Posted on

Why Rising Executives Sometimes Never Find a Real Mission

Why is it that some fast-rising corporate professionals get stalled on their path to the top position? Or, why do they fail to fulfill their potential when they assume the top role? The answer: sometimes, they neglect to revoke unproductive ways of being that operate behind the scenes. 

There’s an invisible transition that should occur during an executive’s ascent to their ultimate destination:  the big corner office. They work hard – that’s not in question. However, by mistake, they rely on two weak “skills” for too long.

Weak Skill #1. Being Liked
Most of us want to be managed by people we like. Those who are seeking to be promoted quickly learn that being a nice person who gets along with others is a key skill. 

Unfortunately, managing effectively is not the same as running in an election. In the better companies, measurable results are more important than popularity. However, when metrics are hard to come by, likeable people wind up being promoted. It’s only human. In the absence of concrete data “how he/she makes me feel” becomes decisive.

Of course, this can end in disaster. A top executive ends up making decisions that keep his/her likability intact, but are in fact poorly made. By sacrificing results for this lower-level achievement, they put their organization at risk.

Weak Skill #2. Looking Good

The other invisible monster that drives the behavior of would-be executives is that of looking good. It starts in small ways, with the accumulation of tangible goods (house, car, etc.) and the refinement of one’s physical appearance.

Unfortunately, looking good rarely stops there. Eventually, one’s work, team, relationships and other items are added as further objects to defend by the individual’s ego. 

The reason this monster grows so fast is that the real driver behind this skill is a fear of looking bad, or rejection. Executives who are wedded to looking good actively try to control anything or anyone who might be associated with their reputation. They go to great lengths to protect their image, even throwing others under the bus. For example, some managers, driven by this fear, will publicly blow up at an innocent mistake made by a subordinate.

On the flip side, these powerful drivers of individual accomplishment help get individuals noticed by those above them in organizational hierarchies. A few will, in fact, boast they are the true secrets of their “success.”

However, enlightened companies know better. In fact, they quietly track a future executive’s development up the ranks, noticing if or when they made the transition away from these two weak skills. If progress seems slow, they intervene and offer training or coaching, hoping to produce a transformation. Their intent is to develop the following two positive traits.

Strong Trait #1 – Mission and Vision

These smart companies wish to promote employees who care about a wide community of stakeholders. They want to see them grapple to fulfill the combined needs of fellow staff members, stockholders, residents of surrounding neighborhoods, customers, suppliers, regulators, and more. Balancing the requirements of all these groups isn’t easy and future CEO’s should begin to struggle with the dilemma long before being promoted. By the time they are elevated, it’s too late.


Strong Trait #2 – Self-Reflection

Few managers realize that the higher they rise in the company, the less quality feedback they will receive. They may get a greater volume of complaints, but the number of people who understand the help they require to be a top executive and are willing to speak up dwindles sharply. As such, they must develop an ability to coach themselves.

This trait is not a matter of second-guessing. Instead, it has to do with a capacity to accept oneself as a work-in-progress. For example, I have met immature executives who would deny that they ever indulge in being liked and looking good. As they read and comprehend these two weak skills, their mind instantly searches for examples which demonstrate where they have transcended both behaviors.

Unfortunately, this rush to exonerate oneself is actual evidence of the ego in action.

The best executives do the opposite, willingly sharing examples of their struggles to overcome being liked and looking good. They realize that the price of leadership is constant vigilance. These two unwanted ways of being are always there, just waiting to cause trouble in new, hard-to-detect forms.

As a result, they engage in self-coaching and self-reflection with a frequency and honesty that can shock others. But it’s not an idle pastime. They willingly sacrifice their ego’s machinations, using this approach as their main method of staying true to their mission: the accomplishment of a lofty vision which serves all related stakeholders.

http://jamaica-gleaner.com/article/business/20200112/francis-wade-mission-failure

Posted on

On Ways to Persuade Others to Act

How do you get groups of people to take non-sales related actions? Is it a matter of using a catchy graphic or video to tell them what to do? Or interrupting them while they are doing something else? Or applying pressure with multiple reminders?

Sales and marketing professionals aren’t confused: persuasive messaging is required to sell products and services. However, if you aren’t a salesperson and you need to persuade a group of individuals to take a certain action, what skills should you employ?

Perhaps you even hate to use the word “sales” in reference to what you are trying to accomplish. But the task remains daunting: you must still say or write stuff that causes people to act. Whether they are employees, peers, board members, customers, the public or another stakeholder, where do you start?

In my column of November 17, 2019, I offered a solution. Begin by analyzing the “Unmet Needs” of individuals in the target group you are trying to influence. When their needs aren’t being met, people’s typical response is to co-opt a low-quality substitute into playing a “better-than-nothing” role. 

However, knowing these needs is just the beginning. The fact is, we live in a world of distracting messages and influences. Whether cash payments are involved or not, you must compete against these distractions for your subject’s time. Even your free offerings need to displace Facebook, Netflix and the news in order to be effective, going up against the millions those entities spend to get attention.

If you are willing to win the battle, I suggest a four-step framework from Michel Fortin, the experienced copywriter. For example, let’s assume that you are trying to arrange a Neighborhood Watch meeting for your community.

Step 1 – Enumerate the Features
These are elements that make your event attractive. They are factual: visible to the naked eye, incontrovertible and distinct. Make a list of these features such as: “The meeting is scheduled for Sunday afternoon at 4pm” or “The nice policeman who drops in occasionally will be there.”

Step 2 – Detail the Advantages
Each of the features you listed can do something that makes your product special. In other words, it provides an advantage. To craft them quickly, simply add “so that” to the end of each feature, and then complete the sentence. For example, “We have scheduled the meeting for Sunday afternoon so that everyone can attend.”

Step 3 – Compile the Motives of Your Prospects
These are the deep psychological drivers, motivations inherent in your targets’ minds. As such, they lie dormant even before the prospect is aware of your solution. You may find these within the Unmet Needs, and they should help you understand why they will take action.

For example, your targets may have a “Hassle-Free” motive for the meeting. Therefore, avoiding the busier days of the week should help.

Continue mapping motives to advantages until the list has been exhausted.

Step 4 – Craft Benefits
The final and most important step is to develop benefit statements you can use in your verbal, written or visual messages. These are practical outcomes which occur when features, advantages and motives are combined to produce a meaningful result. I use the phrase “which means” as a prompt.

For example, “The meeting is on Sunday so that everyone can attend, which means that we can finally come together to plan detailed strategies to protect each and every unit from the thieves living across the gully.”

In benefit statements, I often describe what will happen if the action I want fails to be realised. In the example above, I’m trying to imply that those neighbors who miss the meeting are putting their homes at risk.

When these statements are stacked together, the end-product can be quite persuasive. It should be. After all, it began with your prospect’s Unmet Needs.

However, many individuals don’t want to exert the time and effort to do such rigorous thinking. “De people dem fi know dem need fi come a di meeting” is used as a reason to avoid the hard pre-work needed to craft convincing statements. In the minds of those who are already persuaded, all that’s necessary is a nice, simple flyer.

Unfortunately, most flyers include little more than a list of features; hardly enough to produce the desired result. In a world of relentless demands on our time punctuated by rude surprises, that approach won’t do.  Don’t arrogantly assume your targets should know better and complain when they refuse to comply. Instead, plant the seeds of your success from the start by doing the in-depth work required to convert unmet needs into action. 

Posted on

Why Leaders Don’t Play it Safe

What allows a few corporate leaders to take risks so effortlessly? And why are so many of them over-cautious, trapped in behaviors that leave staff uninspired and disengaged? These tough questions resist one-size-fits-all answers but much can be learned from the leadership of Dr. Martin Luther King.

Few realize that he died with a disapproval rating of 75%, higher than any leader in modern times. At the time, many believed that his approach was not only wrong, but unnecessary. As a result, according to those close to him, he became increasingly disillusioned inside, but to outsiders, he just kept moving. He continued to put himself at physical risk, and today Americans revere him with a 90%+ approval rating.

However, King’s example isn’t only for CEO’s and Managing Directors. In fact, anyone at  who who wants to make a difference must face similar challenges, regardless of their level. Here are two ways to remain motivated as a change agent in your company.

Fleeing Familiarity and Safety

Anyone who is inspired with the ability to see a shiny new vision is cursed by their good fortune. Why? Inspirational feelings soon wear off, revealing an opposing force which feeds on fear and pulls them backwards. It represents the familiar parts of their lives, the routines to which they have become accustomed, the comforts they have embraced. These were all-important right up until the moment when that new vision disrupted everything.

King was no different. He was living a comfortable, middle-class life as a pastor of a church and a father of young children when he was recruited as a spokesman for the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955. He was 26-years old.

Over the objections of others, he steadily abandoned the path other ministers in his circles had followed. This brought him into a sustained, dangerous confrontation with enemies intent on destroying his work and personhood.

However, at the very beginning he may not have perceived the upcoming threat to his life. Like many of us, it was probably more about giving up everyday middle-class certainty for a vision of the unknown.

In fact, a week before he was caught unawares by a nomination to lead the Montgomery Improvement Association he turned down an opportunity to head up the local NAACP chapter. He was too busy, he explained, taking care of this church to serve in a community position.

Thankfully, he accepted the new role in spite of the time pressure.

As a corporate change agent, you may know what it’s like to fail when the moment to step up to lead arrives at your doorstep, dressed in unfamiliar garb. Like Lot’s wife, you glance wistfully back at the fruits of your hard work, afraid to lose them. It pays to look ahead. Here’s why.

Being Willing to Be in Harm’s Way

As a first-time manager you may have been shocked to discover that the easy life you imagined after being promoted doesn’t exist. Now, you find yourself in harm’s way: the subject of criticism from employees below and executives above.

But it’s just the beginning. With every promotion it only gets worse: the risk increases, takes on new forms and arises in ways you never thought possible.

Seasoned executives will tell you that their perks pale in comparison to sleepless nights, undeserved attacks and targeted gossip that comes from any move into the limelight. They also share that leadership is about accepting such uncertainty, while consciously putting oneself in harm’s way. In other words, it’s a bad idea for the employee who has learned how to avoid risks at all costs.

Even King admitted that if he had been given time to think about becoming the leader of the new organization, he would have declined. It was a decision made in response to the moment.

Yet, we only understand it as a momentous decision in hindsight. In that critical occasion, the choice before him was similar to the ones you face each day. Like every other chance to lead, it eventually passes and life goes on, but the difference that you could have made is lost; sometimes forever.

Take this example and multiply it a few hundred time to get an idea of why change in your firm takes so long to bring about. Many company cultures are built on staff members clinging to familiar gains while avoiding risks at all costs. People learn to avoid the key moments when they could step up to lead.

As an agent of change, don’t run: look for these rare opportunities. Prepare yourself to be in harm’s way. It’s not about being reckless, just understand the risk and accept it as part of the cost of leadership. The history of leaders like Dr. King shows us that your decisive action in these key moments makes all the difference.

http://jamaica-gleaner.com/article/business/20190210/francis-wade-effective-leaders-never-play-it-safe

Posted on

Key Strategic Skills Managers Must Master to Become Executives

Why do managers sometimes flounder when they become executives? One reason: their new role requires them to create a corporate strategy. It’s a task for which they have never been trained.

The tale has often been told of the just-promoted manager who, everyone soon discovers, was elevated based only on his technical skills.  As the rubber hits the road, it becomes clear that he is ill-prepared.

Another similar problem occurs when a manager is appointed to the executive ranks. All of a sudden, she finds herself sitting in a strategic planning retreat, failing to contribute. In the moment, she realizes that her well-honed ability to produce short-term results are of little value.

Now, she’s on her own as she struggles to uncover what’s lacking. If your firm recently promoted you to the highest level of leadership, here are three areas you must develop to be effective in creating strategy.

1. Understanding the current environment

Whereas managers are encouraged to stay in their lane, put their heads down and ignore parts of the company that don’t apply to them, that advice won’t work for you. In this new position, you need to comprehend the entire company’s operations all at once.

This means far more than being able to fill out the names in an organization chart. Now, you must see the enterprise as a complex system in which only some of the cause-and-effect relationships are explicitly defined. To gain this level of knowledge, you should study the functions you know little or nothing about, mastering jargon that’s unfamiliar along the way. Also, you should be able to explain how the company works in layman’s language to anyone who cares to listen.

At the start of a planning retreat, you’ll use this skill to bring your team to a joint understanding of the current state of the business. This includes all external trends which may impact the organization, ranging from disruptive technology, competitive threats, to changes in the economy. Your far-reaching, expert contribution is required to complete the exercise.

2. Creating a Long-Term Target Year

Most companies promote managers based on their ability to produce short-term results through teams of direct reports. However, when they are faced with the challenge to create a corporate plan that’s 20-30 years out, they flounder.

As a manager, you knew how to set and accomplish goals you could control. By contrast, executives marshal forces they don’t control in order to hit long-term objectives. The longer the timeframe, the more skill required.

The benefits of such plans are well-established in management practice and theory. It’s not hard to realize that such efforts are the only way to safeguard your firm’s future.

But that’s of little help when you must complete such a task for the first time. Some newcomers to this process even rebel, complaining: “I can’t think that far ahead.”

Don’t be like them. Long before your promotion is finalized, look for (and create) practical learning opportunities to develop long-term plans. This will prepare you for the moment when your role as an executive requires you to craft visionary strategies.

3. Envisioning Details

Most lower level employees are satisfied by overarching vision statements which use vague language. They assume that leaders are effectively managing the next steps.

In your new position, you should go much further.

Now, you must describe a detailed, numbers-based vision of what will happen in the long-term target year. In other words, your team develops a picture of the future painted in concrete metrics such as revenue, EBITDA, headcount and market share.

Furthermore, to ensure that these figures are not just being made up, they need to be “back-casted” to connect with today’s results. While many are familiar with the idea from their days studying for an MBA, doing the task in a real group setting is quite a challenge. Once again, it’s best to practice this ability in advance.

Developing these three skills in concert prevents leaders from running off in different directions, investing time and effort in individual plans. The fact is, your organization is at risk if it doesn’t create a strategy which involves all the relevant points of view. If your team is poorly trained, expect it to conduct planning which is weak, leaving your company vulnerable.

Another trap is to dress up “More of the Same Stuff, But Just a Little Different” as a strategic plan. This is a cop-out—a way to avoid making hard choices based on the most recent information.

Don’t make this mistake. These skills are trainable even though they may be rare. Invest in them early in a manager’s career so they can be practiced long before their promotion occurs. It will save your company from producing weak strategies that ultimately endanger its future. 

http://jamaica-gleaner.com/article/business/20181118/francis-wade-key-skills-managers-need-become-executives