Leadership is lacking in our country, in all areas of business, government, in the church, and in the home. One does not need to dig very deep to find failure in leadership in almost every sector of our society. The long term effects of this lack of leadership are devastating.
How can we raise strong authentic leaders in our companies, among the ranks of our management, on our leadership teams, and on our boards?
Are you getting feedback on a regular basis as a leader? If you are a CEO, is your senior leadership team comfortable giving you feedback? Are you getting feedback from your board? How are you handling it?
What does it feel like when you get negative feedback? For me, sometimes I can get defensive. It can depend on the subject, and on my own emotional state and level of stress at the time, but more often than not my tendency is to be defensive.
Barron’s recently published results from its annual survey of institutional investors about their views of the world’s top 100 companies, based on market cap as of May 12, 2014. This cross section of U.S. money managers ranked companies on the basis of 1. Strong management, 2. Ethical business practices, 3. Sound business strategy, 4. Competitive edge, and 5. Product Innovation. Barron’s has been conducting this survey since 2005, and uses a numerical scale relating to four statements of Highly Respect , Respect, Respect Somewhat, and Don’t respect.
Kip Tindell, Chairman and CEO of The Container Store has a system of onboarding that is revolutionary.
Tindell is author of Uncontainable, How Passion, Commitment, and Conscious Capitalism Built a Business Where Everyone Thrives. Training is a large part of The Container Store’s onboarding process, where new employees receive nearly 300 hours of education and training, compared to a retail industry average of 8 hours. As a result of the investment, The Container Store has a following of devoted customers who love to shop there, and who tell others of their experience.
Are your on-boarding processes functioning well? Are they used strategically to introduce new employees to the systems and mechanisms used in your organization designed to accomplish the goals and deliver a remarkable customer experience? Are you as a CEO involved in the process? If not, you need to be.
The Great Game of Business is a company whose origins were from the Springfield Re-manufacturing Corp, (SRC). For those who do not know about Jack Stack and Springfield Re-manufacturing, I will be writing more about this great story of American Manufacturing ingenuity in future posts. Suffice it to say, Jack Stack and his smokestack industrial Midwest manufacturing companies are the real deal. Key learning from the SRC story are all rolled up into an Open Book Management Concept they call the Great Game of Business, and it is an awesome system to utilize if you want your company to succeed and thrive for decades to come.
Bill George is worth listening to if you have an interest in building a trust culture, and growing your market cap. He should know. During his tenure as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of medical device firm Medtronic, (NYSE MDT) market cap increased from $1 billion to $60 billion. PBS named Bill George as one of the top 25 CEO's over the past 25 years.
Fortune Magazine has been on my regular reading list for at least the past four decades. Articles published by Fortune are generally timely, instructive, useful, thought provoking, and written by terrific authors. I attend the semiannual Fortune Growth and Leadership Summits, co-hosted by Vern Harnish and Gazelles Coaches International, where I listen to terrific speakers and network with mid-market entrepreneurs, CEO’s and other growth coaches and advisors.
Last week, Fortune published an article by Jeffrey Pfeffer, Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business. My takeaway from this article, and a key point with which I strongly disagree, is that In communicating with others in your organization, being authentic, is a deterrent to getting ahead. Compromising who you are as a person is more important than standing up for what you believe. A communicating style that is authentic and transparent is to be discarded in favor of just ‘blowin in the wind’, borrowing a line from the great folk musical trio Peter, Paul, and Mary.
Keeping our jobs is more important than being current and authentic, according to Professor Pfeffer. He reports that 'leaders need to be pragmatic—to say and do what is required to obtain and hold onto power and to accomplish their objectives.' In my view this type of communication behavior only prolongs the pain in organizations where employees are often uncertain and confused when they see ambiguous and compromised messaging coming from their leadership.
Authenticity is the currency of the internet. Organizations will follow their leaders, good or bad. Bad leadership will sink a company, and leadership needs to be trustworthy, honest, and predictable. People working in the organization need to be closely aligned with the culture. One or two wrong moves by leadership, or messaging that is confusing and inconsistent may cause loss of trust, and employee turnover, or loss of valuable customers.
Being authentic and transparent with others is crucial to progress with a team and essential when the business is rapidly scaling. When dealing with conflict, being clear and authentic will yield a higher quality result more rapidly. Truth is critical to building trust on a team, and trust needs to be in place before conflicts can be worked out. Dealing with the truth will absolutely get to the desired outcome more rapidly than not.
The author goes on to say that 'the ability to subordinate one’s views and feelings is a critical skill for advancing and surviving in the workplace.' If this is the default cultural state of affairs in any company, the chances of that company succeeding in the marketplace competing for customers, or for talent, is slim to none. He quotes INSEAD professor Herminia Ibarra as follows: “By viewing ourselves as works in progress and evolving our professional identities through trial and error, we can develop a personal style that … suits our organizations’ changing needs.”
As a business growth coach, I work with many clients who have major problems in their organizations because they are not authentic, behaving instead like the Chameleon, changing colors and adapting as Professor Ibarra suggests. I suggest that if we are not sure of what we stand for, then we stand for nothing, and that is a sure recipe for disaster.
Are you passionate about your work as a leader? You know the answer, and what may come as a surprise, so does your team. If you aren’t, you may be frustrated, ineffective, and struggling to get results. It may be the reason you are not making progress.
Leaders need to have a passion for their work, and have a vision for their organization, exuding the essence of it in all thoughts and expressions to all stakeholders, at all times. S/he needs to be passionate and stay focused like a laser on bridging the gap that exists between that vision, and the mission…what the company actually does day to day.
In one turnaround I was leading, a member of the senior leadership team was always in agreement with everything we discussed and pleasant to be around, but was quietly and effectively undermining my efforts to discover variances that were causing waste numbers to be excessively high. His department was causing the problem by using materials that were over specification because the correct inventory was not available when needed to meet order lead times. This senior manager didn’t want to spend the time or energy to solve it. Instead he tried to bury the data with evasive maneuvers. His passive/aggressive behavior proved not only costly to the company, but fatal to his career.
Strategy can emerge from a gap analysis illustrating where you are currently, your mission, vs your vision of where you want to be. Strategies, goals and objectives can all be set once the mission and vision are identified and agreed upon, and those strategies must be in alignment with the mission, and the organizations overall vision. Its extremely important to identify a unifying strategy(s) and to gain buy – in from all stakeholders in the value chain, and that includes customers, suppliers, employees, bank, and board.
Congratulations! You’ve just been hired as CEO of a company in deep financial trouble. The ownership and board of directors have given you free reign to do your job, and you feel up to the task of leading the effort, but you have limited time to turn this ship around, and get it moving in a different more profitable direction.
What will be your plan starting Monday, your first day on the new job… the first month…the first six months. How will you evaluate and manage the company and its processes. How will you engage with the customers?
Roselinde Torres, in a recent TED talk, describes a new 21st Century world which is global, digitally enabled, transparent, with faster speeds of information flow and innovation, and where nothing big gets done without some sort of a complex matrix. Ms. Torres suggests that leadership is defined by three important questions that we should be considering for ourselves as leaders, and for those whom we lead.
Innovation can be iterative and lineal, as in re-engineering a product component or a work process. It can also be transformational, when entirely new technologies are discovered, such as life changing medical devices like the pacemaker, the Cochlear Implant, or the personal computer. Others come to mind, such as the automobile, or the internet.
Pope Francis, the Pontiff of the Catholic Church and spiritual leader to 1.2 billion Roman Catholic’s worldwide, is known for doing things that are considered contrary to the traditional role of a Pontiff.
He is attempting an amazing turnaround…the reformation of one of the oldest and greatest institutions in the history of mankind, and doesn’t want to be idolized, lifted up, or pandered to just because of his position in the Church. He is setting a new direction for the Catholic Church, which desperately needs reformation, and is doing so by setting himself up as a servant leader, one with great humility.
The most important and long lasting decisions you make as a leader have to do with the people you hire. How you shape the job posting, and then recruit, interview, hire, on-board, and train new people, and how you position them will have an enormous impact on the effectiveness and value of the organization. If you are hiring the right people who might be different than you and have great capacity to do things you can't do, then the organization increases in capacity. You need to model this behavior and drive it throughout the leadership team. Diversity of ideas will promote innovation, growth, and eventually creation of great value.
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