Regenerate!

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.

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.

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.

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