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Thought Leaders
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We are experiencing a leadership crisis today. With so many instances of poor leadership, employees, stakeholders, shareholders and others are searching for leaders that they can believe in again.
A long list of CEOs and their companies have helped cement this negative perception in the past few decades: Ivan Boesky (insider trading), Michael Milken (junk bond fraud), Kenneth Lay (Enron), Dennis Kozlowski (Tyco), Lehman Brothers (sub-prime mortgages), Worldcom (bankruptcy), Union Carbide (Bhopal disaster), Bernie Madoff (Ponzi scheme), Tom Petters (Ponzi scheme) and many others have contributed to a low public perception.
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One of the reasons employees dread performance assessments is the fear of stepping on hidden land mines. Managers who are reluctant or uncomfortable giving negative feedback avoid these discussions by ignoring emails and rushing from meeting to meeting, leaving the employee with a false sense of security. However, when performance failures finally pop up during the assessment meeting like mid-summer squalls, the climate quickly changes from sunny skies to a storm alert.
A survey by Aon Consulting and the Society for Human Resources Management reported only 7% of human resources professionals were “very satisfied” with their performance appraisal systems. Because of this, some companies have abandoned the appraisal process completely, leaving employees in the dark and managers without any standardized performance measurement tool.
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|  After investing considerable time and resources to conduct a multi-rater review (360 review), many organizations dilute or destroy its effectiveness by neglecting to implement an effective follow-up plan. When administered properly, 360 reviews for leadership development provide comprehensive, diverse and multi-viewpoint feedback that can help individuals identify their strengths and areas for improvement. Once the reports are received and distributed, this is where the work really begins.
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|  As great as a performance management system is in helping managers to dig deep into the effectiveness of an organization’s culture, how well employees are doing their jobs, and if the organization is meeting its objectives, it doesn’t take the place of getting out behind the desk and having face-to-face interactions with those employees being assessed. It is not enough to send a performance report and ask “if you have any questions just shoot me an email…”, leaving the onus to the employee to bring up anything that they might find worth mentioning.
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|  There are many different types of coaches out there, each claiming to be the best at what they do and promising to make you successful. What sets a good coach apart from an ineffective one? Educational background and experience are not enough. When looking for a coach, here are twenty-six characteristics that every good one must possess in order to be effective:
Attitude: Does your coach act like your biggest fan? Does the coach cheer you on and have a positive outlook and genuine belief in your success? The ideal coach truly believes in you and maintains a positive frame of mind in every situation. Great coaches are solution-focused rather than problem-centric and have faith in positive outcomes in even the most challenging situations.
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A leader is someone that possesses an inherent set of personal virtues (habits), and with these virtues, can guide an organization effectively and successfully. Stephen Covey talks about those habits that make for better leaders in his book Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Others like Blanchard, Peters, Ulrich and Conger address this issue as well. What Covey and others do not address is how to hold these leaders accountable for learning the proper habits so they can become those great leaders everyone writes about.
Leadership habits, like any other habit, must be learned. We aren’t born with the habits of a great leader. We learn them. Few of us know how to pitch a fastball, brush our teeth or play an instrument the first time we try. Through repetition, education and practice we learn to do these things until they become instinctual habits.
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Everybody’s talking engagement. Not the Kate and William royal wedding kind of engagement but employee engagement. What should be part of any employee engagement conversation is what has happened to the survivors of the economic title wave that has washed over Corporate America.
More than 13.5 million people lost their jobs, which is double the number of what it was before the Great Recession began in December, 2007. Even though economists predict that 2.5 million new jobs will be created in 2011, it still means that it will take years just fill those positions that were lost (from MSNBC.com).
According to Newsweek, through the first quarter of 2011, even those most immune to an economic downturn, white males, have been one of the hardest hit segments with “over 600,000 college-educated white males ages 35-64 ending up on the unemployment line,” which is double that demographic group’s pre-Great Recession rate.
Those that were lucky enough not to lose their jobs, are the survivors – bitter, shellshocked, frustrated and disengaged; but survivors.
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Everybody’s talking engagement. Not the Kate and William royal wedding kind of engagement but employee engagement. What should be part of any employee engagement conversation is what has happened to the survivors of the economic title wave that has washed over Corporate America.
More than 13.5 million people lost their jobs, which is double the number of what it was before the Great Recession began in December, 2007. Even though economists predict that 2.5 million new jobs will be created in 2011, it still means that it will take years just fill those positions that were lost (from MSNBC.com).
According to Newsweek, through the first quarter of 2011, even those most immune to an economic downturn, white males, have been one of the hardest hit segments with “over 600,000 college-educated white males ages 35-64 ending up on the unemployment line,” which is double that demographic group’s pre-Great Recession rate.
Those that were lucky enough not to lose their jobs, are the survivors – bitter, shellshocked, frustrated and disengaged; but survivors.
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 Bob was nervous about his upcoming annual performance assessment. His manager traveled about 50 percent of the time, and hadn’t spent much time with Bob or at his desk in the home office in the past year. The takeover scare a few months ago occupied everyone’s time, and when Bob’s manager was in town, he was behind closed doors in meetings with the executive team, trying to keep the wolves at bay.
Bob attempted to grab a few minutes to go over his past due performance assessment, but his manager responded with unanswered emails and "Not Now!" Blackberry texts. A few weeks later at his assessment meeting, Bob was shocked his manager wrote that he was, “pushy, missed deadlines and had poor communications skills,” Bob trusted his manager would give him a fair assessment, and felt ambushed by the poor ratings and unfair performance statements. It didn’t have to have been this way.
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|  “Do I trust you?”
“Do you trust me?”
Every time you interact with someone, these are subconscious questions in which you search for answers. Whether it is your manager, someone you manage, a contractor, customer or other stakeholder – it’s a regular occurrence.
In 2011 the UK-based Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) issued its quarterly employee attitudes survey1. The lack of trust in senior managers and decreasing level of trust in managers is highlighted as a key demotivation and negative for the culture in “UK public companies.”
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|  Multi-rater feedback, commonly known as a 360 review, is a behavioral survey frequently used by companies to assist employees and leaders to assess themselves in the eyes of their subordinates, customers, peers and superiors. Hence the term "360 review," as it provides a snapshot of the subject's behavior through the eyes of the people that surround him at various levels and in various roles. Often used for leadership development efforts, the survey asks participants to anonymously rate the subject's performance in a number of areas and solicits text comments as well as numeric ratings on a scale.
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In part I of this article, we discussed some attributes that make for a successful coach. Good coaches must have a positive attitude, a sense of determination, and an ability to help you to find an approach for even the most difficult situation with creativity and intelligence. This article will discuss fourteen additional characteristics that set good coaches apart from unsuccessful ones.
Mindfulness: An effective coach is always in the moment and pays careful attention to you. Being able to focus completely on you while also being aware of her own emotional state is central to being an engaging coach. A coach who practices mindfulness both in her coaching sessions and in her personal and professional life will be able to maximize every interaction with you and teach you how to live every moment to the fullest.
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Leadership coaching isn’t about teaching a leader to do the things they already know, but better. It is about putting the ball in the right hands of their teammates and guiding them to victory.
Recently the movie The Kings Speech was in theaters. This was about the man who became King George VI and how his speech therapist, Lionel Logue, helped him overcome a severe stutter. It was also about how the therapist (coach) helped King George VI believe in himself so he could overcome his limitations, the British population’s belief he was unfit for the throne, and become the leader that had been hidden beneath. Through a coaching process, King George VI learned to trust himself and thereby overcome his stutter. King George VI wasn’t a poor leader. He just lacked the confidence to be a leader because everyone doubted him and it manifested itself through a speech impediment.
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To many of us in the industry, the 360 multi-rater assessment seems like it’s been around since the Dark Ages. In reality it first emerged in the 1950s, but really became an integral part of human resource and organizational development circles in the 1990s. Today, most large organizations utilize multi-rater assessments as part of their leadership development program. At Work Effects, we subscribe to the benefits of this type of assessment. Being rated by those we lead and work with on a regular basis often provides greater insight into our actions and behaviors versus the more traditional top-down manager performance appraisal.
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As green shoots of growth poke their heads out from under the Great Recession, there are signs that hibernating employees are beginning to stir as well. To survive the downturn, organizations cut and slashed budgets, headcounts, plants and salaries. The victims of this slash and burn management approach has been the employees. Now that things are starting to look up, so are your employees.
A symptom of the downturn has been engagement -- or lack of it. According to the 2010 Corporate Executive Board's Employee Engagement Study, "21% of employees today identify themselves as highly disengaged, a three-fold increase since 2007." To make matters worse, it's your best employees that are thinking about leaving because "25% of employer-identified, high-potential employees plan to leave their current companies within the year."
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On almost a daily basis we open a major newspaper and read about an organization that has lost its way because technology, competition or the economy has changed the playing field. We then open a business magazine and we see that a leader has guided its organization into hot water because of poor decision making. To make matters worse an industry trade group comes out with a study from a prominent research firm that says that leaders or politicians have lost the public’s trust.