Leadership Training Best Practices Blog

4 Behaviors of a Savvy Leader – Is Your Executive and Leadership Development Program Creating these skills?

2011-08-30T12:18:00.000-07:00

When savvy executives get into positions of authority, they try to optimize decision making and foster innovation. They use leadership skills and strategies to ensure the flow of accurate, timely information and useful suggestions from every part of their organizations. In fact, savvy leaders typically use their executive influence to help their organizations become meritocracies.

Based upon helping thousands of executives take their skills to the next level, here are some of the key behaviors that the savvy leader demonstrates:

Receptivity to feedback and challenge. Unlike an Overly Political leader’s punishment of candor, the savvy leader seeks feedback and rewards people who add value through criticizing or pushing back against ideas.
Admitting mistakes. The savvy leader admits mistakes and is accountable for them. That action, plus phrases such as “I didn’t know that” “I never looked at it that way” and “You’ve elevated my thinking in this area” encourage team members to come forward with ideas.
Changing the risk and rewards equation for candor. When a savvy leader coaches high-level executives, he says, “You see that woman on your team who challenges your ideas and decisions whom you refer to as ‘annoying.’ She is your real friend. You see that guy on your team who waits to know your point of view before giving his and never really disagrees with you. He is not your friend.” The savvy leader knows that and delivers consequences accordingly.
Detecting deception. To obtain accurate information, a leader needs to be attuned to deceptive practices. That allows a leader to effectively filter and screen for self- serving or misleading information.

All organizations have politics. Are your executive and leadership development programs addressing the leadership skills required to navigate today’s challenges? Being a Savvy Executive means never having to say, "I didn't see it coming." It also means achieving career success, maximizing team impact, and protecting your company's reputation and bottom line.

Ten Actions You Can Take To Mobilize Your Workforce around Your Business Strategy - Part 9

2011-08-08T14:32:00.000-07:00

9. Summary

Engagement has become a critical issue that can either erode market success and financial performance or drive an organization more quickly to its marketplace objectives.

While there are many factors that shape the degree to which a workforce will engage in its organization’s strategic priorities, there are a small number of vital factors that can be influenced in order to accelerate engagement in strategy.

There are very few other business factors that warrant more immediate attention than building a workforce that is engaged in your business priorities.

If you’d like further details on any of this research or to discuss how building employee engagement will strengthen the critical business initiatives in your organization, please contact us.

Ten Actions You Can Take To Mobilize Your Workforce around Your Business Strategy - Part 7

2011-08-01T14:25:00.000-07:00

7. Enduring Purpose

Why do your employees get up in the morning and come to work in your organization? What percent are solely motivated by the need to make a living?

People who come to work for reasons other than the need for an income are motivated by some deeper sense of purpose. It’s that purpose that gives meaning to their work. In other words:

Purpose drives engagement

Consequently, the third Root of Engagement represents Enduring Purpose.

There is a large body of research on the power of purpose. At minimum, when employees have a sense of purpose, they are more engaged and they have:

Increased perseverance in the face of obstacles
Greater adaptability and flexibility
The ability to be grounded even in the face of ambiguity and uncertainty
An increased sense of identity concerning how they make a contribution to your organization
Increased job satisfaction
Higher levels of productivity

Research on creating purpose in the workplace identifies a number of different ways that employees can derive a sense of purpose at work.

The Organization – Employees can derive a sense of purpose from the organization’s mission, vision, goals, and culture The Job – Employees can develop a sense of purpose from the actual work they do

Relationships with Others – Many employees derive a sense of purpose from their relationships and interactions with others at work

Their Contributions – Employees can build a sense of purpose from the way they make an impact on the organization The key to aligned engagement is to link employee sense of purpose to the business strategy or change you want to implement.

Ten Actions You Can Take to Build Employee Engagement – Actions #8-10

#8 – Create a Sense of Purpose for the Entire Organization Aligned with Strategy: This is the secret behind the power of communicating a clear and compelling future for the organization—it gives the workforce a sense of purpose.

#9 – Create a Sense of Aligned Purpose for Teams: Help each group in your organization understand their sense of purpose and how their contributions as a workgroup impact the company.

#10 – Create a Sense of Aligned Purpose for Key Contributors: Encourage managers to identify the perspectives, needs, and priorities of your key contributors and help each understand how they “make a difference” in your organization.

Ten Actions You Can Take To Mobilize Your Workforce around Your Business Strategy - Part 6

2011-07-25T14:17:00.000-07:00

6. Facilitating Change-Readiness

New research on change indicates a surprising reality about change. The greatest determinant of change is not an employee’s desire or motivation to change. It is their READINESS to change. The second Root of Engagement therefore is Change-Readiness.

Change is a constant. Furthermore, change that can be unsettling is more the norm than the exception. If employees are not ready to change, then when change does occur, they become disgruntled and disengaged. Alternatively, employees who are ready to change are more likely to be able to sustain higher levels of engagement. In other words:

Change-readiness goes deeper than change management. Change management focuses on organizational processes and gaining buy-in; whereas change-readiness focuses on the readiness to change behaviors and beliefs in order to support new initiatives. The research on change supports the challenges most organizations face when trying to implement change. For example, research on change indicates that:

90% of business process redesign initiatives fall short of producing intended results
80% of quality improvement initiatives don’t yield intended gains
55-90% of technology initiatives fail to achieve their full objectives

We uncovered little known research into change-readiness. We translated this research into a business-friendly tool—the Change-Ready™ model. This breakthrough model clearly elucidates several remarkable points about change-readiness:

Organizations often focus on “one size fits all” solutions when seeking to implement change. They fail to realize that different employee groups may be at different levels of readiness to adopt new approaches and they consequently fail to implement meaningful solutions that really work.
Employees and managers progress through five distinct measurable levels of readiness to change.
Certain level-specific and unique strategies can help teams progress through the levels of readiness more quickly. However, those same strategies, if used at the wrong time and not synchronized to the right level of readiness, will have no effect or even create more resistance.

The ability to help the workforce change rapidly to respond to internal and external business problems and opportunities equates with strategic agility. The greater an organization’s strategic agility, the more likely they will be:

The first to market with new products and services
The first to divest products/businesses that don’t grow the company
Quicker to build competitive barriers
Faster to satisfy client needs and therefore create market dominance

Ten Actions You Can Take to Build Employee Engagement – Actions #5-7

#5 –Manage Change with Engagement Sensitivity: When seeking to implement new changes in your organization, recognize that the way the change is handled will go a long way towards building or eroding employee engagement. Don’t ask, “How should we manage this change?” Instead, ask, “How can we get our employees engaged in this change?”

#6 – Focus on Behavior: When you want employees engaged in a business initiative, give careful consideration to the behavioral outcomes you desire. If you can’t define the behaviors to support the new direction that you want to achieve, then you run the risk that you will fail, as most organizations do, at translating vision to action.

#7 – Center Your Attention on Readiness: Don’t ask, “How can we help our people change?” Instead ask, “How can we help our people to be more ready to make this change?”

Ten Actions You Can Take To Mobilize Your Workforce around Your Business Strategy - Part 5

2011-07-18T13:41:00.000-07:00

5. Manage Accountability and Execution

The first root is Accountability. Accountability might seem an improbable candidate for building engagement but, in fact, it is exactly what the doctor ordered to increase engagement. This is because:

Accountability = Ownership = Engagement

So the question leaders should ask as they seek to enhance engagement is NOT how do we get our people more engaged but, rather, how do we build ownership and accountability. When you think about aligned engagement, this means building ownership for the successful fulfillment of your strategic priorities.

Accountability, when extended over a longer period of time, translates into execution. Execution is intimately linked to engagement.

The greater the engagement, the better the execution; the lower the level of engagement, the poorer the execution. But interestingly enough, the opposite is also true. Why? Because everyone wants to experience success and be part of a winning team. And when execution succeeds, the team experiences success and therefore becomes even more engaged. However, execution is a double-edged sword because when companies execute poorly and fail to achieve results, employees become disengaged. And there is ample evidence that most organizations are deficient at execution. For example:

More than 64% of C-Level executives from 250 midsized to large U.S. and European companies report that being able to execute is critical for their success but nearly impossible to achieve.

Only 27% of organizations fully integrate their strategy and tactics, and 58% integrate at the higher levels, but not at the lower levels.

Ten Actions You Can Take to Build Employee Engagement – Actions #2-4

#2 – Manage Accountability: Ensure your leaders hold people accountable for the success of your business initiatives and change efforts. Ensure that employees who don’t take accountability are held accountable, coached, and given the support they need to be successful. Don’t allow managers to turn their heads when people fail to act with accountability.

#3 – Focus on “Ownership”: Ensure you have a culture in which employees are encouraged to take ownership for achieving your overall company goals. Don’t allow employees, teams, and managers to be harshly criticized and black-listed when they make honest mistakes. This leads to the avoidance of ownership, cover ups, finger pointing, and disengagement.

#4 - Become Obsessed with Execution: Build a culture that pays as much attention to follow-through as it does to developing solutions and clever ideas. Develop execution plans for all key initiatives, including, but going beyond, project planning and, instead, focusing on engagement.

Ten Actions You Can Take To Mobilize Your Workforce around Your Business Strategy - Part 4

2011-07-11T14:07:00.000-07:00

4. Drivers of Engagement

Those organizations that have researched the engagement challenge have surfaced a comprehensive list of factors that impact engagement. They identified anywhere from 15 to 300 drivers of engagement.

These factors pointed to:

Organizational Culture Issues
Senior Leadership Actions
Middle Manager Actions
First Line Supervisor Actions
Actions Individual Contributors Themselves Can Take

We conducted a factor analysis of these drivers of engagement in order to:

Identify the commonalities across models
Surface the higher priority drivers using the Pareto 80/20 Principle – isolating those “vital few” drivers that make the most difference
Put these factors into a coherent model that managers, organization, and individuals can use to build engagement

Ten Actions You Can Take To Mobilize Your Workforce around Your Business Strategy - Part 3

2011-07-05T14:04:00.000-07:00

3. Engaged in What?

Our position is that it’s not enough to get employees engaged. When we work with executives who tell us they want their employees to be more engaged, we respond by asking, “Engaged in WHAT?” For example:

Scenario 1
The Situation:
An engineer is highly engaged in the current project he is working on. He puts in long hours and lots of discretionary effort and really enjoys the work. Sounds good, right?

The Problem:
The project he is working on is his pet project which has little to no strategic value to the company.

Scenario 2
The Situation:
A sales representative has good relationships with his customers and is passionate about his products. What could be better?

The Problem:
The products he is passionate about are the old products and he is hesitant to sell the new products that take the firm in a more strategic direction. The customers with whom he has relationships are long-term “friends” but he is hesitant to be proactive about establishing new relationships with customers in more strategic segments.

These examples make it clear that being engaged alone is simply not sufficient. The type of engagement depicted in these scenarios is what we call “aimless engagement.” Employees are engaged, but their focus has little to do with the strategic imperatives of the business.

Organizations instead need to manufacture what we call “aligned engagement.” Aligned engagement ensures that the workforce is engaged in the strategic priorities of the organization. An organization’s strategic priorities include its:

New business objectives and revised work processes
Strategic change initiatives
Competitive strategy
Customer segmentation approaches
New sales strategies
New products and/or pricing
Increasing innovation
Enterprise system implementations
Reorganizations and acquisitions
Providing unparalleled levels of customer service

When an organization focuses on aligned engagement, initiatives are fueled by the power of a mobilized workforce that is engaged in the realization of critical strategic drivers.

For us, getting employees engaged means aligning your workforce around your critical business objectives.

Ten Actions You Can Take to Build Employee Engagement – Action #1

#1 –Don’t Focus on “Aimless Engagement” Efforts: Ensure that whatever training, communication, and organizational initiatives you undertake are not generic, off-the-shelf engagement solutions. Instead, focus on building an engagement plan around your own most critical strategic imperatives.

Ten Actions You Can Take To Mobilize Your Workforce around Your Business Strategy - Part 2

2011-06-27T13:36:00.000-07:00

2. Shaping the Bottom Line

Employee engagement is not just an HR issue. A withdrawal of commitment and engagement impacts employee performance, which in turn has a domino effect on financial performance. There are repeated examples of the impact on earnings and revenue of engagement. For example:

Companies with higher levels of employee engagement have 71% more revenue than their industry peers.

Increasing engagement can add 2-3% to both operating margin and net profit, while lower levels of engagement will erode operating margin and net profit by 1-2%.

These conclusions are not only striking, they are prescriptive. They tell us that if an organization takes action to improve employee engagement, they will most likely improve financial performance. In fact, one body of research even deciphered what we call the 10:6:2 Rule:

Every 10% Increase in Commitment
Yields 6% Increase in Extra Employee Effort
Yields 2% Increase in Company Financial Performance

Increasing employee engagement is a bottom line company performance issue.

Learn more about Leadership Training

Ten Actions You Can Take To Mobilize Your Workforce around Your Business Strategy - Part 1

2011-06-20T13:18:00.000-07:00

1. The Next Generation of Employee Motivation

Employee motivation has always been on the mind of business leaders. Corporations and universities have continued to teach leaders the theories of motivational experts like BF Skinner, Herzberg, Maslow and Bandura, who all sought to answer the question, “What motivates people to take certain actions?” Ever since the inception of the industrial age, managers have been asking the same question, “What can I do to motivate my employees?”

Managers have been taught conventional wisdom about motivation as part of almost every management training program since the 1970’s. But today’s world is very different because of:

Globalization and diversity
Increasing number of Gen Y employees
Continued outsourcing to former third world countries
Unrelenting investor pressure for continuous revenue and profit performance and growth
No let-up on mergers and acquisitions

The consequences on the workforce of these large scale issues are:

Increased pressure and stress
Less friendly work environments
Greater demand for increased productivity and longer work hours
Skepticism about repeated strategy shifts intended to meet financial and growth expectations

Repeated studies have validated that a significant number of employees world-wide are less than fully engaged in their work and that it has a deleterious impact on company performance.

The Corporate Leadership Council calculates that only 11% of the world’s professional workforce is fully engaged, leaving 89% up for grabs or fully disengaged.

Gallup’s research indicates that 60% of employees are unengaged and a full 17% of US workers are “actively disengaged,” which leads to lower productivity that costs the US $300 billion a year. Furthermore, actively disengaged workers are 10 times more likely to say they will leave their organizations within a year (48%) than engaged staff (4%).

ISR, an international employee research company, has conducted research that shows that 54% of the workforce is complacent, less committed, or fully disengaged.

Accenture conducted a global study of the priorities of C-Suite executives, and engagement ranks third among the factors executives considered critical to performance. The top three organizational capabilities executives view as most important to competing in the marketplace are:

1. Developing effective leadership capabilities (65%)

2. Creating an organization that adapts to change (49%)

3. Engaging and aligning multiple stakeholders (43%)

Customer Service Leadership Best Practices...Impacting the Bottom Line

2011-03-29T11:17:00.000-07:00

In a recent customer service & leadership quarterly poll, a large % of service leaders stated that "ensuring the best customer service experience possible" was keeping them up at night.

A small % increase in service excellence can boost profits by as much as upwards of 50%. Research has shown that satisfied customers lead to greater sales growth.

Read more about some of the best leadership development programs, hiring practices and make the link between industry leading revenue growth and service...

A Trio of Effective Leadership Development Practices

2011-03-28T08:26:00.000-07:00

How do you think your organization's bottom-line would fare if your executives and managers focused 100% of their energy ensuring that:

• Employees are engaged
• Development is aligned with key strategic objectives
• Everything is measured and reinforced

It is safe to say the bottom-line would not suffer from the application of arguably the 3 best leadership development practices preached by nearly every industry leading company.

Search for the Right Leadership Development Resource. Right Now.

2010-12-29T06:00:00.000-08:00

Introducing a powerful new Search Tool to help you track down the right Leadership Development & Best Practice Resource right now. Search this blog and the vast collection of corporate training communities and related best practice blogs with a single click.

Step 1 - Locate the Search Tool to the right of this post

Step 2 - Type your keyword search phrase. eg. Performance Culture

Step 3 - Click Search

Step 4 - Review the results, sorted by:

This Blog | Sites Linked to this Blog | Recommended Blogs

See illustration below. Enjoy.

Leadership Development Research Study Results

2010-09-29T08:16:00.000-07:00

Over the course of the past 12 months, we conducted an online research study where visitors to our website were anonymously surveyed across an area of topics related driving performance through investments in human capital. In particular, one such survey asked respondents the following question:

What leadership development issue is keeping you up at night?

From a list of predefined responses, here are the results for your viewing pleasure.

Improving strategic decisions, execution, and results--24%
Increasing leadership bench strength--35%
Improving organizational performance--29%
Motivating and engaging the workforce---12%
Other--0%

How would you answer the above question regarding leadership best practices, leadership development etc.etc.?

Leadership Connection to High Performing Sales Environments

2010-08-02T06:00:00.000-07:00

It is fair to say many sales environments have goals and objectives that are not stimulating performance across the team.

And, it's a challenge for the sales leaders to create the circumstances that stimulate their sales teams to execute the strategic plan.

Just like a great coach impacts performance on the field across the athletes on their team, effective leadership practices can impact the sales performance and degree of engagement and employee retention across their sales organization.

Leadership Training Best Practice Resources

2010-05-02T17:00:00.000-07:00

From time to time, we like to provide visitors and subscribers to this blog with a refresher on where they can find helpful resources devoted to best practices in the area of Leadership Development, Action Learning, Executive Development and related areas.

We hope you find these resources insightful and relevant:

Enjoy!

Action Learning Takes on Most Pressing Leadership Skill Gaps

2010-03-31T08:43:00.000-07:00

In the case of executive development, the most frequent skill gaps identified by senior leaders are fundamental business execution skills. A recent survey published in Chief Learning Officer Magazine identified the most pressing leadership skill gaps to be:

Strategic thinking
Creating a vision and engaging others in it
Leading change
Inspiring and motivating the workforce
Making decisions using an enterprise perspective

To address head-on the above mentioned pressing leadership skill gaps and training needs requires a working knowledge of the "70/20/10 Principle" and experience implementing an action learning approach to leadership training program design & executive development. Before you know it your executives:

Planning using a C-level perspective
Acting strategically, and
Driving real value to the bottom line in no time

Click here to learn more about the "70/20/10 Principle", Action Learning and the top performing companies that have created a culture of continuous senior leadership development and performance improvement.

Does Your Leadership Development Program Stack Up?

2009-11-06T11:10:00.000-08:00

Is a $13 million dollar return realistic for a one-year Corporate Leadership Development Program?

It certainly sounds far fetched. Yet those numbers are real. It just happened. Done right, it could also happen for you.

Many profess wonderful results from action learning leadership programs. When we looked closer however, the majority of the results were fuzzy at best.

Done right, Leadership Development should build current leaders.
Done right, Leadership Development should build future leaders.
Done right, Leadership Development should deliver tangible business results.

Can Your Leaders Weather the Storm and Come Out Stronger?

2009-04-01T06:00:00.001-07:00

Now is when Leadership really matters.

In difficult times, leaders should have the skills and knowledge to not only weather the storm, but to help you and your company come out of the storm two times faster and two times stronger than your competition.

From our perspective, this means effectively and efficiently moving key strategies forward that significantly increase revenue and decrease costs.

Contrary to popular belief, it is possible to design, deliver, implement, and measure leadership programs that:

Do not hinder cash flow and pay for themselves
Provide measurable business returns
Deliver on your company's top priorities

This is not about "training." This is about running your business to weather the storm and come out stronger and faster than your competitors.