Regenerate!

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.

As I get some time to breath, sitting in a client’s office in Chennai, I see.

Coming out of Channai airport and getting on the arterial road to city, I see with a mixture of pleasure and a bit of jealousy, pedestrians crossing the road with a brisk but not a frantic walk. Of course there are two policemen on either side of the road divider who help this happen. I dream of pleasures of walking in amche Pune.

I see people developing technologies and business models for  providing banking, shopping, and travel services as and when needed. I dream of me not having to repeat my preferences every time I need to bank or travel or buy something . I see that I do not have to negotiate road traffic and aisle traffic in malls and the humanoids there if I choose not to. I see that I do not have to remember to do a web check-in at midnight just to book an aisle seat. Choosing and buying gifts does not have to be such a huge decision making and nerve wrecking exercise. I see around me, hapy people while shopping. That makes me happier too.

In between my work at the client’s place I get some time. I log into our Learning Leadership to coach senior industry people remotely. I see that people in their forties, fifties, or sixties building new businesses and transforming existing ones. I see their commitment for developing themselves even after being successful. I see them coming out with their follies and vulnerabilities just so that they can think better, dream bigger, decide better, and act with purpose. These business leaders are willing to be challenged about their thoughts and they are willing to be corrected. I feel their passion for learning. I feel the energy that their dreams play out.

I see short cuts taken and corners being cut for pennies and careers and lives being sacrificed for some fortune. But also I see people committing themselves to what may come to fruition years later. There are smug people and there are some who  criticize but do not devote their talents for creating. But there are people who dream and create.

I get frustrated with the walls of vested interests that hoodwink us with dubious economics and science - whether for cutting carbon or for Bt Brinjal or for promoting automobile industry or for promoting nuclear energy. But I also see  ethical hackers, RTI activists, and profesionals with heart  -gamely breaching the walls that keep coming up.

I hear about very young people driven to desperation and I see some of them getting too wise and too practical. But I also see young people with gleam in their eyes about their game changing efforts. I see them setting aside limitations of education and asking ‘why not’ to challenges.

I dream too. Dreams, mine & others, make life lively.

As always, change is in the air, I want be part of it.

“We are the best brand in this vertical for delivery of enterprise  computing and we have a global delivery model -this is what our VP told the that big prospective client. I was required to attend our presentation” Mitchell said sounding unhappy.  John nodded as he pressed the cappuccino button for her.

“Do you know what is so special about our brand?”

John looked bank. He said,” Mitchell, this is a typical elevator pitch”

“Is the elevator pitch valid only for the duration of the transit? I constantly get clients’ reminders for pending work and for fixing errors. It is very frustrating. I do not know what a brand means and I no longer wish to know”

It is just as well that the coffee machine capers are not heard in the elevators. For the VP has perhaps no clue to what a brand really stands for. His brand is the market leader so it has to be the best as far as he is concerned.

There are not many companies who can afford to be smug about their market leadership. There are none.

It takes a while to think and act on what a brand really means and how to get there.

Branding is what your customers think about you  and what they think about your market offerings in simple words (great \ so so \ mediocre \ very reliable  and  meticulous \etc). It is obvious that, what customers think flows directly from your offerings and their delivery processes and other customer touching processes.

If these processes are not lead by effective leaders and are not geared to fulfil your promises to customers, your brand value will start slipping and your people will not stand behind your brand.

Coffee machine capers are more potent than elevator pitches. Pay heed.

Learning Leadership offers e-learning and e-coaching services that help in dealing with above issues. Its Regenerative Leadership  model covers business process improvement competencies. On-site or face-to-face engagements are also available in the US and in India.

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.

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.

Personality tests are very popular amongst users as well as corporate HR people. Personality tests seek to profile people. They make sense to the extent that they supplement a chaotic personal interview by something in which one will not miss asking obvious questions. They also make sense when large number of people have to be screened by automating the task.

For a low down on personality tests, visit wikipedia .

But personality tests have limitations. In addition to the limitations the above link mentions, I would like to say that personality tests neither provide diagnostics nor do they offer any action-ability. They are like your health report that tells about your cholesterol levels and other indicators. The report may itself be incomplete (needing more tests) or the report may need an expert’s diagnosis that prescribes a course of actions.

Personality development, leadership development and in general, developing people is far more complex than that. If your aim is to develop your people, you will need a development process which combines training, with exercizes and coaching. You need to pace your people through such process.  This requires a commitment by the CEO andthe management team. That’s why there very few companies who achieve success in this area.

Here is a quote from an ex-student of an Ivy League business school..

QUOTE

Every professor who cruised by seemed intent on achieving a super-ordinate goal and the students seemed equally concerned about maximizing their returns on an Ivy League education.

A decade later, I believe that B-school education prepared me for the challenges of a corporate career but with a missing ingredient — the art of creating value without getting caught in the trivial pursuit of management perfection.

Hemant

Here is an excellent article for our troubled times…

Column : The purpose-driven company - The Financial Express

The conventional view is that, in hard times, business leaders have a responsibility to keep their eyes firmly on the bottom line, protecting workers’ jobs and shareholders’ investment. To do this, business leaders often focus on cutting costs since it is difficult to raise prices in times when consumers are especially price conscious. An auto manufacturer may use lower quality inputs, a consulting firm may staff fewer resources for a client, or a consumer goods manufacturer may cut back on quality checks. Alternately, or sometimes in parallel, businesses will try to raise prices through hidden fees

Do read the complete article. Vikram Akula, who runs SKS Microfinance, writes about his approach and experience. One would expect that a microfinance company would cave in to market pressures when the big and the ‘best’ (till yesterday) have fallen.

My take is that a leader must ask and answer this question: “what are we there in this business for?” He must stick it out. That is tough but if done consistently across the organization and also across it’s partners, employees, vendors and customers it is possible emerge as much stronger entity.

At Learning Leadership, our workouts aim to  integrate these principles into Leader’s Agenda.

Hemant

I am happy to unveil a new web based platform for learning leadership skills supported by coaching. You can register and enroll for various programs at Learning Leadership.

Learning and coaching will take place through a series of workouts specially designed to impart leadership practice.

These are paid programs. However initially they are available without any fees to qualified working executives.

Hemant Karandikar