Organizational surveys show that most managers believe they are providing coaching to employees and score themselves high. However, most employees state they receive little coaching from their leaders and score their leaders low.

Leaders often fall into these common coaching traps:

• Trapped by reactive problem solving that puts out short-term fires and doesn’t build long-term personal, team, or organization capabilities.
• Jumping into coaching discussions with little planning and no framework to guide the conversation.
• Confusing giving advice/feedback with coaching.
• Perpetuating the Manager-Employee Dependence Cycle: Employee complains about what’s not working, hopes for solutions and advice from the manager, and expects him or her to own the issue. The manager listens to the problem, gives advice, and expects results from the employee.
• Climbing The Ladder of Inference way too quickly; rapidly stepping up from data/observations, to adding meaning, making assumptions, jumping to conclusions, adopting beliefs, and taking actions that often damages relationships and doesn’t deal with the root issue.
• Spending 85 – 90% of conversations with employees on project or status updates and very little time on coaching and developing. Employees want a 50/50 ratio.
• Confusing performance appraisal/management with performance coaching.

It’s very easy to slip into these traps without realizing it. Which ones ensnare you? How about your organization’s supervisors and managers? What’s your coaching culture?

Coaching has become a popular “leaderspeak” buzzword. Like driving skills, many managers rate the quality and quantity of their coaching much higher than the people around them do.

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Join in my complimentary webinar on February 12 on “Building Extraordinary Coaching Skills: Six Steps to a Coaching Culture with Exceptional Leaders.” Click here for details and to register (connections are limited).

Wikipedia has a fascinating list of dates predicted for apocalyptic events that starts at 643 BCE and runs through hundreds of end-of-times predictions over the centuries. The last entry is that Mayan apocalypse prophesying the earth will be destroyed by an asteroid or supernova. And just so we don’t get too secure, there are a few future predictions showing dates for the Second Coming of Jesus, Armageddon, and other end-of-the-world events.

‘Tis the season for futurists, forecasters, and analysts to line up with seers, fortune tellers, and prophets to earnestly foretell what 2013 has in store for us. Instead of tea leaves, animal entrails, and crystal balls, the “experts” use data, charts, and logical sounding theories. See New Year’s Prediction Alert: It’s Silly Season Again! for an entertaining Timeline of Failed Predictions.

Harvard Business School professor, James Heskett, poses the right question in his blog Should Managers Bother Listening to Predictions? He points to all the uncertainty swirling around us today and observes, “we’ve always been certain about two things: (1) predictions are never accurate, and (2) plans are obsolete the moment they are made.”

In providing provocative perspectives on this challenge, Heskett draws from three books on the folly of predictions, how some predictions can be made more accurate, and how to gain from disorder. He ends with, “given our inability to predict, should managers bother to base plans on predictions?” Dozens of thoughtful reader comments follow with many insightful comments and observations on the prediction predicament.

One of the classic books on this topic is The Fortune Sellers: The Big Business of Buying and Selling Predictions by William Sherden. He studied the dismal history — and huge multi-billion dollar industry — of forecasting (he calls it the second oldest profession). He concludes:

“of these sixteen types of forecast, only two — one-day-ahead weather forecasts and the aging of the population — can be counted on; the rest are about as reliable as the fifty-fifty odds in flipping a coin. And only one of the sixteen — short-term weather forecasts — has any scientific foundation.”

When I hear an economist or anyone other than a forecaster making predictions a voice in my head says, “you have no idea what’s going to happen.”

A more recent book takes a comprehensive and updated look at predictions. In Future Babble: Why Expert Predictions Fail – and Why We Believe Them Anyway Dan Gardner writes:

“The now-defunct magazine Brill’s Content, for one, compared the predictions of famous American pundits with a chimpanzee named Chippy, who made guesses by choosing among flashcards. Chippy consistently matched or beat the best in the business.”

This explains the funny photo of a laughing monkey dialing a phone on the book’s cover.

So what should leaders do about planning for the future? The clearest and most helpful guide to this question comes from the extensive empirical research of Jim Collins and his research team. Collins and co-author Morton Hansen summarized their findings in Great by Choice: Uncertainty, Chaos, and Luck – Why Some Thrive Despite Them All. They put 20,400 companies through 11 stages of cutting, screening, and shifting over a 30 year period of study to identify “10Xers” — companies that beat its industry index by at least 10 times. This nine year project started right after 9/11 to find companies that thrived through chaos and disruptive change. The book is structured around their main findings boiled down to three core behaviors; Fanatic Discipline, Empirical Creativity, and Productive Paranoia.

We can predict there are big changes ahead. How big, how catastrophic, and when are completely unpredictable. Our best approach is to build flexible and highly adaptable lives, teams, and organizations. These are the central leadership issues that will make for a truly Happy New Year!

Many of these values statements assert a commitment to excellence, respect and integrity, customer focus, teamwork and collaboration, service/quality, responsiveness and the like. This is an important culture foundation. Values can provide clarity for key people practices like hiring, promoting, recognizing, and coaching. Clear values set clear priorities and guide the behaviors that shape the organization’s culture (“the way we do things around here”).

These statements of good intentions were put together for all the right reasons by sincere leaders who often sweated and debated every word and comma. But like New Year’s resolutions there’s a big difference between aspiration and implementation. Too often these well crafted values statements are a bunch of positive words hanging on a wall. In many cases they have a “high snicker factor.” What’s declared isn’t what most people see their leaders living each day.

Very few leaders are Machiavellian manipulators deliberately mouthing values he or she doesn’t intend to follow. Most are innocently ignorant. They are part of leadership teams who don’t recognize the subtle and often unconscious disconnects between words and deeds.

As we’re now helping leaders and leadership teams understand the powerful and transformative impact strengths-based leadership can have on their effectiveness, we’re getting into eye-opening discussions on cultural anchor points. It starts with a look at this slide:

 This shows a culture continuum from extreme focus on weaknesses on the left to strengths on the right. Of course, no culture is a pure form of just one or the other. Organizational cultures blend elements of both.

The discussion progresses along these lines:

• Which side are our aspired values anchored in? Values like excellence, respect, integrity, customer focus, teamwork, collaboration, or service/quality are anchored in strengths and positivity.
• Which approach do our frontline staff, customers, and other team members want to experience every day? Leaders instantly recognize we all want to live and leverage from strengths. Research ranging from engagement surveys, customer satisfaction, team effectiveness, Emotional Intelligence, to Positive Psychology proves it.
• Where are our management systems and leadership practices anchored? Performance appraisals, training needs analysis, competency models, operational reviews, continuous improvement programs, and such are focused on finding and fixing weaknesses.

There’s our basic — and huge — disconnect. We declare values anchored in strengths and positive energy while leading with a focus on weaknesses and negativity.

What’s your culture anchored in?

Lots of organizations are measuring employee engagement levels through regular surveys. They’ll often adjust compensation, benefits, working conditions, schedules, provide childcare, or focus on work-life balance to increase engagement.

Zenger Folkman research clearly shows that one variable is the best predictor of employee engagement, satisfaction, and commitment. And that’s the daily leadership provided in the workplace. People join organizations and quit their leaders.

To increase leadership effectiveness that increases employee engagement there’s often a debate about which works best: a management push or leadership pull? This leads right into the “tyranny-of-the-OR” trap. This black and white thinking sees it as one or the other. It’s especially tempting to believe that creating an inspiring and motivating environment through a leadership pull approach will lead to much higher employee engagement than management push.

Here’s where Zenger Folkman’s extensive research shines a light on this vital performance topic. In his blog, The Push and Pull of Employee Engagement at Ivy Exec, Joe Folkman reports on the results of a study of 160,576 employees reporting into 20,597 teams or work groups and the effectiveness of their immediate leader’s effectiveness on pushing and pulling. These surprising conclusions emerged:

“If a leader was not highly skilled (at the top quartile) at either pushing or pulling the average employee, engagement scores for that group were at the 42^nd percentile. In other words they were below average.

If a leader was highly skilled at pushing (e.g., top quartile) but not at pulling the average employee, engagement scores for that group were at the 61^st percentile … on the other hand, if a leader was highly skilled at pulling (e.g., top quartile) but not at pushing, the average employee engagement scores for that group were at the 63^rd percentile. This is better, but not by much.

The magic formula here is when leaders were highly skilled (e.g., top quartile) at both pushing and pulling. When this occurred the average employee engagement scores for that group were at the 76th percentile. These work groups were at the coveted top quartile level in terms of their satisfaction, engagement, and commitment.”

This surprising research is similar to what I blogged a few weeks ago in Powerful Combinations: Drive for Results and Builds Relationships. When both management push for results and leadership pull of building relationships are used, the odds of being rated as an extraordinary leader jumps from 12 – 14% to 72%!!

So we need to develop “and-also” skills rather than an “either-or” approach for highly engaged employees. As the Danish physicist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics for his contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum mechanics observed, “the opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.”

Jack Zenger, Joe Folkman, and their team have compiled a huge body of research on the best practices for developing and effectively using leadership competency models:

1. What Really Matters: Correlate Competencies to Performance Outcomes

Highly effective leaders have a dramatic impact on morale, teamwork, engagement, innovation, customer satisfaction, quality, productivity, safety, sales, and profits. But which behaviors have the greatest impact?

Zenger Folkman’s research began with looking at survey responses from over 200,000 raters of more than 20,000 leaders. Each of the data sets represented different customized 360 surveys from a wide variety of organizations across dozens of sectors with nearly 2,000 behavioral descriptions or survey items. They searched for the competencies that sharply delineated the top 10 percent from the bottom 10 percent of leaders by their performance outcomes.

This scientific search for the key leadership competencies identified 16 competencies in five clusters:

Using our deep research data base we’ll often help organizations adapt their own customized competency models. The key is validating their competencies and descriptions with research that these behaviors have the greatest impact on performance results.

2. Don’t Try to Do it All: Build 3- 5 Competencies from Good to Great

Extraordinary leaders rated at the 90^th percentile deliver outstanding performance results that are 3 – 20 times higher than those at the 10^th percentile. And top performing leaders deliver results that are double or more than average or good leaders rated at the 50^th or 60^th percentile.

The best news is that extraordinary leaders don’t need to be SuperLeaders excelling at all competencies to perform at the 80^th and 90^th percentiles. Improving just three to five of sixteen competencies from good to great will do it. And it doesn’t really matter which competencies we choose. So we can pick those that are natural strengths, are most relevant to our job, and we’re most energized about developing further.

3. Develop Towering Strengths to Overshadow Weaknesses

Think of the best leader you know personally. What were this leader’s three to five most profound strengths? Did he or she have any weaknesses or areas at which he or she did not excel? What kept those weaknesses for undermining his or her overall impact?

Perfect leaders don’t exist. Leaders who excel at the 90^th percentile across all competencies are exceedingly rare. Leadership development that comes across as the pursuit of perfection (“here are the pages and pages of competencies and behaviors you must excel at to be an outstanding leader”) is often de-motivating.

Leadership development that looks to magnify a smaller number of natural strengths that really make a difference is highly energizing. That’s why rates of personal growth, leadership development, and improvement double!

4. Use Competency Models for Building and Developing

The sole purpose of a leadership competency model is to help leaders improve their effectiveness. A Strengths-Based Leadership Development System built on a relevant and validated competency model is a roadmap to higher performance. Like a GPS mapping device, the competency framework and 360 feedback assessment help a leader identify where he or she is now and which routes will take them to their next performance level.

Companion Competency mapping is a very critical element in this approach. This guides leaders in using strengths cross-training to plot their improvement journey. Here’s one of our studies illustrating the dramatic difference of using competencies and 360 feedback to build strengths versus finding and fixing weaknesses:

The one exception to focusing on strengths is if a 360 assessment shows the leader has a Fatal Flaw. That’s a competency which is important to the leader’s job and he or she is performing so poorly that others can’t see past the glare of this gap to his or her strengths. When that’s the case, the leader needs to focus all improvement energy here.

5. Evaluate Performance Results (The What) Not Competencies (The How)

U.S. General George S. Patton delivered big results in World War Two. Under his leadership his army advanced further, captured more enemy prisoners, and liberated more territory in less time than any other army in history. A German field marshal speaking to American reporters called Patton “your best general.” Patton once articulated a key element in his performance management approach; “Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.”

Effective performance management systems identify what to do. They set clear targets and measurement of success. An effective strengths-based leadership competency model helps people apply their ingenuity in playing to their passions and leveraging their natural strengths to meet organizational needs specific to their role.

Further Reading:

• Free e-book (with short embedded video clips featuring Jack Zenger and Joe Folkman) “Organizations Flourish with Strong Leaders”
• How to Be Exceptional: Drive Leadership Success by Magnifying Your Strengths.
• Manifesto for a Leadership Development Revolution
• Recommended White Papers in the Leadership Resource Center(freely available once registered):
  • “Extraordinary Leader 360 Survey: Validation and Reliability”
  • “How Extraordinary Leaders Double Profits”
  • “Leadership 6.0: Connecting Leadership Development with Drivers of Business Results”
  • “The 11 Components of a Best-in-Class 360-Degree Assessment”
  • “Make Performance Appraisals an Inspiring Event”
• Strengths-Based Leadership Development System

On November 28, Jack Zenger and Joe Folkman are providing a complimentary webinar on Building Organization Muscle. This is an excellent chance to hear from the two revolutionaries who’ve been leading the charge for a whole new approach to leadership development. The webinar will not be archived and available later, so don’t miss it! Click here for details and to register.

But for anyone hoping that kissing up to their boss will increase ratings of their effectiveness they’re falling for a tired old stereotype — and badly off track. “A common assumption that people make about improving the rating of their manager is that over-the-top efforts to score ‘brownie points’ helps those who stoop to that kind of behavior,” said Jack Zenger, CEO of Zenger Folkman. “There are more significant steps employees can take to effectively manage their manager and receive high marks.”

In a study of over 27,000 leaders, Zenger Folkman identified managers who rated their direct reports significantly more positive than others rated them and compared this group to those whose manager rated them significantly lower than others rated them. The study identified eight key behaviors that lead to success with a manager:

• Having strategic clarity and direction
• Quickly recognizing problems, trends, and opportunities
• Looking for opportunities to improve
• Setting stretch goals
• Energizing and inspiring others
• Taking initiative and achieving results
• Embracing change and innovation
• Communicating powerfully

“There are significant issues that managers care about, and proactively practicing these eight behaviors will help employees earn the respect of their managers,” said Joe Folkman, president of Zenger Folkman. “Our recommendation is that you select two of these behaviors that would have the greatest impact on your job assignment and where you have passion and interest in improvement.“

Zenger Folkman’s new book, How to Be Exceptional: Drive Leadership Success by Magnifying Your Strengths (The Globe and Mail review is at Excellent? Counterintuitive tips on how to be exceptional) provides a very helpful roadmap to follow Joe’s recommendation.

Clearly the best way to please your boss is with big kisses of extraordinary performance! That comes from building a few of your natural strengths (ones that really matter to your job) from good to great.

There’s a decades-long history of failed organization initiatives. Dozens of studies have shown that 50 – 70% of organization improvement initiatives like customer service, leadership development, performance management systems, restructuring, quality improvement, etc., have failed. The implementation of leadership competency models is clearly heading toward that same cliff.

Here are six common traps ensnaring many of today’s leadership competency models:

1. Out of Thin Air

We’ve been guilty of facilitating workshops with management teams pulling competencies out of thin air. In one case, we had 140 of the organization’s top leaders in an offsite retreat go through a shifting process to identify and vote on their top 10 competencies. The descriptions of each one were then crafted by a small group of leaders based on the blizzard of Post-It-Notes grouped around each of the competency clusters. Some organizations shuffle, sift, and prioritize card decks listing generic competency sets.

As I outlined in Leadership Lessons from Evidence-Based Medicine, what’s missing is proof that these competencies matter to the organization. Where is the empirical data that these are the key behaviors that have the greatest impact on employee engagement, attraction and retention, customer service levels, quality, innovation, safety, productivity, sales, and profits? How do we know we have the right competencies?

2. It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s SuperLeader!

Many leadership competency models provide a series of behavioral descriptions clustered around 6 to 16 or more headings. If they’re relevant and well written, the descriptions are very helpful. What’s implied is that the pathway to peak performance is improvement across dozens of skills and behaviors.

This pathway to perfection is overwhelming and completely unrealistic. At best, leadership development that’s a mile wide and an inch deep moves a leader from good to a bit better. More often, motivation to develop and follow a personal development plan to become SuperLeader fizzles out and crashes.

3. One Size Fits All

Most competency models weight all the competencies and dozens of underlying behaviors equally. Some models layer the competencies across organizational levels starting with frontline staff, and moving up to supervisors, managers, and executives.

This SuperLeader model doesn’t account for vast variances in individual preferences across leaders or their widely differing functions. Each of us mere mortals is a unique mixture of strengths and weaknesses. We have work areas that play to our passions and turn us on and areas that are a real chore and turn us off. One-size-fits-all competency models don’t account for those differences.

For example, a supervisor, manager, or executive in accounting or IT will have a very different set of competencies and passions leading to their successful leadership than someone in sales or customer service. Competencies such as analytical and problem solving or technical/professional expertise versus those of communication or building relationships take on a different weight for each role. And each competency plays quite differently to the natural strengths and weaknesses of each leader and the personal preferences that motivated him or her to choose their field or profession.

4. The Way of the Weakness

We’re largely unconscious of how we equate improvement, development, and personal growth with finding and fixing weaknesses. Improving low marks is deeply socialized in us going way back to our school report cards. When a leader gets a 360 feedback report from his or her direct reports, peers, manager, and others his or her natural instinct is to quickly skip past positive ratings and comments and look at “where I need to improve.”

Our research shows unless there’s a Fatal Flaw needing immediate attention, this is badly off track. The best that MIGHT happen is the leader raises a few of his or her competencies from poor to average.

Our research also shows that leaders who focus on their weaknesses consistently create weaker development plans, allocate less of their time to personal growth, and abandon training efforts more quickly. In one study we found executives working on weaknesses reported their leadership improvement efforts had minimal impact on business results and even less effect on the commitment or engagement levels of their direct reports.

5. Here Comes the Judge

In the dark ages of medicine, sick patients were often bled under the badly misguided belief that bloodletting released toxins (“humors”) and restored the body’s proper balance. This unscientific — and sometimes deadly — practice often left patients weaker and less able to fight off their illness.

If a leader’s raters know that the leader’s boss will be seeing the assessment results they will change their ratings. And the entire process is transformed from development to evaluation. Now the conversation between boss and the rated leader generally moves toward performance bloodletting. After a cursory acknowledgement of strengths — and under the misguided belief they are holding the leader “accountable” — most bosses (often with poor coaching skills) will focus in on weaknesses and demand the leader address and improve these. It’s little wonder many performance appraisals are put off and approached with as much enthusiasm as a medieval doctor’s house call.

6. Performance (Mis)Management Systems

Too many HR departments and executives confuse competencies and performance outcomes. They’ll use competency models to try evaluating and holding supervisors, managers, and executives accountable for all of the competencies and the dozens of behaviors describing each one.

Effective performance management holds people accountable for delivering results. These targets are the “what” and might include sales, margins, profits, new products/services, project implementation, production levels, service/quality levels, productivity rates, budget numbers, and the like. Well designed and well researched competency maps provide pathways for the “how” to reach these performance goals.

The BIG CAVEAT is that both the “what” and the “how” must be delivered within the bounds of core organizational values. Delivering results while destroying the environment, risking safety, reducing customer satisfaction, or destroying teamwork, is unacceptable.

Sound familiar? My next blog post will look at what the research tells us about how to effectively develop and use leadership competency models.

In “Three Strategies to Dominate in a Scary Economy“, Geoff writes that today’s negative economic news dominating our headlines “are an insidious force that’s undermining the native optimism that buoys up businesspeople everywhere.” He points out that “even in today’s uncertain economy, some companies are winning big.” He goes on to show “three strategies are helping smart companies dominate:

• They manage for value
• They keep developing human capital
• They get radically customer-centric.”

Geoff provides a few prominent examples of companies thriving in our turbulent times using these approaches. I found it especially interesting that he mentioned Wells Fargo and General Mills. These are two major and long-time Zenger Folkman Clients using highly customized programs within our Strengths-Based Leadership Development System.

Geoff writes, “consider General Mills, prospering in the fiercely competitive food industry. Its famously demanding leadership culture hasn’t wavered, and the company ranks No. 21 on Glassdoor.com’s new list of the 25 companies where it’s hardest to get hired.” In the Foreword to Zenger Folkman’s excellent new book, How to Be Exceptional: Drive Leadership Success by Magnifying Your Strengths, Kevin Wilde, VP, Organization Effectiveness and Chief Learning Officer at General Mills wrote of the meeting he had with his skeptical CEO when they were considering Zenger Folkman’s strengths-based leadership development approach.

Kevin replied:

“While some need to concentrate on fatal flaws, most of our leaders would be wasting their time making small, incremental improvements on a few, below-average scores that may not matter in the long run … if we concentrate all our efforts getting everyone to average, that is what we will achieve — a company of average leaders … we needed exceptional leaders with profound strengths that matter.“

Weaknesses are scary. Strengths are enabling. Build strengths and boldly say boo to the ghosts and goblins of doubt and uncertainty.

This research has led to a very unique groundbreaking approach for building leadership competencies from a strength in the 75^th percentile to a profound strength in the 90^th percentile. Linear or traditional training can work well to improve weaker areas. But it’s now very clear that our same old ways of learning and development will not help a leader grow his or her skills from average to exceptional. That calls for a very different approach. This was highlighted in Competency Companion Development Guide to Cross-Training.

During our discussion we debated two particularly Powerful Combinations. These were the competencies of Drive for Results and Builds Relationships. Our database of 360 degree feedback assessments completed by over 300,000 managers, direct reports, peers, and others on 35,000 leaders shines strong new light on this combination.

Analysis shows that if a leader is rated as having Builds Relationships as a strength the chances of him or her being rated as an extraordinary leader is 12%. On the other hand, if a leader is rated with Drive for Results as a strength, his or her probability of being scored as an extraordinary leader creeps up slightly to 14%.

These two competencies have been locked in a classic either/or debate for decades now. And we had that discussion in our retreat. The team was hitting its numbers and clearly getting results that topped every other unit in the company. But relationships were weak and employee engagement was low. The highest rated of a long list of “Spirit Killers” we ranked in one workshop exercise was “There are ‘walking wounded’ in our organization who feel that our management team cares only about results and doesn’t respect their dignity and feelings.” In true binary thinking, many managers wanted the team manager to back off Drive for Results to allow more time and energy for Builds Relationships. They saw it as a zero sum game; you trade off one to get more of the other.

I then showed them our Powerful Combinations research on cross-connecting these two competencies. Looking at the probabilities of being extraordinary at 12% and 14% when each competency is a strength it would be fairly logical to assume that if a leader was strong at both, his or her chances of being rated as extraordinary would be around the total of the two at about 26%. In fact, our analysis of the statistical correlations between these two competencies shows that the likelihood of a leader who is strong at both Drives for Results and Builds Relationships being extraordinary is actually 72%!!

We’re talking about moving only two of 16 leadership competencies from good to great. But if these two strengths are developed in combination, a leader’s overall effectiveness skyrockets. This changed the tone of our discussion. What leadership team or organization really believes they should reduce their drive for results? How would you present a budget or business plan to upper management or board that sets lower targets for next year in order to build relationships?

The management team agreed they need to continue hitting their targets and delivering results. The focus of our discussion, brainstorming, and planning, shifted to counterbalancing what results they deliver to how they deliver them. High-performing leaders don’t deliver results and leave a trail of dead or wounded bodies in their wake. That will cause short-time results at best. And high-performing leaders don’t create highly energized and engaged teams with strong relationships that keep falling short on their results and failing to deliver. That’s demoralizing, enervating, and unsustainable.

Extraordinary leaders aren’t superhuman excelling at all competencies. We all have weak spots and lesser skills. Our leadership data show that exceptional leaders build on powerful combinations to leverage a cluster of interconnected strengths that create incredibly powerful synergies. These catalytic combinations dramatically boost overall leadership effectiveness. They become towering strengths that overshadow weak spots and supercharge performance levels.

Chapter Four (“Leadership Cross-Training: The Revolutionary Approach to Leadership Developing Leadership Skills”) in How to Be Exceptional: Drive Leadership Success by Magnifying Your Strengths has more examples of powerful combinations, research, case studies, explanations of the cross-strengths linkages, and application exercises. It’s one of the reasons The Globe & Mail’s review of the book highlighted the counterintuitive nature of our research and the advice found in the book. You can see the review at Excellent? Counterintuitive tips on how to be exceptional.

Our first Extraordinary Leader public workshops (currently no others are scheduled) in Calgary on November 13 and Toronto on November 29 (hosted by Canadian Tire) provide participants with our 200 page Competency Companion Development Guide and coaches them through using it to build strengths based on the 360 feedback reports they get at the session.

Before we entered the maze, we looked at a large map of it (cleverly spelling out “Canada” and displaying maple leaves) showing every pathway and dead-end and the circling route that would bring us back out. Our son, Chris, and I felt pretty smug as we promptly pulled out our Blackberries and took a photo of the maze map. We were clearly going to find our way through the cornfield with this navigational aid.

Once we were deep into the maze and hopelessly confused, we pulled out our map photos to figure out what route to take. I’ve used Google Maps on my Blackberry for many years to navigate through some of the world’s largest and confusing cities. A few months ago it was very helpful on the back roads of Colorado and Wyoming when I was facilitating a retreat at a very remote “dude ranch.”

But the maze photo map proved to be useless now. It was missing that familiar blinking blue dot showing “you are here.” We had no idea where we were in the maze. It’s very tough to get from here to there when you don’t know where here is! So we sheepishly put our maps away and stumbled blindly through the maze with the rest of our family.

Feedback is essential to leadership development. And when we’re leading others we need to know how they perceive our behaviors. What do they think is working and what’s not so effective? What do they see as strengths we can build on to boost our leadership effectiveness? And are we doing anything that’s veering off track and possibly even a fatal flaw?

Joe Folkman has developed decades of deep experience and expertise in helping leaders gather feedback and figure out how to use it as rocket fuel boosting their performance. Yet many leaders stumble blindly through the maze of personal, team, and organizational interactions. The leader may have some idea of where he or she wants to go, but are missing that “flashing blue dot” triangulated by a group of satellites showing the leader “you are here.” Too often, feedback fear prevents us from having our leadership position triangulated by our manager, peers, direct reports, and others we may be trying to lead or influence. We shut off our GPS units and head into dead-ends and circling career loops.

Joe very rightly points out that “the only thing worse than hearing negative feedback is what happens if you don’t hear it.” Click on “9 Ways To Get Over Your Feedback Fears” for his brief and practical advice published in Fast Company. Joe’s also written an excellent white paper on “Turning Feedback into Change” you can freely download from Zenger Folkman’s Leadership Resource Center (scroll to the bottom of the “Articles/White Papers” page).

On the one hand, comments like this one from Peter Drucker resonates very deeply; “You cannot build performance on weaknesses. You can build only on strengths. To focus on weakness is not only foolish; it is irresponsible. It is a misuse of a human resource as what a person cannot do is a limitation and nothing else.” Most of us immediately get the concept of building strengths intuitively. It makes sense. And it’s clearly aligned with the mounting research from the converging fields of Emotional Intelligence, Positive Psychology, and Appreciative Inquiry.

But then Paradigm Paralysis sets in. To actually build leadership development around strengths means a big change in our models/frameworks. To get to a new destination we need to take a new route. The same old road won’t get us there.

The vast majority of us steeped in the leadership development field have focused on closing organizational or managerial gaps and weaknesses. We’ve used needs or gap analysis to find the weak spots and then gone to work on fixing those.

But that approach isn’t working. If we continue using the same dysfunctional approaches and expecting different results we’ll drive ourselves insane! Study after study shows 70% of organization change efforts fail. And the vast majority of leadership development programs produce very little change.

We need a new approach. As outlined by American physicist, historian, and philosopher of science, Thomas Kuhn, in his widely quoted book, The Nature of Scientific Revolutions, it’s time for a paradigm shift. I wrote a newsletter article published by the Canadian Society for Training and Development summarizing my big shift in thinking on leadership development. That is now available on our web site. Click Manifesto for a Leadership Development Revolution to read it.

Join fellow revolutionaries on October 25 at our Developing Exceptional Leaders briefing and panel discussion. Immerse yourself or key leaders in the revolution at our first Extraordinary Leader public workshops in Calgary on November 13 or Toronto on November 29 (hosted by the revolutionaries at Canadian Tire).

“You were recommended to me by my boss. He is interested in having me take some leadership training specifically on the issue of ‘managing up.’ I see that this is an area you discuss on your website.

Would you have some time to discuss how we can pursue some training on this? I’ll also need to know how many hours this will entail, and the expected costs so I can pass it by my boss for approval.”

I have written extensively about upward leadership. As you’ve probably read, my view has long been that leadership is an action, not a position. It’s what we do and not the role we’re appointed to that determines whether we’re Leaders, Followers, or Wallowers.

What’s been clarified and reinforced in the last six months of our new strategic partnership with Zenger Folkman (see the September issue of The Leader Letter for background), is that an important skill like upward leadership has many underlying and interwoven components. ZF has built a massive database over the past 12 years that all started with the question of what core skills and behaviors most differentiates those leaders perceived as the least effective from those that are the most effective. Based on ratings from over 300,000 managers, peers, and direct reports on more than 36,000 people in leadership roles they now have a very clear answer. 16 “differentiating competencies” were identified in the five clusters of Character, Focus on Results, Personal Capability, Leading Change, and Interpersonal Skills.

When I now look at upward leadership through the lens of ZF’s research findings, some of the 16 competencies like Drive for Results, Technical/Professional Expertise, Develops Strategic Perspective, Communicates Powerfully and Prolifically, Builds Relationships, or Collaboration and Teamwork jump out. All of these (and others) will have an impact on your ability to lead upward. The great news is that leveraging only three of these 16 competencies from a strength to a profound strength will jump you to the 80^th percentile in leadership effectiveness. The critical question is, which ones will have the highest impact and which should you focus on?

That’s where getting feedback is vital. The Extraordinary Leader process involves asking your manager, peers, direct reports, and any others who work with you (customers? outside agents/partners? suppliers? etc.) to give you input on your effectiveness across the 16 competencies, and identify which four are most critical to your job. Feedback from others is twice as valid as your own self-assessment. In your case, having this data would open up a discussion with you and your manager on what route you should take to increase your leadership effectiveness.

Two other keys emerged from the research:

• focusing on your existing strengths, and
• using cross-training to build them.

Most multi-rater feedback-based approaches focus on finding and fixing weaknesses and gaps. Finding and focusing on building your strengths is 2 – 3 times more effective. And it’s a lot more fun!

You can learn lots more about all of this in ZF’s brand new book, How to Be Exceptional: Drive Leadership Success by Magnifying Your Strengths. It was reviewed in The Globe & Mail last week under Excellent? Counterintuitive tips on how to be exceptional.

I’ll be delivering our first Extraordinary Leader public workshop — hosted by ZF Client Canadian Tire — on November 29 in Toronto. I’ll also deliver a session on November 13 in Calgary. Click here for more details and to register.

Attending The Extraordinary Leader public workshop will give you a very solid sense of where you are now, what strengths you can leverage, and help you build a personal development plan to increase your upward leadership — and other leadership skills. It’s like using a GPS device to pinpoint your location, then setting the route to your destination.

You’re welcome to call if you want to discuss any of this further.

Linear training is effective and will often help a motivated learner get better. This sort of training is usually aimed at helping leaders improve from bad or OK to better or maybe even somewhat above average. Zenger Folkman’s research on over 35,000 managers working to strengthen their leadership shows that linear training doesn’t help a leader rated as good or average become a great or extraordinary communicator.

About 12 years ago, Joe Folkman dropped by Jack Zenger’s office with an intriguing observation that turned out to be an “aha” breakthrough. In reviewing data they then had on 20,000 managers rated by over 200,000 bosses, direct reports, and peers, Joe found statistically significant correlations between key leadership competencies and other competencies and behaviors.

So, for example, it turns out that the competency of “Communicates Powerfully and Prolifically” has eleven companion competencies and behaviors including “Strategic Perspective,” “Establishes Stretch Goals,” “Dealing with the Outside World/Networking,” and “Involves Others.” Developing these non-linear skills — or cross-training around this competency — will significantly increase the boss, direct report, and peer perceptions of the leader’s communication skills. When the leader moves this one competency to a profound strength, his or her overall leadership effectiveness can actually double!

As Joe and Jack followed this research trail, they found a set of companion competencies and behaviors that clustered around each of the key leadership competencies. This discovery has since opened up a powerful new leadership development methodology. ZF went on to develop their Competency Companion Development Guide for leadership cross-training. This has proved to be a major tool in Zenger Folkman’s incredible success in helping good or strong leaders become great or exceptional leaders. It’s a core part of The Extraordinary Leader development system/workshop.

Read ZF’s COO, Bob Sherwin’s blog post on Cross-Training for Your Leadership Marathon for a bit more about this revolutionary approach. Jack Zenger will highlight leadership cross-training in our complimentary (no charge) September 20 webcast, Strengths-Based Leadership Development System. He’ll draw from the latest research just published in their new book, How to Be Exceptional: Drive Leadership Success by Magnifying Your Strengths.

But Derek’s divisional performance is now stalling and he’s getting increasingly frustrated. His management team is getting fractious and silo walls are growing thick and high throughout his division. Cooperation and teamwork is slipping along with energy and engagement levels. Absenteeism is soaring and customer service as well as productivity levels are sliding.

Despite his strengths, Derek’s become a bad boss. He doesn’t rant, rave, publicly embarrass, or bully anyone. It’s not what he’s doing that makes him a bad boss. It’s what he’s not doing. His sins of leadership omission are dragging people and performance down. And his flaws are becoming fatal to his career.

Jack Zenger and Joe Folkman have an intriguing blog in Harvard Business Review drawing from their research encompassing leaders like Derek. They analyzed the behavior of 30,000 managers as seen by 300,000 of their direct reports, peers, and managers in 360-degree evaluations. They looked further at the bottom 1% and bottom 10% for predictive signs of their extremely poor ratings and performance. They also analyzed data from executives who’d just been fired for explanations of their failure.

The results of their study led to identifying 10 fatal flaws listed in rank order of most to least fatal. Go to “Are You Sure You’re Not a Bad Boss” to review the list. Dozens of comments following their blog add further dimensions to the discussion.

Based on this article, Joe Folkman has produced a complimentary (no charge) webinar on September 26 at 1:00 PM EDT. You can get more information and register to join the webinar at The Uninspiring Leader: 10 Fatal Flaws That Cripple Leaders’ Effectiveness.

Jack Zenger and I are looking at the strength side of the leadership coin in a webcast on September 20 at 1:00 PM EDT. Visit Strengths-Based Leadership Development System for more information and to register.

By the 1970s medical practices had come a long way and made many — some quite drastic — improvements to healthcare. But medicine was still mostly a collection of standard and accepted practice that had little grounding in scientific evidence. In 1974, when physician David Eddy was asked to give a talk on how physicians made decisions he went searching for best practices to build a decision tree showing diagnosis and treatment. He was looking for “strong evidence, good numbers, and sound reasoning.” It didn’t exist.

In his American Medical Association Journal of Ethics article, “The Origins of Evidence-Based Medicine — A Personal Perspective,” Eddy writes; “If there wasn’t sufficient information to develop a decision tree, what in the world were physicians basing their decisions on? I then realized that medical decision making was not built on a bedrock of evidence or formal analysis, but was standing on Jell-O.”

He went on to become a pioneering researcher and advocate of what’s become known as Evidence-Based Medicine. Now he writes; “Medical decision making has gone through a fundamental change in the last 40 years. Simply put, the foundation for decision making has shifted away from subjective judgments and reliance on authorities toward a formal analysis of evidence.”

We badly need the same evolution in leadership development. While we’re — mostly — past snake oil solutions, there’s a confusing array of leadership theories, opinions, thesis papers, inspiration, training programs, frameworks, styles, models, and tools. Most of these have little to no grounding in hard research or evidence.

In their white paper, “Leadership 6.0: Connecting Leadership Development with Drivers of Business Results,” Jack Zenger and Joe Folkman make a case for leadership development going through this evolution:

1.0 Balancing people and business results.

2.0 Behavioral/skill based approaches.

3.0 Experiential/engaging instructional techniques.

4.0 E-Learning and related technologies.

5.0 Individual responsibility and personalized learning.

6.0 Linked to business/performance results/outcomes with hard data/evidence.

To read the parallels Jack and Joe draw with applying lessons from evidence-based medicine to leadership and the compelling data they’ve uncovered for Leadership 6.0, go to ZF’s Leadership Resource Center. Once you’ve registered (it’s free) or logged in click on Articles/White Papers.

ZF has compiled powerful evidence correlating leadership effectiveness with performance outcomes in their new book, How to Be Exceptional: Drive Leadership Success by Magnifying Your Strengths. Jack and I will be covering this and related approaches on September 20 in our complimentary webcast on Strengths-Based Leadership Development.

Another reason 360s have become so widely used is outlined in Zenger Folkman’s new book, How to Be Exceptional: Drive Leadership Success by Magnifying Your Strengths:

” … very few people have an accurate perception of either their strengths or their weaknesses. This is why we often comically read such facts as “80 percent of American drivers consider themselves above average” and “65 percent of people surveyed believe they are better than average looking in appearance.” Indeed, our research shows that self-perceptions tend to be only half as reliable as those from either peers or direct reports.“

BUT, we’re also seeing a growing backlash against 360 survey feedback tools. Like any tool, the design of the tool and how it’s used makes a huge difference in its usefulness. Traditional assessments and needs analysis look for gaps. And most 360 feedback tools focus on finding and fixing weaknesses. This often leads to:

• Participants feeling beat up by feedback reports.
• Negative response or avoidance of 360 multi-rater feedback tools.
• Erosion of confidence.
• Defensiveness and fear of making mistakes.
• Data denial and feedback phobia.
• Working on a weak area and only getting it to average — with mediocre results.
• A belief that extraordinary leadership is achieved by naturally gifted or “born leaders.”

While most organizations have the technical capability to run 360 feedback surveys internally, over 95% use external companies to provide this service. Some of the reasons include giving raters a much stronger sense of anonymity and participant confidentiality in reporting the results, normative percentile scoring comparisons across industries and leadership levels, measuring competencies that are proven to differentiate low and higher performers, and more sophisticated and flexible tools that have been well tested in a wide variety of situations.

On October 12 I am delivering another breakfast presentation at HRPA’s Toronto office on “The 11 Critical Components of a “Best in Class” 360 Assessment.” I’ll draw on the key lessons learned from Zenger Folkman’s solidly researched and highly successful 360 development system used by Marriott, Harvard Business School, Wells Fargo, Coca Cola, General Mills, and ConocoPhillips. My presentation will:

• Outline compelling research correlating a leader’s effectiveness and organizational success.
• Demonstrate the need for validated, research-based 360-degree assessments.
• Explain how poor rating scales lead to false positives that reduces desire for improvement.
• Show why validated items drive substantial and lasting organizational change.
• Prove how a strengths-based methodology is twice as effective as traditional development methods.

Click here for more information and to register.

If you can’t join us, you can read a white paper on this topic at Zenger Folkman’s Leadership Resource Center. Once you’re registered (which is free and only has to be done once) or logged in, click on Articles/White Papers and click on “11 Components of a Best-In-Class 360-Degree Assessment, by Joe Folkman & Jack Zenger.”

We’re also at the intersection of powerful and revolutionary research emerging from the new movements of Emotional Intelligence, Positive Psychology, Appreciative Inquiry, and Strengths. These emerging fields are scientifically — and conclusively — showing that we can only flourish by moving away from focusing on what’s wrong, performance gaps, and weaknesses. The evidence for what needs to change and why is growing every day. But there’s been a huge vacuum around how to apply these findings to leadership development.

The opening reviews and quotations in the front of How to Be Exceptional tells the reader he or she is holding a revolutionary leadership book with a radical new approach. Award-winning development professionals and senior executives from organizations like Yale University, General Mills, Boeing, Symantec, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Hilton, Transat, Marathon Oil, General Motors, Invesco, and Elsevier laud the book as:

• “the next evolution in focusing on strengths“
• “the best book on professional development in decades“
• “cuts through the clutter“
• “practical how-to realities of leadership improvement“
• “simple, concrete, scientifically validated model“
• “invaluable to my organization“
• “breakthrough milestone“
• “actionable advice“
• “innovative methodology“

The Introduction begins with this declaration:

“Like a gigantic pendulum swinging, there has been a dramatic shift in the world of leadership development. We have moved from a focus on fixing weaknesses all the way over to a focus on building strengths. Without question, it is the most profound change in this realm to occur in the past 50 years.”

And it’s about time!

Parts One and Two of How to Be Exceptional are built around “What Leaders Can Learn From their Strengths” and “How Exceptional Strengths Are Developed.” A third “Special Considerations” part discusses building strengths with individual or frontline staff, when to fix weaknesses or Fatal Flaws, addressing the misconception that strengths can be taken too far, vital keys to effective 360 multi-rater tools, are leaders made or born, and a brief history of the strengths movement.

Parts One and Two are the core of this book. They start with an outline of the powerful research behind Zenger Folkman’s groundbreaking strengths-based leadership assessment, development, and sustainable implementation system. Their research is built on a massive database that now contains 300,000 responses from managers, peers, and direct reports who completed 360 feedback surveys across leadership 16 competencies on over 35,000 leaders.

The aggregated leadership effectiveness scores were then correlated with organization performance data. The differences are stunning! For example, the differences between the weakest and strongest leaders are 4 – 6 times higher profits, 6 times higher sales revenues, 10 – 20 times higher levels of employee engagement, 3 – 4 times reduction in employees thinking about quitting, 50% fewer employees that do leave, double the satisfaction with pay and job security, 4 – 5 times more employees “willing to go the extra mile,” and 1.5 times higher customer satisfaction ratings. Now there’s hard evidence for “soft” skills!

What’s especially remarkable is how obtainable extraordinary leadership is proving to be. A leader needs to develop just three existing strengths out of sixteen competencies to catapult his or her leadership effectiveness from the 34^th to the 80^th percentile! Zenger Folkman’s deep research shows very clearly that it’s the presence of strengths — not the absence of weaknesses — that defines highly effective leaders. Building strengths is proving to be the only way to move from an average or ordinary leader to extraordinary or exceptional.

In a series of pre and post studies Zenger Folkman looked at the impact of leaders choosing to fix weaknesses versus building on existing strengths. 12 to 18 months later the leaders who magnified their existing strengths showed two – three times more improvement in leadership effectiveness than leaders who worked on fixing their weaknesses.

How to Be Exceptional provides the succinct, practical, how-to roadmap we so badly need to navigate the inspiring and tremendously fulfilling territory of strengths-based leadership. This guide book outlines a step-by-step method for “driving leadership success by magnifying your strengths.” For weary leaders feeling beat up by engagement surveys, performance reviews, 360 and other feedback tools highlighting their deficiencies and suffering change fatigue, this book couldn’t come at a better time.

In my 35 plus years of studying, applying, writing about, and providing leadership development programs and services, Zenger Folkman’s approaches are a much needed revolution. The authors close with this modest and understated summary of their contributions to this critical movement:

“We believe that our contributions to this collection of massive granite blocks that make up the current foundation of the strengths movement are the following:

1. A more rigorous analysis of the impact of strengths on business outcomes. This had not been the focus of the pioneers …
2. Studies confirming that strengths can be developed, in contrast to those who believe that they are somewhat fixed or static.
3. Research that confirms that developing strengths is far more successful than developing weaknesses.
4. Research showing that the approach one uses to build strengths is radically different from that used to fix weaknesses. Utilizing a nonlinear approach and companion competencies makes it possible for people to move from good performance to great.”

To order single copies of How to Be Exceptional visit Amazon.ca, Amazon.com, Indigo-Chapters or your local bookstore.

For bulk purchases at substantial discounts, contact McGraw-Hill Ryerson by email or call 905-430-5094.

Upcoming Events Featuring Zenger Folkman’s Strengths-Based Leadership Development System:

• September 20 Complimentary Webcast – Jack Zenger and I will discuss our new Canadian strategic partnership, overview of their key approaches as outlined in How to Be Exceptional, followed by an interview with Jack and Joe Folkman on the four unique aspects of Zenger Folkman’s approach. Click on Strengths-Based Leadership Development System for details and to register.
• Human Resources Professionals Association (HRPA) Breakfasts at their Toronto Office – I’ll be presenting interactive sessions for senior HR and operating executives on October 2 covering 7 Reasons Why Strengths-Based Development Just Works Better and October 11 on The 11 Crucial Components of a “Best in Class” 360 Assessment
• October 25 (AM) Complimentary Executive Briefing on Zenger Folkman’s Strengths-Based Leadership System near the Toronto Airport - my colleagues and I will overview Zenger Folkman’s research and approaches and we’ll feature a panel of Learning & Development leaders who’ve been using them. We’re finalizing details and will have them posted on our web site shortly.
• November 13 in Calgary and November 29 in Toronto Strengths-Based Leadership workshops - I’ll be delivering Zenger Folkman’s foundational The Extraordinary Leader workshop that How to Be Exceptional is written from and around. Click here for details and registration.

“The highest reward for man’s toil is not what he ‘gets for it,’ but what he ‘becomes by it’”

- John Ruskin, 19^th century English social thinker, philanthropist, artist, and writer

We were surprised, shocked really, to discover the type of leadership required for turning a good company into a great one. Compared to high-profile leaders with big personalities who make headlines and become celebrities, the good-to-great leaders seem to have come from Mars. Self-effacing, quiet, reserved, even shy — these leaders are a paradoxical blend of personal humility and professional will. They are more like Lincoln and Socrates than Patton or Caesar.

- Good to Great, Jim Collins, Harper Business, New York, 2001, pages 12-14.

“More men have become great through practice than by nature.”

- Democritus, Ancient Greek philosopher often called “the father of modern science”

“We sense a dangerous disease infecting our modern culture and eroding hope: an increasingly prevalent view that greatness owes more to circumstance, even luck, than to action and discipline — that what happens to us matters more than what we do. In games of chance, like a lottery or roulette, this view seems plausible. But taken as an entire philosophy, applied more broadly to human endeavor, it’s a deeply debilitating life perspective, one that we can’t imagine wanting to teach young people.”

- Jim Collins and Morten Hansen, Great by Choice: Uncertainty, Chaos, and Luck — Why Some Thrive Despite Them All

“Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.”

- Aristotle, Greek philosopher, student of Plato, and teacher of Alexander the Great

“The difference between try and triumph is a little umph.”

- Unknown

“Leaders who are motivated to improve their emotional intelligence can do so if they’re given the right information, guidance, and support. The information they need is a candid assessment of their strengths and limitations from people who know them well and whose opinions they trust. The guidance they need is a specific developmental plan that uses naturally occurring workplace encounters as the laboratory for learning. The support they need is someone to talk to as they practice how to handle different situations, what to do when they’ve blown it, and how to learn from those setbacks. If leaders cultivate these resources and practice continually, they can develop specific emotional intelligence skills — skills that will last for years.”

- Daniel Golemen, author, psychologist, science journalist, and co-chair of the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations based at Rutgers University

“Leaders aren’t born, they are made. And they are made just like anything else, through hard work. And that’s the price we’ll have to pay to achieve that goal, or any goal.”

- Vince Lombardi, as head coach of the Green Bay Packers he led the team to three straight league championships and five in seven years, including winning the first two Super Bowls following the 1966 and 1967 NFL seasons.

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This week we’re learning much more about Zenger Folkman’s ground breaking new book, How to Be Exceptional: Drive Leadership Success by Magnifying Your Strengths. You can now download and read Chapter 1: Organizations Flourish with Strong Leaders .This special introductory chapter is embedded with brief video clips of Jack Zenger and Joe Folkman explaining key concepts. Click here to access it.

Last weekend I came across this provocative piece on the Forbes leadership site:

“The Performance Appraisal: A Workplace Evil That Must Be Destroyed…“
www.forbes.com
“Here are 4 reasons why the annual performance review — as it’s traditionally practiced — is an evil, toxic ritual that must be abolished.”

I added this comment to my posting: Most performance appraisals are weakness-focused. Effective performance development is built on a strength-based coaching foundation.

Almost immediately these two thoughtful comments were posted in response:

Stephen G. Largy: “Excellent article, but here’s the hitch. What’s not measured is not managed. The problem is not with the ‘concept’ of annual feedback, it’s with the process. Begin to approach the ‘annual’ performance review as the culmination of ONGOING feedback on the employee’s ONGOING contribution toward professional, team, and company goals AND tie that to the employee’s ONGOING professional development. The problem is both employee and employer harbor the PERCEPTION that they don’t have time for this. The result? Articles such as this. The article is true, because we make it true.”

David Kennedy: “In an environment that is NOT undergoing rapid change I agree that strength-focused reviews can be used effectively. However when change is occurring on a regular basis, it is important to understand all the capabilities, positive or negative, of an employee. The ability to change job functions of an individual successfully is crucial to the success of the manager. The other day, Steve Ballmer was being critiqued on the ‘life boat’ exercise that his company, Microsoft, uses to evaluate each team’s performance. I agreed that evaluations that use negative criteria may be harsh, but companies must be in a constant state of flux to survive in the 21st century.”

Stephen is right on: performance discussions should be part of an ongoing process. I also agree with David that both positive and negative performance capabilities need to be addressed — especially during rapid change.

The research on performance coaches in the 90th percentile shows they look for what’s strong and positive that can be leveraged to move performance from good to great. They don’t ignore problems or deficiencies — especially if they’re “fatal flaws.” But their ultimate motivation for “performance management” isn’t weakness-focused. They look to help individuals and teams get better through strength-based approaches — including how to counterbalance weaknesses with strengths.

You can find a reader’s example of using performance discussions as development opportunities at “Building on Strengths: Coaching, Developing, and Retaining High Performers“.

Join the conversation. Please post your thoughts on this vital leadership issue below.

In response to that last blog, Rande Matteson, PhD, posted these observations:

“Although we can find examples from all demographics, overall, the nation is suffering from a serious job perspective. No doubt we have great talent, however, we can’t beat folks up either and we sadly have the wrong people in management and “leadership” positions.

If what all the experts including John Challenger reports are that 80% of our workforce is looking for employment and they want to leave a bad boss, we might say the remaining 20% may be those managers…

It is time for folks to wake up and understand the value of all human capital if you expect the organization to succeed.”

Rande hit the core issue; we do have the wrong people in management roles. Part of this pervasive problem is an abysmal — or non-existent — promotion process that has much less rigor than making a small capital acquisition in most organizations. Little thought or research typically goes into identifying and developing competencies that demarcate poor, ordinary, and extraordinary leadership skills.

People who quit and leave expose just the tiny tip of this very big disengagement iceberg. The huge and hidden problem is the majority of people who quit and stay! It is time for executives to wake up if we’re going to raise innovation, productivity, service, and quality levels to grow our economy.

Once again Jack Zenger and Joe Folkman bring solid research and balanced perspectives to a misunderstood leadership issue. Writing in Training magazine they clearly counter the misperceptions that:

“The “Me” generation is selfish, more concerned than older workers about the flexibility the job offers or the ability for the job to support their social life and their personal goals. We think of them as entitled and not as willing to yield to the needs of the organization as their parents and grandparents were.”

Jack and Joe report on their research drawing from an extensive database on leadership practices to conclude:

• Gen Y leaders are every bit as focused on driving for results as their older counterparts.
• Likewise, they’re equally focused on meeting the needs of the organization.
• They exhibit cooperation.
• They welcome collaboration.
• They are enthusiastic.
• They are inspiring.
• They are willing to innovate and to improve on ideas.
• They are generally good at resolving conflict.
• They have a desire to market programs, and also a desire and a willingness to market themselves, as opposed to feeling like their work should speak for itself.

The biggest surprise of all? They welcome feedback. In fact, they actively seek it. Not only do they seek feedback from their superiors, they seek it from their co-workers and from their employees as well.

Our Gen Y leaders score better than their older counterparts (ranking 60 percent or higher) on all of these fronts.

Go to Managing the “Me” Generation: It may not mean what you think to read their insightful article.

Younger workers are more mobile and less willing to work for a weak leader. We need much less excusing and accusing and much more leadership – for all generations.

Time and again we watch resilient and highly driven athletes reaching deep inside to triumph over adversity. Many who don’t win medals inspire us with personal bests as they overcome the toughest competitor of all — themselves. “It is the inspiration of the Olympic Games that drives people not only to compete but to improve, and to bring lasting spiritual and moral benefits to the athlete and inspiration to those lucky enough to witness the athletic dedication,” observed Herb Elliott, an Australian middle-distance runner. He never lost a race from 1957 – 1961 and broke the four minute mile 17 times during his career.

The quest for personal excellence is what the father of our modern Olympics and founder of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), Pierre de Coubertin, envisioned over a hundred years ago: “The important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle, the essential thing is not to have conquered but to have fought well.” French educator and historian Coubertin toiled hard for years in the late 1800s to revive the modern Olympics. His persistence paid off with the 1896 Summer Olympics in Athens, Greece. The ancient Olympic Games were held every four years in the Greek city of Olympia from 776 BCE through to about 261 or 393 AD. During those games battles were halted, as the best athletes competed in a healthier environment.

Coubertin felt that could be a model for international cooperation and rechanneling competition more constructively. A century later, American composer John Williams (his works include numerous popular film scores and theme music for four Olympic Games) confirmed that vision: “The Olympics are a wonderful metaphor for world cooperation, the kind of international competition that’s wholesome and healthy, an interplay between countries that represents the best in all of us.”

Leadership, like athleticism, is multi-faceted. I hope you find this month’s issue inspirational and instructional. We’ll build off another international feat of athleticism — Nik Wallenda’s walk over Niagara Falls — to discuss the high wire balancing act of leadership and management. Pursuing excellence demands change. We’ll see how champions — often monomaniacs with a mission — can be incredibly irritating and vital to moving us forward.

The official 2012 Olympics web site features their logo along with the slogan, “Inspire a Generation.” The core tenants of leadership like excellence are timeless and cut across generations. We’ll take another look at the generational nonsense that too often clouds the real issue: every age group wants inspirational leadership.

London is famous for “The Tube” — its subway system. Everywhere are signs to “Mind the Gap” between the train door and the station platform. In this issue we look at Zenger Folkman research on a critical leadership gap that can create a values ceiling.

Emil Zatopek was a Czech long-distance runner who won three gold medals at the 1952 Summer Olympics in Helsinki. When asked about his unusual facial expressions while running he replied, “I was not talented enough to run and smile at the same time.” Most of us aren’t talented enough to do all the multi-tasking we take on. We’ll look at how to reclaim our time and our life.

The Olympics have a history of wonderfully hilarious sportscaster gaffes. For example, a boxing analyst once defended the brutal and barbaric “sport” (pounding each other’s face to a pulp is a sport?) this way: “Sure there have been injuries and even some deaths in boxing, but none of them really that serious.” And a basketball analyst pointed out, “He dribbles a lot and the opposition doesn’t like it. In fact you can see it all over their faces.” I hope to see laughter — or at least a few smiles — all over your face as you read “Jest for the Pun of It.”

Let the Games begin.

While none of us will likely ever do anything this dangerously dramatic, it’s a powerful metaphor about balance. Life is full of many high wire balancing acts. A critical one for personal, team, and organization effectiveness is managing things and leading people.

Things include physical assets, processes, and systems. People include customers, external partners, and people throughout our team or organization (or “internal partners”). When dealing with things, we talk about a way of doing. In the people realm, we’re talking about a way of being.

Both management and leadership are needed to make teams and organizations successful. Trying to decide which is more important is like trying to decide whether the right or left wing is more important to an airplane’s flight. We need both!

I just came across Jesse Lyn Stoner’s blog post reporting on her dissertation research years at the University of Massachusetts (Leaders vs. Managers: The Real Answer to What’s Better). Over two years she collected data from more than 500 employees rating their bosses on how much they demonstrated leadership versus management behaviors and how those correlated to their team’s performance.

She concluded that, “managers need to lead and leaders need to manage.” She goes on to declare that, “it’s time to retire the conversation about which is better.”

Not surprisingly, Jesse’s research showed that high leadership balanced with high management lead to high team performance. What surprised her was the discovery that high leadership with low management also produced high performance. When she looked deeper she discovered that bosses who provided strong leadership vision were often supported by teams who provided the management needed to implement them.

This is explained by Zenger Folkman’s ongoing leadership research as reported in their book, The Inspiring Leader:

“Adequate leaders get everyone to do their jobs, but inspirational leaders are able to get people to rise far above that mark and achieve more … There is obviously something about a leader’s encouraging innovation that has an extremely powerful impact on people. People are jazzed by the opportunity to participate in new and exciting activities.”

We need both leadership and management for high-performance on the team and organizational high wire. And when working with supervisors, managers, and executives with strong leadership skills, team/organizational members can step up to provide counterbalancing management that takes everyone across the roaring maelstrom.

Part of his e-mail focused on a vital culture change issue:

“As I recall, at the time you had a section on incorporating divergent thinkers into the change process and especially on differentiating between divergent thinkers and negative people who just want to derail change. I believe those employees who are resistant to change because they are negatively orientated in their personalities or wish to harm the organization need to be differentiated from those employees who are offering valid critique.

It seems to me that the latter are often divergent thinkers who are among the most innovative and morally courageous people we have. I also think that organizations need to get such divergent thinkers on board in order to benefit from their critique as well as to ward off any overt or covert resistance. We waste a lot of talent if we label all resistors as negative.

Would you be so kind as to direct me to any literature that you have on this subject matter?”

These are discussions I tend to have during many workshops and executive team retreats. We have a selection of Change Management blog posts and articles. The article, Harnessing the Energy of Change Champions gets into another critical aspect of this discussion and provides a list of how-to implementation ideas.

Resistance is energy. Apathy is the real problem. If resistors can be redirected, their energy can often be turned into a very positive force for change.

Ethics and honesty data collected through 360 surveys by Zenger Folkman on 5,268 leaders vividly illustrates the point. In their Harvard Business Review blog, “The Data’s In: Honesty Really Does Start at the Top,” Jack Zenger and Joe Folkman found “the top managers in an organization create a ceiling — that is, leaders the next level down tend to be rated lower than their managers on every leadership dimension — and that includes their honesty and integrity. In other words, levels of honesty are set at the top and can only go downhill from there.“

Former British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher famously observed “Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren’t.” The very same can be said about an executive’s integrity, honesty, and ethical behavior.

Most executives, like most frontline staff, don’t set out to do a bad job. It’s rare that an executive will declare a value or behavioral goal and then deliberately contradict that value with his or her actions. Most acts of executive hypocrisy are committed innocently. Many executives simply have no idea that their actions are widely perceived to be out of step with their words. And as their personal credibility gulf widens their declarations of values raise the organization’s “snicker factor.”

A big reason executives’ lived values are inconsistent with espoused values is simply ignorance. They’re not getting feedback on how their actions are perceived. Ironically, those very executives who are the brashest violators of their own fine rhetoric are the ones least likely to hear about it. No one wants to tell the emperor he’s naked and being snickered at. So the fantasyland surrounding the inconsistent executive rises ever higher into the stratosphere. And executive frustration also rises because managers, supervisors, and frontline people aren’t grabbing hold of the new values. The values gap widens ever further.

While the two broad steps to help you and your management team live your values are easy to describe, they are very tough to do. The first step is to open up as many feedback channels to the executive team as possible. In today’s interconnected world there’s a multitude of informal and formal ways to get unfiltered feedback on your behavior from people in your organization as well as outside suppliers and customers.

Secondly, treat the messengers, especially internal ones, with kid gloves. If it looks like they got shot in the process, feedback will instantly revert to “gee boss, you’re doing a great job!” Only those people with a career death wish will then participate.

Executives need to LOL – Lead Out Loud – to shift values from rhetoric to reality. Zenger and Folkman advise executives to “take deliberate care to communicate expectations of honesty.” But as the American philosopher, essayist, and poet, Ralph Waldo Emerson, said, “The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.” What we do shouts so loudly most people can’t hear what we say.

In their solidly researched book, The Inspiring Leader, Jack Zenger and Joe Folkman provide highly documented evidence that the characteristic of “inspires and motivates others to high performance” is the most powerful factor in great or extraordinary leaders versus good or average supervisors, managers, or executives. Their research with over 200,000 participants evaluating more than 20,000 managers clearly showed that frontline staff and team members value this competency above all others. Not surprisingly, of the 16 competencies Zenger Folkman have identified as key to effectiveness, this vital leadership skill is by far the most vital to employee engagement.

There is a generational difference: younger generations are much less willing to put up with weak leaders who don’t inspire them. Where their parents might have gritted their teeth and trudged on to pay mortgages and feed their families, younger people are much less tied down to any organization or job early in their careers.

Uninspiring managers often say things like, “the work ethic is dying; young people don’t want to work anymore.” That’s complete rubbish! And it’s a convenient excuse weak managers hide behind. In “We Need Less Generational Nonsense and More Leadership“ I cited Jennifer Deal’s extensive research showing that today’s younger generation is “just as intrinsically motivated as other generations.” So the mediocre manager who wails about younger generations needs to be told the truth: they want meaningful and fulfilling work — just like everyone else. They just don’t want to work for you!

After “We Need Less Generational Nonsense and More Leadership“ was published, two readers posted these comments:

“Thanks Jim! I prefer evidence to anecdote on big matters, and you’ve given us credible evidence — I admire that. And it returns the discourse to leadership and purpose — essentials — rather than distractions.”

- James Hilmar Todd

“What a refreshing article on the generation gap. I have been curious about all the attention on age diversity in the workplace, given my experience over 4 decades in both public and private sector organizations. Clearly these times are not the same as they were years ago, but Jennifer Deal’s research and your commentary certainly rings true for me.”

- Rick Fullerton

What are your thoughts and experiences? Post them below or add them to “We Need Less Generational Nonsense and More Leadership“.