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.

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.

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.

More and more senior corporate executives are undergoing Learning Leadership programs. Every program involves a set of well structured workouts.

A senior executive said that “The workouts seemed to be simple at first. But as I started putting down my answers, I realized that I need to think more. They turned out to be more difficult than I thought.”

That is true. Most executives say that. The Learning Leadership workouts seem to be simple because they avoid jargon and the questions are straightforward. But the questions also make one think about fundamental aspects of the way one interacts, deals with values and feelings, handles work processes, and many more aspects of work & life.

By doing workouts one ’sees’ and ‘examines’ what one has thought. This makes one think deeper. That’s why the workouts seem difficult.

The Learning Leadership’s executive coach can also ’see’ and ‘examine’ one’s thinking. The coach can then ask more questions or suggest different approaches to thinking. This is really invaluable but requires further efforts.

There is one more reason why the seemingly easy workouts turn out to be difficult -one is required to come up specific action items (own agenda) to deal with the situations captured in the workouts. Change is possible only through actions. Bringing about change is leadership, is it not? Learning Leadership is not easy, but it is worthwhile.

Your executive coach is there to see you through.

Sign up now if you haven’t done it yet and see for yourself the how much you learn and directly use it when you lead.

Learning Leadership skills or improving them requires important changes in the ‘wiring’ of our brains. Thinking like walking style  is driven by habits formed.

Some of the important changes required in thinking of leaders are:

-capturing reality comprehensively and  while avoiding various biases and pre-conceived notions. By habit we take a very narrow and biased view.

-zero based thinking or thinking based on first principles. But we find it easier start with some ‘known’ base and come to conclusions fast.

-developing clarity and conviction about values. We are in agreement with values in general but we are used to applying them real situations.

-being in touch with own and others feelings and generating energy from them. Our education (most of it) is heavily biased towards left brain thinking. Our right brains need to be wired in!

-ability to dream big

-communicate and communicate. We always underestimate this need.

-bias for action.

These thinking habits can be formed by ‘thinking’ in above ways in relation to own work.

Miskin sent me an intersting article on unlearning & learning

This article says that generally unlearning (not really unlearning) happens through non-use and for this new thinking habits need to be formed and practiced. Very relevant.

Learning Leadership programs and coaching help learners in all this. Coaching is particularly useful since only a neutral and knowledgeable person can help one with observing and correcting thinking habits.

Take a look.

Many thanks Miskin for a nice article.

The chances are that you never come back to it. That’s your fear, so you try to attend to every mail and every call in real time. You stay late and carry your blackberry and your laptop around. (Why do you need both?)

Deep down somewhere, you know that you are not the boss. Those mails, calls, and now sms or tweets are setting your agenda. But at other times you let your designation fool you.

This is not another piece on time management, it is about you taking a lead.

If think reading mail or responding to calls and messages is work, think again.

Let us be ruthless about what qualifies as work:  Work of value happens when you execute a repeatable process generating a result that is of value (expressed in money terms or through ready acceptance for subsequent value generation) for someone inside or outside the organization. OK, there is more. If you do a one time activity that clearly supports the above kind process then that too is work of value-though indirect.

Work of value happens only through processes and projects.

Now, if you examine what you call as work with help above filters, you may have horror on hand. Much of what passes as work is nothing but reminders, repetitions, repairs, and rework.

One CEO whom I was coaching, told me to reschedule our coaching session due to year end sales pressure. I said, ‘Fine. But what is your Head of Sales doing and why do sales need last minute pushing?” “Oh you know how it is..” The CEO was repeating the work that his head of sales was doing. The head of sales was doing a good turn to the organization. He was repeating what his sales executive was doing or supposed to be doing.

I was walking on a shop floor and I could not spot some supervisors. I peeped in the production manager’s cabin. He was away in stores, I was told. ‘Oh there were errors in the parts received..and the supervisors were busy in the quality department for getting clearances”, I learned from him later.

“We have decided to leverage our factory space and the idle machining capacity by taking up job work” another CEO who was heading a machinery business told me. They had a good product portfolio. “But how did you reach this conclusion? Is that your strategy?”, I asked. “That was not our strategy (till yesterday) but it has become necessary” , was his answer. So they were undoing and trying to repair their own strategy. Their machinery portfolio was crying for attention while they had a good customer base.

Think carefully before you brag or wallow about your work or overwork. You may horror on hand!

If something like the above happens with you or around you, you need to take lead and improvise on you leadership skills and build a good agenda. You can do with some coaching too. You can make a big difference.

“My people work really hard. Many of my top managers stay up late and then take their laptops home. But somehow we are not turning out any superlative performance. Our customers think we are ok type. Our employees…the other day I overheard one of our bright team leaders say -Oh! forget what the client says. Listen to your boss..  I was shocked.  I do not understand…”

Somewhere deep in her mind the CEO knows something is not right. Many things may not be right. But there is always the next meeting, the next budget, the next forecast, the next report, and the explanations to be given.

Why do your top managers have to slog? Why do your brightest people appear to have given in?

There are more than one factors behind all this. But I think there is one factor which is almost always there. And one can always get down to doing something about it.

This factor is your business processes.

Now when was the last time you used this phrase? During the ISO 9001 or CMM audit? While pitching for a deal? Or while waxing eloquent on the “learning process”?

What if you take this ‘processes’ thing more seriously and actual start getting a fix on them by

-defining some key business processes e.g. client acquisition, order fulfillment, recruitment (call it talent acquisition if you feel better that way), complaint resolution, product creation etc. Your gut feeling will tell you which are the top two or three vital processes for you as of now.

-fixing some process performance parameters, guess current values, and fix a goal

-appointing some as process leaders and form a team of players

-give them powers and resources to run and to improve processes

-ask your top managers and experts to step back and provide support when needed or take direct process responsibility as process leaders

-review process performance and improvement actions in routine management reviews (you can leave out many other review points)

It is not easy.  But if you stick to it you will be amazed to find performance going up and yes, good (talented) people and not so good people will get marked. Many borderline cases will improve and you will know what to do with the remaining minority.

Process management provides your leaders powerful levers to for shifting gears for future. It makes them leaders.

“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?

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.

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.