Tag: Talent Development

  • 4 Signs an Executive Isn’t Ready for Coaching

    The stigma of asking for or being assigned an executive coach is vanishing quickly. The growth of the industry tells us so. In the U.S. alone, $1 billion was spent on business, personal and relationship coaches last year, according to IbisWorld, up about 20% from five years earlier. And the number of business coaches worldwide has zoomed more than 60% since 2007, according to one coaching association. But while executive coaches have improved the performance of many already-good managers and sanded the rough edges off many less effective ones, they aren’t a miracle cure. In fact, we have seen many companies waste considerable sums by assigning coaches to managers who just aren’t ready to be coached, no matter how effective the coaches may be.

    So how do those who control the coaching purse strings — HR, talent managers, and other buyers — avoid throwing money away on uncoachable executives? Considering that a year’s engagement with a top executive coach can cost more than $100,000, it’s an important question.

    From nearly 35 years of coaching hundreds of executives, our firm has noticed a pattern of red flags that indicate when a coaching investment will be wasted. Here are four things to watch out for:

    1. They blame external factors for their problems.

    When things go wrong, does this person always have an excuse? Maybe they point a finger at the quality of their team, a lack of resources, or even their boss.

    When leaders argue about the validity of your reasons for offering coaching, or offer excuses or defenses for poor results, it can be a sign that they lack self-awareness. Before any coaching can be effective, they need to wake up to the ways their actions affect others.

    One CEO we worked with was known for his smart turnarounds of a large media company. But he was struggling to get along with his executive team. Finally, several board directors suggested he should seek out a coach. After multiple sessions, he had shared little information about himself, and we were no closer to figuring out the root of the problem. Stymied, we suggested that we observe the next executive team meeting.

    Suddenly, all was clear. We were shocked by how he controlled the conversation in the room. He simply spoke over other people with a volume of words that was unfathomable. When he left the room to take a call, his team members erupted with frustration. It was obvious that this CEO was completely out of touch — something that became even more apparent later on, when he asked us to tell the board how positively he was responding to coaching.

    Leaders like this often ignore criticism if it doesn’t jibe with their view of themselves — and such feedback is easy to ignore if it’s buried in a performance review or mentioned briefly in a larger conversation. Conducting a non-judgmental, just-the-facts 360-degree review could help them see the reality of their situation. Until they can see what others see and why it matters, they won’t examine their behavior, and coaching will be useless.

    2. You can’t get on their calendar.

    Some leaders claim to be receptive to coaching but just can’t find the time. They may cancel sessions at the last minute, constantly reschedule, or, when they do show up, be visibly distracted. They lack space for coaching both in their calendar, and in their mind.

    Unlike the oblivious leader, the too-busy leader is often quite likable. They will apologize for being hard to pin down, and be very direct about how busy they are. Don’t be surprised if they’re flattered to be offered coaching. But coaching can’t be crammed into the schedule of a leader who wears their busy-ness as a badge of honor. Their inability to prioritize is a sign they need coaching, but their unwillingness to make room for it suggests they won’t be a good coaching investment.

    A brilliant engineer we know had been promoted three times in four years, and by the time he was nearly 30 he was a group president at a U.S. manufacturing company. Diligent, humble, and smart, he could hold a room spellbound with only a marker and a whiteboard as he worked out solutions to highly technical problems. However, as adept as he was at the technical aspects of his job, he now had 20 people reporting to him whom he had no idea how to manage.

    After three months of coaching, his superiors could see it was going nowhere. The executive often rescheduled his sessions, telling his coach he didn’t have the time. He believed he couldn’t set aside the time to improve himself. That made him uncoachable.

    HR managers should do some reality testing to ensure the too-busy leader is willing to make room for coaching. To benefit from coaching, too-busy leaders must make the space to be fully present, both during the coaching sessions and after, doing the difficult work of developing new mindsets, skills, and habits. Ask this person what tasks or responsibilities they’d be willing to give up or delegate, even temporarily, to make time for coaching. If they struggle to think of any, give them a gentle but firm ultimatum as part of a career planning conversation: that they have plateaued at the company and won’t go to the next level until they make time for self-development.

    3. They focus too much on tips and tactics.

    Some leaders eagerly agree to coaching, but then avoid the deeper inquiries required for meaningful transformation. They’re willing to modify behaviors, but not beliefs. They view coaching as medicine that, if taken regularly, will help them get ahead.

    The quick-fix leader becomes frustrated when their coach asks questions that require self-reflection. They want answers, not questions. “You’re the expert, you tell me,” they’ll say in response to questions from the coach, or “What if I did this?” Everything comes back to tactics. (A related warning sign is if a leader asks how quickly the coaching can be finished — especially if they demand that the cycle be compressed.)

    Although coaches sometimes offer suggestions, their real job is to help executives uncover the assumptions driving their behavior. Only then can a coach help them challenge self-limiting beliefs that block their development. However, the quick-fix leader has little interest in this process.

    One CEO we worked with was leading a family business that had recently been sold to a large company. He was told by a leader in the new parent company (who himself had benefitted from coaching) that coaching would help him make the transition. The CEO gladly accepted, wanting to be seen as a peer.

    However, it wasn’t long into the first coaching session that he showed his entire focus was on “doing whatever other successful people did.” The coach worked tirelessly to shift the conversation to the CEO’s purpose and goals. Each time, however, he shifted the discussion back to the “secrets of success” of other organizational leaders he wanted to emulate. Ultimately, he was passed over for a permanent role on the parent company’s leadership team, and left the organization.

    To prompt this kind of leader to be open to self-reflection, remind them of all the other times they vowed to change but were unsuccessful. They then might realize they need to work on more than just changing their game plan. Or, introduce them into a preliminary mentoring conversation with one of the leaders they admire. Tell the mentor to share their experience of struggling to develop.

    4. They delay getting started with a coach to “do more research” or “find the right person.”

    To be sure, it’s important to have a good fit between a leader and his coach. But a continual rejection of qualified coaches should give you pause. A related red flag is if the person is acting confused, and asking repeatedly why coaching has been suggested. Assuming you’ve clearly explained why coaching is necessary, this could be a defense mechanism and a signal that the person is not ready to confront their shortcomings. It usually stems from insecurity.

    Being coached can be daunting, and not everyone is ready to take it on. We remember a physician leader who was hired to turn around a business unit of a large medical center. When his staff challenged him, he became emotional. Told by his boss that he needed a coach to help him control his emotions, he was hurt and angrily asked “Why?” — failing again to control his emotions. He was too full of hidden fears for the coaching to be useful. His boss eventually reassigned him, and ultimately he left the organization.

    Reframe coaching as an investment the organization is making in their development rather than a personal fix. Tell them your firm provides this resource for high-potential, top performers to accelerate their success. If this leader can view coaching as something positive to help them achieve their goals, they may warm up to the process.

    When Going Coach-Less Is Not Viable

    After hearing us say that a certain leader is not a good candidate for coaching, an executive who brought us in will often say a variant of this: “Well, he must be coached. We can’t let him continue to manage others the way he has, but we can’t fire him easily either because we need his skills badly.” But imposing coaching on someone who just can’t handle it at the moment isn’t going to help anyone. Companies are better off directing their people development investments elsewhere — skills training or academic programs are often better options.

    Invest your coaching budget in people who have shown the willingness and the capacity to change, and you’ll get a much better return on your investment.

    Source: https://hbr.org/2018/07/4-signs-an-executive-isnt-ready-for-coaching

    By:

    July 09, 2018

  • There’s only one way to truly understand another person’s mind

    It’s often said that we should put ourselves in another person’s shoes in order to better understand their point of view. But psychological research suggests this directive leaves something to be desired: When we imagine the inner lives of others, we don’t necessarily gain real insight into other people’s minds.

    Instead of imagining ourselves in another person’s position, we need to actually get their perspective, according to a recent study (pdf) in the Journal of Personality and Psychology. Researchers from the University of Chicago and Northeastern University in the US and Ben Gurion University in Israel conducted 25 different experiments with strangers, friends, couples, and spouses to assess the accuracy of insights onto other’s thoughts, feelings, attitudes, and mental states.

    Their conclusion, as psychologist Tal Eyal tells Quartz: “We assume that another person thinks or feels about things as we do, when in fact they often do not. So we often use our own perspective to understand other people, but our perspective is often very different from the other person’s perspective.” This “egocentric bias” leads to inaccurate predictions about other people’s feelings and preferences. When we imagine how a friend feels after getting fired, or how they’ll react to an off-color joke or political position, we’re really just thinking of how we would feel in their situation, according to the study.

    In 15 computer-based experiments, each with a minimum of 30 participants, the psychologists asked subjects to guess people’s emotions based on an image, their posture, or a facial expression, for example. Some subjects were instructed to “consult their own feelings,” while others were given no instructions, and some were told to “think hard” or mimic the expressions to better understand. People told to rely on their own feelings as a guide most often provided inaccurate responses. They were unable to guess the correct emotion being displayed.

    The second set of experiments asked subjects to make predictions about the feelings of strangers, friends, and partners. (Strangers interacted briefly to get to know one another before hazarding guesses about the preferences of they had just person they met.) The researchers wanted to see if people who had some meaningful information about each other—like spouses—could make accurate judgments about the other’s reactions to jokes, opinions, videos, and more. It turned out that neither spouses nor strangers nor friends tended to make accurate judgments when “taking another’s perspective.”

     Imagining another person’s perspective doesn’t actually improve our ability to judge how another person thinks or feels. “Our experiments found no evidence that the cognitive effort of imagining oneself in another person’s shoes, studied so widely in the psychological literature, increases a person’s ability to accurately understand another’s mind,” the researchers write. “If anything, perspective taking decreased accuracy overall while occasionally increasing confidence in judgment.” Basically, imagining another person’s perspective may give us the impression that we’re making more accurate judgments. But it doesn’t actually improve our ability to judge how another person thinks or feels.

    There were no gender differences in the results. Across the board, men and women tended not to guess another’s perspective very accurately when putting themselves in the other’s position. But this did increase self-confidence in the accuracy of their predictions—even when their insights were off.

    The good news, however, is that researchers found a simple, concrete way we can all confidently and correctly improve the accuracy of our insights into others’ lives. When people are given a chance to talk to the other person about their opinions before making predictions about them—Eyal calls this “perspective getting” as opposed to perspective taking—they are much more accurate in predicting how others might feel than those instructed to take another’s perspective or given no instructions.

    In the final test, researchers asked subjects both to try putting themselves in another’s shoes, on the one hand, and to talk directly with test partners about their positions on a given topic. The final experiment confirmed that getting another person’s perspective directly, through conversation, increased the accuracy of subjects’ predictions, while simply “taking” another’s perspective did not. This was true for partners, friends, and strangers alike.

    “Increasing interpersonal accuracy seems to require gaining new information rather than utilizing existing knowledge about another person,” the study concludes. “Understanding the mind of another person,” as the researchers put it, is only possible when we actually probe them about what they think, rather than assuming we already know.

    The psychologists believe their study has applications in legal mediation, diplomacy, psychology, and our everyday lives. Whether we’re negotiating at a conference table, fighting with a spouse, or debating the political motivations of voters, we simply can’t rely on intuition for insight, according to Eyal. Only listening will do the trick.

    “Perspective getting allows gaining new information rather than utilizing existing, sometimes biased, information about another person,” Eyal explains to Quartz. “In order to understand what your spouse prefers—don’t try to guess, ask.”

     

    https://qz.com/1319441

  • Getting beyond the BS of leadership literature

    By Jeffrey Pfeffer

    View original publication on McKinsey.com

    Management books and commentaries often oversimplify, seldom providing useful guidance about the skills and behavior needed to get things done. Here’s a better reading list for leaders.

    The almost insatiable demand for leadership studies is a natural outgrowth of the all-too-frequent leadership failures in government, business, and nonprofits. Few people trust their leaders, according to the Edelman Trust Barometer surveys, among others.1 Gallup data show low levels of employee engagement worldwide, while the Conference Board finds job satisfaction at a low ebb and executive tenures decreasing.2 Other research consistently indicates that companies give their own leadership-development efforts low marks. Leaders aren’t doing a good job for themselves or their workplaces, and things don’t seem to be improving.

    This consuming interest in leadership and how to make it better has spawned a plethora of books, blogs, TED talks, and commentary. Unfortunately, these materials are often wonderfully disconnected from organizational reality and, as a consequence, useless for sparking improvement. Maybe that’s one reason the enormous resources invested in leadership development have produced so few results. Estimates of the amount spent on it range from $14 billion to $50 billion a year in the United States alone.3

    The limits of morality tales

    Despite the many shortcomings of leadership instruction, some books and articles do provide fruitful guidance on how to be a better, more effective leader. And there’s scattered information about what skills and behavior are needed to get things done and how to develop them. Sadly, and for a number of reasons, there’s a scarcity of useful material. Here’s why.

    The first and maybe most pernicious problem is that thinking on leadership has become a sort of morality tale. There are writers who advocate authenticity, attention to employees’ well-being, telling the truth, building trust, being agreeable, and so forth. A smaller number of empirical researchers, contrarily, report evidence on the positive effects of traits and behavior such as narcissism, self-promotion, rule breaking, lying, and shrewd maneuvering on salaries, getting jobs, accelerating career advancement, and projecting an aura of power. Part of this discrepancy—between the prescriptions of the vast leadership industry and the data on what actually produces career success—stems from the oft-unacknowledged tendency to confuse what people believe ought to be true with what actually is. And underlying that is an associated confirmation bias: the tendency to see, and remember, what you’re motivated to believe.

    Second, this moral framing of leadership substantially oversimplifies the real complexity of the dilemmas and choices leaders confront. An essay on the 500th anniversary of the writing of Machiavelli’s The Prince noted that it is sometimes necessary to do bad things to achieve good results.4 Not surprisingly, then, some of the most successful and admired leaders—for example, Nelson Mandela, Abraham Lincoln, and John F. Kennedy—were above all pragmatists, willing to do what was necessary to achieve important objectives.

    As such, each of them (and many other renowned leaders) changed their positions on decisions and issues and behaved inconsistently. They dissembled and engaged in strategic misrepresentation, not always disclosing their full agendas and plans, in part to avoid provoking opposition. At times, they acted in ways inconsistent with their authentic feelings. Human beings are complex and multidimensional, so not only do bad people do good things and vice versa but the whole idea of good and bad can also be problematic when you consider the knotty dilemmas leaders face deciding whether the ends justify the means.

    Finally, the division of leaders and their actions into good and bad seriously oversimplifies a much more complex reality and continues to reinforce a problematic, trait-based, and personality-centric view of human behavior. As social-psychological research has made clear for decades, people are not only shaped by their enduring traits but also profoundly influenced by cues and constraints that vary by situation. So they adopt different types of behavior and even personas, depending on the circumstances and the various roles they play. Leaders may behave differently within their families and religious institutions than they do at work, to take one example. When individuals are promoted to management, their perspectives change and so too does their behavior. McKinsey research also suggests that the effectiveness of various types of leadership behavior varies with the health of the organization in which they are practiced (see “Leadership in context”).

    Characterizing leaders’ behavior as somehow dependent on inherent traits provides an easy excuse for avoiding the sort of behavior and strategies that may be required to get things done. To take a simple example, people sometimes tell me that they are not networkers, as a way of explaining their reluctance to build the social relationships so necessary for success. I remind them that they were not born walking or using the toilet either. Networking behavior and skills, like all such behavior and skills, can be learned, as University of Chicago sociologist Ronald Burt has nicely demonstrated.

     

     

  • Decoding leadership

    What skills and behaviors make a good leader effective? Here are the traits that matter.

    Jeffrey Pfeffer, Stanford Graduate School of Business says that “This consuming interest in leadership has spawned a plethora of books, blogs, TED talks and commentary [that] are often wonderfully disconnected from organizational reality, and as a consequence, useless for sparking improvement”.

    McKinsey found that 4 out of 20 behaviors explain 89% of the variance between strong and weak leaders.Here are the traits that matter

    Click here to view on Mckinsey

  • A Survey of How 1,000 CEOs Spend Their Day Reveals What Makes Leaders Successful

    By Oriana Bandiera, Stephen Hansen, Andrea Prat, Raffaella Sadun

    View original Publication on hbr.org

    What makes a CEO effective? The question has been studied extensively, of course, including in HBR. Yet we still know fairly little about how CEOs behave day-to-day and how their behavior relates to the success or failure of the companies they run. Previous studies have typically had limitations. Some have been of small samples, or relied heavily on the researchers’ interpretation to classify different “types” of executive.

    In new research, we use survey data from over 1,000 CEOs across six countries and the financial performance of their companies to explore these questions. And our evidence suggests that hands-on managerial CEOs are, on average, less effective than leaders who stay more high-level.

    Our data set includes every activity a CEO undertakes in a week, as well as whether it was planned ahead of time and who else was involved. We used machine learning to determine which differences in CEO behavior are most important. In effect, we asked the algorithm: If you had to explain CEO behavior by dividing them into two types, how would you do it?

    Although the algorithm is completely agnostic, the classification it generates closely resembles John Kotter’s distinction between “managers” and “leaders.” The first type of behavior — managers — includes relatively more plant visits, interactions with employees in supply chain management, and meetings with clients and suppliers. The other type — leaders — includes relatively more interactions with C-suite executives, personal and virtual communications and planning, and meetings with a wide variety of internal functions and external stakeholders. Our data doesn’t insist on classifying CEOs strictly as one type. Instead, we use an index that classifies each CEO as a mix of the two types.
    What Do CEOs Do All Day?

    On average, about one-quarter of CEOs’ days are spent alone, including sending emails. Another 10% is spent on personal matters, and 8% is spent traveling. The remainder (56%) is spent with at least one other person, which mostly involves meetings, most of which are planned ahead of time. About one-third of the time CEOs spend with others is one-on-one; two-thirds is with more than one other person. (This data includes a CEO’s entire workday, not just time in the office.)

    The most common departments for CEOs to meet with are production (35% of time spent with others), marketing (22%), and finance (17%). The most common meetings with outside functions are clients (10%) and suppliers (7%).

    But CEOs vary considerably on each of these, and our model divides CEO behavior into the two groups mentioned above — leaders and managers — and then scores each CEO as being degrees of each.
    Which CEO Type Is Better for Companies?

    When we analyzed CEO type and companies’ financial performance, accounting for other variables including industry, country, and firm size, we found that CEOs who tilt more toward “leader” than “manager” run more-productive and more-profitable companies. And, to our surprise, these previously ignored behavioral differences across CEOs have quite a large association with firm productivity, about one-fifth as big as the impact of a firm’s capital inputs (machinery, equipment, buildings, and so on). Do leader CEOs just happen to work at better companies? We looked at before and after data for firms where a new CEO was appointed, and we found that the appointment of a leader CEO was followed by higher productivity. The effect showed up three years later, which suggests that leaders are doing the hard work of changing companies.
    Is One CEO Type Always Better?

    So far, you might conclude that the best CEOs don’t get too bogged down in the details of day-to-day management, and instead focus on higher-level leadership tasks, such as convening the heads of the different functions and communicating strategy and vision.

    But the picture painted by the data is actually different from this one-size-fits-all approach. Leaders tend to be more prevalent in larger firms and in industries that are, on average, more skill-intensive and complex, while managers tend to run smaller and, to some extent, simpler organizations (i.e., industries characterized by a greater intensity of routine tasks). And plenty of manager CEOs in our data set do run successful firms.

    These observations led us to hypothesize that the performance differentials we captured in the data might instead be due to imperfections in the CEO-firm fit. Some companies need great in-the-weeds managers as CEOs, and others need high-level, vision-setting communicators. But, because the market for CEOs is far from perfect, sometimes managers — who are more abundant in our sample than leaders — end up in a leader role, and thus negatively affect the performance of the firm they run.

    In support of this hypothesis, we saw that places with less-effective labor markets for CEOs were typically associated with a greater disparity in the performance of firms run by managers, relative to firms run by leaders. Although we can’t say exactly what might drive these allocation frictions, empirically they are important and suggest that the fit between company and CEOs’ behavioral traits really matters for firm performance.

    Leaders who set the vision, convene key functions, and communicate effectively can, overall, have a meaningful impact on firm performance, when the setting requires these skills. But just as important is understanding and finding the right fit between the CEO’s leadership style and what the company actually needs.

  • 19 Traits of Bad Bosses

     

  • 5 Habits Of Effective Introverted Leaders

    5 Habits Of Effective Introverted Leaders

    [Photo: Flickr user John Alexis Guerra Gómez]

    View publication at Fast Company

    Introverts can be quiet changemakers. Here’s how they can adopt their leadership style in a world that won’t shut up.
    By Trina Isakson 4 minute Read

    Leadership is often associated with words like “charisma,” “power,” “outgoing,” and “confident.” As a result, introverted and quiet changemakers may have difficulties envisioning what their leadership looks like.

    But core aspects of leadership, such as those described by transformational leadership researchers James MacGregor Burns, Bernard M. Bass, James Kouzes, and Barry Posner, and by Good to Great author Jim Collins, reflect ideas that are in total alignment with quiet changemakers, and you don’t need to be in a position of authority or have a formal leadership role to practice these leadership characteristics.

    Here are a few practices that introverts–whom I refer to as “quiet changemakers”–can adopt to strengthen their leadership:

    1. Good leaders treat those around them as individuals.

    They learn the interests and preferences of their colleagues. They engage in two-way communication. Quiet changemakers can excel through our preference for one-on-one or small-group communication. Through these individual interactions, we learn about our colleagues more deeply in a way that positively impacts our relationships.

    Questions that lead to better leadership practice:

    • Do I know much about my colleagues outside of work?
    • What do my colleagues and I have in common? Difference?
    • Which parts of their jobs do my colleagues love/hate?
    • What skills do my colleagues have that they don’t have a chance to share in their jobs?
    • How do my colleagues work best?

    2. Good leaders provide opportunities for others to demonstrate their thinking and knowledge.

    They provide space for intellectual discussion. They ask others to provide advice. They provide opportunities for people to show off their knowledge. Quiet changemakers can do well because of their enjoyment of conversation with just a few people on topics of shared interest. They can be good listeners and allow other people to spend more time talking. They can share work or ask for advice in ways that allow other people to shine in their areas of expertise.

    Questions that lead to better leadership practice:

    • Who knows more than me in an area I’d like to improve in? What advice can I ask of them?
    • What projects am I working on that others may be interested in getting involved with?
    • Who would be interested in joining me about a discussion on ________?
    • Are there opportunities for my colleagues to lead mini-professional development lunches so that we can learn from each other?

    3. Good leaders are good role models.

    They follow through on commitments. They have strong characters and are consistent in their beliefs. They offer to help for the good of the team. Quiet changemakers can practice this aspect of leadership by knowing their values and contributing to a positive overall environment.

    Questions that lead to better leadership practice:

    • Does my current workload allow me to follow through on all commitments?
    • Do my values align with those of the organization?
    • Are my interactions with others generally positive, or do I focus on the negative or gossip too much?
    • Do I help others and provide others the opportunity to help me when times are tough?

    4. Good leaders focus their energy on the big picture.

    They ensure that work aligns with the mission and values of the team. They help keep people focused on the end goal. Quiet changemakers naturally take time to reflect on their purpose and that of the organization.

    Questions that lead to better leadership practice:

    • Do I understand how my work and that of my colleagues connects the purpose of the organization and can I communicate that to others?
    • Am I able to communicate how our work positively impacts society?
    • What aspect of my organization’s work really invigorates me?
    • Who in my network would also enjoy talking about the bigger picture of our organization’s work and/or the type of work I contribute to the movement?

    5. Good leaders are both strong-willed and humble.

    They are driven to achieve a purpose, but aren’t interested in taking all the credit or blaming others for failure. They are strong yet reflective. Quiet changemakers are naturally interested in reflection, enjoying time alone thinking. And as introverts often overthink past interactions, we may be at risk for overly blaming ourselves when things don’t work out, so we also need to give ourselves a break once in a while.

    Questions that lead to better leadership practice:

    • Do I know what I want to achieve in my role?
    • Who else can I credit for my successes?
    • What have I learned from past failures and missteps, and how can I share that learning with others?
    • Am I spending time on my purpose? Or are my personal issues getting in the way of success?

    Leadership as a concept or something to aspire to can be alienating to many. If you don’t have a job that involves supervising others or have natural skill as a charismatic public speaker, it can be hard to see yourself as a leader. But by practicing many of the qualities of leadership that align with being a quiet changemaker, leadership is accessible for the introverts among our movements, too.

  • Defy Gravity

    Defy Gravity

    How to break from convention and lead in an ambiguous business world

    by Susan Gilell-Stuy, Executive Coach, Trusted Leadership Advisor and Host of “Lead With IT“ podcast

    A reliance on conventional wisdom limits your ability to act in an ambiguous business world. A new generation of employees has redefined their expectations for top leaders and global organizations. And I’m going to tell you something your employees won’t: if you aren’t meeting their needs, they’ve already decided to jump ship and find a new team or company that will.

    Their lack of loyalty is a sign of your neglect. It’s a clear message that you can’t continue to tackle today’s challenges and opportunities with yesterday’s approach. You’ve got to change or lose them.

    It’s time you defy the gravitational pull for doing for what’s conventional: after all the only other option is staying stuck in the past.

    Here are 4 ways you can defy gravity:

    Raise the Bar for Everyone

    Everyone you add to the team should raise the bar for everyone else. That includes you. Only hire people you could see yourself working for one day. The goal is to constantly boost the talent pool, create ongoing intellectual diversity, and learn from each team member’s knowledge and ability.

    Give Up “Kitchen Sink” Meetings

    Stop holding catch-all weekly team meetings. Instead, switch to meetings driven by subject matter. For example: Mondays are project meetings, Wednesdays are budget meetings, and so on. Invite only the key players to keep things simple. A focused meeting makes for quicker and better decision-making.

    Think Big and Let Them Call the Cadence

    As the leader, paint the big picture for your team. Share with them where you’re heading, tell them that you expect them to get there the quickest way possible, and assure them that you’ll clear the speed bumps if need be. Then step back and let your trusted team members call the cadence, approach, and path they’re going to take to get there.

    Kill the Annual Review

    Only one thing matters when it comes to connecting with your people: putting them first. Spend more time focused on them and less time worrying about technical aspects of the business. Don’t wait for an annual review to share what you’re thinking; coach and develop them in real-time. Your investment in them will pay big dividends over the long-term.

    Once you’ve chosen to defy gravity and finish your transformational journey the organization and those around you have no option but to transform too. Fostering real change in those you lead and the organization itself makes you an unstoppable force as a leader.

    Susan Gilell-Stuy, Executive Coach, Trusted Leaderhip Advisor and Host of “Lead With IT” podcast

    Susan is a top-tier corporate executive coach, leadership strategist and speaker who helps millennial leaders and executives tap their genius by discovering the distinct skills and abilities that empower them to map out a plan for success – one that is perfectly suited to them. She is an executive coach for The Wharton School – University of Pennsylvania, a member of the Association of Corporate Executive Coaches and host of the Lead With IT™ podcast. If you’re wondering what your sweet spot is as a leader get your free copy of Susan’s Lead With IT Kit© at susangilellstuy.com and find out what you lead with.

  • The Surprising Value of Being Unattached

    The Surprising Value of Being Unattached

    Some people are naturally blessed with the powers of persuasion. Maybe you’ve seen them in action. They ask and they receive, and they make it look effortless, painless—even fun. For the rest of us, trying to persuade someone can be a maddening experience, and one that is definitely not fun. Maybe we’re trying to make a sale, recruit a partner or get the support we need to pursue a new idea—whatever our goal, and no matter our tactics, the other person stays resolute in “no.” We can push, beg and even manipulate, but he won’t budge. It soon becomes clear that if we keep pushing we might make things worse.

    In those moments, if we can step back and stop pushing, the situation is more likely to work out in our favor—perhaps with a result perhaps better than the one we sought. It seems counterintuitive, but something happens when we stop trying to force an outcome. And if we understand why this happens, we can use it to get the results we want.

    This is not a new idea. In the 14th century Japan it was shibui, while in 16th century Italy, it was called sprezzatura. Chinese Daoists call it wu-wei, and Hindu philosophers know it as ahamkara.

    In the North America, we think of it simply as cool. And if we remember anything we learned in junior high, it was that life was infinitely better for the people who were cool.

    It’s All About Attachment

    In New Age circles, people sometimes speak of a concept called attachment—which means when we’re caught up in something, we get attached to it. That’s when we lose sight of the big picture. We get tunnel vision on the outcome we want, so we don’t notice all that’s happening
    around us. We are blind to what’s really going on, and we are equally incapable of seeing the situation from another person’s perspective.

    This is when the Law of Attraction kicks in, according to New Age Thought. When we’re attached to the outcome, we’re afraid that the thing we want won’t happen. We become attached to that negative thought pattern and then, under the Law of Attraction, we begin attracting more of that negativity. In other words, we begin to imagine the person saying no to us, and eventually he really does say “no.”

    In the Western paradigm—inherited from the thinking of Dr. Sigmund Freud—we end up clinging to our egos. This ego-centered way of related to the world (and to ourselves) traps us in behaviour patterns that don’t meet our needs but which, maddeningly, are hard to see in the moment.

    Effortlessness + Effectiveness = Success

    All of this happens because we’re merely repeating old patterns. We’re like a car that’s stuck in the mud. The harder we try, the more we spin our wheels and make our situation worse.

    Over years of repetition, we have unintentionally trained ourselves to react this way. Just like an athlete who uses repetition to instill muscle memory, we’ve trained our mind to immediately apply that approach. When we become frustrated or desperate, we instinctively revert to these ways. It’s an unconscious, knee-jerk response. If we want to avoid it, we have to consciously change how we react.

    Early Chinese philosophers believed the ideal state of being was when a person was not actively thinking and was not exerting effort. They believed that this is the state in which the person is most able to achieve his goals.

    But retraining yourself so that you can get to that state most definitely requires conscious effort.

    The first step is simply to be aware of your patterns. Catch yourself in that moment; try to talk yourself out of pushing harder. And it’s a paradox, but trying too hard to stop trying too hard is not going to help you break the habit. Mencius, a Chinese philosopher in the fourth century B.C., advocated an approach similar to gardening: Do the planting and monitor the progress, but mostly just sit back and let the plants grow.

    Mencius’ approach isn’t much different from what New Age thought leaders call “the mindset of the witness.” They argue that, when we find ourselves caught up in these frustrating ineffective patterns, we should try to think like a witness. Because a witness is watching the event, not participating and not invested in the outcome.

    Consider the detective shows you’ve watched on TV: A witness comes in and impassively tells the detective what she saw. She wasn’t harmed by the crime and wasn’t involved in the action. She simply watched it all go down. Taking on the mindset of the witness means not getting emotionally engaged in what is taking place.

    As the witness, we notice what is happening but have no expectations about what will happen. We may intend a certain result, but we are not attached to it.

    Still not convinced? Think about insomnia. The harder you try to fall asleep, the less likely it is to happen. Stop trying and…zzz.

    Non-attachment feels unnatural to us in the West. It’s a hard practice to follow. From birth, we’re trained to desire, act and expect positive results, and we’re taught that the harder we work, the greater our reward. It feels strange to let go of an outcome in order to succeed. It’s especially difficult to practice in the moment, when we are trying to persuade someone and our stress levels begin to rise.

    But, by consciously practicing a more passive approach, we can establish new patterns and get our cars unstuck from the mud. We can train ourselves to let go. Whether we call it sprezzatura, shibui, wu-wei, ahamkara or just cool, we’ll be able to remove the tension from the interaction, tension that is keeping the other person from saying “yes.” With that tension gone, we may find ourselves getting a bigger “yes” than the one we imagined.

    AUTHOR: Beverly Benwick

    ABOUT BEVERLY: https://acec.mgmcsolutions.com/directory/bev-benwick-mal-pcc-cpcc/

    CONTACT INFORMATION:
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    TOLL FREE: 1.866.95COACH or 1.866.952.6224
    E-MAIL: bev@advanceyourleadership.com
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  • The Path To Better Decision Making

    The Path To Better Decision Making