Accelerating Leadership Development

Practical Solutions for Building Your Organization's Potential

Jocelyn Berard

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781118464113
• eBook ISBN: 9781118464731
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Liderazgo

Proven strategies and innovative solutions for developing and retaining successful leaders

Many organizations today are facing a crisis of leadership. As the Baby Boomer generation exits the workforce, companies are struggling to find qualified leaders to fill critical roles. Accelerating Leadership Development offers solutions for leadership development, management, and retention from award-winning development firm Global Knowledge.

Accelerating Leadership Development provides a proven model to help companies develop high-potential employees with the competencies and knowledge capital to assume critical roles successfully. It includes practical and rigorous tools that enable organizations to identify targets and predict those targets' success with six measurable factors. With this proven development system, companies can develop a pipeline of ready leaders with high levels of engagement and retention.

• Features actionable, effective principles and strategies for leadership development using a results-oriented framework
• Chapters address communication and delegation strategies, effective feedback models, shifting of responsibility and accountability to direct reports, and contemporary coaching and development approaches
• Based on in-depth research and client interactions from one of the most prominent names in workforce development

For any business that experiences a leadership failure or a lack of qualified leaders for vital positions, the consequences can be devastating. This practical and effective guide to leadership development offers real solutions for long-term excellence.

Part I

Leadership and Succession

1

The Leadership Success Profile

Hire and promote first on the basis of integrity; second, motivation; third, capacity; fourth, understanding; fifth, knowledge; and last and least, experience. Without integrity, motivation is dangerous; without motivation, capacity is impotent; without capacity, understanding is limited; without understanding, knowledge is meaningless; without knowledge, experience is blind. Experience is easy to provide and quickly put to good use by people with all the other qualities.

—Dee Hock

The first few chapters of this book lay out the theory and practice that organizations can use to recognize and develop great leaders. It is a process that includes defining the success profile required for leadership positions (What does it take to be successful as a leader in your organization?), identifying those high-potential individuals within your organization (Who are the future leader candidates?), diagnosing their strengths and specific development needs (What can they leverage and acquire to become better leaders?), determining how to accelerate their development by taking advantage of multiple development approaches and, finally, determining how to make sure development and growth are happening.

Most leaders today come to the position armed with a distinct skill set or expertise from some sort of technical background. Making the leap from that position to a leadership position, commonly called the leadership transition, is often misunderstood and underestimated. There is a world of difference between doing a particular job and managing people who are doing those same tasks. People get the idea from the world of sports and entertainment that it's easy to do: former players become big-league coaches and the likes of Clint Eastwood make the transition from actor to Oscar-winning director and producer. We tend not to notice that as many fail as succeed. In simple terms, the leadership success profile is a clear definition of what it takes to be an effective leader in a certain organization. Once it has been clearly defined, it will be used to diagnose the actual leaders (Chapter 3) or the high-potential ones (Chapter 2) in order to determine what to do to develop them (Chapter 4).

The Critical Components

What does it take to be successful in a leadership role? A number of individuals both within and outside an organization may have the necessary qualities. However, until an organization determines exactly what specific combination of ability, background and personal makeup is required, launching a search to fill a leadership position or implementing a solution to grow leaders will prove fruitless. Through research and firsthand observation, we at Global Knowledge have identified a set of four key requirements that are critical components of the leadership success profile. These are:

• Competencies
• Knowledge
• Experience
• Personal traits/motivation

Acres of forest have been sacrificed to detail the volumes of academic research on the areas of competencies and personality traits/motivation in relation to leadership development. Perhaps surprisingly, very little research has been done on experience and knowledge and their development. We refer somewhat tongue-in-cheek to the holistic combination that makes up the leadership profile at Global Knowledge as the “Triangle of Truth.” An individual needs to have or acquire certain elements of all four components of the triangle as they relate to leadership.

Figure 1.1: The Triangle of Truth

The combination includes attributes that go well beyond what is generally in a person's résumé. A résumé, after all, lays out only what the person has done and perhaps describes some competencies. It does not describe that person's makeup.

The leadership success profile is not a schematic describing any one individual but rather a description of the requirements at the job or level in an organization (for example, vice-president or director level). The level-by-level approach is one that more and more companies are adopting.

Competencies (What I Can Do)

Competencies can be best described as a set of desired behaviors. For example, at one particular pharmaceutical company, the competency requirement for the vice-president of sales revolves around customer focus—providing internal and external customers with value. (See sidebar, “What It Takes to Succeed as a Leader at TD Bank.”) So just what does that look like in action? A typical behavior would be identifying, building and maintaining long-term customer relationships. Other behaviors that illustrate key competencies might be grouped under the heading “Things the individual is skilled at” or “Things the individual is required to have (or learn) to fill the role.”

Knowledge (What I Know)

The knowledge necessary in the leadership success profile could be organizational knowledge or product knowledge, or knowledge of systems and business functions. It also could include knowledge of laws and regulations. This component of the profile could be roughly described as “This is what I know.”

Experience (What I Have Done)

The experience component of the leadership success profile might be tagged as “This is what I have done”; this, too, is a key component of any potential leader's résumé. Rather than vague descriptions, such as “I have ten years of business planning experience,” the experience component must be expressed in granular and specific terms, articulating the types of situations the candidate has experienced and exposed to justify a claim as a “good manager.” Examples might include having led an advisory group of customers, or having addressed public relations challenges, such as a product recall or labor issue. In the finance arena, it could be a specific experience, such as having implemented a budget-tracking system and defended the variances.

Personality Traits/Motivation (Who I Am)

Why is it important to define personality traits when creating a success profile for a particular leadership role? The simple answer is that any individual's personality traits will influence their leadership style, which will go a long way to determining the leadership results of the person in that role.

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What It Takes to Succeed as a Leader at TD Bank

TD Bank has, like many other organizations, a leadership profile. But what is interesting to note is how it clearly made it behaviors-based, actionable and observable. Competencies, or profiles, should not be done to meet HR obligations. These words and definitions need to mean something for the line managers who will apply them, and they need to be the right ones for the organization.

The most important challenge for a leadership profile is to “make it happen” in a day-to-day fashion. For example, some leaders may say sarcastically, “The values and competencies are on the wall, but not in the hall!” At TD Bank, numerous efforts are made at all levels, including the executive level, to live the competencies and make them real. All executives must realize the power of what they say and do; they are visible and influential. So if they believe, talk and live the competencies, they are sending a very powerful message—one much more powerful than any official communication.

TD's Leadership Profile

Make an Impact and Value Speed

Leaders at TD make an impact by:

• Getting things done.
• Valuing speed.
• Focusing on what matters.
• Owning results—not blaming others.
• Knowing the business from the ground up and customer in.
• Finding ways to outperform—not settling for average.
• Delivering superior results for all stakeholders in both the short and long term.

Build for the Future

Leaders at TD build for the future by:

• Having a vision and proactively taking action to implement it.
• Developing tomorrow's leaders.
• Creating an organization that starts with the customer.
• Building organizational capabilities today that business will need tomorrow.
• Seeking continuous improvement.
• Creating a learning environment.

Inspire the Will to Win

Leaders at TD inspire the will to win by:

• Demonstrating passion for the business.
• Attracting and retaining great people.
• Bringing out the best in individuals and teams and making it fun.
• Showing perseverance and resilience in bad times.
• Recognizing and rewarding the contributions of others, both in little ways and more formally.
• Caring about people.

Act Decisively While Working Effectively in Teams

Leaders at TD work effectively in teams by:

• Being driven to win for the TD team.
• Making things happen by leveraging their partners.
• Using positive influence, not power, to deliver results.
• Showing trust in their business partners.
• Working well with people who are different than they are.
• Knowing instinctively how to engage the organization to make things happen.

Live Transparently and Respect Different Views

Leaders at TD live transparently by:

• Speaking candidly but with respect.
• Not rounding corners.
• Having no time for internal politics.
• Respecting different views.
• Being grounded, authentic and genuine, and not taking themselves too seriously.
• Being willing to personally wear problems.
• Surfacing problems, fixing them and learning from them.
• Recognizing their own strengths and weaknesses.

Show Excellent Judgment

Leaders at TD show excellent judgment by:

• Making pragmatic decisions using a mix of intellect, experience and street smarts.
• Dealing with tough issues fairly, decisively and calmly.
• Making timely decisions, even in ambiguous, rapidly changing situations.
• Taking intelligent and prudent risks.
• Making decisions based on what's best for TD, not their ego.

Demonstrate Unwavering Integrity

Leaders at TD demonstrate unwavering integrity by:

• Doing the right thing to the highest ethical standards.
• Putting the interests of the organization above their own and their business unit's.
• Treating people with respect.
• Showing that actions speak louder than words.
• Acting as a role model publicly and privately.
• Demonstrating loyalty and responsibility to TD.

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The Bucket List

The TD Bank profile is certainly a positive model, but there are many ways to define what it takes for a leader to be successful. Joseph D'Cruz, professor emeritus of strategic management at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management, describes five “buckets” of competency that successful leaders need to develop:

1. Management basics. The first bucket consists of fundamental competencies such as planning, deployment, accountability and performance management, as well as continuous improvement as popularized by Japanese management approaches.

2. Strategic outlook. Frontline managers who are preparing to move to higher levels in the organization need to be coached to think strategically and assess their own abilities and capabilities.

3. People skills. D'Cruz argues that leaders must be able to manage people effectively—“that is the individual interpersonal stuff, such as having difficult conversations, performance management, as well as team management skills and even some self-management and self-regulation, seeing how your behavior impacts others.”

4. Analytical competence. The fourth bucket is understanding data. The successful leader possesses a basic understanding of statistics and behavioral economics.

5. Skill at negotiation. “Every manager throughout an organization can be thought of in terms of negotiation,” says D'Cruz. “Negotiating with the people who work for you, you are negotiating with the people you report to, you are dealing with peers of the organization.” D'Cruz is a big believer in “interest-based negotiation,” where both sides come away satisfied rather than endure a zero-sum negotiation in which one side tries to better the other.

Alan Booth, an associate partner at professional services firm Deloitte, highlights three core competencies for any leadership success profile. “It starts with intellectual horsepower, somebody who gets it, somebody who is a quick study,” he says. “The second is maturity and resilience—someone who can take direct feedback, analyze it, learn from it and get back to work. The third is the ability to manage relationships with others: the ability to form them, the ability to leverage them and the ability to add value to the relationship.”

Earlier in the chapter, the four essential leadership requirements that make up the Triangle of Truth were listed. Remember, though, that it's imperative to take a holistic view of the success profile for any given leadership position. In reality, most people's skills, experiences and traits cannot be configured into neat triangles. Sometimes, for example, people are “professional students,” with a handful of degrees but little or no real-world experience working in an organization. A leadership success profile has these four components because, to be effective, leaders need the right balance of experience, knowledge, competencies and traits according to the position and the organization. To use another analogy, building a robust leadership success profile is akin to constructing a stable foundation for a house.

Hogan Assessments, a firm that provides a variety of psychological assessment tools that have HR applications, contends that every well-run organization needs to have a competency model encompassing four broad skill sets:

1. Intrapersonal: integrity, emotional stability and self-control

2. Interpersonal: the ability to build and maintain relationships together with compassion, empathy and humility

3. Business: a capacity to analyze data, allocate resources and forecast budgets

4. Leadership: vision, a gift for empowering staff and the ability to act as a good role model

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How to Define and Evaluate Leadership

Leadership is typically defined in terms of the persons in charge. That is a mistake. Why? Leadership should be defined in terms of the ability to build and maintain a high-performing team. And when it is time to evaluate leadership, we should look at it in terms of the performance of the team relative to the other teams with which it competes. This is rarely done.

Source: Hogan 2003.

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Competencies, Experience and Knowledge

The following section outlines just what is contained in a real-world leadership success profile for a Global Knowledge client. The sample profile provides the observable behaviors or actions that are required for successful job performance on the executive leadership team, organized by competencies, experience and knowledge.

The most impo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Business Performance Framework
• Part I: Leadership and Succession
• Part II: Leadership in Action
• Part III: Leadership Best Practices
• Conclusion
• References
• About the Author
• Index