Tag Archive for: Edith Onderick-Harvey

4 Must-Do Items on Every Leader’s January Checklist

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We’re starting another year. Like any other, it will be filled with opportunities and challenges, achievements and disappointments, zigs and zags. During these first couple weeks of the year, position yourself and your team for success in the months to come. Here are 4 actions that will help you start the year personally centered, organizationally aligned, and ready to go.
How can you and your team get off on the right foot in 2023?
Reconnect to your North Star.  What is your big “why?” Why do you do the work you do? How is it helping you live your values? How does your work advance your personal and career goals? Your business goals? What needs to change to move you further along this year?
  • There are hundreds of tools online to help you do this.  Here’s one.

 

  • If you’re already sure of your North Star, here’s a quick tool for moving you forward: with your north star in mind, create a “Start-Stop-Continue/ Improve” list. Focus on specific behaviors like “start spending 5 minutes preparing for every meeting/discussion by writing down how it aligns with my purpose and my goals and the top three things I want to accomplish.” Or “stop complaining in front of my team and focus on solutions.”

 

  • No matter what you do, write your thoughts down and put an alert in your calendar to check in with them on at least a quarterly basis. As this year ramps up we will be distracted by fire drills, urgent requests, and changes in plans. Aligning to your North Star will allow you to focus more fully on adding value and saying no to non-value-add activities.
Clarify goals.  For many of you, December and January are about setting annual goals for yourself and your team. Make sure you and your team are clearly aligned. Engage your team members in individual conversations about how frequently they want to check in on goal progression and the best way you can support them. Also, decide how you will reprioritize when inevitable change comes along. Even if you did this as recently as December, a quick check-in is important. People lose focus over the holidays, things change quickly and clarifying expectations at the beginning of the year leads to better alignment and happier team members.
Assess your personal routines.  Research shows that having routines can allow us to be more creative.  By creating routines around repetitive leadership tasks, we are able to direct our free cognitive resources to learning and creativity.  What are your current routines? What else could you routinize? For example, set up ‘do not disturb’ on your messaging while you’re doing concentrated work.  That way, responding to messages becomes routinized, and you’re able to respond at a time when you can focus more fully on the messages. Another way to improve your leadership is to consider your daily habits… what do you do almost without thinking or planning? What should you start/stop/continue?  Here’s a great list shared by 21 executives.
Do a mental health check.  How are you feeling as you start the year? Take an honest look at your emotional and mental health. Many of us are energized and ready to go. Many others are still feeling overwhelmed, burnt out, and daunted by what lies ahead of us. Commit time each day to taking care of yourself. Go for a walk. Connect with friends. Read. Do something that feeds your energy. Your company likely has confidential resources that you can access to help you understand and improve your health.
Being intentional around these four areas, you’ll position yourself for a great start to 2023.
What else do you do to start your new year with intention?

3 Ways to Improve Your Strategic Thinking

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You may have heard the story of the truck that was immovably stuck under a bridge and how the solution came from an unlikely source. If you don’t know it, I’ll share it at the end of this newsletter.

I was thinking about this story when recalling a professional meeting where the topic was developing a global mindset. One of the speakers was talking about their company’s research showing that experiencing another culture has a significant impact on one’s strategic thinking. “Experiencing” didn’t mean going there on a vacation. It was an immersive, longer-term experience, like ex pat assignments or managing a global team where you had to travel to work within their culture somewhat regularly.

The speaker noted that these assignments have this profound impact because they challenge your perceptions and perspectives of the world. These different perspectives allow you to be more nuanced in your thinking about how different parts of a whole interact, the variables that impact it, and the resulting implications. Your competitors are increasingly global, not just national or local. Therefore, such experiences help you to think more like (and outthink) your competitors, to anticipate trends, and to consider solutions and strategies from a broader array of possibilities.

How, then, can you stretch your perspectives to help develop your strategic thinking when working globally isn’t a possibility (or, at least, not yet)?

  • Regularly interact with people in a different function or area of the company. Marketers and engineers don’t think alike. Operations people think differently than researchers. See how someone different from you may experience the same issues or the organization itself.
  • Interact with those outside your industry.  For years, benchmarking was the buzzword when you wanted to get a more strategic perspective and to gain some competitive advantage. Benchmarking is often practiced with a closed-system approach. Life science companies benchmark other life science companies. Tech firms benchmark other tech firms. That’s important, but it’s also somewhat limiting, especially in a world where industries and disciplines are bleeding together like never before. The perspective of someone in a different industry about your issue or situation will cause you to think about the variables and interactions more broadly, more strategically. One of the things that made Steve Jobs so successful at product design was that he included perspectives he gained from things as diverse as digital animation, calligraphy and architecture.

When we hire people who are mostly like ourselves we multiply our strengths… but also our weaknesses and blind spots.

  • Hire people who are different from you. We’re all familiar with research which shows that diverse organizations are generally more successful. In addition to the typical diversity categories we’re used to thinking about (gender, race, age, etc.) we should look for diversity of thought, experience, and education, among many other factors. When we hire people who are mostly like ourselves, we multiply our strengths… but also our weaknesses and blind spots. Make sure to regularly ask those you’ve hired for their perspective and input on the business issues you are working to address.

Thinking about your daily business interactions expansively will help you develop the broader perspective needed for strategic thinking.

So, the story of the truck goes like this. The top of the truck was wedged against the underside of a bridge, and it could go neither forward nor backward. It just wouldn’t budge. Traffic was backed up and police and tow trucks were trying to figure out how to get it out. A little boy walked up and asked what was going on.  The police officer explained the dilemma. The little boy looked at him and said, “let the air out of the tires.”

5 Tips for Handling a Bad Situation

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How should you handle a bad situation?
Facebook is facing a crisis. Cambridge Analytica used 50 million users’ personal information without their permission to create targeted campaigns during the 2016 presidential campaign. Users want answers. The media wants answers. Congress wants answers. Still, during this storm, Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg was conspicuously absent. From news accounts, it’s not just that he wasn’t appearing in public. He also seems to be invisible internally. One news account was speculating that we had more concern about protecting his brand than facing the bigger issues. He broke his silence yesterday, after #WheresZuck took over social media. By not being present, his leadership brand has taken the hit.
Crisis situations (and even garden-variety mistakes) often involve rapid rates of change in stakeholder perceptions and actions. How should leaders handle it when things go wrong? When poor decisions are made? When they simply make a mistake? Here are four tips:
  • Get in front of it. News travels fast these days. Whether it’s through social media or the good old fashion office grapevine, people will know something has happened. Don’t wait to acknowledge the issue.
  • Own it. I very vividly remember sitting in a meeting with a CEO and his team. The CEO called one of his directs out about something that didn’t go well. The leader’s response was simple: “I made a mistake. Here’s what I’m doing to resolve the issue.” No hemming and hawing. No blaming. And, this admission didn’t tarnish his reputation. It continued to elevate it. Both before and after, he was consistently regarded as one of the best division heads in the company.
  • Keep people informed. For a situation like the one Facebook is dealing with, there is no quick fix. A multitude of conversations are happening and decisions need to be made out of the public eye. That said, employees and customers need to know that something is happening. Whether the mistake is visible to 1 person or millions, they need to know that something is happening. And, avoid the platitudes. “We’re in discussions” or “We’re assessing the situation” sound like corporate-speak. Treat people like the adults they are. Even if there is no decision or resolution yet, people need to know what has been done and what your general goals are for resolution.
  • Take the heat. It’s likely that there will be unhappy people in this situation. Even senior executives shy away from conflict and are known to avoid situations that involve a strong negative reaction. However, leadership means that the ‘buck stops here’. People need to know that you understand the situation. And not not just on an intellectual level but that you acknowledge the emotions involved. Don’t just talk about the facts, allow space for the feelings. “We know that some people are frustrated by…”
  • Say “I’m sorry.” Or, “I take responsibility.” Or, “I apologize.” But only if you mean it. Leaders are successful, in part, because of the actions they take, the decisions they make, and the results they get. That success can make it hard to admit that what you did or how it turned out had a negative impact or hurt people. Trust is the foundation of leadership. Without saying those two or three small words when it’s needed, that foundation will erode. You could end up being labeled as that person who thinks he or she can do no wrong.
How have you seen leaders handle bad situations?

Is 20% the Number?

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How hard is it to get 100% of even the smallest group of people to agree on anything, never mind a whole company? We’ve all struggled with that dynamic. But when it comes to culture change, Konica Minolta CEO Shoei Yamana believes the number is a lot smaller:
“Across a big company it is impossible to get 100 per cent of people to change. But you only need 20 per cent of the people. If I can do that, I am 100 per cent confident I can change the whole company.”
Last week, the Financial Times asked me to share my perspective on culture change. Their How to Lead feature was a profile of how Yamana is moving Konica Minolta past 140 years of success into a new business model. I shared my perspective in their companion piece Ask the Outsider. While his journey is focused on leading a traditional, 45,000 person, Japanese company through a major shift, his insights can help anyone who is trying to change mindsets in their team, department or company.
  • Give the words meaning: In the article, Yamana highlights the importance of telling evocative stories to paint a picture. It illustrates and reinforces behaviors that supports the new culture. He cites some actions taken by staff to meet a customer’s desire to see digital stars in their hospital room. By telling that story, he makes the ideas of nimble and customer-focused real.
  • Make people hungry: Complacency is the enemy of innovation. In it’s long history, Konica Minolta was focused on making products without regard for whether it was something the customer wanted or needed. The company wasn’t hungry to do something that was truly breakthrough. Success was simply assumed until Yamana no longer made it acceptable.

 

  • Change who you see as competition: Konica Minolta couldn’t rely on its past. Success was getting in the way of the future. Rather than positioning the company against its traditional competitors, Yamana positioned start-ups and industry disruptors as the competition. That shift, along with putting the customer at the center of their conversations, is changing how the employees at Konica Minolta see their roles.
What do you think? Is 20% buy-in the tipping point for change?
At NextBridge, we advise leaders and leadership teams on successfully changing their organizations and cultures.
What conversation would you like to have? Call me at 978-475-8424. I’d love to hear what you have to say.

How Do I Get to the Next Level?

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I woke up the other morning and the calendar said it was December.  December!
How can it already by the end of the year? This realization made me think about the goals I had set at the beginning of the year and where I stood against those goals. I asked myself, ‘How can I take my performance to the next level?” At this time of year, especially in companies that have end-year check-ins as part of their performance management process, you and your people may have this same question.

What do I need to do to get to the next level?

When our people ask this question, they are usually looking for us to help them navigate the performance of career development waters and give them the answer for where they should be taking their performance or career. When asked this question, use the GOAL Development Conversation Framework to guide the conversation.

First, determine the individual’s Goals. Review where the individual is in his or her current role. Are they ready for a move? What are the individual’s personal and career goals?

Second, gain the individual’s Observations on what he or she does well, areas of interest and development needs. Ask for examples.

Third, add your Assessment and the assessment of others, if you know them for a fact. If your team member is interested in moving to another role, what skills and competencies does someone need to be successful in that role? How does this person compare to that profile right now? What do they need to develop? How does it align (or not align) with their interests?

Finally, create a Learning plan. What more do you or your team member need to learn about the role in which he or she is interested? What skills or competencies do they need to develop? How do they need to better showcase strengths?

The Power of Thank You

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gratitude

As we move toward Thanksgiving, my thoughts are turning to gratitude. I question whether we show enough of it in the workplace. We often think that because someone is ‘doing his job’ he doesn’t need or want to know that we appreciate the value he is providing, the results achieved, or the extra effort given. That’s not to say that we should be showing appreciation or praise for everything someone does. Work is not an 8 year old’s soccer team where “everyone is a winner.” However, a simple thank you can garner immense returns.

Think about the last time someone gave you a genuine thank you or compliment on your work when you were not expecting or asking for it. How did you feel? What did it do to your relationship with that person? If you had two competing demands from the person who said “thank you” and someone else, who were you more likely to move to the top of you list (assuming that all things are equal, like the other person is not your boss or the CEO or someone else who trumps everyone else)?

Effective leaders recognize the contributions others make. They recognize that others achieve the results for which the leader may receive credit. They know that without others they are unable to achieve many goals.

Let me publicly thank a few people who have supported my success this year:

* Thank you to my assistant Diane who has helped me make order out of chaos, helped me put process in place and given me the time to focus on those areas where I add value to my clients.
*Thank you to my husband and family who, even when I doubt myself, have no doubt in the value of the work that I do.
* Thank you to my clients who put the trust in me to help them achieve their goals and to move performance forward in their organizations.
* Thank you to all of you who have so generously let me know that you find value in the words I put on this page every week and that you appreciate finding it in your email.

Happy Thanksgiving!

The Leadership Multiplier Effect

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A third of all CEO’s surveyed by The Conference Board say the most pressing issue they have is attracting, developing and retaining the right talent. Two of the biggest factors in engagement and retention are trust in senior leadership and the relationship people have with their managers. With 75% of employees in a recent Gallup Organization survey reporting that they are unengaged or actively disengaged at work, leadership is not successfully addressing this issue.

Leadership excellence has a multiplier effect on organizations. Investing in developing leaders, increasing the leadership multiplier effect, is a short-term and long-term strategy that allows your organization to adapt and thrive in various economic circumstances by attracting, retaining and engaging your human capital.

What is the Leadership Multiplier Effect?

Resources spent on leadership development have a cascading effect throughout the organization. The effective leader creates exponential value for the organization through his or her influence on the strategy, people and processes in the organization. One leader’s effective decisions and actions has a ripple effect that can impact dozens or hundreds of employees, positively changing business performance for the entire department or business unit. Likewise, the impact of poor leadership decisions and actions can lead to the decreased ability to attract, develop and retain the right talent.

In addition, effective senior leaders model behaviors and skills for other leaders in the organization. They set the tone for the leadership practices that define the organization and its culture. They demonstrate the business skills that address business issues and create innovation. They define and operationalize high performance through their interactions with each other and the entire organization.

As others mature in their leadership roles, their effectiveness is increased for having been effectively developed and for the role-models presented by senior leadership. A cascade is created. With more effective leadership focused on the right things at all levels in the organization, factors impacting business performance improve. Groups led by effective leaders are more engaged resulting in higher productivity rates, increased willingness to give extra effort, and greater acceptance of change. In other words, effective leadership creates an environment that attracts and retains high quality talent.

Ensuring the effectiveness of your leaders is critical whether your business is expanding or contracting. When your business is expanding, bringing on new people, introducing new products, serving new customers, leaders need to integrate and assimilate the growth. They need to plan strategically for growth, effectively develop their teams, establish business practices and maintain the engagement people feel in those initial few months on the job.

When business is contracting, leaders need to manage the change brought on by staff reductions, reduced revenue streams and increased cost constraints. They need to maintain the remaining staff’s focus and morale. Need to maintain customer service levels, identify how to do more with less.

Optimizing the Leadership Multiplier Effect

For the leadership multiplier effect have its maximum impact, leaders must be developed effectively. Effective development includes:

1.  Identifying the core of effective leadership. What makes leaders effective? One way to start thinking about leadership effectiveness is to identify what results you want the leader to achieve and use this to identify behaviors that are effective in achieving those results.

2.   Communicating what is expected of a leader. This communication is not always in words. It’s important to understand that how you select, how you assign resources, what people are held accountable for and how you recognize and reward say a great deal about your expectations of leaders.

3.   Assessing your leaders against your model of effectiveness. If some are less effective than you need, identify a strategy for addressing it. It may be development, assignment changes, or an exit strategy. No matter what strategy seems most appropriate, it should start with a frank conversation with the leader.

4.   Identifying potential leaders within your organization and outside your organization. Do you have the bench strength you need? Also remember that leaders aren’t just those with formal titles but also those in roles that are pivotal to business success.

5.   Developing leadership effectively. Formal learning experiences, business-driven assignments and projects, coaching, mentoring and other leadership development experiences need to align with the business strategy and the expectations you’ve communicated about leadership within your organization. Utilize a suite of development activities that build leaders throughout their careers. Developing leaders is process not an event. You must take a planned approach to leadership development, not one that only addresses obvious flash points that may be ignoring underlying causes.

By taking advantage of the Leadership Multiplier Effect, you will optimize talent and create competitive advantage.

What’s Your Talent Investment Plan?

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Knowledge Investment

“Knowledge and skills have become the global currency of 21st-century economies, but there is no central bank that prints this currency. Everyone has to decide on their own how much they will print.”

–Andreas Schleicher, Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development

Schleicher’s quote is from Pass the Books. Hold the Oil by Tom Friedman in the March 10 New York Times. The piece talks about how performance on Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, exam is correlated with how few natural resources a country has. The fewer the natural resources the better the performance on the exam. As another contributor to the article, K.R. Sridhar, founder of a fuel cell energy company in Silicon Valley says, “When you don’t have resources, you become resourceful.”

Those countries with the least natural resources have learned that in order to compete over the long term on a world stage they need to invest in educating their student populations.

Over the past few years, most businesses would say they’ve learned a difficult lesson of what it is like to live in a resource constrained environment. And the ones that will achieve continued success are those who have continued to invest in developing the skills and capabilities that will bring the biggest return on investment for their business. There’s no one perfect solution for every business. It needs to work in your business and in your business environment.

In the 21st century, competitive advantage comes from the strength of the people you have. As Schleicher argues “the only sustainable way is to grow our way out (of the recession) by giving more people the knowledge and skills to compete, collaborate and connect in a way that drives our countries forward,”

What is your talent investment plan?

My Conversation with HPA Journal

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There are two things I’d like to share with you this week.

First, last fall I had the opportunity to talk with Tim Autrey of HPA Journal about Getting Real.

We talked about how to create sustained motivation and engagement, why there is an “I” in team and why leadership can be so challenging in today’s environment. I share some ideas and tips that anyone can use and apply immediately.  I thought you might like to read the interview in the HPA Journal’s summer issue.

Click here to access your copy of the interview

Second,  I know many organizations and companies are looking for speakers for meetings, events, conferences and I’m answering the call! If you or someone you know is looking for an engaging speaker, whether it be for an hour or a day, I’d welcome the opportunity to talk more about it.

For more information or to contact me, click here.

 

The Journey to Excellence

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Tom PetersBack in 1982, Tom Peters went In Search of Excellence and profiled 40+ companies who were examples of excellence.  If we look back at that book some of the companies are gone now or are not what we would hold up as examples of excellence.  That’s because excellence is not an end state.  It’s an organizational state of being that’s characterized by continuous movement in pursuit of ever-higher achievement.  In a culture of excellence, you are never done or…you never quite arrive.

The drive for excellence — for continually improving on even our most outstanding achievement —  when paired with the compelling clarity I spoke about in my last newsletter sets the stage for achieving or even exceeding the goals defined in the strategy.  The question is how do you create a culture of excellence and performance?

Excellence is about self reflection:  Without knowing who and where you are in your journey, it is difficult to continually pursue ever higher levels of personal or organizational achievement.  What values are of core importance to me?  How do I add value? What values are core to the organization?  How do we add value for our customers? Am I clear where I am taking my organization?  Am I communicating a standard of excellence?

Excellence is about continual, personal growth: Without professional growth, our performance, and that of our organization, will not be characterized by excellence.  Leaders need to be a role model for their teams.  They should ask “how can I use my strengths more fully to achieve the results we need to be successful?” It’s equally important to ask yourself and others,  “what do I, as a leader, not know and need to learn?  What skill do I need to develop and how should I apply them?”

Excellence is about setting the expectation for excellence: In environments that achieve excellence, the standard for it is communicated broadly throughout the organization.  The communication isn’t just verbal.  It’s communicated in goals and objectives.  It’s communicated in everyday actions.  It’s communicated in the quality of anything that’s produced, from emails and meeting agendas to products and services. It’s communicated in processes that focus on continual improvement.

Excellence is about creating a culture that looks at behaviors and results: Cultures that only look at results can become toxic.  It can be too easy to turn a blind eye to unacceptable behavior because “hey, he/she gets results.”  Leaders need to be as concerned with how people achieve results as with the results they are achieving. How do we meet our customer’s expectations, meet our business goals and behave ethically and with excellence? What behavior do we hold up as the gold standard in the pursuit of results?  What behaviors are completely unacceptable?

Excellence is about tapping into each person’s drive for excellence: The neuroscience of excellence tells us that higher and higher performance comes from the need to direct our own lives, to create new things and to improve ourselves and our world.  In his book, Drive, Daniel Pink talks about tapping into the third drive — the drive produced from engagement in the task itself when the task allows us to experience autonomy, mastery and purpose. Too many of our organizations are using what Pink calls the second drive – the carrot and the stick – to try to create higher levels of achievement. What we know is that this only takes achievement to the level of what one needs to do to get a reward and to avoid a negative consequence.  It doesn’t lead us to excellence.

Excellence is about improving those around you and managing performance: As the saying goes, the tide lifts all boats.  In order to instill a culture of excellence, leaders need to manage performance and development proactively by praising excellence and having the difficult discussions that are needed to improve performance.  Too often we short circuit the ability to achieve excellence because we are unable to give the difficult feedback that allows others to build their capacity to contribute.  Unfortunately, many of our performance management practices also drive a trend towards mediocrity by relying too much on the carrot and stick.

As Tom Peters did almost 30 years ago, go in search of excellence in your organization.  Model it, practice it, celebrate it and watch the impact on performance