Author: Tejas

What makes teams successful? – Google’s Project Aristotle came up with these five factors that matter

Post author By Tejas
Post date January 21, 2020
No Comments on What makes teams successful? – Google’s Project Aristotle came up with these five factors that matter

Google’s Project Aristotle. Google spent 2 years and enormous amounts of resources studying over 180 teams to figure out the answer to the question – What makes teams successful?

These are the five factors they found are essential to any high-performing team. The most important factor is “psychological safety,” a term coined by Harvard Professor Amy Edmonson. It affects organizational culture and team effectiveness

The Why of Google’s Project Aristotle

Individual brilliance vs. team effectiveness

Individual brilliance is great, but team cohesiveness is more important. Most of the work done today is in projects involving multiple people working in teams.

An article, published in The Harvard Business Review in Jan-Feb 2016, titled “Collaborative Overload,” states the following. Over the last two decades – ‘‘The time spent by managers and employees in collaborative activities has ballooned by 50 percent or more.’’

Talent management’s primary focus has been on measuring and managing individual performance. But it is not enough. Analyzing and improving individual performance does not translate into the performance of teams or workgroups. Hence the focus on what makes teams successful led to Google’s Project Aristotle.

To quote Michael Jordan – Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence win championships.

It is true in sports and business. In cohesive teams, the whole is a lot greater than the sum of its parts. When teams work in synergy, they achieve extraordinary performance.

In dysfunctional teams, it is vice versa. The whole ends up being a lot less than the sum of the parts. You can put a group of 6-10 high-performing individuals on a team. Yet, their performance together as a team may be disappointing; how a group of individuals performs together as a team is unpredictable at best.

Google’s Project Aristotle – What makes teams successful? What makes the team effective?

In 2012, Google set out to answer this important question – What makes teams successful? Google coined it “Google’s Project Aristotle.”

The name Google’s Project Aristotle comes from the Greek philosopher Aristotle’s quote – “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”

Obviously, this is not a new idea! Many companies, academicians, sociologists, and psychologists have attempted to find the answer to this exact question.

A lot of this previous research on what makes teams successful often included easy subjects. These experimental teams often comprised Graduate students – in an artificial college environment and not real-life work at the office.

However, Google wanted to study real work teams. With Google, things are a little different. Google is a very successful company with access to enormous amounts of resources.

They spent 2 years studying 180 real and diverse teams at Google. These were not experimental teams but were real teams doing “real” work in a corporate setting.

Google has a data-driven approach. Even when they are studying what makes people and teams click. Unlike many of the feel-good theories of management, Google relies on hard data and facts. They conducted over 200 interviews conducted. They analyzed over 250 different attributes of teams. They defined what comprised a team.

They also defined how to measure team effectiveness. They measured it in terms of the leader, team manager, and team members’ performance and opinions.

They collected both quantitative and qualitative data and used their brainpower to analyze the data. They sought to find the “algorithm” that would predict what makes teams successful.

The “recipe” for what makes teams successful

Google wanted to find a “recipe” for what makes teams successful. Initially, Google researchers thought that ingredients could be

put in a few of the high performers on the team
add an experienced manager
please give them a free pass to all resources

And the expectation was that you would have the output in terms of a high-performing team. Google found that this wasn’t true at all! No matter how many times they arranged and rearranged the data – they could not find a specific pattern that was unique to high performing teams!

The constitution of the team or its Geographical location didn’t matter a lot. Neither did the composition of the team matter much. What mattered more were the “team norms.” Team norms are how the teams interacted. Who was on the team didn’t matter much. Instead, how the teams worked together made the difference.

What factors didn’t matter a lot for the team’s effectiveness

To their surprise, Project Aristotle researchers discovered that several common factors thought to impact team performance and effectiveness DID NOT matter much.

The variables that didn’t matter much to the team’s effectiveness at Google:

The collocation of teammates (sitting together in the same office)
Consensus-driven decision making
Extroversion of team members
Individual performance of team members
Workload size
Seniority
Team size
Tenure

5 Factors common to effective teams at Google

Google found 5 factors common in their quest to answer – what makes teams successful.These five factors are listed below in the order of their importance.

Psychological safety:

Team members feel safe taking risks and being vulnerable in front of each other without the fear of being embarrassed, ridiculed, or facing any other consequences.

Psychological safety refers to an individual’s perception of the consequences of taking an interpersonal risk or a belief that a team is safe for risk-taking in the face of being seen as ignorant, incompetent, negative, or disruptive.

In a team with high psychological safety, teammates feel safe to take risks around their team members. They feel confident that no one on the team will embarrass or punish anyone else for admitting a mistake, asking a question, or offering a new idea.

Read an article on Psychological safety at work – Why you need it and how to develop it .

Dependability:

On dependable teams, members reliably complete quality work on time. The opposite of dependability is shirking responsibilities. Team members get things done on time and meet Google’s high bar for excellence.

Structure and clarity:

Team members have clear roles, plans, and goals. Every team member clearly understands job expectations. He/she also knows the process of fulfilling these expectations. The consequences of the individual team member’s performance are also clear.

They can set goals individually or at a group level. The goals must be specific, challenging, and attainable. Google often uses Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) to help set and communicate short and long-term goals.

Meaning:

Finding a sense of purpose in either the work itself or the output is important for team effectiveness. Work is personally important and meaningful to the team members. The meaning of work is personal and can vary amongst many factors. These factors can be: financial security, supporting family, helping the team succeed, or self-expression for each individual.

Impact:

Teams have to feel that their work and their output are making a difference. When teams see their efforts contributing to the organization’s goals, they feel that their work impacts. Team members believe that their work matters to the company and the customers.

Image credit – https://rework.withgoogle.com/print/guides/5721312655835136/

How to apply the learning of Google’s Project Aristotle to your teams at our organization?

Google’s research team wanted team members to understand what was going on with their teams. So they created a survey for teams to take and discuss amongst themselves. Survey items were questions based on the five factors of team effectiveness. Your team can use these same questions in your organization.

Psychological safety – “If I make a mistake on our team, it is not held against me.”

Dependability – “When my teammates say they’ll do something, they follow through with it.”

Structure and Clarity – “Our team has an effective decision-making process.”

Meaning – “The work I do for our team is meaningful to me.”

Impact – “I understand how our team’s work contributes to the organization’s goals.”

After everyone on the team had anonymously completed the survey, the scores were shared with the team. A facilitator would be present to start a dialogue and a discussion to understand the survey scores’ details and plan to improve team effectiveness.

Our team coaching helps your teams improve on the Five factors of team effectiveness.

Learn more about our team coaching process that delivers measurable and guaranteed team growth.

Read: Team coaching – Everything you wanted to know about it.

Amy Edmondson’s research on “psychological safety.”

Harvard professor and organizational behavior researcher Amy Edmondson coined the term psychological safety. She defines psychological safety as “a shared belief held by team members that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.”

How to measure psychological safety?

Amy Edmondson observed that the level of psychological safety varied considerably, even on teams within the same organization.

She has devised a 7 question survey to measure the level of psychological safety within a team. Team members anonymously answer these questions on a scale of 1 to 7. Here are the 7 questions.

If you make a mistake on this team, it is often held against you.
Members of this team can bring up problems and tough issues.
People on this team sometimes reject others for being different.
It is safe to take a risk on this team.
It is difficult to ask other members of this team for help.
No one on this team would deliberately act in a way that undermines my efforts.
Working with members of this team, my unique skills and talents are valued and utilized.

FREE team assessments

We are happy to offer a FREE assessment for your first team based on the five factors of team effectiveness. We also offer the psychological safety assessment, FREE for your first team.

The teams with a higher level of psychological safety outperform teams with a low level of psychological safety. The FREE assessment allows you to gauge the level and work on improving psychological safety, usually through a team coaching process.

If you would like to take advantage of the complimentary assessments, click below to schedule a quick conversation and get the process started

Click the button below.

SCHEDULE NOW!

Watch the webinar: Webinar on Google’s Secret Recipe to Build a High-Performance Team

Conlusion of Google’s Project Aristotle

Google spent a lot of time and used its enormous resources to provide a research-based answer to the question of what makes teams successful. They also studied “real work teams” at Google. To their surprise, the team constitution (who was on the team) didn’t matter a whole lot.

What mattered was how the team members interacted – or the team norms or culture. They found five factors common to effective teams at Google.

The most significant factor was “psychological safety” – a term coined by Harvard researcher Amy Edmonson. The 7-question survey and ensuing discussion with a facilitator are the best way to improve your teams’ effectiveness.

Google’s Project Aristotle in the new normal

In 2020, the world faced an unprecedented crisis of the Covid pandemic.

For a few months, the world came to a standstill. Eventually, companies figured out ways to let employees work from home. They installed the required technology and processes to allow remote teams to work together.

Is Google’s Project Aristotle relevant in the new normal? I want to discuss a couple of interesting factors from the study.

The collocation of teammates (sitting together in the same office): Google found that teammates’ collocation didn’t impact team effectiveness much. It wasn’t in the top five factors that impacted team effectiveness.

Due to the pandemic, a large number of employees are working from home. Although working from home is a work in progress, whether the team works in the same office or works from home shouldn’t be much of a team effectiveness factor. This is an interesting point.

As of March 2021, many companies are considering a hybrid workplace – in-person plus remote work. While many companies are concerned about the productivity and effectiveness of remote teams, it shouldn’t be a significant factor, especially after the processes and habits have been installed properly.

Psychological safety is even more important in the new normal: Google found that psychological safety was the linchpin of the five factors that impact team effectiveness. Psychological safety is even more important to help teams collaborate during the pandemic and thrive in the new normal. The pandemic has caused disruptions and uncertainty, which increase the need for team learning and team collaboration. Without a climate of psychological safety, team members may have difficulty sharing their concerns, ideas, and issues. Without psychological safety, remote teams may remain ineffective. The culprit, in such a case, is not the remote work or remote teams. The lack of psychological safety on the teams is whether the teams are remote teams or collocated teams.

New normal needs a new kind of leadership

The pandemic has drastically changed the way we work. Many remote workers and remote teams are likely to stay remote even after the crisis is over; the new normal needs a new kind of leadership. The new normal requires rapid learning, quickly adapting, and using the entire team’s collective intelligence to stay ahead of disruptions.

Are your leaders prepared?

In other words, the new normal needs a culture of psychological safety. Are your leaders ready to not just survive but thrive in the new normal? Are you supporting your leaders to adapt to lead in the new normal? Or are you taking the sink-or-swim approach?

Taking a sink-or-swim approach can be costly. Rapid disruptions create both threats and opportunities. Taking advantage of the opportunities and avoiding the threats requires a leadership that is prepared. Please don’t leave it to chance. Support your leaders with our leadership and team coaching programs and set them up for success!

Watch the webinar: Building Your Leaders to THRIVE in a post-Covid World.

Set up your leaders and teams for success in the new normal

Our team coaching delivers guaranteed and measurable growth in team effectiveness.

We offer stakeholder-centered team coaching that delivers a measurable and guaranteed improvement in team effectiveness.

Team coaching is a very effective and cost-efficient way to grow leaders, change teams, and develop the organizational culture that ensures that teams deliver results.

TEAM coaching engagements create measurable leadership growth for the leader and the team using our unique process.

Benefits of team coaching

Resource-efficient

Since one executive coach works with all team members supporting each other in this TEAM coaching process, the whole coaching program is very time efficient. It reduces coaching investment per team member while still delivering a majority of the benefits of 1:1 coaching for the leader. For the cost of a group training program, you can deliver team coaching for your leaders and teams.

Changing leaders and teams at the same time and culture

The team articulates one leadership growth area, and each team member defines their leadership growth area that relates to the team focus. This creates an interdependent team effort, focusingon producing results for their effectiveness and team productivity simultaneously.

Create a Team culture of openness to continuous change

When team members collaborate as stakeholders in the TEAM coaching programs, it creates an open culture for leadership and team culture change. Team members feel comfortable using feedback and feedforward to drive change for themselves and their teams.

Insider expertise

Team members should provide expert advice and an insider view of each other related to their business, their people, and their team culture challenges. They become de facto coaches. It also allows the organization to utilize the collective intelligence of the team members.

Coaching culture is a leadership skill.

Some organizations use coaching as an ‘executive intervention’ or to ‘fix a problem,’ but this is a suboptimal approach to coaching. Coaching is a leadership skill, and leaders in organizations should be skilled coaches to help their teams develop and grow. As we expect effective leaders to be highly skilled in, e.g., communication, decision-making, and empowerment, leaders should be highly skilled in coaching others. TEAM coaching is a great program to instill coaching as a leadership skill in the organization.

We offer our New Age Leadership – NAL Triple Advantage Leadership Coaching.

That delivers guaranteed and measurable leadership growth. It is based on a stakeholder-centered coaching process with a 95% effectiveness rate (in a study of 11000 leaders on 4 continents). It is used by companies ranging from startups to 150 Fortune 500 companies to develop their leaders.

Here are some of the salient benefits of NAL Triple Advantage Leadership Coaching

Time and resource-efficient: The leader does not have to leave work to attend training programs. We go to the leader and her team. And it only takes 1.5 hours per month. The rest of the time, the leader is working to implement with her team.

Separate and customized improvement areas for each leader: Every leader is different. A one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t work. Individual development areas for each leader aligned with the business strategy.

Involves entire team: Unlike most leadership programs, NAL Triple Advantage Leadership Coaching involves the leader’s entire team, and it has a cascading effect – increasing the team’s effectiveness and improving organizational culture.

The leader becomes the coach: for continuous improvement for leaders themselves and their teams. It is like kaizen for your leadership development.

Cost-Effective: Our entire one-year coaching engagement often costs less than sending the leader to a short-duration leadership program at any reputed B school.

Guaranteed and measurable leadership growth: as assessed – not by us – but anonymously rated by the leader’s own team members.

Pay us only after we deliver results! : We work with many of our clients on a pay-for-results basis. What does it mean? If the leaders don’t improve, you don’t have to pay us.

Schedule an exploratory 15-minute conversation with our leadership adviser today

Click the button below.

SCHEDULE NOW!

References

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-learned-from-its-quest-to-build-the-perfect-team.html

https://hbr.org/2016/01/collaborative-overload

https://rework.withgoogle.com/print/guides/5721312655835136/

Tags Amy Edmonson's pioneering work on psychological safety, Building and Leading High Performance Teams, Developing and Leading High-Performance Teams, effective organizational culture transformation, Effectiveness coaching programs in India, effectiveness Team coaching programs in India, Google effective teams project Aristotle, Google's Project Aristotle, Leading High-Performing Teams Program, Program for building high performance teams, Team coaching programs in India

Leadership

Simon Sinek quotes – must read for leaders

Post author By Tejas
Post date January 16, 2020
No Comments on Simon Sinek quotes – must read for leaders

Most inspiring Simon Sinek quotes. Carefully chosen and curated quotes by Simon Sinek. Simon Sinek quotes on leadership are the most insightful. Simon Sinek is a bestselling author and an inspiring motivational speaker. Two of his books Start with Why, and Why Leaders Eat Last are best sellers on many lists like the New York Times and Amazon.

Here are 21 of the best quotes by Simon Sinek, carefully chosen, and curated for you.

Quotes by Simon Sinek 1-10

1. If you hire people just because they can do a job, they’ll work for your money. But if you hire people who believe what you believe, they’ll work for you with blood, sweat, and tears.

2. People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.

3. The great leaders are not the strongest, they are the ones who are honest about their weaknesses. The great leaders are not the smartest; they are the ones who admit how much they don’t know. The great leaders can’t do everything; they are the ones who look to others to help them. Great leaders don’t see themselves as great; they see themselves as human.

4. Confidence is believing in yourself. Arrogance is telling others you are better than they are. Confidence inspires. Arrogance destroys.

5. Leadership requires two things: a vision of the world that does not yet exist and the ability to communicate it.

6. Don’t show up to prove. Show up to improve.

7. The goal is not to do business with everybody who needs what you have. The goal is to do business with people who believe what you believe.

8. There are only two ways to influence human behavior: you can manipulate it or you can inspire it.

9. Value is not determined by those who set the price. Value is determined by those who choose to pay it.

10. As the Zen Buddhist saying goes, how you do anything is how you do everything.

Simon Sinek leadership quotes 11-21 continue below

He is an exceptional speaker and his TED talks and YouTube videos are amongst the most-watched list. Two of his must-watch talks are listed below.

How great leaders inspire action

Why good leaders make you feel safe

Quotes by Simon Sinek 11-21

11. It is better to disappoint people with the truth than to appease them with a lie.

12. When people are financially invested, they want a return. When people are emotionally invested, they want to contribute.

13. What good is an idea if it remains an idea? Try. Experiment. Iterate. Fail. Try again. Change the world.

14. There is a difference between listening and waiting for your turn to speak.

15. If you want to be a great leader, remember to treat all people with respect at all times. For one, because you never know when you’ll need their help. And two, because it’s a sign you respect people, which all great leaders do.

16. To succeed takes more than the desire to win. It also takes the acceptance that we could fail.

17. A team is not a group of people who work together. A team is a group of people who trust each other.

18. If you want to feel happy, do something for yourself. If you want to feel fulfilled, do something for someone else.

19. A leader’s job is not to do the work for others; it’s to help others figure out how to do it themselves, to get things done and to succeed beyond what they thought possible.

20. Always plan for the fact that no plan ever goes according to plan.

21. Some see risk as a reason not to try. Some see it as an obstacle to overcome. The risk is the same; to try or not depends on your perspective.

If you are enjoying reading these Simon Sinek quotes, you will love the following quotes

Read : Quotes by John Maxwell- Galvanizing & Encouraging

Read : Insightful and inspiring quotes from Tony Robbins

Leadership

How to use the compound effect to supercharge leadership development?

Post author By Tejas
Post date January 8, 2020
No Comments on How to use the compound effect to supercharge leadership development?

What is the compound effect? What does leadership development have to do with the compound effect? Find out how to use the compound effect to supercharge leadership development. Use, Marshall Goldsmith leadership coaching with the power of the compound effect for leadership development for leaders in your organization.

A hypothetical example to illustrate the power of the compound effect

Consider this hypothetical example that illustrates the power of the compound effect. Imagine that I have offered you freelance programming work. You have two options to get paid.

Two options – small improvements consistently vs. staying the same

Option 1 is to get paid $10 per week. However, if you improve your skills by 10% a week, your salary will proportionately increase by 10% every single week.

This option requires you to improve your skills on a weekly basis. Not a huge jump in the skill level, but small, continuous, and constant improvements.

Option 2 is to get paid a fixed amount of $5000 per month. With this option, there is no need for any improvement in skills. There are no additional increases either – the salary stays the same.

Which option would you choose? Here is the table detailing the accumulated total salary for both options.

Which option would you choose?

At the end of the first month, option 1 would give you a total salary of $51. While option 2 would fetch you a cool $5,000.

Months two and three are equally depressing for option 1 – with a total salary of $126 and $235 respectively at the end of months two and three. At the end of 3 months, option 1 will get you a meagerly amount of $235. Option 2 would fetch you a cool $15,000.

At the end of 1 year, option 1 would add up to $15541 while option 2 is still way ahead with $60,000. Still lagging option 2 by a significant amount.

The power of the compound effect

However, by the end of the 16th month, option 1 has caught up to option 1 – with $86,762 vs. $80,000 for option 2!

And by the end of the 24th-month option 1 has compounded to a cool $2.2 million while option 2 is lagging way behind with a meager sum of $120,000.

How does the compound effect relate to our behaviors and leadership development?

Here are a few real-life options to consider.

What if you ate a chocolate bar a day for a year? What if you instead exercised 20 minutes a day for a year?

What if you watched TV for 1 hour a day for an entire year? What if instead, you read 10 pages of a good book a day for a year?

You would get completely different results.

Small choices + consistency + time = significant results

Seemingly small choices made daily don’t appear to make any difference in the short term. But consistently making the small choices add up to drastically different outcomes over time. That is the power of the compound effect.

Read: Leadership practice make you a better leader? Right? Wrong! Deliberate practice does!

Leadership development and the compound effect

Leadership development is no different! Small changes in leadership behaviors applied consistently over 12-18 months add up to extraordinary results!

We offer Marshall Goldsmith’s stakeholder centered executive coaching for leadership development that capitalizes on the principle of the compound effect. Why is coaching important for leadership development? How is it beneficial?

Leadership coaching is the most effective way to ensure that leadership improvement takes place. Executive education and training programs help in creating awareness for change – however behavior change requires customized solutions, consistent follow-up, and accountability.

Executive coaching provides it by design. Marshall Goldsmith executive coaching is one of the best leadership development programs available in India and worldwide through a network of over 3000 certified coaches who provide the same consistent executive coaching process used by many of the Fortune 500 companies for their leadership development coaching programs.

Read: How to become a better leader? What does it take?

What exactly is Marshall Goldsmith stakeholder centered executive coaching?

Here are the key defining points of Marshall Goldsmith’s stakeholder centered executive coaching process.

Help leaders to grow their leadership behavior effectiveness

Leadership behavior effectiveness is making the leader aware of his behaviors and their impact on the team members. Behavior change helps establish better relationships, better employee engagement and improved performance of the team.

It also includes rectifying derailing behaviors. These are the annoying behaviors of otherwise good leaders. Often such behaviors become a hindrance to smooth team functioning.

Marshall Goldsmith stakeholder centered coaching helps leaders improve their own derailing behaviors and change the perception of the team members.

Often people get promoted to a higher role with little support. This is often because of business emergencies like an urgent project or a senior leader leaving the organization.

Leadership coaching helps leaders transition into a higher role. It also helps the leader transition across into another role within the company – when such a need arises.

Through Feedback / Feedforward from Stakeholders on the Job

Feedback allows the leader to realize the blind spots that may act as their leadership bottlenecks. Most leaders have one or more poor leadership behavior that they may not be aware of.

Such toxic leadership behaviors often end up hurting the engagement and the performance of the leader’s team. However, once they receive feedback, most of the focus is on feed-forward. Feed-forward is asking for suggestions from team members (stakeholders) for improvement for the future.

This takes the focus away from the past – which cannot be changed, to the future – which can be improved if the leader acts of stakeholder’s suggestions.

Coaching the executive and improving on poor or toxic leadership behaviors creates effective teams and organizational culture that promotes employee engagement and performance.

As acknowledged by the stakeholders

Stakeholders are the leader’s team members who interact frequently with the leader. They are at the receiving end of the leader’s behaviors.

They are the “customers” of the leadership product. No one else is in a better position than the stakeholders to assess whether the leadership behaviors are good. They can also assess whether the behaviors are improving. In the Marshall Goldsmith stakeholder centered executive coaching process, as the name suggests, stakeholders are at the center.

Ultimately, they decide whether the leader has improved her behaviors. This is done through an anonymous survey. We consider a leader has improved, not because the leader says he has improved, or the coach says he has improved, but only when the stakeholders (through an anonymous survey) confirm that the leader has improved!

Using a well-defined process/system for 12-18 months

Marshall Goldsmith’s stakeholder centered executive coaching process is a well-defined and tried and tested process. We design it to appeal to the leader’s ways of thinking and leverage it to help the leaders improve. It is also a process that has been used to coach over 400,000 executives in over 60 countries – including executives from 150 of the Fortune 500 companies. The process is highly effective. In a survey of 11,000 leaders on four continents, over 95% of the leaders using the stakeholder centered process improved. Marshall Goldsmith stakeholder centered executive coaching usually lasts from a minimum of six months up to a year and a half.

The compound effect of Marshall Goldsmith Stakeholder Centered Leadership Coaching

Day by day and week by week, small changes in the leader’s behaviors – based on the suggestions given by stakeholders – don’t seem like much, but compounded over the period of 12-18 months, they help the leader significantly improve her leadership effectiveness. That is the power of compounding applied to leadership coaching using the Marshall Goldsmith stakeholder centered leadership coaching process!

Here are some features of the Marshall Goldsmith executive coaching program

Guaranteed, measurable leadership growth as assessed–not by us–but by the leader’s own stakeholders.
In addition, unlike leadership training or executive education programs, it will involve the entire team while doing their day to day work.
The leader becomes the coach, and it has a cascading effect on the team increasing team effectiveness and improving organizational culture.
It is a system for continuous improvement for leaders themselves and their teams – although it is leadership coaching for an individual leader; they realize the benefit of team coaching through the involvement of the entire team.
In a study of 11,000 leaders on 4 continents–95% of the leaders using this leadership coaching process improved!
This is the exact same executive coaching process that is used by 150 of the Fortune 500 companies to grow their leaders through CEO coaching and leadership coaching at C-suite levels
We are so confident of the process we work on a no growth no pay basis (don’t try that with other vendors, lol!)

Schedule an exploratory 15-minute conversation with our leadership adviser today

Click the button below

SCHEDULE NOW!

Or email us on

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Tags Leadership Coaching for Effective Team, leadership coaching for team, Leadership Coaching for Team Building, leadership coaching programs, Leadership development and the compound effect, leadership development coaching, Leadership Development Coaching Program, leadership skills Coaching Program, program for leadership development

Leadership

How can leaders inspire extreme ownership and transform organizational culture?

Post author By Tejas
Post date January 6, 2020
No Comments on How can leaders inspire extreme ownership and transform organizational culture?

What is extreme ownership? As a leader would you like to inspire an organizational culture of “extreme ownership” in your team members? What kind of organizational culture would it create for your teams? What can it do for team performance and team effectiveness? How will it help improve your leaders in 2020 and spark an organizational culture transformation in your organization?

Ramadi, the hot spot of insurgency during the Iraq war

In the spring of 2006, Jocko Willink, a Navy seal for US armed forces, was stationed in Ramadi, Iraq. Ramadi was the hotspot of insurgency in post-war Iraq. Terrorists controlled the Ramadi area by any means necessary – urban warfare, torture, murders, and even rapes. US forces suffered heavy casualties as the terrorists were improvising and using advanced tactics. Jocko Willink and Leif Babin’s Navy SEAL unit faced an impossible mission: help U.S. forces secure Ramadi, a city deemed “all but lost.”

The unfortunate incident that inspired extreme ownership

One morning Jocko was in charge of an operation in a suburb of Ramadi. It was a combined and complex operation involving the navy seals, US army soldiers, and US marines. Their instruction was to clear outbuildings and set up positions to fight the enemy. Friendly Iraqi soldiers were to arrive later to provide additional support.

Jocko’s team, the navy seals were engaged in a heavy gunfight while attempting to evacuate a particular building. Jocko heard on the radio that a friendly Iraqi soldier was shot. The team immediately called in for the support of heavily armored ground troops and air support to strike that particular building. With the morning fog came the fog of war – bringing with it the chaos and the confusion – gunfire, enemy attacks, screaming, wounded and bloodied soldiers, and even death.

A big mistake

Even through this confusion, Jocko’s gut instinct told him that something wasn’t right. He called in to hold off on the airstrike and went to the building to assess the situation himself. He discovered that the navy seal team wasn’t firing on the enemy, but firing on their own men inside the building! Call it the confusion of war, an error of judgment, bad luck or even blame it on Murphy’s law – But Jocko’s team had committed one of the cardinal crimes of war – firing on their own people! The causalities were one Iraqi soldier dead, two wounded, one navy seal injured and everyone on the team shaken!

When Jocko went back to the command center, he found an email waiting from his commanding officer asking him to shut down all operations and wait for them to arrive at the scene. Unfortunately, the email had arrived just after he had left to go to the scene of the event and check things himself. Now Jocko had to report the incident up the chain of command, and there would be a postmortem done.

Who was at fault? Pass on the blame or take extreme ownership?

The senior officers were determined to find out what went wrong and who was responsible. Jocko had to be ready for his debriefing. He understood that someone had to be held accountable and would be fired for this horrible incident. He went over the details of the terrible incident to figure out what may have caused this grave error in the planning and execution of this mission. He found that there was plenty of blame to go around!

But he didn’t feel that it was the right thing to do. He wondered what would happen to the morale of the team if he pointed fingers at some of the team members whose actions may have contributed to this grave incident. When he was just minutes away from the debriefing, he suddenly realized whose fault it was. There was a single person responsible for this entire mess.

When he walked into the debriefing room, the senior officers and his team members, including the wounded navy seals, were eagerly waiting for his answers. Jocko’s commanding officers and his team members may have expected finger-pointing and blame to be passed on to others. Commanding officers may have been ready to “investigate” him and team members may have been ready to “defend” themselves.

Extreme Ownership

Jocko said that he knew that there was a single person he had identified who was responsible for this unfortunate and horrible incident. Who was that person? Jocko said that it was his OWN fault. As the leader in charge of the operation, he took complete and full responsibility for the incident. If the seniors thought that he should be fired, he was ready to accept the punishment. He understood clearly that if his team had to put things behind and bounce back to normal, he himself had to take complete and total responsibility. But when Jocko took “extreme ownership” and complete blame, something strange started happening!

Inspiring Extreme Ownership in others

One after another, the team members raised their hands and shouted that it was their fault! “I didn’t keep the Iraqi soldiers updated of our mission.” “I didn’t pass the information over the radio quick enough.” “I didn’t identify my target correctly and shot an Iraqi soldier.” Many of the team members admitted to their role that may have caused things to get out of hand. Instead of passing on the blame or defending themselves, the team members were taking responsibility for their own actions!

Jocko didn’t get fired! Because Jocko had taken full responsibility, the team members trusted him even more than before. Their respect for Jocko had increased. They realized that Jocko really “had their back” and would never dodge responsibility and would never pass the blame. When their leader took “extreme ownership” it inspired the team to take ownership instead of passing on the blame.

Imagine what would have happened if Jocko had passed on the blame to other members on the team. Would it have inspired ownership? Would it have helped build trust? Would the team’s subsequent performance be hampered? That is the difference between a leader taking complete responsibility and ownership – even when there are things that are out of the leader’s control – vs. leader passing on the blame and creating a toxic leadership culture.

Jocko then promised to everyone that he would never let this happen under his watch. He outlined his plan – new tactics, new procedures, and new training – to ensure that this never happened again.

Extreme Ownership is a game-changer in 2020

What a leader does when things go wrong, can either inspire an organizational culture of ownership or instigate an organizational culture of blame and passing the buck. As a leader, don’t make excuses. Don’t pass on the blame. Don’t let your ego get the better of you. Swallow your pride. Even when there are situations and circumstances that are beyond your control, take complete responsibility! For everything! Your mistakes, your shortcomings, and team results. Don’t we take complete responsibility for successes as a leader? Why not take complete responsibility for the problems and failures?

In battle and in business as well as in life – a leader must take “extreme ownership”. It is a game-changer! It inspires the team members to do the same. It transforms team culture. It lights the fire in people to take their performance to the next level. It is a leadership super-power!

Read: Leadership development plan example template – a real-life case study

How do your extreme ownership as your organization culture?

Would you like the leaders in your organization to become better leaders? Take more responsibility and ownership instead of passing the buck? Even extreme ownership like Jocko Willink did? We help leaders do just that – take ownership of their behaviors and outcomes through the process of feedback and feed-forward using Dr. Marshall Goldsmith’s stakeholder centered leadership coaching.

Why is coaching important in leadership development? How is it beneficial? Leadership coaching is the most effective way to ensure that leadership improvement takes place. That leader takes ownership and responsibility for her behavior and results. Executive education and training programs help in creating awareness for change – however behavior change requires customized solutions and consistent follow-up and accountability, which executive coaching provides by its design.

Marshall Goldsmith executive coaching is one of the best leadership development programs available in India and worldwide through a network of more than 3500 coaches who provide the same consistent executive coaching process that has been used by many of the Fortune 500 companies for their leadership development coaching programs.

We offer Marshall Goldsmith coaching in India, the middle east, and southeast Asia. It is the best coaching program in India because it is exactly the same executive coaching process used by Marshall Goldsmith to coach CEOs of Fortune 500 companies worldwide and we guarantee measurable leadership growth or you don’t pay at all.

Here are some of the features of Marshall Goldsmith executive coaching program

Guaranteed, measurable leadership growth as assessed – not by us – but by the leader’s own stakeholders
Unlike leadership training or executive education programs, the entire team will be involved while doing their day to day work
The leader becomes the coach and it has a cascading effect on the team increasing the team effectiveness and improving organizational culture
It is a system for continuous improvement for leaders themselves and their teams – although it is leadership coaching for the individual leader, the benefit of team coaching is realized through the involvement of the entire team
In a study of 11,000 leaders on 4 continents – 95% of the leaders using this leadership coaching process improved!
This is the exact same executive coaching process that has been used by 150 of the Fortune 500 companies to grow their leaders through CEO coaching and leadership coaching at C-suite levels
We are so confident of the process that we work on a no growth no pay basis (don’t try that with other vendors, lol!)

Schedule an exploratory 15-minute conversation with our leadership adviser today

Click the button below

SCHEDULE NOW!

Or call/WhatsApp on

For India : +91-6352681614

For USA : +1-772-801-6109

References

Book – Extreme ownership

Deliberate practice article by James Clear – https://jamesclear.com/deliberate-practice-theory

Tags Business & Leadership Coaching, Leadership Coaching for Effective Team, leadership coaching for team, leadership coaching programs, leadership development coaching, One-on-One Executive Coaching, One-on-One Leadership Coaching, Online Leadership Coaching Course, Organizational & Leadership Coaching

Leadership

Leadership practice make you a better leader? Right? Wrong! Deliberate practice does!

Post author By Tejas
Post date December 17, 2019
2 Comments on Leadership practice make you a better leader? Right? Wrong! Deliberate practice does!

Does practice make you better? Does leadership practice make you a better leader? Well, mostly not! For example, doctors 20 years into their career are no better in their skills than doctors who are only 5 years into their careers.

When you are a novice, you get better with practice. But only till you reach a satisfactory level of performance. After that point, more practice doesn’t make you any better, whether it is clinical practice, leadership practice or anything else. Unless you use the deliberate practice!

Deliberate leadership practice makes you a better leader! Deliberate practice makes you perfect in anything you want to get better at.

Does leadership practice make you better?

We all know the adage – practice makes you perfect. Does it really? If you have been a doctor for 20 years, you have 20 years of practice under your belt.

Would you not be better than doctors who only have been practicing for 5 years? Obviously the more the practice, the better you are supposed to get.

A study concluded that doctors 20 years into their career are no better in their skills than doctors who are only 5 years into their careers.

What could be the reason for this? When you are a novice, you get better with practice. But only till you reach a satisfactory level of performance. After that point, more practice doesn’t make you any better, whether it is clinical practice, leadership practice or anything else.

Unless you use the deliberate practice! Deliberate leadership practice makes you a better leader! Deliberate practice makes you better at anything. Read on to find out more about deliberate practice.

A study by Anders Ericsson

Eminent researcher and psychologist Anders conducted some research on the effect of practice on performance. He recruited Steve Faloona, an undergraduate student from Carnegie Mellon University to conduct an experiment on deliberate practice.

For a period of one hour, Steve had to listen to a string of random digits and try to recall and repeat the digits only from his memory. He started with recalling 6 digits. When he was successful in recalling 6 digits for a few repetitions, he would then get 7 digit strings to recall.

In case he had difficulty recalling 7 digits for a few repetitions, he would go back to recalling only 6 digits. Thus Steve was always pushing his limits and working at the end of his comfort zone.

We estimate the short term or working memory to hold just 7 bits of information and Steve could soon recall 7 digit numbers with ease. Then he sort of hit a wall and had difficulty recalling 8 digit strings of numbers.

It would frustrate him, but he kept coming back week after week and practicing for an hour. Then, one day, he had a breakthrough – he went from being able to recall 7 digits to recalling 8, 9, 10 and even 11 digit numbers by the end of that single one-hour session!

This pattern of hitting a wall, getting frustrated, still continuing the practice, and then suddenly getting a breakthrough happened routinely as he kept working on trying to recall more and more digits from his working memory.

He got stuck at being able to recall 22 digits, then suddenly hit a breakthrough. The same thing happened at 34 digits and so on. By the end of his 200th session, Steve was able to recall numbers that were 82 digits long! That is 75 more digits and seven times longer strings of numbers than the perceived limitations of human memory estimated at 7 bits of information!

The remarkable results of deliberate practice

Anders credits the four components of deliberate practice for this remarkable achievement by Steve and Dario. As a result of the deliberate practice using the 4 steps, Steve’s brain came up with creative ways of thinking and remembering the digits of the numbers. One such idea was to think of the numbers attached to the branch of a tree.

Another idea was to see the 4 digits of a long number as a single chunk. When he was recalling 22 digit numbers, he had learned to chunk 6 digit numbers together. Without deliberate practice involving these 4 steps, it is difficult for the brain to come up with new techniques and it is not possible to achieve such breakthroughs.

Anders repeated the same experiment with Dario, who was Steve’s friend. Dario learned much faster and was able to remember 20 digit numbers within just a few sessions. Why?

Because Steve had taught him how to use his mental representations and techniques! Dario also developed some of his own techniques. With the head start of Steve’s techniques and coming up with some of his own, Dario was able to recall 100 digit numbers!

Therein lies the second amazing idea for performance improvement. Get a coach! Anders Ericsson had found this to be the formula for breakthrough performance improvement.

What is Deliberate Practice?

According to author James Clear – “Deliberate practice refers to a special type of practice that is purposeful and systematic. While regular practice might include mindless repetitions, deliberate practice requires focused attention and is conducted with the specific goal of improving performance.”

Well-defined goal and motivation to achieve it
Intense focus and repeated practice
Immediate feedback – You cannot manage what you don’t measure – Peter Drucker. Feedback requires that we measure and compare each repetition with the previous one and work on getting just a little better.
Working at the end of the comfort zone – stretch or growth zone, and not hitting the panic zone

Read: How to become a better leader? What does it take? or How leaders become leaders – Why what you know about leadership development may be wrong!

The Four components of deliberate practice

1. A well-defined short term goal

The goal for Steve was obvious. When he was able to successfully recall 12 digits, recalling 13 digits was immediately the next goal.

2. Practice sessions with an intense focus

He consistently practiced recalling the digits one hour per day.

3. Immediate feedback

Steve received immediate feedback whether he got the digits right or not.

4. Working at the edge of the comfort zone

When Steve extended his abilities to remember 10 digit numbers, he would move up to recalling 11 digits. On the other hand, if he failed to recall a 10 digit number for a few times, he would move down to recalling 9 digit numbers. The growth zone lies between the comfort zone and the panic zone. Steve was consistently working within his growth zone.

Our Marshall Goldsmith stakeholder centered coaching – MGSCC for short – uses these two concepts perfectly, deliberate leadership practice and services of an executive coach.

Deliberate leadership practice and having a coach!

That probably is the reason that Marshall Goldsmith stakeholder centered executive coaching has a success rate of 95% and is considered the best executive coaching program in India and around the world. Executive coaching is available through a network of more than 3500 coaches who provide the same consistent executive coaching process that has been used by many of the Fortune 500 companies for their leadership development coaching programs.

Read: Top elements of leadership development

This executive coaching uses the four components of deliberate practice along with a leadership coach.

Focus on one or two specific areas of improvement instead of talking about general principles and theories of leadership
Intense focus on improving just these two areas – focus delivers results.
Using stakeholders to get immediate feedback and reinforcement – there can be little improvement without measurement and feedback.
Growth lies outside of the comfort zone! When leaders practice their new behaviors to get better, it is uncomfortable in the beginning. But with enough practice and feedback, these behaviors become second nature for the leader. They become part of the skill set of the leader.

Here are some of the features of Marshall Goldsmith executive coaching program

Guaranteed, measurable leadership growth as assessed – not by us – but by the leader’s own stakeholders
Unlike leadership training or executive education programs, the entire team will be involved while doing their day to day work
The leader becomes the coach and it has a cascading effect on the team increasing the team effectiveness and improving organizational culture
It is a system for continuous improvement for leaders themselves and their teams – although it is leadership coaching for the individual leader, the benefit of team coaching is realized through the involvement of the entire team
In a study of 11,000 leaders on 4 continents – 95% of the leaders using this leadership coaching process improved!
This is the exact same executive coaching process that has been used by 150 of the Fortune 500 companies to grow their leaders through CEO coaching and leadership coaching at C-suite levels
We are so confident of the process that we work on a no growth no pay basis (don’t try that with other vendors, lol!)

Schedule an exploratory 15-minute conversation with our leadership adviser today

Click the button below

SCHEDULE NOW!

Or call/WhatsApp on

For India : +91-6352681614

For USA : +1-772-801-6109

Tags Business & Leadership Coaching, executive leadership coaching, leadership coaching for team, leadership coaching programs, One-on-One Executive Coaching, One-on-One Leadership Coaching, Online Leadership Coaching Course, Organizational & Leadership Coaching

Leadership

John Wooden quotes – 21 timeless and memorable lessons from the legendary coach

Post author By Tejas
Post date December 6, 2019
No Comments on John Wooden quotes – 21 timeless and memorable lessons from the legendary coach

John Wooden quotes – 21 timeless and memorable lessons from the legendary coach

John Wooden quotes – the coach with the highest winning percentage in the history of US college basketball and his wisdom through his quotes.

John Wooden was an American basketball player and head coach at the University of California UCLA, Los Angeles. He won ten NCAA national basketball championships in a 12-year period as head coach at UCLA, including a record seven in a row. No other team has won more than four in a row in Division 1 college men’s or women’s basketball. Within this period, his teams won an NCAA men’s basketball record 88 consecutive games.

Although he was the coach with the best winning percentage, John Wooden never talked to his players about winning! He always talked about hard work, character, integrity, and improving daily. John Wooden was 99 when he died. He impressed his former players, admirers, and those who felt mentored by him with his humble enthusiasm and zeal for life.

John Wooden quotes 1-10

1. If you’re not making mistakes, then you’re not doing anything. I’m positive that a doer makes mistakes. Wooden
2. A coach is someone who can give correction without causing resentment.
3. The best competition I have is against myself to become better.
4. We can have no progress without change, whether it be basketball or anything else.
5. Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.
6. Success is peace of mind which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you did your best to become the best you are capable of becoming.
7. If you are afraid to fail, you will never do the things you are capable of doing.
8. Failing to prepare is preparing to fail.
9. Things turn out best for the people who make the best of the way things turn out.
10. Nothing will work unless you do.

If you are enjoying reading these John Maxwell quotes, you will love the following quotes

21 Wayne Dyer quotes that are Life-changing

What is leadership Quotes that capture Essence of leadership

John Wooden lived his life based on his principles

He not only preached but practice what he preached. He lived his life based on his principles.

One of my favorite John Wooden quotes – “All of life is peaks and valleys. Don’t let the peaks get too high and the valleys too low.”

John Wooden quotes 11-21

11. The true test of a man’s character is what he does when no one is watching.
12. Don’t mistake activity with achievement.
13. Success comes from knowing that you did your best to become the best that you capable of becoming.
14. If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?
15. Success is never final; failure is never fatal. It’s courage that counts.
16. It takes time to create excellence. If it could be done quickly, more people would do it.
17. You are not a failure until you start blaming others for your mistakes.
18. Don’t let yesterday take up too much of today.
19. Be more concerned with your character than your reputation, because your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are.
20. You can’t live a perfect day without doing something for someone who will never be able to repay you.
21. Failure is not fatal, but failure to change might be.

Check out bonus John Wooden quotes below

If you are enjoying reading this article you will love the following articles

1. Organizational Culture Change Example – Alan Mulally Ford Turnaround Story

2. Poor Leadership Behaviors & its Collateral Damage

3. Building a team culture where the best ideas win – Ray Dalio radical transparency

More John Wooden Quotes

22. Talent is God-given. Be humble. Fame is man-given. Be grateful. Conceit is self-given. Be careful.

23. Never make excuses. Your friends don’t need them and your foes won’t believe them.

24. You can’t let praise or criticism get to you. It’s a weakness to get caught up in either one.

25. It is amazing how much can be accomplished if no one cares who gets the credit.

26. You can lose when you outscore somebody in a game. And you can win when you’re outscored.

27. What you are as a person is far more important than what you are as a basketball player.

28. The main ingredient of stardom is the rest of the team.

29. Tell the truth. That way you don’t have to remember a story.

30. If we magnified blessings as much as we magnify disappointments, we would all be much happier.

Check out, even more, John Wooden quotes

Leadership

Lessons for leaders: Henry Ford FAILURE story & bad leadership

Post author By Tejas
Post date November 28, 2019
No Comments on Lessons for leaders: Henry Ford FAILURE story & bad leadership

Lessons for leaders: Henry Ford FAILURE story & bad leadership

Many of us have heard about the legendary leader Henry Ford assembly line and the Model T car’s success story. The success story has a lot of lessons for leaders. What to do to be a successful leader – persistence, hard work, and thinking outside the box.

But there is also a relatively unknown and darker story of Henry Ford’s bad leadership and equally spectacular failure! And therein lie critical lessons for leaders. These lessons for leaders are about what not to do as a leader.

Leadership success often leads to ignoring feedback and some poor leadership behaviors, ultimately leading to failure. A good 360-degree feedback tool combined with leadership coaching is the most effective way to ensure that leaders become aware of his/her bottlenecks, take ownership of their behaviors and their impact, and work to improve their behavior.

The Model T, the Henry Ford assembly line success story, and lessons for leaders

Until the 20th century, the first automobiles were hand made, clunky, and expensive. Only the rich could afford to own one. October 1, 1908, was a noteworthy date in the automobile industry’s history. When the first Model T, the car, rolled off the assembly line and revolutionized transportation forever. The assembly line became synonymous with Henry Ford and his ingenuity. The Model T was the first affordable car for the mass market, and it kept selling and selling. It took seven years for Ford to sell its millionth Model T. Just a year and a half later, it sold its two-millionth. By 1920, four million model T’s were sold!

Over the next quarter of a century, it made Ford Motor the most successful automobile company globally. It also made Henry Ford America’s second billionaire after John D. Rockefeller.

That is the success story of the legendary Henry Ford, his innovation vision, and his leadership. Many of us have heard about this success story of Henry Ford, the assembly line, and the Model T., The lessons for leaders from Henry Ford’s success story, are persistence, tenacity, and hard work.

Image courtesy – Henry Ford museum

The flip side of success and the lessons for leaders

But there is also a relatively unknown and darker story of Henry Ford’s bad leadership and equally spectacular failure that took the company to the brink of bankruptcy! There are lessons for leaders in his failure story as well. These lessons for leaders lessons in poor leadership and are not what NOT to do as a leader!

During the 1920s, subtle but sure trends emerged that were dangerous to the Model T’s dominance. However, Henry Ford was in denial. Henry Ford stuck to the assembly line and mass production concept. Ford famously declared, “History is more or less bunk.” But history was about to happen to him.

Following the depression of the 1920s, the wealth of Americans grew at a rapid rate. By 1920, more than half the population lived in cities instead of living near a farm or in a rural community for the first time. Working-class Americans enjoyed more leisure than ever before, and some companies implemented the two-week vacation policy. Hollywood was turning out motion pictures that engrossed audiences. Sporting events also captured the nation’s imagination, especially Babe Ruth’s sixty home runs in 1927. Popular culture, style, and fashion were coming to the United States.

The winds of change in the automobile industry – a lesson for leaders to stay ahead of change

This cultural and social transformation also affected the automobile industry. Automobiles, originally just a means of transportation, became a status symbol for the upwardly mobile Americans. Most of what we own is not on display. No one knows your salary or your financial assets, and we consider it impolite in our culture to ask. Only people invited to your home know what it looks like and can guess what it cost to furnish it. Your automobile, by contrast, is on display wherever you drive. It is visible, mobile, and communicates your status everywhere you drive it!

A leader in denial who refuses to change – a classic example of poor leadership behaviors and the lesson for leaders

Henry Ford refused to believe that an automobile was anything more than an appliance. His favorite slogan about the Model T was “It takes you there, and it brings you back.” The factory that was producing the Model T was the same as it had been for years. The way he was producing it—the moving assembly line, interchangeable parts, extreme specialization of labor—was by 1925 the same as it had been for years. His pricing strategy also remained the same. Model T came in only a single color – Black. Henry Ford wrote in 1922 that “any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants – as long as it is black.”

The desires and expectations of consumers were changing in the 1920s. Ford’s sales in 1925 were flat compared to 1924, although the car market grew rapidly. Ford’s market share declined from 54 to 45 percent, a sign of danger. Ford chose to ignore it. But the legendary leader Henry Ford was in denial of the reality. He was ignoring feedback and avoiding facing reality. It often happens with many successful leaders; Ford cushioned himself from reality by surrounding himself with “yes men” who told him only what he wanted to hear and not what he needed to hear!

Read: Poor Leadership Behaviors & its Collateral Damage

General Motors beat Ford by listening to feedback and being responsive – an important lesson for leaders.

General Motors, on the other hand, had the answer to the needs of the changing market. Instead of following the Henry Ford assembly line concept and producing the same model in a single color, they customized. Not only did GM differentiate its cars through colors but also through a policy designed to exploit the automobile as a status symbol. The cars in GM’s line were Chevrolet, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Buick, and Cadillac. Fortune magazine in the 1930s characterized the options of GM models as: “Chevrolet for the hoi polloi, … Pontiac . . . for the poor but proud, Oldsmobile for the comfortable but discreet, Buick for the striving, Cadillac for the rich.”

Unlike Ford, GM also introduced an annual model change for all its cars. With the annual model change, driving last year’s model became a comment on your status in the world. General Motors adapted to the feedback and the changing tastes of the consumers. It poised GM to thrive for the next few decades!

Delivering the bad news to a leader who won’t listen

The sales department told Henry Ford that Model T sales were slipping. Unless they substantially changed the car, it would soon stop selling. The Henry Ford assembly line that brought them success was now an Achilles heel. Ford said the car was fine—the problem was an incompetent sales department. This is a typical poor leadership behavior of ignoring feedback and blaming others.

Imagine that you are a Ford executive. The truth is obvious for all to see. How do you clearly communicate to the boss, a genius, and a successful leader, that change is needed?

Poor leadership behavior – Punishing the messenger.

The man who finally decided to “bell the cat” was Ernest Kanzler. He was a senior executive at Ford and also the brother-in-law of Ford’s only child, Edsel. He wrote a seven-page memorandum and delivered it to Ford on January 26, 1926. Kanzler spoke the unpleasant truth. His reward was the same as for many people who do so. He was fired. The fantasy that you can render the message untrue if you get rid of the messenger is a powerful one.

Punishing the messenger is one of the often fatal poor leadership behaviors of successful leaders. By the mid-1920s, Ford was living in a world of his own. There was irrefutable evidence that his strategy was failing. Ford nevertheless told The New York Times late in 1926, “The Ford car will continue to be made in the same way. . . . I am not governed by anybody’s figures but by my own information and observation.” Ford was suffering from classic “ego traps” that successful leaders often fall prey to.

Read: The leadership ego traps that derail a leader’s career

The Achilles heel of successful leaders – Denial of reality

“What will Ford do next?”—the answer came as quite a shock to almost everyone. Ford decided to shut down the Model T plant at River Rouge completely. The plant remained shut down for nearly a year to retool it to make a new Model A. This left General Motor’s Chevrolet with no competition for an entire year! Sensing the opportunity, Mr. Chrysler also entered the automobile market with his Plymouth model. Ford remained steadfast in his denial of what the automobile market had become. After killing off the Model T, he created the Model A. Although Model A was a technically improved product, there would be no “car for every purse and purpose” and no annual model change.

No one could have predicted the catastrophic fall of Henry Ford and the Ford Motor Company.

This marked the end of the market leadership of the Ford Motor Company. Occasionally over the next decade, it would beat GM in sales. However, except for three years (1929, 1930, and 1935), Ford trailed GM in the automobile’s market share by a wide margin for eight decades to come! Henry Ford never changed. Successful leaders often become superstitious – they hold on to doing the same things that originally made them successful. Not changing is a recipe for disaster. In 1945, by the end of World War II, his company was at the edge of bankruptcy. Henry Ford II, Henry Ford’s grandson, eventually saved Ford when he took the company over later.

Bad habits of good leaders (Poor leadership behaviors) – lessons for leaders

Henry Ford exhibited many of the 20 bad habits that hold back further success – that Dr. Marshall Goldsmith lists in his bestselling book – What Got You Here Won’t Get You There”.

Not listening: Successful leaders often disregard others’ ideas and are unwilling to listen to others. It is not only disrespectful to the team members but also harmful as it was with Henry Ford.
Telling the world how smart we are: Successful leaders suffer from this tendency to show off. The need to show people we’re smarter than they think we are. It is unnecessary and annoying to others.
Making destructive comments: The needless sarcasm and cutting remarks that we think make us witty. Ford was known for such sarcastic comments and practical jokes that may be funny to him but insulted others.
Making excuses: The need to reposition our annoying behavior as a permanent fixture, so people excuse us for it.
Clinging to the past: The need to deflect blame away from ourselves and onto events and people from our past, a subset of blaming everyone else.
Punishing the messenger: The misguided need to attack the innocent who are usually only trying to help us. Henry Ford did it to Ernest Kanzler, who was just a messenger of the bad news.

It is not just the arrogant leaders who fall prey to these bad leadership habits. The most humble leaders often fall prey to many of these bad habits when they constantly get positive reinforcement. When a leader hardly ever gets real, truthful, and unfiltered feedback that may help them stay grounded, it is easy to fall prey to one or more of these bad habits.

How can leaders stay grounded and avoid the bad habits that derail their careers?

A good 360-degree feedback tool combined with leadership coaching is the most effective way to ensure that leaders become aware of his/her bottlenecks, take ownership of their behaviors and their impact, and work to improve their behavior.

One of the most effective tools for leaders to stay grounded is to get regular and anonymous 360-degree feedback from all the team members with whom the leader interacts regularly. This allows the leader to see himself as others see him. Any difference in perception between how the leader sees himself and how others see the leader is an area where the leader may be blindsided and addressed through leadership coaching. The 360-degree feedback should be administered to ALL leaders at least once a year. It is one of the best tools to identify strengths and improvement areas for leadership development.

Global Leadership Assessment (GLA360) for your leadership team

The Global Leadership Assessment (GLA360) is a 360-degree feedback tool based on extensive research and designed and tested by Dr. Marshall Goldsmith. He has been awarded and recognized worldwide and is considered the #1 Leadership Thinker and the Executive Coach to Fortune 500 CEOs. The research included the CEOs of Fortune 100 companies, global thought leaders and their inputs, and international business executives of multinationals on six continents.

A statistician creates most assessments. In contrast, the GLA 360 is created based on inputs by the leaders and for the leaders. A real-life leader, in all likeliness, will know a lot more about leadership than an academician or a statistician. You are assessed on competencies that have made real leaders in multinationals successful. You are compared with actual leaders, which gives a more accurate assessment helpful in the real world.

The GLA 360 measures the following 15 competencies that matter to real leaders on 6 continents. It shows leaders the areas they need to develop to succeed in a competitive business environment.

Helping successful leaders become more successful – lessons for leaders

Making leaders aware of their strengths and improvement areas through 360-degree feedback is only the first step. The next step is to help the leader leverage their strengths and improve weaknesses through leadership coaching. Why is coaching important in leadership development? How is it beneficial? Leadership coaching is the most effective way to ensure that leadership improvement takes place. That leader takes ownership and responsibility for her behavior and results. Executive education and training programs help in creating awareness for change – however, behavior change requires customized solutions and consistent follow-up and accountability, which executive coaching provides by its design.

World’s number 1 Executive Coaching program designed by World’ number 1 leadership thinker

Read: Everything you ever wanted to know about executive coaching

We offer our New Age Leadership – NAL Triple Advantage Leadership Coaching.

That delivers guaranteed and measurable leadership growth. It is based on a stakeholder-centered coaching process with a 95% effectiveness rate (in a study or 11000 leaders on 4 continents). It is used by companies ranging from startups to 150 of the Fortune 500 companies to develop their leaders.

Here are some of the salient benefits of NAL Triple Advantage Leadership Coaching

Separate and customized improvement areas for each leader: Every leader is different. One size fits all approach doesn’t work. Individual development areas for each leader aligned to the business strategy.

Involves entire team: Unlike most leadership programs, NAL Triple Advantage Leadership Coaching involves the leader’s entire team, and it has a cascading effect – increasing the team effectiveness and improving organizational culture.

The leader becomes the coach: for continuous improvement for leaders themselves and their teams. It is like kaizen for your leadership development.

Cost-Effective: Our entire one-year coaching engagement often costs less than sending the leader to a short duration leadership program at any reputed B school.

Guaranteed and measurable leadership growth: as assessed – not by us – but anonymously rated by the leader’s own team members.

Pay us only after we deliver results!: We work with many of our clients on a pay for results basis. What does it mean? If the leaders don’t improve, you don’t have to pay us.

Schedule an exploratory 15-minute conversation with our leadership adviser today

Click the button below.

SCHEDULE NOW!

References

Book – Denial: Why Business Leaders Fail to Look Facts in the Face and What to do about it – by Richard S. Tedlow

Book – What Got You Here Won’t Get You There – by Marshall Goldsmith

Tags Business & Leadership Coaching, executive leadership coaching, how to deal with poor leadership, Leadership Coaching for Effective Team, leadership coaching for team, Leadership Coaching for Team Building, leadership coaching programs, Leadership Development Coaching Program, leadership skills Coaching Program, Marshall Goldsmith Stakeholder Centered Coaching india, One-on-One Leadership Coaching, Online Leadership Coaching Course

Leadership

Why leadership training fails and the fail-safe solution for it

Post author By Tejas
Post date November 12, 2019
No Comments on Why leadership training fails and the fail-safe solution for it

The statistics on the effectiveness of leadership training and executive education programs are both shocking and depressing! Despite a plethora of executive education and leadership training programs and many consultants offering them, most executive education and leadership development programs waste time and money! Why does leadership training fail? Because there is a fundamental problem with them! Read on to find out what this problem is and how to fix it.

A fundamental problem with leadership programs

Executive education and leadership development programs have a fundamental problem. What is it? They often assume that leadership knowing equals leadership doing!

Unfortunately, knowing is not the same as doing! Neither in life nor in leadership. We know many things, but we only consistently do a minuscule of the things we know!

Let me give you an example that I often use in my training sessions to drive home this point. “How many of you have attempted to lose a few pounds?”

Often many people raise their hands when I ask this question. During adulthood, most of us have put on a few extra pounds that we want to shed.

Knowing is NOT the same as doing!

Then I ask – “Do you have any suggestions for me to lose a few pounds around my waist?” And I get a lot of suggestions like – eat more fruits, more raw vegetables, cut down on sugar, exercise more, eat mindfully, join a gym, take the stairs instead of the elevator, walk 10,000 steps daily, and on and on.

Most of them are usually excellent and useful suggestions. I then say – “Thank you for the lovely and useful suggestions!”. My next question is – “How many of you consistently implement one or more of these suggestions regularly?”

Very few people raise their hands in answer to this question! Knowing how to lose weight is not the same as doing it consistently enough to get the desired outcome.

Read: Is your leadership development effective? Or is the money going down the drain?

Awareness is NOT the same as Action!

There is high awareness amongst Americans about weight loss. Diet books are popular and are often on the list of best-selling books.

Americans are buying more and more diet books than ever, and yet there are more obese people in America today than ever! People simply do not lose weight by reading a diet book!

More diet books are sold than ever, yet more Americans are obese than ever!

Leadership is no different. The fundamentally flawed assumption in leadership training and executive education programs is that attending a course for a few days and knowing about some leadership skills and tools will translate into job leadership behavior change. Unfortunately, leadership development doesn’t happen this way.

Read: the article on how leadership development really happens here.

“Leadership awareness may happen in a training program – leadership development occurs when a leader is at her work, interacting with her team! “ – Tushar Vakil.

Approach leadership development like a fitness regime and fix why leadership training fails

We should approach leadership development like a fitness regime. If we want to get fit, a one-week routine at the gym once or twice a year, just doesn’t work!

We need to work out regularly, probably daily. The exercise routine should be customized based on our individual needs and not a standard curriculum of one size fits all. Our diet regime should be designed similarly. Despite the help and despite the good intentions, we will fail to go to the gym.

Failing, dusting ourselves off, and getting “back on the wagon” should be part of the fitness routine’s design and shouldn’t come as a surprise. Why?

That is how human beings learn and form habits. Losing weight and keeping it off is a process and not an event – and so is leadership development! It takes time, effort, and commitment.

Hiring a personal trainer for our fitness regime increases our chances of losing weight and getting fit by a wide margin. How wide a margin? Research studies have shown that hiring a personal trainer increases your success rate by a whopping 1100%!

Read: The Swiss army knife of talent development is leadership coaching!

“Personal trainer” for your leadership development – to fix why leadership training fails

Using Marshall Goldsmith’s stakeholder-centered coaching process, our leadership coaching program is like hiring a personal trainer for your fitness regime! Here, the coach is the “personal trainer” for our leadership growth! He will help you shed leadership fat and build some leadership muscles.

The leadership coach will help us reduce or eliminate leadership bottlenecks and build on our leadership strengths. And best of all – it guarantees results. If there are no improvements in leadership behavior, there is simply no charge. Period!

Executive education and training programs help in creating awareness for change – however, behavior change requires customized solutions and consistent follow-up and accountability, which executive coaching provides by its design.

Guaranteed and measurable leadership growth

Would you like to develop leaders in your organization? We use Marshall Goldsmith’s stakeholder centered coaching process to deliver measurable and guaranteed leadership growth.

NAL Triple Advantage Leadership Coaching

Here are some of the salient benefits of NAL Triple Advantage Leadership Coaching

Involves entire team: Unlike most leadership programs, NAL Triple Advantage Leadership Coaching involves the leader’s entire team, and it has a cascading effect – increasing the team effectiveness and improving organizational culture.

The leader becomes the coach: for continuous improvement for leaders themselves and their teams. It is like kaizen for your leadership development.

Cost-Effective: Our entire one-year coaching engagement often costs less than sending the leader to a short duration leadership program at any reputed B school.

Guaranteed and measurable leadership growth: as assessed – not by us – but anonymously rated by the leader’s own team members.

Pay us only after we deliver results!: We work with many of our clients on a pay for results basis. What does it mean? If the leaders don’t improve, you simply don’t have to pay us.

Schedule an exploratory 15-minute conversation with our leadership adviser today

Click the button below.

SCHEDULE NOW!

Tags Business & Leadership Coaching, corporate coaching programs, executive leadership coaching, Leadership Coaching for Effective Team, leadership coaching for team, Leadership Coaching for Team Building, leadership coaching programs, leadership development coaching, One-on-One Executive Coaching, One-on-One Leadership Coaching, Online Leadership Coaching Course

Leadership

Tony Robbins quotes – 23 most Insightful & inspiring quotes

Post author By Tejas
Post date October 28, 2019
No Comments on Tony Robbins quotes – 23 most Insightful & inspiring quotes

Here are 23 Tony Robbins quotes that are insightful and inspiring.

Here are 23 Tony Robbins quotes that are insightful and inspiring. Anthony Robbins, fondly known as Tony Robbins is a best-selling author, public speaker, life coach, business strategist, and philanthropist. He is also the guru of personal development movement and has impacted more people around the world through his books and programs than any other person.

Quotes from Tony Robbins: Best quotes 1-10

Once you have mastered time, you will understand how true it is that most people overestimate what they can accomplish in a year – and underestimate what they can achieve in a decade.
In life, you need either inspiration or desperation.
It is not what we get. But who we become, what we contribute … that gives meaning to our lives.
Successful people ask better questions, and as a result, they get better answers.
It’s not what we do once in a while that shapes our lives, but what we do consistently.
I’ve come to believe that all my past failure and frustration were actually laying the foundation for the understandings that have created the new level of living I now enjoy.
Success is doing what you want to do, when you want, where you want, with whom you want, as much as you want.
Trade your expectation for appreciation and the world changes instantly.
A real decision is measured by the fact that you’ve taken a new action. If there’s no action, you haven’t truly decided.
When you are grateful, fear disappears & abundance appears.

Best of Tony Robbins quotes continue below

IF YOU ARE ENJOYING READING THESE JOHN MAXWELL QUOTES, YOU WILL LOVE THE FOLLOWING QUOTES

Timeless and memorable John Wooden quotes

21 Wayne Dyer quotes that are Life-changing

Tony Robbins is so popular that Netflix did a series on him called Tony Robbins – I am not your guru. Check it out on Netflix

Quotes by Tony Robbins: Best quotes 11-23

People who succeed at the highest level are not lucky; they’re doing something differently than everyone else.
The only limit to your impact is your imagination and commitment.
If you want to be successful, find someone who has achieved the results you want and copy what they do and you’ll achieve the same results.
In life, lots of people know what to do, but few people actually do what they know. Knowing is not enough! You must take action.
It’s what you practice in private that you will be rewarded for in public.
It is in your moments of decision that your destiny is shaped.
If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten.
Life is found in the dance between your deepest desire and your greatest fear.
Persistence overshadows even talent as the most valuable resource shaping the quality of life.
People who fail focus on what they have to go through; people who succeed focus on what it will feel like at the end.
Only those who have learned the power of sincere and selfless contribution experience life’s deepest joy: true fulfillment.
The secret of success is learning how to use pain and pleasure instead of having pain and pleasure use you. If you do that, you’re in control of your life. If you don’t, life controls you.
If you don’t set a baseline standard for what you’ll accept in life, you’ll find it’s easy to slip into behaviors and attitudes or a quality of life that’s far below what you deserve.

I hope these Tony Robbins quotes inspired you. Looking for more inspiration?

If you enjoyed reading this article, you will love the following articles

1. Leadership lessons I learned from my son about feedback vs. feedforward

2. Poor Leadership Behaviors & its Collateral Damage

3. What are the best executive coaching programs & the top executive coaching firms?

If you liked this article–please click like, comment and share this article with anyone who may enjoy reading it.

Leadership

What are the ego traps and Leadership Derailers leaders fall for?

Post author By Tejas
Post date October 16, 2019
No Comments on What are the ego traps and Leadership Derailers leaders fall for?

What are the ego traps and Leadership Derailers leaders fall for?

Leadership in the 21st century is quite different from how leaders got results in the 20th century. The command and control paradigm has been replaced with inspire and empower. But there are residues of the 20th-century leadership paradigms and of control and power are still prevalent. Let’s call them the ego traps. Having too much ego can prove to be disastrous in one’s career growth and can be a derailing factor. A study by the Harvard Business Review also suggests that two out of every five CEOs fail in their initial months of leading an organization.

In her book “EGO vs. EQ” Jen Shirkani rightly points out those leaders who become successful in taking their career paths ahead are those who manage the ego traps using their emotional intelligence.

Read: What Got You Here Won’t Get You There-Marshall Goldsmith-Book summary

Who makes a good leader?

In today’s VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous) business world, a leader’s role is more as a facilitator, and not as the person with the most knowledge or expertise. In a fast-changing world, it is simply not possible. A leader’s job is to inspire and facilitate the best performance from the entire team. To do that, the leader needs to keep her ego traps in check.

Source: https://www.istockphoto.com/in/photos/man-in-cage?sort=mostpopular&mediatype=photography&phrase=man%20in%20cage

The 8 Ego Traps:

According to Jen Shirkani, below mentioned are the eight common ego traps that most leaders fall into:

Ego Trap One: Ignoring Feedback You Don’t Like:

For leaders to have an insight into where they stand, they need to learn to accept and hear the truth as it is. It can often be hard for someone to hear negative feedback even if it stands true about them. What drags them into the trap is ignoring such honest feedback that can be unpleasant for the leader, but that provides the leader with ample opportunities to improve and develop. The leader’s inability to take such honest and constructive feedback drags them into an ego trap.

Ego Trap Two: Believing Your Technical Skills Trump Your Leadership Skills:

It is a common misconception that only technical skills play a crucial role as one moves up the hierarchy. As an executive, one needs to have technical skills and abilities, but leadership skills are even more important. For becoming a good leader, one must understand the need for having what Shirkani calls ‘Emotional intelligence.’ Self-awareness, self-control, and empathy are some of the common skills that a good leader must possess. Relying solely on technical skills is disastrous for a leader’s performance and career.

Ego Trap Three: Surrounding Yourself with More of You:

It is often challenging when trying to build a good executive team. Good leaders can see strengths, vision, and zeal in candidates that are different from that of their own way of thinking. People with varying values, strengths, and thoughts try to bring the best solutions in the way they think and often be challenging. Avoiding this factor could put your Organization at risk of having more blind spots resulting from surrounding yourself with more of you. This is likely to prevent you from foreseeing the challenges because your team’s vision is the same as that yours.

Read: Diversity and inclusion at the workplace

Ego Trap Four: Not Letting Go of Control:

A leader getting involved in his subordinates’ work and overseeing their work may believe it to be a helping hand which in reality is not. What they expect out of their superior is not the helping hand rather “the need for a leader.” By letting certain minor things come their way, a leader lets himself/herself go out of control by pushing away the major responsibilities that are expected of them. This, therefore, makes the leader fall into the ego trap four: Not letting go out of control.

Ego Trap Five: Being Blind to Your Downstream Impact:

This ego trap arises as a result of “Prioritizing one’s own needs over the needs of the others and the Organization at large.” Such a leader will not know the consequences of their decisions and their effects on others. The most common attributes or characteristics of leaders becoming prey to this type of ego include- shifting their priorities, deviating from their set goals or objectives, lack of uniformity in the way they work, scheduling last-minute meetings, etc. As a result, Employees feel disrespected and become dissatisfied.

Ego Trap Six: Underestimating How Much You’re Being Watched:

Leaders are constantly being watched by the employees and subordinates. The way leaders present themselves is often followed by their subordinates. They tend to follow the leader’s manners, conduct, even writing or presentation style. Following or reciprocating their style is not a bad thing. But as a leader, one must not underestimate it or give a negative connotation to it. As a leader, one must not be under the impression that “there exist different rules for all.” Being a leader and an employee, the duty is to lead the team and believe that the team is watching him/her.

Ego Trap Seven: Losing Touch with the Front Line Experience:

A leader is said to have fallen into this trap when he/she is totally disconnected from the team. It forms a wide parity between the front-line environment and the physical environment. Lack of connection with the team, no proper communication, etc., happens due to the same. As a senior executive, it is all too easy to become disconnected from the troops. A common sign of this ego trap is ‘having employees working in locations that have never been visited.’

Help your leader’s overcome their ego traps with leadership coaching

Ego Trap Eight: Relapsing Back to Your Old Ways:

The greatest ego trap is what we call “ego relapse.” This is the most dangerous ego trap that pushes a leader into a pitfall. This ego trap occurs when a leader shifts from “high-ego to high-EQ behavior,” thereby projecting his/her potential to be self-aware, empathetic, and self-disciplined—only to slip or fall back into the same high-ego behavior displayed in the past. The most common sign of this ego trap is that the leader knows best when to act mindful and jump back to his previous choices. By doing so, a leader is under the trap of Relapsing and is losing the employee’s trust and worth.

A person at the top of the hierarchy believes that skills and hard work alone are important factors. Falling into such an ego trap will always result in employee disengagement, lowered morale, increased turnover, or decreased motivation.

NAL Triple Advantage Leadership Coaching

That delivers guaranteed and measurable leadership growth. It is based on a stakeholder centered coaching process with a 95% effectiveness rate (in a study of 11000 leaders on 4 continents). It is used by companies ranging from startups to 150 of the Fortune 500 companies to develop their leaders.

Here are some of the salient benefits of NAL Triple Advantage Leadership Coaching

Involves entire team: Unlike most leadership programs, NAL Triple Advantage Leadership Coaching involves the leader’s entire team, and it has a cascading effect – increasing the team effectiveness and improving organizational culture.

The leader becomes the coach: for continuous improvement for leaders themselves and their teams. It is like kaizen for your leadership development.

Cost-Effective: Our entire one-year coaching engagement often costs less than sending the leader to a short duration leadership program at any reputed B school.

Guaranteed and measurable leadership growth: as assessed – not by us – but anonymously rated by the leader’s own team members.

Pay us only after we deliver results!: We work with many of our clients on a pay for results basis. What does it mean? If the leaders don’t improve, you don’t have to pay us.

Schedule an exploratory 15-minute conversation with our leadership adviser today

SCHEDULE NOW!

References: https://www.businessinsider.in/strategy/signs-that-your-suffer-from-these-8-common-ego-traps/articleshow/23995337.cms

EGO VS EQ

Leadership

Top elements of leadership development

Post author By Tejas
Post date October 9, 2019
No Comments on Top elements of leadership development

https://www.marshallgoldsmith.com/articles/what-does-leadership-mean-to-you/

What are the top elements of leadership development? Why these top elements of leadership development should be a part of your leadership development programs?

How has leadership development changed?

Over the last three decades, we have clearly moved from the industrial age to the information and communication age. Leadership has changed to keep up with these changes. In the industrial age, leaders relied on their position and power to “command and control” others. Today, a leader is more a facilitator of highly skilled and interdependent employees doing complex work.

Dr. Paul Hersey defined leadership as:

“Working with and through others to achieve objectives.”

Why are the top elements of leadership development important?

Irrespective of the business that an organization undertakes, Leadership development is definitely an important aspect. The quality of leadership in a company is the single most effective predictor of long-term success. Good leaders help productivity, performance, and profits. Poor leaders are a drag on engagement, productivity, and performance.

Leadership development critically impacts the overall functioning of an organization. Here are some important indicators and top elements of leadership development:

An improved retention rate of employees and effective recruitment
Improved skills among the employees and enhanced productivity
Promotes better employment
Leadership development programs positively impact the ROI (Return on investment)
Plays a pivotal role in shaping and improving the corporate culture
Develops role models within the organization and also helps in the identification of potential leaders.

Read: The importance of Leadership: Business impact of good and poor leadership

“The single biggest way to impact an organization is to focus on leadership development. There is almost no limit to the potential of an organization that recruits good people, raises them up as leaders and continually develops them.”
-John Maxwell

There is a plethora of leadership development programs and activities that help improve the skill sets of leaders. Leadership training programs, E-learning, B-school curriculum, and many more. What are the top elements of leadership development that should be included in any leadership development program?

Source: https://impactconsultingng.com/courses-2/management-leadership/leadership-development-programme/

Steps to Developing a good leadership development program:

1. Identifying the right leadership improvement areas :

Every individual, every leader, every company, and every situation is unique. Standard cookie-cutter programs that “teach” everyone the same leadership skills don’t work. Such programs may increase the intellectual knowledge around the concepts of leadership but result in little change of behavior at work. In other words, the training remains theoretical with no practical application. Identifying individual leadership development needs that are aligned to the organizational goals is the key element for an effective program.

2. Identifying the right participants:

Well-defined criteria to select participants in leadership development in a necessary and important element for success. Most companies evaluate employees on the basis of past performance, and future potential. Employees are classified into either nine boxes, or four boxes, based on their past performance and future potential.

As high performers and high potentials deliver better business results, they are the starting point and the main focus group. Then the program may be cascaded to include others.

Another top element of a successful leadership development program is to start from the topmost leader and cascade leadership development down. When the top leaders practice what they preach, it has a cascading and a multiplier effect on other employees, which in turn helps the performance.

3. Keeping track of the right metrics:

Having a progress tracker is of utmost importance. Progress levels should be tracked down for each goal set out and each activity performed.

Some of the metrics tracked by most companies are:

The number of participants
Number of training programs
Percentage of employees covered
Post-program evaluation by participants etc.

While these metrics are necessary, they are not sufficient! The real measure of the effectiveness of any program is actual application at work – real behavior change in the leader, as observed by the leader’s team members.

Read: Leadership development plan example template – a real-life case study

5 Must include top elements of leadership development program:

The five most important skills that an effective leadership development program must include are:

1. Communication: Top elements of leadership development program

By definition, leadership is getting work done with and through others. Communication skill is the most important pillar of leadership development training. It is not a skill that leaders can learn by just reading, watching a video, or listening to a presentation. In a leadership role, communication happens at all levels and all the time. It can be through large presentations, one-on-one conversations, phone calls, text messages, videoconferencing and, emails, etc. Leaders spend the majority of the time communicating. Thus, having good communication skills plays a vital role in the development of effective leadership.

2. Accountability: Top elements of leadership development program

We hold leaders accountable for their actions since that is the most important factor that decides the team’s performance. They are not the only contributors to the success factors. Having trained the leaders on this can ensure that they can define accountability. In this way, they can ensure uniformity through constant fulfillment of the commitments, producing positive results. Leaders have to hold themselves and others accountable to the goals and the results. Without accountability, a brilliant strategy and a fabulous plan will surely break down.

3. Change Management: Top elements of leadership development program

Organizations are not static; rather, they are dynamic. T Changes in the marketplace, employee turnover, company growth, and countless other factors contribute to ongoing changes. Therefore, leaders must expect and prepare themselves for constant change, which requires training the leaders to manage change effectively whenever it happens. Thus, it is a crucial aspect of a good leadership development program, especially in today’s VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous) business world we work in.

4. Influence & Negotiation: Top elements of leadership development program

Effective leaders inspire, persuade, encourage and prepare others to help drive their vision into reality. By learning to negotiate and influence, leaders take on the roles to influence the employees to achieve the best results. Leaders must use this skill to build relationships, align priorities, and find a win-win situation that ultimately leads to the best results.

5. Coaching: Top elements of leadership development program

Of the variety of leadership development programs and methodologies available today, leadership coaching is THE MOST effective leadership development tool. It is one of the most important skills that a leader must have to derive the true potential of the employees the leader leads.

One of the best ways for the leader to learn how to become a coaching leader is to undergo coaching themselves.

A leader is always leading by example, whether she knows it or not, wants it or not, believes it or not, or likes it or not! – Tushar Vakil

NAL Triple Advantage Leadership Coaching

That delivers guaranteed and measurable leadership growth. It is based on a stakeholder centered coaching process with a 95% effectiveness rate (in a study or 11000 leaders on 4 continents). It is used by companies ranging from startups to 150 of the Fortune 500 companies to develop their leaders.

Here are some of the salient benefits of NAL Triple Advantage Leadership Coaching

Involves entire team: Unlike most leadership programs, NAL Triple Advantage Leadership Coaching involves the leader’s entire team, and it has a cascading effect – increasing the team effectiveness and improving organizational culture.

The leader becomes the coach: for continuous improvement for leaders themselves and their teams. It is like kaizen for your leadership development.

Cost-Effective: Our entire one-year coaching engagement often costs less than sending the leader to a short-duration leadership program at any reputed B school.

Guaranteed and measurable leadership growth: as assessed – not by us – but anonymously rated by the leader’s own team members.

Pay us only after we deliver results!: We work with many of our clients on a pay for results basis. What does it mean? If the leaders don’t improve, you don’t have to pay us.

Schedule an exploratory 15-minute conversation with our leadership adviser today

Click the button below.

SCHEDULE NOW!

References: What Does Leadership Mean to You?

Leadership

Leadership development plan example template – a real-life case study

Post author By Tejas
Post date October 1, 2019
No Comments on Leadership development plan example template – a real-life case study

Here is a real-life leadership development plan example template and how you can use it to create an organization-wide leadership development program that is impactful and delivers measurable results

Case study: Agilent Technologies, leadership development plan

How do Human Resources, talent management, or leadership development professionals develop and implement an impactful organization-wide leadership development plan and have a measurable return on investment?

The planning and implementation of Agilent’s coaching program named APEX (Accelerated Performance for Executives) – has some valuable lessons for any company that wants to invest in its leadership development and get a guaranteed and measurable return.

They coached over a hundred leaders using the worldwide pool of coaches over two-and-a-half years. 95% of the leaders who went through the program showed improved overall leadership effectiveness, as measured by the anonymous feedback from raters.

The worldwide leadership development plan example

Agilent Technologies, a spinoff of Hewlett Packard, deployed a worldwide corporate leadership development program for their high-performing and high-potential senior leaders. Key features included were –

Defining their leadership competencies
Customized 360-degree feedback for their leadership competencies
Using executive coaching as a part of leadership development
An international network of external coaches
Measurement of coaching effectiveness
An interesting clause of “pay for results.”

Leadership coaching and “pay for results” clause

The “pay for results” clause ensured leadership growth for the leader, or else the coach would not get paid (except for incidentals).

Hewlett Packard had previously used coaching as part of leadership development but in an unstructured and uncoordinated way. Multiple vendors and individual coaching practitioners had different coaching approaches and different price points.

Read: How to find the best executive coach for you or for the leaders in your organization

Defining Agilent Global Leadership Profile

Agilent defined a set of competencies and profiles across all management levels – first-line managers through top business leaders. Over several months and through an iterative process comprising managers’ inputs, review of documents, discussions, and refinements, a Global Leadership Profile was developed. A senior manager then checked and confirmed this profile in each of the company’s divisions in the US and abroad.

Initial Objectives of the APEX coaching program

Along with developing the leadership profiles, an initial draft of the leadership coaching was also being developed. They outlined the initial objectives of the coaching program as follows –

Focus on senior managers and executives – Participants of the APEX coaching included VPs, GMs, directors, and BUHs.
Global reach – the program should be accessible by all Agilent locations in sixty countries. Ideally, provide local coaches that speak the local language and understand the local culture.
Flexible and user-friendly To make it easy for them, they created end-users a menu of options. The user can choose from 2 to 3 local coaches and avail multiple coaching options at different levels and budgets. They simplified everything for the user to hire a coach and make the payments.
Accountability – As the company was investing in the employee’s development via leadership coaching, the participants would have to show measurable growth in leadership effectiveness as rated by their subordinates, peers, and superiors.

The final version of APEX – the cultural based leadership development program plan example

Critical factors for developing a leadership development program may include many factors. Over several months and after going through several iterations, they outlined a final version of the APEX coaching program that included

Several coaching options
General description of each option
A global coaching pool of qualified coaches
Guidance for the 360-degree feedback process
Creating intranet pages with all these details
The official launch of the program and internal marketing
Educating HR and leadership development team within the organization

It was also decided that APEX will not be used for career planning or remedial coaching. The purpose of APEX was to improve leadership behaviors only. And this is critical for any leadership development plan example. Keep career planning or performance management separate from leadership developmental activities.

Five Coaching Options

Five coaching options were made available, and the names were coined using the mountain-climbing analogy.

Base Camp	Multi-rater GLP assessment	2-4 hour face-to-face coaching	Review report and create an IDP	No, check-in with stakeholders	n/a	No results guarantee
Camp 2	Multi-rater GLP assessment	Six months of telephone & in-person coaching	One mini-survey as follow up assessment	Coach has a telephone check-in with key stakeholders	n/a	Guaranteed results
Camp 3	Multi-rater GLP assessment	Six months of telephone & in-person coaching	One mini-survey as follow up assessment	Coach has a telephone check-in with key stakeholders.	Coach conduct up to 12 interviews with key stakeholders on the leader’s behaviors and shares the report.	Guaranteed results
High Camp	Multi-rater GLP assessment	One Year telephone & in-person coaching	Two mini-surveys as follow up assessment.	Coach has a telephone check-in with key stakeholders	n/a	Guaranteed results
Summit	Multi-rater GLP assessment	One Year telephone & in-person coaching	Two mini-surveys as follow up assessment	Coach has a telephone check-in with key stakeholders.	Coach conduct up to 12 interviews with key stakeholders on the leader’s behaviors and shares the report.	Guaranteed results
Team coaching	Multi-rater GLP assessment	Group coaching sessions	Two mini-surveys	Participants cross-check with one another.	Participants conduct interviews with one another.	Guaranteed results

There was also an option to upgrade to the next higher level option with no penalty. Besides, several add-on options were made available, including additional interviews, instruments, and team and group-based experiences.

The most popular option was the High Camp. Many line managers nominated their entire team for team coaching.

Results-Guarantee Clause of the leadership development program

All but one APEX coaching program options including a unique clause of guaranteed results. The leader didn’t have to pay until the entire coaching program was completed and only if the leader had improved as assessed by the leader’s stakeholders via the min-surveys. There was a “leader qualification” process to gauge the leader’s commitment to avail of the no-growth no-pay option. The coaching program manager conducts a brief interview with the potential coachee leader to assess specific needs and assess genuine interest. This also helps the program manager recommend suitable coaches. Participating leaders have a choice of coaches and also have a sense of ownership in their development process.

Internal marketing

The following efforts of internal marketing and easy access helped spread the word about the APEX program.

Availability of all relevant details and documents on the intranet
Presentations to HR and leadership development team within Agilent
Word of mouth publicity of the measurable results and results guaranteed clause.

Involving the stakeholders in the leadership development program

It was a known fact that regular follow-up with key stakeholders results in a perceived leadership effectiveness improvement. Involving stakeholders of the leader before, during, and after is an excellent process to help change the leader’s behaviors and stakeholder’s perceptions.

The leader conducted an initial debriefing session lasting 5-10 minutes with each stakeholder with the following agenda.

Thanking raters for providing anonymous 360-degree input
Relating the positive and developmental feedback
Disclosing the developmental goal(s)
Enlisting the rater’s help in the participant’s developmental efforts

Leaders also follow up with stakeholders regularly, usually at least once a month, throughout the coaching engagement.

Measuring effectiveness through mini-survey

Mini surveys are anonymous and include short 3-5 questions. Did the leader improve? Raters respond on a Likert scale of -3 to +3. They also solicited some qualitative comments. Mini surveys are also used to determine whether the leader has improved – so that the coach can get paid as per the no-growth no-pay clause.

Results from the APEX program

Has this leader become more or less effective as a leader since the feedback session? In response to this question, 78% of respondents felt that the leader had improved anywhere from a level of +1 to +2 or +3. Overall, the outcomes of the APEX coaching program were very encouraging. Leaders improved both in overall leadership effectiveness and their selected improvement areas, as perceived by those working with the leaders.

Read: Case Study: Guaranteed measurable results delivered for our FMCG client

Some useful lessons and pointers

The following are some key pointers and useful lessons learned from the APEX program that may enable any organization to more effectively implement an executive coaching program:

A commitment of senior leadership
Willingness and commitment of the participating leaders
Offering choice and responsibility (of showing improvement) contributed to the success.
Regular follow up with stakeholders increases leadership effectiveness.

Read: Your Executive Leadership Development – Sink, Swim or Setup for Success

Benefits from the highly successful APEX leadership development program

Agilent could provide the following benefits because of the APEX coaching program.

Uniform leadership development process worldwide
Uniform leadership coaching across geographies
Fixed cost instead of often uncontrollable billable hours
A lower negotiated rate that was uniformly accessible to any Agilent leader worldwide
Saving of the leader’s time and travel costs – as the coach came to the leader
Result guaranteed clause – no payment if the leader didn’t improve.

Some companies think they do not need a leadership development program. They simply fail to understand the detrimental effect of poor leadership on business performance.

Our leadership coaching program with a 95% success rate

We offer our New Age Leadership – NAL Triple Advantage Leadership Coaching.

Here are some of the salient benefits of NAL Triple Advantage Leadership Coaching

Separate and customized improvement areas for each: Every leader is different. One size fits all approach doesn’t work. Individual development areas for each leader aligned to the business strategy.

Involves entire team: Unlike most leadership programs, NAL Triple Advantage Leadership Coaching involves the leader’s entire team, and it has a cascading effect – increasing the team effectiveness and improving organizational culture.

The leader becomes the coach: for continuous improvement for leaders themselves and their teams. It is like kaizen for your leadership development.

Cost-Effective: Our entire one-year coaching engagement often costs less than sending the leader to a short duration leadership program at any reputed B school.

Guaranteed and measurable leadership growth: as assessed – not by us – but anonymously rated by the leader’s own team members.

Pay us only after we deliver results!: We work with many of our clients on a pay for results basis. What does it mean? If the leaders don’t improve, you simply don’t have to pay us.

Schedule an exploratory 15-minute conversation with our leadership adviser today

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References: Book – Best Practices in Leadership Development and Organizational Change

By Louis Carter, David Ulrich, Marshall Goldsmith

Tushar Vakil

A fundamental problem with leadership programs

Knowing is NOT the same as doing!

Awareness is NOT the same as Action!

Approach leadership development like a fitness regime and fix why leadership training fails

“Personal trainer” for your leadership development – to fix why leadership training fails

Guaranteed and measurable leadership growth

NAL Triple Advantage Leadership Coaching

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