Regenerate!

There is no suitable way of making this expression applicable to both the genders. My apologies to talented women executives.  CEOs have their favorites. It is only human to take a liking to someone and develop some trust and comfort with the chosen few. CEO’s have good reasons for this.

The least a CEO, could do is to invest something in your favorite executives. A CEO could for example-

-send them to a Management Development or Executive Education program of a reputed institute and hope that this helps them to develop to those leadership skills needed to shoulder more responsibilities

-send them to an outdoor adventure learning program and hope that they pick up team building and communication skills etc.

-send them on another posting to add to their experience and hope that they pick the skills needed for the higher position

-send them on paid vacation and hope that this motivates them to learn those skills by themselves

-make them understudy of an existing senior person and hope that the current manager is indeed a role model

CEOs try above or variants of the above techniques. But not many give a thought to coaching a person in real work situations, partly because there is not much awareness and partly because executive coaching tends to be very expensive and impractical given the need for physical meetings.

But the fact remains that putting an executive through paces of systematic leadership thinking applied to work situations and with support by an experienced business leader as a coach can be very effective.

In workout based coaching programs, executive need to put in hard thinking about their responsibilities and the coach gives further impetus to their thinking through comments. All this provides opportunity for improvisation and evidence for learning.

You can take a look at Learning Leadership.

The web based workouts and coaching offer a very efficient, affordable, and flexible method for result oriented leadership development.

Give it a try.

You are a CEO and you are weighing options for filling up the position of the Operations Head, which has fallen vacant because the previous occupant left his job. The previous occupant could not cope with the job pressure.

You have a couple of successful project leaders.  Should you chose one of them or should you look beyond?

The usual tendency is to reward good performers by a promotion. That would seem fair. But it is better to ask yourselves some questions. Here are they and some thoughts too.

What are the additional skills that the Operations Head needs to have over above what a competent project leader needs to have?

I think that the foremost skill a good operations head must have is the ability to assess, select, and develop competent project leaders. A strong project leader may be good in use of project management tools and may also be resourceful in solving day to day problems. The operations head, on the other hand, needs to be skilled in dealing with longer term needs like developing more versatile pool of resources, establishing ealry warning systems, cost management etc.

Another critical skill that an operations head needs to have is the ability to influence things horizontally. Even a good project leader may not have been tested on this.

One more skill that project leaders may not get tested on is the ability to diagnose (processes) and take preventive actions.

Why did the previous head fail to meet job pressures?

It is likely that the previous occupant of this post lacked the above skills. It is also possible that your operations group lacks some capabilities that are needed to meet client needs. It is possible that the previous head did not have the diagnostic skills to spot the deficiencies and skills to build new capabilities in your team.

It is very risky to choose someone for promotion on the basis of success in previous job. The risks go beyond immediate failures. Sometimes hardworking people overcome their lack of above skills by resorting to working extra hard (but still in their old areas of comfort), making their people to work unreasonably harder, and other such heroic methods. These can be damaging -talented people may leave, your organization may become more susceptible to shocks.

What is the way out?

1. For every important leadership position, identify differentiating skills needed at that level compared to lower levels. See e.g. Career Planning. Use these to evaluate candidates.

2. Establish ongoing leadership development programs. These programs will not only develop people but they will also provide you with more informed answers when you evaluate people for promotions.

The Regenerative Leadership achieves more from less, it embraces changes before they threaten existence, and it sets the organization on to the virtuous loop of higher and higher performance.

The Regenerative Leadership is a loop consisting of activities such as:
-making sense of reality
-understanding, articulating, and implementing general and specific values
-Leveraging small and big ideas
-learning and teaching
-articulating larger vision
-coming up with actions and taking actions that change reality (bias for actions)
-Learning from all above and revisiting all above periodically (the regenerative loop)

I have found that this loop releases energies for change and transformation in organizations that take up such leadership development programs.

For knowing how the regenerative leadrship helps you develop your leadership pipeline read about career planning.

Hemant

Leadership is often described in terms of vision, inspiration, courage, passion, dynamism, motivation, change & transformation, mobilization etc. While all these are important outcomes or facets of leadership they do not offer many clues about how to get there if one wants to develop leadership skills.

When I think about leadership, I can think about feeling responsible and doing something about it. If I think of leadership in the context of organizations I can say that to improve leadership skills one needs to get better at a range of competencies.

A leader should be able to grasp and face reality in all its complexities. The reality must cover ‘own and internal’ reality. The leader should be able to both handle and harness emotions well. He \ she should be able to identify and implement values.  The leader should be able to generate and harness small and big ideas, generate excitement and develop them into overarching vision. The leader should be able to connect with the organization’s goals and generate breakthroughs in projects and processes. He \ she should be able to learn quickly and teach for developing people. The leader should be able to develop an agenda covering all above and should be able to communicate it simply and directly.

At different points of an executive’s career and depending on the organization’s situation the emphasis would shift, but I have come to believe that above competencies remain core.

Having defined the competencies in these specific terms it easier to think about ways of getting there.