A couple of high-profile CEO resignations in Vancouver this week got me wondering: do stakeholders expect the board of directors to be transparent about the reasons underlying a CEO's untimely departure?  Do they believe the published account put forth by the PR folks?  I think I can safely answer 'not usually' to the second question.  Sometimes the situation is what it seems - health reasons, family reasons, turns out not to be the job they want.  But often, there is something else going on.  And a couple of conversations (thanks to the universal law of 'six-degrees of separation') can quickly get you closer to the truth.   

The number one reason people leave jobs and companies is to escape their boss.  CEOs are just like the rest of us.  An unexpected CEO departure frequently has its roots in the relationship between the CEO and the board, often the board chair.  There is a mis-alignment of vision.  There is no chemistry.  The CEO isn't listening or open to coaching.  The board chair is meddling.  The board is being pressured by key stakeholders around results.  The board has questions about the CEO's style, decisions, leadership effectiveness.  The CEO railroads the board.  The board tramples the CEO.  The board is suspicious information is being withheld.  The CEO is suspicious the board is talking to people behind his back.  The board feels the CEO they have isn't the one they thought they hired.  The CEO discovers the job she was pitched doesn't match the one she is doing.  With one CEO and 10 board members, most of whom have pretty strong egos, the potential for dysfunctional interpersonal dynamics to emerge is not insignificant.  And once it starts, it does not take much to spiral someone right out the door.  That person is, almost always, the CEO.  

This takes me back to my first question: does it matter to stakeholders when boards don't tell the whole truth about why the CEO is leaving?  

A version of this article was first published in my monthly HR column on Troy Media June 24, 2015.
 
I recently read a blog by marketing guru and all-round provocative thinker Seth Godin entitled “The fruitless search for extraordinary people willing to take ordinary jobs” (June 4, 2015).   It took me back to a board room conversation about executive pay.  Every company has a ‘compensation philosophy’ that it uses to guide how it sets the pay of employees, from the CEO on down.  We talked about the challenges we were having meeting the performance expectations of shareholders and our need to increase the level of talent in the organization.  Then, as if we had just forgotten the previous conversation, we reconfirmed our compensation policy - to target pay at the market median (otherwise known as ‘average’).  We were doing exactly what Mr. Godin proposes as lunacy - expecting above-average talent to deliver above-average results for average pay.  Guilty as charged.  Reflecting on this got me thinking about other ways organizations and leaders ‘kill’ the potential for excellence:

Rate everyone’s performance as ‘above expectations’.  A few years ago I had the opportunity to help a client ‘fix’ their performance review process.  We discovered there was nothing wrong with the performance criteria, the forms or the process.  The problem was the ratings - the average performance score was 4.2/5.  Only 10% of employees scored a 3 (‘meets expectations’) and no one scored less.  If the organization was delivering exceptional results perhaps this statistical improbability could be overlooked.  But it wasn’t.  The organization was reinforcing average performance and getting exactly what it deserved - average results.

Reward loyalty and effort.  Long-service, loyalty and effort are all laudable and should be encouraged.  But they are insufficient if the goal is to create organization excellence.  The world stopped being a meritocracy several decades ago.  One of the most common reasons I hear for keeping long-serving but poor-performing employees around is their knowledge and institutional memory.  We are in the information age.  It is time to think long and hard about how you are managing and transferring knowledge in your enterprise.  The statute of limitations on gold service pins has run out.

Offer a defined benefit pension plan.  You are not enjoying one of these unless employed by a large corporation or anything resembling a government.  Had I understood the implications of the pension when I was 20, I would now be happily retired and vacationing on a desert isle.  Pensions are wonderful things and of tremendous benefit to employees and society, and I wish we all had one.  They are also guaranteed to stop people who really need to get out and do other things from voluntarily leaving your organization.  

Ask extraordinary people to work for average leaders.  Talent is attracted to talent.  If your goal is to bring in exceptional people, you need to staff your leadership roles with people who will inspire and engage them.  A strategy of recruiting exceptional people to shore up an organization’s weaknesses is guaranteed to create a revolving door.

Make personal development optional.  My job requires me to regularly ask people ‘what is on your current development agenda?’  The answers I typically hear makes me want to tear my hair out.  ‘Nothing really’ or ‘I actually don’t have a development plan right now’, or ‘I still need to have that conversation with my boss.’  I used to think people were busy working away on things designed to help them get better and just didn’t want to tell me about it.  I turned out to be wrong.  Many of us don’t seem particularly concerned about honing our performance, as if personal excellence has little to do with organizational excellence.  Leaders, when they put off having those conversations with their teams, are complicit.  Organizations who take a casual attitude toward people development will never deliver consistently outstanding results.  Because for a business to survive these days requires constant improvement, and we’re not just talking about processes and IT systems.

Building and sustaining organizational excellence requires exceptional people dedicated to the task and supported by the right values, expectations, processes and leadership.  Jack Welch was a lighthouse for all of us on the topic of organizational excellence.  As the CEO of GE he taught us exceptional performance is a relentless and disciplined pursuit, not a happy accident.  Jack may have retired and moved on, but that idea still burns bright.  

Sources
Seth Godin, June 4, 2015.

Taylor is one of those confident, outgoing guys who stands out in a crowd.  He looks like a leader, talks like a leader, and collects fans the way charismatic types do.  He has built an impressive career.  When I asked him what has been key to his success, he spoke about the importance of never staying too long in any one job or organization and being aggressive and aspirational in pursuing the next opportunity.  The funny thing about Taylor is, if you stop and objectively evaluate his success beyond the positions he’s held, he comes up short.  While he’s been successful, the projects he’s managed, the teams he’s built, the businesses he’s led have not been particularly remarkable or successful.  In fact, he is someone who consistently disappoints.  In his case, moving from one company and opportunity to another helped him evade questions about his real effectiveness.  Because Taylor looks like a leader and talks like a leader, people have - erroneously - assumed he is a leader.  This is a common, and potentially disastrous, human decision-making error: confusing leadership presence with leadership effectiveness.

It is this very human error that tends to get us, as citizens, into trouble in the political realm.  We are naturally attracted to those candidates who possess leader-like qualities and we get behind them.  It isn’t until after the fact we discover that, sometimes, looking like a leader and sounding like a leader does not translate into an ability to lead.  

It is this same human error that gets CEOs and boards into trouble when they make judgments and decisions about personnel.  When we use ‘executive presence’ as a proxy for effectiveness, we run the risk of hiring or promoting someone who proves unable to translate their leadership presence into results.

Strategies to Avoid Getting Duped by Leaders Who are ‘Big Hat, No Cattle’
There are things you can do to avoid hiring people who possess more leadership presence, confidence and ambition than they do real ability.

Be aware of the natural tendency to be attracted to and distracted by leadership presence.  Knowledge is power.  If you know we tend to correlate leadership emergence with effectiveness you can guard against it.  When you hear yourself thinking or saying ‘she really stands out as a leader,’ follow up with ‘I wonder how effective she really is.’

Seek out and supplement intuition with hard data.  Sometimes it is easier to make judgments and get to the heart of someone’s effectiveness when there isn’t so much veneer.  When there is a lot of veneer, this is the time to be more diligent in supporting your gut reaction with facts.  Expand the reference pool and dig deeper.  I recently did a 360- feedback process for someone who got glowing reviews from everyone I spoke with.  It wasn’t until I dug in and asked about results that I heard things like "yeah, I really like her and would work with her again in a second, but to be honest, while she did okay she really wasn’t as successful as we were expecting".  Things to watch out for include: a track record of promotions generated by moving between rather than within an organization and frequent job changes before results can be adequately assessed.

Psychometrics can be your friend.  In my leadership practice I use both in-depth interviews as well as psychometrics (you know, those pesky online leadership assessments) to understand leadership effectiveness.  They can provide important supplemental information about leadership style and personality variables that are missed by interviewers.  Leader-like people perform exceptionally well in interviews.  Good psychometric tools can help to tease out leadership presence from leadership effectiveness so you don’t get duped.

Know when to cut your losses  
We all make mistakes, sometimes in spite of our diligence.  It can be hard to face up to bad decisions - it is embarrassing to admit you have mis-judged someone.  Discovering your new CEO isn’t very effective in leading the people or the business is a hard pill to swallow.  But leadership effectiveness requires the building of managerial ‘muscle’ and ‘scar tissue’ over time and experience.  Can you afford to try and transform this leader’s emergence into effectiveness at this stage in their career?  If the answer is ‘no’, best to move on.  If the answer is ‘yes’, you will need to figure out how you are going to do that.  Step one is convincing that leader she is not as effective as she believes herself to be.  It isn’t impossible, but it is probably not going to be very easy.  After all, look at her track record.

What to Do if This is You
What if you are the person who possesses tremendous leadership presence but hasn’t been able to translate it into real and sustained leadership success?  Sometimes our self-confidence and belief that we ought to be in charge can get in the way of the vulnerability that is required to actually learn how to be effective.  The good news is, you are starting from a position of strength - people already see you as a leader.  Here are some strategies to get you on your way.

Admit you may not be as great as you think you are.  As they say, admitting you have a problem is the first step.  My favourite people to work with are those who see themselves as always coming up short and in constant need of development to improve as leaders.  Not surprisingly, these are usually the people who are most effective and need my help the least.  When you say you want to improve, do you really mean that or is it a superficial acknowledgement?  Where is the evidence to back up your commitment to change?  Are you prepared to do the work?

Seek a deeper level of self-awareness.  Not all of us are blessed with penetrating insight into who we are and what makes us tick.  Strategies for supplementing your own insight include 360-reviews and those pesky psychometrics.  These tools are designed to tell you, in very objective terms, about you.

Get professional help.  I know that you don’t just want to be a leader, you want to be a good leader.  If being an effective leader were so easy, you would have figured it out by now.  It isn’t easy.  So admit you need help transforming yourself into the leader you want to be and seek out the help and support of someone who can really help you make that happen.  This isn’t a 30-day program.  This is a lifelong pursuit.

Sources
This article was inspired by a webinar entitled The Impact of Narcissism on Leadership courtesy of Hogan Assessments (www.hoganassessments.com), the Alberta provincial election, and at least one ‘big hat, no cattle’ leader I’ve bumped into recently.

A version of this article was first published in my monthly Troy Media column and can be viewed at  http://www.troymedia.com/2015/03/30/tips-to-becoming-a-strategic-thinker/

Last week I started working with a leader who suddenly finds herself on the executive team.  A corporate restructuring caused her to skip a level and now she is sitting around the table asking, ‘am I strategic enough to do this job?’  Her question is not unique.  Twenty years of working with leaders on their development has taught me there are 3 leadership success factors executives worry about most: public speaking, financial acumen and strategic thinking.  The typical solution for the leader who wants to be more strategic is to attend an executive education program called something like "Strategic Planning for Executives".  What usually happens is they take the program, have a wonderful time, develop some really good peer connections, and then complain the course was aboutplanning not strategic thinking.

What is strategic thinking?

Strategic thinkers demonstrate the following characteristics:

1. They see patterns.  Strategic thinkers have a way of looking at information and seeing relationships.  Instead of identifying 5 problems that need solutions, they see how 5 problems have a common thread and conceive a solution that addresses all of them at once.   
2. They see the future.  Strategic thinkers see how events are likely to play out.  They have a ‘sixth sense’ that gives them an upper hand in using data to predict the future and they plan accordingly. 
3. They communicate at a higher level.  Strategic thinkers speak the way they think - they are future-oriented and thematic in their communication.  They are good at connecting actions and people to higher-order goals.
4. They are efficient and disciplined in assigning resources.  Strategic thinkers streamline how they assign and align resources.  They are less distracted by the ‘urgent’  and maintain a steadfast focus on the ‘important’.

Can strategic thinking be learned?

First, the bad news.  Everyone’s brain is wired differently.  Some people are profoundly creative.  Others have an intuitive sense around people.  Your brain is your brain.  Best to know what it does well, and where the wires don’t connect.

Now, the good news.  If you understand how your brain works, and you know what you want it to do, you can apply it in new ways.  

How to be more strategic

Not every strategist will be a leader, and not every leader will be a strategist.  Being a strategic leader is a combination of strategic thinking and strategic action.  

Tactics for developing strategic thinking include:

1. Be curious.  Strategic thinkers take in a lot of information from many different sources to help them spot patterns.  The best way to stimulate thinking is to step outside your normal flow of information.  
   
2. Look for themes.  As you travel around your environment, keep an eye out for things that are related.  Stop and take note every time you read or hear a particular topic or point of view.  I have a couple of blogs and podcasts I track and when the same idea pops up 4-5 times in completely different places, I like to ask the questions, ‘what is going on here?  Does this mean something?’
3. Set aside time for reflection.  How can you possibly think strategically if you don’t allow yourself time and space to think?  The 21st century is all about doing.  Shame.  Because the best ideas and insights come from thinking.  I highly recommend a daily walk, alone. 

Tactics for developing strategic actions include:

1. Develop and use frameworks.  Strategic leaders are able to link activities and initiatives to higher-order goals and objectives.  There shouldn’t be anything on your ‘to do’ list that isn’t tied to a key objective.  A framework allows your team to prioritize effort so they are working together with maximum impact.  There is nothing worse, or less strategic, than a leader who is constantly downloading random questions and requests for information.  The message it sends to the team is, ‘this is interesting but I don’t know what is important.
   
2. Lead through goals.  Strategic leaders manage goals, not tasks.  They are good at establishing deliverables and then leave others to determine the mechanics of how things will get done.  They focus on what, now how.  
3. Delegate decision-making authority.  Strategic leaders are rarely accused of micro-managing.  Being too hands-off, maybe.  Because they provide their teams with clear strategic objectives aligned around performance outcomes and have a decision-making framework, they rarely need to intercept the decisions being made by those around them.

Everyone wants to be strategic.  While you might not be the most strategic thinker by nature, strategic action can be nurtured.

I sit on the board of a not-for-profit organization engaged in transforming leadership in the not-for-profit sector and we design and deliver a lot of governance education to executive directors and their boards.  We strive to lead by example and model what we teach.  We just completed our annual board evaluation process and many things are going extremely well in how we operate and govern.  And then there is this comment: “We need to be careful to keep taking the longer view - we easily slip into the weeds in discussion.”  Sigh.  We are just like everybody else.

Pretty much every chief executive I have ever worked with has logged the same ‘observation’ of the board: they can get awfully mired in the detail.  When I try to reassure them their experience is not unique, I tend to get a look of profound skepticism.  Because when you are the chief executive and your board is triple-checking the math or debating the word in a sentence, you can get a little paranoid.  A board that dives down and gets stuck in the weeds is, unfortunately, the rule rather than the exception.  This dynamic occurs even though directors would rather shoot themselves than be described as tactical or meddling.

One of the most difficult and often unexpected tasks a chief executive undertakes is the management of his or her board.  A first-time CEO is often blown over by the nuanced complexity of this task.  And for some reason, prior experience as a board member seems to be little pre-requisite for effectively managing your own board. 

Rather than write one more article reminding us all of the role of the board and the difference between governance and management, I thought it might be worth exploring - from the point of view of a psychologist - why the ‘detail-absorbed board’ phenomena is so prevalent and what you can do to alleviate it.  

Why boards get in the weeds

Some of the reasons boards struggle with maintaining a strategic focus have more to do with being human than they do with being a board member.

The human brain uses data and detail to create big pictures and spot trends.  Our brains formulate narratives by accumulating details.  Because the board member’s brain actively engages with the organization sporadically, it takes time, and a lot of data, to build up a coherent picture and elevate facts to insight.  Management tries to help by providing (often hundreds of pages of) information which it expects board members to digest in 7 days or less.  It reminds me of my first week in graduate school when each professor handed out 350 pages of reading for discussion in next week’s class.  When board members ask a lot of detail-oriented questions, it is probably because their brains are still trying to piece together information and make sense of it.  And some brains require (and adore) more data than others.  Given the nature of the human brain, it is possible that ‘dropping into’ an organization a few times a year may not be an ideal rhythm when the goal of the board is to provide strategic oversight and input.

The role of the board member is complex and multi-faceted.  In the world of not-for-profit board governance and leadership excellence, we talk about three roles boards play: fiduciary, strategic and generative (Chait & Ryan & Taylor, 2005).  Fiduciary responsibility is a natural draw for the detail-oriented.  Strategic responsibility can also elicit its fair share of detailed questioning as board members seek to understand an organization’s priorities, rationale and method of executing on those priorities.  Generative responsibility is the playground for future-oriented, strategic, conceptual thought.  It needs more than a 10-minute time slot.  If you look at your board meeting agenda and the topics up for discussion, it will probably become painfully clear why board members show up with their pencils sharpened.

Under stress, strategists become obsessive-compulsive detail-oriented problem-solvers.  Personality is a funny thing.  There are our normal tendencies and then there are our stress behaviours.  For some strange reason, stress behaviour is often the exact opposite of normal behaviour.  Since the issues boards face are rarely run-of-the-mill, are frequently high-stakes, and the voting members do not have any control over their execution, stress responses kick in.  Suddenly you find yourself staring down a group of highly strategic people who all want to dive in and solve the problem - or even argue about the right method to solve the problem - instead of formulating brilliant questions that cast a light on the shadowy corners. 

How to elevate the contribution of the board

There is a tendency for us to make assumptions and draw conclusions about the character and competency of board members when it might be more helpful to take a step back and think about them as human machines with predictable patterns of behaviour.  If you can anticipate, you can try to over-ride.  Here are three suggestions for facilitating the strategic contribution of the board:

Manage the human brain.  The way information is prioritized and communicated can lighten the cognitive load and help the board maintain a strategic focus.  If you communicate strategically, you increase the likelihood of getting strategic input in return.  

• Provide a cognitive ‘map’ by grounding content in a framework (ie, your strategy, policies, etc.) and making links clear and obvious  
  
• Remind people where you are in the ‘journey’.  Serial tv programs usually start with a flashback to get the audience back in the action for a reason.
  
• Organize reading material and verbal presentation to start at the top (get to the point) and then work down through levels of detail to support the conclusion or recommendation. Don’t start with a data-dump, and don’t stop at a data-dump. 
  
• Anticipate questions or concerns and address them proactively.  

Make space for generative contribution.  Recognize the board is being asked to play multiple roles.  If you want a strategic contribution you have to create the time and headspace for that.  The middle of the audit committee meeting may not be the best place to insert a conceptual discussion about the evolution of the risk management model.  

• Evaluate the board agenda and the proportion of time dedicated to fiduciary, strategic and generative contribution.  Adjust as desired.
• Label tasks and be explicit around desired input.  Rather than make assumptions about what you expect from those sitting around the table, clarify the type of contribution the discussion is meant to elicit.  
• Establish shared expectations between the chief executive and each board and committee chair.  It is healthy to review the status quo and align around how the committees and board want and need to spend their time.  Often, routines emerge that no one is satisfied with but that continue until someone steps in to shift or re-focus.

Anticipate stress reactions.  When people walk into a room to deal with an issue, they have probably had just a few days or weeks to get their heads into it and, suddenly, you are asking them to make a high-stakes decision.  As a board member, what I hate most is being surprised with something and then told a decision is urgent.  What it says to me is that the chief executive is a) not on top of the business, b) lacks respect for me, my role and my decision-making process and/or, c) wants to rush something through before I’ve had a chance to think about it.  If you are going to ask the board to confront an important decision that will likely cause anxiety, plan for that.

• Prepare well-considered materials for review (nix the power point and write a detailed memo instead where your clarity and depth of thinking can come through)
• Proactively engage members in discussion in advance to allow them to formulate questions and articulate their concerns.  Talking stimulates active thinking in a way that just reading about something does not.  The default, ‘if they have questions they should call me,’ is an avoidance tactic, not an engagement tactic.
• Make sufficient time available during the board meeting for discussion, and don’t leave the important conversations for the end.  Perhaps do something crazy and organize the meeting agenda in order of priority.  

A board can make a significant contribution beyond fiduciary due diligence.  And this is, in fact, why most people sign up to serve.  Not just for the pleasure of combing through financial statements and risk management policies, but also to ignite the strategic capacity of an organization.  Do they get too stuck in the detail?  Probably.  And, maybe, it isn’t just their fault.

Sources
Governance as Leadership: Reframing the Work of Nonprofit Boards.  Richard Chait, William Ryan & Barbara E. Taylor.  John Wiley & Sons, Inc, 2005.

Your future success as a leader depends upon your ability to translate feedback and awareness into a tangible development plan.  Unfortunately, you probably have no idea where to start.  After 20 years in the business of helping to transform leaders and organizations I am convinced, more than ever, that the ‘black box’ in bridging the gap between leadership potential and reality is development.  There are endless solutions for acquiring feedback that point in the direction of change.  There are, likewise, endless solutions for measuring and rewarding performance.  What is most often missing is what happens in between - a fundamental understanding around how to move from leadership aspiration to reality.  In essence, how to change behaviour.  If you are a leader interested in how you can transform yourself, read on.

Step 1: Gain Clarity Around You Who Are and Who You Aspire to Be

Why should anyone be led by you?  We don’t spend enough time asking ourselves who we want to be when we grow up and why we should be leaders.  How can you tackle your development if you really don’t know who you are and what you stand for?  I have had the privilege of working for leaders who ‘get’ this and the less-than-inspiring experience of working for those who do not.  Quite honestly, there is nothing more frustrating or disillusioning than working for someone who really does not have an interest in developing their identity as a leader.  

Defining Who You Are as a Leader

I will admit I can be a tedious leadership coach.  When I am working with leaders in the context of personal transformation, before we even discuss where they should focus in terms of their development, I ask them to answer these questions: 

1. What is your leadership philosophy?  How do you think about and define leadership excellence?  What do you value in a leader?  What do you stand for?  What kind of leader do you aspire to be?
2. What is your leadership personality? (who are you?).  What are your key character traits?  What are your values and beliefs? What motivates you?
3. What is your leadership presence? (who do others see and experience?)  What is your behaviour?  How would others describe you?
4. What is your leadership potential?  What is the alignment between your leadership philosophy, who you are as a leader, and how people experience you? (these are your core strengths and form the foundation of your leadership practice; this is what you build from).  Where is the mis-alignment between your intent and how your behaviour is interpreted? (these are your gaps, shortcomings and blind spots; these you assess and determine if you manage, mitigate or develop).

Step 2: Setting Development Targets and Priorities

The goal of leadership development is to align intent with behaviour in order to achieve higher-order objectives in the context in which you find yourself.  So often, leadership development springs from a mis-match between what a leader is striving to do and what is coming across to key stakeholders.  The extent to which you are aware of and can objectively assess your development opportunities determines your ability to develop strategically and intentionally.    

Questions leaders should ask before determining development priorities and next steps

Not everything that you get feedback on is worthy of development.  I don’t particularly care what your 360 feedback, leadership assessment report or leadership coach have to say about how you need to change.  Instead, I suggest you ask yourself a series of questions to get at the heart of where you should focus your development:

1. What relevant strengths do I possess that I can leverage more effectively in this situation?
2. What strengths do I possess that I can build upon to be more effective in this situation?
3. What strengths have I relied on in the past that are less relevant to success in this situation that I need to monitor and manage in order to avoid over-reliance?
4. What gaps do I have that limit success in this situation but which I have the potential to close?
5. What gaps do I have that will be difficult for me to close in any situation and which I need to manage or mitigate?
6. What are blind spots that can derail me in this situation if I don’t become more actively aware of and monitor?

Making Change Stick

Where the rubber hits the road around personal development is translating your desired future behaviour into tangible action steps that will result in real change.  I have seen a lot of development plans; I have seen a lot less actual development.  If you are serious about actually transforming who you are as a leader, the very best resource I have found for changing behaviour is James Clear’s Transform Your Habits.  My summary of how to translate development intent into sustainable behaviour change is:

1. Goals need to be visceral and tangible.  You have to be able to see and feel the future leader you aspire to be.
2. You have to really want it. 
3. You have to be able to translate the goal (future behaviour) into a daily habit.  
4. Focus your activity on the daily practice of a new habit.  Behaviour changes one day at a time until old habits are transformed into new habits. 
5. Actively track your process and progress.  That means every day, stop to reflect on what you intend to do and make a note of how it went.
6. Celebrate success on a daily basis.  And if you were not successful today, remember that tomorrow is a new day that begins with a clean slate.

Change is hard.  This is the humble summation of my experience working with hundreds of leaders.  But it is less hard when you are clear on the case for change.  And less hard when you are clear on what really needs to change.  And less hard when you are clear on how you are going to instigate that change.  You are in charge.  What you want to do is completely up to you.


Sources
Transform Your Habits (2nd Ed.).  James Clear.  www. jamesclear.com

According to recent surveys, employee engagement is at an all-time low.  At the same time, the focus on engagement seems to be at all-time high.  Even worse, organizations have handed off driving employee engagement to the human resources department when so clearly it is a leadership accountability.  The culprits of low satisfaction scores of old - poor wages or working conditions, lack of training and tools, insufficient communication, no recognition, lack of empowerment -  have largely been resolved in many of our work places.  And yet malaise is increasing.  What is going on and how do we fix it?

Why we are disengaged at work

Recession fatigue.  The fragility and inconsistency of the economic recovery is wearing us down.  For most organizations cost-management and ‘operational efficiency’ seem to have permanently replaced growth and innovation as a strategic vision.  It is hard to get excited about pinching pennies 7 years in a row.  The human spirit needs a more meaningful purpose.

Technology fatigue.  Whatever lines used to exist between work and life have been erased by the phone-sized computer we carry in our back pocket.  Other than the few hours when we are asleep,  chances are we are constantly multi-tasking job and life responsibilities.  Although humans invented computers, we are not computers and we do not function well when we are all-systems-go, 24/7.  The human physiology needs a different set of rhythms and programs.

‘Just world’ hypothesis fatigue.  There was a time when we believed in a just world - that commitment and hard work were rewarded and the world, including the workplace, was a fair and just place.  Instead, we see a world that is not so fair.  The rich and powerful get richer and more powerful while the rest sit on the sidelines waiting for a turn that never comes.  Average CEO pay has risen 22% since 2010 while average wages have declined or barely kept pace with inflation (Mishel & Davis, 2014).  It's no wonder employees are disgruntled.

Middle child fatigue.  Drawn in by the now infamous War For Talent argument (McKinsey & Co., 1998), organizations have concentrated their recruitment, development and retention efforts on executives and future executives.  The remaining time is spent trying to manage the performance and exit of under-performers.  Meanwhile,  85% of the workforce - solid contributors who are critical to success - have been left on the sidelines.  Discretionary effort and emotional engagement are hard to muster when no one seems to be paying attention.

Engagement fatigue.  It is possible we are all tired of being surveyed and then told that on top of everything else we are expected to do, we have to work on our attitude.  There is no evidence proving organizations that measure and manage engagement in the same way they tackle equipment maintenance have more engaged employees.  Workplaces visibly humming with engaged employees are probably not worried about measuring it.  

How to improve engagement

Rather than focus on measuring engagement and spending countless days in post-survey focus groups and action planning committees, I have some ideas about how to instantly improve the engagement of employees:

Vision.  Give people something to believe in and strive for that ignites their imagination and spirit.  Say it like you really mean it.

Balance.  Take the IT system off-line for 12 hours each day and/or encourage people to deal with pressing personal issues during work hours, whenever they may arise and no matter what is going on at the office.

Equity.  Share the wealth.  Consider skipping the executive team retention bonus and distribute it to the customer service reps or safety officers instead.

Respect.  Treat everyone like they are important today and a critical part of the organization’s future.

Leadership.  Ask teams to vote for the person they want as their leader and appoint them.  Repeat annually.

These may seem like radical ideas at first blush.  But, frankly, if you are really serious about having people show up at work excited, committed, giving it all they’ve got you are going to have to do something really different.   

A version of this article was first written for my column on Troy Media and is posted at http://marketplace.troymedia.com/2015/01/29/5-sure-fire-ways-to-improve-employee-engagement/

Sources
CEO Pay Continues to Rise as Typical Workers Are Paid Less.  Mishel & Davis, Economic Policy Institute, June 12, 2014.
The War for Talent.  The McKinsey Quarterly, 1998 Number 3.

Because it is January, chances are you are frantically trying to schedule year-end performance reviews.  The dreaded performance review - quite possibly the most detested HR program ever invented.  It doesn’t matter what process, form or technology is in place to accomplish this task, it is always bad.  But what if I were to tell you that you can put an end to the madness?  It is probably not realistic to eliminate the task altogether (someone from HR will hunt you down eventually), but you can put an end to the dreaded part.  I know I did.

Step 1: Focus on performance planning, not performance review

How would you feel, as a fan, if your favourite hockey team showed up on the ice without a game plan.  Instead of carefully crafted and well-rehearsed strategies and plays to get the puck in the net, the coach decided just to ‘play it by ear’.  That is what a lot of leaders do with their teams.  Instead of investing time and energy in crafting well-considered performance contracts that align tightly with business objectives, a lot of leaders leave their direct reports to ‘wing it’ on a day-to-day basis.  I have seen large, complex organizations with serious strategic objectives fail to engage employees in anything resembling a robust performance planning process.  Each member of your team should have clearly defined deliverables that directly align with your deliverables, which should directly support your boss’ deliverables, and so on.  This process takes effort, but at the end of it each of your team members will have a concrete business plan they will use to prioritize their time and performance.  They will know what is expected of them and align their activities accordingly.

Step 2: Hold weekly review meetings based on the performance contract 

When I took on managing a senior team my coach gave me a piece of advice: hold weekly 30 minute update meetings with everyone.  The prospect of that seemed overwhelming to me at the time, but I decided to trust her and give it a shot.  While it wasn’t always easy, and sometimes the weekly meeting drifted to a bi-weekly meeting, I can tell you it worked.  For 30 minutes each week, team members provided a short and snappy update against their performance plan.  Anything not directly related to the plan was dealt with in a separate meeting.  What did this accomplish?  Focus.  Momentum.  Timely, relevant two-way feedback.  No surprises.  Results.  My team got the important stuff done.  This is what performance management (and people leadership) is all about.  More importantly, as a team we knew we were contributing in a significant way to helping the organization achieve results and we felt good about our accomplishments.

Step 3: Watch performance review become a non-event

When formal mid-year or year-end performance reviews were due, it was a non-event for us.  Everyone knew where they stood because we tracked this on a regular basis.  And because I knew my team were achieving their goals, I knew I was delivering on my commitments to my boss.  So instead of spending time arguing about and negotiating performance ratings, we spent our time talking about development and career goals.  And that is how you engage employees.  Not by handing them a report card like they are still in grade-school, but by helping them paint a picture of their future.

I have many shortcomings as a leader, but performance management is something I was pretty good at.  But only because I was intentional in building it into my management routine and relentless in executing against it.  So make this the last year you say you hate performance reviews.  It’s January, after all.  Time to get on that performance planning process.


Sources

This month's blog was inspired by a conversation on building organizational alignment with DC, a newly appointed CEO.

Evidence shareholders are being short-changed by traditional board composition is mounting with every research report linking the participation of women in senior management and on boards to positive business outcomes.  In Canada, diversity is being given an extra push by the Ontario Securities Commission’s ‘comply or explain’ policy.  Companies will need to publicly release information about how they are promoting and actively managing gender diversity.  Board diversity is more than just about rectifying bad optics.  It is about getting the best talent around the table.  To do that will require more than good, heartfelt intent, which I believe we have a lot of in corporate Canada.  Underlying the existing board composition patterns are a set of beliefs and attitudes that drive board recruitment and selection decisions.  To change the outcome requires some fundamental shifts in how we think about and recruit board members. 

Board Recruitment Attitudes and Practices Help Maintain the Status Quo

Historically, board members have been drawn from the pool of retired CEOs, COOs and CFOs with experience in a similar or related industry and often with a connection to one or more influential members of the board.  Board recruitment was, and in many cases still is, informal and personal.  The introduction of recruiters to the process has broadened the search, but the ideal candidate profile has remained relatively consistent.  The traditional recruitment model poses a number of challenges when the goal is to diversify.

1. To identify diverse candidates, boards will need to reach beyond their existing networks.  Last month my not-for-profit board launched our 2015 recruitment strategy.  We asked current board members to identify potential candidates from amongst our networks.  This is a strategy most organizations employ.  When existing directors don’t have a strong network of diverse candidates, the recruitment process stalls.  The ‘lack of awareness of potential diverse candidates’ and ‘belief there are not enough diverse candidates’ have been identified as two of the top 3 obstacles to increasing board diversity (Spencer Stuart, 2013).  It turns out directors know potential candidates just like them, but not so many who are not like them.  To be successful in achieving diversity, boards will need to re-think their recruitment strategy.
2. Expanding and diversifying board candidate criteria would significantly increase the pool of director candidates.  As long as director talent pools are defined in a way that excludes a majority of women and minorities, diversity goals will be difficult to achieve. The number of women and other under-represented groups who have been CEOs or COOs in any industry is minuscule.  A recent study of 3000 global companies found a mere 3.9% of current CEOs and 8.5% of business unit heads are women (Credit Suisse, 2014).  As long as CEO or operating experience remains a key criterion for board selection, the pool of potential female candidates will be breathtakingly small and continue to reinforce the belief there are no qualified women.   
3. Board directors need to value broader, more diverse expertise.  One solution to the board diversity dilemma is to broaden the kind of background and expertise boards typically seek.  For example, expanding the candidate talent pool to include those who have served in any senior executive role would increase the number of female candidates by 400%.  The global Credit Suisse study reports 17.5% of top finance and strategy roles and 19% of top legal/HR/marketing/administrative jobs are held by women.  But to make this recruitment strategy work will require a fundamental shift in attitudes at the board table around the value of different kinds of expertise.  While 93% of board members rate financial expertise and 68% rate operational experience as ‘very important’ only 22% rate HR or legal expertise in the same way (PwC, 2014).  For diversity initiatives to take hold, sitting directors will need to re-think the value they place on the types of background and expertise they need around the board table.  

 
Diversity as a Strategy to Build Talent on the Board

Increasing diversity is more than just good PR.  It helps boards and organizations better address key business and governance issues.  There is tremendous breadth and increasing complexity in the issues facing organizations today.  For example, according to Deloitte, the top board concerns for 2014 included: enterprise risk management, executive compensation, corporate strategy, shareholder activism and sustainability.  The Conference Board (2014) identified the top five challenges for CEOs as: human capital, customer relationships, innovation, operational excellence and corporate brand and reputation.  While former CEOs will continue to form the nucleus of corporate governance, boards made up of members who bring deep and diverse expertise are probably better equipped to help organizations anticipate, tackle and solve their most pressing problems.  Diverse boards bring a more comprehensive collective view, are more attuned to risks and opportunities, and are in a better position to provide guidance and oversight to the organization.  When talented people across multiple domains with diverse experience and perspective come together in the pursuit a common objective, good things can happen. 

Sources
Spencer Stuart Board Index.  Spencer Stuart, 2013.
Governance Trends Shaping the Board of the Future: Board Performance and Diversity.  Annual Corporate Directors Survey, PwC, 2014.
The CS Gender 3000: Women in Senior Management.  Credit Suisse, 2014.
Deloitte Center for Corporate Governance, 2014.  www.corpgov.deloitte.com/site/us/board-governance/.
The Conference Board CEO Challenge® 2014: People and Performance.  Conference Board of Canada, 2014.

“Find us someone who will be ready for a VP job in 12-18 months but who is prepared to come in and prove it.”  Those in the recruitment business will recognize this request as a growing trend.  As demographics kick in and retirements loom, organizations find themselves with talent holes and a lack of ideal internal candidates to fill them.  Asking recruiters to find and secure high potential talent willing to make a job change on the possibility of bigger things to come is certainly ambitious.  And unlikely to be successful as a talent building strategy.

Why recruiting high potential talent works better in theory than in practice

When organizations have the opportunity to go outside for talent, they take it very seriously.  The goal is, always, not only to attract the best possible candidate for a role but to increase the talent pool.  Then reality sets in:

1. The odds of finding a needle in a haystack.  What are the odds of finding a future star at exactly the right moment, for the right job, with the right culture fit, for a manager who will inspire them, who is willing to relocate companies/cities/countries for the compensation you are willing to offer to work for you?  You have to get awfully lucky.  And the more senior the role, the smaller the pool, the lower the odds.  More than likely, by the time you’ve checked all the boxes, you have hired a very capable individual and left your search for the elusive high potential talent for another day.
2. Recruiters source candidates with experience, not potential.  Sitting in the HR executive chair gave me an immense respect for the work search professionals do.  But they are fundamentally set up to identify and validate past experience, not future potential. 
3. Highly talented people are rarely out looking for new opportunities and if they are, they are probably getting better offers.  The high potential leader is very fussy.  She probably has a short-list of companies and roles she wants to pursue.  Unless your organization is a leader in its space, can guarantee ongoing career growth and provide an inspiring environment, boss and management team, you are probably not on her short-list.  Top-tier talent want to work for top-tier organizations with other top-tier talent.  My 20-something nephew graduated top of his class with several notable professional awards under his belt and was recruited by his dream company to do his dream job for less money than he was currently making.  He took it, packed up his car, and headed east.  Unless you are someone’s dream company offering their dream job, successfully recruiting high potential talent as a way to bolster your pipeline is a tough proposition. 
4. Success is contextual.  People are not successful in a vacuum.  It is often difficult to know how much of someone’s previous success has been tied to the environment and context.  Whether they will be able to transfer their capability and potential to a new setting is unknown.  For an interesting look at this phenomenon, see The Risky Business of Hiring Stars (Harvard Business Review, May, 2004).

Strategies to increase your odds of success

For many organizations, the necessity of using external recruitment to bolster the talent pipeline is a reality.  Here are a couple of suggestions to make this a more successful endeavour.

1. Target aggressive and proactive talent recruitment at lower levels and focus on retention at upper levels.  The earlier you can recruit talent, the better your odds of finding and getting them - the numbers are working in your favour and some of the hooks that grab and hold high potential talent haven’t yet been established. 
2. Introduce the ‘special projects’ role.  It is a mystery to me why organizations don’t simply hire talented people when they bump into them, regardless of whether they have anywhere logical to put them.  Every department has more on its plate than it has the resources to accomplish.  Consider establishing a special projects role and using it to place new recruits and untested talent.  Imagine what your life would be like if, every time there was a vacancy, you had a high potential you knew and had nurtured you could slip into the role.  
3. Make talent scouting a leadership expectation.  The best candidates don’t come from the recruiters.  They come from your own leaders who are out interacting with customers, suppliers, competitors and other stakeholders.  They are also the best people to be out there selling your company’s value proposition. What are you doing to ensure leaders are actively scanning, identifying and hiring talent? 
4. Hire or retain a professional talent scout.  There is a reason hockey scouts travel around the country, sit in arenas, and watch kids grow up and play.  Many companies are making the move toward supplementing external recruiters with internal recruiters.  Social media has significantly eased the task of finding and phoning talent.  But rather than simply focus on filling existing vacancies, this function should be proactively scanning the environment for potential talent and actively recruiting them well before they are in demand.  
5. Make data-driven decisions.  Hiring is always a gamble.  However, there are very sophisticated assessment tools and strategies designed to help you understand, identify and predict potential.   Building these into your recruitment process will significantly increase your ability to pick a rising star who can operate effectively in your organization.

Stay tuned for my next article Talent on Board: How Traditional Board Recruitment Practices Help to Maintain the Status Quo.

Sources
The Risky Business of Hiring Stars (Harvard Business Review, May, 2004).