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How Top Companies Breed Stars

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Geoff Colvin, Fortune Senior editor at large has just done a great piece for Fortune Magazine on how the best companies go about developing leaders. It is a long piece – but here are the headlines:

“You couldn’t be blamed for rolling your eyes when American Express chief Ken Chenault says, “People are our greatest asset.” CEOs always say that. They almost never mean it. Most companies maintain their office copiers better than they build the capabilities of their people…”

“A close look at the companies on our list reveals a set of best practices that seem to work in any environment… These companies operate in every kind of industry and are based all over the world. But what’s most striking are traits they share – specifically, nine practices that combine to create world-class leadership development.”

  1. Invest time and money
  2. Identify promising leaders early
  3. Choose assignments strategically
  4. Develop leaders within their current jobs
  5. Be passionate about feedback and support
  6. Develop teams, not just individuals
  7. Exert leadership through inspiration
  8. Encourage leaders to be active in their communities
  9. Make leadership development part of the culture

Great to see that much of this resonates with what we teach in the Progressive Managers Network! Delegation, coaching, feedback all come through strongly in this research.

Managing People With Passion

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My working life has been spent working with a wide variety of organisations. But they all have one thing in common. Each is trying to make the world a better place. Whether operating in the private, public or third sector they have all been about making things better.

People join these organisations because they:

  1. Want to make a positive difference in the world
  2. Develop their own potential and capacity in making this difference
  3. Want to provide food, warmth and shelter for themselves and their loved ones.

They want to belong in an organisation where they can grow, make a difference and earn a living.

They need respectful and nurturing management. The salary to them is important – but in the long run it is personal growth and making a difference that they really value. They need management that focuses on helping them to make their contribution.

Many of the organisations I have worked with have struggled in this area. People lose their sense of purpose and identity as they become consumed by delivering ‘the service’ or ‘the contract’. They become more technically proficient at what they do – but their optimism and belief slowly fades away and performance slowly degrades.

This process is driven by an orthodox approach to management that focuses on tasks and fails to engage with dreams and aspirations. The noble goals are transformed into routine. There is a famous story about the floor sweeper at NASA who proudly told visitors that he was working to help put men on the moon. Well, in many organisations this process of ennobling a job is completely reversed. People doing great work, contributing to great goals, become reduced to ‘marketing co-ordinators’, ‘database administrators’ or ‘account managers’. They get absorbed into management systems, balanced scorecards, customer service standards and the other paraphernalia of modern management and they lose sight of what they are all about.

Managing people with passion has to be done differently. It has to keep the sense of purpose ‘up front’.

It has to keep the passion burning.

Love, Hate and Indifference

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Stope Hate UK

For a while now I have used a Honda advert in my work with clients – the one with the fluffy bunnies and the dirty diesel engine that becomes clean and environmentally friendly.    It has a wonderfully catchy tune with the lyrics  ‘Hate something, change something, make something better…’

It helps people to understand that both love and hate provide the fuel for change; the energy, inspiration and motivation required to make something happen.  The power to make things better.   ‘Love’ and ‘Hate’ are full of opportunity and potential.

It is indifference that is the problem.  Indifference never made anything happen.

Often the people that hate things the most are the ones that you need to talk with to make things better.  Passion fuels progress.  That is why I love hate – and encourage managers to love it too.  Find out what people hate – and help them to change it.

Today though I met an organisation based here  in Leeds called ‘Stop Hate UK’.  Their purpose is to stop hate crime, and their unique contribution is to make reporting of hate crime easier and to provide practical and relevant help to those who suffer it.  Wow!  No problem getting up in the morning to go and work on that!

In organisational life it is usually the object of hatred (the unethical practice, the flaky printer, the fussy customer) that provides the opportunity for change.  But perhaps there are times when it is the hater that provides the real opportunity for progress rather then the hated?

If you would like to know about the work of STOP HATE UK then just click on the graphic to visit their website.  And if you are a victim of a hate crime then give them a call.

Appreciation, Affirming Feedback and Retention!

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According to the Department of Labor in the USA, 64% of working Americans leave their jobs because they don’t feel appreciated, while Gallup research shows that 70% of working Americans say they receive no praise or recognition on the job.

Is there any reason to suspect that things may be different or better here in the UK? I doubt it. We have a long history of management by exception (managers leaving the good stuff alone and focussing on the problems). Often work is designed so that managers really don’t get to see or hear the good stuff that goes on.

I have played my part in this.

I once helped a call centre to install a piece of software that allowed callers to rate the quality of service provided by the agent. Low scores generated e-mails to team leaders with attached MP3 recordings of the call and invited them to provide coaching to the agent involved where appropriate.

This helped to quickly reduce the number of problem calls.  But it also had the unwanted effect of damaging the perceptions that team leaders had of many of their agents – because the only stuff they saw and heard was bad. Likewise agents started to perceive team leaders as critical, picky and failing to appreciate the good work that was done. No wonder employee retention in the call centre business is low.

Once we changed the software so that team leaders got e-mailed about the great calls as well as the bad ones things in this call centre rapidly got better.

  • Is your job designed to help you to see, appreciate and feedback on the good stuff that your team members do?
  • Have you been trained in how to do this well?
  • Do you spend enough time and effort on it?

Practical Coaching for Managers

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Coach

I have been working over the last week or so on delivering my Practical Coaching workshop. It is designed to help managers to coach every team member to improve performance on a weekly basis. It should get some real momentum behind professional development, personal development and performance improvement.

Like most of my training the emphasis is put less on ‘coaching skills’ and more on an effective, systematic, replicable coaching process.

Judging by the initial repsonse the approach has been well received. Much of the training focuses on helping managers to agree SMART objectives for coaching that will ensure real clarity about what is going to be learned – and how a success will be judged.

We did this in a few case study examples that were supplied by participants and had some fun turning some pretty vague coaching aims (I want to coach them to be more confident/decisive; I want to coach them to be less needy of me as their manager etc) into SMART coaching objectives.

By turning these into SMART goals and then developing resources for learning, building action plans and looking at weekly progress reviews, participants were able to see some very practical ways that they could approach coaching their team members – without the need for (usually expensively acquired) ‘coaching skills’.

As always the work on SMART objectives flushed out some interesting variations on the acronym. Is the A for Achievable? The R for Realistic? If so, then what is the difference? The formulation that I encourage participants to use is:

  1. Specific – what exactly do you want them to learn to do
  2. Measurable – how will you know – absolutely whether they have met the standard that you expect
  3. Actionable – is the objective ‘dripping’ with potential actions – is it full of ‘things to do’?
  4. Relevant – where does this objective fit with their personal and professional development? Where does it fit with the needs of the business?
  5. Time related – have we got a clear time commitment – by which the goal will be achieved?

Being able top convert a vague coaching aim into a SMART coaching objective is certainly more than half the battle. After that it just requires lots of feedback and a bit of discipline to manage weekly checks on the team members progress.

This way a manager can coach every member of their team, every week and deliver real performance improvement in the organisation – without spending fortunes on external coaches.

Sounds like a winning recipe to me!