Note from Art: every Friday, I share three thought-provoking management posts for the week. Fair warning: I take a broad view of management, so my selections will range from leadership to innovation to finance and personal development and beyond.
This week’s selections feature content on assessing whether an executive coach might be right for you, dealing with the dilemma of having promoted the wrong person into management and knowing when it makes best sense to speak up or to remain quiet. Enjoy!
From Mary Jo Asmus, “What Makes Executive Coaching Different?” Mary Jo is a consistently great blogger, a successful coach and an all-around great person to learn from, engage with and follow. In this week’s post, she celebrates her third year of leadership blogging and offers some valuable food for thought for people considering whether an executive coach might help them along their journey. I know that being friends with Mary Jo and reading her content regularly certainly helps me along mine!
From the post: “Engaging with an executive coach could make a very big difference for you. But it may not. Your results with an executive coach will depend on the skill of the coach and your willingness to embrace the coaching process with gusto. So you might prefer to spend your organization’s hard earned dollars on a workshop, a retreat, or other form of training. So why would you consider working with a coach over other options for your development?”
From John Baldoni, “Four Questions to Ask About an UnderPerforming Manager.” John is another of the consistently outstanding management and leadership bloggers and a relentless book writer to boot. This post tackles the vexing dilemma of a leader coping with having promoted the potentially wrong person into a management role and what to do about it. Political intertia often leaves leaders unwilling to admit and make adjustments for this mistake. John offers four questions the leader should ask about the situation he/she created.
From the post: “So often when a newly hired or promoted employee does not perform, he or she remains in place because removal would reflect negatively on the executive who hired the candidate. Fearing for his or her own reputation, the boss procrastinates instead of acting on the problem.” and , “The only way for the boss to redeem his reputation is to remove the person, and do it sooner rather than later.”
From Nilofer Merchant at Harvard Business Review Blogs:” Three Times You Have to Speak Up.“ I’m new to Nilofer’s work, and I’m impressed. In this post, she tackles an issue that impacts all of us and all of our teams at some point in time: when to speak up.
From the post: “Whether you’re on the board of directors, or an individual contributor in a weekly staff meeting, knowing what to let slide and what to make an issue of, what to bring up publicly and what to raise privately, requires wisdom and judgment. Underlying that wisdom and judgment is the moment of conscious choice when we decide to speak, or to hold our tongues. When is the time for you to speak? Let me share three crucial criteria…”
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OK, that’s it for the week. Enjoy your weekend! I’ll be back Monday with a fresh cup of Leadership Caffeine.
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About Art Petty: Art coaches high potential professionals and develops and delivers workshops and programs on leadership, professional development and building high performance teams.Contact Art to discuss your needs for a program or keynote.
And whether you are an experienced leader seeking to revitalize and develop as a professional, or, a new leader looking for guidance on starting up successfully, check out Art’s book with Rich Petro, Practical Lessons in Leadership at Amazon.com.
Thank you Art for including this post amongst the esteemed others on this great weekly feature! Hope to catch up with you soon, MJ
Mary Jo, thanks for the consistently great writing and guidance. Congratulations on three years as a blogger! -Art
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by John Baldoni, Hauke Borow. Hauke Borow said: Management Week in Review for February 4, 2011 http://bit.ly/fYgH75 […]
Art – Thank you for the posts. I enjoyed reading all of them. John Baldoni blog “Four Questions to Ask About an Under Performing Manager,” holds some good points and steps to evaluate a manager’s progress. When the best time would be to hire a coach for the manager to possibly fix the underlying issues instead of letting the manager go? Perhaps the manager has something to contribute but does not have the right tools themselves. Would this occur or do you think that the investment would already be too much for the company and letting the manager would cost less?
Nilofer Merchant blog, “Three Times You Have to Speak Up” made some helpful tips. I have normally always spoken my mind and it has been at wrong times so perhaps to have some rules to go by would be good for me. 😉 Thanks again! -Kira
Glad you enjoyed the posts, Kira. I would in most cases advocate helping the ill-fitting manager. He/she was likely promoted for positive reasons…good at the job, great individual contributor etc. These problems have to be dealt with quickly, but it is important to try and not lose someone that works well in a different role. -Art
Art-
I appreciate the post by John. He finds relying on past indicators to predict future performance a troubling proposition and I couldn’t agree more. Excelling in a different job does not necessarily coorelate with excelling as a manager. That being said, what are esamples of indicators that one could use to predict future performance if you don’t look at the past? — Alex
Alex, the best method for assessing management capabilities in my opinion is to create a version of Charan’s Apprenticeship program, where individuals are provided opportunities to try on the role in a series of increasingly challenging assignments. This affords everyone involved an ability to gauge performance, progress and likes/dislikes. The prospective manager benefits..the promoting manager benefits and no teams are harmed in the making of this movie! -Art
Art – Thank your for posting the article by Nilofer Merchant. Knowing when to speak up and when to remain silent is a skill that I think has to be mastered by all professionals, but especially by those with managerial aspirations. The three rules set forth work great as general guidelines, but I wonder if some important other guidelines were left out, or maybe they just fall within the other three rules. Is this the right time to bring up the issue? Is this is the right audience to discuss the issue? Is this the appropriate forum or venue?
Casey, by all means. It’s great when people like you take the time to help us all out with your ideas and thoughts. Love to hear them! -Art