Question: I just completed an internship with an amazing company. I’m excited about starting my career and eventually want to earn a leadership role. Do you have any basics for how to start off on a good foot?
HBO’s new drama, Succession, about an aging media tycoon’s struggle with turning over stewardship of his empire is part Rupert Murdoch case study and part King Lear. The CEO-cum-founder’s inability to pass the reins is an all too common leadership transition facing today’s enterprises.
I recently met for an initial coaching session with the Founder/CEO of a mental healthcare provider based in the U.K. and his successor-in-waiting who was the newly appointed COO. I had been coaching the CEO for over a year and knew that he was passionate about preserving the culture he had worked so hard to build since launching the agency 12 years ago. I also knew that he had no board of directors to help guide the transition, making the need to get him comfortable with truly letting go all the more tenuous. Over the course of our meeting, I facilitated a discussion between the CEO and COO around two thematic areas: context and trust.
CONTEXT
1. The origin story.
The CEO had grown up in Zimbabwe. He had watched his beloved grandmother slowly deteriorate from dementia. The family did their best to meet her needs, but her young grandson felt that his family should have had access to trained mental healthcare clinicians to respectfully support her as she declined. As soon as he graduated from high school, he set about righting that wrong. He moved to England and earned a license to practice mental healthcare. But the agencies that he worked for fell far short of his expectations. So, he started his own agency ingrained with the passion to provide mental health services through staff who would treat every patient as if caring for his or her own grandmother.
I asked the COO to share her version of the agency’s origin story and how the story may have resonated with her personally and professionally. Her version of the story was spot on, and she went on to share how she had a very similar experience as a child with her own “nan”. We discussed the importance of using the origin story as a basis for shifting the culture from founder-led to founder-inspired.
2. The values.
I then asked the COO to list the agency’s core values and her understanding of how those values played out in practice. She listed each of the three values — family, quality and honesty — and shared her discussions with staff about what the values look like in action. She noted that honesty was the most difficult for the team to define. I invited the CEO to share why honesty was included in the values list to give the COO the framework needed to develop a working definition with the staff.
3. The growth story.
Pivoting to the CEO, I asked him to highlight the business decisions he had made over the company’s 12-year history to scale the agency. I wanted the COO to grasp his risk tolerance, learn who he had leaned on to make big decisions, and discuss the opportunities and challenges he felt would impact the agency’s ability to sustain its growth. After he shared the highlights, I suggested that the two of them carve out time to review the growth story again. I recommended focusing on the 2016 decision to diversify, whether that decision was yielding the forecasted return, and, if so, what kind of attention the new business units needed to thrive.
4. The sacred cows.
Next, I explored the amount of discretion that the COO had to take action. Could she fire an employee for performance or cause with impunity, or were some team members safe from being fired? Could she challenge assumptions about the processes, places and products/services, or were there bounds that she needed to be aware of? The CEO’s initial response was vague. “If I am satisfied that she has taken the time to build relationships with each employee,” he said, “I am okay with her taking action at her discretion.” I recommended that he take time to consider the question more deeply and provide a more objective response when he had more clarity.
TRUST
Under the theme of trust, I recommended that the pair work together to get clear about the following:
Division of duties/power. What does success look like, and when will the CEO shift from coaching to mentoring the COO?
Division of loyalties. How will the COO respond when employees say that the CEO would not agree with her decisions/suggestions/statements?
Division of access. How will the CEO respond when employees try to end run around the COO?
If you’ve ever experienced a thriving founder-led company you’ll know that the person who started it has a special and unique relationship with the company. It runs much deeper than their formal CEO job title and responsibilities. Stepping into the role of a Founder/CEO is not a discrete event. It’s a process that requires repeated discussions to clarify and codify expectations, build trust, and confidently pass the baton.
Question: How would you give up control of a thriving organization you built from the ground up?
Driven by the premise that excellence is the result of aligning people, purpose and performance, Center for Executive Excellence facilitates training in leading self, leading teams and leading organizations. To learn more, subscribe to receive CEE News!
During the 3 minutes it will take you to read this post, you’ll probably get an email, a text, a social media update or a missed call. Let 30 minutes pass, and you could be swimming in unanswered inbounds. A steady diet of requests for your attention – both electronically and in-the-flesh – can leave you overwhelmed and intellectually and emotionally undernourished. You cannot lead effectively when your plate is full, but your cup is empty.
As a leader, you have a responsibility to create a culture of performance. Research shows that your ability to do so will require you to carve out your most precious resource – time – for yourself to reflect. In his March 2013 Harvard Business Review article, JP Morgan Managing Director Chris Lowney suggests that leaders need to take a mental pit stop. As a former Jesuit seminarian, Lowney recalls that St. Ignatias of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, recommended a practice known as “examen.” Simply put, it’s the concept of examining your day and taking stock.
Before you move onto your next thing to do, make a commitment to yourself to refuel by practicing the 3 G’s for daily reflection. Find a notebook and select a time and place each day to “examen,” as follows:
Practice Gratitude. A 2013 survey of 2,000 Americans by the John Templeton Foundation found that people are less likely to feel gratitude about work than anyplace else. In fact, respondents tended to rank their jobs as dead last when asked to list the things they were grateful for. Yet, studies have shown that people who make a habit of recording what they are grateful for have more positive emotions, feel better physically and mentally, and feel more connected to others as a result. What or who at work are you grateful for?
Give Your Reserve. When your tank is low, the last thing you may think about is, “what can I do to help someone else?” But, research confirms that the warm glow you feel after giving someone else a boost can be mapped to neural hedonic activity (aka stimulate pleasure systems in the brain). So, pay for the coffee of the next person in line. Call someone who needs it. Take the neighbor’s garbage cans in. It will give them something to be grateful for, and give yourself a lift as well. What little thing could you give today?
Extend Grace. There’s a saying that not forgiving someone is like drinking poison and hoping the other person dies. Remember when your colleague cut you off in mid-sentence today when you were trying to make that point about the new project? Drop it. Whether she did it to undermine you or because she was caught up in the brainstorm, it’s over. She’s not burning up thinking about it. While you’re at it, give yourself some grace too. If you’re still punishing yourself for a mistake you made with the best of intentions, let it go. Who can you stop keeping score on?
You’re taking in more information today than you ever have before. Make time for yourself to turn that information into knowledge, and that knowledge into insight.
Question: What do you do when your plate is full but your cup is empty?
Driven by the premise that excellence is the result of aligning people, purpose and performance, Center for Executive Excellence facilitates training in leading self, leading teams and leading organizations. To learn more, subscribe to receive CEE News!
Businessman and author Paul Hawken said it best,
“We lead by being human. We do not lead by being corporate, by being professional or by being institutional.”
That may be why leadership experts like John Maxwell understand the value of a good laugh at their expense. Just watch this minute with Maxwell video about humor.
The best leaders know that humor and humility go hand in hand. They act to keep their feet on the ground and their egos in check. The timely and appropriate use of humor is an asset to any leader.
Assuming your sense of humor passes the timely and appropriate test, here are 3 reasons why you should ensure humor is part of your leadership toolkit:
1. Humor fosters creativity
When you’re the leader, everyone is watching you for problem solving cues. If you approach business problems with furrowed brows and rapid-fire questions, you set the tone for a culture of fear. Cut down on the intimidation factor by using humor. “Humor is a key ingredient in creative thinking,” says Michael Kerr, President of Humor at Work. “It helps people play with ideas, lower their internal critic, and see things in new ways.” You can find Kerr’s formula for how HA + HA = AHA! in this short clip.
2. Humor improves health
Today’s business challenges require executives to face tough situations with greater frequency than ever. When stress becomes a part of your routine for an extended period, it can lead to illness and chronic disease. In fact, research by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention shows that up to 90% of all illness and disease is stress related. The good news is, humor is the physiological opposite of stress. It lowers blood pressure, increases blood circulation, reduces muscle tension, and boosts your immune system. Find out more about the short- and long-term benefits of humor here.
3. Humor improves retention
When a team laughs together, it facilitates a sense of community and helps to create a positive corporate culture. It also helps to create a shared history. In an interview with Businessweek, University of Missouri-Columbia professor Chris Robert says that humor “enhances the degree to which you feel bonded and part of the group in the workplace.” When employees have positive emotions about their job, they’re more likely to stay. As Robert states, “You might get a better job offer, but it will take more to draw you away when you like where you work and the people you work with.”
Things will go wrong. The best leaders find the humor in the situation to keep things light and moving forward. Browbeating others is not as powerful as helping them have a good attitude and a little levity.
Question: Have you used humor to diffuse a stressful situation at work? What were the results?
Driven by the premise that excellence is the result of aligning people, purpose and performance, Center for Executive Excellence facilitates training in leading self, leading teams and leading organizations. To learn more, subscribe to receive CEE News!
Congratulations! You just returned from your annual strategic planning summit. You gathered economic, competitor, and market data. You compared the strengths and weaknesses of your organization with external opportunities and threats. You decided where to tweak your services, how to reach new markets, and ways to generate higher profits. Now what?
If your strategic plan is in a 3-ring binder sitting on a shelf collecting dust until time to work on next year’s plan, it’s really no more than a theory. The sooner you can connect your strategic objectives with employee goals and rewards, the better chance you have of turning that theory into reality.
Here are three proven ways to keep your strategic plan from collecting dust:
Break it down. Many strategic plans focus primarily on financial metrics. Most employees don’t connect on a day to day basis with metrics like operating margins, net profit and EBITDA. They don’t see how making a decision about how to handle a customer leads to achieving a desired profit margin. And when employees get to see key performance metrics, the gap between when their performance occurred and the metrics is far too great to have any real meaning.
What kinds of metrics help people connect? Things like improving customer satisfaction, speeding up response times, reducing waste – just about anything that ties directly to the tasks people perform on a daily basis. When employees can see what winning looks like in ways they can relate to, they make better decisions in support of the plan.
Monitor progress.
Throw out the old paradigm of the annual Performance Review. That pattern traditionally goes like this: set goals, file goals, pull goals out after 12 months, beat employee about the head for not achieving goals. Instead, change the annual performance review process to one of continuous review and adjustment throughout the year. Why? You don’t want to save up negative feedback until the employee fails. Employee failure means organizational failure.
Link performance to rewards.
Employees should feel that when the organization has been successful, they share in the rewards. Conversely, when the organization has been unsuccessful, they should feel some of the pain. Incentive and reward systems should link directly to organizational and individual performance. Don’t be afraid to move all employee performance reviews to coincide with the release of annual performance results.
Strategy execution happens with true goal alignment from top to bottom, regular monitoring of progress, and linking individual incentives with organizational performance. Help your employees move from obliged to engaged to turn your strategy into reality.
Here’s a short parable to summarize the importance of true goal alignment:
There once was a Pharaoh who went out to inspect the progress of two pyramids. The first pyramid was a mess! The blocks were uneven, the ramps were unstable, oxen were milling about… The Pharaoh stopped a nearby worker and asked, “What is your job?” The worker replied, “I move stones from this pile to that pile all day.” At the next pyramid, the Pharaoh saw much greater progress. The blocks fit together perfectly. Teams of oxen were moving evenly up the ramps. This pyramid was really taking shape. When the Pharaoh asked a worker, “What is your job?” the worker replied, “I am building a pyramid!”
Bonus! Download our simple, FREE strategic planning template here – a framework to help you measure organizational performance beyond key financial metrics.
Question: How deep into your org chart do employees connect with the organization’s strategic goals?