Believe In The Future

Believe In The Future

This is one of the cartoons I did for my client, the Rackspace Cloud.

It’s a riff on the famous Gandhi line, “Become the change you want to see.”

In other words, the Rackspace cloud doesn’t matter; it’s what you can do with it that matters.

And that’s an interesting discussion- and interesting discussion that’s still in its infancy.

One thing I notice about this Internet-enable world of ours: It’s so very, very new, and yet we already take it for granted.

That’s a mistake….

*     *     *

I urge you to check out Hugh MacLeod’s two books (Ignore Everybody and Evil Plans) as well as the wealth of resources at his website, including an online gallery of art works that are of high quality and yet priced reasonably.

Executive Transitions: The Importance of Relational Intelligence

Patricia Wheeler

Here’s another article written by Patricia Wheeler and featured by Marshall Goldsmith’s website,  Leading News, one that “delivers state-of-the-art information and ideas about best practices in leadership, helping successful people become even more successful, not only for themselves but also for their teams and for their companies. Leading News will be sent to your email address monthly. We feature articles written by Marshall Goldsmith, Patricia Wheeler and other thought leaders.”

To check out the other resources provided, please click here.

*     *     *

The rate of change has never been so intense as we have experienced over the past few years.  Business is no longer “business as usual.”  A recent Booz and Company report shows that companies across many industries and geographies are hitting the “reset button,” making changes to their portfolios, their business and operating models, their processes and infrastructure, all through a lens focused more closely on what truly creates value for their companies and their customers.  Most companies acknowledge that their executive pipelines need to be more robust; indeed, this is seen as their Number One challenge as they move forward.

We’re seeing an upswing in the rate at which executives are moving into new roles; transitions take place as organizations merge or are acquired, reposition their business models, grow into different segments and geographies, and as the previous generation of senior leaders continues to retire.   And we’ve been studying these trends since 2007, when our global coaching alliance Alexcel partnered with the Institute of Executive Development to study executive transitions: what makes them succeed, and what predictable obstacles leaders face as they move into more senior roles.

In our own research, we examined how senior leaders (defined here as executives within the top five percent of their organization) best navigate these moves, whether they entered a new organization or were promoted internally, as well as how many of these senior leaders did not fulfill the promise of their positions.  We gathered responses to an online survey from over 350 leaders and talent professionals across many organizations and geographies consisting of 18 multiple-choice questions plus over 50 in-depth interviews to gain additional insight.

So what did we find?  In our second generation of research completed in December 2010, we found that the rate of failure at the top five percent of the organizations we surveyed continues to be unacceptably high.  One in three leaders brought into these roles from other organizations were not successful in meeting organizational expectations by the two-year mark.

And the more disturbing finding is that we continue to hear that one in five leaders promoted from within to the top failed to meet their organization’s criteria for successful performance within two years.  This means that twenty percent of leaders who were successful enough in their roles to earn a promotion or lateral move to a bigger and broader role did not succeed in their new role.  They weren’t necessarily fired; companies tend not to dismiss many of these internally grown leaders; but their lack of success likely meant the end of the road for their upward mobility.  And for the organization, it often means wasted time, energy and engagement as these leaders stumble.

So it’s still true, to paraphrase Marshall Goldsmith, that what gets you to one level won’t necessarily be sufficient at higher levels.  Let’s take a closer look at our findings.

What derails leaders at the high potential and senior levels?  Failure here is rarely about technical knowledge; it’s more about relational intelligence and cultural alignment.  73% of our survey participants listed interpersonal and leadership skills as a significant factor in executive underperformance.  For one in three respondents, it was listed as the most important factor.  So as individuals move into bigger and broader roles, keep in mind that relationships are an increasingly important factor in more senior roles.

If you’re thinking that this comes as no surprise, you are in good company.  It’s a simple idea that we’ve all heard many times before.  The truth is, however, that simple ideas are not so easy to execute.  So many leaders know this, but neglect the daily discipline and practice of these relational competencies.

Remember that each move up the leadership pipeline increasingly forces leaders to get more done through others.  So we always suggest that leaders practice daily actions to address this challenge. Actions include asking how others see you, developing conscious awareness of the culture, and learning to flex your leadership and communication style.  In this way your good intentions have a greater probability of being perceived clearly by others, as it’s so clear that interpersonal behavior is the biggest differentiator of success at the senior level.

We suggest that you ask yourself and your team: what regular steps are you taking to increase your relational intelligence to prepare yourself to move into bigger and broader roles?

*     *     *

By far, the best book on this subject is Managing Transitions (Third Edition) by William Bridges and published by DeCapo Lifelong Books (2009). I also highly recommend Goldsmith’s What Got You here Won’t Get You There.

Dr. Patricia Wheeler is an executive and team coach who helps smart people become more effective leaders. As Managing Partner in the Levin Group LLC, she has spent 15 years consulting to organizations and coaching senior leaders and their teams. Her work helping executives succeed in new roles is featured in The AMA Handbook of Leadership. You may contact Patricia at Patricia@TheLevinGroup.com.

 

StrengthsFinder 2.0: A book review by Bob Morris

StrengthsFinder 2.0
Tom Rath
Gallup Press (2007)

“Mirror, mirror on the wall….”

Note: One of my passions in life is to help promote and (yes) celebrate business books that are “classics,” deserving far more attention than they currently receive. That is certainly true of StrengthsFinder 2.0.

You will probably find no head-snapping revelations in this book if you have already read Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman’s First, Break All the Rules and/or Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton’s Now, Discover Your Strengths (especially the latter). Nor does Tom Rath claim to offer any. Rather, this is a new and upgraded edition of the Gallup organization’s previous online test (StrengthsFinder 1.0) that enables those who take it to identify and measure their talents relative to “more than 5,000 new personalized Strengths Insights that we have discovered in recent years.”

In Rath’s two previously published books, How Full Is Your Bucket? co-authored with Donald O. Clifton and Vital Friends, he shares his own reactions to an abundance of research data that reveal the importance of two separate but related forces that have profound impact on the workplace: getting strengths in alignment with work to be done and then developing them even more with strategic delegation and close supervision.

What we have in this book, Strengths Finder 2.0, is a wealth of new research material that Rath examines with exceptional precision and uncommon eloquence. I strongly encourage each reader to take full advantage of the self-diagnostic opportunities that both Rath and the Gallup organization generously offer. Of course, once various exercises are completed, a significant challenge remains: to take effective and productive action to apply what has been learned. It is helpful to be aware of what Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton so aptly characterize as the “knowing-doing” and “doing-knowing” gaps. It is also helpful to recall Peter Drucker’s observation more than 40 years ago: “There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.”

Presumably Rath agrees that, more often than not, the Yoda is right: “Do or do not. There is no try.”

The 3 Biggest Myths About Motivation That Won’t Go Away

Heidi Grant Halvorson

Here is an excerpt from an article written by Heidi Grant Halvorson and featured at her personal blog, The Science of Success. To read the complete article and check out all the other resources, please click here.

*     *     *

People can have remarkably keen insights into their own behavior.  Then again, people can also be remarkably wrong about why they, and everyone else, do the things that they do.  And some of those people turn out to be motivational speakers and authors.

No doubt their intentions are very admirable – many genuinely want to help others to reach a higher level of success.  But too often, they simply end up reinforcing false notions (albeit intuitively appealing ones) about how motivation works.   Here are three of the most firmly entrenched motivational myths:

[Here are the first two.]

Just Write Down Your Goals, and Success is Guaranteed!

There is a story that motivational speakers/authors love to tell about the Yale Class of 1953.  (Google it.  It’s everywhere.) Researchers, so the story goes, asked graduating Yale seniors if they had specific goals they wanted to achieve in the future that they had written down.  Twenty years later, the researchers found that the mere 3% of students who had specific, written goals were wealthier than the other 97% combined.  Isn’t that amazing?  It would be if it were true, which it isn’t.  (See the 1996 Fast Company article that debunked the story here.)

I wish it were that simple.  To be fair, there is evidence that getting specific about what you want to achieve is really important. (Not a guaranteed road to fabulous wealth, but still important.)  In other words, specificity is necessary, but it’s not nearly sufficient.  Writing goals down is actually neither – it can’t hurt, but there’s also no hard evidence that writing per se does anything to help.

Just Try to Do Your Best

Telling someone, or yourself, to just “do your best” is believed to be a great motivator. It isn’t. Theoretically, it encourages without putting on too much pressure.  In reality, and rather ironically, it is more-or-less permission to be mediocre.

Edwin Locke and Gary Latham, two renown organizational psychologists, have spent several decades studying the difference between “do your best” goals and their antithesis: specific and difficult goals.  Evidence from more than 1,000 studies conducted by researchers across the globe shows that goals that not only spell out exactly what needs to be accomplished, but that also set the bar for achievement high, result in far superior performance than simply trying to “do your best.”  That’s because more difficult goals cause you to, often unconsciously, increase your effort, focus and commitment to the goal, persist longer, and make better use of the most effective strategies.

*     *     *

To read the complete article and check out all the other resources, please click here.

Heidi Grant Halvorson is a rising star in the field of motivational science.   She is an Expert Blogger for Fast Company, The Huffington Post, and Psychology Today, as well as a regular contributor to the BBC World Service’s Business Daily, the Harvard Business Review, and SmartBrief’s SmartBlog on Leadership. In addition to her work as author and co-editor of the highly-regarded academic book The Psychology of Goals (Guilford, 2009), she has authored papers in her field’s most prestigious journals, including the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, European Journal of Social Psychology, and Judgment and Decision Making. Her latest book is Succeed: How We Can Reach Our Goals, published by Hudson Street Press (2010), a member of the Penguin Group. She earned her Ph.D. at Columbia University. You are welcome to  contact her:  heidi.grant.halvorson@gmail.com.

 

Common Purpose: A book review by Bob Morris

Common Purpose: How Great Leaders Get Organizations to Achieve the Extraordinary
Joel Kurtzman
Jossey-Bass/John Wiley & Sons (2010)

“Organizations themselves are mindless, so if people don’t repair them, no one will.”

Regrettably, the old rules of employment have created in many organizations a serious crisis that is the result of command and control management, hierarchical structure, bureaucratic swamps, and dueling silos. According to Joel Kurtzman, “When an organization inhibits the ability of a group of people to achieve its goals, it must be reformed. When an organization consistently raises up leaders who suppress, demean, or nullify the productivity of others, swift action must be taken to right this situation.”

The new rules of employment that Kurtzman endorses are by no means new. Consider these observations by 3M’s then chairman and CEO, William L. McKnight, in 1924: “If you put fences around people, you get sheep. Give people the room they need.” Kurtzman wholeheartedly agrees, noting that “people have a need to be heard, to be respected, and to control their space.” The results of hundreds of major research studies, involving millions of workers throughout the world, reveal that “feeling appreciated” is ranked either #1 or #2 among what is most important to them.

I agree with Kurtzman that common purpose requires common goals as well as leadership (at all levels and in all area) to generate and energize sufficient support to achieve those goals “that are beyond the capability of an individual to accomplish alone. [Structures, strategies, and policies] are methods for aligning groups of people so they can achieve common goals.”

In Good to Great, Jim Collins observes that Level 5 leaders are to their companies what Abraham Lincoln was to the nation. The key to a Level 5 is ambition first and foremost for the cause, the company, the work — not any individual — combined with the will to make good on that ambition. “In looking at the data, we noticed that leaders in our study had significant life experiences that might have sparked or furthered their maturation…I believe — although I cannot prove — that potential Level 5 leaders are highly prevalent in our society. The problem is not, in my estimation, a dearth of potential Level 5 leaders. They exist all around us, if we just know what to look for. And what is that? Look for situations where extraordinary results exist but where no individual steps forth to claim excess credit. You will likely find a potential Level 5 leader at work.”

Kurtzman asserts (and I agree) “when it comes to common purpose and resonant leadership, one size does not fit all. People are individuals, and those who thrive in one firm might not thrive in another. Chemistry, fit, values, and many other qualities are in the eye of the beholder.” It is important to keep in mind that a common purpose that unites and motivates one group of people may not appeal to – or “fit” — others. That is why Zappos offers a bonus to all new hires after they complete a two-week training program. They are told, “If you quit today, we will pay you for the amount of time you’ve worked, plus we will offer you a $1,000 bonus.” Zappos actually bribes its new employees to quit. Why? Because if you’re willing to take the company up on The Offer, you obviously don’t have the sense of commitment they are looking for.

It is rare but nonetheless possible for those who comprise a segment within an organization – Disney and Pixar animation teams, Lockheed’s “Skunk Works,” and researchers at Xerox PARC — to share a common purpose that can produce “an almost palpable sense” of what defines the entire enterprise. “It is the feeling that we’re all in this together and that we all know and understand what to do, why we’re here, and what we stand for…Common purpose is the goal of great leaders and great leadership. It is the way a group of free agents is transformed into a cohesive, orderly group – an organization – aligned around a common set of goals in a way that makes defeat almost impossible.”

How specifically to achieve and then sustain a common purpose? Read the book.

3 Ways to Increase Productivity with Better Sleep

Here is another valuable Management Tip of the Day from Harvard Business Review. To sign up for a free subscription to any/all HBR newsletters, please click here.

Don’t be fooled: staying up an hour later doesn’t mean you gain an hour in productivity. In fact, losing sleep is directly linked to poor focus and memory. Sleep is vital and here are three ways to get more of it:

Clear your mental to-do list. Write a list of unfinished tasks and unresolved issues before getting into bed. Put them down on paper so they don’t take up mental space when you’re up in the middle of the night.

Go to bed earlier. Set yourself a bedtime and stick to it. You may feel like a child, but there’s a reason parents badger kids to bed.

Wind down. Give yourself 45 minutes to relax before going to bed. Drink tea, read a book, or listen to music.

Today’s Management Tip was adapted from “Guide to Managing Stress.”

To check it out and join the discussion, please click here.