Regenerate!

“When Ajit joined our team there was a great hope. After all, he not only had top rated education but he had also worked at the market leader in our industry. I was very proud to net him. But six months have passed and I no more enjoy meeting him”

CEOs go through such disappointments.

Here are some thoughts before you go for your next prize catch:

-Agreed, Ajit came from the same industry. But working with the market leader can be quite different than working for a company which is trying to come up with better offerings. Being a market leader means that the way things are compared by customers has been set already. On the other hand, at a company offering some thing new, you have to change customers’ benchmarks. Your star recruit may not have done this before.

-Ajit’s excellent education: Great. But your company has been built around people with education from different kind of institutions. You culture is that of looking around and learning by trying things out. Ajit is not used to that. He tends to take many things for granted. That would be a cause of some friction between Ajeet and your other people.  And Ajeet being perceived as a new star would have increased the distance further.

It does not mean that a CEO should only recruit ‘our types’. Quite the opposite. People ‘not like us’ can be a good addition if what they bring adds to the business.One should know what it is.

But how does one find this about new comers when one does not know own people well enough -going by those botched up cases of promoting the favorites?

First thing to do is raise your own capability of developing people -you will start understanding people much better. A good resource for this can be Learning Leadership -it is flexible, accessible, and affordable.

The second thing to do is to prepare yourself well before you start looking for new people. If you do the first one well you will have much to build on for this.

What to do about Ajit who is unfortunately so off-color now?

Perhaps a short assignment to investigate competitive landscape to come up with some ground up thinking might bring him out of his shell? Perhaps.

Any more guesses?

I conducted a workshop Leadership -How Regenerate and Rejuvenate Your Business at the Renal Unit of K.E.M. Hospital, Pune, India on Nov. 16, 2009. The renal unit’s team had identified the need for delivering better services to patients by upgrading their staff’s leadership skills, improving inter-relationships  amongst the staff and team spirit.

The workshop consisted of selected workouts from Leaning Leadership’s various programs. Doctors, counselors, and other staff of the renal unit participated in this workshop. The participants liked the broad and in depth coverage of leadership principles and workouts that were directly relevant for their work situations.

This workshop once again showed the applicability of Learning Leadership’s learning methods to various sectors and to people with diverse backgrounds.

Sounds familiar. The signs were all there.

She would come up to you and make some good suggestions. You would say ‘great’ and give her a know-all look and an indulgent smile. She would speak with conviction in meetings.  But she would not get a clear mandate from you. At the times of important decisions, she would observe you silently but relentlessly. You would of course indulge her once in a while.

Then one day she quits and you say ‘Oh!I was going to promote her.’ You even make an offer to her. But she has a better opportunity and she has made up her mind.

Sounds familiar. But preventing this takes much more.
-Do you promote people for performance (you can see that) or for potential (not obvious)? One needs to be clear on what additional competencies are needed to perform the next job. Your people too need to be clear about what do they need to learn for their advancement. Read this career planning.
-Do you have an ongoing mechanism for finding out the leadership potential of your people? And for ‘improving’ their potential? For knowing more about a tried leadership development process available, register at Learning Leadership and join the free program Leadership -learning, coaching, and developing.

If you do not a have a confident YES as an answer to each of the questions the above familiar incident might also be a recurrent one.  It is difficult to handle talented people as compared to the mediocre. The mediocre would be happy to plod around.

The talented people must be engaged with twin challenges of learning new skills and taking on more responsibilities. They also need to be coached well.

Learning Leadership brings such leadership coaching to your people through the internet.