Leadership Caffeine-Get Invested in Developing Your New Leaders

February 13, 2012 By 4 Comments

image of a coffee cupI’ve yet to run a workshop or program on leadership where anything approaching a majority of the participants describe their initial days of their initial role as a team leader, supervisor or manager as a period when they received much if any support and coaching from their own direct manager.

Most describe this particularly precarious professional time as more like a “hit and run,” or, at least “promote and run,” where their manager anoints them as in charge of some group and disappears like a Cheshire Cat, grin and all, only to resurface around performance review time. Sadly, the flameout rate for first-time leaders is high, and the fallout on those being led equally high.

Experienced Leaders Often Perpetuate the Sink or Swim Approach:

Unfortunately, many experienced leaders (those promoting the first-timers) will under the cone of silence and with just a bit of truth serum, admit to perpetuating the same promote and run approach they received during their own careers.  “I know it’s wrong, but I’m too busy,” described one. “I promoted her because I knew she was up to the job and because I needed someone to carry that load while I dealt with mine,” offered another. And, “I survived and if he’s as good as I think he is, he’ll survive as well,” added one experienced leader.

The slight pang of guilt I feel every time I write about this topic tells me I might have committed this act of leadership treachery at some point during my journey as well. Ouch.

While few of us have time to handhold…and that’s not healthy for anyone anyways, we all have an obligation to ourselves, our firms and those we’ve put into roles of responsibility to do a better job with this important development task.

8 Things You Can Do to Start Supporting Your First-Time Leaders More Effectively:

1. Provide clear context for the role. Help the individual understand your view and the organization’s view on and expectations for their team and their role. Ideally, make certain the new supervisor can see clearly how his/her role and team plug into the firm’s strategic goals.We do our best work when we have context for its’ importance. Your first-timer will draw upon this context to motivate his/her team.

2. Establish clear accountability for outcomes. The new leader is typically overwhelmed with the people complexities of leading and it’s easy to lose track of what needs to be done to help the rest of the organization. By clearly communicating how the new leader’s performance and team performance will be evaluated, you remove much of the ambiguity from the situation.

3. Scheduling planned time to connect and a “911″ protocol for crises with the new leader. The planned time provides an anchor for regular updates and having a clear “911 protocol” assures the new leader that you are there in a pinch. (And yes, those momentary crises are great teaching opportunities.)

4. Resist telling and focus on teaching. Use questions to teach. Your best friend may in response to, “What should I do?” is, “What do you think you should do?” Too many senior managers fall back on telling their first-timers what to do. That’s not teaching.

5. Choose a variety of settings/situations to observe and then provide coaching feedback. Hey, this is your job and your diligence here will absolutely pay dividends. You get to see the new leader in action and the new leader gains valuable insights and performance suggestions.

6. Resist the urge to flame the new leader for mistakes. Your post-mistake coaching opportunity must focus on, “What did you learn?” and “How would you do this differently?”

7. Provide ample positive feedback (when it’s earned, of course). Confidence is one of the missing components of first-time leaders, so celebrate the small victories.

8. If things are going well, ratchet up the challenges.  We learn by exposure to new and more complicated situations. As the new leader develops confidence for current tasks, establish a challenge in a new and more complicated area and keep pushing him/her out of the proverbial comfort zone.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

A first-time leader is a horrible thing to waste. You’re already invested in the promotion, now get involved in creating the success.

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Don’t miss the next Leadership Caffeine-Newsletter! Register here.

Art Petty is a Chicago-based management consultant focusing on strategy and leadership development. Art regularly speaks on innovation in management and leadership, and his work is reflected in two books, including the recent, Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development. Art publishes regularly at The Management Excellence blog at http://artpetty.com

Prior to his solo career, Art spent 20+ years leading marketing sales and business units in systems and software organizations around the globe. You can follow Art on twitter: @artpetty and he can be reached via e-mail at art.petty@artpetty.com

Filed Under: Leadership, Leadership Caffeine Tagged With: , ,

Don't Spend Too Much Time with the Wrong People

August 3, 2010 By Leave a Comment

choicesThe major “people mistakes” of my career have occurred as a result of investing too much time and effort in trying to change people.

As leaders, we can enable change.  We can help people that want to change.  But trying to change people on our own is ultimately a fool’s errand.

In one case, a talented, but mercurial individual simply flamed out after several years (yes, years) of coaching, training, disciplining, imploring and anything else that I could think of to strengthen his inter-personal skills.  This was no simple inter-personal issue.  He genuinely pissed people off to the boiling point, although it was always carefully wrapped in supporting business priorities.

In another case, I spent another several years (yes there’s that “Y” word again) helping this individual expand her skill-set through job rotation and preaching.  It was never coaching, because she didn’t want any part of it.

She had a fierce sense of entitlement over being in charge of a group based on her seniority, yet to me, her skill-set was too narrow and her impact on others was typically negative.  She showed no signs of leadership or managerial capabilities.  Nonetheless, I counseled, coached and provided developmental experiences.  When I finally had a promotion to offer, I awarded it to the most deserving candidate.  In response to not gaining the promotion, this delightful individual left the company with no indication.  She just never showed up again.  A few weeks later, I was summoned to the CEO’s office where I was presented with a document indicating her lawsuit.  It was dismissed as frivolous.

While two examples don’t make a career, I learned over time how to invest in those that actively pursued change and development over those that felt entitled or simply were discipline problems.

Give me a person that wants to grow, and I’ll move mountains to help him/her advance.  Show me someone that feels entitled to a promotion or, engages in repeated aberrant behavior in spite of feedback and counseling, and I’ll move mountains to move them out.

Invest like crazy in those that want to grow and develop.  Just don’t spend too much time with the wrong people.

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Want to Lead? Consider These Questions: #7 of 7

July 29, 2010 By Leave a Comment

compassNote: the Seven Key Questions for Ambitious, Aspiring Leaders, are presented in the book, Practical Lessons in Leadership by Art Petty and Rich Petro.  I’ll explore each question here at Building Better Leaders through individual “Leadership Tip of the Day” posts, offering ideas for investigation and discussion.

The first six questions in this series challenged you to think through issues that are both philosophical and powerfully practical:

  1. Why do you want to lead?
  2. Do you understand the true role of a leader?
  3. Do you understand that the skills that made you successful as an individual contributor are not the skills that will carry you forward?
  4. Are you prepared to give up your domain expertise as your foundation for results?
  5. What do you believe are the skills and personality traits that you need to succeed as a leader?
  6. Do you understand that you will be judged by the output of your team and held accountable for this output?

If you’ve made it through the investigation of questions 1-6, it’s time for you to consider what your daily work life will be like as a leader.

7. What do you imagine your workday life to be like as a leader?

For those accustomed to having some semblance of autonomy over their daily lives, the transition to a role as a leader can shock the system.  This move from a “me-centric” daily routine to “everyone but me” focus has caught many an early leader by surprise.  The “day in the life” discussion fostered by this question will help clarify what a leader does everyday and how it differs from the role of individual contributor.  One suggestion is to allow aspiring leaders the opportunity to shadow you from time to time, as a means of understanding just how unglamorous leading can be.  Another suggestion is to have the aspiring leader spend a little bit of time with other leaders and interview them about their daily and weekly activities.

The Takeaway from The 7 Questions:

The Seven Key Questions for the Ambitious Aspiring Leader are powerful conversation starters to support a manager’s leadership development activities.  They are not intended to be delivered in machine-gun style, but rather to be used in concert with an approach to helping individuals discover and explore the profession of leadership.  Not everyone should lead, yet someone motivated by advancement might believe that leadership is the best or only way to achieve this goal.  An effective mutual discovery process is the leader’s best friend in helping identify leadership talent and in helping individuals come to their own conclusion on whether leading is a good choice for their own careers.

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5 Actions to Improve Leadership Development in Your Firm

June 15, 2010 By Leave a Comment

building leadersWhen it comes to leadership development, sweeping corporate mandates and expensive training initiatives are rarely as effective as consistent blocking and tackling.

Your own practices are capable of creating a new and next generation of professionals that carry the right approaches and ultimately innovate and improve upon your achievements.

5 Actions You Can Take Now To Start a Leadership Revolution in your Firm:

1.  Always strive to set the the example of the effective leader. No one is perfect, but word travels fast through an organization when some one and some team is meeting and beating targets, innovating, problem solving and somehow becoming a magnet for talent from other areas.

2.  Be a relentless developer of talent: your support of the development of others through coaching, feedback, a supply of increasingly more difficult challenges and your encouragement of risk-taking in pursuit of innovation are all powerful tools at your disposal. You don’t need a budget or a training program to do any of this.

3. Encourage your team members to branch out into the organization. The better a developer of talent and the more success that you have at propagating your former team members into roles around the organization, the more likely you are to see your best leadership practices popping up all over the place.

4. Work leadership development into the corporate conversation. Ensure that strategy discussions ultimately encompass talent discussions…because no strategy can be executed without the right talent in place.  Once there is broader awareness, encourage your peers to engage in activities that promote discussions and that lead to actions. An example is the simple, low-cost “leadership book club” activity that I’ve seen work so successfully at the senior and front-line leadership levels. Tie development actions to lessons-learned from the reading activities.

5. Build leadership development accountability into the organization. Hold your managers accountable for proving that they get it and are living it in the prosecution of their jobs.

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NOTE: Don’t miss the latest Management Excellence newsletter with newsletter-only features on “Coping with Leadership Fatigue” and “A Summer of Ideas.” Register to receive the newsletter at either Building Better Leaders or at the Management Excellence blog. (Right column)

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Leadership Caffeine: Strengthen Your Leadership Foundation

June 29, 2009 By 5 Comments

The best leaders in my opinion are guided by a strong sense of duty and responsibility. The individuals that succeed in motivating, inspiring and even changing the lives and careers of others operate with an underlying philosophical foundation that they draw upon to remain focused and steadfast in pursuing their daily activities.

Everyone else sort of wanders through the leadership woods, reacting more on instinct than acting as if they are being guided by a stronger sense of purpose and duty.

First-time leaders wander a great deal, often because they are thrust into the very difficult role of a leader without much more than a pat on the back and a disingenuous “let me know if you need any help.” Others get a two-day training class and a binder of materials that sit on the shelf in their offices for the next few years.

Mid-career leaders that survived those awkward first few years often settle into a pattern that includes guiding people on tasks and managing to minimize their own personal risk.

In both cases, the cost to our organizations is huge in real and in psychic terms. Floundering first-time leaders create tremendous disruption and take a significant toll on the unwitting victims around them. Mid-manager malaise sucks the energy and life out of a team and entire organizations, resulting in an employee culture where everyone seems to be walking around with their feet encased in concrete.

Unfortunately, I see far more concrete-encased teams and managers and floundering first-time leaders than those guided by a clear sense of duty and responsibility. I also hear from a lot of people that are caught up in those traps seeking a way out.

The good news is that many express a desire to change. First-time leaders would rather succeed than flail and a great number of people that have had the leadership life sucked out of them would like to renew and re-energize their careers.

One of the activities that I encourage those interested in changing and improving is to craft some form of personal philosophical statement that will guide and serve as a frequent reminder as to their true role. I have my own, and I call it The Leader’s Charter.

I’ve written about this before. It’s one of those topics and one of those important tools that bears repeating. The Charter helps remind me of my True North as a leader and allows me to align my priorities properly when I feel them drifting in the face of the urgent-unimportant. My version reads as follows:

Art’s Personal Leader’s Charter:

My primary role as a leader is to create an environment that:

Facilitates high individual and team performance against company and industry standards

Supports and promotes innovation in processes, programs and approaches

Encourages collaboration where necessary for objective achievement

And…

Promotes the development of my associates in roles that leverage their talents and interests and that challenge them to new and greater accomplishments.

I developed this as a younger leader and refined it over time based on my own experiences…both the successes and the failures. The words are noble and the thoughts lofty, but every word and phrase has a very distinct meaning for me in my leadership life.

I anchor on creating the effective environment as a core priority; never lose track of the fact that my firm is looking for performance and innovation and last and most important of all, I remind myself that my highest and best use is to help others develop.

The Charter has served me well.

Perhaps you know someone that is earnest in their desire to improve and hungry for something that will give context to their activities as a leader. Encourage them or help them create their own Charter. Use mine or parts of mine if it fits, or create something new from the ground up.

And when you or they are finished, put the charter in a place of prominence to both remind you of your role and priorities but also to show others how you view your role and what they can expect from you as a leader.

The words are important but of course, they are the easy part. The real payoff comes in striving to live up to Your Leader’s Charter.

Filed Under: "To Do" List, Career, Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Performance, Professional Growth, Values Tagged With: , , , , , , ,