Leadership, Management and Professional Development
Many thanks to Jason Seiden for hosting the August, 2010 Leadership Development Carnival.
The Carnivals are outstanding opportunities to sample the favorite posts of some of your favorite leadership and business bloggers and to discover some great new talent.
I’m grateful to Jason for running my recent post on Decision-Making along with so many outstanding contributions from other bloggers. Have fun, enjoy the blog and stay for Jason’s great content!
When 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)
I had a great conversation the other day with a talented twenty-something who just exudes confidence, competence and excitement about her career and her interest in professional development. Her reviews are top flight, she has been managing a major client account to great results, and she is actively pursuing her M.B.A. degree. This is one motivated young professional!
It’s too bad that her biggest dilemma is, “My job is fine, but I’m starting to get bored. I want some bigger challenges and I want to lead, and they keep telling me that they are working on a program for that. They also tell me that they are worried that any new projects will distract me from my main job. But I have the time and energy to do more.”
First, let’s tackle the program issue. A program for what? A program to figure out how to give an aggressive, capable person more responsibility? A program to magically teach someone how to lead, when there are ample opportunities to begin learning in the workplace every day?
You don’t need a stinking program to sit down with your team members and talk about next steps and then work together to define some good developmental challenges. You as manager and leader must be interested in ensuring that people are challenged, learning and growing. There’s no HR program in the world that replaces your responsibility to spend time challenging and coaching your team members. You own this responsibility.
As a manager and developer of early career talent, here’s a newsflash. Leadership and talent development is free. Your only cost is time and maybe a bit of creativity.
I like to apply Ram Charan’s “Apprenticeship” approach, where you as the manager are responsible for providing your employee with a series of increasingly ambiguous challenges. Over time as the individual confronts the challenges, they are gaining valuable and relatively risk-free experience learning to cope with the realities of more responsibility. (Note: I guide participants through one of these programs in my course: Considering the Move to Leadership-What to Expect and How to Prepare.)
Often, the outcome of this program is that individuals begin to zero in on what they truly want to do next…manage others, manage projects or focus on developing their skills as an individual contributor. Without the apprenticeship program to uncover interests and identify strengths and weaknesses, everyone is left guessing.
As for my conversation partner, I encouraged her to take the initiative to outline her own rough career plan and next general steps (she wants to lead) and then sit down with her managers and share this plan and ask for their help. She of course is responsible for convincing them that she is capable of executing here current role without missing a beat, and I encouraged her to position herself as someone both interested in contributing more and solving more problems as well as someone that welcomes coaching.
She will learn a lot about her managers if they continue to push her off, and she will learn a lot about herself if they appropriately support her. Either way, it’s worth politely pushing the issue.
Note from Art: I’m taking time out from my usual blogging activities today to share with you a bit about the background and approach of my new program and website: Building Better Leaders. Back tomorrow with regularly scheduled content!
My Personal Journey Towards Building Better Leaders:
To understand the genesis of today’s launch of my new Building Better Leaders service and website today, you have to understand just a little bit about my personal-professional journey to this point.
I had a stellar corporate career and was fortunate to work for great organizations and great people every step of the way. I earned my first promotion to a supervisory role 18 months out of college and other than a short stint as a corporate staff member in an industrial conglomerate and the past few years on my own, I’ve always been responsible for teams and people and results. Yeah, I learned how to lead with the pain of a million mistakes! However, with my best humble voice, the teams and businesses that I was fortunate enough to be a part of consistently won in the market by all reasonable financial and customer measures. Hey, people truly are the difference makers!
After we sold the last company (from turnaround to market leader) and I came home to be with my family through my mother’s illness, I decided to reinvent my career and focus in the one area that provided consistent joy and challenge, developing early and mid-career and front-line and mid-level professionals.
Step one was writing the book, Practical Lessons in Leadership with Rich Petro (thanks for joining Rich!) and then step two involved honing my skills as an educator and content creator. Again, long story short and several thousand people through dozens of classes and training programs and keynotes later, the following issues and needs started jumping out from comments and feedback and inquiries:
Enter Building Better Leaders:
After conducting more discussions than I can count with professionals in product management, project management, marketing, new first-time leaders, those interested in leading, technical professionals thrust into leadership, I decided to create something that would solve the problems of: practical content, cost, access, sustainability and guidance.
And then I spent a year trying to figure out the technology pieces to the puzzle…as well as creating the initial programs (twice) to learn. Note…a key component of the puzzle was the distance learning delivery platform. I discovered the great folks and offering from Digital Chalk and they are truly enabling me and other professionals to serve up great programs on demand.
And that brings me to today. Paraphrasing liberally from Guy Kawasaki, build it, get it to market, take feedback and keep improving, and that’s what I’m doing.
Here’s the Commercial:
Building Better Leaders consists of:
The right content plus mentoring plus developmental activities plus access, plus affordability. In many regards, this is a new approach to filling critical skills gaps and allowing people to take charge of their own career development.
The first two programs are core leadership programs: Considering the Move to Leadership-What to Expect and How to Prepare and Succeeding as a First Time Leader.
We will move quickly into audience specific programs with Leadership for Technical Professionals and High Performance Event Management for Marketing Professionals in January.
Oh yeah, and did I mention that I created a new Building Better Leaders blog. I’ll be focusing on blocking and tackling and professional development related content…and will strive to keep it different than the material here at Management Excellence. I hope that you’ll join me in this new blog.
And the Dirty Little Secret of Building Better Leaders:
Supporting the development and advancement of great professionals is the focal point of Building Better Leaders. However, I also expect that this will serve as a powerful collaboration platform for me to work with other great professional trainers, coaches and executives interested in serving their audiences using this format. Whether I’m involved helping others create programs or simply enabling them to move their programs into this format, I look forward to some outstanding new collaborative adventures!
The Bottom Line for Now:
The grandest cathedrals start with vision and a single stone. Great careers start with that first step and first hard-won lesson. The vision is there, the first stone is set in place and there are careers and leaders and great professionals to be created. Let the work begin.
A colleague used the phrase Tripping Points in conversation the other night to describe what leaders and management teams go through in attempting to take businesses from one level to the next.
Firms and teams run into natural Tripping Points in the form of infrastructure and know-how as they work to grow a firm from start-up to $10 million or from $10 million to $25 million and so on. Often, the only viable solution to get beyond a Tripping Point is to retool the management team with people that have experience creating the infrastructure and programs/teams/processes needed to reach the next few levels.
I can easily apply Tripping Point thinking to the challenges that we as professionals face in advancing our careers and in particular, in developing as leaders. Awareness of your prospective Tripping Points is an important first step in creating your personal and professional development plan.
In my article, Career Growth and the Product Manager in The Pragmatic Marketer Magazine, I outlined the critical skills that product managers must develop to become senior contributors and leaders. In hindsight, I was referencing the Tripping Points that impact not only product managers seeking to develop as leaders, but all professionals interested in advancing.
The Five Tripping Points of Emerging Leaders
1. Strategic thinking skills-the ability to see the big picture, to look at patterns in the marketplace and assemble pictures that others don’t see into competitive, value-creating strategies.
2. Business acumen-Ram Charan describes this as the ability of the leader to understand how the firm makes money in the language of a street vendor.
3. Inbound communication skills-especially the ability to ask questions, listen intently and interpret what people truly mean or are thinking, which is often different than the words they are voicing.
4. Outbound communication skills-the ability to translate complex ideas into simple concepts that resonate with others and that promote positive action.
5. Diplomatic skills-the ability to broker value-creating relationships and resolve disputes with the finesse of an ambassador.
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The Tripping Points have profound implications for us as we seek to grow and expand in our careers, and they are THE issues we need to focus on as we seek to develop others around us.
As simple as the points are, we are often blind to our own limitations in these areas. So are the people you are seeking to develop.
Use the Tripping Points as filters to evaluate the advancement and maturity of your team members, and as the basis for creating developmental assignments. Use these points as the basis for coaching and feedback.
For your own purposes, seek feedback and coaching about the perception of your competence and maturity in each of these areas. Be aware of your limitations and areas of discomfort, and if necessary, design your own developmental assignments to ensure that you gain experience and refine your skills in the right areas.
We all have Tripping Points, and while perhaps there are truly limits to our individual abilities, I remain convinced that with awareness, focused effort and coaching, we can advance our skils and increase our contributions to our firms.
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