One of the great things about leading workshops with talented professionals is how much I learn about the very real challenges that people face in trying to get work done inside their organizations.  

I had the great privilege of facilitating a workshop called Leader Mastery for Technical Professionals at The Data Warehouse Institute’s World Conference in Las Vegas this past week.  Kudos to the team at TDWI for producing an outstanding educational conference and for their usual flawless arrangements.

A special thanks to the group of great professionals that had the courage at a technically focused conference to attend a day-long session on a topic that would have many heading in the opposite direction. This group was engaged, hungry for knowledge to improve their performance and excited about sharing ideas, challenges and best practices with each other.  The pleasure was all mine!

After spending a day together helping this group develop a better context for what it means to lead and the principles and practices that will support their development as effective leaders, a number of themes about their challenges emerged from the discussions. These include: 

  • Gaining more context for their firm’s strategies as a means of better linking team goals and priorities to the organization’s priorities. 
  • Dealing with the very real challenges of building high performance teams across cultures, geographies and time-zones.  
  • Leading teams that increasingly include external contractors that don’t necessarily have the same level of commitment and share the same level of accountability.
  • Improving mastery of soft skills that promote performance including: coaching and feedback, talent development and decision-making. 
  • Gaining better support from HR to facilitate talent development and team strengthening versus the still all-too-common policing that seems to emanate from this functional area.
  • Breaking the vicious cycle of promoting the best technical contributors into a nightmare as they try and build bench strength.
  • Finding ways to work effectively and collaboratively in matrix environments.

My message in these sessions is always that effective leadership and effective leadership development practices serve as the foundation of organizational performance excellence.  What I hear consistently as I run these programs as well as when I engage with MBA students is an intense desire on the part of the individuals to contribute at a higher level.

I also hear significant frustration at the ridiculous cultural, managerial and procedural impediments that they face when trying to innovate and drive change.  These people want to create and belong to high performance teams and organizations.  Most confess that all too often, this is not the case. 

My bottom-line for this quick post from the road is for senior leadership to focus on breaking down barriers that inhibit performance and seek ways to set your talent free.  

Now more than ever, you and your organization require all hands to be contributing, innovating and seeking ways to create value.  It’s time to get out of your executive meetings, clear your agendas, start asking questions, listen carefully and then do something.  You are wasting remarkable opportunities to improve, and that’s not a winning approach in this market.