Coaching Tip: The Leadership Blog

Mentors Wanted

Known for frequently changing jobs either because senior managers haven't invested the time to engage them or because they haven't felt committed to their companies, workers in the Gen Y or millennial generation (born between about 1978 to 2000) have an incentive for staying put now: a shrinking job market.

Finding that they can't move as easily from job to job, these young professionals will have to adjust to the new reality of working in one place for the long haul.  To do so, they have to find ways to connect with senior managers in a less-needy way and actively seek out mentors.  "Without as many opportunities...mentoring becomes a more strategic avenue for career development," says Beth Carvin, CEO and president of Nobscot Corp., a retention-management consulting firm in Honolulu.  "Most employees are surprised to discover that their companies have mentoring programs that they didn't even know about," says Ms. Carvin.

About 70% of FORTUNE 500 companies offer mentoring programs.  The human resources department or training & development department can tell you what's available.  Armed with a good understanding of what you're trying to achieve, seek out a colleague who has those skills or experiences you would like to acquire.

Source: The Wall Street Journal, January 27, 2009

Genes and Friends

Your natural talents are gifts at birth.  You had nothing to do with them.  However, you have a great deal to do with becoming aware of them and developing them into strengths. It is up to you to discover your natural signature talents and transform them through focus, practice and learning into consistent high performance.

Leaders' first awareness of a signature talent comes in late childhood or adolescence.  They then build on this competency in their first job or when some other transitional situation occurs that demands they use this signature talent more purposefully.  Focusing on what matters helps them reach clarity.

As the years go by, they regularly practice developing their signature talents into strengths. The progression from a person's first awareness of their signature talents to the point of mastery offers a clear picture of how leadership excellence is achieved.

Formula for Success:  The formula for both personal and corporate success = your human capital  (what you know and can do) times your social capital (who you know and who knows you) times your reputation (who trusts you).

 

Consumer Sentiment and Stimulus Packaging

There is a key question asked in the monthly U.S. consumer sentiment survey by the Institute of Social Research (ISR) at the University of Michigan: "One year from now will your financial situation be better, worse or about the same?"

The answer to this question determines the openness of the consumer to spend or save in the current economic climate and is an early warning signal toward where the economy is headed.  If the consumer believes that his family's take home pay will steadily increase over the next year, the family will likely continue to spend.  This is an important concept to understand when designing government stimulus packages.

For example, one explanation for why tax rebates don't have a bigger impact is that they don't affect what Milton Friedman called people's "permanent income."  Friedman argued that people's spending is determined by what they think their income will be over time: they change their spending habits only if they think they're going to be permanently wealthier or poorer.

You might think that handling people a big chunk of change is a perfect way to get them to spend it.  But it isn't, because people don't treat all windfalls as found money.  Instead, in the words of the behavioral economist Richard Thaler, people put different windfalls in different "mental accounts," which in turn influences what they do with the money.  The size of the windfall matters a lot: the bigger the windfall, the more likely it is to be saved.

The key factor in these kinds of distinctions, Thaler's work suggests, is whether people think of a windfall as wealth or as income.  If they think of it as wealth, they're more likely to save it, and if they think of it as income, they're more likely to spend it.  In Thaler's words, "People tend to consume from income and leave perceived wealth alone."

So what does this mean for making a rebate work?  You want to give them small amounts over time.  And you want the rebate to show up as an increase in people's take home pay, because an increase in steady income is more likely to translate into an increase in spending.

Source: THE NEW YORKER, January 26, 2009

Leadership: Texas Hold'em Style

The game of poker and its many variations were chosen as a means to demonstrate the art of leadership in a book that can be an excellent reference guide for leaders in the military, police, fire-fighting, emergency services and manufacturing vocations. 

The cards, the suits, the games and strategy are metaphors with which to paint a picture of leadership.  Like all art, there is an underlying element of science--a painter chooses colors, the musician notes, and the leader chooses actions.  Moreover, academic research, theories, models and practical experience are woven into the art and science of leadership.  For instance, in poker, each player draws from the same 52-card deck.  Some players are extraordinary in the application of those randomly chosen cards.  The poker player and the leader share the same dilemma---they can't choose the resources they were given, they have to play those cards.  Poker and card play are the rich metaphor from which lessons about leadership are drawn.

The rules are always the same but the hands, games and tables are always different.

Each play requires your experience and your intuition.  Your ability to read the situation, rely on your understanding of the theories of play, and your decisive use of the cards dealt.  The leadership tools in the chapters of this book are the cards.  You have to decide when to play them, when to fold, and when to raise.  Leadership is about people, not things.  That's why it's difficult.

Just as the cards change, the people at the table change.  Like your followers, some come and some go.  Perhaps more importantly, the players that stay are also growing; they are learning and changing.  What works in one hand won't work again.  Just as you figure out how to get them to line up, they will change or the environment will change. 

You have to grow with your followers.  Stay ahead and lead.  If you are a really good leader, you are going to find your followers surpassing you.  They're going to know the play before you do.  This is because one of the fundamental tasks of leadership is to grow the next batch of leaders.

  Andrew J. Harvey: Leadership: Texas Hold 'Em Style

Quantum Physics for Leaders & Dummies

We have difficulty in contemplating events of our everyday lives as quantum phenomena.

Yet, the principles of quantum physics are an essential component of what is happening around us.  We still tend to see our world operating within the empirical science that is based upon seventeenth century, Newtonian cause and effect, mechanical physics and the Cartesian split of mind and body. 

Leaders need to understand and embrace what we know of reality through quantum physics, cosmology, neuroscience and the evolution of consciousness.  Principles of quantum physics have led to high technologies like lasers, transistors and CAT scans but we have difficulty in figuring out and translating our thoughts of these 'subatomic' matter processes into our business language.

Way back in 1900, physicist Max Planck wrote a mathematical formula, on a postcard to a friend, that introduced to the world the notion of tiny, discrete bundles of energy, which behaved both as waves and as particles, and came to be known as quanta. 

This formula has become the basis of quantum physics, the strange new science that tells us reality is discontinuous and deeply paradoxical---a reality that doesn't follow the cause and effect rules of our ordinary empirical science.

Now, Lewis Little’s long-awaited book, The Theory of Elementary Waves: A New Explanation of Fundamental Physics, will revolutionize the science of sub-atomic physics.  It is as ground-breaking as Benoit Mandelbrot’s Fractal Geometry and even more radical in overturning 80 years of bad science.  Little writes for the intelligent layman, so you can follow his discussion of a field that has often posed as being too obscure and anti-intuitive for the common mind to grasp.

But anything real can be explained, and Little spares no words in tearing down the edifice of magical thinking that permeates quantum mechanics and then erecting a new structure of reasoning from real, physical action and reaction that, as he puts it, “any 8th-grader can understand.”

 Lewis E. Little: The Theory of Elementary Waves: A New Explanation of Fundamental Physics

The Mindful Leader

Before you dismiss mindfulness as New Age rhetoric, pay attention to the research. Recent studies in management science, psychology and neuroscience point to the importance of developing mindfulness and experiencing meditation.

Mindfulness meditation has long been practiced by Buddhists and others seeking greater calm and peace of mind. A Buddhist-trained HR executive, Michael Carroll encourages business leaders to take time to sit and be still. Stressed-out executives, he maintains, need a way to reconnect with themselves to become more open and, consequently, more effective.

In his new book, The Mindful Leader: Awakening Your Natural Management Skills Through Mindfulness Meditation (2008), Carroll explores the key principles of mindfulness and how they apply to leading organizations.  

Mindfulness meditation addresses a wide range of topics, including:

·         How to heal toxic workplace cultures where anxiety and stress impede creativity and performance

·         How to cultivate courage and confidence in spite of workplace difficulties and economic recession

·         How to pursue organizational goals without neglecting what’s happening here and now

·         How to lead with wisdom and gentleness, not only with ambition, relentless drive and power

·         How a personal meditation practice develops your innate leadership talents

The Art of Nonachievement

Most business books focus on how leaders can achieve more.  How can you do more, better…and faster?

This article takes the opposite tack: how and why, as leaders, you should sit and be still.

Psychologist Daniel Goleman, an authority on emotional intelligence in organizations, calls this the leadership paradox in Primal Leadership  by Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis & Annie McKee (Harvard Business School Press):

“For leaders, the first task in management has nothing to do with leading others; step one poses the challenge of knowing and managing oneself.”

This includes:

·         Connecting with deep values that guide

·         Imbuing actions with meaning

·         Aligning emotions with goals

·         Keeping motivated, focused and on task

Honing the skills of awareness leads to mindfulness — becoming aware of what’s going on inside and around us on several levels.  Mindfulness is living in a state of full, conscious awareness of one’s whole self, other people and the context in which we live and work.

Leadership and Meditation

In short, meditation is a friendly gesture toward ourselves, in which we take time to sit still for 10–15 minutes or longer.

You can meditate in your office, sitting in your chair.  Here are some essential guidelines:

·         Sit upright—relaxed, yet alert.

·         Open your eyes and maintain a soft, relaxed, downward gaze.

·         Place hands palms down, resting gently.

·         Tuck in your chin.

·         Breathe normally.

·         Observe your thoughts gently, without judgment.

·         Label your thoughts as “thinking” and dismiss them. Let them go.

·         Return your focus to your being, breathing and bodily sensations.

·         Be still.

·         Experience being you in the moment—in the now.

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Talent Management in Tough Times

Most companies now have a talent management strategy in place according to a new study by Hewitt Associates and the Human Capital Institute.  However, very few of those companies are executing that strategy successfully.  In short, plans on paper don't translate to reality in the workplace when it comes to recruiting, developing and retaining talent.

The research, entitled "The State of Talent Management: Today's Challenges, Tomorrow's Opportunities" included input from 700 senior-level talent leaders across a wide spectrum of companies.  Among the findings:

• Only 7 percent of organizations consistently hold managers accountable for developing their direct reports through performance management processes.

• Just 17 percent of respondents indicate their workforce strategy is consistently aligned with their business strategy across the organization.

• Only 10 percent of companies consistently measure the effectiveness of talent management programs.

At Convergys in Cincinnati, Senior VP of Human Resources Clark Handy says that, although the difficult economy is prompting the company to look for ways to save money, it is not pulling back on its talent management efforts.  The company is relying on its coaching and mentoring programs to keep employees engaged, says Handy.  "I've certified all my vice presidents as 'certified leadership coaches' and we've invested in external and internal coaching for all our managers.  All of these efforts were put in place within the last 18 months and they've turned out to be a lifeline of sorts in these tough times," he said.

Source: Human Resource Executive, January 2009