Creating Catalysts

Would you like to see your leaders creating breakthrough shifts in how the work is done? Would you like to see them consistently and naturally drawing together teams from all parts of the business to develop new and creative solutions? Would you like to see your leaders developing new ways for people to work together? Would you like to see your leaders routinely evaluating their own assumptions and working to understand the work through differing perspectives?
Leaders who operate in these modes are Catalysts … catalysts for change. Whether driving LEAN manufacturing through an organization, moving into new markets, or integrating acquisitions, Catalysts have grown beyond the Achievers in their ability to bring people together to move a vision into reality.

In the preceding postings, we have been exploring a competency model for leadership outlined by Joiner and Josephs in their recent book “Leadership Agility”. This newsletter will look at the implementation of Lean manufacturing system to point out the differences in how Achievers and Catalysts might approach the same work. We’ll end by identifying development opportunities that can be used to support competency development to the Catalyst level.

Consider the premise that there is always a way “to create more value with less work.” That is the basis of the process management philosophy exemplified by the Toyota Production System and now described simply as Lean (reference http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_manufacturing). Let’s see if we can contrast how Lloyd, an Achiever, and Susan, a Catalyst might proceed in leading a Lean implementation.

Lloyd is energized by the opportunity to lead the Lean transformation team for his organization. He believes strongly its philosophies and practices. He’s got a proven track record of being able to diagnose and resolve problems with innovative solutions. He knows that the key to his success will be in persuading others that Lean is a key to the future of his organization.

Susan is fascinated by the successes some companies have achieved with Lean. She’s also been exploring what sets apart the best from those that aren’t succeeding. She knows that the tools and structures are important, but has recognized that the key to success is in establishing a clear vision and then getting people from all levels of the organization involved. Susan has seen that if she can create a new way of working together, people will feel excited, empowered and energized. But she also knows that there will be a lot of different opinions on the value of lean and how to implement it. She is looking forward to getting the conflicts out on the table so that the best solutions arise.

Three months into the project Lloyd is noticing that the Purchasing group is routinely not following through on their team commitment. He knows that his conversation with the Purchasing Director will be pivotal. Before the meeting, Lloyd meets with his coach to prepare for this conversation. Lloyd’s coach helps him get clear on the outcomes he is seeking and the relationship he wants to have with the Purchasing Director. In the meeting, he is able to gain a better perspective on the challenges in Purchasing, while reminding the Purchasing Director of the management attention this project is getting. He leaves with agreement to Purchasing will live up to their commitments.

While initially engaged in the work, Susan is noticing that the production planning group is resisting some of the initiatives. In reflecting on an earlier conversation with the Production Planning Manager, she realizes that neither of them really opened up about their differing priorities and there was no real commitment; in fact, the conversation created more distrust. Susan knows that she needs to lead the Lean implementation – it’s not negotiable – but that she needs to be looking for collaboration in the solution. Susan has learned that in the upcoming conversation that she’ll need to be explicit with her key priorities and assumptions throughout the conversation, and that she’ll need to be asking the questions to learn about the priorities and assumptions in Production Planning. With awareness of her own intent and behavior throughout the conversation, Susan was able to find opportunities for joint problem solving.

Lloyd is pleased to get some feedback from his management and HR that he’s really grown into his role as a manager. His team meetings are well attended and include a comfortable balance of information sharing and problem-solving. He’s finding that he can back away from troubleshooting specific problems and spend most of his time motivating his team members, providing support, breaking down barriers, and keeping everyone moving together.

Susan believes that the best solutions come from exploring a variety of perspectives, but is concerned that her participative approach will be seen as too “soft”. With the encouragement of her coach, she has begun to experiment with her team meetings in order to find a balanced power style. She works at encouraging discussion that examines issues from different perspectives. Her team is learning that sometimes she is looking to strengthen her idea, sometimes she is looking for new ideas, sometimes she negotiate a compromise within the team to keep things moving forward, and sometimes she lets her team have their way. She is realizing that valuing input is not the same as giving up her authority to decide the direction. She also finding ways to delegate leadership to people within her team and seeing this is accelerating their development.

Reflect on the stories of Lloyd and Susan. Who would you rather have working for you? Who would you rather have as a boss? Which organization will achieve the greatest transformation?

The Catalyst level is a natural extension of the Achiever. The Achiever can be counted on to deliver results with a focus on solving the current problems and involving others through persuasion. The Catalyst is at a stage in his career when he sees the personal and organizational value in stepping out of the old ways of doing business, in building a participative team, and in finding creative ways to develop his direct reports.

To develop an Achiever to the Catalyst level, coaching will focus on the following areas:

1. Deepening awareness of beliefs, values, and assumptions about yourself and others
2. Discovering the interest in and value for helping others succeed
3. Finding out what’s important to other people and connecting with it to make a difference for them
4. Shifting from motivating and directing others to coaching and training
5. Involving others in collaborative problem solving
6. Increasing self-awareness in the moment, and learning how to adjust feelings and behaviors throughout interpersonal interactions
7. Seeking and incorporating feedback into personal development

For more information on how Sherry L. Read, Principal and Executive Coach, Read Solutions Group works with developing and senior leaders to raise their competencies, contact Sherry at Sherry@ReadSolutionsGroup.com.

The Achievers

The last posting described the Expert Leader in the following way:

The Expert Leader is a strong, tactical problem-solver; someone you love to have
on your team. You can depend on them to get the job done day after day. Yet the
Expert Leader is often so focused on being seen as right that they forget to
look at the bigger picture, or to bring other people along with them.

The Achiever combines leadership with technical capabilities in order to play on a bigger field. Let’s follow Mary from the last newsletter, on her career path to Regional Sales Manager. A few months into the job, Mary feels as though she has never worked harder in her life. There seem to be challenges with every client, personnel issues that are not being addressed, and errors being with the customer accounts. She says that she has no problem with delegation, yet it seems as though nothing is ever quite good enough for her. She wants to have real team meetings, but can barely find the time to get the work done. While Mary has been promoted, at this stage, her leadership skills remain at the Expert level.

Believing in Mary’s potential, her boss hires an executive coach. In reflecting on her desires for her leadership style, Mary tells her coach that she wants to create an environment where her team is both challenged and motivated, and where she can work on broader issues. With the support of her coach, Mary begins to schedule biweekly team meetings with the agenda focused on the key projects she has identified that will support sales throughout the region. She is seeing opportunities to use her team’s initiatives to change the sales process for the division. Mary is disciplining herself to listen more, use more questions than answers, and to choose the times when she makes the decision. Mary is making the shift to Achiever Level Leadership.

At the Achiever Level, leaders spend an increasing time delivering organizational outcomes versus solving discrete problems. They see their priority as delivering on the mandates of senior leadership and other stakeholders. The Achiever motivates his team by focusing on the larger objectives, inviting discussion, creative and healthy debate. He shifts his emphasis from managing tasks to managing people. This latter shift requires the Achiever to become more skillful and comfortable engaging in crucial conversations.

Coaching at the Achiever Level

Build self-awareness and intent: Challenge the developing achiever to explore their experiences and strengths. Ask for reflections on personal growth – “How are you changing? How are you still the same as in earlier periods of your life?” Ask the Achiever to investigate how their actions reflect their values and beliefs. Inquire into the discrepancies between stated values and observable behaviors. Support the Achiever in building a coherent set of values and beliefs that will support their development as leaders.

Develop a breadth of perspective: The Achiever develops the ability to look at problems through an adjustable lens - zooming in and out on problems – looking forward and back, over short and long intervals. Invite the Achiever to envision a range of possibilities, to be open to “a right answer” rather than “the right answer”. Encourage the Achiever to analyze situations for patterns and to use this learning to find new ways to solve old problems. Notice that the Achiever, while aware of bias and error, will still depend heavily on their own sources of data and experience, and can become quickly closed to other perspectives.

Use your team: The Achiever focuses more energy around motivating others, rather than giving orders. Question the Achiever on how she is using team meetings. – are they being used to gain buy-in and test their own ideas, or is the Achiever using the meetings to cast a wide net for new ideas? Is the team truly supportive of the leader’s direction or are there concerns and opportunities being left unsaid?

Tackle the crucial conversations: Coach the Achiever to explore the areas where they are holding back. The authors of Crucial Conversations tell us that these are conversations where the stakes are high, emotions may be high and there is an expectation of opposing opinions. Learning and practicing skills, employing them with all stakeholders, and growing with each experience is key to developing through this level.

Achievers are the key to leadership at many organizations today. They are strong at outlining their vision for an organization, at rallying the troops and executing on outcomes. They explore the landscape for changes in strategy, let go of the day-to-day, and are motivated by the success of the organization. Focusing on the behaviors above will enhance the success of the Achiever.

Is Coaching a Fad?

With so many organizations rushing to develop programs for managers as coaches, is coaching turning into a fad?

A recent presentation sponsored by the Human Capital Institute, and given by Peyton Daniel and Anne Doster of DBM gave the statistics that over 80% of the respondents to their survey used "coaching skills training" at least sometimes, and nearly 70% were using external executive coaches at least sometimes. Now, survey samples are notoriously, so we don't want you to conclude that coaching is, as yet, that prevalent. But could it be well on its way to becoming too fashionable for its own good? The perquisite to go with the corner office? The emblem of the high-potential? The consultant's favorite gig?

Before we dismiss coaching and mentoring as another passing fad, let's look at more closer what current research is showing us about executive coaching.

• Executive coaching is found increasingly on a routine basis for C-level execs, and both less frequently and less often for senior executives; and almost never for non-managers.
  
• The primary drivers for coaching are:
  • Derailed executives
  • Enabling capable executives to achieve greater excellence
  • Supporting the development of high-potential employees
  • Improving team effectiveness
• Executive cite benefits for coaching to include
  • Continuous one-on-one attention
  • Expanded thinking through dialogue with a curious outsider
  • Increased self-awareness, including blind spots
  • Personal accountability for development
  • Effective learning delivered just-in-time
• Coaching failures are linked to
  • Lack of commitment from the client
  • Lack of clear goals and purpose
  • Client too busy to focus on developmental goals
  • A mismatch between client and coach
  • Client's manager is not involved or supporting
• ROI ranges from the value of the coaching investment up to more than 500% depending on study cited
  
• Successful coaching engagements have:
  • Coach evaluation including
    • Coaching methodology
    • Senior-level business, industry and/or functional experience
    • Chemistry with client
    • Measurement system
  • A willing client
    • Open to increasing their self-awareness and enhancing their personal growth
      
    • Entering coaching with enthusiasm, interest and a commitment of time
  • Measure the ROI of all coaching assignments using
    • Achievement of agreed-upon objectives, including performance metrics as appropriate
    • Evaluations by client, clients boss, and coach
    • 360 assessments
      
  • Clear expectations around the process from initial meeting, overall time commitment (typical agreements are 4 to 6 months, twice per month), confidentiality, and management support and involvement

David B. Peterson, in a chapter on Coaching and Mentoring Programs, adds depth to this research report by outlining the major assumptions around effective coaching. His assumptions about positive, proactive coaching are modified and included below.

• People are motivated to learn and grow; the coach's role is to clarify and engage that motivation
• Insight is ever-evolving and should be developed through the coaching process, whether initiated with a current situation or a 360 assessment
• While coach can and does provide feedback, the main goal of the coaching is to enable the client to gather and gain their own insights
• Coaches should be expert in helping people learn how to change and adjust their behaviors to become more effective, with a goal of enhancing ongoing learning and development
• Coaching is about achieving results by working on the areas of greatest leverage and payback.

The executive coaching methodology practiced at Read Solutions Groups is then to provide customized coaching that moves iteratively through the following steps:

• Clarify personal goals, values and motivations
• Develop insights into what needs to be developed
• Establish and agree to measures for success
• Evaluate reasons for and barriers to change
• Explore or chose alternative ways of behaving
• Practice new skills and behaviors
• Develop action plan and measure progress, watching for additional insights
• Ensure that other people and structures are put in place to support progress and ongoing feedback

So, is coaching a fad? Studies, whether focused on feedback from executives, clients or HR, point to solid returns on the investment of coaching when the systems employ recommendations like those above.

Email us to receive references to additional studies on executive coaching.

How Women Become Leaders

Is it a glass ceiling, a glass cliff or perhaps it’s a labyrinth. Alice Eagly and Linda L. Carli, in their book, Through the Labyrinth: The Truth About How Women Become Leaders, argue that the glass ceiling is no longer an apt metaphor. In the 70’s and 80’s, women were encouraged to seek higher positions, yet found their careers stalled just short of the top leadership positions. In some cases, women were allowed into leadership, but not too far. There was a glass ceiling.

In more recent years, as attention has shifted enabling all high potential employees, the glass cliff phenomena was identified – a situation where women are given high risk opportunities, and denied (whether consciously or unconsciously) the support and resources to succeed. (See Testing the Glass Cliff for more on this topic.)

In the 21^st century, women are achieving more and more positions of prominence, yet the numbers of women in leadership remain low. Eagly and Carli propose that the path to leadership for women is more akin to a labyrinth – a difficult and challenging maze with numerous obstructions and barriers, rather than a single glass ceiling.

Barriers identified include:

• Women tend to carry much of the family / child responsibility in the home.
• A hidden bias in the prevailing sense that leadership is a masculine endeavor. As a consequence, women tend to be evaluated lower even with same credentials.
• Discrimination found in the company cultures. For example, fast track careers may require intense hour commitments (referred to as extreme jobs by Sylvia Ann Hewlitt) or in the environments that continue to support socializing involving strip clubs, drinking, hunting, etc.
• Women placed in staff rather than line jobs.
• Women being passed over for the high-visibility challenging assignments, conversely being assigned to glass cliff jobs.

What can be done about this?

• As the definition of leadership changes to include more elements of emotional intelligence, women will be perceived as more suitable for leadership roles.
• Leadership can allow flexibility for parenting, particularly in the dinner hours (see Top Jobs and Maternal Guilt).
• Organizations can strive for more objective measures of performance and accomplishments.

What can women do for themself? Women can and do succeed in all kinds of environments. Recognize their personal strengths and limitations and then aligning those with the choice of company and the company culture will best position them to negotiate the labyrinth.

Remote Leadership: When you can't just walk down the hall and see how things are going

Whenever you are in the world, more likely than not, you lead people or teams that are not located in the same office as you. Or if this isn't the case, you may well be dealing with a remote leader or manager. So if you can't walk down the hall and see how things are going, what are some of the keys to successful remote leadership?

In this article, we'll look at three elements:

• What is different about remote and face-to-face leadership?
• What structures support remote leadership?
• What are the actions you should take as a remote leader?

Are there really any differences between remote and face-to-face leadership or isn't good leadership just good leadership?
Strong leaders are skilled in establishing a vision, motivation, engagement, goal setting, performance management and continuous improvement, among other things. In principle then, there is no difference between remote and face-to-face leadership skills. In practice, both the leader and team members lose information about the subtle messages. In their article, "Virtual line management: The competitive advantage", Bente Thomassen and Henrik Villumsen of The Danish Leadership Institute argue that the crucial difference is the leader's lack of access to the atmosphere or tone of the workplace. There are more clues when you can see, hear, and feel a person's tone or a group's atmosphere. The messages that surround you as a leader provide information on productivity and morale. Distance makes many of these messages and clues harder to spot and read.

Leadership becomes even more challenging when you have a mix of local and remote team members. It is extraordinarily easy to assume that the remote team members are facing the same challenges and opportunities as the local team; and perhaps more importantly, to assume that the remote team members have the same needs as the local team. In fact, the remote team members work in a different environment, and as with any group of people, have individual needs. Michael Watkins, in a recent Harvard Business Review Online article give s recommendations to remote team members in "Remote Leadership: Meeting the Challenge of Working for a Virtual Boss" by Michael Watkins.

What are the structures supporting good leadership?
All leaders need to establish structures to support goal alignment and the achievement of desired results. A remote leader should look particularly at these areas.

1. Do the remote team members have supported technology that will enable communication, collaboration and access to information? Technology solutions can include web-based scheduling software, teleconferences, videoconferencing, groupware, and webconferencing.
   
2. Do your remote team members understand their limits of authority? Build a decision tree with your team members that outlines the kinds of decisions that can be taken independently, the extent of input you need to have, and the level of communication required (approval needed, advice sought, informed, part of regular updates).
   
3. Does the format of your regularly scheduled team meetings enable clear two-way communication and a sense of involvement? Conscious efforts must be made to include remote team members if there is a sizeable local group; jokes, side discussions, visuals are often lost over the conference lines, leading to a sense of disconnection, rather than inclusion.
   
4. Are you choosing the appropriate forms of communication for each message? Formal follow up and discussion can occur over email. Satisfying your curiousity about an issue may best be done over the phone to avoid a sense of micromanagement, and to ensure your team members are chasing your questions, rather than achieving results. Balance your knowledge and control needs against the pitfalls of micromanagement.
5. Have you established a pattern of individual interactions tailored to the needs of the individual team member? Some employees relish a brief interaction daily; some do better with a formal weekly update call. Also ensure that your employees know the best way, and the best times to reach you with more urgent updates.
   

What actions do you need to routinely employ to be a successful remote leader?
Structures enable communication. Your actions as a remote leader within and outside those structures are the elements that lead to success.

1. Your ability to manage the subtle messages from yourself and the work place are correlated with remote leadership success. Quoting Thomassen and Villumsen, "the further away, the clearer, explicit and unambiguous the message" must be. Whether your team members are on opposite coasts of N. America or separated by 12 time zones, context, jargon, and differences in cultural directness can dramatically effective the understanding of your messages. Simplifying your message, frequently repeating key messages and seeking understanding are key steps to establishing a clear direction.
2. The effective remote leader watches closely for the unsaid messages to gain keep a firm grasp on the atmosphere. Be aware of the number or frequency of phone calls or emails, length of messages, changes in tone or words employed, breakdown in interactions between team members, and hints of problems. Be sensitive to what your people are telling you, and what they are not disclosing.
   
3. Know who the thought leaders and social leaders are within a remote group. Deputize them to signal you when problems arise and need your intervention or presence.
4. Set aside time for social interactions, both face to face and through your normal means of team communication. Employee engagement is strongly linked to a sense that the boss cares. Building a depth of relationship remotely is more challenging, and more necessary.
5. Gallup research documented in "The Fourth Element of Great Managing" reminds leaders of the need for frequent recognition. Gallup recommends recognition be given at least every 7 days. Frequent recognition in a remote situation quells the question, "do they even know what we are doing?" The remote leader who consciously reaches out to every employee on a weekly or more frequent basis to acknowledge and support work, will enhance employee engagement and productivity.

The remote leader faces many challenges. He must establish values from a distant, communicate a shared vision for the future, build trust with individuals and teams, balance the need for control against micromanagement, and ensure that employees feel engaged, productive and supported, all at a distance. She must be spend additional energy attuned to subtle hints and changes in the workplace. He must know how and when to intervene. Those who successfully take on the challenges of remote team members find their overall leadership skills greatly enhanced.

- What have you found to improve remote leadership? What impact has remote leadership had on your overall leadership skills? -

See Jane Lead

In a break from her earlier books, Nice Girls Don't Get the Corner Office and Nice Girls Don't Get Rich, Lois P. Frankel focuses her new book, See Jane Lead on strategies to take charge.

Between the two earlier books, Dr. Frankel outlined 176 mistakes women make in pursuing their professional and financial goals. The coaching tips in both these books are quite informative, and no doubt that Dr. Frankel's clients have greatly benefited from her coaching and books. Yet a focus on mistakes is counter to the latest understanding of how change occurs. A focus on what is wrong tends to reinforce the wiring in our brain (the neural connections) that is established around that habitual behavior.

The new book, See Jane Lead, begins each section with a reinforcement of where the skill area is already being used. Dr. Frankel goes on to point out the similarities among these behaviors that demonstrate an established and useful skill set. The bulk of the chapter looks at how to build on the existing skill sets through examples of theory and practice. Each chapter ends with detailed coaching tips. As with all her books, Dr. Frankel provides plenty of anecdotes demonstrating how women have made successful changes.

The book is focused around the following skill areas:

• Balancing strategy and tactics
• Taking calculated risks
• Influencing with and without authority
• Coaching others to achieve their best
• Leading teams
• Developing Emotional Intelligence and Likability
• Leading your own Enterprise

Dr. Frankel ends the book with a chapter aimed at both men and women on raising daughters to lead. Some of the areas she cites are honoring your daughter's unique gifts, instilling a competitive spirit, encouraging financial independence, and model the way.

Understanding where you currently stand on a behavior, how you will benefit from modifying the behavior, and the consequences of not doing so, are key steps to bringing about successful change. See Jane Lead starts with a self-assessment to establish both strengths and the most significant area for improvement. The book would be strengthened with a chapter, or section at the end of each chapter, which led the reader through an action planning process around change.

All of us can benefit from enhancing our skills in the seven areas listed above. Whether you are a professional woman, or a father seeking ways to support his wife or daughter, this book contains excellent coaching tips on taking charge at work.

Global Leadership Competencies

In researching on the internet to find a suitable set of competencies for one of my speaking engagements, I came across the article "Internationalising corporate leadership competencies through 'behavioural diversity'".

Leadership competencies are generally defined as the observable behaviors that support excellence in leadership. In this article, Stephen Martin notes that many of the existing competency models, while giving a nod to cultural sensitivity, define successful behaviors from the perspective of the dominant culture. As an example, the Career Architect competencies from Lominger Limited defines the competency "Standing Alone" including as an example of skilled behavior, "willing to be the only champion for an idea or position".

In a culture where collectivism is valued over individualism, Standing Alone would not be valued. There may be a high need for people to champion an idea or position, but it needs to be done by involving others, rather than by standing alone. In looking at the competency model Global Leader of the Future Inventory written by Marshall Goldsmith, the competencies are defined more in terms of the outcomes, rather than the specific actions. For example, Standing Alone are captured in "courageously stands up for what he/she believes in". In the US that might mean standing alone; in Asia, it might mean building a collective understanding.

As competency models are developed and propagated within a company, consideration should be given as to whether they provide flexibility and adaptability to the country cultures or whether there is only one way to get the work done.

Avoids Political Behavior

A leadership competency in the area of "Demonstrating Integrity" is "Avoids political and self-serving behavior". Is it really true that in corporations of today, a leadership must avoid political behavior? I disagree. Yet, this a behavior identified the Global Leader of the Future Inventory written by Dr. Marshall Goldsmith in collaboration with Al Jacobson.

A definition of politics is “the process by which a community's decisions are made, rules for group behavior are established, competition for positions of leadership is regulated, and the disruptive effects of disputes are minimized.”* This is a neutral definition; politics is one of the structures of behavior – common to all human relations. It is a process or set of rules overseeing decision-making, group behavior, competition for leadership and dispute handling. I would argue that the savvy senior executive needs to be skilled in using politics, with integrity. Politics is about influence. It is about understanding people's motivations and needs. It is about recognizing the network of relationships in an organization. It is about constructing that meet the organization's needs and influencing the response by being aware of and accommodating, if practical, the needs of various internal stakeholders.

Further in this inventory, we find these additional competencies:

• Builds effective partnerships across the company
• Builds effective alliances with other organizations
• Creates a network of relationships that help get things done.

I wonder, aren't these "political behaviors"? Perhaps a better Leadership Competency would be "Engaging in political behavior in the best interests of the company". For more on political skills, see my earlier blog posting, Office Politics: Playing the Game.

What do you think? Should leaders avoid political behaviors?