Showing posts with label High Potentials. Show all posts
Showing posts with label High Potentials. Show all posts
Friday, August 09, 2013
Thursday, July 25, 2013
Positive Leadership: Being the Best You Can Possibly Be
Imagine being the best you could possibly be!
How often have you seen the line “creating an environment
where staff can achieve their full potential”? It’s a great
aspiration, that’s for sure, but what does it really mean and can it ever be
possible? Well, we are all born with an innate capacity to learn, a sort of
learning instinct, a playful spirit of enquiry and curiosity about who we are
and how the world works, and this should never be underestimated, but as we
progress through life blocks and barriers arise which limit and obscure the
potential that lies within us. We are bruised by often brutal experiences in
both work and education and we start to limit ourselves and the service we
offer others in ways that are both conscious and unconscious.
So, how can we start to win this inner game? Back in 1975
Timothy Gallwey in his wonderful book The Inner Game of Tennis put forward in
the form of an equation the simple but fascinating proposition that
POTENTIAL – INTERFERENCE = PERFORMANCE
This proposition challenges us to change our focus and our
thinking. Rather than trying to push performance or naval-gaze at potential, it
invites us instead to focus on the interference that inhibits the former and
blocks the latter. Remove the interference and the other two can flow together.
This can be a personal quest, a valuable piece of self-discovery, but it can
also be the basis for an approach to leadership: liberating leadership which
aims to set potential free by focussing on interference and which uses empathy,
compassion and passion to move towards a more fully engaged workplace and
learning environment.
There are four fundamental types of interference that block
personal performance:
Low inspiration,
Self-limiting beliefs,
Deficit relationships,
Pain language.
Let us look briefly at each of these and share some ideas
about how to win the inner game and the role of the liberating leader.
1. Low inspiration:
How often are we actively inspired? Inspired in a way that gives us
life, fresh energy, enthusiasm, vigour and positivity? Inspired in a way that
enables us to inspire others, perhaps? It can be a rare thing and certainly a
quality of being that is hard to summon at will. Well, maybe Andy Murray’s
historic success at SW19 in June was an example of collective inspiration. The
FTSE 100 share index went up 1.1% the very next day after his Wimbledon
Championship victory – as it always does after a great sporting success ( the
‘bulls’ have their day…). So, here are some steps you can take to combat low
inspiration:
Find things that actively inspire you,
Visit them frequently,
Carry them with you all day long.
Developing a scrapbook of inspiration has never been easier
with pictures, video clips, music and articles available to everyone on the
internet. Start building your inspiration scrapbook today!
A liberating leader will look to tune-in to the things which
inspire individuals, teams and even organisations. They will also openly share
the things which inspire them. In their
approach to business planning and achieving change they will focus heavily on
the inspiration that lies behind the initiative. They know that we are inspired
by a dream not a plan and will look to make the ‘dream’ or vision a clear part
of their dialogue around goals and performance.
2. Self-limiting beliefs: The beliefs we are looking at here
are the things we tell ourselves about ourselves, our inner dialogue about what
we can and cannot do and crucially what we are good at and what we are bad at.
We all have a combination of supporting beliefs, based on our core values and
successes, and limiting beliefs stemming from the outcomes and consequences we
have experienced and also importantly the messages, often much repeated, given
to us by significant players in our lives (parents, teachers, bosses, friends,
partners, the media, community leaders, and so on).
Winning the inner game involves raising self-awareness
regarding these limiting beliefs and challenging their origins, basis and
validity. It involves challenging the troll under the bridge that says to our
potential ‘you cannot cross’. This is not “you’ll believe a man can fly”-type
stuff. For example, no matter how strong my beliefs it would clearly be a
delusion to think that in my middle-years I could ever become an astronaut. These
are beliefs about things within the sphere of the individual’s reality.
Stemming from a steadfast faith in human potential a
liberating leader will work with individuals to raise awareness of
self-limiting beliefs and release potential through coaching, great feedback,
developing relationships and demonstrating personal commitment.
3. Deficit relationships:
Avoiding or transforming deficit relationships is a key way of keeping
the flow of potential going. They seem friendly enough, these corridor conversations
or chats over coffee, but they actually latch onto your negativity, double the
feeling and take you lower. The catharsis is false, as the emotions are
intensified rather than purged. These relationships are often cynical,
deflating and uncaring. There is no winner, just a sharing of interference that
makes doing challenging work/study more onerous than ever.
A liberating leader will look to set the tone in terms of
creating relationships based on empathy, compassion and passion. These
relationships are energising, inspiring and fulfilling and go beyond the
difficulties of today. They are based on trust, respect, warmth and a desire to
understand the emotional needs of others.
4. Pain language: The language we use, the language we
choose to use, has a powerful impact on how we feel about ourselves and our
performance. Our outer dialogue has a very strong influence over our inner
dialogue and can become a source of interference. Pain language like I can’t… I
have to… and it’s never going to happen… feeds through into our thoughts,
beliefs and even values. They can create or reinforce self-limiting beliefs.
Monitoring this dialogue, this choice of explanatory style, and moving from
pain to power language will have a transformative effect. Moving from “I can’t”
to “I choose not to” or from “I have to” to “I want to” is both empowering and
enriching. It links demonstrably with the other three points covered so far.
A liberating leader will aim to lead with a narrative and a
way of interacting that is all about power language. She or he will set out to
model power language for colleagues in all directions, not just the immediate
team, and will develop relationships on this basis.
So, just imagine…
Imagine these four transformations:
From low inspiration to carrying inspiration with you,
From self-limiting beliefs to empowering beliefs,
From deficit relationships to liberating relationships,
From pain to power language.
Imagine the interference this would reduce and imagine the
potential it would release, and imagine working with a liberating leader
committed to these principles.
When working with staff a liberating
leader knows –
That we are inspired by a dream not a plan,
The importance of removing interference so that people can
thrive, and
The value of creating organisations that people enjoy.
Thursday, July 11, 2013
Tuesday, June 18, 2013
Positive Leadership: Syndicating the Work of Leadership
In this video, Professor Gary Hamel discusses why he
believes it is vital for companies to "syndicate the work of
leadership" across the organisation.
An edited transcript of his interview with McKinsey's Simon London can be found at: http://bit.ly/McKLeadersEverywhere
An edited transcript of his interview with McKinsey's Simon London can be found at: http://bit.ly/McKLeadersEverywhere
Tuesday, October 30, 2012
Positive Leadership: Cultivating #Leadership Success
Here are some guidelines to cultivating leadership success across an
organisation:
Make It a Priority: Acknowledge the risk, and put a formal
action plan in place. Start by clearly defining the behaviours and skills which
make a successful leader in your organisation.
Look Beyond Performance: Have a full picture of the leadership
potential across your organisation and don’t restrict that view to only those
you think are high potential. Do not confuse ambition with ability.
Replace Subjectivity with Objectivity: Gut instinct won’t do.
Using scientific data, benchmark your people against competitor talent and
identify leadership shortages to avoid succession risk.
Be Pragmatic & Proactive: Don’t wait for yearly review
cycles, instead, employ development interventions at the point-of-pain with
individual employees or across departments. This includes where and when to
spend learning and development budgets throughout the company.
Cast a Wider Net: Take a global view of where your
leadership talent is located and be prepared to use creative strategies to
source talent across borders to fill leadership gaps.
Monday, January 30, 2012
Positive Leadership: Being Average is No Use
In the past, workers with average skills, doing an average
job, could earn an average lifestyle. But, today, average is officially over.
Being average just won’t earn you what it used to.
It can’t when so many more
employers have so much more access to so much more above average cheap foreign
labour, cheap robotics, cheap software, cheap automation and cheap genius.
Therefore, everyone needs to find their extra — their unique value contribution
that makes them stand out in whatever is their field of employment. Average is
over.
There will always be change — new jobs, new products, new
services. But the one thing we know for sure is that with each advance in
globalisation and the I.T. revolution, the best jobs will require workers to
have more and better education to make themselves above average.
By way of
illustration, here are the latest unemployment rates from the Bureau of Labour
Statistics for Americans over 25 years old: those with less than a high school
degree, 13.8 per cent; those with a high school degree and no college, 8.7 per
cent; those with some college or associate degree, 7.7 per cent; and those with
bachelor’s degree or higher, 4.1 per cent.
In a world where average is officially over, there are many
things we need to do to buttress employment, but nothing would be more
important than passing some kind of Recovery Act for the 21st century that ensures that every Briton has access to
post-secondary school education.
Friday, January 20, 2012
Positive Leadership: What Makes Stanford University a Unique Environment
Monday, November 28, 2011
Positive Leadership: Global Entrepreneurship and Successful Growth Strategies of Early-Stage Companies
Global Entrepreneurship and Successful Growth Strategies of Early-Stage Companies
Tuesday, November 01, 2011
Positive Leadership: On Excellence
For 10 years, Tom Peters wrote a syndicated column—"On
Excellence"—for the Tribune Media Services. It was carried by over a
hundred papers—the flagship carrier was the Chicago Tribune. After Steve Jobs'
death, one of his old columns surfaced—on Jobs. It appeared on 8 November 1993,
when Steve was still "in the wilderness"—before his subsequently
triumphant return to Apple.
Herewith, in full ...
‘On Excellence
Marathoners call it "hitting the wall." You get to
a point where you can't go on. But you do. And, miraculously, you come out the
other side and finish the race.
Truth is, damn little of merit, in a profession or a hobby,
is accomplished without running through a wall or two.
I got to thinking about that while reading Fortune's recent
cover story, "America's Toughest Bosses." Some turn "beet
red." Others "scream." Some engage in "sadistic"
behavior and use tactics that amount to "psychological oppression."
While I hardly countenance "Jack Attacks," the tirades by Jack
Connors, head of the ad agency Hill Holliday, I also don't believe the best
bosses are sweethearts.
The best leaders take their firms and followers to places
they've never been before-and, more important, places they never imagined they
would reach. The chief's voice may be subdued or, more likely, strident at
times. The reason, Fortune acknowledges, is the incredible demands these
honchos place, first and foremost, on themselves.
Take Steve Jobs, one of Fortune's seven nasties. I've seen
him, in his days at Apple, lose his cool on occasion. Not a particularly pretty
sight.
Yet I was thoroughly taken aback by one of Jobs'
"excesses," as chronicled by Fortune. A subordinate at Next Computer
was showing Jobs shades of green for the company's logo. More precisely, she
produced some 37 shades of green before coming upon one that pleased the
master. "Oh, come on," the minion recalled thinking, "green is
green."
Oh, no, it isn't!
Almost every step Jobs took at Apple (and Next) broke the
mold; moreover, it defied industry tradition as set by the all-powerful, undisputed
master of the universe (IBM). To say Jobs was fighting an uphill battle is to
suggest that Charles Lindbergh's historic flight across the Atlantic was
"challenging." Jobs was reviled and ridiculed. Yet he reinvented the
computer world, in a way that makes Bill Gates' more recent contributions at
Microsoft seem meager by comparison.
How did Jobs do it? By worrying about which shade of green
was "right." He triumphed with the Apple II. Then the Macintosh. It
was precisely his stratospheric standards ("insanely great" was a
common Jobsism in days past) that allowed him and his enormously spirited teams
to push past the existing frontier time and time again.
No, sir. Green is not green. Not if you're reinventing the
planet. Which is not to applaud his tirades. But it is to suggest that for
every disaffected Apple or Next employee burned by Jobs, there are probably 10
who by age 28 achieved Neil Armstrong-like lifetime highs at his side. Perhaps
the bitterness of some stems from the subliminal realization they'll never soar
so high again. It's a nightmare for a 28-year-old software designer, just as it
is for 30-year-old Michael Jordan.
My two best bosses were my two toughest bosses. Neither was
a screamer, although one came reasonably close. Both practiced psychological
terrorism-though neither knew he was doing so. Both set mercilessly high standards for themselves. And
neither believed in barriers to achievement, including acts of God (which were
seen simply as opportunities to demonstrate one's mettle as never before). Both sent me home screaming. I recall literally a year of
just about non-stop headaches in one case.
It doesn't jibe with the perfectly balanced life. But I'll
tell you, I learned more, faster, from these two than ever before or since.
The perfect boss is, of course, aware of individual
differences and knows exactly how far to push each individual to "attain
maximum performance," or some such ideal.
Except I very much doubt bosses like that exist. Those with
shockingly high standards undoubtedly cause casualties among their followers.
Yet without these outrageous pioneers, we wouldn't get anywhere.
Am I callous? Yes and no. To countenance, under any circumstances, the infliction of pain is callous. But to fail to understand that no epic bridge or dam has ever been built, or fighter aircraft tested, without casualties is to fail to comprehend the real world of high-performance anything.
Fortune quotes experts who say these executive thugs suffer
from low self-awareness. I'm sure that's true, and perhaps the toughies would
benefit from counseling by a trusted peer (unlikely) or elder (slightly more
likely) who would clue them in on the havoc they've left in their wake.
But, let's face it. If these chiefs were thoroughly
self-aware they would probably not realize how insane (literally) their
towering quests are. And the world would be a poorer place for it.’
Wednesday, September 21, 2011
Positive Leadership: Achieving Greatness
What is the difference between mediocrity and greatness?
Possibly not as much as you think.
You know, it really takes very little to make a big
difference in our lives and in the world. In professional baseball in the USA for
example, most batters hit for an average of about .250, which means that they
get one hit for every four times at bat. Anyone who hits .300, three hits out
of ten, is considered a star. By the end of the season, there are only about a
dozen players out of hundreds in the leagues who have maintained a .300
average, and these are the ones who get the big contracts, the acclaim, and the
TV commercials.
In other words, the difference between the great players and
the ordinary players is only one hit out of twenty! This slim margin of
greatness in baseball symbolises the dynamics of greatness in life, because
when we use just a tiny bit more of our potential, we become outstanding human
beings.
Now, the purpose of being outstanding is not to win acclaim
or glory, but to be more of what we can be. If you accept the idea that most of
your present limitations are not based on any unchangeable reality but are
rather the result of beliefs you hold about your reality, then the next step is
to deliberately and systematically change those beliefs.
It’s called possibility thinking, and it’s a skill you can
learn quite easily.
Thursday, July 28, 2011
Positive Leadership: High Potentials
Disproportionately this new generation of leaders will come from the pool of
people within an organisation, often referred to as, “high potentials.” But
there’s the rub. By what criteria do we decide whether somebody is a high
potential suited for a leadership position?
Face it, not everyone is a high-potential. Some have reached
their potential and others are quite comfortable where they are. They are good,
if not great, performers who are satisfied with their accomplishments and
focused on doing what they do best.
So what are the criteria by which you evaluate whether
someone can be a high-potential leader?
Here are five
suggested criteria:
1. Knowledge
They know their business. Simply put, high-potential leaders
are those individuals who have displayed a certain amount of accumulated
expertise. This expertise may be technical or it may be based in networks, but
it’s invaluable for an organisation. More importantly, they understand how
their activities, their sector, and their realm of knowledge, is related to the
wider organisational agenda.
2. Reputation
They have legitimacy in the eyes of others. Others in the
organisation must appreciate the relevance of the knowledge base that a
high-potential possesses. It’s a simple reality that having expertise or a
skill base isn’t enough to make one a high-potential leader. High-potential
leaders must also have the ability to garner the professional respect of
others.
3. Ambition
They have a strong career mindset. We want our high
potentials to be ambitious—but we want them to be ambitious in a very focused
way. And the best way to get a sense of their ambition is to evaluate their
commitment to their career progression. High potentials need to be committed to
accumulating new responsibilities, new successes, acquiring additional
knowledge, and, for better or worse, achieving additional recognition.
4. Partnering
They understand the importance of working with others. While
a strong career mindset is important, high-potentials must also have a deep
appreciation of partnership. A high-potential leader’s partnering ability
shouldn’t be a politically correct exercise, but rather a pragmatic, tactical
skill that will allow them to make better, more informed decisions.
Lone-rangers and lone-wolves may be creative and ambitious, but they may not be
suitable for the next leadership rung in the organisational ladder.
5. Courage
They are bounded risk takers. High-potential leaders must
understand that no matter how good they think a decision may be—they are making
it under conditions of uncertainty. No matter how much information you have, no
matter how many cost-benefit analyses you have done, no matter how many market
surveys you have completed, a high-potential leader will know all information
is limited. They’ll know that some decisions are inevitable, but they’ll also
have the courage to take risks.
Identifying high-potential leaders requires an appreciation
of what it is we want from our leaders. We want our leaders to know their
business, and therefore knowledge is critical. We want others to accept their
expertise, and therefore reputation is critical. We want them to be personally
driven, and therefore ambition is essential. We want them to understand that
nothing can be done alone, and therefore partnering is critical. And finally,
we want them to know that nothing is guaranteed, and therefore courage is
fundamental.
These five criteria, when identified appropriately—be it
through skill matrixes, interviews, delineated questionnaires or peer
review–will go a long way toward identifying high-potential leaders.
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