Generational Leadership
As a follow up on the last posting about Situational Leadership I want to make an observation. I recently spoke at national conference on the subject of Leadership for 21st Century. The major point of the presentation was the need to shift from a positional leadership model to a participative one.
The feedback after both of my sessions confirmed everything I have been reading on this subject. There is very little honest and clear communication taking place between key leaders and their teams on an ongoing basis.
The challenge for most corporations today is that the majority of senior management positions are filled by baby boomer age leaders who know nothing but a positional model. They were trained that way academically and that is the only system that has been a part of their entire career.
The new workforce is made up of generation x employees that have an entirely different world view that impacts how they view their career. They are highly motivated and want to be a part of interactive team where they can actively be a part of the process.
If we do not provide the critical situational leadership skills that both generations need then we are creating unnecessary leadership cultural wars that destroy moral and diminish productivity. The result of any lack of relevant training is that the older generation think the younger are too aggressive and the younger are convinced that the old guard will simply not let go and delegate.
Personnel Qualifications
When hiring any new employee you can ultimately place all of the criteria you are evaluating into the two major categories of character and competency. In the old days of the Industrial Age model of hiring the priority was given to job competency over personal character.
The process was started with a specific job description and then you would try to find a person with an educational and experience background that matched that job assignment. Their character was a factor but just not the main one.
In the new Information Age character has now clearly moved to the top of the list. Today you find the right person that will be a good fit for your team and over time you know they will find their right seat on the bus.
Jack Welch had three major things he was looking for at General Electric with all new executives. Two of these criteria related to character and only one to competency.
The first test was integrity because he wanted to know they would keep their word and tell the truth.
The second test was for intelligence because it takes smart people to compete in today’s complex global economy.
The third test was for personal maturity which means they can handle the stress and setbacks with equal parts of joy and humility.
The major reason for this significant shift in hiring priorities is that people now have to know how to work well in a highly participative environment. In this culture the mutual goals of the group are the target and not just personal success.
Everyone must have the mindset that what matters is that we succeed regardless of who gets the credit. Competency will always play a part in the hiring decision but today personal character clearly separates the winners from the losers.
Conflict Management
Filed under: Leadership Callling, Personnel Development, Servant Leader
At times we all have difficulty working with other people especially in stress charged environments. It is very easy especially as leader to fall into the bad habit of making negative comments about people especially when they are not present.
This type of conflict resolution will do nothing but add to the problem and ultimately destroy your leadership credibility. When anyone hears you making destructive comments about another person who is not there, they too realize that one day they will not be there either.
The principle that I have adopted is that if I have something negative to say to another person I will go directly to them and talk about it privately. If it is not a big enough deal for me to go and talk privately then it should not be a big enough deal to talk with others.
This one discipline has eliminated at least seventy-five percent of my need to make negative comments to other people and almost completely stopped the destructive habit of public personal criticism of others. Now when I do need to talk with someone about a real performance issue my motives are right and my methods are positive.
Character Matters
I have hired a lot of people over the years from working in the corporate world to being involved with several different large churches. I ultimately take all of the factors involved and put them into one of two categories, character or competency.
Competency is the possession of the skill set, experience or aptitude to do a particular job with excellence. This can be accessed through a variety of performance evaluation tools and talking with references.
Character is the sum total of the moral and ethical qualities of an individual that is based on their core beliefs about life. This takes quite a bit longer to evaluate and many times references will give you only one side of the story.
I make sure I am able to spend a lot of informal time with the person so that I can eventually move beyond the interview script and hear their heart. I also never hire a key person without meeting their spouse.
The priority of evaluating this part of the person must take first place over all other qualifications. As a matter of fact, character has moved to the top of the list in the corporate world.
The first test in hiring anyone at General Electric under the leadership of Jack Welch was the character quality of integrity. He wrote, “people with integrity tell the truth and they keep their word. They take responsibility for past actions, admit mistakes, and fix them.”
Someone has well said, your ability may help get you to the top but it will be your character that will keep you there.
Resignation
If you are an A player as defined by Jim Collins in Good to Great you are a character driven leader. This means that you are willing to set aside any personal agenda for the good of the team and the organization.
It also means that as a leader you are by nature a change agent. You want to deal with the brutal facts facing your team and find new solutions to old problems.
In some situations the people that you report to are not as open to change. This is where your character must lead you to deal with this situation in the right way.
The right way is to approach you boss directly and openly share what you are recommending to do and why. The absolute wrong way is to talk about your superiors to someone else in any negative way that would be disloyal.
If after a long period of respectful dialogue you are not sensing any openness to change within the culture of the organization then your decision is clear. What you must not do is to try to change your boss, that is not in your job description.
A players realize one fundamental truth about organizational culture. You will over time help be a part of a team effort that will change it for good or if you stay too long in the wrong culture it will change you. That is an unacceptable price to pay and that is why it’s time to leave.
People Skills
Filed under: Leadership Callling, Personal Development, Personnel Development
When you are evaluating any leader’s effectiveness you tend to look at two major categories that summarize everything else. They are the character that defines the core values of the person and the competency or skill set that they bring to the position.
Marshall Goldsmith is one of the top Executive Coaches in the market. His latest book What Got You Here Won’t Get You There is a great read for all leaders who want to reach their maximum potential. He identifies twenty habits that can completely destroy your influence as a leader.
The amazing thing that he confirms for all of us is that the most critical problems related to executive leadership have very little to do with core industry specific competency or even the expected qualities of productive leadership.
The overwhelming majority of smart, disciplined, experienced and passionate leaders are failing in the one major area of basic people skills. They do not relate well to their superiors, peers, subordinates and sometimes even customers.
They do not listen, make negative comments about people when they are not in the room, and always tend to punish the messenger when bad news is delivered just to list a few. Almost always these potential fatal flaws are obvious to everyone but the leader who does not even see them as an issue.
An absolute necessity for any effective leader is to establish a culture within their organization where the truth can be told and they will get the feedback they need or these extremely negative blind spots will never be revealed.
Hire Winners
In the old days of the Industrial Age model of leadership everything was pretty simple. The leaders made all of the decisions and the followers did all of the work. There were very clearly identified lines of authority and policies and procedures for everyone.
The major goal of the company culture at the end of the day was to prevent failure. Therefore if you had a problem with two people that were chronically taking too long for lunch breaks then you would design a system where everyone would have to sign out and sign back in.
Then it became some middle managers job assignment to monitor the system until it became a part of the new and improved culture for the company and that would solve the problem with lunch breaks. This cycle was repeated over and over again and the best people in the organization were always assigned the duty of cleaning up the mess produced by the worst ten percent of workforce.
Today you better have your best people working on your biggest opportunities or you competition will eat your lunch and you will not need to sign out and in anymore. You must move from a culture that tries to prevent failure to one that ensures success.
This means that you define success not by how the process is managed by what type of results your people are achieving. The leaders number one responsibility now is to hire great people and set the vision for the organization.
The winners will take care of the strategy and it will produce results but you will probably have to live without your weekly employee lunch report. You will not need it any more they fired the two people.
Termination
This is not a pleasant subject either for the person who needs to go or for the person who made the wrong decision to bring them on the team. It requires courage and it must be done well or the moral of the entire organization can suffer.
I always feel to some degree as a leader that I have failed when we finally get to this point. I want to make absolutely sure that I have given this person the right amount of leadership, specific feedback and the necessary resources and training to be successful.
After this due process, how do you know the timing is right? The two questions that are listed in Good to Great offer some incredible perspective.
The first is would you hire this person again? If the clear answer is no, then you know it is time to act. The second is if they were to go on their own would you be disappointed or relieved? If the answer is relieved, then you know what you need to do.
Leaders must have the character to act and make the hard calls. There is clearly one thing worse than having to deal with an appropriate termination. The later realization that your entire team had reached this same conclusion six months ago and were beginning to wonder why you could not see it.