies, with General Electric and Procter & Gamble topping the list.)

According to Hay’s study, the Best Companies for Leadership create workplace environments and processes that enable innovation to thrive. In fact, 90 percent of the top 20 report that, if individuals have excellent ideas, they can bypass the chain of command without the threat of negative consequences, compared to only 63 percent of other companies.

“Many companies prize innovation,” says Rick Lash, director in Hay Group’s Leadership and Talent practice, “but the Best Companies for Leadership approach it in a disciplined way by building agile organizations, promoting collaboration, celebrating successes, learning from setbacks and fostering a culture that encourages a passion for innovation throughout the organization.”

To do that, they “train and develop their people, celebrate diversity [and] reward collaboration …,” says Susan Snyder, a senior principal in the practice and co-leader, along with Lash, of the study.

Their announcement got me thinking about a news analysis I’m currently working on (to be posted on HREOnline^™ in the near future) tied to this global study by New York-based Towers Watson on what makes companies succeed in organizational change management. (Here’s Towers Watson’s press release about the study.)

The study finds nearly two-thirds (65 percent) of companies with the best change-management outcomes follow a formal, systematic process, compared with just 14 percent of companies that just can’t seem to get it right.

Also, 45 percent of respondents in the Towers Watson study (604 organizations worldwide) with high change effectiveness have staffs dedicated to change-management efforts, versus just 16 percent of those with low effectiveness. Seventy-six percent of the former also set measurable goals for the imapct of changes and 73 percent measure their progress against their goals.

I’ll be interviewing a few folks later this week about more of the specifics that companies are doing, and should be doing, around change management. But for now, based on both sets of findings, I think it’s safe to say that, if you want to get the really big HR goals right (leadership development, innovation, change mangagement, talent management … you know the list better than me), you can’t just talk about them, or go to conferences and hear about them, or complain to the executive team about their absences from your organization.

You have to have clearly defined and well-designed structures and disciplines to make them happen. You have to assign staffs to them. And make sure you’re measuring them, too.

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Came across this release from PDI Ninth House that, though somewhat intuitive, did seem off the beaten path from most research I come across looking at what makes workers tick.

According to the company’s Pulse on Leaders studies, using data collected by PDI Ninth House and analyzed by University of Minnesota researchers, business leaders who rated their skills significantly higher than ratings provided by their bosses are more than six times more likely to derail than those who display signs of being more “in touch” with their actual work performance.

In one study, U. of M. researchers looked at 360-degree ratings of more than 39,000 global leaders and compared the leaders’ ratings of their own performance with those given by their direct managers. Those considered to be in touch with their self-assessments — meaning their ratings closely matched those of their direct managers — were at little risk of derailment, while strong self-promoters were more than six times (629 percent) as likely to derail as the in-touch group.

(Perhaps what raised my eyebrows the most was the dramatic difference between the two groups. I don’t think I’ve ever seen behavioral research showing a 629 percent difference between two sides of anything before.)

In another study, 14,000 U.S. business leaders were asked to rank their employees on 135 behaviors representing 24 core competencies. Those leaders considered by their direct managers to be most likely to derail flunked the following:

• Demonstrates awareness of own strengths and weaknesses
• Creates an environment where people work their best
• Expresses disagreement tactfully and sensitively
• Has the confidence and trust of others
• Develops effective working relationship with higher management
• Develops effective relationships with peers

” … as both studies show, success depends on a realistic view of one’s own strengths and weaknesses,” says Lou Quast, vice president and executive consultant at PDI Ninth House, and associate chair of the U. of M.’s department of Organizational Leadership, Policy and Development at the College of Education and Human Development.

“Managers [or HR professionals] noting shortfalls in any of these specific behaviors should take the initiative to intervene: coach early and often,” he says.

(One thing I think I can safely say about HR professionals themselves: I don’t think very many of the ones I’ve met stand much of a chance of derailment due to self-promotion. Almost to a person, they are some of the most self-critical and self-aware folks I’ve ever met. I realize this parting thought probably has nothing to do with the rest of this post, but … just thought I’d share.)

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