Coaching for Leadership

Top Executive Recruiters Agree There Are Only Three True Job Interview Questions

2012-02-21T13:01:00.001+01:00

Excerpt from an article, written by George Bradt, that appeared last April in Forbes Magazine:

"The only three true job interview questions are:

Can you do the job?
Will you love the job?
Can we tolerate working with you?

That’s it.
Those three.
Think back.
Every question you’ve ever posed to others or had asked of you in a job interview is a subset of a deeper in-depth follow-up to one of these three key questions.

Each question potentially may be asked using different words, but every question, however it is phrased, is just a variation on one of these topics:

Strengths
Motivation, and
Fit."

You can read the whole story:

Top Executive Recruiters Agree There Are Only Three True Job Interview Questions - Forbes

Candidates asked to send proof of "web presence" instead of résumés

2012-01-24T19:53:00.000+01:00

Here is an excerpt from an article by RACHEL EMMA SILVERMAN in today's Wall Street Journal, under the title No More Résumés, Say Some Firms.

Union Square Ventures recently posted an opening for an investment analyst.

Instead of asking for résumés, the New York venture-capital firm—which has invested in Twitter, Foursquare, Zynga and other technology companies—asked applicants to send links representing their "Web presence," such as a Twitter account or Tumblr blog. Applicants also had to submit short videos demonstrating their interest in the position.

Union Square says its process nets better-quality candidates —especially for a venture-capital operation that invests heavily in the Internet and social-media—and the firm plans to use it going forward to fill analyst positions and other jobs.

To read the rest of the article, see how other companies are by-passing résumes, and readers' comments please go to No More Résumés (paying article).

How to evaluate true intuitive experience

2011-10-23T14:04:00.000+02:00

Managers and coaches often lay a great deal of store in the value of intuitive management. I do too, but it depends on who the intuitive decision or advice is coming from and how much experience they have of their professional field. Below is an excerpt from today's Sunday New York Times Magazine article adapted from Daniel Kahneman's forthcoming book, "Thinking, Fast and Slow".

We often interact with professionals who exercise their judgment with evident confidence, sometimes priding themselves on the power of their intuition. In a world rife with illusions of validity and skill, can we trust them? How do we distinguish the justified confidence of experts from the sincere overconfidence of professionals who do not know they are out of their depth? We can believe an expert who admits uncertainty but cannot take expressions of high confidence at face value. As I first learned on the obstacle field (note from John Gaynard, based on an earlier part of the article, when Kahneman demonstrated how it was impossible to correctly evaluate who would be a good leader in the Israeli army based on a series of standard tests or levels of confidence shown in ad hoc groups), people come up with coherent stories and confident predictions even when they know little or nothing. Overconfidence arises because people are often blind to their own blindness.

True intuitive expertise is learned from prolonged experience with good feedback on mistakes. You are probably an expert in guessing your spouse’s mood from one word on the telephone; chess players find a strong move in a single glance at a complex position; and true legends of instant diagnoses are common among physicians. To know whether you can trust a particular intuitive judgment, there are two questions you should ask: Is the environment in which the judgment is made sufficiently regular to enable predictions from the available evidence? The answer is yes for diagnosticians, no for stock pickers. Do the professionals have an adequate opportunity to learn the cues and the regularities? The answer here depends on the professionals’ experience and on the quality and speed with which they discover their mistakes.

Anesthesiologists have a better chance to develop intuitions than radiologists do. Many of the professionals we encounter easily pass both tests, and their off-the-cuff judgments deserve to be taken seriously. In general, however, you should not take assertive and confident people at their own evaluation unless you have independent reason to believe that they know what they are talking about. Unfortunately, this advice is difficult to follow: overconfident professionals sincerely believe they have expertise, act as experts and look like experts. You will have to struggle to remind yourself that they may be in the grip of an illusion.

Read the whole article:
Don’t Blink! The Hazards of Confidence - NYTimes.com

Only one in seven companies has managers that enable workers to progress

2011-09-04T09:23:00.000+02:00

In today's New York Sunday Times Review, Teresa Amabile constructs an article around her own research, a Gallup Healthways ongoing poll and two books: The Limping Middle Class and One Path to Better Jobs: More Density in Cities. Both books will be published tomorrow, September 4, 2011. The title of the article is: Do Happier People Work Harder?

Below is an excerpt:

As long as workers experience their labor as meaningful, progress is often followed by joy and excitement about the work. “This time it looks good! I feel more positive about this project and my work than I’ve felt in a long time,” one programmer wrote after she’d completed a small but difficult task. This kind of rich inner work life improves performance, which further supports inner work life — a positive spiral.

Unfortunately, many companies now keep head count and resources to a minimum and this makes progress a struggle for employees. Most managers don’t understand the negative consequences of this struggle. When we asked 669 managers from companies around the world to rank five employee motivators in terms of importance, they ranked “supporting progress” dead last. Fully 95 percent of these managers failed to recognize that progress in meaningful work is the primary motivator, well ahead of traditional incentives like raises and bonuses.

This failure reflects a common experience inside organizations. Of the seven companies we studied, just one had managers who consistently supplied the catalysts — worker autonomy, sufficient resources and learning from problems — that enabled progress. Not coincidentally, that company was the only one to achieve a technological breakthrough in the months we studied it.

So what is the lesson for managers and coaches? Create a climate in which you allow your staff or team members sufficient autonomy to do their jobs, give them the right resources and allow them to learn from problems. Is that rocket science?

Read the whole article:

Do Happier People Work Harder? - NYTimes.com

The Psychopathy Checklist-Revised Test for CEOs

2011-08-16T15:11:00.003+02:00

In a July 21 article in Businessweek, Bryant Urstadt reviewed Jon Ronson's book The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry. The article is subtitled: "Why are so many CEOs jerks? Because they're psychopaths" and it goes on to show that many corporate leaders score way above average on a test known as the The Psychopathy Checklist-Revised test. By following a link from the review you can take test yourself. Here is how the review begins:

The very first thing to know about psychopaths, at least according to Jon Ronson, is that they’re very charming. They’re also usually smart, easily bored, and ruthless power mongers who watch suffering with interest, have an inflated sense of self-worth, lie compulsively, and rarely take blame for their mistakes. For those reasons and others they tend to congregate in places such as London and New York. And a relatively high percentage end up running big companies.

Ronson, the author of The Men Who Stare at Goats, wrapsThe Psychopath Test around the research of Robert Hare, a Canadian psychologist who is the authority on psychopaths and co-author of Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work. Hare is also the author of the definitive psychopath test—Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R)—which has become the SAT for diagnosing nutjob behavior. Throughout decades of research, he’s found that many corporate leaders score way above average.

Actually, alarmingly high. While studies suggest that about 1 percent of the general population qualifies as genuinely psychopathic, Hare believes that about 4 percent of people with substantial decision-making power can be classified as such, and their influence is outsized. Hare even tells Ronson he wishes he’d spent less time studying psychopaths in prison and more time studying those who work in the markets. “Serial killers ruin families,” Hare says. “Corporate and political and religious psychopaths ruin economies. They ruin societies.” Although Ronson leans heavily on Hare’s research, he explains that other psychologists feel the same way. “The higher you go up the ladder,” says Martha Stout, a former Harvard Medical School professor and author of The Sociopath Next Door, “the greater the number of sociopaths you’ll find there.” (Ronson uses the terms socio- and psychopath interchangeably.)

You can also find reviews of the book in the New York Times: Running Down a Sanity Checklist, or by following some of the links to:

The best way to kick off a new organisational change is to give the skeletons from previous changes a decent burial

2011-07-08T10:17:00.000+02:00

I remember once talking to a marketing VP about a major organisational change that had gone wrong in his company. I asked him if he would call in a person with no experience of marketing to launch a major new product. "Of course I wouldn't," he replied.

But, often, that is exactly what happens when a company decides to implement a major organisational change. It may never have implemented a change in the past, may never have laid off people, but it decides to confide the task to HR staff who have never had experience of change management.

That marketing VP was faced with implementing another major change. He had learned from the company's past mistakes. That is why he was talking to me and why he asked me to advise him on better planning change, better comunicating change, and then managing the transitions provoked by change. I use the methods, developed by William Bridges, to manage the organisational and individual transitions provoked by change.

One of the main lessons I learned from Bridges is that it is often necessary to begin a new change by going back to old changes and seeing what went wrong and how those things continue to pollute the organisational culture. It is necessary to show people how to take their skeletons out of the closet, so that they can give them a decent burial. Many managing directors don't want to hear of this. Sometimes they even get irritated when they hear a consultant advising them to repair the errors of the past. All they want to talk to their staff about is a "bright new beginning", and to hell with whatever went wrong with the last change.

By giving staff about to enter a new change, the time, even if it's only a couple of hours, to give their still clanking skeletons a decent burial, and to talk about their personal lessons learned, it allows them to come to terms with the past. It augments trust in management, and allows the new change to move forward more smoothly than it would have done if things had been kept under the carpet.

I was reminded of this when I saw the latest edition of Strategy+Business, in an article that uses case a few real-life case studies to explain how a new change can be unsuccessful because of poor experience with change in the past. Here is an excerpt:

The first study involved a property and development firm in the Philippines. Unable to meet the demands of a booming population and increasing competition, the company’s executives had decided to merge with another firm. At the time of the study, the organization had announced the merger to its employees and begun the transition — including the evaluation and redefinition of jobs.

In interviews with the human resources department, the researchers learned that the company had a poor history of change implementation: In the past, senior managers had created satellite offices and reassigned employees without consulting them, leading to resentment among those affected. With the help of HR, the researchers split employees into two groups — those who had reason to resent upper management for previous actions and those who didn’t.

Two months after the merger was announced, 155 employees at the firm completed surveys assessing previous change management projects, their perceptions of the current transition, and their level of trust in the organization. The results of this first study confirmed that employees who had had poor experiences with change in the past felt more cynicism about the current transition as well as less trust.

You can read the whole article at : Dealing with the ghosts of change management.

Six 21st century rules of thumb for reinventing your career

2011-06-27T11:20:00.004+02:00

The latest edition of Fortune Magazine, which will be on sale until July 11, contains a really informative set of articles titled "Pulling off the ultimate career makeover". While providing case studies of five people who have successfully reinvented themselves, it extracts some rules of thumb for reinventing yourself in a world of social media.

Here they are :

Get online, for real. Reinvention these days is digital. You're not too old to learn social media, and it's not too hard. In fact, technology has become more, not less, accessible. So get going!
Start from scratch. In the Age of Disruption, we're all starting from scratch. Don't get hung up over it -- embrace it. (Anyhow, you don't have a choice.)
Learn by doing. Don't worry about being perfect before you post something or try out a new site. The beauty of the medium is that there's often no right answer -- so you won't be wrong.
Share the wealth. Competitive advantage used to be about keeping a juicy nugget to yourself. But today knowledge is practically a commodity. Sharing raises your personal brand and connects you to others on a higher level. (Now go post this article.)
Cut back fast. To change your career, you need to be financially fit. So forget about status; the neighbors will be more impressed by your reinvention than your country club.
Prioritize your passions. The great thing about remaking yourself is that you can jettison all those things that you hate. Plot your passions and skill sets, and see if it gets you to a new place.

The six rules above just give a hint of what is contained in the stories of the five people who reinvented themselves. I encourage you to read the whole article at : Reinvent Your Career

Alerting Foreign Managers to Risks in the United States

2011-05-30T21:49:00.000+02:00

Amazing as it may seem there are still managers who are not given coaching about the appropriate behaviours to have and respect when they are asked to manage in another country.

In the wake of the Dominique Strauss-Kahn affair it seems that American Human Resource professionals are wondering how to ensure that foreign managers play to the rules.

Below is an excerpt from an article by Andrew R. McIlvaine on Human Resource Executive Online:

Human Resource Executive Online - The Risks of Foreign Managers: "HR must ensure that foreign nationals receive training on U.S. workplace laws before they begin supervising employees, says Celia Joseph, a management attorney at Fisher & Phillips in Philadelphia.

'They don't necessarily need to memorize every law, but they should have a clear understanding of when to recognize a potential issue, when they should seek guidance and who they should turn to,' she says.

Foreign managers, especially executives, should also sign an employment agreement in which they acknowledge that harassment is illegal in the United States and that they will comply with the law, says Arpin.

'It's not at all unusual for executives brought over here to sign an employment agreement,' she says. 'You can include a provision in which the executives agree to read all the materials passed on to them regarding the treatment of people in the workplace and to indemnify the company for any legal costs associated with a dispute. That's extreme, but what we're often dealing with here is the need to change behaviors, and if you hit them in the pocketbook, they're likely to pay attention.'"

Disruptive Innovations Within Integrated Health Systems

2011-05-03T17:58:00.000+02:00

There is a tendency to think that the latest "new" book on innnovation is the best, but that is far from the truth. The books on the subject that I find truly worthwhile are a few years old and most of them have been written by Clayton M. Christensen, author of The Innovator's Dilemma.

One of Christensen's most recent books is The Innovator's Prescription, co-written with Jason Hwang, M.D. Since the publication of that book and another one on disruptive innovation in education, Christensen's mission has been extended through the work of the Innosight Institute, which recently announced that it will be publishing a series of case studies on disruptive innovations within (U.S.) integrated health systems. The first case study is of Grand Valley Health Plan, which has

"served the greater Grand Rapids, Michigan, area for nearly 30 years as a regional, for-profit integrated delivery system, specializing in primary care with a guiding focus on wellness and prevention. Though it is a small plan with an enrollment of fewer than 8,000 members, the staff-model HMO has earned national distinction for health care innovation and quality. It is regarded as one of America’s “Best Health Insurance Plans,” ranked #4, for two consecutive years, by U.S. News & World Report/National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) for consumer experience, prevention, and treatment."

You can download the case study from this page: Grand Valley Health Plan.

The ideal manager in Europe is a good planner and organizer

2011-04-25T14:19:00.000+02:00

According to an article written by Laurance N'Kaoua, based on research done by BVA/BPI among employees in 11 European countries the quality/competence most sought in a manager is that of being a good planner and organizer.

Below are the managerial competencies/qualities that were listed in the article, in their order of importance to employees (for the purposes of this blog post I am using the words capacities, competencies and qualities interchangeably):

The capacity to plan and organize
The capacity to motivate employees.
The capacity to communicate and explain decisions.
The capacity to evaluate, recognize and reward the quality of the work done by his/her team members.
Self-confidence.

The five qualities or competencies that seemed the least important were:

The capacity to delegate without micro-managing
Intuition
Open-mindedness, curiosity
Ethical behavior
Expertise

Read the original article in Les Echos:
Le portrait-robot du manager idéal - Les Echos.fr

The science of empathy

2011-03-27T15:24:00.004+02:00

Simon Baron-Cohen does some very interesting research and he writes well. His next book to appear will focus on the subject of empathy, or, to be more to the point, the consequences of the lack of it. In the U.K. it will be titled "Zero Degrees of Empathy" and in the States, when it comes out in June, it will be titled "The Science of Evil"

In today's English Observer newspaper Simon Baron-Cohen has written an article which, as I read it, brought to mind a whole lot of other books, most notably Christopher Browning's "Ordinary Men" and "Defiance" the story of Tuvia Bielski's partisan otriad in the Belorussian forests during WWII. Although Bielski's Jewish partisans fought the Germans, like other partisan groups in the forests, his emphasis was on "saving jews" not on killing Germans. In Nechama Tec's book about Bielski it was interesting to see that although Bielski was heavily criticized by other partisans for such empathetic behavior saving children, women and the old--the other partisans didn't want to be burdened down by non-fighters - fact more members of Bielski's group of so-called weak people survived longer than the men-only, fighter-only groups

There is a neat inventory attached to the article that can allow you to find your empathy quotient (EQ) score, but as with all such self-marked questionnaires the results should be taken with a small pinch of salt. The best way to analyze your EQ results would be to look back at recent experience with people and see if you can find occasions that seem to confirm or deny the score. If a situation in which you showed low empathy bothers you, what can you do to make it different next time around?

Baron-Cohen's article, on the other hand, needs to be taken very seriously. His previous book about autism has helped me enormously in trying to understand different styles of creativity.

Below is an extract from the article:

Zero degrees of empathy means you have no awareness of how you come across to others, how to interact with others, or how to anticipate their feelings or reactions. It leaves you feeling mystified by why relationships don't work out, and it creates a deep-seated self-centredness. Other people's thoughts and feelings are just off your radar. It leaves you doomed to do your own thing, in your own little bubble, not just oblivious of other people's feelings and thoughts but oblivious to the idea that there might even be other points of view. The consequence is that you believe 100% in the rightness of your own ideas and beliefs, and judge anyone who does not hold your beliefs as wrong, or stupid.

Zero degrees of empathy does not strike at random in the population. There are at least three well-defined routes to getting to this end-point: borderline, psychopathic, and borderline personality disorders. I group these as zero-negative because they have nothing positive to recommend them. They are unequivocally bad for the sufferer and for those around them. Of course these are not all the sub-types that exist. Indeed, alcohol, fatigue and depression are just a few examples of states that can temporarily reduce one's empathy, and schizophrenia is another example of a medical condition that can reduce one's empathy.

Read the whole article at:

The science of empathy | Science | The Observer

How clueless bosses suffer from annual review "rater bias"

2011-03-05T12:11:00.002+01:00

A couple of powerful sentences, in an answer to a reader's query, by Marie G. McIntyre, in the Inside Bay Area section of the Oakland Review and titled "Managers rigid reviews shortchange best workers" caught my eye. Here they are:

Your clueless boss provides a perfect example of "rater bias," a common phenomenon which contributes to unfairness in performance reviews. Research has shown that many managers have preconceived ideas about how rating scales should be used. "High raters" freely distribute top scores, while "low raters" refuse to use them at all, even for exceptional employees.

While high-rating bosses need to become more discerning, low raters need to recognize that this tightfisted attitude automatically de-motivates their most valuable employees. People who do truly outstanding work ought to be recognized with an outstanding rating.

*** Marie G. McIntyre is a workplace coach and the author of "Secrets to Winning at Office Politics."

The Importance of Connectedness

2011-03-04T11:55:00.001+01:00

In an informative March 31st post on Customer Think titled Why are Clever Executives Failing? John Todor provides many answers to his question. One of them is the fact that the isolated manager no longer has the knowledge to do his or her job.

Excerpt:

In 1987 people felt they had 75% of the knowledge needed to do their jobs. In 1997, they had only 20% (Kelley***). Today we would expect the percentage to be much less. For virtually all of us it is impossible to function independently these days. So the question is do you have a networked brain trust to help you in your sense making?

*** Robert E. Kelley How to Be a Star at Work: 9 Breakthrough Strategies You Need to Succeed

How to eliminate the color line with other colors

2011-01-06T18:07:00.001+01:00

At lunch today I talked to a client about a conflict situation I had to mediate in Congo Brazzaville a few years ago. The company was under Dutch ownership. There were three groups of managers. The first group was made up of expatriate managers sent out from Holland for a few years. The second group was made up of Congolese citizens who had grown into their jobs and acquired responsibility based on time spent in the company. The third group of managers was made up of young Congolese nationals who had been brought up in France and who had been to French Business Schools and worked for large French consumer goods companies before they were recruited to work in Brazzaville and Pointe Noire.

The home grown African managers refused to recognize the expertise of the younger managers who had been to Business School, and who had been hired because of their mastery of modern management techniques. The younger African managers disliked the fact that when the older managers talked to them it was often in terms of "Hey, you, the student!" The Dutch managers had often come up through apprenticeships and both the homegrown African managers and the French educated ones both felt that they were being lorded over by Dutch people with inferior qualifications who knew nothing about Congolese consumers.

The conflict between the three groups eventually settled down into one of Africans against Europeans. The Dutch managers refused to believe that they had been condescending and overbearing to their African colleagues. The Africans refused to believe that their Dutch colleagues could bring skills to the company that they did not already have.

The way the conflict was defused was serendipitous and quite simple, in hindsight. Searching for an approach to resolve the conflict, I asked all the managers to fill in a simple Questionnaire developed by William Moulton Marston, the person who came up with DISC theory back in 1928. DISC postulates that there four main personality styles. Individuals tend to favor one of these styles of behavior when communicating and trying to influence other people. Each style is associated with a color. The four styles are :

DOMINANCE (color RED) - Dominant individuals tend to be assertive and use control and power to exercise mastery over a situation.
INFLUENCE (color YELLOW) - These individuals tend to use metaphor, analogy, colorful language and many examples when they try to get their message across.
SUBMISSION (color GREEN) - Submissive individuals tend to be patient, persistent, empathetic and favor group harmony above all else.
CONSCIENTIOUSNESS (color BLUE) - Detail oriented individuals who tend to favor structure and the use of precise facts and evidence when they communicate.

It took me a few minutes to score the responses to the questionnaires and then I asked all the managers to get into their style groups and discuss how to resolve the differences. The people with a Blue style joined up with others of a Blue style, the Greens with the Greens, the Reds with the Reds and the Yellows with the Yellows. I asked each group to spend fifteen minutes talking about the problems, then to do some brainstorming and come up with practical ideas to help all the managers work better together. As individual differences that can be measured by psychometric instruments are usually at a higher logical level than national differences, each group of similar color that emerged was made up both senior and young African managers and Dutch managers.

After a few minutes to break the ice, each group settled down and began to work amicably together. The Blue group began to get into detail about the situation and joked about the crazy solutions that the Yellows would no doubt produce, the Reds quickly came up with bullet points to demonstrate how to solve the problem in five minutes, the Yellows spent all the time talking and joking, and the Greens lamented the lack of group harmony and how comfortable, in contrast, they felt with each other.

Each group then presented its ideas. The Greens concentrated on how to restore empathy, the Blues presented a lot of logical, rational, detailed ideas about how to solve the situation, the Reds gave their ideas about how to restore control and the Yellows concentrated on how to improve communications between the managers. There was a lot of joshing about how impractical the different sets of ideas were, with Blues criticizing Reds, Yellows criticizing Greens, and so on.

But the main impact that came from using the Marston's Colors questionnaire was that the line between Black and White had disappeared to be replaced by the colors representing the different personality styles. Some of the managers said to me afterwards that being called a "Blue" or a "Red" had provided not only welcome relief from being categorized as a "Noir" or a "Blanc" but had shown them that, in fact, the conflict had had much less to do with nationality than with the different ways in which individual managers of different styles approached the task of managing their teams.

Burnout and how to avoid it

2011-01-05T16:12:00.000+01:00

Yesterday's edition of the Financial Times carried a long article titled Stress in the executive suite, which I recommend to anybody who may be suffering from job stress and possible burnout.

The article underlines the value that coaching can bring to 24/7 executives. It begins:

When it comes to burnout, Garry Savin has pretty much seen it all: chief executives who cannot bring themselves to get out of bed in the morning, hedge fund managers with drink problems and leading industrialists unable to turn off their phones for a 10-minute consultation.

There is a lot in the artilce in the preventive value of coaching, for example the following paragraphs:

Matt Paese, a vice-president of executive solutions at Development Dimensions International, the talent management consultancy, observes that 10 years ago his firm would work on the appointment of a chief executive and then move on, but now about 75 per cent of the projects he does involve ongoing coaching and support for leaders. Sessions can continue for up to a year and help clients adjust to their role by prioritising goals.

Eric Schmidt, chairman and chief executive of Google, has said the best advice he ever received was to hire a coach. He picked Bill Campbell, a tech industry veteran and chairman of the board at Apple, who once coached Columbia university’s football team.

The need to train and empower managers to deal with dificult people

2010-11-12T17:10:00.005+01:00

In an article with the above title on the HR.BLR.COM website it is stated that:

Dealing with difficult people is one of the top areas searched by visitors to Employaid.com, an online community for corporate employees that offers videos and tip sheets for handling a variety of situations.

In the Creativity and Innovation MBA module on which I tutor the students are presented with a number of psychometric instruments that allow them not only to understand their own temperaments and creative styles, but also to analyze why they find other people difficult or why colleagues can find them difficult. In many cases a difficult person does not mean to be bad, s/he just thinks differently.

For example a "big picture thinker" may find a person who is always asking for more detail very difficult. One of the main tasks of leadership is to bring together a team of diverse personalities and coach them in such a way that they understand and appreciate each other's differences and what those differences can bring to problem-solving. But, in the absence of good management or leadership, what can start off as simple differences in style can degenerate into personal conflict and even open warfare. This is especially true of conversations in which two individuals come at a problem from two entirely different directions, cannot understand why and then end up saying that the other person is bad or evil.

In the article mentioned above, Barbara Poole advises that managers should be trained to handle difficult people. Barbara is the founder and CEO of Employaid.com. She says that:

Employers should be proactive about managing difficult people in the workplace instead of “batting cleanup” and trying to fix a problem after it has escalated, says Barbara Poole, founder and CEO, of Employaid.

If I were to advise on any type of training for handling difficult people I would include the use of valid and reliable psychometric instruments. MBTI is an old favorite, but new instruments such as NEO-FFI and KAI Theory are emerging.

Read Barbara's whole article here:

Empower Managers, Employees To Deal with Difficult People

The six keys to achieving excellence in any field

2010-11-09T11:29:00.009+01:00

Tony Schwarz, the author of The Way We're Working Isn't Working has an article full of practical advice on the Harvard Business Review Guest Blog, under the title Six Keys to Being Excellent at Anything.

The six keys are:

1 - Pursue what you love

2 - Do the hardest work first

3 - Practice intensely

4 - Seek expert feedback, in intermittent doses

5 - Take regular renewal breaks

6 - Ritualize practice - for example, do it at regular, inviolable times.

The article reminded me of the work done by Malcom Gladwell in his book Outliers. I encourage you to read it. Tony Schwarz acknowledges the work done by Anders Ericsson and others to determine that if you wish to be excellent at anything you need at least 10,000 hours of practice.

How beliefs can put limits on leadership

2010-11-06T16:01:00.001+01:00

There are probably about 136 different definitions of leadership in "the literature" and another three hundred million in people's heads. All of them, in some way, are influenced by belief systems: national or religious belief systems, family belief systems and unconscious personal belief systems. At the national level we know that leadership in Japan calls for qualities that may not always be needed in the United States or France, and vice versa.

At the level of the individual who has been designated, or who has chosen to be, leader qualms about the adequacy or inadequacy of his or her leadership practice usually come from the feeling that personal thought patterns and habits are limiting day-to-day effectiveness and efficiency.

Andy Smith has a useful article on his emotional intelligence blog (one of many useful articles, in fact) that recounts his personal experience in dealing with a belief system that imposed limits on the leader he was coaching, a person who had been promoted to be the boss of former colleagues, probably one of the toughest challenges any manager can be confronted with.

Excerpt:

"Last week I had a first coaching session with the Managing Director of a medium-sized company. Although he had a long and successful track record as Operations Director, and had a wealth of experience and an MBA under his belt, he was fairly new in the MD role, and had doubts about his ability to lead.

In the course of our conversation he described various examples of how he had made a difference to staff at more junior levels. I was impressed by how neatly he had created the conditions where staff could come up with necessary adaptations to changes in the marketplace themselves, ending up where the business needed them to be with far less resistance than if he had tried to impose the same changes from above.

Leading people at a more senior level was a different story. Specifically, his doubts were around how he could lead his fellow directors - the guys who not long before had been his colleagues. 'How can I tell the Sales Director what to do?' he asked. 'I don't know anything about sales.'"

Read the rest of Andy's blog post at:

How Limiting Beliefs Can Affect Your Leadership - Coaching Leaders Blog - Coaching Leaders: NLP, Coaching, Appreciative Inquiry, Emotional Intelligence

For or against the performance review?

2010-11-05T15:57:00.001+01:00

Samuel A. Culbert had a provocative article in the the October 20th edition of the Wall Street Journal, titled very simply: "Get Rid of the Perfomance Review!" Read it and decide if you are for or against the performance review.

You can find the article here:
Get Rid of the Performance Review!
Here is how it begins:

"You can call me 'dense,' you can call me 'iconoclastic,' but I see nothing constructive about an annual pay and performance review. It's a mainstream practice that has baffled me for years.

To my way of thinking, a one-side-accountable, boss-administered review is little more than a dysfunctional pretense. It's a negative to corporate performance, an obstacle to straight-talk relationships, and a prime cause of low morale at work. Even the mere knowledge that such an event will take place damages daily communications and teamwork."
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How to Identify and Get Paid for Your Disruptive Skills

2010-10-07T21:08:00.001+02:00

Whitney Johnson has posted an interesting couple of articles on the Harvard Business Review Blogs about the above subject. The first one was titled To Get Paid What You're Worth, Know Your Disruptive Skills and the second one has the title How to Identify Your Disruptive Skills.

Here is an excerpt from the first article that reminded me of a little exercise I sometimes do with my Master's students:

"...if we subscribe to classical economics — which says that the price paid for any given service is the price at which the quantity supplied equals the quantity demanded — aren't we paid precisely what we're worth? And if we still believe we're trading at a discount to our intrinsic value, is it possible to change the market's mind?"

The exercise I run with the Master's students is about how to put a price in dollars on their value to an employer. I ask them how much money their parents have invested in raising them, and how much the State and their parents have paid to educate them. An average 25-year old can quite easily calculate that the total investment in him or her, since birth, has been more than $1 million dollars and s/he is often amazed at how high that figure is. I then ask them what sort of return should be obtained on that investment and they usually come up with a figure of 15%. "Do you think you'll get that 15%?" I then ask and the answer is often "No."

Education and rearing aren't the only source of individual value to an employer. Every person comes with his or her specific talents, which sometimes add a lot of value to the basic investment in upbringing and education.

I then suggest to them that the way to change the market's, or their future boss's mind about what they are worth is to be cognizant of it themselves. If they don't know the value of what they have, what is to stop them from giving it away free.

The first paragraph in Whitney's second post begins:

"In my previous post, I talked about the importance of re-evaluating your portfolio of skills and leading with those that are unique — your disruptive skills. These may be capacities that are so innate you may not even consciously recognize them, or skills you have honed over years of practice. These are the skills that can help you carve out a disruptive niche — consequently upping your value in the marketplace. But how do you identify these skills? Or as one reader queried over at YCombinator Hacker News, 'How do you identify the skills that disrupt others' previously-established judgment of your worth to them?' This is a subject I've researched and thought deeply about; readers of my last post also left some great advice. Here are three questions to get started."

I strongly encourage you to read both articles to see what those three questions are and why they need to be asked:

How to Identify Your Disruptive Skills - Whitney Johnson - Harvard Business Review

Most bad managers are not consciously aware they are bad managers

2010-09-13T14:14:00.004+02:00

My approach ever since I started this blog has never been just to give my own advice and share my own experience as a coach, but also to help readers discover the methods and approaches of other succesful coaches and advisers on personal or general management skills. I find that reading articles by other coaches triggers memories of my own experience and leads to good reflective practice.

The latest person I have discovered is Steve Tobak. On the bnet.com website you can find very practical advice from Steve, carrying titles such as

How to Deal with a Bad Boss: Don't!
10 Things Good Managers Believe, and
10 Lies Managers Tell Themselves

Steve's latest article is titled "7 Signs You May Be a Bad Manager". The opening sentence immediately caught my eye, "One thing most bad managers have in common is they’re not consciously aware that they’re bad managers. And if they are aware of it on some level, they’re probably not willing to admit it to anyone, least of all themselves. That’s because nobody wants to believe they’re the problem."

I have often come across this phenomenon. When such a manager seeks coaching advice, s/he finds it difficult to understand why his/her often, positive intentions for themselves and their team members translate into behaviors that their colleagues see as 'bad'. The objective for the coach becomes, "How can I help this manager align his/her positive intentions with behaviors that will be seen as 'good'? The first step is to identify the positive intentions, the second step is to uncover the unhelpful behaviors, and help the manager to understand how they work against positive intentions, and the third step is to help the manager put in place other behaviours that will allow him/her to become more internally aligned so that positive intentions translate into positive behaviors.

Read Steve's article and find links to his other articles mentioned above by following this link:

7 Signs You May Be a Bad Manager

When looking for your replacement, hire for character and don't hire your clone

2010-09-12T13:22:00.004+02:00

To mark the 75th podcast and column in the 'Great Bosses' series on Poynter Online, Jill Geisler has posted some advice on how bosses should appoint their deputies. The first three of Jill's tips are :

Hire for character
Don't hire your clone
Hire your replacement:

Go to the article to see the other seven tips:

Poynter Online - SuperVision

19% more British Companies using Coaching than in 2006

2010-07-14T19:15:00.000+02:00

According to the 2010 Learning and Talent Development Survey conducted by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), eighty two percent of of large British organisations are now using coaching in one way or another. The figure of 82% is 19% higher than that of 63% found in 2006.

A lot of this coaching is not done by people external to the company, but by internal managers. The CIPD concludes in its survey that, "Encouragingly, the use of coaching by line managers continues to rise…it is regarded as one of the most effective practices in use."

It is useful to have your internal coaches trained by a reputable training firm.

One of the worst things to do is to throw them in at the deep end of coaching and oblige them to learn wholly by trial and error.

You can read download the full report from:

CIPD Learning and Talent Development 2010

Transition: work-out and how to moult out of the skin of old skills and experience to gain a new one

2010-06-27T15:20:00.001+02:00

When you need to transition from one job to another, it is a little like when a reptile moults. The old skin has become a hindrance and a new one is needed. Whether the transition is wanted or involuntary, it is always a good idea to do a "workout" of your past professional experience. By this I mean that it is useful to sit down for a few hours and methodically look through what you did on a daily basis in the old job. Below are some questions you can ask yourself:

What skills and experience have passed their sell-by date, even if you were still using them in the old company?
What emerging skills and experience did you begin to develop in the old company, that it would be useful to nurture in the new job?
What will you need to drop from the old job, such as outdated skills, experience and behaviors that were valuable only for the old company?
But don't throw out the baby with the bathwater. Not everything you learned with the old company needs to be discarded. What skills and behaviours will you need to bring with you into the new job from the old one?
What skin or inner uniform was appropriate for the old job but will not be appropriate for the new one? Let me give an extreme experience of this. If you had just left the army would you expect to turn up for your new managerial job at Home Depot wearing your old uniform? Would you expect to manage your staff the same way as in the army? Of course not. But the old atitudes and behaviors we carry around with us are just as visible to our new colleagues as would be an army uniform. The most difficult thing to shake off is the old mind-set, because it is largely unconscious. If a person moves from Procter & Gamble to Mars and maintains the same mind-set it will be difficult to succeed.

So, how do you shed the "inner" uniform you wore in the old company? What sort of old skin of skills or inner uniform of behaviors and attitudes do you need to shuck off?

We all have a tendency to look back with pride on achievements from 3 or 5 years ago, that is only human, but the world has moved on. About 50% of a young engineer's skills picked up during education are going to be out of date within 5 years of getting his or her first job. About 90% of the knowledge needed to work for a company is contextual. When you leave a company you lose that context. You have to learn to contextualize your core skills and behaviors in a totally new context.

When I use the term "work out" I use it in the General Electric way. See this article on my innovation blog to see how the method can be used in an organizational setting. The GE way is to work everything useless out of the system, to free up resources so that new skills can be developed and to figure out what skills and experience will serve you well in the new job.

Probably the best guide to managing Life's Transitions is William Bridges. When I decided to leave a managerial job in a big organization about 12 years ago, the training I did with William Bridges and his associates was as good as anything I learned from doing my MBA. It has helped me time and time again as a coach.

For anybody wishing to consult a specific example of experience mapping in order to start a new job or business, Karen Newman has crystallized what she learned when leaving Fox News to become an online entrepeneur in her book "Experience Mapping". Here is what she writes about it on her website:

"Experience Mapping is my process for taking an inventory of your skills, abilities, training, education, experience, and anything else that enables you to earn an income, and then realigning all of those assets and resources in a new career. It’s a simple and totally effective process that can absolutely change your life. Just like it changed mine.

If you’re thinking about starting a business—but particularly if you’re thinking about starting a business online—you need a copy of Experience Mapping. In the book, I show you, step by step, how to take what you’ve done and what you know and turn it into doing what you want to do."

Are Annual Reviews Responsible for the Growing Number of Toxic Workplaces?

2010-05-20T18:12:00.008+02:00

In France a lot of employee dissatisfaction in companies such as France Telecom is being linked to new methods of "Anglo-Saxon" performance management that have been introduced to the country's biggest companies over the past few years. These methods are said to have worked well in "Anglo-Saxon" environments but do not work in France. Tara Parker-Rope in a blog post in the Health Section of the New York Times asks the question "Time to review workplace reviews?" and her article seems to say that modern performance management and annual reviews don't work very well in the United States either.

The other morning on the BFM financial radio station I heard a representative of SYNTEC, the French consulting companies' professional association, accepting that consulting and training companies have to accept some responsibility for this state of affairs. They probably responded to quickly to companies urgent requests for "quickie" performance management training methods, without paying enough attention to the context or climate of each company. He also said the big companies, after swearing to never again use consultants, are now coming back with the question, "What do we do now?"

Below is an extract from Tara's blog post:

"Samuel A. Culbert, a clinical psychologist who teaches at the Anderson School of Management at the University of California, Los Angeles, says too many people work in a “toxic” environment, and the title of his new book (from Hachette) throws a spotlight on one of the culprits: “Get Rid of the Performance Review!”

Annual reviews not only create a high level of stress for workers, he argues, but end up making everybody — bosses and subordinates — less effective at their jobs. He says reviews are so subjective — so dependent on the worker’s relationship with the boss — as to be meaningless. He says he has heard from countless workers who say their work life was ruined by an unfair review.

“There is a very bad set of values that are embedded in the air because of performance reviews,” he told me.

Not every expert agrees that reviews should simply be abolished. Robert I. Sutton, a Stanford University management professor, says they can be valuable if properly executed. But he added, “In the typical case, it’s done so badly it’s better not to do it at all.”"

Read the whole article:

Time to Review Workplace Reviews? - Well Blog - NYTimes.com

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Are Annual Reviews Responsible for the Growing Number of Toxic Workplaces?

Read the original article in Les Echos:
Le portrait-robot du manager idéal - Les Echos.fr