Dec
24
Best practice leadership development
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Skip Reardon of Be Excellent provided a pointer to a study by the Hay Group, in partnership with Chief Executive, conducted a second year long study to identify the top companies that develop leaders systematically in ways that others acknowledge as productive of top talent. The study, considered 1,279 companies with at least $8 billion in annual revenues from around the world, focused on what top performers did differently with high potential future leaders.
Top 20 Companies for Leaders
| 2006 | 2005 |
| 1. General Electric | 1. Procter & Gamble |
| 2. Procter & Gamble | 2. PepsiCo |
| 3. PepsiCo | 3. IBM |
| 4. Citigroup | 4. General Electric |
| 5. Johnson & Johnson | 5. Johnson & Johnson |
| 6. HSBC Holdings | 6. Dell |
| 7. BASF | 7. Microsoft |
| 8. Home Depot | 8. Home Depot |
| 9. IBM | 9. JPMorgan |
| 10. Coca-Cola | 10. Motorola |
| 11. Dell | 11.Pfizer |
| 12. Microsoft | 12. FedEx |
| 13. Novartis | 13. BASF |
| 14. Verizon | 14. Verizon |
| 15. Nestle | 15.BAE Systems |
| 16. Lockheed Martin | 16. Johnson Controls |
| 17. GlaxoSmithKline | 17. Siemens |
| 18. Amgen | 18. BP |
| 19. Hewlett-Packard | 19. L’Oreal |
| 20. BAE Systems | 20. Colgate-Palmolive |
The study identified the following leadership development best practices…
Leadership Development Best Practices
| 2006 Best Practices | 2005 Best Practices |
| 1. Having leaders at all levels who focus on creating a work climate that motivates employees to perform at their best. | 1. Having leaders at all levels who focus on creating a work climate that motivates employees to perform at their best. |
| 2. Ensuring that the company and its senior management make leadership development a top priority. | 2. Ensuring that the company and its senior management make leadership development a top priority. |
| 3. Providing training and coaching to help intact leadership teams, as well as the individual leaders, work together more effectively. | 3. Providing training and coaching to help intact leadership teams, as well as the individual leaders, work together more effectively. |
| 4. Rotational job assignments for high potentials. | 4. Providing job-shadowing opportunities for managers in mid-career. |
| 5. External leadership development programs for mid-level managers. | 5. Ensuring that high potentials receive objective 360-degree assessments and feedback on their leadership ability early on. |
| 6. Web-based, self-study leadership modules for mid-level managers. | 6. Ensuring that mid-level managers get enough time to take part in leadership development activities early in their careers. |
| 7. Executive MBA programs for mid-level managers. |
The 2006 survey found that the top 20 companies for leadership manage high potential employees with a greater sense of urgency and priority. They are more likely to have a formal process for identifying high potentials and a separate career track with specific programs to accelerate their development. In addition, the top 20 are more likely than other firms to include marketing as a function to which they attract high potentials. This might be due to the fact that the top 20 have a high number of market- focused businesses with leaders who value that background. Also, the top 20 are more likely to promote from within-not just for mid-level and senior managers-but for the CEO as well.
Practices That Waste Resources and Don’t Get Results
Based on the 2006 data, the practices that are least likely to create more of the right kind of leaders are as follows:
- Outdoor activity-based programs at all levels of management
- Paper-based self-study leadership modules at all levels of management
- Job-shadowing for senior managers
- Web-based self-study for senior managers and high potentials
- Executive MBAs for senior managers
An interesting piece of research, I was surprised to see that “Executive MBAs for senior managers” as a waste of resources! The best organisations institutionalise leadership development ans continually strive to learn the most effective ways of developing leaders.
Technorati Tags: Leadership, Management, Business, Practice, Research, Strategy, Development, Best Practice, HR
Dec
24
South African Executives are Very Well Paid
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I came across the interesting artilce on MoneyWeb, SA executives really do coin it the article point out that:
Measured by after tax purchasing power, SA executives are among the best paid in the world.
The graph, prepared by PE Corporate Services, compares executive pay in seven OECD countries and three in Africa with that in SA. Only in the United States are executive pay packages more generous in terms of what one can buy after tax.
Americans are in a league of their own, bringing more 20% more than SA’s first team.
The graph compares average gross remuneration in each country after deduction of tax and social security costs and essential living costs, such as food, transport and schooling. The net disposable income left is the discretionary element of an executive’s package for saving or spent on luxuries, travel, etc.
The graph suggests that living standards of SA executives, by implication, are double those of their peers in the UK and the Netherlands and a good deal better than those even in a rich country like Germany. SA executives make their Australian counterparts look poor.
It’s seems that leadership is in demand in South Africa!
Technorati Tags: Leadership, Management, Business
Dec
24
The 800-CEO-READ Blog posted this list of Toronto’s Globe and Mail top ten business books:
- Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths And Total Nonsense: Profiting From Evidence-Based Management by Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton
- Managing the Dynamics of Change: The Fastest Path to Creating an Engaged and Productive Workplace by Jerald Jellison
- The Ultimate Question: Driving Good Profits and True Growth by Fred Reichheld
- Questions of Character: Illuminating the Heart of Leadership Through Literature by Joesph Badaracco
- Leading Leaders: How to Manage Smart, Talented, Rich, And Powerful People by Jeswald Salacuse
- Get Them On Your Side by Samuel Bacharach
- Working With You is Killing Me: Freeing Yourself from Emotional Traps at Work by Katherine Crowley and Kathi Elster
- Questions That Sell: The Powerful Process for Discovering What Your Customer Really Wants by Paul Sherry
- A Leader’s Legacy by Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner
- The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger by Marc Levinson
Technorati Tags: Leadership, Management, Business, Book, Books
Dec
24
Groups perform better than the best individual at solving complex problems
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Organisations are increasingly dependent on teams to solve the complex problems challenging businesses today. A recent study shows that their faith in teamwork to solve complex business problems is the best approach.
In this study 760 students from the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign solved two letters-to-numbers coding problems as individuals or as groups of two, three, four and five people. Previous research has shown that groups perform better than the average individual on a wide range of problems. However, this study tested the relationship between group size and performance as compared to that of an equivalent number of individuals by comparing the number of trials to solutions and answers given for complex problems. The groups of three, four, and five performed better than the best of an equivalent number of individuals on the letters-to-numbers problems.
The summary of the research findings states that:
Groups of size three, four, and five performed better than the best of an equivalent number of individuals, but groups of size two performed at the level of the best of two individuals. Groups of size three, four, and five performed better than groups of size two but did not differ from each other. These results suggest that groups of size three are necessary and sufficient to perform better than the best of an equivalent number of individuals on intellective problems.
Article: “Groups Perform Better Than the Best Individuals on Letters-to-Numbers Problems: Effects of Group Size”, Patrick Laughlin, Erin Hatch, Jonathan Silver, and Lee Boh, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign; Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 90, No. 4. The full of the article is available from the APA Public Affairs Office here.
Technorati Tags: Leadership, Management, Business, Team, Teamwork, Research, Psychology, Groups
Dec
24
A new wiki called WikiSummaries.org provides free summaries of books, plays and other written documents, that anyone can edit! I had a look around and there are already some interesting summaries on the site, such as:
- Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
- Rich Dad, Poor Dad
- Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
- Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t
Technorati Tags: Leadership, Management, Business, Book, Summary, Wiki, Books
Dec
17
Make Christmas Matter
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A study on The World Distribution of Household Wealth by the World Institute for Development Economics Research of the United Nations University (UNU-WIDER) was released on the 5th of December 2006. For the purposes of the research wealth was defined as:
“We use the term in its long-established sense of net worth: the value of physical and financial assets less debts. In this respect, wealth represents the ownership of capital. Although capital is only one part of personal resources, it is widely believed to have a disproportionate impact on household well-being and economic success, and more broadly on economic development
and growth.”
The research highlights include:
- The richest 2% of adults in the world own more than half of global household wealth.
- The richest 1% of adults alone owned 40% of global assets in the year 2000, and that the richest 10% of adults accounted for 85% of the world total. In contrast, the bottom half of the world adult population owned barely 1% of global wealth.
- The research finds that assets of $2,200 per adult placed a household in the top half of the world wealth distribution in the year 2000. To be among the richest 10% of adults in the world required $61,000 in assets, and more than $500,000 was needed to belong to the richest 1%, a group which - with 37 million members worldwide - is far from an exclusive club.
- Wealth is heavily concentrated in North America, Europe, and high income Asia-Pacific countries. People in these countries collectively hold almost 90% of total world wealth.
- The study finds wealth to be more unequally distributed than income across countries. High income countries tend to have a bigger share of world wealth than of world GDP. The reverse is true of middle- and low-income nations. However, there are exceptions to this rule, for example the Nordic region and transition countries like the Czech Republic and Poland.
- A small number of countries account for most of the wealthiest 10% in the world. One quarter are Americans and another 20% are Japanese. ‘The USA and Japan stand out because they have large populations and high average wealth.’
Another interesting aspect of the research for me was exploration of the “super rich“, the number of US$ based millionaires and billionaires in the world. The research found that the “relationship in the range from $250,000 to $5 million appears stable and remarkably well approximated by a Pareto distribution….. Fitting a Pareto distribution in this range and extrapolating to the highest echelons of the wealth distribution, yielded the following predictions for the number of high wealth holders and the super rich”
| Wealth ($) | >Number above |
| 1 billion | 499 |
| 100 million | 15 010 |
| 10 million | 451 809 |
| 1 million | 13 568 229 |
Explaining the above table the report states that, Thus extrapolating our upper tail leads us to predict 499 dollar billionaires in the year 2000. The number estimated by Forbes magazine for the year 2000 was 492.
Reflecting on this research, it’s clear that you and I are probably on of the 10% richest people in the world! Compared to the majority of the world’s people, you and I are rich. To gain a graphical representation of how your income compares to others in the world you can do so at this website and see how you stack up. There is a verse in the Bible that says something to the effect that “to whom much is given much is required“. It seems to me that you and I have been given much. The lead me to as the question, “What are we doing with this gift?” Thinking about this question in my own life, I have decided to contribute to a credible charity to help make a difference in a small way in the life of someone less fortunate than me, I would like to encourage you to do the same. Listed below are two organisations that are worth supporting, to help make a difference in the life of someone less fortunate this Christmas.
Make Christmas Matter
The idea behind Make Christmas Matter… is to enable South Africans to support accountable poverty eradication programmes, while reaffirming the real meaning in celebrating Christmas.
Make Christmas Matter enables South Africans to revive the true joy of giving and receiving by making our contribution to a brighter and better future an integral part of celebrating Christmas. The campaign makes it easy for you to make a real difference in uplifting lives, and ensures that the funds do reach accountable, registered non profit and bona fide community-based organisations.
ONE
ONE is a new effort by Americans to rally Americans - ONE by ONE - to fight the emergency of global AIDS and extreme poverty. ONE is students and ministers, punk rockers and NASCAR moms, Americans of all beliefs and every walk of life, united as ONE to help make poverty history. ONE believes that allocating an additional ONE percent of the U.S. budget toward providing basic needs like health, education, clean water and food would transform the futures and hopes of an entire generation in the world’s poorest countries. ONE also calls for debt cancellation, trade reform and anti-corruption measures in a comprehensive package to help Africa and the poorest nations beat AIDS and extreme poverty.
So why not time time to get involve and contributing to one of these worthy causes….!
“He who has not Christmas in his heart will never find it under a tree.” - Roy L. Smith
Technorati Tags: Christmas, Leadership, Management, Charity, One, Giving, Community
Dec
17
Building Leadership Character
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Character is an important part of the practice of leadership. The December CCL newsletter featured an article “Building Character: Strengthening the Heart of Good Leadership Don’t Give Up On Leadership Character” which discusses the the key components of building leadership character based on the book by Gene Klann, Building Character: Strengthening the Heart of Good Leadership“. Based on the book, the newsletter provides the following character building advice:
To develop leadership character, leaders should focus on their behavior, make small adjustments over time and commit to consistency.
- Focus on Behavior Leadership character shouldn’t be an abstract or vague concept. “Leadership character is about tangible behavior,” Klann explains. It is what leaders say and do - regardless of what inner qualities they may possess or thoughts they may cherish - that determines their reputation and good name. By focusing on behaviors, then, leaders can build and strengthen their character. They can learn how to speak and act in ways that reflect positive character qualities such as courage, caring, self-control, optimism and effective communication. “None of these attributes is innate, and all five of them lie at the heart of effective leadership,” says Klann.
- Adjust, Don’t Overhaul Of course, changing behaviors isn’t always easy. “A behavior that a person has practiced for several decades will not change overnight,” Klann explains. “However, most people can see when there is an advantage to changing certain behaviors and can take action. Typically, adults change their behavior to gain something positive or to avoid something negative.” The key is to go about change in terms of adjusting behavior, rather than expecting wholesale, instant change.
- Be Consistent “A leader’s reputation is based on his or her behavior over time,” says Klann. When a leader’s pattern of behavior consistently reflects strong character, the result is greater respect and trust and stronger emotional connections between such leaders and their employees.
The Five E’s Of Character Development
How can leaders establish an effective process of character development for themselves and for their subordinates? CCL’s Gene Klann says to follow the “Five E’s.”
- Example: Leadership by example leverages the natural human tendency to emulate the behavior of individuals held in high esteem. A leader’s behavior sets the standard for the entire organization.
- Education: Leaders and organizations should find ways to discuss the importance of character, the potential pressures on and challenges to character, and the short- and long-term implications of a lapse of character. Education might include discussions of case studies and scenarios that involve difficult moral or ethical choices.
- Environment: The organization’s culture is shaped and developed over time by the actions and values of people in the organization. Senior leaders can establish an environment that is open to character development by creating a clear, detailed, practical set of organizational values and by ensuring that everyone in the organization lives those values.
- Experience: Senior leaders should ensure that high-potential employees are given “stretch” jobs and assignments requiring them to make difficult choices, which can help them better understand and develop character. These experiences also provide good indications of the character strengths and weaknesses of those who might become the future leaders of the organization.
- Evaluation: Clear expectations regarding patterns of behavior need to be established and communicated. Leaders can then use feedback sessions and performance evaluations to gauge their progress, reviewing specific instances when their character was challenged and either stood fast or cracked.
This sounds like a good leadership book, it’s rare to find a book that provides solid and practical advice on building one’s character. Definitely a book on my “to be read” list for 2007.
Technorati Tags: Character, Leadership, Management, Books, Business, Book, Principles
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