Recurring Themes
I was commissioned to write a book for a UK daily newspaper on family finance a few years ago. I knew a fair amount about personal finance but these projects always require one to do further research. So for the six months before I actually started to write the book I pored over all the personal finance supplements of the national newspapers gathering together the current thinking and issues. It became clear after about six or seven weeks that there were only six topics involved and that to create these weekly supplements it was necessary to rehash one of the topics on a six-weekly cycle to fill the space. (For those of you interested they were pensions; mortgages; debt & credit cards; savings accounts; investing and personal tax - read next weekend's personal finance columns and see if anything falls outside those categories!)
Summer is a time for doing some calm reflection and it has occurred to me that all disciplines are probably founded on about six core topics - and executive development is certainly no different. This thought was sparked by an article in Booz Allen's quarterly journal strategy + business that once again was beating the drum about the lack of HR expertise in company boardrooms. You will find few CEO's standing-up to proclaim that the core strength of their business is the robustness of their Treasury, or their warehouse stock or their marketing collateral - no, to a man (or woman) they say their core strength is their people. And they are all right. So why do we repeatedly have to read that people development is an area that gets plenty of talk but no walk?
A second recurring theme is closely related - development programs, as a rule, do not succeed unless they are supported (championed even) from the top down. If the CEO or Chairman is on board with the program corporate cultures will change, re-organisations will work, everyone will see that it is in their interests to make the effort to make the programs succeed. If it is just being driven by Joe from HR it will most likely die a quiet, unannounced death some six months down the line.
Over the next few weeks I am going to complete the list of exec-ed recurring themes - any assistance from other summertime thinkers will be gratefully received.
Boundaries to Executive Education
We are in the process of expanding the depth and scope of the executive education program data we publish on the IEDP.info database. For the last few years we have focused very much on the top business school providers. This in itself is a difficult group to identify. The core constitutents are easily identifiable - the likes of Harvard, IMD, Chicago GSB, London Business School, INSEAD, Michigan/Ross etc but as you move out from these towards the margins of the inner core it becomes more complicated to say with any certainty who is "in" and who should be "out".
As such the obvious solution is to push the boundaries of those we include wider. Those only interested in the very top schools will still be able to search their open programs quickly as we have decided that we shall use the FT Executive Education Rankings published each year in May as the basis for the "global premier league" of business school providers - although this has its weaknesses as well. We shall then start to add the best European and N American regional business schools to the database - so that those who are not looking for the global reach (or expense) or for something more domestically focused and applicable will have relevant results too.
But this is only part of the problem of categorising Executive Education. Working out whether a program is targeted at junior, middle or senior management is often not clear. What may be appropriate for the Managing director of an SME will probably not be appropriate for the CEO of a quoted company. What may be good for someone new to a middle management role may actually be provided by an organisation better known for its staff or sales training. And as this last example indicates business schools are not the "be all and end all" of executive edcuation provision. There is a huge - and growing - supply of commercial training providers competing for the same market.
Add in to this mix the army of consultants who have leadership and development training services as part of their offerings and the burgeoning sector of executive coaches and the picture starts to get more complex yet again.
Over-arching all this is the fact that the whole sector is very fragmented: there are many thousands of providers ranging from international organisations with hundreds of millions of dollars of turnover to single-person specialist consultants who can lead their field in specific niches. At IEDP we are determined to try and pull all this information together into a manageable form - where senior management and HR professionals can access the data and leave and share feedback.
If you have any views or comments please leave them below. Also I would be delighted if any of our interested readers would be happy to complete an online survey on this topic - it will only take 5 minutes (all the questions are multiple choice) and if you leave your contact details we will enter you for a draw for an iPod Touch. To take the survey please click here.
Big Ego Leadership
An occasional series of articles from IMD professors from their series "Tomorrow's Challenges". For more info on IMD visit their website.
Leadership is a tricky concept. We each understand the word differently and have different views on what a "true leader" is. Academic research on and around leadership has been equally heterogeneous. Leaders have been studied along multiple dimensions (traits, behaviors, personal backgrounds, etc.), but this effort has yielded relatively few findings that stand the test of time and prove robust in different situations and across national and organizational cultures.
In this context, an intelligent assessment of the advantages, disadvantages and future prospects of "big ego" leadership would first require a clear definition of the term. What do we mean by big ego leadership? And what is its opposite? We read about the contrast between “big ego” leaders and humble, soft leaders referred to as “nice guys”. But does the world really need more nice leaders?
I am tempted to answer "yes" and "no". All things equal, most of us would like to work for leaders who empower their staff, welcome and even solicit their staff’s opinions, care about them as employees and as individuals and help them to develop. A touch of humility, a positive attitude towards life and people, and a good sense of humour would also be welcome.
Empirically, however, I am not aware of any evidence suggesting that such nice leaders are systematically more effective, or even more appreciated by their staff. Indeed, imagine this wonderful "nice person" also has a pathological problem with keeping track of priorities, or of listening to so many people that he or she ends up being indecisive. Or imagine this nice leader lacks business judgement, industry expertise, or any credit with his/her own bosses and hence is incapable of providing you with the support and resources you need. Do you still want this nice leader for a boss?
Leaders, especially senior leaders, have multiple roles and responsibilities. First, they have responsibilities in the realm of strategy definition: they need to understand the evolving competitive landscape (including potential new entrants), keep track of changes in technology and in customer expectations, understand the business and the dynamics of the industry and maintain a strategic perspective on things, including what kinds of alliances, expansions or divestitures might be relevant.
Second is the leader as organizational architect, designing and using the organization’s structure, systems, processes and technology to translate strategy into action and to shape the organization’s culture over time.
Last and obviously not least, leaders must mobilize the energy of several constituencies often presenting different expectations and mindsets: downward (direct reports and the larger unit), upward (one’s immediate boss, all the way to the board for CEOs) and outward (e.g., shareholders, analysts, journalists, customers, suppliers and competitors, regulatory authorities and the general public).
In real life, successful fulfilment of these roles often requires making difficult decisions that involve uncertainty and/or are bound to create winners and losers. Whether it’s shifting the organization’s strategy to de-emphasize some products/regions at the profit of others, changing the structure of the organization or the criteria that govern executive compensation, or postponing a salary rise to local employees in order to invest resources abroad, the leader faces uncertainty and potential resistance. Making these tough calls requires leaders to have the ability to filter out the noise around them in order not to be paralyzed. It requires self-confidence, sometimes boldness.
Leadership also sometimes involves believing something is possible when all around you believe it is not. Take the example of Lakshmi Mittal, who now controls the largest steel producing company in the world. In 1994, his company was number 32 in the world. Imagine how his managers felt when he encouraged them to set a stretch goal for themselves and shoot for the number one position in their industry!
Of course, only the most senior leaders get to make the more radical strategic calls. (And by the way, these leaders are rarely humble, contented, happy-go-lucky individuals. As Général de Gaulle once put it, “glory only offers itself to those who have always yearned for it”.) But all bosses face decisions that are difficult because they involve some degree of uncertainty (and hence one cannot be sure one is making the right decision) and/or entail negative consequences for some individuals, hence requiring some degree of self-confidence, independence and personal drive.
The danger, of course, is the fine line that separates hard-of-hearing from deaf, self-confident from arrogant, and performance driven from insensitive and heartless. As time passes, as leaders accumulate successes (some of which necessarily involved them being right against the advice of others), leaders tend to become increasingly insensitive to disconfirming evidence and push back from others, thus crossing the fine line.
Some individuals are, of course, more prone to crossing this line than others. I remember a senior executive who explained: “My mother repeated to me many times over the years to be nice to people on the way up because, she said, you’ll meet them again on the way down.” Also, he added: “I’ve had enough 'close shaves’ in my life, occasions where I almost made a mistake, or made a mistake but was rescued by others from its consequences, so I remember I’m not infallible.”
But even the most balanced individuals must remain mindful of the danger they face as success starts dulling their edge and lowers their sensitivity to weak, disconfirming signals. Some managers guard against this danger by surrounding themselves with a few strong individuals. For example, a senior executive explained to me that he always chooses one or two of his functional executives among managers who have had general management experience before, typically in a smaller structure. His experience was that such individuals would be more prone to identify, and then not be afraid to bring forward, potentially threatening but relevant information.
Leaders must also make sure they maintain and protect their ‘bandwidth’: i.e., their cognitive and emotional ability to process complex issues. Too many managers are so swamped and overwhelmed that, despite their good intentions to remain open, listen, learn and support, they end up becoming inflexible, emotionally detached and unreasonable in their expectations.
Loving one’s children helps one to be an effective parent, but effective parenting requires more than love. Similarly, being humble and nice helps one to relate to others and can be an asset for a leader, but being a manager/leader requires so much more than this. Leaders, especially senior leaders, must have solid egos. They must have the ability to face uncertainty and resistance, to choose courses of action that may be unpopular and sometimes to inflict pain on individuals and groups. They must also make sure they keep learning, adapting and developing, in order to remain on the right side of the fine line.
This continuous, never-ending process was exemplified by Mahatma Gandhi, who throughout his life systematically made time to review his day’s actions. His secretary, Pyarelal, reported that well into his seventies, Gandhi daily “held a silent court with himself and called himself to account for the littlest of his little acts. Nothing escaped his scrutiny. He gave himself no quarter”. This relentless drive for betterment is what learning is all about.
Rod Millar
in Leadership, Eccentric Leadership, IMD: Tomorrow's Challenges
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CCL Goes for Growth
An article this week in The Business Journal's online site examined the new strategy that the Center for Creative Leadership is adopting under the direction of its new President, John Ryan, to expand its operations through a more decentralised approach. More autonomy will be given to CCL's satellite campuses. Currently 300 of CCL's employees are based at the Greensboro, NC, headquarters with a similar number spread across the four other sites at Colorado Springs, San Diego, Brussels and Singapore.
Intriguingly for this previously very US-immersed organisation, Colorado Springs and san Diego are soon to get Managing Directors to drive their regional businesses, in the same way that Brussels and Singapore have had for some time. My dealings with Rudi Plettinx - a regular contributor to this blog - and MD of CCL Europe in Brussels, has indicated that the Brussels campus enjoys a great deal of autonomy in how it builds its European operations. There was certainly some concern earlier in the year that this might have been reined in while the new plans were in formulation, but it appears that Ryan has understood the benefits that local approaches can bring. This is especially true of course in terms of the marketing and sales operations - and not in terms of the actual program content that must retain a coherent approach across the organisation.
France, for instance, has been pretty resistant to CCL's charms - this no doubt was partly a reflection over the last 8 years of the Bush effect, which was never a great selling proposition for any US organisation in France. It goes deeper than that, there are cultural barriers that go beyond a dislike of the current resident of the White House that prevent French organisations and managers from embracing star-spangled education programs. CCL Europe has been chipping away at this perception and the recognition from Greensboro that they could do no better (only much worse, in fact) by dictating from the other side of the Atlantic is to be applauded.
Hey Leader! Get Those Priorities Carved in Stone!
Rudi Plettinx, Managing Director of the European operations of the Center for Creative Leadership, offers his personal view on a current aspect of business leadership.
I had a call from my old friend Charlotte the other day. She’s one of those corporate trouble-shooters who get sent to problem parts of an organisation when the going gets too hot for everyone else. Is she a leader ? You bet. But talking to her about her last challenge made me think just how poorly prepared many of us are when we take on one of those tricky assignments.
Here’s what Charlotte told me about her recent experiences. “Often the problem for me is that I’m only called in when others have failed to do their job. So the number one issue, especially if you are sent to clear up a mess, is to be certain that the firm has given you all the tools you need to turn things around.”
She went on to say, “If you aren’t sure just how far you can go (and don’t have it in writing) then you’ll never achieve anything. My belief – based on a great deal of “combat” missions - is that you need maximum autonomy (and authority) to get a job like that done well. You can’t build respect and develop and engage employees if you – as the leader - are unsure of what you can and cannot do. Hesitation and prevarication aren’t options out there on the battle front.”
Charlotte’s belief is that the biggest trap any manager moving into a new job can fall into is letting the initial euphoria (of their so-called promotion) stop them from getting some very basic rules agreed between them and their boss.
As she explains, “time and again I hear of newly appointed managers who were so excited by their new promotion they forgot all the basics – that’s a recipe for disaster.” She continues, “sure, have that bottle of celebratory champagne, but next morning sit down with your boss and get the rules agreed. AND get them in writing. If they aren’t carved in stone they aren’t rules at all.” She adds, “without that you can’t do the job you are being asked to do.”
So what are Charlotte’s rules ?
“Any manager heading into a new assignment needs to have at least these clear from day one,” she stresses. “Not just clear, but agreed in writing before they begin.”
- What are my short-term goals ?
- What are my long-term goals ?
- What is the time frame for reviewing, correcting and revising these goals ?
- What is the report-back relationship and how and when does this happen (weekly, monthly etc) ?
- If my personal compensation is related to performance, what are the parameters ?
- Is the budget for my group agreed and what autonomy do I have in using it?
- What is my expense approval threshold ?
- What are my limits on hiring new personnel ?
- What are my limits on dismissing existing personnel ?
She concludes, “There are more than this, but get these basic ground rules agreed and you will at least know where your limitations are. This saves a lot of grief and hand-wringing later on.”
Charlotte tells me that she is consistently successful because she and her boss both know the rules. “This way there are no ambiguities, no surprises. I know where I stand and the company knows what it has asked me to do and the parameters that have been set.”
My question : is that how the rest of us work ?
Do you have ground rules for your team leaders; are they clear and unambiguous; are there other key pieces of advice I missed ? Let us know, we’d like to hear from you.