Regenerate!

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.

Passion for developing people.

An executive coach must be  a person, who is passionate about developing people. How will you find this? This will show up in his \ her track record through

-formal or informal teaching assignments

-learning new thing (people who keep learning new skills, acquire new knowledge find it easier to transfer their learning to others)

-what his \ her former subordinates say

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.

“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.

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.

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.