Leadership Quote

“By recording your dreams and goals on paper, you set in motion the process of becoming the person you most want to be. Put your future in good hands – your own.”
– Mark Victor Hansen

What will be the most important leadership qualities over the next five years?

The “2010 Global IBM CEO Study” was recently published, it’s one of the largest one-on-one CEO interview studies, surveying 1,541 CEOs, general managers and senior public sector leaders from 60 countries and across 33 industries. The four primary findings of this year’s survey are as follows:

• Today’s complexity is only expected to rise and more than half of CEOs doubt their ability to manage it. Seventy-nine percent of CEOs anticipate even greater complexity ahead. However, one set of organisations we call them ‘Standouts’ has turned increased complexity into financial advantage over the past five years.
• Creativity is the most important leadership quality, according to CEOs. Standouts practice and encourage experimentation and innovation throughout their organisations. Creative leaders expect to make deeper business model changes to realise their strategies. To succeed, they take more calculated risks, find new ideas and keep innovating in how they lead and communicate.
• The most successful organisations co-create products and services with customers, and integrate customers into core processes. They are adopting new channels to engage and stay in tune with customers. By drawing more insight from the available data, successful CEOs make customer intimacy their number one priority.
• Better performers manage complexity on behalf of their organisations, customers and partners. They do so by simplifying operations and products, and increasing dexterity to change the way they work, access resources and enter markets around the world. Compared to other CEOs, dexterous leaders expect 20 percent more future revenue to come from new sources.

After reviewing the findings what becomes clear that there is an overarching theme, the is the extent to which the economic downturn has affected customers, business and society. The world will not simply go back to “business as usual” after we recover from the economic downturn. The world has undergoing a significant paradigm shift and it will never be the same.

 

As we move towards a recovery in the world economy, leaders world-wide are experiencing high levels of complexity and uncertainty where “eight in ten CEOs expect their environment to grow significantly more complex and fewer than half believe they know how to deal with it successfully.” This environment creates an urgent need for leadership. Given this, the survey explored what CEOs consider to be the most important leadership qualities that would be required over the next five years, the results are illustrated below.

 

CEOs cited creativity as the most important leadership quality over the next five years…

Creativity is essential when uncertainty is high and where the future is expected to be a significant departure from what we’ve known in the past. When uncertainty is high you cannot just repeat the successful practices of the past and expect similar results. You will need to find new ways of thinking, new ways of operating and new ways of behaving. The IBM survey puts it this way…

“Creativity is often defined as the ability to bring into existence something new or different, but CEOs elaborated. Creativity is the basis for ‘disruptive innovation and continuous re-invention,’ a Professional Services CEO in the United States told us. In addition this requires bold, breakthrough thinking. Leaders, they said, must be ready to upset the status quo even if it is successful. They must be comfortable with and committed to ongoing experimentation… It’s not that CEOs are just now becoming aware of the importance of creativity they have long been aware of the need to innovate their products, their processes and their customers’ experiences. Even in 2004, CEOs were telling us that ‘CEOs the world over were refocused on growth and they viewed innovation as the way to get there.’ But today, creativity itself has been elevated to a leadership style. Traditional approaches to managing organisations need fresh ideas, ideas that are intended to disrupt the status quo.”

It seems that we are entering a period that places a premium on effective leadership. It’s not often that we have the opportunity to re-invent how we choose to approach our life and work. These are exciting times indeed…!

• What are you doing in response to this increased demand for leadership?
• Are you re-examining your existing leadership practices?
• Are you experimenting with new approaches, new paradigms, new ways of working? If not, why?

Innovation secrets of Steve Jobs

I came across a great article based on Carmine Gallo’s new book, “The Innovation Secrets of Steve Jobs” which are as follows:
1.Put a Dent in the Universe: “Innovation requires a team and you cannot inspire evangelists unless you offer a compelling vision….”
2.Sell Dreams, Not Products: “Steve Jobs doesn’t rely on focus groups. “Steve Jobs avoids most focus groups like the plague,” says tech analyst Rob Enderle. “It comes down to the very real fact that most customers don’t know what they want in a new product.” Apple customers should be glad Jobs doesn’t do focus groups. If he had, they may never have enjoyed iPods, iTunes, the iPhone, the iPad, or Apple Stores. Jobs doesn’t need focus groups because he understands his customers really, really well. Yes, sometimes better than they know themselves!… Sure, “listen” to your customers and ask them for feedback. Apple does that all the time. But when it comes to breakthrough success at Apple, Steve Jobs and his team are the company’s best focus group. Asked why Apple doesn’t do focus groups, Jobs responded: “We figure out what we want. You can’t go out and ask people ‘what’s the next big thing?’ There’s a great quote by Henry Ford. He said, “If I’d have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me ‘A faster horse.’””
3.Say No to 1,000 Things: “Steve Jobs once said the secret to innovation comes from “Saying no to 1,000 things.” In other words, Jobs is as proud of what Apple chooses not to do as he is about what Apple chooses to focus on. This philosophy has helped Apple introduce products that wow consumers because of their elegance and simplicity…”
4.Create Insanely Great Experiences: “There are no cashiers at an Apple Store. There are specialists, creatives — even geniuses — but no cashiers. Although the Apple Stores have no commissioned sales staff, they generate more revenue per square foot than most other widely recognized brands. Why? According to Jobs, “People don’t want to just buy personal computers anymore. They want to know what they can do with them, and we’re going to show people exactly that…”

Reflecting on the above four innovation secrets, the one that stands out for me is the ability of Steve Jobs to understand what the customer actually wants and not just what the customer needs. It is this the unique ability of great leaders, to gain deep insight into their constituents and to provide a vision, purpose and dream that speaks to their unspoken desires and aspirations. Just as a changing context allows new and innovative products to be created and become successful. A changing context calls for new kinds of leaders and new approaches to leadership. A shifting context, shapes the expectations of followers and demands new approaches to leadership…!

•How is the context changing around you?
•What does that mean for the kinds of leaders people need?
•What changes do you need to make in your or your organisation’s leadership?

Six Ways to Measure the Impact of Leadership Development

Much has been written about the importance of measuring the impact of leadership development programs or systems. Over the years I’ve been looking for practical, meaningful, and effective metrics. Here’s what I’ve settled on for now, and although I’m not completely satisfied with any single measure, a combination of these should give you a pretty good dashboard.

1. Company performance. The ultimate measure, nothing else really matters. In most cases, consistent great company performance can usually be attributed to great leadership. And of course, lousy leadership is usually the root cause of business failures.

2. External perception of leadership. External perception can be measured by awards, such as CEO Magazine “Best Companies for Leaders” and hundreds of individual leadership awards (CEO of the Year, CIO of the year, CFO of the Year, etc…).

3. Internal perception of leadership. Internal perception can be measured in two ways. First, if you’re using 360 leadership assessments, you can maintain an aggregate score of a single “overall effectiveness” question, or run a report that aggregates the average score for all questions. Second, you can pull questions out of your annual employee survey pertaining to leadership and look for year over year improvement. You can also compare your leaders to other companies if you’re using questions provided by a third party vendor, such as Gallop or the Leadership Practices Inventory.

4. Succession planning measures. Keep tract of the number of key positions filled by internal candidates or the number of “ready now” candidates for each key positions (bench strength).
Individual Development Plan (IDP) progress or completion. Track the completion of development activity for key leaders and succession candidate pools.

5. Leadership development training measures. Use the basic Kirkpatrick measures, satisfaction, knowledge, behavior change, and business results. Easier said than done for the last one, but it works in some cases. For example, you would expect a decrease in turnover and improvement in sales after the implementation of a successful sales manger hiring or coaching program.

6. Finally, the easiest measure and perhaps the one that has the biggest impact on your funding and career opportunities: ask your key stakeholders. Regular meetings with your top executives and other key stakeholders will ensure you’re efforts are hitting the mark. These meetings are a great way to continuously assess current and future needs, communicate your accomplishments, and check for satisfaction

Please comment if you’ve had success using other measures or have questions or opinions on any of these.

How I’ve Learned to Develop Leaders

Every once in a while I’ll get a question from a co-worker, or student about how to break into the leadership development field. The reality is, it’s not really an entry level profession, and there’s no one right way to get there.

The leadership development profession includes trainers, coaches, HR generalists, managers, authors, speakers, preachers, and every combination of these. They have degrees in management, organizational development, human resource development, psychology, education, and engineering. Some have certification… some don’t.

So while I don’t have a good answer on how to break into the field, I can look back and share how I’ve learned (and continue to learn) about leadership development. I believe these could be repeatable learning experiences for someone just getting started.

In no particular order:

1. Study real leaders
From the day we play our first sport or join our first organized activity, we are surrounded by opportunities to study leadership and management. We learn from all of those good and bad examples. It’s a numbers thing – the more of them we are exposed to, the more we learn. However, the “studying” needs to be intentional – it won’t just happen by osmosis.
You have to be rampantly curious about what makes great leaders tick – their skills, values, experiences, career paths, styles, etc….
More importantly, you have to be an investigative reporter to find out how they got to where they are. You begin to see patterns on how the good ones develop, and the bad ones don’t. Those patterns can then be replicated for others to follow or avoid.

2. Learn from the real “gurus”
Fortunately, there are already a lot of people out there that have already had all this experience and studying. When you can fit what you seeing and hearing into already discovered best practice frameworks, it all starts to come together and make sense. You develop a proven framework and toolkit.

3. Learn from fellow practitioners
When you work for a big company, chances are, there will be others involved in leadership development that you can learn from. I’ve learned from my managers, peers, and employees. There’s also lot’s of opportunities to learn from others outside of your organization.

I’ve gone to a lot of great conferences and networking events, and am always looking for new opportunities to maintain an external perspective.
That’s one of the reasons I started a blog… to learn as much as I share. It’s a way to connect with others from around the world that are as passionate about this stuff as I am.

4. Don’t just buy products and services; buy capability
I lot of what I learned came from external suppliers, consultants, and coaches. I suppose this is a combination of learning from experts and other practitioners, but worth calling out separately. I’m thinking more of those that I have hired to do work or provide products for the various companies I’ve worked for. In my early days, I did this a lot, because quite frankly, I didn’t know a whole lot about anything. Each time I did, I tried to soak up as much as I could during certifications and project work. Most were very generous about transferring their capabilities.

6. Trial and error.
I’ve been fortunate to have worked at companies that have given me a lot of freedom to innovate, take risks, and screw up now and then. I love to tinker with the system, test new ideas, and add to my toolbox. I’ve always considered a 1/3 adoption rate a pretty good batting average.
Earlier in my career I fell for my share of fads and wacky ideas. Now, while I still like to think I’m open to possibilities, I’ll make sure anything new I try is based on research, tested, reference checked, and evaluated.

So while that’s what’s worked for me so far, I realize my experience is limited and there still is lot’s more to learn.

For those of you in the field, what’s worked from you? Where have you learned the most about leadership development, and what advice could you share for someone just getting started?