For many of you, making your corporate executives better leaders is a big challenge. Connecting them to mentoring and coaching is a great way to add value to your relationship with them, gain their trust and better effect cultural improvements within your organization.
One key area you can focus on to build leadership talent is helping your corporate stars redefine their coaching needs as they rise through the ranks:
As noted in a recent article (free registration required) by Robert Kaplan, a professor at Harvard Business School:
This is the paradox of coaching: Most executives, as they rise up the ranks, focus sideways and upwards rather than down. They see value in adopting and adapting the vision coming from the top, running friendly competitions with peers, and managing staff to meet career goals. Asking advice on job performance and leadership ability does not occur to them. As the successful executive nears the top, however, he or she will find good advice from above harder to get:
--Fewer superiors above them actively observe how they go about their business.
--Fewer peers around them are willing to act collegially and provide useful criticism that could help make them better.
This lack of support is both because there are:
--Too many like-minded people among their peers, with similar habits and mindsets, which drains the senior management pool of perspective.
--Too many competitors for a narrowing funnel of promotional opportunities. Helping a colleague can hinder a manager’s own chances, naturally reducing the incentive to help unless top management sets a strong collegial example (a rare occurrence.)
Here is where you can step in: Work with middle managers to change that heretofore successful mindset of only looking up for counsel and direction, and embed as a personal professional habit looking down to subordinates for advice on job performance. This concept sounds a bit nuts to newly senior managers, but it is the key to their long-term success.
Adopt the Spirit of the 360-Review!
When you run a 360-degree review, everyone above, at your level and below you get to offer frank assessments of how you have been performing. These reviews are predicated on the idea that the formally structured environment encourages people to be frank, while remaining constructive in their input. The underlying assumption is that people (subordinates especially) will not share feedback that is ‘negative’ without clear institutional protection against retribution and need this special artificial construct to let their guard down.
So, once a year a lot of managers find out that while they may be managing tasks and projects well, they are failing as leaders. This creates all kinds of angst and hurt feelings. People react negatively to the whole process, and hurry back to the culture they feel more comfortable in, whether or not it is productive.
If 360-degree reviews are so effective, it strikes me as a great idea for senior management to move heaven and earth to embed such an open, sharing environment directly into the corporate culture. It’s hard work to establish full employee engagement into the mindsets of employees and their managers, but the 360 Spirit would have huge organizational advantages in fostering a proper leadership culture.
How does a manager embed the Spirit of the 360-Review in daily corporate life?
The ongoing goal for every senior manager must be to create subordinate relationships based on the three core tenets that we focus on in embedding a full-engagement mindset:
Unshakable Trust:
-- Encourage full and open truth in meetings.
-- Expect the best of everyone. Everyone you hire is talented. Challenge them to make full use of their skill sets.
-- “Tuesday is Tuesday” (Stick to your commitments.)
-- Take true accountability for your own results, good and bad.
The Pursuit of Truth:
-- Take genuine interest in the truth at all levels.
-- Center conversations on how to be “the best we can be,” not just meeting our targets and beating our competition.
-- Look way beyond the metrics and never settle for “good enough.” Pre-set goals are pretty arbitrary, and may blind you to potential lying beyond those limits.
-- Encourage authentic, transparent and complete two-way communication from bottom to top, by celebrating the truth whether good news or bad.
Communication that Counts:
-- Keep communication “next action” focused. No dwelling or looking backwards!
-- End all communications with mutual commitment to action.
-- Check up on commitments, see that delegations are fulfilled, and run meetings with a forward focus on decisions that help to complete the commitments. No updates that could be sent by e-mail!
-- Instill a belief in everyone that every communication improves the relationship.
Focusing on embedding these three habits as a day-to-day mindset will generate better feedback, particularly from subordinates, that will help the manager materially improve their personal performance, often in 90 days or less.
A great leader knows that his or her subordinates know far more about the current state of customer mindsets and potential than senior managers (and perhaps even all of them put together!)
Train your leaders, at all levels, that a great amount of support for their career ambitions comes from below, not above. More of their day-to-day decisions will be based on the truth rather than on hunches based on input from people who are even farther from the front line than the manager is!
Plus, engaging subordinates fully gets that team 100% behind the manager, helping to push him or her up the ladder!
