Organizational Development
Once Core Strategies are well articulated, the People Process is the next most important process. One of the Board of Directors and the CEO’s core competencies should be the selection and the development of executive talent and 20-40% of the CEO’s agenda should be dedicated to hiring, appraising & coaching leaders. In the end, the ultimate throttle for growth is not the markets, the technology, the competition or products, it is the ability to attract and keep enough of the right people in the right seats.
The Charismatic Leader
Very often, we hear that leaders need to be charismatic. It is probably because those who inspired us in the past were indeed, charismatic. However, they are not simply charismatic in the pure sense; it is not a veneer; they never wanted to be charismatic. What we are interpreting as charisma is an all-encompassing demonstration of their passion. They have sparkles in their eyes; they speak with a flame the belly about their organization, their employees, their customers, and their partners. You can’t fake this sort of charisma.
Good leaders hold a profound belief in what they are trying to accomplish, in the envisioned future and they demonstrate an unwavering resolve to do what must be done. When they talk about anything related to reaching the Promised Land, they get enflamed in their passion, they become vibrant, eloquent, engaging, selling, even preachers.
They take all their employees, board members, market players and customers in their wake. This charisma matters and leaders need to be aware of the climate they create at all levels of the organization as this will affect strategy execution.
More importantly, it is very evident that they are not the center of the discussion. The topic is never about what they did, or how good they are, or about their own realization. They are, generally, humble people moved by passion. They have achieved what Jim Collins calls Level 5 leadership: through a paradoxical blend of personal humility and professional will, they build enduring greatness for their organization, not for themselves.
Building the organization
In hiring leaders, you should be looking for people with an enormous drive for winning; are upbeat with energy that energizes others, for the day, month, year; that get things done through others (delegating without abdicating); are decisive on tough issues (procrastination is contagious); follow through, calibrate judgment and align teams. You want to create a leadership that is execution biased.
Within your own organization, you should not have to look for very long for leadership as leadership is very visible. Leaders don’t necessarily have a title, but by their competence, their passion, their attitude, they get things done, and people around them grow naturally.
In addition, leaders must possess seven key personality traits.
- Know your people and your business: it is through personal connection that leaders can overcome passive resistance. When leaders know their business inside-and-out, show open mind and positive demeanour and approach their business leaders with a coaching intent, they gain credibility and loyalty.
- Insist on realism: Insisting on reality is not only for planning purposes. It is of even greater importance as we track execution. Leaders should avoid management by hope. If you have missed your quarterly plans, you cannot keep going with the hope to catch up. Continually challenge what the organization should continue to do, start doing and stop doing.
- Set clear goals and priorities: Look for leaders that set clear stretched, yet achievable goals (BHAGs). Just like the corporate strategies, goals and priorities set at the business unit or individual level should be just a few. At the individual level, it gets hard to reconcile more than three goals or priorities. When everything is priority number one, nothing is.
- Follow through: Leaders must show coherency and consistency. When goals, or other agreements are reached, follow-up with a written confirmation. Delegation is not abdication; it is not because the leader has delegated the authority and accountability for execution that the personal authority and accountability has vanished. Check back regularly to see if coaching is needed.
- Reward doers: Leaders should get in the habit of rewarding and promoting doers. The only way to do this well is to remember that what gets measured gets done.
- Expand people’s capabilities through coaching: Good leaders regard every encounter as a coaching opportunity. To be able to coach effectively, leaders need to have the ability to question – in a way that makes people think, discover and search – and listen.
- Know yourself: This requires authenticity, self-awareness, self-mastery, and humility. If you cannot be honest wit yourself, you cannot deal honestly with the business realities and cannot give other forthright assessments.
And remember, when you’re not certain, you are correct to be uncertain – don’t promote or hire, keep looking. Errors in hiring, particularly in senior positions, will have mortifying effect on any organization. Not only will cost the organization twenty-four to thirty months of wasted time, it has a direct cost, it as a lost opportunity cost, it has a morale cost, it has a vision cost. The people process has to be full proof, and never compromised. Best practices suggest that important hires should go through a four-way interview process including the manager once removed, a peer, a key employee and an HR representative. This is in addition to the CEO for all senior positions. All of these people should be using a uniform, agreed upon evaluation matrix customized for the position, bringing their own perspective to the same evaluation topics.
Not only should the Board of Directors and the CEO be involved in all new leader hires, particularly sales management, the CEO bares the full accountability for the right hires being made, for the right people to be in the right jobs. The CEO should focus the best resources on the biggest opportunities – not the biggest problems.
To strengthen further any organization, it is paramount that the leadership team deals with two major aspects: Career Planning and Succession Planning. Although one could argue these are in fact the same, they are really representations of different interests. Employees need to understand their career paths so they can see to road to personal growth. The organization also needs to how people in higher echelons could eventually be replaced by employees with the right potentials.
Job titles, skill levels, compensation layers, all need to be orchestrated so that clarity exists from the employee perspective.
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