I regularly rub shoulders with senior business leaders and find that many do not fully comprehend what leadership competencies matter most to be successful within an organisation. A leader generally doesn’t like to waste time, yet regarding developmental approaches I find many who do, by inadvertently chasing shiny objects that promise transformation, yet deliver little progress. Having been in senior leadership positions and now walking beside leaders, I want to share some key insights to assist leaders in focusing on those developmental areas that create an exponential difference in their organisations. An integrated approachI think that most understand that to make it at the top, senior leaders must have a convergence of behavioural competencies that have been gathered through their journey to the top. However, it is often difficult to put one’s finger on the critical components that make the difference. When interviewed many leaders will point to some of their strengths that they have become aware of over the years, truly believing they are strengths that support them in a senior role. However, what we know now through research is that strengths at one level of leadership in an organisation can actually become a weakness if not tempered by other complementary behaviours. This is the whole premise of a book like Goldsmith’s, “What Got You here, Won’t Get You There.” The very behaviours that brought a promotion up the leadership ladder will undo success if uncritically transferred to executive levels of leadership. Two steps to successHence, leadership development approaches
Business leadership goals
Developing Talent Management Pathways within an Organisation
Is talent management part of your strategic plan? With all the details involved in running a successful organisation, a leader can get overwhelmed at times. Therefore, it is good to step back regularly and remind ourselves that there are only a few key result areas that need our attention to lead to organisational success. Regarding the human resource side of this equation, implementing a clear talent management pathway within your organisation that attracts, retains and develops top talent will always outperform like-for-like organisations by a significant difference. Dr. Jim Asplund, one of Gallup’s chief scientists states, that the best-led organisations know the direct path to individual, team, and organisational success starts with a key investment in their employees’ greatest talents. How are you investing in this area? Starting a Talent Management PathwayWhat is involved in a talent management pathway? Assuming you have your recruitment processes in order, where you are only getting top talent into the final interview and consistently onboarding A players (ask me how) then you need systems in place to track each employee’s current growth and developmental needs. Fortunately, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel on this. The heavy lifting has already been done, so it is just a matter of tapping into an existing resource. Harrison Assessments offers an online organisational dashboard, listing all employees, tracking their suitability alignment with their job role, along with their engagement in their work, and numerous other key metrics to assess existing talent and how to manage it. It
Overcoming Procrastination
The Mystery of Procrastination and how to conquer it. I haven’t met a leader who doesn’t struggle to some degree with procrastination. The funny thing is that most of us do not want to practice this debilitating behaviour, yet it seems to persist. We allow it to prevail in spite of our full knowledge that it eats into potential productivity and profitability levels. So what is the cause? Why do we continue to do the very thing we know is unhelpful? How can we overcome such a prevailing, and often, unconscious habit? Before we can hope to overcome this unwanted nemesis to greater effectiveness
Managing Organizational Culture
The three words of this article’s title seem simple enough to understand and many organizations invest heavily in trying to achieve just this. But I think in order for us to intelligently discuss this topic, we need to ask a couple of questions and bring further clarity to the topic. The first question is, “What is organizational culture?” The second question is, “Can organizational culture be managed?” So allow me in a few words to answer these questions by examining different definitions and then to investigate any potential steps that could be taken to produce positive change. Most people who deal with this topic will articulate organizational culture through summarising the individual elements that make up culture such as, collective – behaviours, values, myths, symbols, norms, rituals, beliefs and assumptions that “this is the way we do things around here.” It would be difficult to find leaders who would disagree with these fundamental components as being the essence of what makes up organizational culture. However, it is the expanded definition of culture that I am going to discuss shortly that starts to expose different opinions. Furthermore, the preferred perspective chosen profoundly affects the strategic approach taken to deal with it. Generally speaking there are two main paradigms of organizational culture that people choose between. Some see it as a singular dominating influence that each individual operates within. Others see it being made up of various sub-cultures within the one organization with continual superficial adjustments being made by those in each
Leadership empowerment: what is it and how do you do it?
There is quite a bit of talk today about the need to have empowered employees within the workplace. Unfortunately that is often all it is – talk! But what are the benefits and how do you accomplish such a task? Let’s start by discussing the benefits of having more empowered team members. Business environments change so rapidly today. There is a need to develop more empowered employees in order to keep up with today‘s fast-paced fluctuating global environment. In order for organizations to remain adaptable to customer needs, front-line employees must be given more authority and flexibility to make on-the-spot decisions. Research in the area of empowerment has revealed that increased empowerment produces greater organisational success factors. These factors include employee contribution, innovation, organizational commitment, expands latent talents, increases capacity to accept change, and increases employee retention. These benefits are all necessary traits for improving organisational success. Having discussed some benefits and hence the desirability for greater empowerment let’s investigate what we mean by the term ‘empowerment’. There seems to be a plethora of definitions but for me the best way to discuss empowerment is to break it up into two dimensions. Hence, empowerment can be summed up by looking at both its internal and external aspects. The technical definitions that describes these two aspects are psychological empowerment (internal) and leader-empowering behaviours (external). Psychological empowerment is made up of four facets, a sense of real meaning in one’s work, a sense of making an impact through the contribution you make
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