It’s hard to find anyone in the business world whose company hasn’t been subjected to the need for change management recently due to one or more of the following factors: intensified competition (often of a global nature), new technology or systems, changes in customer needs and their technology, the emergence of substitutes for a company’s product or service, mergers and acquisitions, new leadership, or changes in the law or regulations or a host of others.

Years ago, a professor and author, and one of the experts in managing corporate change, John Kotter, wrote a book called, The Heart of Change, and he laid out seven key elements of change management for companies that still hold up:

• Increase Urgency
• Build the Guiding Team
• Get the Vision Right
• Communicate for Buy-In
• Create Short Term Wins
• Don’t Let Up
• Make Change Stick

Coincidentally, an article I recently read, written by an executive recruiter, talked about the need for some older executives (and non-executive employees) who need to play technology “catch-up” if they expect to stay in the career game. This is consistent with what we hear from some of our senior career management clients who may have had 20 to 30 years of management and leadership experience, but find themselves now struggling to be relevant in a digital world. This dilemma seems to be especially acute for marketing and information technology executives whose companies have not kept pace with the leading competitors in their industries.

I would, therefore, suggest that many experienced and heretofore successful executives need to seriously consider and execute a Personal Change Management plan (we could also call it a “learning and growth plan”) well in advance of finding themselves being considered for internal promotion or wanting or needing to look outside of their companies in order to make a career change. At that time, in the absence of updating or upgrading their skills, they may be confronted with a real handicap in an internal competition or during an outside search process.

I would define the seven key steps of Personal Change Management as follows:

Decide you need to update or upgrade your skills.

While this sounds obvious, my point is that people need to consciously face this tough reality, and admit to themselves that they haven’t kept up with technology developments in their field and, if they want to stay relevant, they need to do so and start immediately.

Consult with experts (especially those younger than you) on what’s hot and in high demand.

For some people it may be clear where their technology gaps are, but not for others. In either case, as with most situations in life, it pays to focus on what’s most important. Speaking with others in your field, including tech savvy millennials, can be invaluable in surveying the contemporary technology landscape.

Determine where to concentrate.

The adage, “every journey starts with a first step”, applies here. There may be several areas that need to be addressed. But don’t let that paralyze you. Rather, pick an area, a skill, a device, a technology, or an algorithm and get started. Take a step at a time. Being able to talk about your initial personal development steps to an executive recruiter or a hiring executive may be enough to get you in the door despite your having more to learn. The fact that you’re doing something and are committed to personal development is impressive in itself.

Find and utilize the right training resources.

Can you get the training or instruction you need at your company… perhaps from a younger employee? Is there an online course or program you can take? Is there a community college, local university, or graduate school offering that provides all or part of what you need? Can you hire an expert to train you? Can you use a supplier, vendor, or professional service provider? Any of these or some combination may be right for you.

Get the training.

Sign-up and be disciplined and diligent. Clearly, this is tough work, especially if you have to do it at night or on weekends. But, if it’s really critical and has genuine implications for your suitability for your current role or elsewhere in your industry, you can’t afford to be complacent nor procrastinate.

Start to use your new skills and competencies and acquire supplemental training, if needed.

Like everything else in life, to improve you need to use new skills and abilities. You may find that the training you just received is exactly what was needed or, as in many instances, you need to augment what you learned with some additional development. The best attitude is to build on what you’ve just learned, not to be discouraged by not knowing it all at the outset. Most of us, even the experts, rarely do. Applying new knowledge can be hard. Be patient with yourself. Remember, it wasn’t easy to learn to ride a bike.

Apply the new training repeatedly and, if necessary, execute the process again to acquire new skills or capacity.

As has been noted by a variety of writers and academics, the key to achieving expertise in any skill is, to a large extent, a matter of practicing the correct way to do it. Similarly, to refine and hone your newfound technology capability, you need to execute and practice, and execute and practice, until you start to develop some genuine expertise.

Once you’ve finished with the first technology area, depending on your technology gaps, you may need to start the cycle again.

In summary, just as companies repeatedly engage in change management, many executives and technical employees may need to engage in their own personal development to keep abreast of the technology curve. To avoid personal obsolescence and the potential threat to you before someone in your firm or a recruiter says, “Sorry, you’re Old School and you don’t qualify”, develop and act on your “Personal Change Management” plan.

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• Psychological Safety: Can we take risks without feeling insecure or embarrassed?
• Dependability: Can we count on each other to do high quality work on time?
• Structure & clarity: Are goals, roles, and execution plans on our team clear?
• Meaning of work: Are we working on something that is personally important for each of us?
• Impact of work: Do we fundamentally believe that the work we’re doing matters?

Although these findings are specific to Google, I believe that leaders of teams at any level could improve results and drive performance by creating a climate that supports these principles. What do you think?

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Organizations that invest in executive leadership development have consistently performed better over the long term than those that don’t.

Here are five executive leadership development strategies designed to build long-term success for your business:

1. Give potential leaders the opportunity to experiment and take risks that generate small wins and experiential learning.

The common thread among some of the most successful companies, from Google to Cisco to P&G, is that they expect executive leaders to be innovators. Innovation comes from experimentation and calculated risk-taking. Executives must step out of their comfort zone and into a learning zone where there is uncertainty and risk. It’s in this space where an executive can peel back the layers of a challenge and creatively stretch himself or herself while confidently moving through the fear of possible failure and into a zone of competence and success.

2. Encourage potential executive leaders to search for opportunities, seize the initiative, and look beyond the enterprise for innovative ways to improve.

Think of executive leadership development as an inverse pyramid. Everyone, not just senior executives, has the potential to demonstrate leadership competencies, and each individual is given the opportunity (and the clear responsibility) to understand the business, pursue initiatives that strengthen the business, and make decisions that support company strategies and goals.

3. Create opportunities for potential leaders to foster cross-functional relationships and build trust.

Although cross-functional relationships can be challenging and complex, managing them well is essential to high-performance companies. If designed to be durable and productive, they have the ability to enable exceptionally positive outcomes for the business. Successful employees work to build better, trusting cross-functional relationships with their peers and counterparts in collaborative efforts that produce impactful results and put “points on the scoreboard”.

4. Identify specific competencies in potential leaders that need development and provide resources for learning and confidence-building.

A mistake many companies make is not further enhancing the unique strengths of their most promising employees. By carefully identifying and building upon the already evident leadership competencies of high potential executive leaders within your company, you have the opportunity to hone their capabilities to a fine edge as they continue to assume greater responsibility and generate greater productivity and growth for your company.

5. Engage coaches, both inside and outside of the organization, to work with these potential and emerging leaders.

Executive coaching helps both established and emerging executives understand the benefits of change and the consequences of failing to professionally learn and grow. The best executive leadership programs create real-time learning situations where executives are able to practice the new skills and behaviors they have recently acquired and are primed to apply.

Developing executive leaders is the “new normal” for long-term business success. Executive development should be thought of as a strategic effort to continuously foster a leadership-driven foundation that enables such success.

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How are decisions really made in your organization? How does company culture influence business choices? What does accountability mean in your company’s culture? The answers to these questions might become clear in time, but the bright young employees in your ranks are certainly not going to absorb them overnight, which is why the leaders your organization requires in the future – in five years, 10 years or more – need to be on hand today absorbing its values, culture, and business and decision-making processes.

Unfortunately, many U.S. businesses today stint on leadership development. They have allowed employees with deep knowledge and understanding to retire without passing along their expertise. Often, faced with an executive position vacancy, these companies consider external candidates alongside less trained and prepared internal ones. But identifying and developing executive leadership talent is an important aspect of strategic business planning. The most effective means to do this is through a formal coaching and development program that systematically provides opportunities to identify and nurture talent.

Here are some key ideas for you to consider to strengthen future executive leadership:

1. Understand the capabilities and competencies needed for your organization’s long-term success. Job descriptions and employee evaluation forms may be a helpful place to start but you’ll need to go deeper. Make sure your list includes functional, technical, interpersonal, and business capabilities, as well as the ability to incorporate critical new information and data.

2. Recruit for executive leadership potential. Look for quick learners who are collaborative and have a strong work ethic, discipline, dedication to task, and a goal orientation. Other important characteristics include the ability to communicate effectively, an analytical approach, resiliency, and the determination to overcome obstacles.

3. Coach current managers and executives to identify talented team members, especially those who have an inherent drive that energizes others. Give these promising employees a variety of experiences by exposing them to challenges and opportunities in a variety of functions, regions and business units of your organization. These meaningful and substantial experiences genuinely help prepare them for senior leadership positions.

4. Assign mentors to formally work with these high potential future leaders. Your mentors need to model the leadership traits that your company values, such as:

• Building trust and credibility
• Inspiring a shared vision of a successful future
• Constructively challenging the status quo
• Crediting others
• Acting decisively

Moreover, mentors can naturally offer guidance to their younger associates throughout their careers. Choose mentors who are articulate and engaged, because it falls to them to explain how the organization really works and how to motivate and inspire people.

If your potential mentors need some inspiration, they might read the description of legendary House Speaker Sam Rayburn’s mentoring of the ambitious Lyndon B. Johnson, beautifully detailed in Robert Caro’s 1982 book, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power.

5. Evaluate frequently. Nurture the best employees with the most potential. Provide executive coaching to help those strong contributors fill gaps in their knowledge and experience.

6. Keep filling the pipeline. Give current leaders the responsibility for identifying, developing, nurturing and promoting new leaders. Institutionalize this responsibility by assigning them the task of recruiting new talent from wherever available, such as business schools, the military, and other companies.

As businesses begin to invest in talent development, an essential part of that investment should be devoted to filling the executive leadership pipeline. Strong leaders need years to develop the competencies and capabilities that provide the confidence, experience, and skill to make decisions in times of difficulty or opportunity.

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At SoftOneIT Associates, we are always excited and proud when one of our clients secures a position that is an outstanding fit and comes with a strong compensation and benefits package, often one that we have helped the client negotiate. But, from our vantage point, acceptance of the offer is not the end of our client process. Assuming our client doesn’t have to start in the new role immediately (and though it’s rare, it does happen), we arrange to spend additional time with our newly landed client to review four key principles we believe are crucial to significantly raising her chances of success in the role. This is especially important because a large majority of our clients haven’t begun a new job in years and haven’t had to think through and act on what such a start entails.

The first principle is to ensure there is synchrony between our client and her supervisor on key priorities and deliverables, and on separating the important from the urgent for the first 6 to 12 months on the job. It’s our view that our client’s relationship with her boss is overwhelmingly the most important success factor when starting in a new position. Making sure there is a clear understanding of expectations at the start of the relationship, the more likely our client will be to perform at or better than the desired level. This principle is one we can’t stress enough and it’s too often overlooked or downplayed.

The second principle is to encourage our clients to accelerate their learning curve. In any new role, there are a number of simultaneous moving parts – the role itself may be a new one; the company, culture, and people will be new; the challenges and projects are likely, at least in part, to be new and unique; and the industry dynamics are likely to be new, too. So, mastering all of this as quickly as possible raises the chance of a new hire making a series of meaningful contributions to the new employer.

How do you this? There are no magic techniques. We urge clients to read key documents (both paper and electronic); learn about competitors and industry structure; familiarize themselves with projects, proposals and initiatives; meet with employees, customers, suppliers, service providers, and consultants; visit facilities and plants; ask questions and, most of all, listen, listen, and listen some more.

The third principle is to secure some initial wins to build personal credibility. In the early going, these wins don’t have to be outsized. Singles are just as good as home runs when you start. Simple actions go a long way – acknowledging good work and giving credit to others, carefully listening, doing something very visible in terms of organizational structure, adjusting office space or changing infrastructure, eliminating logjams and clutter, being responsive, showing confidence and optimism, demonstrating expertise, repairing or building intercompany bridges, having a physical presence in both expected and unexpected places, revealing the personal side of yourself and discussing how you like to operate and have others interact with you, and genuinely showing interest in others and their ideas.  These are just some of the things you can do to garner those early wins.

The fourth and final principle is to understand and master the complex set of relationships that exist within organizations. Who are the real performers, the “go to” people, and to whom are they connected? What coalitions exist in the new organization; where do the rivalries and frictions lay, and which alliances are temporary and likely to shift? Which people are guided and supported by a more mature and experienced or influential person, and who are those mentors and protectors? How do you break into the favored groups and why are they favored? What are the “third rail” issues that must be avoided, at least initially? What are the general and specific organizational and cultural protocols and beliefs? And, to help you break through this sometimes dense organizational mist, who can play the dual role of organizational scout and Rosetta Stone for you?

In the end, each of our clients will have to perform over the long term to be successful in their roles. Heeding these four principles in the early stages of a new employment situation substantially raises the probability of on-the-job success and satisfaction for any new employee.

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August, 2014

Over the past several years, we’ve noticed a growing interest in “Resilience”. First, executives are being pushed to their limits by years of highly volatile, resource-constrained conditions in their companies and in the markets they serve. Second, organizations are scrambling to identify and further develop top talent to fill key leadership positions created by both retirement and attrition. So I thought it would be useful to offer a few words on the subject.

Resilient leaders are first and foremost resilient individuals. The more resilient you are, the more likely it is that at each level you’ll be successful and get promoted to the next. But as the adversity level increases, the skills that most leaders have learned to stay focused, engaged and effective can begin to fail them. So the first key to being a resilient leader is to get a handle on one’s own resilience.

Most successful leaders have intuited at least a subset of these resilience skills throughout their careers. But they are largely “unconsciously competent” – unaware of how they reach into their resilience tool kit to stay composed, confident, optimistic and in problem-solving mode, especially when the going gets tough. When we teach them resilience skills, we see fewer “aha moments” than when we teach the skills to individual contributors and lower level managers. But what we do accomplish is to get them off auto-pilot, provide them with a vocabulary and a process so they can more consciously boost their resilience to do better as the going gets even tougher.

With their resilience skills firmly in place, leaders then need to develop strength in five core competencies to staying resilient at the top. We use Adaptiv’s Leadership Excellence Inventory® (LEI) to measure these strengths. Here’s a quick summary of each, with some questions to ponder:

Integrity & Fairness:

How much your do your management behaviors signal fair practices? How much you treat all your reports the same, create an even playing field for all employees, and provide a model of honesty for your employees? How transparent is your management process to all employees?

Mentoring:

How much do you emphasize coaching and career guidance for your employees on a daily basis? How willing are you to do one-on-one coaching with your direct reports and demonstrate how important succession planning is to you? How important is the role of mentor to you?

Values:

How aware are you of your values around leadership and how important are they to you in your daily job performance? Each of us brings core values and beliefs to our leadership roles. How willing are you to stick to your values even if it hurts your productivity or, ultimately, your career?

Connection:

How connected are you to your job and how much do you guide your reports to be more connected and engaged? Our research has shown that the higher your level of connection – with real line-of-sight to the difference you are making – the more satisfied you will be in your job and the greater your productivity and performance. And the more connected your people are, the better they and your organization will do.

Results: How bottom-line oriented are you? How important are measurable results for you as a leader?

All five factors are key, and it’s important to create a balance across them. Many excellent leaders are strong on Integrity, Mentoring, Values, and Connection. But, over-emphasis on Results often comes at the expense of the other four factors. In most cases, focusing on the first four factors will drive results more effectively than will focusing directly on results. Resilient and successful leaders learn to strike a good balance between Results and the other factors.

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