On March 21st, I had the opportunity to spend a day with the Governor of Vermont, Peter Shumlin. (I gave a quick overview and observation from this visit in an earlier post.) During the course of my day in Montpelier, I asked a few questions about leadership, about the connections between public service and business, and about his learnings in his first year as Governor. You can read the full text of that interview here.
By Michael Hornsby
Last week I had the opportunity to spend my Wednesday with Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin, a long-time friend who had invited me to tag along for “a day in the life of the state’s chief executive.” In the course of our time together, I had an opportunity to ask the Governor some questions about his leadership style, lessons learned, and role models – and I will post the full transcript soon. But I have a couple of immediate impressions that really struck me.
Brimstone Senior Partner Allen Sockwell recently published an excellent white paper that summarizes the “Top Ten Leadership Blind Spots” he’s encountered in his years advising senior executives. His observations (and recommendations) cover several areas that are critical to leadership effectiveness: communication; hiring, developing and (when necessary) firing people; and enhancing team performance. Here’s a rundown of the key areas that Sockwell argues “create significant risk to both personal and organizational success”:
by Mike Krivan
I spent two days last month observing the workshop of a global trade association that is a long-time client and, more recently, a strategic partner. Leaders of nine project teams shared their findings and recommendations with the organization’s entire Executive Committee, receiving in return feedback on how to improve the project and speed implementation. The workshop marked the conclusion of the fifth iteration of this annual leadership development program: as the program matured, the client, like any good learning organization, had taken on full responsibility for refining and delivering the program for its people. Brimstone was effectively out of the picture. And while much of the process looked identical to the one we helped them to establish in 2007, there were aspects of the approach that were clearly innovations driven by past years’ experience and organizational culture.
In a recent Corner Office interview, Harlem Children’s Zone President and CEO Geoffrey Canada reflects on his early (and fruitless) struggle to persuade change-resisters to change:
“Convincing people to give your way a try will work if you neutralize — and sometimes you have to cauterize — the ones who really are against change. They’re the kind of person who, if you tell them it’s raining outside, they’ll fight you tooth and nail. You take them outside in the rain, and they’ll say, ‘But it wasn’t raining five seconds ago.’
“I spent a year trying to convince those people to change and give me a chance. Then I realized that was a wasted year. I’d have been much better just to simply say O.K., thank you, difference of opinion. Go do something else with your life. Let me work with this group of folks and move forward.”
Canada’s realization is one that many of our clients, especially those pursuing major transformations, eventually come to: Not everyone is going to make the journey with you.
by Bob Marcus
In the time crunch and pressure that surrounds most business leaders these days, it’s easy to understand why taking the time to publicly praise great performance gets put to the bottom of the to-do list. But in skipping over that activity, leaders miss out on one of the great levers of human nature.
I was reminded of this point (oddly enough) by “The Upside of a Demotion from Jack Welch,” a FINS interview with GE Chief Technology Officer Mark Little. One passage in particular caught my eye:
The arrival of the New Year marked the departure of Sam Palmisano from the top job at IBM. Not surprisingly, the man who ran the technology giant for the last decade, and who was CEO on the day it celebrated its 100th birthday and crossed the $100B revenue line, has been the subject of many profiles and paeans in the news media of late. Several publications (see here and here) honored Palmisano with a “Top Leader” designation; others highlighted specific aspects of his leadership, such as his four-question guiding framework (which, we have to say, seems a bit elementary for the maker of Watson, the super-computer). One writer posited that during Palmisano’s tenure, which saw the company exit the PC business and make more than 100 acquisitions in the services and software space, “IBM has been a textbook case of how to drive change in a big company.”
With that title in mind, we wanted to highlight a few elements of Palmisano’s approach to transformation that merit attention and praise:
A few weeks ago, the Wall Street Journal reported on the growing popularity of sharing 360-degree feedback; now they’ve published an article about performance reviews trending in the other direction – at least that’s what the headline (“Performance Reviews Lose Steam”) suggests. In support of this thesis, author Rachel Emma Silverman highlights a Corporate Executive Board study that shows about 1% of companies are eliminating the review. One percent. In other words, don’t hold your breath waiting for an email from HR releasing you from your performance review responsibilities.
(Source: The Wall Street Journal)
In “Transparency Pays Off In 360-Degree Reviews,” the Wall Street Journal’s Joann Lublin reports on the increasingly common practice among businesspeople of sharing 360-degree feedback results with fellow staffers. Examples of this trend include executives who published their results company-wide on an internal website, an HR leader who shared some of his scores with 200 people on his first day with a new company, and a business unit president who communicated some of her shortcomings to her direct reports. And while these “case studies” yielded positive outcomes – heightened loyalty, swifter integration into a new organization, even a promotion – Lublin also is careful to point out the possible downsides to sharing – namely, loss of confidence among subordinates and power plays aimed at exploiting “revealed” weaknesses.
(Source: The Wall Street Journal)
Amy Schulman, Executive Vice President, General Counsel, and President of Nutrition at Pfizer, in this week’s Corner Office interview
