Join Maggie Walsh, Forum’s VP and Lead of our Leadership Practice, on an April 24th webinar as she ‘pulls back the curtain’ to reveal tactics that enable leaders and their teams to deal more effectively with ongoing change. You will learn:

• Insights on why complexity and uncertainty drives performance down
• A simple framework for helping your team handle change
• A way to flip your mindset regarding unexpected challenges

Here is a preview of some of the insights Maggie will share.

Click here to join the nearly 1200 people who have already registered for the webinar!

Whether you are leading a specific change initiative, are in the midst of an individual transition, or are simply trying to survive in these complex times, this webinar will equip you with actionable tips and proven strategies that can be applied right away.

Jocelyn R. Davis, head of our global Research and Development function, has published an e-book, “Leadership Failures Sink Unsinkable Ship: Business Lessons from the Titanic.” She writes that the catastrophe’s fundamental cause was a failure in leadership and shares three lessons business leaders can learn from one of the most memorable events in maritime history.

Q: Why did you write the e-book?

A: When we were doing the research behind our book “Strategic Speed,” a colleague brought the Titanic story to my attention. It turned out to be a perfect illustration of one of the book’s key points: Rapid execution doesn’t come simply from picking up the pace, but rather from skillfully mobilizing people. When you look at the story through that lens, there are a lot of practical lessons for leaders in organizations today. If we heed those lessons, we can move faster (without hitting icebergs).

Q: Why did poor leadership sink the Titanic?

A: On the Titanic, poor leadership trumped impressive design. The captain and officers put their faith in the supposedly unsinkable ship, with all its modern technology, and ignored some basic leadership tenets that might have prevented the disaster or at least made the outcome less terrible. Today, the same thing can happen in businesses; leaders often overlook people factors and fall into one of the following traps:

• The Brilliant Strategy Trap: Leaders put most of their efforts into researching and devising an ambitious strategy that will, they hope, vault them ahead of the competition. They pay a lot of attention to writing it up. They pay little attention to building the understanding, buy-in and skills that would ensure its execution. As a result, the strategy never bears fruit.
• The Efficient Process and Structure Trap: Leaders give most of their attention to process reengineering and organization design, thinking, “If we can just get everything lined up in the right order and all sources of waste eliminated, things will run smoothly.” They fail to realize that an efficient business is not necessarily a successful business and, moreover, that people are rarely guided by official process maps.
• The Sophisticated Technology Trap: Leaders throw technology at problems in the mistaken belief that it’s the strongest, quickest, most lasting lever for changing how a business operates. What they don’t see is that technology is actually a weak, cumbersome and transitory lever unless it’s designed and installed with the explicit intention of helping people be more effective.

Q: What lessons can business leaders learn from the disaster?

A: As in organizations that operate on dry land, it was the ship leaders’ ability or inability to drive clarity, unity and agility that made the difference to speed and performance over the course of the crisis. As our research indicates, it’s these three people factors that correlate most highly with fast, effective execution of strategies and strategic initiatives. When leaders focus on strengthening these characteristics, strategies are accelerated and results improve.

1. Clarity: People have a shared understanding of our strategy at a detailed level, and they focus their efforts on a critical few priorities. Our strategy has been translated into concrete and achievable goals and behaviors.
2. Unity: We have commitment at all levels to the success of our strategy, and we staff strategic initiatives with team members who are capable and can dedicate sufficient time. A spirit of teamwork and cross-boundary collaboration is evident throughout the organization.
3. Agility: People stay open and flexible in the way that goals are met, and they maintain a bias for action while correcting course as needed. People capture and communicate what they learn from initiatives and projects.

To download a copy of Jocelyn’s e-book, click here.

The most humbling and gratifying part of being nominated, though, is that we were named, in part, due to the strength of our clients.

One such client is Fifth Third Bank.  Like many financial institutions after the 2008 meltdown, Fifth Third faced an uphill battle – customer mistrust, commoditized market, lines of business operating as silos, and a shrinking share of wallet.

Join us tomorrow at 2pm EST, as Christine Nester, Fifth Third’s VP, Director of Performance Consulting, will join us to share the specific tactics and strategies they employed to overcome these challenges.  In line with a new “One Bank” strategy, Christine and her team worked with Forum to align and equip their sales force to execute on a customer-focused sales strategy with impressive results.

Register here.  Regardless of your industry, you are sure to take something away that you’ll be able to put into practice right away.

It’s not easy to define.  When I started out in leadership development, everyone wanted to clone Jack Welch from GE.  “If we could just clone Jack and what his folks do at Crotonville, we would have strong leadership bench strength,” the predominant thinking went.  In fact, going to Crotonville and seeing GE’s operations and methods was on every leadership development professional’s bucket list.

In the past 10-15 years:

• Industries have become incredibly specialized niches, requiring highly specific knowledge and deep networks
• Awareness of regional leadership differences has dawned on many global organizations
• Authenticity has become more acceptable, even preferred, in leaders in many companies and regions
• Business success has begun to demand ability to work across boundaries, often in culture-specific ways
• Technology and globalization have combined to require the skills and knowledge to operate virtually

Today, leaders simply cannot be cloned or borrowed from other companies or industries.  Organizations must develop their own leaders with skills and personal attributes that fit the company’s vision, mission, and values.  In other words, leaders must be molded, not cloned.

Leadership Today

Today’s leaders:

• Can dive into multiple parts of the organization with multi-disciplinary knowledge
• Have strong cultural acumen and are able to adapt to different environments and cultures
• Are asked to lead in a virtual world, which requires developing their ability to engage in meaningful virtual interactions with a variety of stakeholders, in and outside the organization

In days past, we would ask participants in a leadership course to identify someone with strong leadership skills.  Common answers would include:  Mother Teresa; Martin Luther King, Jr.; Mahatma Gandhi; and John F. Kennedy.

Today, asking this question is not as effective in identifying strong leaders.  Today, some better questions might be:

• Who in our company has strong leadership skills? (company-specific).  
• Would he or she be an effective leader in our Dubai or Pune offices? (cultural acumen)
• How does this leader provide leadership in a virtual environment? (virtual leadership)
• What knowledge of the various functions and disciplines in our organization does this person have? (multi-functional and multi-discipline knowledge)

These questions get more at the heart of molding leaders to be effective within a specific company, to develop cultural acumen (if needed), and to increase knowledge and skill in operating in a virtual and multi-functional environment.

Agent 007’s catch phrase was “shaken, not stirred.”

We’re thinking our own new catch phrase might be “molded, not cloned.”  (Okay, that’s not nearly as cool.  Let’s stick with what Bond said.)

As the candidates square off, we can take some lessons about good leadership from the campaign trail:

1. Don’t Be Political, but Do Know What People Care About. Like the candidates, leaders need to know the hot-button issues that people care the most about. What are the people in your company most anxious about, and what do they need direction on? Provide that direction, get those resources, but avoid posturing and manipulation—it causes trouble and mistrust. There will be politics, but, as John Bell, former CEO of Jacobs Suchard (Nabob, Kraft) said, “Deal with politics, but don’t be political.”
2. Don’t Pander, Be Authentic. Leaders don’t have to kiss babies to show that they can connect with regular people. But they do need to use emotional intelligence. It’s important to be likable, to actually listen to employees, not just act as though you are, and to show that you care. That’s how good leaders garner followers.
3. Don’t Peddle Your Influence, Align Your Interests. Politics is often about trading on quid pro quo relationships —and using one’s “influence” to get votes. In business, leaders must “lead with influence,” which Forum defines not as “influence peddling,” but as “the ability to generate results collaboratively, in a variety of contexts, without direct or positional authority.” Leaders must understand the importance of authentic relationships and actively seek to align interests with people at all levels inside and outside the organization around shared goals. If they can’t do that, they will go nowhere.

In this week’s Forum Focus, we examine what social media means for learning, who should manage social platforms in companies, and why technology may mean that employees do not need to be in the office to be effective.

Learning and Social Media

In his piece for Chief Learning Officer, Dan Pontefract tackles the question of who should manage social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Google+.  Pontefract takes issue with an MIS Quarterly article that lists the executive roles which will be affected by “social business.”  But one key role did not make the list:  The Chief Learning Officer.  Pontefract argues that the CLO’s responsibilities should include collaboration through social media and social learning.  At the same time, no one division should ‘own’ social media; everyone should get involved in the collaboration.

Business Agility and Social Media

In fact, everyone needs to be a little more nimble, especially when it comes to learning. In her piece for the Harvard Business Review, Nilofer Merchant explains that social media has not only changed the way we learn, it has changed the way businesses operate. Social media tools are a part of customer service across industries; they are also used to hold conferences, consulting sessions, and webinars. The physical space is becoming less relevant, and it is saving a lot of money. Social tools allow for fluidity and flexibility, which are two traits businesses need to survive.

Being a flexible business reaches beyond the ability to host webinars and provide customer service via Twitter. Tony Schwartz recently wrote that employers should do more than just allow their employees to work from home; they should encourage it.  Schwartz said that in his own business, he realized face time was less important than his employees having a balanced life, because it means they are doing their best work.

We expected to see some differences, by region, in salespeople’s’ reaction to this new method of selling.

Instead, we saw completely uniform responses in two important respects. In all cases, on all continents, the sponsoring executives (senior sales leaders) immediately saw the value of this approach to selling and how it was especially suited to executing their selling strategy. In fact, these executives were quite eager to have Forum “transform” their salespeople with this new method.

In contrast to the sales leaders’ enthusiasm, many of the senior salespeople who participated in Point of View Selling were highly skeptical. In every group on every continent we encountered initial resistance: salespeople said things like, “How can I call on a senior decision maker without a relationship? I certainly can’t provoke or challenge these senior-level customers!” “I don’t have the time it takes to prepare for this level of discussion.” Yada, yada, yada …

What do Senior Buyers Look For in a Supplier?

This resistance, and its underlying fears, come from understandable but erroneous beliefs regarding what senior-level decision makers care about and how they make buying decisions. The resistance also hints at people’s doubts about their ability to master significantly more advanced selling skills., When we recently asked 231 senior-level decision makers around the globe to rank the criteria they use in deciding whether to meet with a supplier , “knows me” came in dead last. “Knows my business” and “knows my industry” topped the list. These findings completely contradict the widespread belief that a salesperson must have a relationship with an executive before she can initiate a provocative business discussion.

Selling in 2012

At the end of our 2-day program in each of the four countries, nearly all participants demonstrated increased skill levels and a shift in beliefs about their customers.  The participants “got it,” they knew instinctively that senior-level decision makers expect more from salespeople today.  Buyers expect insight about how to achieve their objectives. The executives who invited us to test our new sales program with their teams understand this well—because they are themselves senior-level decision makers. Are your sales teams prepared to call higher in your customers’ organizations?

We believe that Point of View Selling is the future of complex selling.  For more on Point of View Selling, watch this brief video: