Category: Change Management

Is Your Company Threatened By This Potentially Devastating Situation?

Leadership experts predict a management vacuum to arise in the corporate world in the next few years. Read here to learn how to develop an effective succession plan.

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Does your company have an effective succession plan that has identified the next CEO and the one after that? Today’s leadership has the responsibility of hiring and training tomorrow’s leaders. Warren G. Bennis, an American leadership expert claims that “too many companies believe people are interchangeable. Truly gifted employees have unique talents that tend to be irreplaceable. Such individuals cannot be forced into roles for which they are not suited, nor should they be. Effective leaders allow talented employees to do the work they were born to do.”

A Challenging Question

Several years ago, my CEO made a challenge to his leadership team. He asked if he took the top 10% of individual performers from the organization to begin a new division, would the leaders have someone to backfill the top 10% of employee’s positions. Of course, the answer was no! Identifying and building a succession plan to train top performers is often a frightening task for executives who fear the associate will leave the organization or worse yet take over the leader’s position. In cases such as this, top performers are quite frequently hidden behind their supervisor’s work and taken for granted. A correct succession plan would identify these high performers and provide a strategy to encourage growth and retention of these future company executives.

The “Obvious” Solution

I remember a woman I hired with several years of work experience. I could tell she was a superstar right from the start. She wanted a manager role, but she just wasn’t ready for that much responsibility. I convinced her to accept a lower position after a tough negotiation. Within a year she was promoted to a manager and that same year she received a perfect employee engagement score from her staff. Two years later she was promoted to a Director. When traveling to a trade show, we ran into the CEO. I made a point of introducing her to the CEO as the future of my company. He smiled broadly and was delighted. Today, she continues to grow in her talents and is still with the company. I am grateful that I was able to assist in coaching her to the leader she is today. Whether she becomes the CEO of this company or another, I honestly believe she has the talent and fortitude to be a CEO one day. 

A Fast Approaching Deadline

Sometimes valuable leaders lurk in the shadows of an organization. These are the individuals that are in the trenches doing a tremendous amount of work but lack acknowledgment or recognition by upper management, which kills their motivation to reach their full potential. Not recognizing future leaders in a company’s succession plan is unfortunate due to the future need for engaged leaders. A vast leadership vacuum is beginning to impact corporate cultures due to the retirement of over 10,000 people per day from the baby boomer era.

If you are ready to build a real succession plan to fortify your company’s future, check back next week to learn about how to create a “bulletproof” organization with effective succession planning.

CHANGING BEHAVIOR

Will you accept Marshall Goldsmith’s two-week challenge to achieve your goals?

TAKE THE TWO-WEEK CHALLENGE

Published by GoldenProfessionalCoaching.com

Marshall Goldsmith is the master of behavioral change. In his book called “Triggers, Becoming The Person You Want To Be.” Goldsmith suggests, can we increase our motivation, demonstrate commitment, focus on positive action and reinforce the idea that goals are achieved incrementally by asking ourselves daily active questions that help inspire us to work toward our goals.

What is the two-week challenge one might ask?

To understand the challenge, we need to understand the concept of a Trigger. Inside of each of us, there is a leader who always wants to behave appropriately no matter what the environment. Yet certain environments cause us to be followers and inappropriately behave when faced with a Trigger. Consider when you last encountered an unpleasant trigger. An embarrassing moment occurred to me when I called the school and asked to speak my child’s teacher. The secretary informed me that the teacher did not take phone calls. I explained that she had told me I could call at any time. The secretary insisted all she could do was leave a message for her to call me. When I did not receive a return phone call for two days, I was exasperated. I contacted the school secretary again, and instead of calmly thinking of what circumstances may have prevented a return phone call, I  got very irate. That is not my typical behavior and certainly did not win me any favors in the long run.

Thus, we can consider the definition of Triggers to be stimuli that prompt a behavioral reaction. They can be beliefs, behaviors, or environments. Identifying your Triggers is useful in all your interpersonal relationships whether at home or the workplace. Being able to work consciously and proactively with Triggers in today’s ever-changing environment, and knowing how to identify, anticipate and adequately respond to them is critical to career success, strengthened relationships, and becoming the best version of one’s self.

The typical cycle for a Trigger looks like this: Trigger – Impulse – Response

To create behavioral change, we must take a moment and become self-aware of how we are feeling and what a proper response should be to this moment. We make many excuses for ourselves to misbehave. In the end, we are the only ones that can change our behavior. We have to decide to change and be accountable for our results

“Between a TRIGGER and our response, there is a space.  In that space is our power to choose our response. It is in our response that lies our freedom and growth as leaders.”   Victor Frankl

When we add two additional steps to our Trigger response process, we can find our freedom from circumstances.

Trigger – Impulse – Self-Awareness – Choice – Response

Marshall Goldsmith’s program of accountability requires us to ask ourselves (or have someone ask us), a series of engaging questions that are designed to incite a feeling of personal responsibility and demonstrate effort. Asking oneself a specific set of questions each night reflects a dedication to behavioral change. It also provides a mechanism for receiving feedback on current practices. The real key to the queries’ effectiveness is having another person, such as a friend or loved one, respond to the answers and challenge any trouble spots to determine if there is a causal link between behaviors and an environmental factor.

Marshall Goldsmith recommends that we begin at a minimum with six active questions listed in his book. He also advises us to add specific issues that relate to the critical goals in our life and or career. What is important to note here is the development of these questions. Questions that say, “ I have done my best to listen to my staff” are a passive question and give the leader an out. All inquiries should be formatted in an active voice.  This question should be formatted to read; I set aside one hour each day to listen to my staff’s needs.

The Two-Week Challenge

This week I was fortunate enough to offer a workshop on Triggers to the Retail Value Chain Federation (RVCF.com) at their spring conference. We spent about two hours discussing the topic and then agreed to ask ourselves our own set of eight to ten questions every day for two weeks. We determined we would rate ourselves 0-10 on each question each day for two weeks, and at the end of each week, we would average the questions to see if we had improved. Why two-weeks you might ask? It takes a minimum of two-weeks to form a new habit.

Watch for more feedback on how we did.

Final thoughts

“THE ONLY PERSON YOU ARE DESTINED TO BECOME IS THE PERSON YOU DECIDE TO BE!”

Ralph Waldo Emerson