Talent Management creates a healthy leadership pipeline

Posted on October 30, 2008 by executivecoachingguru

There is hardly a document in the last 5 years that hasn’t indicated that executive boards have a primary focus on the area of talent management and thus succession planning.

As an executive coach I often work with a business to enable the development and release of talent, though what is often clear is that whilst most senior managers understand the need for talent, they often are unaware of the dangers of not valuing talent as a primary business focus.

1. Succession planning should be done at every level, not just at the senior tier:

  • This enables the business as a whole to feel this isn’t just an elitist activity
  • Educates people to a process that will enable them to contribute as opposed to just be told
  • Gives new team members a sense they are entering a transparent environment

2. It is also key to build an executive’s reward around their capability in locating, developing and promoting talent:

  • This in itself promotes a culture of sustainability and legacy
  • Starts to address the “I’m in it for the short term” mentality that many executives have cultivated over the last decade
  • Breeds behaviour that is geared to a learning organisation that achieves through the development of its people

3. Talent Management should be reviewed twice a year

  • Of course the a persons development should be continually reviewed, but twice a year it should be a board review
  • Executives should feel comfortable talking about success and failure in terms of developing their team, to learn from each other
  • “How often, if ever, is someone maneuvered around the organisation in order to grow them?”
  • It is key that people are not owned by a Director, but seen as  business resource

Talent management has become a high profile concept, though it should be an easy process. Sometimes the documentation looks great when you consider just one person, but when you are generating these things at a business level it can be very labour intensive:

Top Talent Management Tips:

  1. Let the individuals own their profile, they keep it up to date
  2. Use a simple 4-9 box grid.
  3. Ask people where they see themselves on that grid and discuss the fact you agree or disagree
  4. Make it an open and transparent process
  5. Consider do you want your potential career value to be a secret: No! So make it an open process
  6. Have the painful conversations, the business will only have to do it once, then it’s done
  7. Do this process at the same time as Reviews, so it’s seen as one activity
  8. Don’t make out it’s a grind, this is someones career you are talking about

In the end, remember that Talent Management is part process and part culture, it demonstrates that as a business leader you understand the difference between the short term and the long term.

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Leadership Responsibility and Stewardship

Posted on October 10, 2008 by executivecoachingguru
“The individual increasingly comes to know who he is through the stand he takes when he expresses his ideas, values, beliefs and convictions, and through the declaration and ownership of his feelings” - Clark Moustakas

There is no doubt about it, that being a leader has responsibilities and most of them are obvious, but still many leaders see their responsibility as being a very finite level, generally being what they have direct control over.

The reality is that leadership responsibility is horizontal and not vertical, meaning that leadership looks across the business as opposed just up and down it, the Executive Coaching Guru developed the TLeadershipModel to simply illustrate that where as management has vertical responsibility, leadership has a horizontal one.

tleadershipmodel

The very essence of management is the achievement of outputs through the management of resources, the very essence of leadership is the achievement of outputs with the continued sustainabiltiy and legacy of a business. What’s important to understand is that leadership by its very definition entwined with responsibility and a sense of purpose that goes beyond the pure achievement of the task, leaders give value and reason to a business, aligning the everyday tasks to something that has a greater value and thus bringing value to all people at all levels.

Understanding this is very important as we hear about ‘credit crunch’ and the leadership of the financial markets, that is effecting the world currently, how has this come about? At its most basic it is a disregard of the TLeadershipModel and a limited focus on the horizontal.

People can at the most senior or junior levels can:

  • become enamored by their own agenda, yes at a daily transactional level, but also on a more personal level that can flow between fear around capability, through greed and a personal agenda that has no interest in the business other than a mechanism for increased financial gain.
  • see their value as being one of stewardship and development.

As an executive coach it is paramount that we advocate for the horizontal as well as the vertical, that stewardship and responsibility are our natural antidote for the current chaos and crisis that we see within the world markets and that as the pressure of the everyday transactional, output lead environment places pressure on the most authentic of leaders , the executive coach uses personal authenticity to enable senior managers to navigate their path.

Consider the following, that if you have ‘leadership’ within your personal self-definition, then you have responsibility to others, if you don’t see this as the case not only are you wrong, but you aren’t a leader, you are just a manager who has (unfortunately) control.

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Leadership Skills: Dealing with team Blockages and Stuckness

Posted on October 10, 2008 by executivecoachingguru

Executive coaching places you into the heart of some most diverse and ambiguous places, often as an executive coach I find myself talking to senior leadership teams in a moment of great situational fluidity (which is management speak for ‘their up against it!’).

As an individual when you are being paid a big salary it’s sometimes difficult to admit to yourself that you are stuck and then by definition even harder to bring that to the table with colleagues. As a team its considerably more complex to have the observational insight to see the team is stuck and even when you can, having the personal elegance to bring it into focus, in the moment with colleagues and a boss who may or may not be operating from the same place of personal insight as yourself.

  1. Trust your instinct: If something feels wrong, then it probably is.
  2. Test the water: You may need to broker your observation at a coffee break, but it’s worth understanding where the rest of the team are.
  3. No room to test?: An elegant - “Can I get some clarity around….” or “How would I explain this to my guy’s”. Is a great way to get a sense of whether you are the one that doesn’t get it, or you were right in the fact no one else has a clue either. 
  4. Bring it to the table: When all is said and done, you are a leader so be one! If you think the team is stuck say so. A great way to do this is to state it as an observation of fact - “It feels like we can’t make headway with this, can I get a sense of where you guy’s are” (That’s a statement not a question).

So it’s out in the open, you highlighted the ‘elephant in the corner’, the key thing about being stuck on something as a team is getting the darn thing recognised and if you are can make that happen then any success after that can primarily be linked back to you.

Of course then it has to be dealt with and that’s something else entirely, which will owe success as much to the behaviour of the people involved as to the tools you may utilise to solve it.

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Leadership hero Alison Hawkes, puts XL bosses to shame

Posted on September 14, 2008 by executivecoachingguru

Leadership has a new hero and it’s not coming from where you would expect it to. There’ll be no books or speaking tours, there will be no consultancy fees, in fact only a few of us will ever know who she is in the context of this subject.

All the books you will ever read and the workshops you will ever attend will talk about integrity and personal authenticity and of course one of this decades best leadership phrases such as servant leadership. They will espouse the need for leaders to be there for the people, not for the title or the pay, you will here that only by being there for the good of the people and the business as a whole will you truly demonstrate leadership at it’s finest. Then like most of us you will wonder how to make it a reality in the everyday ebb and flow that is your working life.

Alison Hawkes XL Tour Operator - Employee of the Century
Alison Hawkes XL Tour Operator - Employee of the Century?

Alison Hawkes demonstrates servant leadership, though I’d hazard a guess she might not be that well versed on it (of course I am probably doing her a great dis-service). She worked for XL Holidays the UK’s 3rd largest holiday tour operator which on the 12th September announced it would cease to trade, at the moment of this announcement Alison Hawkes was out of a job, she and 1,700 other workers would not be required to turn up for work the next day and getting paid well…..good luck!

Now honestly what would you do? Really think about this, you hear you are out of a job through the media, you know you won’t get paid, to be true most of us would (post blaspheming) spend the next day trying to call your boss and get the CV up to date; this isn’t what Alison Hawkws did though. No she got up the next morning, got dressed and went into work in order to help people, which I think deserves a round of applause and I darned well wish I’d been there to give her one! Well done Alison Hawkes the Executive Coaching Guru salutes you.

  • Management is at its most and overly simplistic, managing resources
  • Leadership is setting direction, acting selflessly, seeing the big picture and doing what others are not willing to do, but above all leadership is the willingness to be a human being to other human beings.

We’ll never know the answer to this, but how many of the XL tour operators board of directors, XL non- executive directors or any of senior management tier turned up at any airport? I’m going to hazard a guess that Alison was one of a very small handful.

Executive coaching very often means touching the hearts and souls of people that have spent a long time building persona’s that they feel represents the kind of leader they want to be or most probably feel should be. The executive coach often has a primary role to enable the most senior of managers to ‘give themselves permission’ to be themselves, the whole person at home and at work. We often look to the business world for examples of where this has worked, but honestly I’m not really interested in the example of a millionaire business leader who has decided that to rescue their soul they will give something back through writing a book. I’m empowered by the humble and honest behaviour of Alison Hawkes, the XL tour operator employee of the century and the fact she demonstrated the core foundation of all leadership behaviour, leadership of oneself. If you are a coach I’d say these are the examples, these are the people you want to find to get to come and talk to your leadership groups.

The Executive Coaching Guru has always said, “if anyone looks to you for direction, then you are like it not, in that moment a leader”, when Alison Hawkes walked into that airport, I wonder how many people looked to her for direction!? That’s leadership by anyones standard.

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Authentic Presence: Obama acceptance speech

Posted on August 29, 2008 by executivecoachingguru

First of all it’s worth noting I am fundamentally not interested in politics, as I believe that the soul went out of the whole arena when Kennedy and Gandhi were shot. There’s just something that has always struck me as unsavoury about the type of person that wants power and dominion over others.

A friend of mine is a policeman and he has always said about validating gun licenses, “there should be an automatic criteria for denying someone a gun license….we don’t give a gun to anyone that actually wants one. Instead we should give them only to people that have no interest in them”.

I like this type of thinking and have always thought the same thing should apply to politics, the criteria for selection should be only choosing those that don’t want the power, but do want the job! I digress….well actually not really. I have just never seen selflessness in the eyes of only but a hand full of politicians.

This brings me to Barack Obama, I have just been watching the speeches surrounding Obama’s acceptance as the Democratic nominee in Denver and by heck what an impressive set of speeches they were. Bill Clinton was superb bringing the two competing teams of Hilary Clinton and Obama together, at the same time with the brilliance that is Clinton there is a certain ‘loose cannon’ element about him.

Someone decided that just in case Bill Clinton went off message then there would be a five second delay on the broadcast similar to that used to screen callers on talk radio programs. The five-second delay, customarily used to censor callers who might use profanity or other unacceptable speech on a radio show, has never before been used in the broadcast of a speech by a former President of the United States. But convention planners, nervous that Mr. Clinton might depart from his prepared remarks in an unacceptable way, said that they were using the delay “just in case.”

Obama himself ‘I thought’ topped it off brilliantly with a 60 minute speech that I have now actually watched 3 times.

To watch the full videos visit youtube and type/paste in:

  • Joe Biden accepts the Democratic Party’s nomination for VP
  • Bill Clinton Democratic Convention Speech - Part 1
  • Bill Clinton Democratic Convention Speech - Part 2
  • Bill Clinton Democratic Convention Speech - Part 3
  • Barack Obama (Part 1) - Acceptance Speech - Democratic National Convention 2008
  • Barack Obama (Part 2) - Acceptance Speech - Democratic National Convention 2008
  • Barack Obama (Part 3) - Acceptance Speech - Democratic National Convention 2008

Obama talks from the heart, he is authentic. Being honest I’m not really in a situation to say whether his politics are sound, whether his budget adds up but you know, “that doesn’t matter”. When you decide to ‘follow’ a leader the majority of the time you never really know the facts as they get to see them and most of the time you’re not as knowledgeable as they are, nor do you have the resources to back you up like they do. So what are you really buying into? Simply, whether or not you actually trust the person, the human being, the fact that if it all goes horribly wrong, even if you don’t really get it, you trust them to make a decision that you can and will believe in.

Watch the video. Do you trust the man even if you can’t be sure about the facts? The Executive Coaching Guru does.

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