Talent Management creates a healthy leadership pipeline

Posted on October 30, 2008 by executivecoachingguru

There is hardly a document in the last 5 years that hasn’t indicated that executive boards have a primary focus on the area of talent management and thus succession planning.

As an executive coach I often work with a business to enable the development and release of talent, though what is often clear is that whilst most senior managers understand the need for talent, they often are unaware of the dangers of not valuing talent as a primary business focus.

1. Succession planning should be done at every level, not just at the senior tier:

  • This enables the business as a whole to feel this isn’t just an elitist activity
  • Educates people to a process that will enable them to contribute as opposed to just be told
  • Gives new team members a sense they are entering a transparent environment

2. It is also key to build an executive’s reward around their capability in locating, developing and promoting talent:

  • This in itself promotes a culture of sustainability and legacy
  • Starts to address the “I’m in it for the short term” mentality that many executives have cultivated over the last decade
  • Breeds behaviour that is geared to a learning organisation that achieves through the development of its people

3. Talent Management should be reviewed twice a year

  • Of course the a persons development should be continually reviewed, but twice a year it should be a board review
  • Executives should feel comfortable talking about success and failure in terms of developing their team, to learn from each other
  • “How often, if ever, is someone maneuvered around the organisation in order to grow them?”
  • It is key that people are not owned by a Director, but seen as  business resource

Talent management has become a high profile concept, though it should be an easy process. Sometimes the documentation looks great when you consider just one person, but when you are generating these things at a business level it can be very labour intensive:

Top Talent Management Tips:

  1. Let the individuals own their profile, they keep it up to date
  2. Use a simple 4-9 box grid.
  3. Ask people where they see themselves on that grid and discuss the fact you agree or disagree
  4. Make it an open and transparent process
  5. Consider do you want your potential career value to be a secret: No! So make it an open process
  6. Have the painful conversations, the business will only have to do it once, then it’s done
  7. Do this process at the same time as Reviews, so it’s seen as one activity
  8. Don’t make out it’s a grind, this is someones career you are talking about

In the end, remember that Talent Management is part process and part culture, it demonstrates that as a business leader you understand the difference between the short term and the long term.

Filed under: models (copyrighted), succession planning | Tagged: , , , | Leave a Comment »

Leadership Responsibility and Stewardship

Posted on October 10, 2008 by executivecoachingguru
“The individual increasingly comes to know who he is through the stand he takes when he expresses his ideas, values, beliefs and convictions, and through the declaration and ownership of his feelings” – Clark Moustakas

There is no doubt about it, that being a leader has responsibilities and most of them are obvious, but still many leaders see their responsibility as being a very finite level, generally being what they have direct control over.

The reality is that leadership responsibility is horizontal and not vertical, meaning that leadership looks across the business as opposed just up and down it, the Executive Coaching Guru developed the TLeadershipModel to simply illustrate that where as management has vertical responsibility, leadership has a horizontal one.

tleadershipmodel

The very essence of management is the achievement of outputs through the management of resources, the very essence of leadership is the achievement of outputs with the continued sustainabiltiy and legacy of a business. What’s important to understand is that leadership by its very definition entwined with responsibility and a sense of purpose that goes beyond the pure achievement of the task, leaders give value and reason to a business, aligning the everyday tasks to something that has a greater value and thus bringing value to all people at all levels.

Understanding this is very important as we hear about ‘credit crunch’ and the leadership of the financial markets, that is effecting the world currently, how has this come about? At its most basic it is a disregard of the TLeadershipModel and a limited focus on the horizontal.

People can at the most senior or junior levels can:

  • become enamored by their own agenda, yes at a daily transactional level, but also on a more personal level that can flow between fear around capability, through greed and a personal agenda that has no interest in the business other than a mechanism for increased financial gain.
  • see their value as being one of stewardship and development.

As an executive coach it is paramount that we advocate for the horizontal as well as the vertical, that stewardship and responsibility are our natural antidote for the current chaos and crisis that we see within the world markets and that as the pressure of the everyday transactional, output lead environment places pressure on the most authentic of leaders , the executive coach uses personal authenticity to enable senior managers to navigate their path.

Consider the following, that if you have ‘leadership’ within your personal self-definition, then you have responsibility to others, if you don’t see this as the case not only are you wrong, but you aren’t a leader, you are just a manager who has (unfortunately) control.

Filed under: executive coaching, leadership behaviour | Tagged: , , | Leave a Comment »

Leadership Skills: Dealing with team Blockages and Stuckness

Posted on October 10, 2008 by executivecoachingguru

Executive coaching places you into the heart of some most diverse and ambiguous places, often as an executive coach I find myself talking to senior leadership teams in a moment of great situational fluidity (which is management speak for ‘their up against it!’).

As an individual when you are being paid a big salary it’s sometimes difficult to admit to yourself that you are stuck and then by definition even harder to bring that to the table with colleagues. As a team its considerably more complex to have the observational insight to see the team is stuck and even when you can, having the personal elegance to bring it into focus, in the moment with colleagues and a boss who may or may not be operating from the same place of personal insight as yourself.

  1. Trust your instinct: If something feels wrong, then it probably is.
  2. Test the water: You may need to broker your observation at a coffee break, but it’s worth understanding where the rest of the team are.
  3. No room to test?: An elegant – “Can I get some clarity around….” or “How would I explain this to my guy’s”. Is a great way to get a sense of whether you are the one that doesn’t get it, or you were right in the fact no one else has a clue either. 
  4. Bring it to the table: When all is said and done, you are a leader so be one! If you think the team is stuck say so. A great way to do this is to state it as an observation of fact – “It feels like we can’t make headway with this, can I get a sense of where you guy’s are” (That’s a statement not a question).

So it’s out in the open, you highlighted the ‘elephant in the corner’, the key thing about being stuck on something as a team is getting the darn thing recognised and if you are can make that happen then any success after that can primarily be linked back to you.

Of course then it has to be dealt with and that’s something else entirely, which will owe success as much to the behaviour of the people involved as to the tools you may utilise to solve it.

Filed under: leadership behaviour | Tagged: , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Leadership hero Alison Hawkes, puts XL bosses to shame

Posted on September 14, 2008 by executivecoachingguru

Leadership has a new hero and it’s not coming from where you would expect it to. There’ll be no books or speaking tours, there will be no consultancy fees, in fact only a few of us will ever know who she is in the context of this subject.

All the books you will ever read and the workshops you will ever attend will talk about integrity and personal authenticity and of course one of this decades best leadership phrases such as servant leadership. They will espouse the need for leaders to be there for the people, not for the title or the pay, you will here that only by being there for the good of the people and the business as a whole will you truly demonstrate leadership at it’s finest. Then like most of us you will wonder how to make it a reality in the everyday ebb and flow that is your working life.

Alison Hawkes XL Tour Operator - Employee of the Century
Alison Hawkes XL Tour Operator – Employee of the Century?

Alison Hawkes demonstrates servant leadership, though I’d hazard a guess she might not be that well versed on it (of course I am probably doing her a great dis-service). She worked for XL Holidays the UK’s 3rd largest holiday tour operator which on the 12th September announced it would cease to trade, at the moment of this announcement Alison Hawkes was out of a job, she and 1,700 other workers would not be required to turn up for work the next day and getting paid well…..good luck!

Now honestly what would you do? Really think about this, you hear you are out of a job through the media, you know you won’t get paid, to be true most of us would (post blaspheming) spend the next day trying to call your boss and get the CV up to date; this isn’t what Alison Hawkws did though. No she got up the next morning, got dressed and went into work in order to help people, which I think deserves a round of applause and I darned well wish I’d been there to give her one! Well done Alison Hawkes the Executive Coaching Guru salutes you.

  • Management is at its most and overly simplistic, managing resources
  • Leadership is setting direction, acting selflessly, seeing the big picture and doing what others are not willing to do, but above all leadership is the willingness to be a human being to other human beings.

We’ll never know the answer to this, but how many of the XL tour operators board of directors, XL non- executive directors or any of senior management tier turned up at any airport? I’m going to hazard a guess that Alison was one of a very small handful.

Executive coaching very often means touching the hearts and souls of people that have spent a long time building persona’s that they feel represents the kind of leader they want to be or most probably feel should be. The executive coach often has a primary role to enable the most senior of managers to ‘give themselves permission’ to be themselves, the whole person at home and at work. We often look to the business world for examples of where this has worked, but honestly I’m not really interested in the example of a millionaire business leader who has decided that to rescue their soul they will give something back through writing a book. I’m empowered by the humble and honest behaviour of Alison Hawkes, the XL tour operator employee of the century and the fact she demonstrated the core foundation of all leadership behaviour, leadership of oneself. If you are a coach I’d say these are the examples, these are the people you want to find to get to come and talk to your leadership groups.

The Executive Coaching Guru has always said, “if anyone looks to you for direction, then you are like it not, in that moment a leader”, when Alison Hawkes walked into that airport, I wonder how many people looked to her for direction!? That’s leadership by anyones standard.

Filed under: current affairs, executive coaching, leadership behaviour | Tagged: , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Authentic Presence: Obama acceptance speech

Posted on August 29, 2008 by executivecoachingguru

First of all it’s worth noting I am fundamentally not interested in politics, as I believe that the soul went out of the whole arena when Kennedy and Gandhi were shot. There’s just something that has always struck me as unsavoury about the type of person that wants power and dominion over others.

A friend of mine is a policeman and he has always said about validating gun licenses, “there should be an automatic criteria for denying someone a gun license….we don’t give a gun to anyone that actually wants one. Instead we should give them only to people that have no interest in them”.

I like this type of thinking and have always thought the same thing should apply to politics, the criteria for selection should be only choosing those that don’t want the power, but do want the job! I digress….well actually not really. I have just never seen selflessness in the eyes of only but a hand full of politicians.

This brings me to Barack Obama, I have just been watching the speeches surrounding Obama’s acceptance as the Democratic nominee in Denver and by heck what an impressive set of speeches they were. Bill Clinton was superb bringing the two competing teams of Hilary Clinton and Obama together, at the same time with the brilliance that is Clinton there is a certain ‘loose cannon’ element about him.

Someone decided that just in case Bill Clinton went off message then there would be a five second delay on the broadcast similar to that used to screen callers on talk radio programs. The five-second delay, customarily used to censor callers who might use profanity or other unacceptable speech on a radio show, has never before been used in the broadcast of a speech by a former President of the United States. But convention planners, nervous that Mr. Clinton might depart from his prepared remarks in an unacceptable way, said that they were using the delay “just in case.”

Obama himself ‘I thought’ topped it off brilliantly with a 60 minute speech that I have now actually watched 3 times.

To watch the full videos visit youtube and type/paste in:

  • Joe Biden accepts the Democratic Party’s nomination for VP
  • Bill Clinton Democratic Convention Speech – Part 1
  • Bill Clinton Democratic Convention Speech – Part 2
  • Bill Clinton Democratic Convention Speech – Part 3
  • Barack Obama (Part 1) – Acceptance Speech – Democratic National Convention 2008
  • Barack Obama (Part 2) – Acceptance Speech – Democratic National Convention 2008
  • Barack Obama (Part 3) – Acceptance Speech – Democratic National Convention 2008

Obama talks from the heart, he is authentic. Being honest I’m not really in a situation to say whether his politics are sound, whether his budget adds up but you know, “that doesn’t matter”. When you decide to ‘follow’ a leader the majority of the time you never really know the facts as they get to see them and most of the time you’re not as knowledgeable as they are, nor do you have the resources to back you up like they do. So what are you really buying into? Simply, whether or not you actually trust the person, the human being, the fact that if it all goes horribly wrong, even if you don’t really get it, you trust them to make a decision that you can and will believe in.

Watch the video. Do you trust the man even if you can’t be sure about the facts? The Executive Coaching Guru does.

Filed under: current affairs, leadership behaviour | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Leadership delegation Top Tips

Posted on August 23, 2008 by executivecoachingguru

I’m going to tell you a story about a new manager; he’s 34 years old, a dedicated and highly intelligent individual, used to succeeding in life through a high work ethic and a strong line of sight on the end goal.

Promoted to a senior role in a high brand recognition business, he deserved it and started to prove that the promotion was valid and pave the way for even greater opportunities. This showed itself in the way he didn’t delegate and I’d go so far as to say in the way that he wouldn’t delegate.

As each task came in this chap took it on himself and his workload increased, never mind what this was doing to his team, the belief started to be that they just weren’t trusted and people became disaffected and they then started to complain to his line manager (a senior partner in the business). The Senior Partner reacted in a very measured way, first of all he gathered the team together and telling them he’d listened very seriously to what they had to say he asked them a simple question, “Do you trust me?”

As senior partners go, this individual is a classic leader, very astute, highly emotionally intelligent and able to really sense the reality and need of the moment in any given conversation.

People looked around the room and then said, “Yes, we trust you……(pause)……..but” and then he held up his hand and said, “Do you really trust me?”, again there was a pause a few nervous laughs amongst the 30 people in front of him followed by lots of “nods and yes we do’s”. He simply said, “Good, I was banking on you all saying that, thank you”; and that ladies and gentlemen was that, everyone stood up and went back to work.

Over the next 2 months the Senior Partner increased the workload of the newly promoted manager, to breaking point, giving him every bit of new work that could possibly be aligned to that role. The new manager, burnt the midnight oil, worked through the night and the weekends and then finally snapped, walking into the Senior Partners office he let loose with the statement, “For gods sake I’m doing the work of 20 people!”

The Senior Partner, looked up at him and asked him to take a seat, called through to his PA and asked her to gather the new managers team together immediately; five minutes later everyone was in a meeting room, the Senior Partner turned and said, “I count 30 thirty people”.

Now I’m not advocating the style or methodology of anyone here, because it was the style of one individual that worked well for them, but I think you get can get the point of the story.

Now if this story is you take a moment and think about it; you have to trust people to delegate to them trust means ‘relationship and engagement’ to understand a persons capabilities. Delegation means the people are capable of carrying out the task, that they are positioned to succeed by a license to operate and that you are there to learn from them as much as to develop and coach.

Don’t make the fatal error of jumping to task and think the harder you work, the more likely it is you will succeed, the contrary may even be true and always remember that managers control resources, leaders motivate people, the Executive Coaching Guru agrees with Marshall Goldsmith that success though often happening because of you, may well also sometimes happen ‘in spite of you!’

Top Tips for Delegation

  • Be absolutely sure you need it doing, people hate doing irrelevant work.
  • Choose the right person to do it, this isn’t always the most capable. Consider those that would benefit from the experience.
  • Ensure people understand the context of the delegated task, so they understand the value of their work.
  • Be sure to follow through on the task and be seen to do something with it.
  • Show people how this has/is/will make a difference.
  • It’s an old story but set SMART objectives, so people understand the whole deliverable.
  • Check back occasionally to demonstrate interest in the the individual and the activity.
  • Be sure to consider the individuals need in relation to the task, this means you are considering whether you are Delegating, Coaching, Directing or Supporting them in this endeavour.
  • Say “Thank you”, it goes a long way!

Sooner you start, the sooner you’ll get there

Filed under: executive career management, leadership behaviour | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Board Director – Step up not just stand up!

Posted on August 1, 2008 by executivecoachingguru

Do you recall when you find out that Santa Claus didn’t exist, or the day you stopped dressing up as a superhero because you realised it wasn’t really true; sometimes being in a leadership role can be a little like that.

When younger you looked up to the person higher up, especially those people who had the title ‘Director’, which for many was/is the ultimate demi-god status and some directors are exactly what you are looking for; capable of leading the business on both an operational and strategic level whilst being able to also capture the hearts and minds of people within the business. The Executive Coaching Guru likes Peter Druckers perspective on this:

“The final requirement of effective leadership is to earn trust.
Otherwise there won’t be any followers and the only definition of a
leader is someone who has followers.” Peter Drucker

What hurts the most then is a business that had the ‘hearts and minds’ of it’s people and then started to throw it away, a business that has from the outset achieved what many other enterprises can only aspire to, having a workforce that is inspired by the energy of it’s entrepreneurial founder and gives ‘on mass’ the type of discretionary effort that then drives the business forward to become a darling of the city. But then something happens, the step from SME to Plc and somewhere in that growth there is a subtle sense of loss, that is only picked up on the periphery, by those that are listening to the people and then this loss starts to grow and grow, from a point where it was a given that 80%+ of the population identified with the business, and now below 50% see the business as a great place to work.

How does this loss happen? It is the familiar story of the drive for numbers (£/$) outweighing the capacity of the business to develop it’s leadership community from within and it’s inability to recruit people into that business that ‘believe’ in the journey and the community that already exists. It happens when a business fails to realise that it wasn’t the brilliant leadership that actually created the success, but the add value and discretionary effort that was contributed to the business by those people that ‘believed’ in the dream and reality of what it meant to work there. It’s the senior management team not realising that the business was successful in spite of the leadership and finally as the uber coach Marshall Goldsmith says:

“One of the greatest mistakes of a successful person is the assumption, “I am successful, I behave this way. Therefore I must be successful because I behave this way!” Marshall Goldsmith

One of the greatest challenges for an executive coach is to facilitate the reality for successful senior managers that sometimes, maybe even often, they and the business is successful in spite of their behaviour.

George Bernard Shaw in the film Pygmalion, wrote that, “The difference between a lady and a flower girl, is not how she behaves, but how she is treated”. This is a key factor for those of us involved in leadership, recognising that the emphasis is not on demanding behaviour, but in treating people in a manner that facilitates the elegant behaviours that already exist inside. The Executive Coaching Guru loves the idea that the, “more you lead, the less you have to manage”. As a business if you are losing the internal battle of staff advocacy and engagement, don’t blame the credit crunch, the tough times or any other factor, as your role as a leader is to (sit down for this revelation)……..LEAD!

Leadership is about the being with your business in the moment as well as thinking about the future. To understand about leadership in the moment, follow the link and read the speech made by Colonel Tim Collins (when he made this speech the reporter said, “he went out to talk to the troops about taking their malaria tablets, looked around and then realised they needed something more and then spoke without notes and captured the moment). This speech sets the balance of not worrying about the language, or whether the facts would be cascaded, but just delivering from the heart and understanding that if the message is understood, it will spread of it’s own accord.

  • Being a Board Director is more than just numbers and achieving FTSE 100 status, it is about legacy, sustainability, integrity and something called ‘followship’, which is when the people decide to follow and the leadership team realise that making decisions based on ‘career and bonus’ aspirations will never deliver the value that decisions made on ‘people and sustainability’ produce.
  • Board Directors share a duty that goes far beyond their fiduciary responsibility, in the same way that being a parent goes far beyond, feeding and clothing a child. People today do not require management in terms of their daily activity, they require leadership to enable them to contribute beyond yours and even their own expectations.
  • Being a Board Director automatically comes with the badge of leadership, it’s time to not just step up, but to stand up!

Stand Up!

Filed under: leadership behaviour | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Leadership decisions – Max Mosley ’stay or go’

Posted on July 26, 2008 by executivecoachingguru

Max Mosley the somewhat embarrassed President of Motor-sports governing body, has been fighting a public battle over the allegations of a Sunday newspaper that he took part in a ’sick Nazi orgy’ and apparently had the video evidence to prove it: mock uniforms, whippings, talking in German.

Now the Executive Coaching Guru doesn’t feel it is his right to judge others, in regards to their personal appetites, whatever you get up to in the privy of your own dungeon is your business! But there are a few things that don’t sit comfortably.

As long as no one is getting harmed, then basically do what you want, but at the same time you are the leader of an organisation that operates at a global level and has incredible power in terms of its influence, not only within a global market but to all those that look up to their sporting heroes. So you see, it’s not just as simple a thing as saying “it’s a private matter”, because once you take on the mantel of leadership, especially within a marketing led business, then this comes with it’s own level of responsibilities.

Let’s use the example of parent hood, Max has sons, who I can only believe are embarrassed by the exploits of their father. But doesn’t Max have a responsibility to those boys that goes beyond the ‘not getting caught’ to the ‘not blinking well doing it in the first place’. Why? Simply because he had no right to place his family into a ‘potential’ situation where this might occur, which it did. Because these things always come out.

In the same way the Executive Coaching Guru believes that Mr Max Mosely had a responsibility to not place the sport he represents into a place where if something goes wrong, may create a situation that adversely affects it. But Mr Ecclestone (President and CEO of Formula One Management and Formula One Administration) denied that the claims threatened Mr Mosley’s position as president of the motor sport’s governing body, saying, “Has he in anyway damaged F1? No!”; he told the Daily Mail.

Really Mr Ecclestone, you can see nothing that connects the behaviour of this individual to the sport, I bet you’d be singing a different tune if you didn’t like the guy. If you don’t already know Mr Mosley is the fourth son of British World War II fascist Sir Oswald Mosley, a friend of Adolf Hitler, now if ever there was a warning sign that you might not want to get caught up in anything that even has the word German in it as a descriptor, I reckon that’s it.

So what is the message here, well it’s a simple one. The moment you step into a leadership role, you are bestowed with a weight of office that goes beyond the mere operational tasks that come with the role, I can’t believe for one moment that if asked if he believes leadership entails ‘only making the numbers’, that Mr Mosley would agree. No, he’d say, ‘there is more than just output generation to being a leader, one must live by a code that others can aspire to, you have to stand for something bigger than the job itself”. And if he is ever asked this, and replies with that line, I’d agree.

But somehow I don’t think that’s going to happen in the immediate future.

Filed under: current affairs, leadership behaviour | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a Comment »

« Previous Page — Next Page »