Leadership and succession
From PLN
Leadership and succession
Notes and resources on leadership development and succession gathered by Leslie Dillon (Leader's Digest).
"What to ask the person in the mirror"
As leaders rise through the ranks, their opportunities for honest feedback decrease. And by the time a manager's missteps show up, it’s often too late to make course corrections. Therefore, it's wise to make periodic self-assessments.
Author Robert S. Kaplan, formerly of Goldman Sachs, identifies seven areas for self-reflection and questions that go with them, which I've paraphrased:
- Vision and priorities. (How often do I communicate my vision and priorities? Can my staff articulate them? Having 15 priorities is the same as having none!)
- Managing time. (Do I spend my time in ways that will let me achieve my priorities? Your staff will determine how to spend their time from the way you spend yours.)
- Feedback. (Do I give timely, direct, constructive feedback? Your direct reports know what you're doing wrong. Cultivate subordinates who'll tell you the truth.)
- Succession planning. (Have I picked one or more potential successors? If you haven't, you're probably not delegating as you should.)
- Evaluation and alignment. (Am I attuned to changes in the environment that'll require organizational changes?)
- Leading under pressure. (How do I behave under pressure, and what signals am I sending my staff?)
- Staying true to yourself. (Does my leadership style reflect who I truly am?)
Kaplan advocates writing down what you do every working hour for a week and checking how well your actions match your intentions. (Robert S. Kaplan, "What to ask the person in the mirror", Harvard Business Review, Jan. 2007.)
"How leaders create and use networks"
After closely studying 30 emerging leaders, the authors of this article outline 3 forms of networking:
- Operational networking--geared toward doing one’s assigned tasks more effectively; involves cultivating stronger relationships with colleagues in the network.
- Personal networking--engages people from outside the organization to find opportunities for personal advancement.
- Strategic networking--uses networking to accomplish business goals; these managers create networks that will capitalize on new opportunities for the organization. "The ability to move to this level of networking is a key test of leadership."
(Herminia Ibarra and Mark Hunter, "How leaders create and use networks", Harvard Business Review, Jan. 2007.)
When the boomers leave, will your library be ready?
Librarianship isn't the only field with a graying workforce. Fifty percent of corporate executives will also be eligible to retire in the next five years. This major change "portends leadership crises" for organizations "that haven't prepared the next generation of younger managers to step into the departing executives' shoes." This article gives advice from experts on providing your organization's future leaders with effective training. Here are a some suggestions:
- Identify future leaders. Your "high potentials" are the ones who learn quickly, are strong problem solvers, are skilled at working with diverse groups of people, and handle change well.
- Stretch them in multiple directions. Give future leaders a series of relatively short-term assignments that round out their skills, for example an assignment that complements their regular duties.
- Charge them with tackling problems as a group. Giving your "high potentials" a challenging problem to solve will help speed their learning and strengthen cross-organizational relationships, plus let them engage in "analysis, persuasion, and negotiation essential to their success" as leaders.
- 'Encourage them to learn from the experts down the hall. "Creating mixed teams of 'high potentials' and experienced...managers is an efficient way to transfer knowledge" to the next generation.
- Make learning objectives explicit Be explicit about the desired outcome of each assignment--which skills to strengthen and gaps to fill. Keep learning goals front and center.
(Ann Field, "When the boomers leave, will your company have the leaders it needs?", Harvard Management Update, Apr 1, 2007.)
What you can do right now to grow as a leader
Opportunities to build your leadership skills are everywhere. You don’t need to change jobs to develop as a leader. In your current job, you can can take on challenges that can substantially expand your leadership knowledge and skills and not even significantly increase your workload.
Here’s where you can find new leadership challenges:
- Reshape your current job to find new challenges.
- Rethink your approach to current responsibilities; trade tasks with a colleague.
- Take on temporary assignments that offer new challenges.
- Look for short-term projects, task forces and activities that you can participate in briefly.
- Seek challenges outside the workplace.
These are the skills to develop:
- Handling unfamiliar projects.
- Leading change.
- Embracing higher visibility and greater accountability.
- Managing across boundaries.
- Dealing with diversity.
And while you’re at it, be sure to set yourself up for success by learning to consider others’ viewpoints and seeking feedback and coaching.
(Cynthia D. McCauley, “What you can do right now to grow as a leader," Harvard Management Update, June 2007. Available on EBSCOhost or from Harvard Business Online.)
Building a leadership brand
Do you want your library to be a “leader feeder”? That’s an organization known for its leaders. These organizations build a “leadership brand”--a reputation for developing exceptional managers with talents geared to fulfill customers’ expectations. “A company with a leadership brand inspires faith that employees and managers will consistently make good on...promises.”
Building a strong leadership brand requires that organizations follow five principles:
- Do the basics of leadership—like setting strategy and grooming talent—well.
- Ensure that managers internalize external constituents’ high expectations.
- Evaluate their leaders according to those external perspectives.
- Invest in broad-based leadership development that helps managers develop skills needed to meet customer expectations.
- Track their success at building a leadership brand over the long term.
By adopting these five principles, an organization “can create a leadership brand that differentiates the organization to employees inside and to customers...outside... As leaders at all levels of the company learn how to master both the core skills of leadership and the essence of the leadership brand, they will increase the value of their organizations.”
(Dave Ulrich, Norm Smallwood, “Building a leadership brand,” Harvard Business Review, July/August 2007. Available on EBSCOhost or from Harvard Business Online for $6.50.)
Solve the succession crisis by growing inside-outside leaders
Many companies have no succession programs in place, but research by the author of this article revealed that companies performed “significantly better” when insiders were appointed to the job of CEO. Other researchers have reached similar conclusions. While the focus of the article is on large, for-profit corporations, there are some good lessons to be learned from it:
- The best CEO candidates are “inside-outsiders—internal candidates who have outside perspective.”
- Organizations need to recognize that succession is a long-term process, not an event.
- Strong CEOs “wield enormous power...and...their ability to make sense of the environment and to craft and articulate the mission and the strategy are central to long-term success.”
- The best leaders are insiders who are sufficiently detached to “maintain the objectivity of an outsider.” They’re aware of the organization’s people and traditions but they know “how those will have to change.”
- To build a pipeline of future leaders, you need to recruit from a diverse pool of highly-talented people with management potential.
- Performance evaluation is critical for nascent leaders. They need to be held accountable and learn how to deliver.
- Senior managers overseeing development of talented junior managers need to “pay special attention to planning, budgeting, performance evaluation,[etc.]...and to how these different processes are linked.”
- Because they think outside the box, inside-outsiders can appear to be mavericks with weird ideas. They need to be encouraged by their mentors and protected “from old-timers who might be inclined to teach them a lesson.”
- Potential leaders need to be given increasingly responsible positions. And they need help maintaining their unique perspectives.
“Those who want to be chosen as leaders must build a track record of delivering in the short term while building for the long term.”
(Joseph L. Bower, “Solve the succession crisis by growing inside-outside leaders,” Harvard Business Review, Nov. 2007. Available free from HBR; also available on EBSCOhost’s Business Source Premier.)
A leader's framework for decision making
Not all leaders are able to juggle multiple demands when they face situations that require a variety of decisions and responses. Different “contexts call for different kinds of responses,” and wise leaders need to be able to “tailor their approach to fit the complexity of the circumstances they face.”
This article sorts issues into five contexts and discusses appropriate actions for each:
- Simple contexts--characterized by stability and clear cause-and-effect relationships. “Known knowns.” Action: Simple rules work well.
- Complicated contexts--may contain multiple right answers. “Known unknowns.” Action: Sense, analyze, respond.
- Complex context--right answers can’t be ferreted out. “Unknown unknowns.” Much of contemporary business operates here. Action: Probe first, then sense, then respond.
- Chaotic context--searching for right answers is pointless. “Unknowables.” Action: Establish order, sense where stability is present, then work to transform the situation from chaos to complexity.
- Disorder--it’s unclear which of the other four contexts is predominant. Action: Break the situation into its parts and assign each to one of the other four realms. Then make decisions and intervene appropriately.
This article is definitely worth reading in full. It includes an excellent Leader’s Guide, a one-page chart that summarizes the entire framework, including a set of actions, dangers and appropriate responses for each context.
(David J. Snowden and Mary E. Boone, “A leader’s framework for decision making,” Harvard Business Review, Nov. 2007.)
Intuitive decision making
Conventional wisdom tells us that executives should use "painstakingly collected megabytes of data" to make good decisions. But the authors of this article argue that "all the data in the world can't trump the lifetime's worth of experience that informs...intuition."
According to Garry Kasparov, the former World Chess Champion, "intuition is the defining quality of a great chess player." Many scientists embrace intuition as well, and successful executives agree. But what makes up gut feelings, and when should they be trusted?
Pattern recognition
Chess masters see many patterns in the configurations of a game; novices don't. Intuitive decision making is really the "ability to recognize patterns at lightning speed." Even though this often happens unconsciously, it's a critically important trait for making complex decisions. But complex decisions come about through "a process in which knowledge, experience and emotions are linked." Research has shown that people who have "deep wells of knowledge and experience" make good "intuitive" decisions more often than others.
Honing intuition
Since intuition is a highly developed, complex process, how can we hone our own intuition to improve our chances of making good decisions? Cultivating your instincts requires the following:
- Experience. The more extensive your experiences, the more patterns you'll recognize, and "the more patterns, the better the intuition." It takes "at least 10 years of domain-specific experience" to develop the required gut instincts.
- Networks. Senior executives need to surround themselves with their peers to share experiences and get feedback on their decisions.
- Emotional intelligence. "[E]motion precedes cognition." Ninety percent of the differences between the highest performers and average performers "can be explained by emotional intelligence ... --being able to recognize and interpret one's emotions."
- Tolerance. Top managers must be willing to tolerate mistakes -- their own and those of their employees. And they need to create a culture of tolerance by publicly supporting staff who are willing to take risks and make mistakes.
- Curiosity. Curiosity is "a prerequisite for discovering new opportunities." Peter Drucker wrote that good managers always focus more on opportunities than on risks.
- Limits. Intuition needs discipline. Check out gut feelings with facts. Chess masters make decisions fast, then carefully rethink the intuitive decisions they've made.
Making your own luck
Are people just lucky? Actually, no. Some people are better than others at "recognizing 'chance' opportunities and seizing them at the right moment." They're able to separate out ambiguities and contradictions from the information needed to make a strategic decision.
Analytics "can never trump the intuition ... of a thoughtful, curious executive constantly seeking new opportunities."
(Kurt Matzler, Franz Bailom, Todd A. Mooradian, "Intuitive decision making," MIT Sloan Management Review, 49(1), 13-15.)
Evidence-based library management: The leadership challenge
Libraries “recognize the value of collecting and using data for planning and decision-making, but they do not do this systematically or effectively.”
Amos Lakos, librarian, Rosenfeld Library, Anderson School of Management, University of California Los Angeles, interviewed library leaders from ARL libraries who have introduced a culture of assessment in their libraries and are committed to new performance measures.
Following his interviews, Mr. Lakos came to these general conclusions:
- Senior university administrators don’t view the library as necessarily connected to their central priorities of faculty, research funding, and student learning and life.
- Assessment and analytics aren’t currently a “central cultural tenet of universities... This lack of institutional culture is central to the slow development of a culture of assessment in libraries.”
- The library profession is challenged in recruiting enough librarians with statistical, analytical or IT skills.
- Library leaders have managed to succeed in their careers “without having an assessment framework.” This is another major reason for slowness in adopting a culture of assessment.
- Although they’re aware of the need for assessment, library leaders are “stymied” by legacy systems, staff resistance and lack of vision.
- Library directors are slow to identify external sources of analytics, statistics, reports, etc.
Mr. Lakos believes library directors need to learn about use of assessment from non-library industries and that “allowing for imagination to thrive may help.”
Five to ten years out, higher education will experience the increasing influence of the “accountability movement.” Because of the need to demonstrate measurable evidence, libraries will be forced to change their vision and values.
Librarians will have to learn “to measure the right things and change from a culture of intuition-based decision-making to a decision-making framework based more on evidence, analytics, and results... Effective implementation of data-driven and evidence based decision-making requires vision, leadership, and risk-taking. This leadership depends on character, [and on] understanding of economics, changing technology, and expected impacts.” Libraries will have to outsource their assessment activities until there are enough librarians with the requisite skills. Local libraries will need to move to collaborative frameworks, and consortia will fill the analytics gap by distributing needed reports and analyses to member libraries.
(Amos Lakos, “Evidence-based library management: The leadership challenge,” portal: Libraries and the Academy, Vol.7, No. 4, Oct. 2007. Available through Project MUSE to subscribing libraries. “ALL OTHERS: Inquire with the journal’s publisher about obtaining this article.”)
Using your strengths to become stronger
Top performers excel not by overcoming their weaknesses but by focusing on their strengths--those work activities that make them feel “productive, energized, and engaged.”
To generate the most business value from your strengths:–
- Use the SIGN test to identify your strengths:
- Success. Do you feel successful and effective as you perform the activity?
- Instincts. Are you effortlessly drawn to the activity?
- Growth. When you perform the activity, do you feel your mind is advancing?
- Needs. Does the activity leave you fulfilled?
- Use the FREE approach to put your strengths at the center of your work:
- Focus. How--and how often--do you use this strength in your job?
- Release. How can you use this strength more?
- Educate. What skills and techniques would help you leverage this strength?
- Expand. How might you share your best practices with others?
To help your employees leverage their strengths –
- Listen to them and trust their judgment.
- Adjust their jobs when possible.
- Help make undesirable tasks less burdensome.
- (Read more about this in Lauren Keller Johnson’s article, “Using your strengths to become stronger,” Harvard Management Update, Feb. 1, 2008, or see Marcus Buckingham’s book Go Put Your Strengths to Work: 6 Powerful Steps to Achieve Outstanding Performance, Free Press, 2007.)
Related articles
- Are we doing enough to create the next generation of leaders? - Steven J. Bell and Wayne Bivens-Tatum post key questions on future leadership; several librarians respond.
- Leadership issues - the LLN Peer Panel discusses key issues for today's and tomorrow's leaders.
- Using data to make decisions - More notes on evidence-based librarianship and the desirability of evidence-based management in general.
- Career paths - Notes on changes during careers, including key events within a career.
