Coaching Tip: The Leadership Blog

How to Overcome Poor Presentation Skills

The higher you go up the corporate ladder, your technical skills become less important and your social skills become more important.  Why is that?

If your operational management was in a technical area, you now have the ability to delegate the data gathering and analyzing tasks to others while it is your responsibility to educate the leadership of the organization and industry why, what and how action must be taken based upon what the analysis reports.  That requires face-to-face interactive conversations and presentations to various interested and influential parties.

It has been said many times, that what got you to your current position (technically-based fact-finding) won't keep you in your in your new role.   It's not unusual that 40 to 45% of leaders in new positions fail within the first 18 months of their promotion or hiring.  

Leaders often fail for a few common reasons: due to unclear or outsized expectations, a failure to build partnerships with key stakeholders, a failure to learn the company, industry or the job itself fast enough, a failure to determine the process for gaining commitments from direct reports and a failure to recognize and manage the impact of change on people.

Executive onboarding coaching (of the newly recruited or promoted executive can turnaround this high rate of failure) by helping the newly appointed leader develop the interpersonal skills necessary to succeed at the next level.  One of those important skills is being able to present their ideas and vision is a convincing manner.

Presentations are such a vital tool of living, yet many bright, talented, dedicated people never get as far in life as they'd like because they can't present to a high standard.  The fact is, people do judge by appearances.  For example, in Corporate America, a woman's wardrobe is an essential component of her presentation.  It is as important as her handshake, her eye contact and her attitude.

Many people are terrified of giving presentations.

If you have great ideas but present them poorly, many people will fail to see their worth.  You'll often be beaten by somebody whose ideas are less worthy than yours, but who presented them superlatively.  Now imagine what life would be like if you were both very smart and a great presenter.  The world would be pretty much yours for the taking!

Do You Suffer from a Lack of Coachability?

The biggest reason that new hires fail is a lack of coachability.

The 2012 hiring season is here and 46% of the people about to be hired will fail within the first 18 months on the job.  And the real surprise?  They're not going to fail for lack of skills; they will fail for lack of attitude.

When new hires fail, 89% of the time it's because of attitude and only 11% of the time because of skill.  It's not that skills aren't important, but when the top predictor of a new hire's success or failure is dependent on attitude, then attitude is clearly what we need to be hiring for.  And that requires defining the specific attitudes (both good and bad) that make a specific organization different from all the rest, and then turning the hiring and interview process focus onto those attitudes.

What do job seekers need to know about getting hired?

Because companies are now looking for attitude, as well as skill, it really changes how people need to prepare for an interview.  If you do have the right attitude, and you've got the experience to back it up, then make sure you let them know.

Networking is one way to get a company's attention, but one thing that people misconstrue is what networking is actually about.  Job seekers need to ask, "how can I add value" and then work from there.

Based on research of 20,000 new hires over a three-year period, "Hiring for Attitude" (McGraw-Hill December 2011) by Mark Murphy, CEO of Leadership IQ, reveals a new approach for choosing high performers with fantastic attitudes and great chemistry.

Here are the top five reasons why new hires failed:

Coachability (26%): The ability to accept and implement feedback from bosses, colleagues, customers, and others.

Emotional Intelligence (23%):  The ability to understand and manage one's own emotions and accurately assess others' emotions.

Motivation (17%): Sufficient drive to achieve one's full potential and excel in the job.

Temperament (15%): Attitude and personality suited to the particular job and work environment.

Technical Competence (11%):  Functional or technical skills required to do the job

Note: For what questions to ask to determine if a job candidate is "coachable" read chapter 3 of this book:

 Mark Murphy: Hiring for Attitude: A Revolutionary Approach to Recruiting and Selecting People with Both Tremendous Skills and Superb Attitude

If you are a newly recruited or promoted executive, be sure to connect with an onboarding coach before beginning your new assignment.  Why?  

Leaders often fail for a few common reasons: due to unclear or outsized expectations, a failure to build partnerships with key stakeholders, a failure to learn the company, industry or the job itself fast enough, a failure to determine the process for gaining commitments from direct reports and a failure to recognize and manage the impact of change on people.

Executive onboarding coaching (of the newly recruited or promoted executive can turnaround this high rate of failure).

7 Habits of Spectacularly Unsuccessful Executives

By Sydney Finkelstein, the Steven Roth Professor of Management at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, published "Why Smart Executives Fail" 8 years ago.

Habit # 1:  They see themselves and their companies as dominating their environment.

Habit #2:  They identify so completely with the company that there is no clear boundary between their personal interests and their corporation's interests.

Habit #3:  They think they have all the answers.

Habit #4:  They ruthlessly eliminate anyone who isn't completely behind them.

Habit #5: They are consummate spokespersons, obsessed with the company image.

Habit #6: They underestimate obstacles.

Habit #7: They stubbornly rely on what worked for them in the past.

The bottom line: If you exhibit several of these traits, now is the time to stamp them out from your repertoire.  If your boss or several senior executives at your company exhibit several of these traits, now is the time to start looking for a new job.

 John Agno: Can't Get Enough Leadership: Book Notes & Coaching Tips

 

Is Higher Education Too Expensive for the Middle Class?

The middle class has traditionally believed that higher education was crucial for climbing the success ladder and making money.

Parents of the Baby Boomer generation encouraged their children to choose college majors that would insure them economic success during their adult life.  However, many boomer college students decided to take more liberal education options having little fear of finding careers that paid well.  Born as the West was emerging from the trauma of the Second World War, graduating from university as hostility to the Vietnam draft plunged campuses into turmoil and helped to spawn the counter culture, the “Baby Boomers” have been shaped by turbulent social and political change.

These boomers were born into the beginning of a long and prosperous world economy.  Their children, who also grew up in prosperity had the luxury of their helicopter parents guiding them through their younger years.   The Gen Y or Millennials children were encouraged by their boomer parents to complete their university studies to guarantee a promising future.

Now, as the world economy dips into a long period of economic recession, the boomers approach their retirement years---while many still support their unemployed or underemployed adult children.  

The grassroots leadership protesters at Occupy __________ may not have put forth an explicit set of demands yet, but there is one thing that they all agree on: student debt is too damn high.  Since the late nineteen-seventies, annual costs at four-year colleges have risen three times as fast as inflation, and, with savings rates dropping and state aid to colleges being cut, students have been forced to take on ever more debt in order to pay for school.

The past decade has seen a student-loan binge, so that today Americans owe well over six hundred billion dollars in college debt.  That's a burden that's hard to carry at a time when more than two million college graduates are unemployed and millions more are unemployed.

Wages for college graduates actually fell over the past decade, and the unemployment rate for recent grads is close to ten percent.  That's hardly a ringing endorsement of the economic value of education.  Though recent college grads are having a hard time finding a job, it's much higher for recent high-school graduates, who have an unemployment rate of nearly twenty-two percent.

Can only the Wealthy Can Afford College Today?

A Georgetown University study of the class of 2010 at the country’s 193 most selective colleges found that as entering freshmen, only 15 percent of students came from the bottom half of the income distribution.  Sixty-seven percent came from the highest-earning fourth of the distribution. These statistics mean that on many campuses affluent students outnumber middle-class students.

“We claim to be part of the American dream and of a system based on merit and opportunity and talent,” Mr. Anthony Marx, a political scientist and president of Amherst College, says. “Yet if at the top places, two-thirds of the students come from the top quartile and only 5 percent come from the bottom quartile, then we are actually part of the problem of the growing economic divide rather than part of the solution.”

For all of the ways that top colleges have become diverse, their student bodies remain shockingly affluent.  At the University of Michigan, more entering freshmen in 2003 came from families earning at least $200,000 a year than came from the entire bottom half of the income distribution.  At some private colleges, the numbers were even more extreme.

Perhaps, it is time for America to figure out its priorities by pulling back from attempting to solve worldwide issues and begin concentrating on domestic solutions....

Source: The New Yorker, November 21, 2011 and The New York Times, May 25, 2011

Boomer Retirement Life Tips explores their personal strategy and saving for retirement to where they will retire, how to handle aging parents and adult children, to health and wellness tips for aging like fine wine and deciding on a phased retirement or encore career. 

Sample for free or purchase for $2.99 this new retirement life tips ebook at: www.smashwords.com/books/view/106452

Sample or purchase Kindle Edition for $2.99

Sample or purchase Nook/iPad Edition for $2.99

Personal Leadership Philosophy

To create your personal leadership philosophy, you must define your principles or rules of conduct.  These principles you will live and work by are called maxims.  In the context of the leadership maxims approach, it is a short, personally meaningful, and easily explained statement that reflects one of your assumptions & beliefs about leadership.

Maxims do not contain buzzwords ( like leverage, optimize, outside the box, win-win ).  Maxims are simple, clear statements that serve as reminders for how you want to behave and lead and how you want your team members to behave.  When written well, your leadership maxims become simple daily reminders of how you should behave so your actions are consistent with who you want to be as a leader.

The all-encompassing nature of your leadership maxims provides you a means for living your leadership philosophy during every waking moment of your existence.  It is that constant application of your leadership maxims that strengthen the leader you are and will become.  Theory is nice.  Application is where you have an impact on the world around you.

The approach outlined in "One Piece of Paper" by Mike Figliuolo will help you to clarify, for yourself and others, the heart of your personal leadership philosophy, and to do so simply enough that you can capture it on a single piece of paper.  As you apply this method, you will write down fifteen to twenty emotionally powerful statements or reminders of personal events that will serve to guide your behaviors on a daily basis.

To get a complete view of your leadership philosophy, you need to evaluate four aspects of leadership:

Leading yourself: what motivates you and what are your rules of personal conduct?

Leading the thinking: where are you taking the organization and how will you innovate to drive change?

Leading your people: how can you lead them as individuals rather than treating them like faceless cogs in the machine?

Leading a balanced life: if you are burned out, you are worthless.

All four aspects of leadership are equally important.  If you truly want your philosophy to be well-constructed, the tools you use should all come from the same toolbox.  This book is that toolbox:

 Mike Figliuolo: One Piece of Paper: The Simple Approach to Powerful, Personal Leadership

Download "Can't Get Enough Leadership" to your computer: Add to Cart

Kindle Edition (preview or buy): John Agno: Can't Get Enough Leadership: Book Notes & Coaching Tips

 ePub/Nook Format: http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Cant-Get-Enough-Leadership/John-Agno/e/2940012474339

 Buy all ebook formats at Smashwords: http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/64141

Your Genius

Are you a genius?  This very question was asked at the 2010 TEDGlobal Conference in a powerful talk that redefined genius as something we all have, but need to find within.

 "No man is born into the world whose work is not born with him." James Russell Lowell

Yet, we've been conditioned to believe that geniuses are something we only read about in history books; Einstein and Mozart but not us.  Genius is about identifying your assets (skills, strengths, passions, creative abilities, assumptions/beliefs, values, guiding principles, vision and expertise) because these intangibles will lead you to your unique genius.

The place to start in assessing your genius is to take some self-assessments that help you know yourself better and identify your innate signature talents.  Then begin to identity your unique life purpose or life signature.

Your assets include all of your natural and cultivated aptitudes and skills.  The simplest way to view your assets is to think of them as professional capabilities that are predominantly cultivated on the left (logical) side of your brain. You have likely been programmed to assess your market value based on those attributes since you were a child.  For most people, the best measure of their human capital, at least in the workplace, is measured within the context of personal accomplishments.

Next, answer these five tough questions:

1. If you were on your deathbed and you wanted to tell your children -- or the young people to whom you are close -- the three most important things that you've learned in your life, what would they be?
2. What gives you the greatest joy, satisfaction and renewal in your life and how could you do more of it?

3. Who are you without your job, your money?  Describe in detail.

4. What activities could you add to your life that would be a source of richness and joy!

5. Think of someone you admire deeply--and explain why.

The message is: Life is not a dress rehearsal.  You can solve your problems using the mind you know you have.  You can stop seeking answers outside yourself.  You can look within where genius lives.

It should be noted that in the business world, we don't speak much about the heart.  Yet, since all businesses are ultimately people serving people, our life's work should come from the heart. Long after your products or services have been delivered, the feelings and knowledge shared during the business relationship remain. People need connection, belonging and meaningful contribution. They need to know that their life and work matter.  Many people find that personal or career transformation is an excellent time to better understand their life's work and direction.

Leadership Skills

Though there is a debate about whether leadership is an ability people are born with or is cultivated, these skills deal with your ability to manage teams to accomplish goals and to inspire initiative in others.  Leadership skills also involve your ability to maintain a productive climate and to motivate, mobilize and meet high performance standards.

A leader has the capacity and confidence to draw others toward a desired conclusion.  This quality has saved the day countless times through history and plays a crucial role in human events.

 Gina A Rudan: Practical Genius: The Real Smarts You Need to Get Your Talents and Passions Working for YOU

 Kevin W. McCarthy: The On-Purpose Business: Doing More of What You Do Best More Profitably

How does your personality affect your decision-making?

Guest author Jeffrey Kennedy shows you how your psychological strengths and weaknesses determine your ability to "live long and prosper" in fast-moving markets.

Do your decisions rely on data, or do you go with your gut?  

Think about your most recent auto purchase.  Was it based on meticulous consumer research or did you go with a model that "felt right"?  

How about the last time you had to assemble something?  Did you read the manual first or just figure it out as you went?  

What about your most recent successful stock market trade?

Consistent trading success demands independent thinking and emotional discipline.

Jeffrey Kennedy, our Chief Commodity Analyst and highly-respected tutorial instructor, says:

I just cannot stress enough how you have to manage your emotions whenever you're on [a] position.

Field dependence can sabotage you unknowingly when you're trading, because you'll see a trade signal, the trade will be there, but "it just won’t feel right."

[It's] one of those things that can sabotage us if we're not aware of it, or, more importantly, [don't] have a well-defined methodology and the discipline to follow it.

In footage from his trading course in Las Vegas, he goes on to discuss the psychological profile that makes "the best trader:"

Learn more about managing your emotions, developing your trading methodology, and the importance of discipline in your trading decisions in The Best of Trader's Classroom, a FREE 45-page eBook from Elliott Wave International.

Since 1999, Jeffrey Kennedy has produced dozens of Trader's Classroom lessons exclusively for his subscribers. Now you can get "the best of the best" in these 14 lessons that offer the most critical information every trader should know.

Find out why traders fail, the three phases of a trader's education, and how to make yourself a better trader with lessons on the Wave Principle, bar patterns, Fibonacci sequences, and more!

Don't miss your chance to improve your trading. Download your FREE eBook today!

This article was syndicated by Elliott Wave International and was originally published under the headline What Personality Type Makes the Best Trader?.  EWI is the world's largest market forecasting firm. Its staff of full-time analysts led by Chartered Market Technician Robert Prechter provides 24-hour-a-day market analysis to institutional and private investors around the world.

Getting to know yourself better is important in achieving success.   To know how you "standout,"  go to: http://www.coachingtip.com/2011/09/how-do-you-standout-as-a-leader.html

What is EntreLeadership

EntreLeaders understand that ultimately the only power they can use to grow a quality team is the power of persuasion.  Persuasion is pulling the rope and positional leadership is pushing the rope.  And we all know you can't push a rope.

You cannot lead without passion.  Passion causes things to move, and passion creates a force multiplier.  Passion actually covers a multitude of sins.  Real EntreLeaders care deeply, and that is basically what passion is.  Passion is not yelling or being wild; it is simply caring deeply.  When you care deeply about the organization, lots of things start to happen naturally.

"Nothing happens unless first a dream." Carl Sandburg

EntreLeaders are always dreaming about what can be and what is yet to come.  We wake up in the morning and have two ideas over coffee, three more on our morning run and six more ideas when in the shower.   Dreaming is the lifeblood of people and organizations that are alive and thriving.

Being able to "see" is a skill that must be present or developed in an EntreLeader.  People with no vision simply have jobs; they exist but aren't going anywhere because they aren't aware there is anywhere to go.  In Proverbs the Bible says, "Where there is no vision the people perish."   With no vision in your organization, you perish; you can't make payroll, your team becomes just employees, morale goes down, turnover goes up, sales go down.

The corporate mission statement is further clarification and definition for your dreams and vision and assures you that your goals are aimed at the right target.  The "mission statement" is based on agree-to intangibles (vision, values, guiding principles and assumptions/beliefs) by the leaders of the organization:

•Assumptions/beliefs:  A reality map formed through your collective reinforced experience.  This would be a manifesto of the mental models you use and believe in to create your work and personal lives.

•Values/Aspirations:  An attitude or world-view depicted by one word or one single concept observed through one's behavior.  Values often influence people's choices about where to invest their energies.  Please recognize that values change over time.  Being "fair" means something different for a person at 44 than at 4 years old.

•Vision:  A word picture of the future leading from now through near to far reality.  You energize people to support your purpose or life signature with an overarching description of what you see.

•Guiding Principles:  A universal operating standard that guides decision-making both personally and organizationally.  Use guiding principles to align, create trust and walk the talk by putting everybody on the same playing field.  Energy isn’t wasted in the politics of the team, organization or community because there aren't different rules for everybody.

For Peter Drucker, leadership is about communicating with people, uniting them behind a shared mission and values, and mobilizing energies toward accomplishing the mission or purpose of an organization.  An effective leader leads followers with dignity, and inspires them toward achievement.  That means that leadership is a means to an end--the mission it serves is the end.

Goals convert vision/mission into energy.  When you lay out exactly what you want to do in detail, you immediately start feeling the room move and the earth shake.   Your business plan is comprised of a series of: goals (the main objective), sub-goals or tasks required to achieve the goal, key success factors (metrics) and standards (quality requirements).

A goal must have these characteristics:

1.  Have economic value.

2.  Require an action by someone (beside yourself)

3.  Specify an accomplishment date.

4.  Be realistic.

5.  Allow for impartial evaluation.

The way to create unity is through shared personal goals.  For example, if you know the salesperson next to you is saving to buy his first home two years from now, you are his biggest cheerleader when he makes a sale.  In short, this creates relationships.  Many business leaders have made a huge mistake in separating the tasks or sub-goals from the person and his or her life.

Sources:  Dave Ramsey: EntreLeadership: 20 Years of Practical Business Wisdom from the Trenches

Your Leadership Checklist

Reality Checklist for Entrepreneurs

Seven Principles of Marketing

Sales by Objectives (SBO) slide show (click and then scroll down)

 

Download "Can't Get Enough Leadership" to your computer: Add to Cart

Kindle Edition (preview or buy): John Agno: Can't Get Enough Leadership: Book Notes & Coaching Tips

 

ePub/Nook Format: http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Cant-Get-Enough-Leadership/John-Agno/e/2940012474339

Buy all ebook formats at Smashwords: http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/64141

How Do You Standout as a Leader?

Your genius is precise and will play out as your life signature....but only if you know what your comparative advantage is and build on it throughout your life.

That, my friends, is the message for experiencing the third generation of those self-assessments that help you to better understand what your signature talents are and how you can express them in your life: first: Now Discover Your Strengths, second: StrengthsFinder 2.0, and now StandOut by author Marcus Buckingham.

As most of us do, you probably struggle to find the right words to capture what makes you stand out.  You are either too vague: "I like challenge."  Or you overcompensate, and lurch into flagrant self-promotion.

Without knowing their individual employee and corporate strengths, many leaders have tried to replicate innovations as best practices (read: benchmarking) throughout an organization without success; because one-size-doesn't-fit-all.  Yet, every organization has the ability to scale innovation among employees by creating an effective configuration that amplifies individuals' strengths.

The problem is that most leaders don't know how to take his or her performance to next level and become a linchpin for corporate success.   All great leaders rally people to a better future, but each does it differently.  Authenticity is the currency of effective leadership but you first must know your natural leadership edge and which practices will accelerate your growth and effectiveness as a leader.

Where other self-assessments stop at description, StandOut takes the next step and provides practical advice on what to do to make the most of one's strengths.  The StandOut assessment measures individuals on nine Strength Roles revealing their top two.   These two Strength Roles are where a leader will make his or her greatest contribution.  They are your edge--where you have a natural advantage over everyone else.  And these strengths are your multiplier--where you most quickly learn and improve upon any innovations, techniques or best practices that complement these two roles:

Where you will be at your most powerful.

How you can make an immediate impact.

How you can win as a leader.

For example, my top two StandOut strength roles are "Equalizer" and "Pioneer" because I love order but thrive in the unknown---an explorer, yet I am grounded in intelligent argument.  I know how to articulate my values and guiding principles clearly and concisely (nobody has to guess) and this makes my relationships straightforward and simple.  The greatest value I bring to my target audiences and followers is: I won't allow us to charge ahead without proper preparation.

As a structured and optimistic leader, I inspire followers to bet against the law of averages to achieve higher and sustained performance.   My career or life signature is bringing order to opportunity.  An organized trailblazer, I have forged ahead with a clear purpose, and with confidence that comes from knowing that my "supply lines" would not be broken.

Specifically, I excelled as a junior military officer during the Vietnam Conflict Era.  I was recognized as an officer of initiative who advances boldly yet is never reckless.  Early in my military service, I competed for the position of "Top Gun" or "Honor Graduate" of our 70+ officer leadership class with Lt. Ron Brown (who was the first African -American member of his and my Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity.  He later became U.S. Secretary of Commerce and, while holding this position, was killed, along with 34 others, in a 1996 plane crash in Croatia).  That and other military and corporate leadership experience built on my signature talent to create order while pushing beyond the boundaries of current understanding.

Once you take the StandOut self-assessment, you too will see where  your "ideal career" has shown itself and allowed you to acquire the self-knowledge that will continually lead toward expressing your desired life signature.

 Marcus Buckingham: StandOut: The Groundbreaking New Strengths Assessment from the Leader of the Strengths Revolution

 Tom Rath: StrengthsFinder 2.0

 Marcus Buckingham: Now, Discover Your Strengths

 

Overcoming the Oxymoron: Family Business

Over the past few years, more family-firm leaders have been turning to executive-education courses tailored to their needs.  Instead of just teaching the best way to run a business, the courses focus on overcoming the unique obstacles that family ties can pose—such as succession planning and poor communication among relatives.

Currently, the Family Firm Institute lists 182 schools offering family-business courses, including two dozen targeted executive-education programs throughout the world. The list of educational offerings has increased by about 20% in the past five years.

Several company executives are encouraged to attend at the same time, and a large part of the courses involves getting everyone at the company on the same page, often through team exercises like role playing. The instructors act partly as professors and partly as counselors, giving advice on navigating current family conflicts as they teach business theory.

Having one sibling promoted over another, say, may elicit a more emotional reaction than it would in a business that's not family-owned.  So companies and families are encouraged to set up objective processes they must follow for all decisions, to eliminate the perception of bias.

Learning to listen to each other:

Discussions can get heated, the same way they would around a family dining-room table.  Sometimes family members storm out of the room, and tears are not uncommon.

A look at some of the top sources of friction in family businesses includes the percentage of company leaders who said these cause "some" or "a lot" of tension as surveyed by PriceWaterhouseCoopers.US in 2010 & 2011:

30%  Discussions about future strategy

27%  Performance of family members actively involved in the business

22%  Decisions about reinvesting profits vs. paying dividends

19%  Decisions about who can and can't work in the business

18%  Setting of remuneration for family members actively involved in the business

15%  The role in-laws should or should not play in the business

13%  Failure of family members actively involved in the business to consult the wide family on key issues.

Source: The Wall Street Journal, August 22, 2011