21 Inspiring Quotes.....

What You Don't Know Will Hurt You: 3 Top Skills Leaders Need To Learn Today

By Marcel Schwantes

Principal and founder, Leadership From the Core@MarcelSchwantes

In my line of work, I will admit that not all leaders and owners have reached a visceral understanding of the potential of people. But those that do see it as their responsibility to help others grow towards their full potential.

Exceptional leaders shine the spotlight on their people by developing them -- a key retention strategy that will give you competitive advantage.

But how? I can think of no better way to developing your own tribe than implementing these simple strategies as soon as you can:

1. Provide opportunities for learning and growth.

What you'll find in most healthy organizations is a high commitment to growing their employees.

If you happen to work in such an environment, you'll probably notice a strong bond between top leadership, training and human resources functions working together to:

• Identify their employees' gifts, talents, and strengths for the best job fit so that they can reach their potential.
• Champion a "learning spirit" within the organization, sending a clear message that "growing our people is one of our highest priorities."
• Give meaning and purpose to the employees' work, adding further motivation.
• Provide ongoing training, coaching and mentoring opportunities that are aligned with job purpose, performance measures, best-in-class customer service, and fulfilling the organizational mission.

2. Build up others through encouragement and affirmation.

Gallup Organization researchers spent decades accurately measuring employee engagement, which resulted in their Q12 Engagement Survey. They have interviewed more than 25 million employees around the world to find the core of a great workplace.

The 12 questions are designed to be posed to employees. And from the perspective of the employee, many of the questions, I will submit to you, point to the principles of encouraging and affirming employees to be the best they can be.

The results can also be boiled down to 12 "look-in-the-mirror" questions that every leader can ask to understand how their companies measure up on the key elements needed to keep their most talented employees.

If you're a manager, and your employees were asked the following about you, how would you do?

• In the last seven days, have I received recognition or praise for doing good work?
• Is there someone at work who encourages my development?
• At work, do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day?
• In the last six months, has someone at work talked to me about my progress?
• This last year, have I had the opportunity at work to learn and grow?

The research also makes a strong business case for growing leaders in management roles.

Employees who responded more positively to these questions worked in business units with higher levels of productivity, retention and customer satisfaction.

The opinions formed by employees pointed to their immediate manager as the critical player in building and maintaining a great workplace.

Once again, as the old saying goes, people leave managers, not companies.

3. Have honest conversations during the onboarding process.

First of all, if you're new to onboarding, we're not talking about an HR orientation during the first day or week of hire. Effective onboarding is a management responsibility that can extend three-to-nine months after a hire date, sometimes longer.

Research is saying that a typical employee's mind isn't made up about staying or leaving a new company until month six!

I want to bring out some key questions that every leader should ask to find out if you are doing the things that lead to a great new hire experience.

These questions are meant to trigger a response for you to be more intentional about having conversations that lead to high employee engagement during those crucial first few months.

• Do you as a leader/manager engage your new hires in "How can we/I help you with your professional development interests?" conversations in the first month?
• Do you as a leader/manager engage new hires in conversations about what motivates them within the first 1-2 weeks of employment?
• Do most of your employees have development plans? If so, do these plans get discussed periodically one-on-one?
• Are you, as leader/manager, actively helping employees to advance their plans by talking with them?

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From:

 

Richard (Dick) Peters

Owner & Publisher - Profit and Leadership

Chair - The Executive Committee, T.E.C. Canada

(rpeters@tec-canada.com)

President, Leader Logic Ltd.

(richardpeters@leaderlogic.ca)

Slow Deciders Make Better Strategists

 

There are many ways to split people into two groups. Young and old. Rich and poor. Us and them. The 98% who can do arithmetic and the 3% who cannot. Those who split people into two groups and those who don’t. 

 

Then there’s the people who make good competitive-strategy decisions, and those who don’t. 

 

It’s not easy to split people into the good/bad strategy decision-makers. Track records are useful but they’re not unambiguous, and those getting started have no track records at all. General intelligence and business degrees seem to be good signs, but smart people with business degrees don’t agree on what works in strategy. Veterans with specific industry expertise look promising, but so do outsiders with new ideas. 

 

What about mindset? We know people put credence in confidence. However, it seems to me there’s a difference between someone who’s confident after laboring over a thoughtful decision and someone who’s confident with a snap judgment. It seems to me there’s a difference between someone who’s unsure after serious contemplation and someone who’s unsure about a quick pick. 

 

Imagine that we can record decision-makers’ solutions to a competitive-strategy problem. We also ask how confident they feel that they’ve found a good answer and how long it took them to find it. We can categorize them, then, like this:

I’ve got such a database of people, those who have entered the Top Pricer Tournament. The database includes business executives, consultants, professors, and students. I gave all of them the same unfamiliar but straightforward pricing-strategy problem.

Dozens of Tournament entrants said they were very confident in their strategies after making a fast decision, dozens said they were very confident after a slow decision, and so on. The phrases in the boxes are how I interpret the mindsets of the people in those boxes. In the analysis below I’ll leave out the respondents in the “I guessed” box because they seem unrepresentative of what happens in real life, where strategists work at strategy decisions until they’re confident in their answers or they’ve worked long enough to conclude they’re not going to make further progress.

In general, the I-already-knows, confident in their snap judgments, and the Now-I-knows, confident after pondering, tend to be older males. Male business students are also represented in the I-already-knows. The I-don’t-knows, unsure of their thoughtful decisions, tend to be somewhat younger. And females make up well over half of the I-don’t-knows, a much higher percentage than in the other mindsets.

Make your prediction: which of the three styles selected the best-performing Tournament strategies?

The best-performing group: the I-don’t-knows.

Perhaps it’s about age: we gain confidence over time, but maybe not skill. Perhaps it’s about gender: rather than the conventional wisdom that females don’t have enough confidence, maybe males have too much. I don’t have enough data yet to assess those hypotheses. And perhaps the results will change as the sample sizes grow.

Still, the I-don’t-knows’ success fits my business war-gaming experience.

In one case, the new vice president of a troubled business brought together about thirty managers, each with decades in the business. The managers considered the war game an amusing waste of time. They all knew the answer already, they said, and no other options were possible. Then, role-playing their business and its competitors, they discovered that their already-known answer simply would not work. The manag­ers suddenly found new options. We war-gamed one, and it worked, and they rolled it out in real life, and it worked.

The new VP got promoted.

It’s not that the managers didn’t care or were incompetent; it’s that they were overconfident. When you think you know the answer, you sincerely believe it’s a waste of time to keep looking for it. It feels like continuing to search for your keys after you’ve found them.

I think the essential lesson for competitive-strategy decision-makers is not so fast, in both senses of the phrase: take your time and don’t be so sure. That’s the mindset used by the new VP and the I-don’t-knows.

The willingness to apply that mindset is what separates the good decision-makers from the bad.

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Mark Chussil is the Founder and CEO of Advanced Competitive Strategies, Inc. He has conducted business war games, taught strategic thinking, and written strategy simulators for Fortune 500 companies around the world.

The enemies of adaptability

Never give up!

 

At age 5 his Father died.
At age 16 he quit school.
At age 17 he had already lost four jobs.
At age 18 he got married.
He joined the army and washed out there.
At age 20 his wife left him and took their baby.
He became a cook in a small cafe and convinced his wife to return home.
At age 65 he retired.
He felt like a failure & decided to commit suicide.
He sat writing his will, but instead, he wrote what he would have accomplished with his life & thought about how good of a cook he was.
So he borrowed $87 fried up some chicken using his recipe, went door to door to sell.
At age 88 Colonel Sanders, founder of Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) Empire was a billionaire. 🙌

A Framework for Understanding VUCA

Executives have taken to using the military acronym VUCA–Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity–to describe the world in which they operate and to ask that question: In a VUCA world, what’s the point of strategy?

Strategy does still have a purpose, but building one in a VUCA environment requires more nuanced thinking. And treating those four traits as a single idea leads to poorer decision making. 

Watch and listen as Nathan Bennett provides a framework, first featured in an HBR article, for how you should deal with a world that includes V, and U, and C, and A.

A Framework for Understanding VUCA