When reflecting on one’s career, we believe every working executive should consider themselves a stand alone business with a need to maximize ROI for their experience, education and time invested in their roles as experts or leaders. This Forbes article provides more insight into what we’ve been saying for a long time…Forbes.com
Being “great on the job” has more to do with communication than just about anything
else. Well, maybe a few engineers would
argue that point. But I would say that
even an engineer has to state their case.
Technical prowess goes unnoticed unless the engineer can explain the
value of his work. Great communication
can move things forward, heal the inevitable wounds and build an environment of
trust and confidence. Take a look at the
below book summary and you’ll get the picture of how Jodi Gluckman sees the
importance communication in the work place.
Jodi Glickman, communications consultant and author of Great on
the Job, once applied to Cornell’s Park Leadership
Fellowship program, a $72,000 two-year scholarship for Cornell’s Johnson
Graduate School of Management. Glickman was not
offered the scholarship. Undeterred, she phoned the director of the program to
lobby for the award; the next day the program director personally called her to
offer her the fellowship.
Glickman’s life story, which includes time spent as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Chile and as an investment banker for Goldman Sachs,
is filled with many remarkable triumphs of communication (including ranking
first out of more than 300 Goldman Sachs associates in communication). With
straightforward two- or three-step strategies, Glickman tries to share the
fundamental secrets of her extraordinary communication skills.
For example, Glickman offers the following three-step strategy for managing
expectations:
Step one: Ask for timing/expectation. Get the details, ask for time to
think about it, then either confirm the assignment with the manager or move to
step two.
Step two: Be transparent about your workload. If the timing or
parameters aren’t doable, explain what’s on your plate and ask for time to come
up with an alternate timeline. Don’t accept an unrealistic deadline.
Step three: After serious consideration, present a detailed timeline and
action plan for completing the project.
Many of Glickman’s strategies include “example language” —
hypothetical conversations illustrating the strategy at work. For example, the
following dialogue illustrates the three strategies (shown in brackets) for
asking for time off at a particularly inopportune time:
Susan, I’d like to talk to
you about taking the weekend of July 4th off. My closest friend is getting
married in Maine. [Highlight the Issue]
I wanted to let you know
early so that we can plan accordingly. I will take care of everything I need to
in advance, and I’ll make sure that the team knows exactly where all of my
pages stand. [Cover Your Bases]
Do you think that will be
a problem or can we make it work? Is there anything else you’d like me to take
care of in advance? [Get Buy-in]
The G-I-F-T
Four themes run throughout the book that, according to Glickman, are key to
effective communication. These four themes are summarized in the acronym GIFT:
Generosity. Sharing information, sharing credit, and keeping others’
agendas and schedules in mind will go a long way toward smooth communication
and cooperation.
Initiative. Asking, “How can I help?” is not actually all that
helpful, Glickman argues. Give people choices so that they don’t have to dream
up answers on their own.
Forward Momentum. This is Glickman’s phrase for nurturing and
maintaining relationships that may prove to be vital in the future.
Transparency. More than just a question of honesty, transparency means
volunteering difficult information, whether it’s alerting people to problems
and mess-ups or acknowledging when you don’t know something, writes Glickman.
Be Strategically
Proactive
Transparency is key in many of the strategies in Great
on the Job. It’s also vital to be strategically proactive,
Glickman writes. Excelling at the work you are given is not enough to advance.
Success depends on proactively learning new skills, assisting others and
knowing how to diplomatically redirect unwanted tasks (by accepting the task,
but emphasizing that you are interested in more challenging or valuable
assignments).
In the second part of the book, readers learn how to “move up the learning
curve” by managing expectations, and knowing how to ask for help and
feedback. “Stay out of Trouble” is the third part of the book, and
includes advice on how to raise a red flag and manage a crisis.
The final chapter is on selling yourself. And there is perhaps no better person
to give advice on selling yourself than an author who only needed a casual
conversation to vault over 10 competing classmates and land a prized
internship.
Roger von Oech was once quoted as saying “It’s easy to come up with new ideas; the hard part is letting go of what worked for you two years ago, but will soon be out of date.” In these challenging times, innovation is critical to success in any business endeavor and in that spirit, we recommend the following review of Gary Hamel’s book “What Matters Now”.
It’s an informative quick read…Forbes.com
While I’m not a Sales guy, the following book illustrates the focus it takes to succeed
in growing the company by “leaps and bounds”.
Whether it’s focusing on growth, as the following implies, or on quality
or on cost or any other business success indicator, an absolute focus on the
goal in hand is a must. Visualizing the
goal is the first step. You need to clearly
define and see the target before you can hit it. Going after it with all your force is the
next step. Things you do every day must
contribute in a major way to achieving the goal. Submit your daily and weekly activities to
this test and you’ll know whether or not you’re on the right track. The best organizations I’ve been a part of
understood this. Cameron Herold clearly
shows how to make this happen in his book.
In Double
Double, entrepreneur and consultant Cameron Herold says
he can show readers how to double their company’s revenue and profit in three
years. “The idea of doubling your business may seem intimidating, but it
only requires growing your business 25 percent per year for three years,”
Herold writes in his introduction. “This is fast growth, but not hyperfast
growth.” And, he adds, it is the kind of growth that he has helped dozens
of companies in 17 different countries to achieve.
While all readers may not reach the “double double” promised by the
author — despite his track record — they will benefit from the solid management
advice in a book that covers everything from vision to technology to work-life
balance. The central theme throughout the book is focus— the “one
absolutely essential discipline” for fast growth, writes Herold. “If
you are an entrepreneur and the leader of a $500,000 to $50 million company,
you have to focus intently on everything you do to grow quickly and
successfully,” Herold explains. “There’s no room for running around
unsure of what you’re doing and why. Everything must be on target and geared
toward that specific growth goal.”
Preparing for Fast
Growth
The first step, according to Herold, is to create what he calls a “painted
picture” of the company. In Herold’s phrase, entrepreneurs must “lean
out into the future” and grab hold of a clear vision of what the company
will look like in three years. One way to lean out into the future and leave
the past behind is to turn off the computer and leave the office. Otherwise, he
writes, the present will keep interrupting — in the form of daily tasks,
e-mails, phone calls and other interruptions and pressures.
The painted picture is detailed, showing not only what the company is making,
but also how the media is covering it, what clients are saying, how the company
is funded, what core values drive the company and so forth. Once the painted
picture is in place, the entrepreneur must “reverse-engineer” the
picture to create a game plan for the future. Here Herold’s methodology
reflects scenario planning, although Herold does not use the term. As with
scenario planning, Herold’s reverse engineering involves starting with your
goals and objectives, then working back to determine what the company needs to
accomplish along the way in order to achieve those goals.
Focused Action
After showing how to prepare for fast growth, Herold lays out a series of
chapters devoted to “focused actions for fast growth.” This includes
sections on hiring, communication, meetings, marketing and other areas.
The suggested strategy in the chapter on focused meetings, for example, is to
end meetings early by allocating less time than leaders think they will need.
Although this may not seem efficient, in truth, meetings fill up the time that
they are given. If 90 minutes is allocated, the material will take 90 minutes
to cover. However, if the meeting is planned for 50 minutes, the material will
be covered in that time.
Herold also lists and describes the different types of meetings that should be
held, including annual retreats, quarterly business area reviews, monthly
profit sharing meetings, weekly “WAR” meetings (weekly action review)
and daily “huddles” — a short (seven minutes in one of his
companies), all-company, stand-up meeting starting at precisely the same time
every day.
The focused marketing chapter offers advice on what Herold calls
“bootstrap advertising” — essentially advertising on a small budget.
One suggestion: “parketing” or parking branded vehicles at
high-traffic locations.
One of Herold’s strategies for focused productivity is the 5/15 reporting
system. Every two weeks, direct reports write a bullet-point memo listing the
status of every project for which they are responsible. The memo should take no
more than 15 minutes to write and 5 minutes to read —hence the name.
A section on leadership, including chapters on personal productivity and dealing
with boards of advisers, and appendices offering interview questions and an
employee goal-setting process closes out this well-written, comprehensive
package of management ideas and strategies for entrepreneurs and business
leaders.
We have been saying this for quite some time… There’s a real shortage of qualified talent in key sectors of the US and Mexico and we are hearing the same thing from our global partners in IRC Global Executive Search. This article from Human Resource Executive addresses the risks of overlooking talent retention in overall HR strategy.
HR leaders at the nation’s largest companies are taking steps to manage what has been identified as one of the top risks facing businesses: a shortage of qualified talent.
BY ANDREW R. McILVAINE
When you think about the human resource arena, the word “risk” rarely, if ever, comes to mind. After all, risk typically connotes dangers such as kidnappings, oil spills, cyber warfare or theft. Recruiting, benefits administration and employee development may be perceived as challenging, but hardly risky.
So it’s interesting that the 2011 Lloyd’s Risk Index, a poll of 500 C-suite and board-level executives that was released in December by the venerable London-based insurance institution, found “talent and skills shortages” to be the No. 2 risk facing businesses, up from 22nd place in 2009. The No. 1 risk in the latest Index was “loss of customers,” while “reputational risk” was No. 3.
Read More at HREOnline.com
If you are like many people when weighing hiring decisions between extroverts and introverts, you opt for the bold, gregarious, A-personality. You may want to re-think that. Read on for some great insight on what introverts bring to the table!
If you had to guess, what would you say investor Warren Buffett and civil rights activist Rosa Parks had in common? How about Charles Darwin, Al Gore, J.K. Rowling, Albert Einstein, Mahatma Gandhi and Google’s Larry Page? They are icons. They are leaders. And they are introverts.
Despite the corporate world’s insistence on brazen confidence–Speak up! Promote yourself! Network!—one third to half of Americans are believed to be introverts, according to Susan Cain, author of just released Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. She contends that personality shapes our lives as profoundly as gender and race, and where you fall on the introvert-extrovert spectrum is the single most important aspect of your personality.
Read more at Forbes.com
This book outline reminds me of the premise behind continual improvement. Continual improvement is the backdrop for
quality improvement and waste elimination techniques. We’ve heard them all – from Quality Circles
and Just in Time in the 80s to Total Quality Management and Total Productive
Maintenance in the 90s to Six Sigma and Lean Manufacturing in the last decade. The following book outlines the concept that
small discoveries may generate breakthroughs. To me, this describes continual
improvement. Take steps to marginally
improve things and those will lead to breakthroughs not previously thought of.
According to Peter Sims, author of Little
Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries,
there are two types of innovators: conceptual innovators who pursue bold new
ideas and often achieve their success early in life, and experimental
innovators who use slow, iterative, trial-and-error approaches that gradually
lead to breakthroughs. In Little Bets,
Sims illustrates the experimental process of innovation, accomplished through a
series of small bets.
The Growth Mindset
Success as an experimental innovator, Sims writes, depends on a
“growth” mindset, which sees failures and setbacks as learning
opportunities. People with a “fixed” mindset, in which skills,
abilities and intelligence are considered innate and present from the
beginning, are unable to accept and benefit from failures, since failure
challenges their self-worth. Growth mindset people, however, are not afraid to
fail, and are therefore constantly challenging themselves to innovate and
improve. Howard Schultz had a simple idea: bring the concept of the Italian
coffee house to the United States. However, his original shops — with their bow
tie wearing baristas (who hated the bow ties), menus written mostly in Italian
and non-stop opera music — were hardly well received. Learning from the chorus
of complaints from customers, Schultz slowly tweaked and changed his concept to
eventually create the ubiquitous Starbucks coffeeshop now present on nearly
every street corner.
The Affordable Loss
Principle
Innovators using the small bets approach, writes Sims, tend to operate under
the “affordable loss principle” — in other words, focusing on what
they can afford to lose rather than calculating expected gains. When first
purchased by Steve Jobs, for example, Pixar was at once a hardware business,
software business and a digitally animated TV advertising company. The future
of the company, it seemed to Jobs and others, was in the Pixar Image Computer
that helped people visualize complex images. Jobs dedicated only a small
fraction of his investment toward the digital animation section of the company,
but didn’t expect to ever see a return on that money. As Sims explains, had
Jobs based his decisions not on what he could afford to lose, but rather, as someone with
a different mindset might have done, on what he expected to gain from digital
animation, he might have shut down the group early on.
Sufiya and the
Professor
The story of Muhammad Yunus and the birth of micro-lending illustrates another
principle of experimental innovation: the importance of immersion. “One of
the best ways to identify creative insights and develop ideas is to throw out
the theory and experience things first-hand,” Sims writes. Yunus was an
economics professor in Bangladesh theorizing, he
told the author, “about sums in the millions of dollars.” Then he
started wandering through nearby villages and discovered craftspeople such as
Sufiya, all but enslaved to local middlemen because she could not afford 22
cents for bamboo. Outraged, Yunus lent her and others the miniscule sums they
needed, and the world-famous Grameen Bank was born.
Using examples from a variety of disciplines, from architecture to stand-up
comedy, Sims has provided a learned and entertaining how-to guide to
innovation.
Read more at RealAge.com
This is a great blog post from the Fast Company blog about creating and sustaining a vibrant and healthy organizational culture. We see organizational leaders every day that don’t get a fraction of the concept produced in this blog post and it seems that if we continue to ignore this intangible concept, we do so at our own peril. What are you doing to contribute to or improve upon your company’s culture?
Get on a Southwest flight to anywhere, buy shoes from Zappos.com, pants from Nordstrom, groceries from Whole Foods, anything from Costco, a Starbucks espresso, or a Double-Double from In N’ Out, and you’ll get a taste of these brands’ vibrant cultures.
Culture is a balanced blend of human psychology, attitudes, actions, and beliefs that combined create either pleasure or pain, serious momentum or miserable stagnation. A strong culture flourishes with a clear set of values and norms that actively guide the way a company operates. Employees are actively and passionately engaged in the business, operating from a sense of confidence and empowerment rather than navigating their days through miserably extensive procedures and mind-numbing bureaucracy. Performance-oriented cultures possess statistically better financial growth, with high employee involvement, strong internal communication, and an acceptance of a healthy level of risk-taking in order to achieve new levels of innovation.
Read More at Fast Company
I was told by a manager at Nortel
Networks in the 1980s that when times were tough, true character in leaders was
revealed. I couldn’t have agreed more…
especially in a politically charged climate for a company approaching $30
Billion in sales. That insight stayed
with me for assignments to follow and it paid off when I focused on being calm
during the storms. The stress of the
situation was always tough enough without adding my own “manufactured” stress
in the moment. The following book summary rings true for me and articulates advice for leaders who find themselves under constant pressure.
According to Justin Menkes, consultant for the executive search firm Spencer Stuart and
author of the best-seller Executive Intelligence, the best leaders are
those who have the ability to realize their potential and the potential of
those they lead — in other words, to perform to the best of their ability and
to get the best out of their people. In his new book, Better Under Pressure,
Menkes presents three specific “catalysts” for realizing potential:realistic
optimism, subservience to purpose and finding order in chaos.
How to Be Optimistic Without Losing Your Head
Realistic optimism is self-confidence without self-delusion or irrationality,
writes Menkes. People who have this trait are not afraid to attack audacious
goals, but are also fully realistic about the challenges and difficulties that
lay before them. To be realistically optimistic, Menkes explains, leaders must
have both “an awareness of actual circumstance” — the ability to see
the world as it is, both positive and negative — and a “sense of
agency” — the deep belief in one’s capabilities to change circumstances or
situations.
Menkes illustrates the ability to see the world as it is through the story of
“Randy,” an insurance company executive interviewed for the top
position at one of America’s leading insurers (Menkes disguised his name for the
sake of privacy). The interview took place soon after the collapse of AIG,
which was in large part due to the company’s involvement with high-risk credit
default swaps. Randy was intrigued by the credit default swaps, but remained
cautious. It seemed to him that there were serious risk issues that his
competitors did not seem to notice. As a result, according to Menkes, Randy set
up “a separate subsidiary unconnected to the rest of the corporation that
did a small trade in these products.” In retrospect, the move might seem
like genius, but for Randy it was simply of matter of “weighing risk and
reward,” Menkes writes. Randy was realistic about both the upside and
downside of credit default swaps. And he also had the humility to admit that he
wasn’t sure where this new market might go. His approach to credit default
swaps reflected realistic optimism — he was willing to give the new product a
try, but didn’t buy into the unsupported enthusiasm in which other companies
indulged, to their eventual regret.
Fighting Back
Subservience to purpose, the second of the three catalysts, means a total
dedication to a goal. “Leaders who demonstrate subservience to purpose put
a particular pursuit — such as their company’s mission — ahead of their own
comfort,” Menkes explains. “Quite simply, great leaders equate
progress toward this goal with emotional satisfaction. They are, ultimately,
servants to their company’s most noble purpose.”
The third catalyst for leaders is to find order in chaos, Menkes writes. This
is the unique ability to cut through multiple or multi-dimensional problems to
find the solutions and resolutions that others cannot see. Maintaining clear
thinking and having the drive to solve puzzles are the two key attributes in
leaders who are able to find order in chaos.
Menkes conducted in-depth interviews with 60 of the best CEOs in America and
draws on research of 200 other CEOs and leaders. The result is a clear
explanation of three core personality attributes that separate the leaders who
can face up to any challenge from the leaders who crumble or are weakened by
adversity. Better Under Pressure
is a valuable book for both experienced and emerging leaders.
Our Canadian partner in IRC Global Executive Search was founded in 1994 and was featured in Business Week's Most Influential Headhunters in the World List!
Our Brazilian partner in IRC Global Executive Search was founded in 2001. DRH is led by Hamilton Teixeira, a former C-level executive of Kellogg, Bausch & Lomb, Timex, and Rayovac.
Vista en Español