Tag Archives: Organizational change

Five behaviors you must practice to cross the leadership threshold

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by Jared LafitteJared-Lafitte

Leadership is not defined by a title or a position, a record of experience or an accumulation of knowledge. That’s why there are many in positions of power who have great expertise and experience, yet are poor leaders.

Leadership is a practice that requires mastery of several key behaviors that transfer vision and motivate action. Like any behavior, they are meant to be learned, practiced, repeated and sharpened. Leadership should be pursued primarily as a set of practices to be developed and not as a position to be attained. When leaders learn to make this distinction between position and practice, they are crossing what I call the leadership threshold: a conceptual line that divides leadership grounded upon expertise, experience and authority (positional leadership) from leadership grounded upon behaviors and practices (behavioral leadership).

One way to nuance this is to say that experience, expertise and authority serve as crucial supplements to leadership, but generally do not themselves create leadership. Like logs in a fireplace, an accumulation of knowledge and experience provides fuel for the fire of leadership, but it is only behaviors such as conviction, communication and influence that provide the spark to set it ablaze. Crossing the leadership threshold means learning to view expertise, experience and authority as supportive but not primary. Continue reading →

The Talent Curse

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by Jennifer Petriglieri and Gianpiero Petriglieri

 

TalentThere were many late nights during Thomas’s time at a private equity firm, but two of them really stand out. On the first, he was at a bar. Earlier in the day, his boss had let him know that he was the top performer in his cohort. Over drinks that evening, he struck up a conversation with a partner at a rival firm. “You’re the guy who closed two deals in six months, aren’t you?” the man asked. It was a moment Thomas had dreamed of and worked for since leaving his small town for college, the first in his family, years before.

On the second, he was at his desk, working on a high-profile IPO. He was the only associate on the deal—the kind of assignment reserved for top talent on the firm’s fast track to partnership. Dawn was breaking, and he had no memory of the past six hours, even though his e-mail and phone logs chronicled a busy all-nighter. A neurologist later ran some tests and warned him of the dangers of sleep deprivation. “I would go to bed at five, wake up at seven with palpitations, and go to work,” Thomas recalled. “I never stopped to think that it was wrong. It’s how it works, I told myself. Everyone does it.”

Thomas slowed down briefly after the doctor’s warning but soon came back full throttle. His talent and drive were intact, though somehow he’d lost his sense of purpose. He created an opportunity for the firm to do a $1.3 billion deal, and then surprised his bosses by suddenly quitting. His performance was strong and his prospects bright as ever, but as he put it when we spoke, he had fallen victim to a vicious cycle: “I did not want to step off the fast track, so I could not slow down.” Thomas felt trapped by his firm’s expectations, but his desire to prove deserving of his bosses’ endorsement kept him from challenging the culture or asking for support. He felt both overwhelmed and underutilized, and concluded that this firm was not the right place to realize his leadership ambitions. Continue reading →

Seven new onboarding strategies you’ll see this year

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iStock_000012204568LargeAccording to a study from Equifax, more than half of all employees who left their job in the past year did so within the first 12 months.

To counter this problem, more and more companies are turning their efforts toward retention, and that starts with onboarding. Recently, we asked members of Forbes Coaches Council to describe new onboarding strategies companies will be using this year. Here’s what they said.

1. Purposefully Introducing Candidates To Workplace Culture

New employees are often unfamiliar with the cultural nuances of a novel workplace environment. Companies now realize providing clear guidance on culture and how to maximize an employee’s success within it as a strategic priority. Also, because many “rules of the road” are often policy-based and not found in a handbook, discussions on culture will likely escalate to enhance the onboarding process. – Karima Mariama-Arthur, Esq., WordSmithRapport Continue reading →

Great Teams Are About Personalities, Not Just Skills

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by Dave Winsborough and Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic

At the start of 2016 Google announced that it had discovered the secret ingredients for the perfect team. After years of analyzing interviews and data from more than 100 teams, it found that the drivers of effective team performance are the group’s average level of emotional intelligence and a high degree of communication between members. Google’s recipe of being nice and joining in makes perfect sense (and is hardly counter intuitive).

Perhaps more surprising, Google’s research implies that the kinds of people in the team are not so relevant. While that may be true at Google, a company where people are preselected on the basis of their personality (or “Googliness”), this finding is inconsistent with the wider scientific evidence, which indicates quite clearly that individuals’ personalities play a significant role in determining team performance. In particular, personality affects:

  • What role you have within the team
  • How you interact with the rest of the team
  • Whether your values (core beliefs) align with the team’s

Continue reading →

How will leadership change in the cognitive era?

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by Chris Cancialosi, Ph.DChris-Cancialosi_avatar_1459267712-400x400

Technological innovation is continuing to accelerate on a hockey stick growth curve. Companies like IBM, Microsoft, Facebook, and Amazon are bringing cognitive computing capability to the masses.

And it’s only a matter of time until nearly every aspect of our work and personal lives are impacted.

These advances are still relatively new. Time will tell when and how they change things, but it will happen, and it will happen quickly. In a recent article, Steve Denning reminds us that a repeating pattern of massive transformation has occurred regularly over the last 250 years.

With massive change at our doorstep, now is the time to begin a collective discussion to help leaders navigate this new age. Continue reading →