Tag Archives: Leadership

Leadership

Performance Excellence linked to Preventing Failures, Corrective Coaching

Atul Gawande

Simple behavior changes, such as following a structured checklist, can prevent crucial workplace errors and increase quality in medical settings, found Harvard’s Atul Gawande.

He found that people effectively improved their performance when they recognized weaknesses in organizational processes, and took proactive steps to remedy these shortcomings.

Three elements of better performance can be applied across industries:

Diligence – Attending to details can prevent errors and overcome obstacles.
Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right suggests best ways to structure these memory aids,
Doing Right –Ensuring that skill, will, and incentives are aligned to drive excellent performance,
Ingenuity – Deliberately monitoring potential failures, continuously seeking innovative ways to improve performance and solutions.

These elements can be improved with attentive observation and feedback to prevent errors of omission when people don’t:

Know enough (ignorance),
Make proper use of what they know (ineptitude).

Ignorance occurs less frequently than ineptitude because relevant information is widely available, Gawande noted.
He suggested that both errors can be improved by systematic analysis and consistent use of tools like checklists.

Geoffrey Smart

Checklist-based analysis was also linked to Internal Rate of Return (IRR) in Geoffrey Smart’s study of investments by Venture Capital (VC) firms,

He found a correlation between IRR and leadership effectiveness in new investment ventures.
Selecting capable leaders is critical to business outcomes, so Smart also evaluated VC firms’ typical approach to assessing potential leaders:

The Art Critic is the most frequent approach in which the VC assesses leadership talent at a glance, intuitively, based on extensive experience,
The Sponge conducts extensive due diligence, then decides based on intuition,
The Prosecutor interrogates the candidate, tests with challenging questions and hypothetical situations,
The Suitor woos the candidate instead of analyzing capabilities and fit,
The Terminator eliminates the evaluation because the venture firm replaces the company’s originators,
The Infiltrator becomes a “participant-observer” in an immersive, time-consuming experientially-based assessment,
The Airline Captain uses a formal checklist to prevent past mistakes.
This last approach was linked to the highest average Internal Rate of Return (IRR) for the new ventures.
In addition, this strategy was significantly less likely to result in later terminating senior managers.

Venture Capitalists in these studies reported that two of their most significant mistakes were:

Investing insufficient time in talent analysis,
Being influenced by “halo effect” in evaluating candidates.

Systematic reminders to execute all elements required for expert performance can prevent failure and signal potential failure points.

-*How do you improve performance?
-*What value do you find in expert coaching?

Related Post:
Developing a SMARTER Mindset for Resilience, Emotional Intelligence – Part 2

©Kathryn Welds

Creating Productive Thought Patterns

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Albert Ellis

Leaders’ actions actions are influenced by unspoken self-talk.
Sometimes, these thoughts are self-critical and provoke anxiety.

Aaron Beck

Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT), developed by University of Pennsylvania’s Aaron Beck, provides a systematic way to notice and restructure “irrational self-talk.“
Similar approaches were developed by Albert Ellis in Rational-Emotive Therapy (RET), and David Burns in his synthesis of CBT and RET.

David Burns

Arizona State University’s Charles Manz and Chris Neck translated these self-management processes to managerial development.
They outlined a Thought Self-Leadership Procedure as a five-step circular process:

Charles Manz

1. Observe and record thoughts,
2. Analyze thoughts for potential errors in reasoning (jumping to conclusions, exaggeration, etc)
3. Develop alternate positive, realistic thoughts and notice how these sound”,
4. Substitute alternate more positive, realistic thoughts, and monitor how they seem,
5. Notice if more negative thoughts appear, and substitute the more productive thoughts.

Screenshot 2023-03-04 at 10.06.57 Additional strategies for Productive Thought Patterns at work were summarised by writer Parismita Goswami, drawing on evidence-based Cognitive Behavioural approaches.

John Crimmins

Other recommendations to manage thoughts about stressful situations were distilled by John Crimmins of Behaviour Institute in coaching people at work.

-*What practices do you use to develop and apply productive thought patterns?

©Kathryn Welds

“Evolved” Leaders in an Era of Self-Interested Leadership

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Jim Collins

Organizations that are “built to last” are guided by “Level 5 Executives,” argued Jim Collins in Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t.

This style of leadership requires both personal humility and personal will, a combination not favored in the current US national leadership.

Collins proposed a developmental leadership hierarchy including:

Level 1: Highly Capable Individual, who applies knowledge, skills, abilities, and commitment to achieve team goal,
Level 2: Contributing Team Member, who contributes to team goal achievement through effective collaboration,
Level 3: Capable Manager, who sets plans and organizes others to achieve goals,
Level 4: Effective Executive, who inspires others to act toward the shared vision,
Level 5: Level 5 Executive combines personal will to achieve the organizational improvement goal, tempered with personal humility.

Modesto Maidique

Drawing on developmental psychology theories by Jean Piaget as well as Harvard’s Lawrence Kohlberg, and Robert Kegan, Florida International University’s former President, Modesto A. Maidique proposed a six-level Purpose-Driven Model of Leadership,

Jean Piaget

Leadership is service to others, organizations, and ideals, and follows a related developmental path:

Level One: Sociopath, who serves no one, exhibits low empathy, and destroys value and undermines others.
Well-known examples are Muammar Gaddafi, Adolf Hitler, and Saddam Hussein.

Lawrence Kohlberg

Level Two: Opportunist, who serves himself or herself, often at others’ expense by focusing on “What’s in it for me?”
Examples include Bernie Madoff and Jeffrey Skilling.
Level Three: Chameleon, who “flip-flop” and cater to as many people as possible.
Examples include Senator John Kerry, former Florida governor Charlie Crist, and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney.

Robert Kegan

- Level Four: Achiever, who often achieves business goals through energetic focus.
  Peter Drucker
  
  Peter Drucker characterized this leader as “monomaniac with a mission,” driving toward a goal without fully considering the broader mission.
  Examples include former H-P CEO Mark Hurd.
- Level Five: Builder, who seeks to build an institution, not just to achieve a goal.
  Examples include IBM’s Tom Watson Jr., GM’s Alfred P. Sloan, and Harpo’s Oprah Winfrey.
  They have a clear vision, energize others, manage for the long term, and not swayed by short-term profit or stock market valuations.
Level Six: Transcendent, who focus on broader social benefit beyond their personal affiliations.

Examples include Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Dalai Lama.

These frameworks provide a structure to evaluate the words and actions of current political and business leaders, and suggest potential leadership vulnerabilities.

-*What level of leader do you observe in the highest levels of your work organization?
-*What practices are you implementing to develop your next level of leadership skill

©Kathryn Welds

Developing “Big 8” Job Competencies

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George Hallenbeck

Better job performance is associated with eight capabilities known as “The Big 8”, according to Korn-Ferry International’s George Hallenbeck, in the Leadership Architect® Library of Competencies:

• Dealing with Ambiguity,
• Creativity,
• Innovation Management,
• Strategic Agility,
• Planning,
• Motivating Others,
• Building Effective Teams,
• Managing Vision & Purpose.

He analyzed more than 1500 ratings on this 360 degree assessment, and found that just 12% of executives possessed four or more of “The Big 8.”
None of these organizational leaders demonstrated more than six of these competencies, though they consistently showed more than individual contributors.
This suggests that although executives demonstrate more of critical leadership capabilities than non-leaders, the vast majority have significant room for professional development.

Daniel Goleman Executives and individual contributors who had more of “The Big 8” competencies also had more of “Career Staller and Stopper” behaviors.
Bold individuals who demonstrate persistance may effectively execute, but may run afoul of key stakeholders and influencers.

Self-Awareness and Self-Management, identified in Daniel Goleman’s framework for Emotional Intelligence, may be a key to balancing between the Big 8’s performance enhancing impacts while mitigating their potential drawbacks in stalling careers.

-*What have you found the most important job competences among organizational leaders and those preparing for future leadership roles?

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©Kathryn Welds

Developing Executive Self Awareness to Enhance Leadership Impact

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Vicki Swisher

Lack of self-awareness among organizational leaders is pervasive and costly, according to Korn Ferry’s Vicky Swisher and Evelyn Orr.
They studied executives using the FYI: For Your Insight assessment tool, based on research from FYI for Insight: 21 Leadership Characteristics for Success and 5 That Will Get You Fired.

Evelyn Orr

Executives’ most significant blind spots were:

• Making tough people calls,
• Demonstrating personal flexibility, adapting approaches to new circumstances.

Similarly, the top leadership problems were:
• Not inspiring employees, not building talent,
• “Too narrow”, relying on deep expertise without broadening perspective.

Leaders vastly underestimated their effectiveness in “managing up”, suggesting that they focused more on their next promotion, rather than on developing their employees.

Joe Luft

Lack of self-awareness can be reduced by using a “Reality Check” including:

o Feedback from others to provide “early warning” of difficulty.
However, this requires that evaluators are willing to provide candid observations, despite widespread discomfort in providing corrective feedback.

o Self-reflection concerning effective and ineffective behaviors, documented in a personal journal for review.

Harry Ingham

Executives learned most to enhance leadership skills and self-reflection from on-the-job experiences, distantly followed by learning from other people.
Structured trainings are least effective and most costly approaches to enhance leadership cognitive, emotional, motivational, self-awareness, and learning agility capabilities.

These leadership development processes reduce individual blind spots, portrayed by San Francisco State University’s Joe Luft and Harry Ingham of National Training Labs in The JoHari Window. johari-window

Korn Ferry’s Michael M. Lombardo and Robert W. Eichinger provided additional executive development recommendations based on research in FYI: For your Improvement, A Development and Coaching Guide(3rd Edition).

-*How do you increase your self-awareness at work and reduce your “blind spots” about yourself and others?

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©Kathryn Welds

“Derailing” Executive Personality Measures Predict Leadership Mishaps

Perception of CEOs’ Non Verbal Leadership Behaviors Affect IPO Valuations, Predict Financial Performance

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Elizabeth Blankespoor

Favorable first impressions of CEOs can affect new companies’ valuations and can predict near-term performance.

Perception of CEO non-verbal behavior during IPO road show presentations was associated with higher valuations at each IPO stage, found Stanford’s Elizabeth Blankespoor, Greg Miller of University of Michigan, and University of North Carolina’s Brad Hendricks.
These findings underscore the importance of road show presentations and presenters’ credibility to investors, underwriters, analyst, and financial media.

Greg Miller

Blankespoor’s team noted that for most investors, the road show is the first time they see the CEO in the two-week interval between setting the initial proposed price and determining the final offer price.
As a result, Blankespoor and colleagues posit “a tight link between perceptions and valuation.”

Participants in their investigation were hired through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, a crowdsourcing task website, to view videotapes of CEOs presenting IPO roadshow, then to rate the speakers for competence, attractiveness, and trustworthiness.

Brad Hendricks

At least 40 people viewed each series of 30-second video clips from 224 actual road show presentations between 2011 and 2013, with modified audio to muffle words while retaining vocal pitch and rhythm.

After controlling for other factors that could affect stock price like CEO age, experience, and education, companies with higher-rated CEOs on a composite score of competence, attractiveness, and trustworthiness ratings received a larger price increase for the proposed offering price and the revised price for secondary markets.

Mechanical Turk For each 5% increase in CEO composite perception score, the final market price was 11% higher, and CEO perceived competence and attractiveness had a significant impact on firm valuation.
However, trustworthiness alone had no effect.

These initial perceptions also correlated with companies’ early performance, based on stock prices up to 12 months after the IPO, suggesting that “…investors … glean real additional information about the CEO from … nonverbal behavior and … perceptions of management are signals for firm value.”

Bloggers as well as traditional media outlets are important arbiters of CEO reputation.
In a commissioned analysis of 10 well-known institutional bloggers by the Gotham Research Group, perceptions of CEO authenticity were significantly related to bloggers’ evaluations of CEO competence and performance.

Candor, bluntness, fearlessness, specificity, plain words, examples from stories, warmth, frequent contact with customers and employees, and acknowledging challenges and worthy competitors are all essential to setting a credible tone, according to this report.

In fact, Public Relations firm Weber Shandwick noted that 49% of company reputation is attributed to CEO reputation, and 60% of market value is attributed to company reputation.
Perception of a CEO, the firm argues, has significant influence on market value, underscoring empirical findings by Blankespoor’s team.

-*What non-verbal behaviors and attributes signal “leadership” and “executive presence” to you?

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Four Leadership Behaviors Differentiate Top Performing Organizations

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Ralph M. Stogdill

Effective leadership is a critical part of organizational health and growth and an important driver of shareholder returns, according to Ohio State’s Ralph M. Stogdill with McKinsey’s Aaron De Smet, Bill Schaninger, with Matthew Smith.

Bill Schaninger

Consistent with this report, more than 90 percent of CEOs said they plan to increase investment in leadership development because they see it as their single most important human-capital issue, reported McKinsey’s Claudio Feser, Fernanda Mayol, and Ramesh Srinivasan.
However, only 43 percent of CEOs reported confidence that leadership training investments will render an acceptable ROI.

To more accurately target developable leadership behaviors associated with superior organizational performance, McKinsey identified 20 critical leadership traits then surveyed 189,000 people in 81 organizations of varying sizes across industries.

Claudio Feser

They segmented organizations by leadership effectiveness measured by McKinsey’s Organizational Health Index, and focused on companies in the top quartile and bottom quartile.

The team reported that four skills closely correlate with effective leadership and explained 89 percent of the variance in leadership effectiveness between top-performing organizations and lowest-performing organizations:

Effective problem solving by gathering, analyzing, and considering information before taking a decision,
Operating with a strong results orientation, developing and communicating a vision and setting objectives to efficiently achieve results,
Seeking different perspectives by monitoring trends affecting organizations and the external environment and by encouraging employees to suggest improvements,
Supporting others by demonstrating authenticity and sincere interest in colleagues to build trust and help others manage challenges.

Ramesh Srinivasan

A related post outlines other findings of top leadership competencies required for optimal organizational performance, including “Big Eight Competencies” described by Lominger’s Voices® 360˚ Assessment:

• Dealing with Ambiguity
• Creativity
• Innovation Management
• Strategic Agility
• Planning
• Motivating Others
• Building Effective Teams
• Managing Vision and Purpose.

-*Which leadership behaviors do you find most imperative?

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Power of “Powerless” Speech, but not Powerless Posture

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Assertive speech is assumed to signal competence and power, pre-requisites to status, power, and leadership in the U.S. workplace.

Alison Fragale

However, University of North Carolina’s Alison Fragale demonstrated that warmth trumps competence in collaborative team work groups.

Fragale studied “powerless speech,” which has been believed to make a person seem tentative, uncertain, and less likely to be promoted to expanded workplace roles.
She defined “powerless speech” as including:

Hesitation: “Well” or “Um”, as known as “clutter words”
Tag questions: “Don’t you think?”
Hedges: “Sort of” or “Maybe”
Disclaimers: “This may be a bad idea, but … “
Formal addresses:“Yes, sir” or “Yes, ma’am”

In collaboration-based work teams, “powerless” speech characteristics are significantly associated with being promoted, gaining status and power.
Interpersonal warmth and effective team skills are valued more than dominance and ambition by team members and those selecting leaders for these teams.

Paul Hersey

In contrast, “powerful” speech does not feature these characteristics, is more effective when the task or group is independent and people are expected to work alone.

Ken Blanchard

As in Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard’s Situational Leadership, Fragale concludes that communication style should be tailored to group characteristics.

Li Huang

Likewise, INSEAD’s Li Huang and Columbia’s Adam Galinsky with Lucia Guillory of Northwestern University demonstrated the impact of “powerful” body language – also called “playing big” – on perceived power.

Adam Galinsky

Although assuming “larger” postures is associated with credibility and authority, some situations benefit from assuming “smaller”, less powerful postures to establish warmth or to acknowledge another’s higher status.

Lucia Guillory

As noted in an earlier post, Women Get More Promotions With “Behavioral Flexibility”, careful self-observation and behavioral flexibility based on situational requirements are effective foundations to establish group leadership.

-*How do you monitor and adapt “powerless” speech to work situations?

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Leadership Qualities that Lead to the Corner Office?

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Adam Bryant

Adam Bryant, deputy national editor at the New York Times interviewed more than 200 CEOs of top companies for his column, and distilled the leadership qualities that moved them to The Corner Office: Indispensable and Unexpected Lessons from CEOs on How to Lead and Succeed :

Passionate curiosity, deep engagement with questioning mind and a balance of analytical and creative competencies
Confidence based on facing adversity, knowing capabilities
Collaboration, ability to “read” and shape team dynamics
Ability to translate complex to simple explanations
Fearlessness in acting on considered risks

These five characteristics augment qualities that might be considered “table stakes” – or “must-haves” for any leadership candidate:

Preparation
Patience
Navigating organizational obstacles
Building a team of diverse members by galvanizing with a clear mission and spending time with members

Bryant argues that these behavioral competencies may be developed through attentive effort, but he acknowledges that some people have greater natural predisposition and aptitude for these “ways of being.”

Lois Frankel

Lois Frankel’s earlier book, Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office: 101 Unconscious Mistakes Women Make That Sabotage Their Careers provided different recommendations for women seeking leadership roles, later empirically validated in research studies:

Act like a mature woman rather than a “girl”
Frame statements as assertions rather than questions
State and initiate a course of action, rather than waiting to request permission

In contrast, Bryant particularly advises women to “meet as many people as possible and build relationships because serendipity and chance encounters can lead to unplanned opportunities.”

Research organizations like Catalyst and Center for Talent Innovation conduct social science research to investigate these behavioral and attitudinal recommendations.

Both groups have questioned the applicability of mainstream recommendations in leadership development curricula when implemented by women, minorities and “people of color.”

Their continuing research agendas include analyzing the behavioral components of general recommendations such as “demonstrate gravitas” which the majority of top executives affirmed as “… critical for leadership. I can’t define it but I know if when I see it.”

These research organizations seek to more clearly define what these key executives see in critical leadership attributes like “gravitas” and to define them in replicable behavior terms.

-*Which leadership behaviors do you consider most important for any executive?
-*Which behavioral competencies are most crucial for aspiring women leaders?

Kathryn Welds, PhD | Curated Research + Commentary

Consulting Organizational Psychologist | Change Consultant | Leadership+Career Master Coach | Coach Supervisor+Mentor Coach |

Tag Archives: Leadership

Performance Excellence linked to Preventing Failures, Corrective Coaching

Creating Productive Thought Patterns

“Evolved” Leaders in an Era of Self-Interested Leadership

Developing “Big 8” Job Competencies

Developing Executive Self Awareness to Enhance Leadership Impact

“Derailing” Executive Personality Measures Predict Leadership Mishaps

Perception of CEOs’ Non Verbal Leadership Behaviors Affect IPO Valuations, Predict Financial Performance

Four Leadership Behaviors Differentiate Top Performing Organizations

Power of “Powerless” Speech, but not Powerless Posture

Leadership Qualities that Lead to the Corner Office?

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