Regenerate!

I am delighted that I will join the starting session of the new batch at the university.

Learning Leadership’s Emotional Leadership program will start for the next batch of B-School Students at the University of Texas, Arlington On September 9, 2010.

James Campbell Quick, John and Judy Goolsby Distinguished Professor, at the university’s Goolsby Leadership Academy will start this online program and teach how to develop emotional leadership.

This program has helped many executives in understanding themselves and channelising their emotional energy in better ways. This is at the heart of leadership that has power to bring in change.

At Learning Leadership, we always recommend that our Emotional Leadership program is used as a platform to launch leadership development initiatives in an organization. A leader’s ‘presence’ is felt when he or she inspires people to achieve something worthwhile. Inspiration being an emotional phenomenon, a leader must be in close touch with emotions -own and those of people.

The Emotional Leadership program has been running at the College of Business, The University of Texas at Arlington, USA.*

The importance of Emotional Leadership is best understood from what Professor James Campbell Quick says:

“Emotional Leadership offers a pathway to the heart of leadership growth and development. Great leadership inspires; inspiration come from within. This course invites you to know yourself and the power of your own emotions. These are the gateway to knowing and leading others. Emotional Leadership empowers you to enhance your emotional intelligence, which is essential to the skills of powerful leadership. Emotional leadership is key to effective leadership.”

James Campbell Quick
John and Judy Goolsby Distinguished Professor
Goolsby Leadership Academy
College of Business
The University of Texas at Arlington, USA
Visiting Professor, Lancaster University Management School, UK

Various workouts in the Emotional Leadership programs offer good insights for executive coaching. An experienced executive coach can understand the person under coaching better and provide useful developmental inputs.

*The Emotional Leadership is also running at several corporations.

Business leadership is all about making decisions. Decision making can not be easily taught in leadership courses, however good they are. See what is happening here.

A CEO is meeting his management team. The subject is review of some proposals for additional investments in manufacturing operations.

Head of Manufacturing (HOM): These investments will increase the capacity of  the production line. We have bottlenecks.

Head of  Sales (HOS): Yea.. we lost some sales recently due to supply constraints.

Head of Quality (HOQ): Rejections is another problem. This adds to the pressure.

HOM; But the rejections are within the budget.

CEO: What does finance say? What is the payback?

Head of Finance (HOF): Based on the trends on sales lost over last three months. Full payback from these incremental investment will take place over 18-24 months. That is why I have forwarded budget papers. We will need raise additional term loan, but our bankers have agreed.

CEO:  Then what is the hitch? Go ahead…we need sales.

We had a coaching session two days after the above meeting. The CEO told me about this decision. The conversation went as given below.

Coach (I): But we recently discussed that our cash generation is low and resorting to additional financing will increase the interest burden.

CEO:  But we have already invested so much in our manufacturing. This incremental investment will help….

Coach: That’s a classic case of historical costs or existing investments influencing decisions which have to work in future. Have the bottlenecks been analyzed? Various reports show that on-time material availability performance has not been good enough. What about in-process rejections? Last month’s reports stated that the in-process rejections were well above 10%.  This is like 10% of the capacity is wasted. Could any of these be causing problems? Are you expecting further growth in demand? What happens if the product mix has to change?

CEO: Yea. I recall that there have been several order cancellations due changes in demands.

CEO: I see…it is better to go to the root of the problem. Our bankers had told me privately that though they would be happy to provide line of funding, in our interest we should generate more cash out of operations and retire some old loans which have adding to the interest burden. I will get this sorted out.

There are some issues here:

-Historical bias: The tendency to justify sinking more money because you have already done so.

-Functional bias: Each functional head defines problems narrowly (wrongly). Every functional head has undergone many leadership courses but the thinking has not changed.

-Financing bias: It seems that a good payback and availability of finance is all this needed to justify any decision.

-Tendency to throw money at the problem instead looking for root causes.

Learning Leadership’s executive coaching programs help  management teams to examine business processes and root causes. Various workouts help them understanding problems in term of business processes. When executives do these workouts periodically, they get better in applying various principles.

Scene : A coaching session with a CEO.

CEO: There are now two candidates for the job of the operations head. A has many years of relevant experience and is less qualified. I can get him easily and at a substantially lower CTC. B is qualified, experienced, and very ambitious. He will cost twice as much as A. A is eager to join, whereas B is ambivalent. I think A suits us.

I (the coach): A suits the company or he suits you?

CEO: umm….B seems to have strong views..such people you know..

I: The question is whether A can revamp the operations as you need. If he can not, the entire CTC spent on him will be a waste. As long as B’s strong views are based on facts, logic, and partly gut feeling backed by conviction, there is nothing wrong. One can not achieve anything without these things.

The CEO went into deep thought.

CEO: I see your point. The operations head  will take up the work I was handling so far. I do not want him to leave things as they are and I should learn to deal with a strong person who can change things. But what is guarantee that B will carry out changes and that he is not just a hard headed person? Also, B will upset our salary structure.

I: That is a good question to ask. CTC is less important as long it is market related and as long the company can afford it. Is the salary structure out of step with market? If yes,it will have to change.

The CEO again got immersed in his thoughts.

A leader’s most immediate output is decisions that can leave a lasting impact on their companies and morale of their people. People related decisions fall in this category. Unknown to our conscious mind, we use wrong criteria for making decisions.

A good business \ leadership \ executive coach can help in averting such blunders.

(In this case, the CEO went on to hire B. He also revamped the salary structure realizing that the company was at a risk of losing good people. Some years down line , the  company has revamped its operations and has a stronger and balanced management team.)

You must be coming across this phrase often, particularly if you are a business leader who tries to keep in touch with the current research and thinking in the fields of leadership and management. There is always some new thinking. You read an article, attend a leacture and pick up new thoughts. But before you have had any time to apply this to your business, you are either neck deep in your urgent business matters or there is a newer idea.

And then whatever happens to ‘old’ ideas and concepts? Does something gets useless just because it is ‘outdated’? Consider these, for example:

Core competence

Blue Ocean \ Red Ocean Strategy

Disruptive innovation

Six Sigma \ Lean Sigma for process improvements

360 degrees appraisal

Values based leadership

One can list many such concepts which were ‘in’ once upon a time.  But these concepts still present useful perspectives  if applied to specific situations. An intelligent leader can exploit these to check if any new insights and strategy points can be obtained by using these.

Learning Leadership programs and agenda generating workouts incorporate powerful principles behind various frameworks and ‘theories’ and give an opportunity to the leader to apply them to specific situations. Learning Leadership’s executive coaches assit the leaders in this.

Leaders sharpen their thinking and develop their agenda using the above and many more powerful principles throgh carefully designed executive coaching programs.

Learning Leadership’s Executive Coaching programs have been running successfully in the US & in India.

Having pioneered the learning process & content based on agenda generating workouts and web based access & delivery, Learning Leadership believes that these programs can offer tremendous benefits to Large, Medium, and Small companies.

Therefore, Learning Leadership intends to enlist partners who can spread the word and get enrollments to its programs.

Ideally , our partners will have top level contacts in companies, universities, and other institutions and the enthusiasm for selling our path breaking programs.

Learning Leadership believes in long term relationships based on value addition & trust.

If you are interested, please write to me at hemant.karandikar@learning-leadership.com

Hemant Karandikar

What kind of leadership?

This is going to be tough for you to decode. Ask, “What kind of leadership will I learn?”

You may get answers like “Situational Leadership”, “Value based Leadership”, “Strategic Leadership” and so on..

These answers do not make you any wiser. Probe more. Ask “What exactly is that? What does it do in real world?” You may get more jargon.

Go on and ask, “Which skills will I learn? How will these skills help me in my career?”

Answers to these questions may help you in making up your mind. Remember executive coaching often can be in the form of free wheeling conversations. While you may feel good about exploring and expressing yourself, that is all that you will be left with.

Therefore ask, “What is the specific outcome of the coaching programs?”

If you hear ‘you will communicate better’ or ‘you will build a better team” forget it. You can not verify all these. Besides, leadership is more than that.  You need something tangible and useful to come out of your time and money.

Learning Leadership’s executive coaching programs help you in developing your own agenda as leader. That is something you can use, evaluate, and improvise! Read more…

Experience as a business leader.

Your executive coach should have been in a formal position like  a CEO or a Managing Director or a President of a business organization and he or she should have served on the board of directors of this organization.

This is important. A view from the top is fundamentally different. No amount of lateral experience at lower levels can give the perspective which a top leader gets through his or her work. Only a person who has had a view from the top can help you no matter at what position are at now.

If you are a CEO, then the above requirement is even more critical.

Additionally, your executive coach should have had functional experience that straddles at least two of these areas: marketing \sales, operations, finance, product creation, R & D.

The belief that one can learn leadership.

There are many successful business leaders who think that one is born with leadership skills. They therefore think that one is either a leader or one is not a leader.

This is not true. Leadership skills can be learned like other skills. The impression that leadership skills are innate to one’s personality exists because people equate leadership with charisma, oratory skills, and an obvious sway over people. While these abilities can help in leading, they can at times mislead a leader into believing in his or her infallibility and can prevent correct assessment of reality. Leadership is more than these qualities.

Another reason for such a belief: leadership development can not take place in classrooms. Traditional teaching methods fall short here. Leadership skills can only be developed only on the job. For this, coaching helps. When there is no executive coaching support a person’s development depends on how much he or she can absorb and cross-apply.

Therefore the belief that leadership can be learned is central to executive coaching.

How does one look for this belief? Find out what the would be executive coach has done in his \ her career. What kind of diverse responsibilities have been handled? Did he or she develop teams?

Non-judgmental attitude!

Why? You need a coach to help you think widely and deeply. If your executive coach reaches conclusions fast (he or she as an accomplished business leader may be able to reach conclusions faster), your thinking process will remain stunted. Your coach should help you to make better decisions and make them faster.  You do not want the coach to undertake thinking on your behalf.

This attribute is by far the most difficult one to have.

How to recognize this: Have a conversation with your potential executive coach. The conversation need not be about the coaching assignment. You can also listen into such a conversation.

Note down how many open-ended questions (how, in what way, .) the coach asks. Open ended questions result in answers that describe situations and possibilities.

Note down how many times  he or she asks closed-ended questions (this or that?). Such questions require one to choose from just two options.

More open-ended questions indicate a thinking pattern that is not inherently judgmental.

In other words, your coach should be a curious person! Since we associate curiosity with children and do not give enough thought to it, the above explanation is needed.