The Missing Half of Leadership Training

It is unsettling to me that companies are still looking to capture the perfect leadership competency model. The expectation is that the right skills can be developed for the right situation. Many people are operating under the belief that the right skills help leaders execute the plan. But, there are contradictions for every situation. A move that was logical yesterday, might be illogical today as a result of rapid change. Consistent business practices are only valuable in a consistent business climate, which is virtually nonexistent today.

For today’s leaders, mindset development must come before skill-set development. For instance, it is hard to become a better listener without developing curiosity first. Learning to look people in the eye, fight distractions, and ask appropriate questions are important, but they are simply mechanical skills. Being open to new ideas and processes, and remaining inclusive of others lets you really hear what’s being said – and put it to good use. This is what I mean by mindset. Mechanics can be applied and developed universally. Mindset is individual. Mindset is the true separator of talent, not technique.

Our leaders do not know how to manage the paradox between the need to be strong-willed and sensitive to the needs of the team. They struggle with balancing command and control and remaining collaborative. They struggle balancing between having the right answers and forming the right questions. Today’s leaders do not know how to manage the paradox that exists in protecting organizational heritage and tenets while driving change, or making the tough call while trying to create an inclusive working environment.

Leadership development must look beyond simple skill-set development and focus more on helping leaders navigate the paradoxes by helping them form the proper leadership mindset.

10 ways to know if you’re teaching mindset in your organization:

1. Are you teaching mechanics or principles? Teaching mindset is principle based. If you understand the principles, you’ll embrace the mechanics.
2. Are judgment and paradox involved in what’s being taught? Teaching mindset prioritizes judgment and introduces paradox. Judgment helps leaders navigate through change and develop adaptability.
3. Are debate and collaboration part of the learning process? Teaching mindset opens up valuable debate. Diverse opinions matter for teaching mindset.
4. Does your teaching emphasize compliance or progress – acknowledging that these aren’t mutually exclusive? Teaching mindset will emphasize progress as the priority. Progress is the reason for compliance, but progress sometimes requires a leader to improvise.
5. Is there a social component to your teaching where participants are asked to react according to their observations of others? Social interactions and reactions are important for mindset development.
6. Is your teaching pushing transactional or transformational outcomes? Teaching mindset helps leaders move beyond transactional thinking and bring valuable ideas and innovations to the table.
7. Do you emphasize personal values over conformity in your teaching? Teaching mindset invites participants to bring their own personal values to the training, allowing diverse ideas and solutions to emerge.
8. Is your teaching focused only on the present circumstances or are future needs and opportunities contemplated? Teaching mindset asks participants to anticipate future needs and opportunities as well as deliver results in the business today.
9. Do you value imagination in your teaching and training? Teaching mindset asks participants to be imaginative. Teaching mindset shouldn’t answer every question for participants.
10. Does your teaching encourage rote repetition or routine versus creativity? Teaching mindset demands significant creative thinking.

Five concepts to teach mindset:

1. Teach systems thinking.
2. Teach creative thinking.
3. Teach principles and values.
4. Teach judgment for paradox.
5. Teach transformational ideation. i

Leaders cannot be successful with skills alone. Organizations that recognize the importance of developing an innovative and adaptable mindset in their leaders are the ones that will experience the greatest success in the face of ever-increasing change.

Onward!

Tags: development, Leadership, mindset, skill, skills, skillset, Training

Don’t Dominate, Cooperate

Yesterday I returned from a 3 day Champions conference that our team facilitated at Horseshoe Canyon Ranch in Arkansas. We were fortunate to work with a very impressive team of emerging champions in this most beautiful setting. The conference focused on the importance of resilience in today’s complex economic environment; and the ranch was the perfect place to set up many challenges from cliff-walking on a via ferrata to spelunking through a tight speleo box. These challenges definitely provided lessons in resiliency for everyone.

The overall team was split into three separate teams with the single objective of each team capturing 300 points within 2 hours through 7 different challenges. Each of these teams began these challenges early in the morning and none of them succeeded. No team even got close to the proper point totals. Therefore, we asked them to attempt to capture the points again, only this time with better planning. After their second attempt, one team captured the point totals and the other two teams failed again.

At the third attempt, when all participants were completely drained, we demanded that all teams succeed. At this point, the teams all got together, planned together, and worked together. In less than two hours all three team s had succeeded despite their exhaustion. Only by coming together was success ensured by all.

This simulation in resiliency debunks some popular philosophy. Ayn Rand, a Russian-born American philosophy, founded the philosophy of objectivism that claims that the highest moral purpose in life is the pursuit of rational self-interest and happiness. Objectivism states that our only true responsibility is self-preservation.

Taking things a step further, we have Charles Darwin’s natural selection philosophy, which focuses on the emergence, growth, and dominance of the fittest organisms. Organisms with the most favorable phenotypes tend to thrive, thus supporting Darwin’s belief in the “survival of the fittest.” Applying Darwin’s theory in a social context, we are a highly competitive society in which only the strongest survive.

Whether or not they’ve read Rand or Darwin, some business leaders share these views. They may not feel good about hurting the competition, but they believe it’s the natural thing to do in a dog-eat-dog world, a matter of self-preservation.

Champions have a different view; one espoused by, among others, Martin Nowak, the director of the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics at Harvard University. In his study “Five Rules for the Evolution of Cooperation,” Nowak determines that our society’s health is based upon our ability to cooperate and help each other. He uses Darwin’s natural selection process to support his theory as he describes two types of organisms: dominators and cooperators. Cooperators actively contribute to each other’s benefit. Dominators provide no support and are given no support by others. Dominators go it alone.

Dominators are stronger than cooperators and therefore increase in number. Over time, cooperators vanish because of natural selection. Without cooperation, natural selection favors dominators. A cooperator on its own will lose to a dominator on its own every time. Ironically, however, a community of cooperators achieves the highest level of fitness. A community of dominators occupies the lowest level. Over time, dominators struggle to survive as a species while cooperators thrive.  In other words, helping each other works better than isolating ourselves.

We saw this principle applied over the past few days at Horseshoe Canyon Ranch. Without cooperation, these teams would have never reached the goal set before them.

Onward!

Tags: ayn, champions, cooperation, cooperator, corporate, darwin, domination, dominator, rand, Training

All This Talk About Creativity

I’ve been impressed lately by the play creativity has been getting from business writers. Fast Company has really highlighted the topic and has featured a number of articles that show how creativity helps leaders and their businesses get ahead. Check out the October edition of Fast Company - page 56.

This brief highlights the book Iconoclast by Gregory Berns. The brief and the book present how our brains are lazy and our creative or imaginative process defaults to what we already know. The brief goes on to suggest that creativity and imagination happen most often in new environments or with new experiences.

Next time you want to get creative or imaginative, take on a new experience – bust out of the conference or leave the seminar, and go find a mountaintop, a shaded tree, or a roller coaster. Your mind needs a little right brain action. You and your business will benefit.

Tags: berns, business, champion, champions, championship, company, creativity, development, Fast, gregory, Iconoclast, imagination, Leadership, mike, organizational, thompson, Training

The Four Types of Employees

Over the next few blog posts I am going to be building the groundwork towards an article that is bouncing around in my head. There are some things that we need to go over first.

Companies have employees in every shape, background, personality type and, well this list could go on and on. The point is, as managers we have to evaluate a multitude of employees to find the next generation of leaders. This is a daunting task that I would never dream of diminishing, but the truth is we have to evaluate and know our teams in order to be successful.

In the same vein, we have to evaluate our own careers and career paths. Checking the gauges every once in a while is necessary and important. The hard decision to go somewhere else may need to be made.

There is an illustration that we use at SVI to better understand our employees, our team, and our selves called The Four Types of Employees.

In this illustration employees are measured along two spectra. The first spectrum measures productivity, and the question is simple. Are we productive or not in our role?

The other spectrum runs vertically and it measures how inspired or engaged we are.

When we lay these spectra over one another we get a matrix that helps to illuminate and describe our current job situation or state of mind. It looks like this:

The Mole

Here is how it works. Let’s start in the bottom left corner. This is someone who is neither productive nor inspired. We have all encountered these people. They tend to suck the energy out of everything they touch. They are energy vampires. In most organizations, if there aren’t extenuating circumstances, they aren’t long for the world. They tend to move on to another job or are asked to leave.

The Worker

If we move to the right, we see the worker. The worker is productive and very capable. She has more than likely been at her position for a long time. There is nothing in her day that really challenges her because by this time she has it all figured out.

As managers, we tend to like workers. They get their job done with little to no supervision or complaining. However, there is a problem. Workers don’t tend to stay workers for long. They either lose interest and become moles or they leave for greener pastures.

The Dreamer

This that guy with all the plans and schemes who never seems to do any of them. He talks a big game and his energy can be quite infectious, but has little or no track record. The people are fun to be around. Their energy can be intoxicating, but be careful and don’t be fooled. Dreamers are dangerous if left unchecked. Dreamers can leave teams frustrated and confused because they are constantly casting new and sometimes conflicting visions of the future. Dreamers rip teams apart.

When the day is done, if you will pardon the expression, the proof is in the pudding. In spite of all the glossy team-building/leadership-building/leadersoftomorrow mumbo jumbo, it is still about getting your job done, hitting your marks, and being excellent in what you do. The trick is to be extraordinary. The trick is to be a game changer. The trick is to be transformational not transactional. That brings us to the final corner…

The Champion

This person is both inspired and productive. This person plays at the next level. This person stands out in a crowd. She is a maverick, but not at cost of the company. She isn’t afraid to attack problems when they arise even when it leads to a course of action that isn’t popular.

Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” -Gil Bailie

This quote by Gil Bailie captures the heartbeat of what it takes and what it means to be a champion. On its face, the quote seems to be counterintuitive. It seems to prompt us to go against what we have been trained to do our whole lives and become selfish or self-indulgent. However, upon further examination it starts to make more and more sense.

Imagine a team of people who are inspired and productive, and who do it from a drive that lies within each of the team members. Who wouldn’t want to be on that team?

Are you a champion? Do you want to be a champion? These questions are the very bedrock on which this blog is built. We have to build the foundation in order to proceed.

Tags: employee, evaluate, evaluating, Leadership, planning, succession, Training

What is Wrong with Retention Rate?

In my previous entry (Is HR Using the Wrong Numbers?), I challenged the HR industry to rethink the numbers it uses to show its value to the board room. Over the course of the last several months I, along with members of my company, have become convinced that HR is using the wrong measures to evaluate its success within companies. This is why, when the going gets tough, HR budgets get slashed.

Now before I go any further, let me attest to the following: I solemnly swear that I am a devoted member of the HR industry. I promise that, while I think that HR is a bit…misguided today, I truly believe that it can provide significant value to companies across the land.

With that out of the way, I will now draw my bead on the first sacred cow. For the weak at heart, let me warn you that what follows will be seen as heresy in the HR industry.

“Retention Rate” is a red herring.

I will pause and allow those who have fainted to wake up…

For far too long, HR has shouted at the top of its lungs that turnover costs money in terms of replacement recruiting and training costs. Members of HR (including me) have used this measure as an argument for increasing our training budgets.

After spending significant time researching and thinking about retention, I no longer believe a low retention rate necessarily correlates to organizational success. More importantly, I am convinced that executive level management doesn’t care a bit about retention. Executive level management is concerned about this: profit and bottom line results.

Below are three reasons why I no longer believe retention rate is a serious argument for HR budget increases or a serious defense against HR cuts:

1. Executives are not in favor of completely reducing turnover. In fact, some turnover is good in that it injects new ideas and energy into the organization. If you post turnover as a key metric and say that success means lowering turnover, then you are saying that zero turnover is good. I just don’t think executive-level management will agree.
2. Some people are not good (or are not willing to be good) at their jobs no matter how much training you throw at them. The cost of retaining them far outweighs the costs associated with their replacement. Retention rate hardly ever distinguishes between top talent that you want to keep and that talent that you don’t want to keep.
3. (Note: this is the big one) The remedies for resolving turnover (i.e. training, development, team-building activities, etc) are disconnected from bottom line results (i.e. profit, sales growth, market share, etc). This means that, for stockholders and executives, turnover is irrelevant. In other words:

On the other hand:

So here is where I wind up. At the end of the day, turnover can matter but it doesn’t matter when it includes everyone and is disconnected from the bottom line. For turnover to be a key indicator that matters in budget arguments it must:

1. Be directly correlated with operational metrics. That means hard core numbers that the operations divisions are accountable to. In other words, operations defines the operational metrics, not HR.
2. The remedies (training, development, etc) that are meant to address turnover must be clearly shown to reduce turnover among top performers. Not everyone, just top performers.

In the next post, I will take on “completion rate”.

Tags: development, HR, hr value proposition, retention, retention rate, team building, Training, turnover, value proposition