Archive for the 'Uncategorized' Category

Posted: October 7, 2014
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5 Insights to Survive Anything

pathsSo it happens, that unthinkable thing. A phone call or an unanticipated Friday meeting, pick your poison. Something happens that will change your life forever, or at the very least, place you on a different path. After the shock wears off a little bit, the anger sets in for a long stay and you stop trying to bargain your way out of your new, unwanted reality. Then and only then, you ask yourself and every other person who will listen, “How am I going to survive this?”

Well, you have come to the right place because I, hands down, know how to survive. I never aimed to become a member of the uber-resilience club, but here I am anyway, a charter member. And I want you to know what I have learned, so that when your phone call comes, and it will one day if it hasn’t already, you will know that you can survive.

You see, I woke up one morning to learn my only child, a 21-year-old son, had died when a bass boat collided with a jet ski. Just like that. And thus I was on my way to figuring out if I would live or die.

So, 12 years later, here are my 5 insights for surviving anything. Read More

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Posted: August 5, 2014
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The Financial Impact of Executive Leadership

My research passion for the last ten years has been in the area of top team behavior, specifically how the most senior executives in a company work together and how that level of effectiveness correlates with business performance metrics, over time. Not surprisingly, the linkages are proving to be tight and significant. As you will see on this blog over the coming months, some of the best social scientists in the world have been asking the same questions and running their own experiments. Deloitte’s CIO Journal will get the disscussion going for us, with this article that originally appeared in Deloitte’s CIO Journal in 2012, reposted here with permission:

The Financial Impact of Executive Leadership

Most businesses recognize the role their senior leadership teams play in driving financial performance. Yet measuring the direct impact of company leadership on outcomes such as corporate earnings or equity value has proven difficult for researchers.

Deloitte spent six months (August 2011 to January 2012) studying investment analysts’ perception of the relationship between corporate leadership and performance.

“We wanted to find a quantitative metric for the value of leadership,” says Adam Canwell, a human capital consulting partner with Deloitte Australia. “We set out to understand the impact of leadership on long-term equity value, its relative importance compared with other aspects of company performance, and the size of the potential increase or decrease in value that it can deliver.”

Through interviews and surveys with 445 investment analysts, Deloitte found they routinely factor the quality of a company’s senior leadership team into their valuations, and that effective senior leadership can add 15 percent to a company’s value. (For the specific leadership capabilities investment analysts seek in corporate executives, see “CIO Leadership: The Capabilities Investment Analysts Value”) Read More

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Posted: July 14, 2014
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Board Member Alignment

Screen Shot 2014-07-11 at 2.29.28 PMI’m frequently asked about the work we do to help corporate Boards become more integrated. How do we get a room full of very successful, outspoken and highly polarized Board members to govern together? Do we build a Board as we might an executive team? Do we coach outside directors as we would those from the inside?

We have developed a reputation over the years for gaining the trust and confidence of very senior leaders, leaders who sit on many Boards. These very busy, brilliant business people don’t suffer fools easily, so it is always with a great sense of privilege   that we find them choosing to buy into our belief that the best Boards have members who are fiercely collaborative. They will surely continue to compete in their own markets, but they recognize the value of adding great teamwork to their leadership repertoire. We have found that these men and women share a deep desire that the entire Board experiences success and that along with that success the business they govern will thrive and prosper.

So what happens that causes a Board member to set aside his or her highly energized agenda to focus on what will most help others become comfortable and feel heard? The answer to this question is complex but the principles are fairly straightforward. So we thought we would start a discussion about effective Board member integration by sharing the underlying beliefs that shape our work. These principles and some practices are chronicled here and all we ask is that you take a look and let us know what you think. Read More

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Posted: June 9, 2014
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Culture Change Leadership: Principles, Practices, Pitfalls and Traps

changeVolumes (quite literally) have been written on the subjects of change and transition. Here we hope to hit a few highlights, give you a couple of clues of what to be on the lookout for and how to anticipate and respond to some likely attitudes and behaviors. Additional conceptual grounding appears at the end of the blog entry on change and transition, resistance, and teams. Some of what follows may be useful in the early stage in the process of “planning for change” and other information may be most relevant as you actually try to implement what is being designed.

Be on the lookout for:

1. Resistance

People can resist change actively and passively.

Active resistance may be manifested by deliberate opposition, reduction in output, chronic quarrels, subtle hostility, “why this won’t work,” agitating others, not reporting problems, and denying problems.

Passive resistance may include withholding information, foot-dragging, no confrontation (but no productivity), not attacking solutions (but not supporting it either), “we’ve always done it this way,” overcomplicating the new way.

People resist because (any/all of what follows): They think they will lose something, they do not understand implications, they assess the situation differently from those initiating the change and perceive more cost than benefit, they fear they will not be able to develop new skills and behaviors that will be required, they have limited tolerance for change, to save face (“if the change is occurring, what we’ve been doing is devalued”), loss of control, discomfort of excess uncertainty.

For example: rumors, talking “behind people’s backs,” saying one thing in meetings and other things in private conversations, confusion about whom to include in/exclude from communications, and skepticism.

No matter how well “the case has been made” for the innovation some will experience a loss (of the way things have been done, self concept of being successful and knowing the ropes, etc.)

Read More

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Posted: January 22, 2014
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It’ll Never Work

It'll never workI was sitting in a meeting with a top leadership team that I was working with to introduce a new go-to-market strategy and operating model. Having chosen to build it on a platform of Customer Intimacy, they had set up three teams staffed by high-potentials – their best and brightest – to come back with innovative ways to use Customer Intimacy to drive competitive advantage in their lines of business. The thinking was that forming these teams would create high levels of engagement among the people they saw as the best internal candidates to move onto the executive team and give the top team an opportunity to further assess them in action.

There was a real buzz in the air. You could clearly tell that the teams were excited to get the opportunity to show their progress. As the meeting went on, with the teams presenting some really innovative ideas, I listened to the members of the top team offer feedback – feedback that took the form of comments like:

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On a break, I asked one of the high-potentials what he thought about how it was going. He responded that he saw some real breakthrough ideas being presented by the teams. I told him that I did, too. Then he lamented that nothing would come of it. “I don’t know why they keep asking us to do stuff like this. They give it lip service, but they always shoot everything down. It’s like they don’t believe that anyone but them has ever had a good idea. I wish they would just number the excuses and use shorthand. Nope… number 3.”

Thomas Bata, the founder of Bata Shoe, was fond of telling the story of how he sent two salesmen to explore market potential in Africa. One cabled back to the home office: “No one here wears shoes. No potential.” The second salesman cabled: “Everyone here is barefoot. Infinite potential.”Bata believed in that potential long before any of his much larger Western competitors and went on to create the largest shoe company in the world, with over 30,000 employees at production facilities in more than 30 countries and, according to their web site, services more than a million customers a day through 5,000 international retail locations. Read More

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Posted: January 1, 2014
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To Succeed in 2014, Stay Away from New Year’s Resolutions

New-Year_Resolutions_listIt happens every year. We resolve to break a bad habit or start a new, healthy practice. Gym memberships are purchased, e-cigarettes are ordered and refrigerators are stocked with apples and kale. Your teenager is enlisted to help move the flat screen out of your bedroom in hopes you will gain an extra hour of sleep each night while others are watching Jimmy Fallon.

As January rolls in, our good intentions show up at the workplace, too. Like the new kid at school decked out in a hipster backpack and Converse sneakers, our noise canceling ear buds dangle from our necks and each wrist is circled with a device, one monitoring our health and the other our activity. We set the alarms on our calendars to remind us to drink more water throughout the day and call our mothers on Sunday.

Taking steps to change behavior for the better is always a good idea, right? I mean, what could be wrong with focusing our energies on those things that help us to improve?

Well, for the most part, there is absolutely nothing wrong with setting new goals in the New Year. Some researchers have found that writing a desired outcome down on paper or sharing a clear commitment out loud with others can increase tenfold the likelihood of achieving that goal. So, don’t get me wrong, there is only an upside to goal setting.

However, it has also been said that less than 8% of the people who set New Year’s goals achieve them. This does not surprise me at all because setting a goal and achieving a goal are very different entities. It’s all in the execution, after all.

In fact, after spending thousands of hours with leaders in the C-suite over the past 30 years, I have observed that New Year’s resolutions are NOT the best way to achieve important goals. The leaders who have been the most successful personally and professionally are those who regularly and quietly take stock of what is/is not working.

Without any sign of insecurity, they check in with others throughout the year to “see how things are going”. They know that others can see what they cannot and that their perspectives are important to understand if business priorities are going to be successfully implemented. To stay the course, they are continually sensing and interacting, adjusting and readjusting how work is done and who does the work so that everyone in the business (or in their families, as the case may be) is pulling together to do the right things to succeed.

The best leaders are able to figure out what risks are worthwhile to take and are likely to pan out in positive ways. They know when to stay the course and do not have any problem disappointing those who wish they would move things in another direction. This skill of knowing when to fold them and when to hold them throughout the year is infinitely more important than the ability to make a sweeping change at a designated point in time. Read More

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Posted: August 27, 2013
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Harnessing the Power of Cinema to Create Employee Engagement

 

quoteI have two distinct passions that I am fortunate and blessed to explore and share with the world. For the last 20 years, I have helped leadership teams disseminate strategy, evolve culture, and develop their leadership capability. Concurrently for the last 14 years, I have directed, produced, shot and edited independent films. These two worlds seemed separate and distinct to me for many years, and because of my own limited paradigm, I operated contentedly in these two creative silos.  It is only the last few years that I have discovered the unique power of the medium of the moving image as a powerful business communication tool.

Using video as a tool for training is certainly nothing new. Animation and video make an otherwise dry PowerPoint presentation more dynamic. Leaders of large, global organizations use streaming video to make company-wide announcements, bringing a personal immediacy to a strategic communication. What I believe to be sorely under-utilized in the business arena is the power of cinema—the marriage of sound and the moving image—to transport the viewer to another place, reaching not only their mind, but also their heart and soul.

I witnessed the power of cinema first-hand a few months ago at the Annual Leadership Retreat of one of my clients. This particular client is in the process of rebranding themselves as a pioneer in a new market space, and the senior leadership team, and more specifically the marketing team, was ready to share the new direction and the new brand promise with their top managers. They did this in a brilliant way…they used the tools of cinema to lure the top 150 leaders to the emotional core of the new brand, through imagery, music, and narration. It was effectively group hypnosis. The combination of these artistic elements put these leaders into a meditative state. The audience was feeling the powerful effect of this new brand, taking it in at a deep level. Read More

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