Walt Disney Had No Good Ideas

Tracey White

Early in his career a newspaper editor fired Walt Disney because he had “no good ideas”. When Thomas Edison was a boy, his teachers told him he was too stupid to learn anything. Beethoven's music teacher once said of him: "as a composer he is hopeless."

Creative and imaginative people are often not recognized by their contemporaries. Very often, they are not even recognized by their schoolteachers. So how do businesses seeking to capitalize on the creativity and ingenuity of their employees maximize the potential in their midst?

Now more than ever, business needs to encourage experimentation and promote learning. The Gap is closing a quarter of its North American locations while sister brand Old Navy posts double its sales. Retail analysts attributed the performance difference to a high degree of collaboration, cross-functionality, willingness to learn and exploit best practices at Old Navy.

In his brilliant book, The Process Mind, Philip Kirby argues that mistakes and problems are treasures. They are the means to improve performance by identifying and eliminating hidden cost and waste in delivering value to customers.

Kirby, an internationally recognized Lean expert, demonstrates how the culture of most organizations is designed to ensure that tomorrow consistently and predictably replicates yesterday with inflexible structures, operating procedures, fixed job titles and roles that impede experimentation, learning and ultimately change.

Poorly designed operating processes, misaligned incentives, bureaucracy, and waste, particularly wasted time, are signs to Kirby of an inherent disrespect for people. Most insidiously, these operating environments breed a level of risk aversion and intolerance for mistakes that snuff out new ideas and problem solving that feed innovation.

To Kirby, people are the secret sauce in delivering customer value. Respect for people means a true understanding and leveraging of their power, experience and creativity.

Consider Disney’s experience again. “I could never convince the financiers that Disneyland was feasible,” he famously said, “because dreams offer too little collateral.”

Six Myths About Venture Capitalists

by Diane Mulcahy 

Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin: We celebrate these entrepreneurs for their successes, and often equally extol the venture capitalists who backed their start-ups and share in their glory. Well-known VC firms such as Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia have cultivated a branded mystique around their ability to find and finance the most successful young companies. Forbes identifies the top individual VCs on its Midas List, implicitly crediting them with a mythical magic touch for investing. The story of venture capital appears to be a compelling narrative of bold investments and excess returns.

The reality looks very different. Behind the anecdotes about Apple, Facebook, and Google are numbers showing that many more venture-backed start-ups fail than succeed. And VCs themselves aren’t much better at generating returns. For more than a decade the stock markets have outperformed most of them, and since 1999 VC funds on average have barely broken even.

The VC industry wouldn’t exist without entrepreneurs, yet entrepreneurs often feel as if they’re in the backseat when it comes to dealing with VCs. For someone who’s starting (or thinking of starting) a company, the myths surrounding venture capital can be powerful. In this article I will challenge some common ones in order to help company founders develop a more realistic sense of the industry and what it offers.

Myth 1: Venture Capital Is the Primary Source of Start-Up Funding
Venture capital financing is the exception, not the norm, among start-ups. Historically, only a tiny percentage (fewer than 1%) of U.S. companies have raised capital from VCs. And the industry is contracting: After peaking in the late 1990s, the number of active VC firms fell from 744 to 526 in the decade 2001–2011, and the amount of venture capital raised was just under $19 billion in 2011, down from $39 billion in 2001, according to the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA).

But less venture capital doesn’t mean less start-up capital. Non-VC sources of financing are growing rapidly and giving entrepreneurs many more choices than in the past. Angel investors—affluent individuals who invest smaller amounts of capital at an earlier stage than VCs do—fund more than 16 times as many companies as VCs do, and their share is growing. In 2011 angels invested more than $22 billion in approximately 65,000 companies, whereas venture capitalists invested about $28 billion in about 3,700 companies. AngelList, an online platform that connects start-ups with angel capital, is one example of the enormous growth in angel financing. Since it launched, in 2010, more than 2,000 companies have raised capital using the platform, and start-ups now raise more than $10 million a month there. (Disclosure: The Kauffman Foundation is an investor in AngelList.)

Another new source of start-up investment is crowdfunding, whereby entrepreneurs raise small amounts of capital from large numbers of people in exchange for nonequity rewards such as products from the newly funded company. Kickstarter reports that more than 18,000 projects raised nearly $320 million through its platform in 2012—triple the amount raised in 2011. Passage of the JOBS (Jumpstart Our Business Startups) Act last year promises to support even faster growth by allowing crowdfunders to invest in exchange for equity and by expanding the pool of investors who can participate. 

Myth 2: VCs Take a Big Risk When They Invest in Your Start-Up
VCs are often portrayed as risk takers who back bold new ideas. True, they take a lot of risk with their investors’ capital—but very little with their own. In most VC funds the partners’ own money accounts for just 1% of the total. The industry’s revenue model, long investment cycle, and lack of visible performance data make VCs less accountable for their performance than most other professional investors. If a VC firm invests in your start-up, it will be rooting for you to succeed. But it will probably do just fine financially even if you fail.

Why? Because the standard VC fund charges an annual fee of 2% on committed capital over the life of the fund—usually 10 years—plus a percentage of the profits when firms successfully exit, usually by being acquired or going public. So a firm that raised a $1 billion fund and charged a 2% fee would receive a fixed fee stream of $20 million a year to cover expenses and compensation. VC firms raise new funds about every three or four years, so let’s say that three years into the first fund, the firm raised a second $1 billion fund. That would generate an additional $20 million in fees, for a total of $40 million annually. These cumulative and guaranteed management fees insulate VC partners from poor returns because much of their compensation comes from fees. Many partners take home compensation in the seven figures regardless of the fund’s investment performance. Most entrepreneurs have no such safety net.

Other investment professionals often face far greater performance pressure. Consider mutual fund managers, whose fund performance is reported daily, whose investors can withdraw money at any time, and who are often replaced for under performance. VC performance is ultimately judged at the end of a fund’s 10-year life, so venture capitalists are free from the level of accountability that’s common in other investment realms. They take on less personal risk than angel investors or crowdfunders, who use their own capital. And all investors take fewer risks than most entrepreneurs, who put much of their net worth and all of their earning capacity into their start-ups. 

Myth 3: Most VCs Offer Great Advice and Mentoring

A common VC pitch to entrepreneurs is that the firm brings much more than money to the table: It offers experience, operational and industry expertise, a broad network of relevant contacts, a range of services for start-ups, and a strong track record of successful investing.

In some cases those nonmonetary resources really are valuable. But VCs vary tremendously—both as firms and as individuals—in how much effort they put into advising and assisting portfolio companies. Among those who do mentor their CEOs, ability and the quality of advice can differ widely. There are no solid data about the industry’s delivery on this mentoring promise. But if you asked the CEOs of 100 VC-funded companies how helpful their VCs are, some would say they’re fabulous, some would say they’re active but not a huge help, and some would say they do little beyond writing checks. This last group isn’t necessarily bad, of course: Some CEOs may be happy to skip the mentoring and just take the cash. But for founders who have bought into the idea that VCs provide lots of value-added help, it can be a source of great disappointment.

The best way to determine whether a VC firm or partner brings resources other than capital to the table is to conduct your own due diligence, just as you’d do a thorough reference check on a key hire. Talk with the CEOs of the firm’s other portfolio companies and ask if the partner is accessible, how much he or she adds to boardroom discussion, and whether the CEO has received constructive help in dealing with company problems. Ask about resources the firm offers—PR, recruiting, and so forth—and whether those have been useful.

Some questions you should ask the VC firm directly, such as: Whom does it intend to put on your board? Is the person a partner or an associate? Does the person have any experience (or any other portfolio companies) in your industry? On how many other boards does he or she serve? Asking such questions may seem like common sense, but it’s shocking how few company founders actually make the necessary calls before signing up for a long-term relationship with a VC. If part of what makes a firm attractive is that it offers expertise, mentoring, and services, the entrepreneur needs to confirm that both the firm and the partner have a track record of delivering them. 

Myth 4: VCs Generate Spectacular Returns
Last year my colleagues at the Kauffman Foundation and I published a widely read report, “We Have Met the Enemy...and He Is Us,” about the venture capital industry and its returns. We found that the overall performance of the industry is poor. VC funds haven’t significantly outperformed the public markets since the late 1990s, and since 1997 less cash has been returned to VC investors than they have invested. A tiny group of top-performing firms do generate great “venture rates of return”: at least twice the capital invested, net of fees. We don’t know definitively which firms are in that group, because performance data are not generally available and are not consistently reported. The average fund, however, breaks even or loses money.

We analyzed the Kauffman Foundation’s experience investing in nearly 100 VC funds over 20 years. We found that only 20 of our funds outperformed the markets by the 3% to 5% annually that we expect to compensate us for the fees and illiquidity we incur by investing in private rather than public equity. Even worse, 62 of our 100 funds failed to beat the returns available from a small-cap public index.

Venture capital investments are generally perceived as high-risk and high-reward. The data in our report reveal that although investors in VC take on high fees, illiquidity, and risk, they rarely reap the reward of high returns. Entrepreneurs who are distressed when VCs decline to fund their ventures need only review the performance data to see that VCs as a group have no Midas touch for investing.

Myth 5: In VC, Bigger Is Better

Venture capital in the United States began as a cottage industry, notable in the early years for investments in companies such as Intel, Microsoft, and Apple. In 1990, 100 VC firms were actively investing, with slightly less than $30 billion under management, according to the NVCA. During that era venture capital generated strong, above-market returns, and performance by any measure was good. What happened? During the peak of the internet boom, in 2000, the number of active firms grew to more than 1,000, and assets under management exceeded $220 billion. VC didn’t scale well. As in most asset classes, when the money flooded in, returns fell, and venture capital has not yet recovered. The number of firms and the amount of capital have declined since the boom, though they are both still far above the levels of the early and middle 1990s.

What’s true for the industry is also true for individual funds: Bigger isn’t better. Company founders often feel that signing a deal with a large VC firm lends cachet, just as MBA students may get special pleasure from being offered a job by a big, well-known employer. But industry and academic studies show that fund performance declines as fund size increases above $250 million. We found that the VC funds larger than $400 million in Kauffman’s portfolio generally failed to provide attractive returns: Just four out of 30 outperformed a publicly traded small-cap index fund. 

Myth 6: VCs Are Innovators
It’s ironic that VC firms position themselves as supporters, financers, and even instigators of innovation, yet the industry itself has been devoid of innovation for the past 20 years. Venture capital has seen plenty of changes over time—more funds, more money, bigger funds, declining returns—but funds are structured, capital is raised, and partners are paid just as they were two decades ago. Any innovation in financing start-ups, such as crowdfunding and platforms like AngelList and SecondMarket, has come from outside the VC industry. 

The story of venture capital is changing. Entrepreneurs have more choices for financing their companies, shifting the historical balance of power that has too long tilted too far toward VCs. Entrepreneurs will enjoy a different view as they move from the backseat into the driver’s seat in negotiating with VCs. An emerging group of “VC 2.0” firms are going back to raising small funds and focusing on generating great returns rather than large fees. And the industry’s persistent underperformance is finally causing institutional investors to think twice before investing in venture capital. As a result, VCs will continue to play a significant, but most likely smaller, role in channeling capital to disruptive start-ups.

Diane Mulcahy, a former venture capitalist, is the director of private equity for the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, an adjunct lecturer in the entrepreneurship division at Babson College, and an Eisenhower Fellow.  

Good Strategy/BadStrategy: The Difference and Why It Matters

Video - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZrTl16hZdk

Speaker(s): Professor Richard Rumelt
Chair: Professor Gordon Barrass

Developing and implementing a strategy is the central task of any leader. Richard Rumelt shows that there has been a growing and unfortunate tendency to equate motherhood and apple-pie values and fluffy packages of buzzwords with "strategy."

Richard Rumelt is the Harry and Elsa Kunin Professor of Business and Society at UCLA Anderson.

How The Most Successful People Think Differently To Solve Their Biggest Challenges

Paul B. Brown, Contributor

Invariably, when presenting a new approach to solving problems, authors, pundits and commentators go to great lengths to “prove” why everything that existed before they presented their argument has been a waste of time.

That’s just silly. 

You know why people attack everything that has come before. We live in a hyper-competitive environment when it comes to getting someone’s attention and so if you have something new, you may feel compelled to come up with a gimmick such as “everything you know is wrong” in order to get people’s attention.

We understand why they do this, because it would have been extremely tempting to go down this road ourselves.

We have developed a proven approach to dealing with uncertainty in all forms, i.e. what you should do when you don’t know what to do. 

We know it works because it is the same approach that the people who are masters at dealing with uncertainty—successful serial entrepreneurs—use. (There is nothing more uncertain than starting a business, and serial entrepreneurs are masters at it.)

The clichéd image of entrepreneurs coming up with an idea, laboring feverishly to perfect it, and delivering their creation to the market fully-formed is not what usually happens. The much more typical path is that they come up with an idea. They take a small step toward implementation to see if anyone is interested, and if it looks like some people are, they take another step forward. If they don’t get the reaction they want, they regroup and then take another step in a different direction.

In other words, they:

• Act.
• Learn (from that action)
• Build (off that learning)
• Repeat, i.e. they act again.

That cycle continues repeats until the entrepreneur succeeds, knows she is not going to, or decides there is another, more appealing opportunity to pursue. As we said, the approach serial entrepreneurs use when faced with the unknown (starting a business) will work for you when you face the unknown of any kind.

So, does this mean you should scrap your traditional ways of problem solving?
 
Absolutely not.

You shouldn’t use this approach exclusively. The way we all were taught to solve problems that are predictable—how do we introduce our existing product into an adjacent market; how many refrigerators will we sell during a recession—works just fine. You have historical precedents and data to draw on.

When you do, predict away.

When you don’t, try what we are advocating. It gives you an additional tool. It does not replace the ones you have.

We concede presenting a new idea this way is far less dramatic then screaming “EVERYTHING YOU KNOW IS WRONG.”

But it is honest, the process has been proven, and it should be helpful.

Paul B. Brown is the co-author (along with Leonard A. Schlesinger and Charles F. Kiefer) of Just Start: Take Action; Embrace Uncertainty and Create the Future recently published by Harvard Business Review Press.

9 Habits of People Who Build Extraordinary Relationships

The most extraordinary professional relationships are built by ordinary actions like these.

Professional success is important to everyone, but still, success in business and in life means different things to different people--as well it should.

But one fact is universal: Real success, the kind that exists on multiple levels, is impossible without building great relationships. Real success is impossible unless you treat other people with kindness, regard, and respect.

After all, you can be a rich jerk... but you will also be a lonely jerk.

That's why people who build extraordinary business relationships:


1. Take the hit.
A customer gets mad. A vendor complains about poor service. A mutual friend feels slighted.

Sometimes, whatever the issue and regardless of who is actually at fault, some people step in and take the hit. They're willing to accept the criticism or abuse because they know they can handle it--and they know that maybe, just maybe, the other person can't.

Few acts are more selfless than taking the undeserved hit. And few acts better cement a relationship.

2. Step in without being asked.
It's easy to help when you're asked. Most people will.

Very few people offer help before they have been asked, even though most of the time that is when a little help will make the greatest impact.

People who build extraordinary relationships pay close attention so they can tell when others are struggling. Then they offer to help, but not in a general, "Is there something I can do to help you?" way.

Instead they come up with specific ways they can help. That way they can push past the reflexive, "No, I'm okay..." objections. And they can roll up their sleeves and make a difference in another person's life.


Not because they want to build a better relationship, although that is certainly the result, but simply because they care.

3. Answer the question that is not asked.
Where relationships are concerned, face value is usually without value. Often people will ask a different question than the one they really want answered.

A colleague might ask you whether he should teach a class at a local college; what he really wants to talk about is how to take his life in a different direction.

A partner might ask how you felt about the idea he presented during the last board meeting; what he really wants to talk about is his diminished role in the running of the company.

An employee might ask how you built a successful business; instead of kissing up he might be looking for some advice--and encouragement--to help him follow his own dreams.

Behind many simple questions is often a larger question that goes unasked. People who build great relationships think about what lies underneath so they can answer that question, too.

4. Know when to dial it back.
Outgoing and charismatic people are usually a lot of fun... until they aren't. When a major challenge pops up or a situation gets stressful, still, some people can't stop "expressing their individuality." (Admit it: You know at least one person so in love with his personality he can never dial it back.)

People who build great relationships know when to have fun and when to be serious, when to be over the top and when to be invisible, and when to take charge and when to follow.

Great relationships are multifaceted and therefore require multifaceted people willing to adapt to the situation--and to the people in that situation.

5. Prove they think of others.
People who build great relationships don't just think about other people. They act on those thoughts.

One easy way is to give unexpected praise. Everyone loves unexpected praise--it's like getting flowers not because it's Valentine's Day, but "just because." Praise helps others feel better about themselves and lets them know you're thinking about them (which, if you think about it, is flattering in itself.)

Take a little time every day to do something nice for someone you know, not because you're expected to but simply because you can. When you do, your relationships improve dramatically.

6. Realize when they have acted poorly.
Most people apologize when their actions or words are called into question.

Very few people apologize before they are asked to--or even before anyone notices they should.

Responsibility is a key building block of a great relationship. People who take the blame, who say they are sorry and explain why they are sorry, who don't try to push any of the blame back on the other person--those are people everyone wants in their lives, because they instantly turn a mistake into a bump in the road rather than a permanent roadblock.

7. Give consistently, receive occasionally.
A great relationship is mutually beneficial. In business terms that means connecting with people who can be mentors, who can share information, who can help create other connections; in short, that means going into a relationship wanting something.

The person who builds great relationships doesn't think about what she wants; she starts by thinking about what she can give. She sees giving as the best way to establish a real relationship and a lasting connection. She approaches building relationships as if it's all about the other person and not about her, and in the process builds relationships with people who follow the same approach.

In time they make real connections.

And in time they make real friends.

8. Value the message by always valuing the messenger.
When someone speaks from a position of position of power or authority or fame it's tempting to place greater emphasis on their input, advice, and ideas.

We listen to Tony Hsieh. We listen to Norm Brodsky. We listen to Seth Godin.

The guy who mows our lawn? Maybe we don't listen to him so much.

That's unfortunate. Smart people strip away the framing that comes with the source--whether positive or negative--and consider the information, advice, or idea based solely on its merits.

People who build great relationships never automatically discount the message simply because they discount the messenger. They know good advice is good advice, regardless of where it comes from.

And they know good people are good people, regardless of their perceived "status."

9. Start small... and are happy to stay small.
I sometimes wear a Reading Football Club sweatshirt. The checkout clerk at the grocery store noticed it one day and said, "Oh, you're a Reading supporter? My team is Manchester United."

Normally, since I'm pretty shy, I would have just nodded and said something innocuous, but for some reason I said, "You think Man U can beat Real Madrid next week?"

He gave me a huge smile and said, "Oh yeah. We'll crush them!" (Too bad he was wrong.)

Now whenever I see him he waves, often from across the store. I almost always walk over, say hi, and talk briefly about soccer.

That's as far as our relationship is likely to go and that's okay. For a couple of minutes we transcend the customer/employee relationship and become two people brightening each other's day.

And that's enough, because every relationship, however minor and possibly fleeting, has value.

People who build great relationships treat every one of their relationships that way. (That's a lesson I need to take to heart more often.)

Jeff Haden learned much of what he knows about business and technology as he worked his way up in the manufacturing industry. Everything else he picks up from ghostwriting books for some of the smartest leaders he knows in business. @jeff_haden

Developing Character Habits in our Leaders

Developing Character Habits in our Leaders:

Are we addressing a Sin of Omission or a Sin of Commission?

“People… do you realize we are contemplating firing, or at least sidelining, some of our senior talent for the same reasons we promoted them earlier in their careers…what is that about!?”

A memorable statement from a CEO to his team during a talent-review meeting I was facilitating. The senior team was discussing and making recommendations on who gets promoted, sidelined, or even removed from role at the two levels below them.

Earlier in their careers, high-potential managers are noticed for what they do. They’re the ones achieving concrete results by utilizing their smarts, technical skills and drive to execute on short- term tasks.  They learn early on that in order to get ahead they must get noticed for their results. These short-term results are easy to see, evaluate and measure. When it comes to important relationships, however, their sphere of influence is mostly contained within their immediate team; so the negative impact on others – a result of their driven behaviour – is easily overlooked. “Yes, but look what she accomplished!”

According to Robert Hogan, founder of the Hogan suite of psychometrics for assessing leadership, we all wrestle with two primary motives that appear to conflict at times: getting along and getting ahead. Junior leaders learn to emphasize skills for getting ahead, and neglect developing the skills for getting along.  But later in their careers, these same people will need getting along skills to be successful achieving longer term, complex cross-business initiatives. Truly successful senior leaders are adept at situationally employing skills that have their origin in both of these motives: getting ahead and getting along.

Here is the problem. Rising stars in our corporations are being conditioned to develop their getting ahead muscles at the expense of their getting along muscles. Getting along skills become more important in the future for more complex leadership challenges. For the most part, organizational systems and cultural norms reward and reinforce the getting-ahead behaviours. We pay lip service to getting along, at least at the functional middle-management level (e.g. we have all heard “teamwork is our core value … blah, blah, blah”).

When these alpha leaders reach the senior leadership ranks, they are faced with greater complexity and timespan as they endeavour to drive longer-term cross-enterprise initiatives. Leading these complex tasks requires tight collaboration (getting along skills) of the senior team, while the team also needs to enable a work climate of collaboration, through good role modelling, setting clear accountabilities and expectations for their teams, along with installing the management systems, to support the expected norms of behaviours. As individual leaders they are all in over hteir heads.  They need each other to act in these complex adaptive systems.

Leaders who are able to value, model and apply the skills for getting along will enable a work climate that promotes trust, openness, deep listening and empathy. These characteristics are the bedrock for connection and high-quality, multi-level, internal and external social interactions. The ideas and subsequent changes that emerge from these interactions are required for organizational agility and ongoing adjustment with strategy. This starts with a senior leadership team that values its members; and its members in turn are good at interacting with each other.

All too often, these highly-talented, newly-minted, senior leaders have not adequately developed their muscles for getting along. Instead, they have developed bad habits—behaviour that was tolerated and even rewarded in the organization. Ironically, these habits tarnished their reputation, compromising their ability to get along and build the critical relationships required to facilitate change.

This career conditioning has led to many of our senior leaders being seen as lacking in character, or as Fred Kiel, in his ground breaking book,  Return on Character: The Real Reason Leaders and their Companies Win, would call them: self-focused leaders. Self-focused leaders are those that appear to lack the will and skill to demonstrate the behaviours informed by the four character habits of integrity, responsibility, forgiveness and compassion.

Self-focused Leadership: A sin of commission or omission?

My colleague  John Barker said it most eloquently:

“I’ve often wondered whether the lack of focus on building character habits in business is a sin of omission or commission.  Clearly an emphasis on deep, technical/tactical skills that are easily quantified and self-promoted drives early career momentum for most high-potential leaders. These breathless, short-term, obvious-impact results help define the self-focused ethos of so much young talent. Consequently they have, and are given, very little latitude or oxygen to develop big-breath capacities like integrity, responsibility, forgiveness and compassion.  Ironically, when they succeed in this highly competitive and ruthlessly pragmatic process, and are promoted to senior roles, we immediately expect them to lead with the Wisdom of Solomon.”

My personal view is that self-focused leadership is rarely a result of a sin of commission, or in other words, leaders behaving deliberately in a way that others would describe as lacking in character. Many of these apparent, self-focused leaders are acting that way due to a sin of omission. Again, they have not had the character habit development nurtured in them earlier on. Bad behaviour doesn’t necessarily imply bad people. Bad behaviour comes from outdated bad habits, which were useful to survive and get ahead in earlier times.

This wisdom can be developed in leaders through addressing the sin of omission. For example, we often have not held our rising stars accountable for demonstrating the skills and habits for Leadership Character: integrity, responsibility, compassion and forgiveness. As well, we have not installed the management systems and cultural norms that enable, encourage and expect our leaders to operate with character, regardless of the level.

Character Habits of Virtuoso Leaders:

The KRW research data is clear. Sustainable business results are strongly correlated with senior leaders demonstrating the four character habits. These powerful data have created the case for leaders to get the two primary motives (getting ahead and getting along) back in balance. The Return on Character data supports the business case for how critical it is that senior leaders have the four habits well developed and ready to go. However, the early selection and emphasis on getting-ahead skills mitigate against having getting-along skills well-developed and ready to utilize, for the appropriate situations, at senior levels.

It is the job of senior managers to act as personal trainers for each other and to help all organizational leadership see that, the new situation they find themselves in, requires a different set of muscles for success. To win at a senior level, the emphasis in development needs to shift more toward getting along, with less weight on the more competitive inclinations of getting ahead. One way of doing this is through working with senior leaders to help them gain awareness of their character reputation, as seen through the eyes of others. Once they see the gap between their self-image and how others see them, they become motivated to work on closing that gap. Closing that gap becomes their personal development plan to authentically show up with more integrity, responsibility, forgiveness and compassion.

Along with the cultivation of these habits, we need to make sure our organizational culture and management systems support these newly-formed muscles and behaviours, so we don’t have a sin of omission playing out here. There will always be some self-focused individuals who are guilty of a sin of commission involving the four habits, and will need to be dealt with accordingly. Seeing this leadership problem as primarily a sin of omission, rather than only one of commission, makes the problem very solvable, or perhaps even avoidable.

For more on how to get started on your journey of measuring and moving your executive team up the Character Curve, get in touch with me at  brian.brittain@brittainconsulting.ca

Or at 416 999-3217