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Tip of the Spear Ventures

A Family Office that behaves like Venture Capital | Private Equity | Business Consulting

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2013 Learning and Leadership Development Conference from HCI

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The Human Capital Institute (HCI), a global non-profit institution for strategic talent management, recently shared details of its upcoming 2013 Learning and Leadership Development Conference. Held November 18-20, 2013 in Boston, the conference will focus this year on three principles critical to organizational success:

  1. Creating Transformative Leaders
  2. Building a Continuous Culture of Learning, and
  3. Tools and Skills Leadership Needs to Stay Relevant

According to a report from Deloitte, 54 percent of business leaders cite gaps in their leadership pipelines as one of their three most critical obstacles to growth. In addition, executive confidence in middle managers continues to deteriorate each year (from 66 percent in 2010 to 49 percent in 2012). While many think this is due to a weaker selection in current and potential talent, a more likely reason is criteria used for leadership selection and in-house leadership development.

HCIs Learning and Leadership Development Conference is designed to address the challenges of traditional leadership development programs and training to give attendees the insight needed to create a deeper, more transformative experience that produces a new type of leadership. As the business environment continues to evolve rapidly, leaders need to acquire a new set of skills and competencies, including social and mobile expertise, internal process improvement and the ability to embrace new decision-making methodologies such as big data.

Leadership Challenge: Change Management Success Factors

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We see study after study talking about what are those magical three elements that are going to magically make your leadership challenge of change initiatives successful.  What are those top three things that could be considered Change Management Success Factors? In our minds, they are:

  1. Leaders – Leaders sponsor and champion the change effort. Leaders are behind change management publicly.  Leaders are behind the change initiative in their communications, in their actions and in their behaviors. Leaders are out in front championing the change.
  2. Vision – A clear and compelling vision and case for change, and a strong communication plan in place behind that change management vision. People anymore are not like sheep going off to do their job.  People today are interested in knowing that what they do is in service of the greater good of the company. That means that in any change management initiative, a leader is going to have to stand up and have a clear and compelling case for who are we, what are we about, and why are we doing this.
  3. Engagement – So if you have leaders standing up and saying “This is why we’re doing this… This is what we’re doing… This is how you can be a part of this journey” this will invite people to come and be a part of the change.

That engagement becomes the platform, along with leadership alignment and the clear case for change that really becomes the platform for making change stick at the end of the day. When it’s all said and done, change that sticks and achieves desired results is what you should be after (No magic there, right?)

The Leadership Challenge: Conquering Alibis

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John was a C-suite leader that had been recommended to us by his board of directors for a coaching engagement (Centered Executive Coaching: Leader Centered Coaching program) and participate in The Leadership Challenge development program.  The company he belonged to was growing at a +25% annual growth rate, but John’s area of the company was coming in short (<10%).  While John had many of the same talented people in his department (The organization had a cross-functional organization chart, allowing them to share team members based on assignment), leadership was looking for improvement out of John.

In our first initial interview, where we determine alignment of the coaching initiative as well as outline future steps, John was shall we say a little “defensive” of his performance thus far for the year. In fact, John was downright full of excuses when it came to his performance.  It appeared as though it was everyone but John’s fault for the department’s lack of performance.

With this lack of performance in mind, and John’s lack to accept responsibility, we provided him with an exercise on alibis. Here is a list of the most commonly used alibis we presented to him. Our instructions were for him to read the list, and examine himself carefully for each item and determine how many of these alibis were his own property (ownership):

  • IF I didn’t have a wife and family…
  • IF I had enough “pull”…
  • IF I had money…
  • IF I had a good education…
  • IF I could get a job…
  • IF I had good health…
  • IF I only had time…
  • IF times were better…
  • IF other people understood me…
  • IF Conditions around me were only different…
  • IF I could live my life over again…
  • IF I did not fear what “they” would say…
  • IF I had been given a chance…
  • IF I now had a chance…
  • IF other people didn’t “have it in for me”…
  • IF nothing happens to stop me…
  • IF I were only younger…
  • IF I could only do what I want…
  • IF I had been born rich…
  • IF I could meet “the right people”…
  • IF I had the talent that some people have…
  • IF I dared assert myself…
  • IF I only had embraced past opportunities…
  • IF people didn’t get on my nerves…
  • IF I didn’t have to keep house and look after the children…
  • IF I could save some money…
  • IF the boss only appreciated me…
  • IF I only had somebody to help me…
  • IF my family understood me…
  • IF I lived in a big city…
  • IF I could just get started…
  • IF I were only free…
  • IF I had the personality of some people…
  • IF I were not so fat…
  • IF my talents were known…
  • IF I could just get a “break”…
  • IF I could only get out of debt…
  • IF I hadn’t failed…
  • IF I only knew how…
  • IF everybody didn’t oppose me…
  • IF I didn’t have so many worries…
  • IF I could marry the right person…
  • IF people weren’t so dumb…
  • IF my family were not so extravagant…
  • IF I were sure of myself…
  • IF luck were not against me…
  • IF I had not been born under the wrong star…
  • If it were not true that “what is to be will be”…
  • IF I did not have to work so hard…
  • IF I hadn’t lost my money…
  • IF I lived in a different neighborhood…
  • IF I didn’t have a “past”…
  • IF I only had a business of my own…
  • IF other people would only listen to me…
  • IF *** and this is the greatest of them all ***

If this list looks familiar to you, you may have seen a version of it in the classic “Think and Grow Rich” by Napoleon Hill.  The list is tucked away in the back of the book, in a section that is must reading for any leader titled “How to Outwit the Six Ghosts of Fear.”

John came away from the exercise realizing that while many of his alibis were professional in nature, those that were truly holding him back were his personal ones.  A modification therein allowed him to move closer to established goals.

What’s the Point? Analyze your weaknesses and overcome them, instead of building alibis to cover them.

Why You Need an Executive Coach

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Col. Jessep: You want answers?

Kaffee: I think I’m entitled to.

Col. Jessep: You want answers?

Kaffee: I want the truth!

Col. Jessep: You can’t handle the truth!

This scene from A Few Good Men staring the iconic Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson represents why you need an executive coach to effectively run your business.  As a leader, we’ve seen time and again a search for answers.  A search that often times comes about when problems arise, or a change is needed.  Unfortunately, the truth is often times difficult to find.  It’s not that truth is elusive; it’s just that no one on your leadership team wants to tell you!

We recently conducted a poll of the executive coaches within our network on the topic of telling the truth. Roughly two-thirds of the coaches responding reported that their leadership engagements involved being a trusted advisor able to provide much needed objectivity to the C-Suite.

Trust is the primary reason that executives approach an executive coach.  Think of it as acting as a sounding board.  Leaders typically are under the false impression that there already exist sounding boards within the organization that they run and lead.  However, it’s this falsity that brings on strong negative reactions from leaders.

The common perception that friends and sounding boards exist can easily be debunked when you consider that as a leader, you have the power and authority to hire, reward, and fire.

May CEOs that we work with would agree with the statement; “It’s lonely at the top.”  While the view can be fantastic (think executive pay packages and perks), they also know that having the ability to open/close facilities, make difficult succession decisions, and deciding which business pursuits to attempt has tremendous impact on the lives of others.

With such territory, comes much stress… Enter the executive coach. The role of the executive coach is to enable the leader to make their best decisions, get their best results, and become the best leader possible (No short order).  In order to do so, the executive coach delivers the truth that the leader is missing;  The truth about what is happening currently.   The truth about what impact their future vision will have.  The truth about what the executive doesn’t want to hear, but must hear in order to move forward successfully.

You CAN handle the truth (You just don’t like it!)

As the leader of the organization, you must enable yourself to receive the truth.  That is not easy.  No leader likes to receive push-back, especially when we are working so hard to advance the organization in the right direction. But it is exactly this message, that of truth, that needs to be heard.

We worked with one leader that used to make all of the decisions himself all the time.  He had no sounding board to bounce ideas off of, nor would he accept one.  This worked well, until the economy turned and the water table surrounding him/his business lowered revealing the many tree stumps and boulders.  It would take careful navigation moving forward to not only keep his company afloat, but his role as the CEO.  He came to us with the goal of getting the proper direction, one that he knew could not be attained from his staff.  In the end, we provided the proper navigation and through his strategic execution moved the organization forward successfully with him at the helm.

Will you/your organization have such a happy ending?

What’s the Point: Leaders need objective/unbiased perspective in order to successfully lead.  Perspective provided by executive coaching leads to better decisions, better results, and better leadership.

Are Your Leadership Beliefs Limiting Your Success?

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We had an executive coaching conversation with a client recently.  The leader in the conversation was a highly successful 30-something that grew his Inc 500 organization from scratch, but was now in position to realize that his leadership beliefs were limiting growth.  He realized the following two business aspects were present now that he achieved lift-off for his organization:

  1.  PLATEAU – The organization wasn’t a startup anymore. He had successfully grown from thought/ideation, creation, implementation, launch pad to lift off, but now the organization had achieved a plateau.
  2. POTENTIAL – The organization (or a leader therein) had achieved growth, but he realized that they’d only achieved Point A results (When Point B is where they should be).

We asked several questions to him, with the majority revolving around “How will you push through that plateau and/or achieve full potential?”  That’s why we created Tip of the Spear’s Centered Executive Coaching programs for leaders just like him to solve exactly those challenges.

In our experience as Marshall Goldsmith Stakeholder Centered Coaches we’ve seen leaders behave in dramatically different ways, and several facets of leadership belief modification that have made Centered Executive Coaching so impactful for leaders and their organizations.

It’s a paradox for most leaders… What made them successful might be limiting them from achieving their full future potential. As Marshall Goldsmith said, “What got you here won’t get you there!” At the heart of this is a “core” leadership belief system which accounts for much of their success:

  • I am successful
  • I choose to succeed
  • I will succeed

At risk is something akin to implementing a change initiative… You might get worse before you get better! Most leaders are not willing to risk getting worse, and therefore continue to go to the well they know.

What’s the Point? The next time you’re not pushing through those plateaus, or achieving full potential your beliefs just might be limiting your success. How you modify those beliefs will spell the difference between future success and failure.

If you’d like to learn more about our Centered Executive Coaching programs, and how they can help you/your organization achieve results in less time contact us.