Coaching Tip: The Leadership Blog

Retention and Development of Great Talent

Corporate leaders often fail because the organization’s structure is wrong: key players don’t have budgets or authority, the company moves too slowly and the structure promotes destructive conflict.  Younger, motivated people with highly sought-after skill sets often find their talents underutilized.  The result is that talented people lose motivation and the organization suffers “brain drain” as they look for opportunities elsewhere. 

Companies often fail to recognize, let alone solve, the design/talent problem – they throw training at it, when they should instead redesign the organization to help talent thrive, according to Amy Kates and Greg Kesler managing partners at Kates Kesler Organization Consulting and coauthors of Leading Organization Design: How to Make Organization Design Decisions to Drive the Results You Need (Jossey-Bass, December 2011). 

“Talented people join and stay in an organization to have an impact – to do work that matters to them and to make a difference.  But a badly designed organization keeps them from having an impact or satisfying their values,” says Ms. Kates.

Born Leaders

Your natural talents are gifts at birth. You had nothing to do with them.

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

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

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.

When we are conscious of our identity (our assumptions and beliefs, values, vision and guiding principles), we can make choices on how we wish to act in certain situations-rather than just defaulting to our unconscious behavior.  As the leader transitions to a higher level of personal development, s/he is able to create more productive corporate cultures.

To some degree, we all have an innate talent for leadership.

By focusing our attention on building strengths within our individual and enduring talents (while applying damage control to our weaknesses), we can choose to move from satisfactory performance to excellence. When we know what our signature talents are and how we might apply them, the application of attention allows our focused energy to push us toward success. Individual and corporate transformation happens when the leader truly understands who s/he is through increased self-awareness that leverages innate talents into leadership strengths. Knowing who you are and what you are meant to do makes all the difference in moving from good to great.

A recent study, "Leadership and Neuroscience: Can We Revolutionize the Way That Inspirational Leaders Are Identified and Developed?" appeared in the February issue of the Academy of Management Perspectives.

The study, by David A. Waldman, Pierre A. Balthazard and Suzanne J. Peterson, centers on the concept of coherence, measures the extent to which different parts of the human brain communicate with each other.  Greater movement, suggesting greater coherence, is associated with individuals who had visions of the future for their organizations that were more inclusive and collective; those with less coherence had more individualized or more selfish visions.  Those with more collective visions were seen as more inspirational and charismatic by their followers.

The idea that charismatic leadership has this physical manifestation in the brain is important because leadership has proved to be one of the least teachable aspects of management.

Knowing How to Play Your Marketing Cards

Marketing and branding expert, Stephen Denny, author of the new book, "KILLING GIANTS: 10 Strategies to Topple Goliath in Your Industry," lays out powerful strategies for overtaking larger competitors.

Top tips for getting the most out of the hand you've been dealt:

Seize the microphone.  Just because they're bigger than you doesn't mean they're saying anything. So hijack the conversation.  Bob Parsons at Go Daddy was stumped as to why his company, with the best product assortment and the best pricing, only had 16% share of the domain name registration business. When he learned that his problem was brand awareness, he introduced himself to the entire market, becoming the first domain name registrar to advertise on the Super Bowl in 2004. Now, he's #1. 

Win in the last three feet.  It's a noble calling, spending other people's money - especially when it's your competitor's marketing you're hijacking.  Oslo University reversed years of declining enrollment in the face of a competitor that outspent it 200 to 1 with a tightly focused guerrilla PPC campaign, keying off of its competitor's well-advertised curriculum course names, reaching students in the waning moments of the school registration period. The results were a five-fold increase in admissions.

Fight dirty. When you can't compete on spending, sometimes you can compete on mindshare. Searle Canada's successful launch of its Arthrotec painkiller for arthritis sufferers swept away the resistance and expected slow acceptance of the medical community with a $1 million grant for the discovery of a device or protocol for early diagnosis of ulceration caused by normal pain killers - a fact known to everyone, but thought to be unavoidable. Arthrotec went on to become the top prescribed arthritis drug in Canada.

Create a culture of speed, rewarding those who embody evidence-based decision making and who thrive on winning. Intuit launches early versions of its products for intensive user feedback so that it can bring the voice of the customer - using both qualitative and quantitative metrics - to bear on its decision making. Its speed of decision making cuts no corners: they get to the right decisions faster because they come into the room with the best evidence. 

Shed light on the inconvenient truth. Understand the power of pricing your product in a smart way.  Dessert maker Kozy Shack competes with some of the largest food companies in the world, but has successfully carved out a 30% share in its category by careful management of its return on inventory investment, ensuring that its relatively faster inventory turnover and competitive gross margins to its retailers deliver a better financial return on every dollar its retailers invest in inventory.  It's not just about being cheaper.

 Stephen Denny: Killing Giants: 10 Strategies to Topple the Goliath in Your Industry

Understanding the Fed

... We all know that the Fed created $1.4 trillion new dollars in 2008.  It has told the world that it will inflate to save the monetary system. So that is the news that most people hear.

But the Fed’s dramatic money creation in 2008 only seems to force inflation because people focus on only one side of the Fed’s action. Even though the Fed created a lot of new money, it did not affect the total amount of money-plus-credit one bit... When the Fed buys a Treasury bond, net inflation occurs, because it simply monetizes the government’s brand-new IOU. But in 2008, in order for the Fed to add $1.4 trillion new dollars to the monetary system, it removed exactly the same value of IOU-dollars from the market. It has since retired some of this money, leaving a net of about $1.3 trillion.

So investors, who previously held $1.3t. worth of IOUs for dollars, now hold $1.3t. worth of dollars. They are no longer debt investors but money holders. The net change in the money-plus-credit supply is zero. The Fed simply retired (temporarily, it hopes) a certain amount of debt and replaced it with money.

Evidence for this case is in Figure 4. Even though the Fed has swapped over a trillion dollars of new money for old debt, the banks aren’t lending it. The money multiplier is back in negative territory, which means that there is more debt being retired than there is new money being created. In other words, deflation is winning.

 

The bottom line is that the Fed hasn’t created much inflation over the past two years. The only reason that markets have been rallying recently is that the Elliott wave form required a rally. In other words, in March 2009 pessimism had reached a Primary-degree extreme, and it was time for a Primary-degree respite. The change in attitude from that time forward has, for a time, allowed credit to expand again.

But the Fed and the government didn’t force the change. They merely accommodated it, as they always have. They offered unlimited credit through the first quarter of 2009, and no one wanted it. In March, the social mood changed enough so that some people once again became willing to take these lenders up on their offer.

When credit collapses again during the wave 3 downtrend, we at Elliott Wave International will no longer have to keep “making the case” that the Fed is impotent. It will be clear once again, just as it was in 2008. (...continued)

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Read the rest of this important 32-page eBook online now, free! All you need is to create a free Club EWI profile. Here's what it covers:

Chapter 1: Money, Credit and the Federal Reserve Banking System
Chapter 2: What Makes Deflation Likely Today?
Chapter 3: Can the Fed Stop Deflation?
Chapter 4: Jaguar Inflation
Chapter 5: Can’t Buy Enough...of That Junky Stuff, or, Why the Fed Will Not Stop Deflation
Chapter 6: The Fed’s “Uncle” Point Is In View
Chapter 7: Government Thrashing
Chapter 8: The Coming Deflationary Pressure on the Government

Keep reading this free report now.

This article was syndicated by Elliott Wave International and was originally published under the headline Understanding the Fed. 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.

 Robert R. Prechter Jr.: Conquer the Crash: You Can Survive and Prosper in a Deflationary Depression

Four Keys to Corporate Leadership Success

What will determine who gets the next promotion, and the one after that?  Which of them, when the time comes, will get that corner office?  In other words, what does it take to lead an organization — whether it’s a sports team, a nonprofit, a start-up or a multinational corporation?

Interviews conducted with more than 70 chief executives and other leaders point to five essentials for success — qualities that most of those C.E.O.’s share and look for in people they hire.

The good news: these traits are not genetic.

It’s not as if you have to be tall or left-handed. These qualities are developed through attitude, habit and discipline — factors that are within your control. They will make you stand out. They will make you a better employee, manager and leader. They will lift the trajectory of your career and speed your progress.

What follows are excerpts from chapters taken from “The Corner Office: Indispensable and Unexpected Lessons From CEOs on How to Lead and Succeed,” by Adam Bryant on these five leadership qualities:

Ideally, the Most Desirable Solution is...

If you can generate an awareness of what an ideal state of affairs might be, even if it seems unattainable at present, constraints that have loomed as absolute can be seen differently; as potentially surmountable obstacles to the attainment of the ideal solution.  Then you can concentrate on ways of removing those obstacles.

To illustrate, let's say that you are in the lumber industry and the key success factors are: owning large forests and maximizing the yield from them.  The rate of tree growth is a key variable that is dependent upon the amount of sunshine and amount of water.

If you owned forests in Arizona and Utah, for example, they would get enough sunshine but too little water.  The ideal solution would be to give trees in those two states enough water, so they'd be ready in less than fifteen years instead of the thirty it takes today.  The most important project you would have would be finding out how to do this.

Try using this out-of-the box thinking to work through opportunities in your business.

Source:  Kenichi Ohmae: The Mind Of The Strategist: The Art of Japanese Business

Leadership Influence

Jeremie Kubicek, author of "Leadership is Dead: How Influence is Reviving It," sees leadership as a vehicle to influence people and have a positive impact on them.  "The runaway greed of Wall Street's leadership, skyrocketing salaries for corporate executives and unkept promises from political leaders have left most people feeling betrayed and jilted.  In many cases, employees are becoming victims of these unresponsive leaders as well," Kubicek explains.

In his new book, Kubicek discusses the Seven Action Steps that anyone can take to awaken the true leader within:

1.  Break through your walls of self-preservation and focus on service to others.

2.  Give trust to become trustworthy--without trust, there can be no influence. 

As Kouzes and Posner write in their book, "Leadership Challenge" in the five principles of leadership, No. 1. is to Model the Way: Modeling the way is essentially about earning the right and the respect to lead through direct individual involvement and action.  People first follow the person, then the plan. Titles are granted but it is behavior that wins respect.  Your team members first buy into you emotionally before they are ready, willing and able to listen to the leader's analytical message.  Therefore, a major part of the new leader's first 90 days on-the-job is all about building trust through individual and group interactions.

 

New 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. 

 

 3.  Become credible, not just smart--you'll have to prove yourself by passing the A.C.I.D. test to establish credibility.



4.  Be intentional in your influence--take conscious action and follow through with what you have intended to do.



5.  Pursue relationships before opportunites--true influence is about establishing authentic connections to others.



6.  Give yourself away--influence means you give for the benefit of others by practicing the Law of Reciprocity (www.LawofReciprocity.com).  

Ask a Las Vegas cab driver, "What's the best show in town?"  He will probably reply with something like this, "Oh, Jay Leno!  My wife and I just went to see him.  He gives a special show for taxi drivers at two in the morning.  Otherwise, we could never afford to go."  You wouldn't think that anyone as big in the entertainment filed as Jay Leno needs to give away their performances, but they do.  Leno recognizes that some of the best word-of-mouth advertising would be taxi drivers raving about his show.  If you could do just one thing to help your customer and your business, what would that be?  The short answer is to give more of what you have away.



7.  Become "significant" through your memorable, positive impact on others.



 Jeremie Kubicek: Leadership is Dead: How Influence is Reviving It



Entrepreneurship: Transforming Nothing into Something

By Scott Adams, the creator of "Dilbert," abstracted from How to Get a Real Education in The Wall Street Journal, April 9, 2011

If you're having a hard time imagining what an education in entrepreneurship should include, allow me to prime the pump with some lessons I've learned along the way.

Combine Skills. The first thing you should learn in a course on entrepreneurship is how to make yourself valuable. It's unlikely that any average student can develop a world-class skill in one particular area. But it's easy to learn how to do several different things fairly well. I succeeded as a cartoonist with negligible art talent, some basic writing skills, an ordinary sense of humor and a bit of experience in the business world. The "Dilbert" comic is a combination of all four skills. The world has plenty of better artists, smarter writers, funnier humorists and more experienced business people. The rare part is that each of those modest skills is collected in one person. That's how value is created.

Fail Forward. If you're taking risks, and you probably should, you can find yourself failing 90% of the time. The trick is to get paid while you're doing the failing and to use the experience to gain skills that will be useful later. I failed at my first career in banking. I failed at my second career with the phone company. But you'd be surprised at how many of the skills I learned in those careers can be applied to almost any field, including cartooning. Students should be taught that failure is a process, not an obstacle.

Find the Action. In my senior year of college I asked my adviser how I should pursue my goal of being a banker. He told me to figure out where the most innovation in banking was happening and to move there. And so I did. Banking didn't work out for me, but the advice still holds: Move to where the action is. Distance is your enemy.

Attract Luck. You can't manage luck directly, but you can manage your career in a way that makes it easier for luck to find you. To succeed, first you must do something. And if that doesn't work, which can be 90% of the time, do something else. Luck finds the doers. Readers of the Journal will find this point obvious. It's not obvious to a teenager.

Conquer Fear. I took classes in public speaking in college and a few more during my corporate days. That training was marginally useful for learning how to mask nervousness in public. Then I took the Dale Carnegie course. It was life-changing. The Dale Carnegie method ignores speaking technique entirely and trains you instead to enjoy the experience of speaking to a crowd. Once you become relaxed in front of people, technique comes automatically. Over the years, I've given speeches to hundreds of audiences and enjoyed every minute on stage. But this isn't a plug for Dale Carnegie. The point is that people can be trained to replace fear and shyness with enthusiasm. Every entrepreneur can use that skill.

Write Simply. I took a two-day class in business writing that taught me how to write direct sentences and to avoid extra words. Simplicity makes ideas powerful. Want examples? Read anything by Steve Jobs or Warren Buffett.

Learn Persuasion. Students of entrepreneurship should learn the art of persuasion in all its forms, including psychology, sales, marketing, negotiating, statistics and even design. Usually those skills are sprinkled across several disciplines. For entrepreneurs, it makes sense to teach them as a package.

The list is not meant to be complete.  Obviously an entrepreneur would benefit from classes in finance, management and more.

What's Going On With You & Your Business?

 

Take this quiz to find out.

Instructions: Circle the number of the statements that are true. If more than 5 statements are true, then working with a coach specializing in entrepreneurs may be the perfect solution.

1. I am uncertain about the sustainability of my revenue streams.

2. I have business debt that is more than 20% of my annual revenues.

3. Given the effort I’m putting in, my net income is nowhere near high enough.

4. If I wasn’t here, the place would fall apart within a month.

5. I can’t seem to attract – or keep – the right staff.

6. I’m doing tasks that I do not like or am not very good at.

7. I am working more than 10 hours a day.

8. I am working far too much in my business instead of on my business.

9. Sometimes I wonder if I’m both the arsonist and the fireman.

10. We’re not as focused on our customers as we need to be.

11. There’s more chaos in this company than the employees prefer.

12. I want to spend more time with my family or in other interests.

13. I don’t feel free and that’s where I want to be.

14. I want to improve the focus and direction of where the business is heading.

15. I have ideas for significant revenue streams that I just can’t seem to make time for.

16. Profitability isn’t where it could be.

17. I want to delegate more so I can have the time to discover new opportunities.

18. The joy of owning a business is being replaced by the stress of running a business.

19. It would be valuable to develop a 12 to18-month growth plan.

20. We need to find a way to better motivate the staff.

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Hiring Flexible and Temporary Talent

As many as 41% of employers have used more independent contractors over the past two years, according to an online survey of 430 senior human resource executives conducted by Right Management.

Asked if their organizations had seen an increase in the use of independent contractors in the last two years, 41% of respondents said yes and 59% said no.

“Nearly all companies are re-examining their talent management practices in order to align their workforce with their business strategy,” Michael Haid, Right Management’s Senior Vice President for talent management.”  This has required a behavioral shift that includes the greater flexibility afforded by independent contractors.”

Many of the contractors, Haid acknowledged, eventually become full-time employees.  “But just as many prefer their independence and organizations must accommodate the goals of these workers to stay competitive in the marketplace and attract the best and brightest talent available.”

The increased use of independent contractors creates legal compliance concerns, cautioned Neil Alexander, Co-chair of the Contingent Workforce Practice Group of Littler Mendelson, a national employment and labor law firm. “Many firms haven’t taken precautions to help limit the likelihood that a government auditor or court will determine such workers have been misclassified.  Taking the time to design a workforce model in advance can reward productivity, lower overall labor costs, and help avoid findings such workers have been misclassified.  The penalties, interest, and uncompensated overtime can add up very quickly.” 

Survey respondents were also asked if their organization had seen an increase in flexible working practices over the past year.  Twenty-three percent said “Yes, a lot” and 54% said “Yes, somewhat.” Only 22% said no.

Haid advised that such HR policies and practices are on the increase. “These might be more flexible work hours, telecommuting, or even a greater use of temporary or contingent workers for specific projects or short-term assignments.”

As more people move from being unemployed to being employed or becoming an independent contractor, there is a ripple effect throughout the economy.  For example, http://www.leasetrader.com/ saw a 5.3% increase in March from personal lease escapes due to and increase in company cars (4.8% increase in February).  Until the beginning of 2011, the main reason for dumping a lease was the driver's need to find a lower monthly car payment.  Since January, more vehicles have been listed by people for non-financially distressed reasons.  "The increase in more company-issued vehicles, and in these cases people look to shed their personal car leases." - Sergio Stiberman, CEO and founder of LeaseTrader.com

Source: Right Management surveyed 430 individuals on March 15, 2011, in partnership with law firm Littler Mendelson.

The Liberal Arts of Leadership

The primary task of management as a liberal art is to provide leadership for human beings to help them fulfill the mission of the organization.

Historically, the definition of a liberal art was a skill or craft practiced by a free citizen with time and means for study, a member of the elite, ruling classes of society.  Liberal arts training meant training citizens to be society's leaders.  As such, the ideals of an arts liberales education were to instill standards of conduct and character, knowledge and mastery of a body of texts, a respect for social values and standards, and an appreciation for knowledge and truth.

Today, there is a global search for answers to some of life's most important questions, such as "why am I here?"  and "what is my purpose?"  Instilling a liberal arts mentality involves an ever-shifting search for the best way to foster values based on tradition, even though that tradition may morph through time.  It is to take seriously the counsel of Socrates to examine one's life, for "the unexamined life is not worth living."

In the revised edition of Management, Peter Drucker, a thinker and the first executive coach who was always ahead of his time, called management a liberal art:

Management is thus what tradition used to call a liberal art: "liberal" because it deals with the fundamentals of knowledge, self knowledge, wisdom and leadership; "art" because it is practice and application.  Managers [should] draw on all the knowledge and insights of the humanities and the social sciences--on psychology and philosophy, on economics and history, on ethics as well as on the physical sciences.  But they have to focus this knowledge on effectiveness and results--on healing a sick patient, teaching a student, building a bridge, designing and selling a "user friendly" software program. (Drucker, 2008, p. 25)

Drucker believed that management would be the key to keeping the liberal arts sentiment alive in today's society.   He saw an important relationship between the two forms of training.  The liberal arts can bring wisdom and self-knowledge to the practice of management, while management can "be the discipline and the practice through and in which the 'humanities' will again acquire recognition, impact and relevance" (Drucker, 2008, p. 25).  And practicing leadership as a liberal art might, in fact, return management to its original, intended professional status.

In recent years, there has been a virtual explosion of books and articles on leadership, as well as entire journals dedicated to the exploration of leadership qualities, styles and models.  For 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.

Source:  Joseph A. Maciariello: Drucker’s Lost Art of Management: Peter Drucker’s Timeless Vision for Building Effective Organizations