Coaching Tip: The Leadership Blog

Could 33% of Your Managers be Incompetent?

Half of all employees believe their managers are competent or very competent, according to an online survey conducted by Right Management of 764 North American individuals during July 2010.

However, an alarmingly high level of employees – 33 percent – think their managers are either somewhat or completely incompetent with an additional 17 percent only marginally impressed with managerial competence.

The question asked was: “How would you rate your manager’s performance?”  The findings were:

§  28% Very competent

§  22% Competent

§  17% Somewhat competent

§  13% Somewhat incompetent

§  20% Incompetent

“It surprised us that as many as half of employees are less than enthused about their manager’s performance,” said George P. Herrmann, Executive Vice President Americas for Right Management.  “The recent business climate has necessitated many fast and reactive changes – often quick decisions without explanations of rationale provided to employees. We interpret the results as highlighting the lack of trust between many employees and their managers.”

“With the volume of change surrounding most businesses – layoffs, restructurings, changes in business strategy – most managers have had their hands full managing the business and meeting aggressive goals with fewer resources,” noted Herrmann. 

One common challenge is that many organizations don’t provide managers with coaching or support to develop the behaviors that are important for driving engagement and leading through all the changes faced regularly in today’s business climate,” advised Herrmann. “Many managers are focused on ‘managing’ and getting things done, with little effort on leading and empowering others to navigate organizational change. ‘Managerial competence’ needs to be redefined and then align the manager’s development, recruitment and succession initiatives accordingly.”

“It’s a manager’s responsibility to make sure that employees know their role in the future success of the organization – no matter what the change in business strategy,” said Herrmann. “Without knowing this, trust will be eroded, employees will become disengaged and business goals will not be realized.”

Political Savvy Leaders

To become politically savvy and build your power base:

1.   Map the political terrain. Identify all stakeholders and how they will react.  Recognize that some resistance is inevitable.

2.   Get them on your side. Build your coalition — a politically mobilized group committed to implementing your idea because doing so will generate valued benefits.

3.   Make things happen through leverage. You must win others’ buy-in by making it clear there’s a payoff for supporting your efforts and drawbacks for refusing to join your coalition.

 Jeffrey Pfeffer: Power: Why Some People Have It and Others Don't

Leadership Persuasion

Persuasion has four elements:

1.    Credibility: Credibility is built on trust and expertise, and it must be earned.  People will believe you have expertise and are worthy of their trust if you exercise sound judgment and demonstrate a history of success.
 

2.    An understanding of the audience: Identify the decision makers and centers of influence.  Determine their likely receptivity and personal agendas.
 

3.    A solid argument: What is perfectly sensible to you may elude others — especially those who are already opposed to your ideas and prepared to resist.

You can improve your chances of persuading them when your case:

a.    Is logical and consistent with facts and experience

b.    Strikes an emotional cord

c. Favorably addresses the interests of the parties you hope to persuade

d.    Neutralizes competing alternatives

e.    Recognizes and deals with the politics of the situation

f.  Comes with endorsements from objective and authoritative third parties
 

4.    Effective communication: Don't mistakenly think that logic and rationality will win out and persuade people to your side.  Effective communication appeals to people’s emotions, tapping into universal human values and desires.  Appeal to both hearts and minds.

 Bill Lane: Jacked Up: The Inside Story of How Jack Welch Talked GE into Becoming the Worlds Greatest Company

Leveraging Your Resources to Gain Power

When you need others to give their best efforts in the face of differing ideas and opinions, you need leverage — and powerful people use several strategies to advance their agendas.

1. Leverage Resources.

Whenever you have discretionary control over resources — money, equipment, space and/or information — you can use them to build a power base.

Helping people evokes reciprocity, a universal drive to want to repay a favor — even without making it explicit that there’s a quid pro quo.

Money is not the sole source of leverage.  Access to information or key people can be even more valuable.

2. Shape Behaviors with Rewards and Punishments.

In international companies and governments, leaders reward those who help them and punish those who stand in their way.  You may disagree with this approach, but it remains an important tool for building a power base.

Leaders who effectively wield influence make it clear that subordinates will reap rewards if they help and problems if they refuse to pitch in.

3. Make the Vision Compelling.

It’s easier to exercise power when you’re aligned with a compelling, socially valuable objective.  Similarly, power struggles inside companies seldom revolve around blatant self-interest.  At the moment of crisis and decision, clever combatants typically invoke shareholders’ interests, company values and mission, and causes greater than short-term or personal interests.

 Jeffrey Pfeffer: Power: Why Some People Have It and Others Don't

Managers who Avoid Power

Jeffrey Pfeffer, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business and author of Power: Why Some People Have It—And Others Don’t, cites three barriers that cause executives to shy away from using power to extend their influence.

1.    The belief that the world is a just place: If you do a good job and behave appropriately, do you assume things will take care of themselves? When others make self-aggrandizing, envelope-pushing power plays, do you dismiss them instead of watching to see if you can learn something?

Believing in a just world makes you less powerful by:

a.    Limiting your willingness to learn from all situations and people — even those you don’t like or respect

b.    Anesthetizing you to the need to proactively build a power base — an outcome that blinds you to potentially career-damaging landmines
 

2.    Leadership literature and popular business books: Many successful authors will tout their careers as models to emulate, but they’ll often gloss over the power plays they’ve used to get to the top.
 

3.    Your delicate self-esteem: Any experience of failure puts their self-esteem at risk.  If you fail to actively seek and gain power, you won’t view your lack of it a personal failure — a phenomenon known as “self-handicapping.”

 Jeffrey Pfeffer: Power: Why Some People Have It and Others Don't

Leadership Persuasion Using Power & Politics

Successful leaders must use power, political savvy and persuasion to bring their ideas to fruition.

Many executives, however, are uncomfortable with power or office politics, viewing them as the dark side of workplace behavior. They believe job satisfaction, morale and commitment erode when politics dominate the environment.

But research clearly shows that being politically savvy and building a power base pay off.

Sources of Power

There are three sources of power in an organization: positional, relational and personal:

1.    Positional power: Your title and job status confer some level of formal power.
 

2.    Relationships: Informal power stems from the relationships and alliances you form with others.  If you do a favor for someone, the law of reciprocity ( www.LawofReciprocity.com ) impacts your relationship.
 

3.    Personal: Some people generate power based on their knowledge, expertise, technical competencies and ability to articulate ideas or a vision that others will follow.  Your communication skills, charisma and trustworthiness help determine your personal power.

Open Influence

Executives and managers who are open to peers’ and subordinates’ input garner greater respect than those who resist others’ influence.  An openness to influence demonstrates trust and respect, which become reciprocal and contagious.

You can offer goods and services to a potential ally in exchange for cooperation: technical assistance, information, lease of space or equipment, a plum assignment and the like.  Understand what others want or value.

Empowering CEOs

Over the last few decades, the growth of business intelligence (BI) has enabled companies to streamline many processes and expand into new markets on an unprecedented scale.  In addition, new BI technologies are enabling mass collaboration and innovation.

However, the implementation of these BI solutions often gives rise to new challenges.  There are five essential competencies that must be mastered to improve an organization's ability to leverage the new opportunities in a volatile global economy.  These competencies are communication, collaboration, innovation, adaptability, and leadership.

One of the most challenging aspects of leading in the new world model is giving up the need for control.  And yet, with the complexity of business today, it is impossible to micromanage from the top.  Not only is it less effective to operate with a top-down leadership style, but it diminishes so much of the energy, wisdom, and vitality of the organization.  In the article, "The Paradox of Empowerment," Wayne Baker states that "empowerment means letting go while taking control.  Often this requires leaders to transform the work environment by actively changing "the way people work, relate, think and feel."  However, they must also allow time for the new empowerment to "take root, grow and thrive."

"Like any paradox, the paradox of empowerment is full of traps.  It ensnares CEOs who cannot accept or live in the contradiction of taking control and letting go.  Such CEOs become abdicators or meddlers.  Those who thrive in the paradox become coaches who learn how to cultivate true empowerment."

Meddlers never really give up control.  They say they want self-managed teams, but they often stay too involved and tend to micromanage.  This results in team members delegating upward and abdicating responsibility.  "Coaches [, however] know the difference between intervention and interference."

Empowering CEOs are experts at tapping into the natural desire of people to work in fulfilling and productive jobs.  They know that people are motivated by many things besides money, such as "belonging, mastery, self-esteem, achievement, respect."  Meddlers, who generally distrust human nature, feel their employees must be coerced into doing their jobs.

Empowering CEOs create an environment of collaboration and self-direction.  They create effective social mechanisms, such as high-level networks that unite and build community.

Source:  Olivia Parr Rud: Business Intelligence Success Factors: Tools for Aligning Your Business in the Global Economy (Wiley and SAS Business Series)

Fast-Changing Customer Needs Require Corporate Interdependence

Why is it harder today than ever to develop an outside-in orientation?

Part of the answer is complexity.  Customers have become progressively more empowered and demanding; at the same time, some business-to-business sectors have become much more complicated as customers themselves have grown to become multibusiness enterprises.  As that has happened, the very definition of outside-in or customer centricity, has evolved.

The speed with which organizations are able to adapt to fast-changing customer needs is another factor.  Organizations today have trouble moving as fast as their customers are changing.  Any change to a firm's entrenched silos means upending career trajectory, a daunting prospect even in more stable times.

The fundamental shifts needed to align divisions around a customer axis are rarely self-evident, and most firms don't get it right the first time.  The delivery of integrated and seamless offerings to customers requires systemic integration.  True integration requires internal units to work together in totally new ways.  Yet, internal groups often have no or little connections.  Such intraorganizational barriers are no longer just slowing things down: they make true, systemic integration virtually impossible.  Thus, the challenge of developing a customer axis usually means overcoming a company's organizational history.

Interdependence--the relationship among the units or divisions of an organization or system--is integral to all organizational architectures, since every unit depends on one or more other groups to accomplish the overall work of the system.

Source:  Ranjay Gulati: Reorganize for Resilience: Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business

Through interviews with more than 500 executives over a decade of boom-and-bust economic cycles, author Gulati uncovered five key levers that pry open silos, expand mindsets, build partnerships and help an organization recognize and shift internal barriers to move toward ongoing resilience.

A Convenient UnTruth

The single most convenient untruth about the 2008 (and counting) financial crisis is that it was unforeseen. For two years policymakers have insisted "There was no way to know ahead of time" that the liquidity boom would come to a screeching halt. Back in November 2008, in fact, the usually tight-lipped Queen of England herself publicly described the turmoil of international markets as "awful" and openly asked a panel of experts from the London School of Economics "Why did nobody notice?"

Her Majesty is right: Most financial authorities did NOT notice the crisis before it was too late. Comedy Central's "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" of all places provided the most poignant evidence: A March 2009 video montage shows executives and economists from the world's leading financial firms repeatedly forecasting continued upside strength in stocks, plus renewed bull market growth in financials -- right as debt markets came unhinged and the US stock market headed into a 50%-plus selloff.

Dubbed the "8-Minute Rap" (after the "18-Minute Gap" of Nixon's Watergate tapes), the Daily Show video feature sent an equally powerful message, as the clip below makes plain.

Yet even as the mainstream authorities failed to detect the economic earthquake moving below their own feet, somebody did "notice" well in advance. That person was EWI's president Bob Prechter.

The clip below is from a 2007 Bloomberg interview. Clear as PLAY, the foreseeable nature of the crisis emerges from Bob's October 19, 2007 interview.

As the historic trend change began to unfold, Bob issued this timely insight:

"We've seen the first crack in the credit structure with a huge drop in commercial paper... These are the harbingers of a change toward the downside for the stock market, commodities including oil, and the debt market itself."

Don't believe the convenient untruths. Get objective market analysis today. Download this free report that contains valuable market forecasts directly from the desk of Bob Prechter.

This article, The Economic Crisis No One Saw Coming: A Convenient Untruth, was syndicated by Elliott Wave International. EWI is the world's largest market forecasting firm. Its staff of full-time analysts lead by Chartered Market Technician Robert Prechter provides 24-hour-a-day market analysis to institutional and private investors around the world.

Goodbye, Conspicuous Consumption; Hello Happiness!

Conspicuous consumption has been an object of fascination going back at least as far as 1899, when the economist Thorstein Veblen published “The Theory of the Leisure Class,” a book that analyzed, in part, how people spent their money in order to demonstrate their social status.

And it’s been a truism for eons that extra cash always makes life a little easier. Studies over the last few decades have shown that money, up to a certain point, makes people happier because it lets them meet basic needs. The latest round of research is, for lack of a better term, all about emotional efficiency: how to reap the most happiness for your dollar.

Many began overhauling their spending habits before the recession, now most consumers have had to reconsider their lifestyles, bringing a major shift in the nation’s consumption patterns.

“We’re moving from a conspicuous consumption — which is ‘buy without regard’ — to a calculated consumption,” says Marshal Cohen, an analyst at the NPD Group, the retailing research and consulting firm.

Amid weak job and housing markets, consumers are saving more and spending less than they have in decades, and industry professionals expect that trend to continue. Consumers saved 6.4 percent of their after-tax income in June, according to a new government report. Before the recession, the rate was 1 to 2 percent for many years.  In June, consumer spending and personal incomes were essentially flat compared with May, suggesting that the American economy, as dependent as it is on shoppers opening their wallets and purses, isn’t likely to rebound anytime soon.

On the bright side, the practices that consumers have adopted in response to the economic crisis ultimately could — as a raft of new research suggests — make them happier.  New studies of consumption and happiness show, for instance, that people are happier when they spend money on experiences instead of material objects, when they relish what they plan to buy long before they buy it, and when they stop trying to outdo the Joneses.

If consumers end up sticking with their newfound spending habits, some tactics that retailers and marketers began deploying during the recession could become lasting business strategies. Among those strategies are proffering merchandise that makes being at home more entertaining and trying to make consumers feel special by giving them access to exclusive events and more personal customer service.

While the current round of stinginess may simply be a response to the economic downturn, some analysts say consumers may also be permanently adjusting their spending based on what they’ve discovered about what truly makes them happy or fulfilled.

“This actually is a topic that hasn’t been researched very much until recently,” says Elizabeth W. Dunn, an associate professor in the psychology department at the University of British Columbia, who is at the forefront of research on consumption and happiness. “There’s massive literature on income and happiness. It’s amazing how little there is on how to spend your money.”

In Las Vegas, NV, over 21 hours during the August 20-22 weekend, a select group of forward thinkers will be exploring the impact of "the new normal"----where the days of an employer taking care of you are gone forever and now it's an internal job, discovering some things about you where happiness and custom-tailored success can be achieved by each person.

Source: The New York Times, August 8, 2010