Economic uncertainty and market complexity have employees feeling anxious and overwhelmed. As a result, people are less willing to exert “discretionary energy” on innovation, collaboration, or other behaviors required to excel today.

Join Maggie Walsh, Forum’s VP and Lead of our Leadership Practice, on an April 24th webinar as she ‘pulls back the curtain’ to reveal tactics that enable leaders and their teams to deal more effectively with ongoing change. You will learn:

• Insights on why complexity and uncertainty drives performance down
• A simple framework for helping your team handle change
• A way to flip your mindset regarding unexpected challenges

Here is a preview of some of the insights Maggie will share.

Click here to join the nearly 1200 people who have already registered for the webinar!

Whether you are leading a specific change initiative, are in the midst of an individual transition, or are simply trying to survive in these complex times, this webinar will equip you with actionable tips and proven strategies that can be applied right away.

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April 15, 2012, marks the centennial of the Titanic disaster. The ship steamed away from Southampton, England, as one of the biggest ships of its time, its passengers and crew eager for the trans-Atlantic journey to New York. What they didn’t know was that the “unsinkable” ship would rest at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean after colliding with an iceberg.

Jocelyn R. Davis, head of our global Research and Development function, has published an e-book, “Leadership Failures Sink Unsinkable Ship: Business Lessons from the Titanic.” She writes that the catastrophe’s fundamental cause was a failure in leadership and shares three lessons business leaders can learn from one of the most memorable events in maritime history.

Q: Why did you write the e-book?

A: When we were doing the research behind our book “Strategic Speed,” a colleague brought the Titanic story to my attention. It turned out to be a perfect illustration of one of the book’s key points: Rapid execution doesn’t come simply from picking up the pace, but rather from skillfully mobilizing people. When you look at the story through that lens, there are a lot of practical lessons for leaders in organizations today. If we heed those lessons, we can move faster (without hitting icebergs).

Q: Why did poor leadership sink the Titanic?

A: On the Titanic, poor leadership trumped impressive design. The captain and officers put their faith in the supposedly unsinkable ship, with all its modern technology, and ignored some basic leadership tenets that might have prevented the disaster or at least made the outcome less terrible. Today, the same thing can happen in businesses; leaders often overlook people factors and fall into one of the following traps:

• The Brilliant Strategy Trap: Leaders put most of their efforts into researching and devising an ambitious strategy that will, they hope, vault them ahead of the competition. They pay a lot of attention to writing it up. They pay little attention to building the understanding, buy-in and skills that would ensure its execution. As a result, the strategy never bears fruit.
• The Efficient Process and Structure Trap: Leaders give most of their attention to process reengineering and organization design, thinking, “If we can just get everything lined up in the right order and all sources of waste eliminated, things will run smoothly.” They fail to realize that an efficient business is not necessarily a successful business and, moreover, that people are rarely guided by official process maps.
• The Sophisticated Technology Trap: Leaders throw technology at problems in the mistaken belief that it’s the strongest, quickest, most lasting lever for changing how a business operates. What they don’t see is that technology is actually a weak, cumbersome and transitory lever unless it’s designed and installed with the explicit intention of helping people be more effective.

Q: What lessons can business leaders learn from the disaster?

A: As in organizations that operate on dry land, it was the ship leaders’ ability or inability to drive clarity, unity and agility that made the difference to speed and performance over the course of the crisis. As our research indicates, it’s these three people factors that correlate most highly with fast, effective execution of strategies and strategic initiatives. When leaders focus on strengthening these characteristics, strategies are accelerated and results improve.

1. Clarity: People have a shared understanding of our strategy at a detailed level, and they focus their efforts on a critical few priorities. Our strategy has been translated into concrete and achievable goals and behaviors.
2. Unity: We have commitment at all levels to the success of our strategy, and we staff strategic initiatives with team members who are capable and can dedicate sufficient time. A spirit of teamwork and cross-boundary collaboration is evident throughout the organization.
3. Agility: People stay open and flexible in the way that goals are met, and they maintain a bias for action while correcting course as needed. People capture and communicate what they learn from initiatives and projects.

To download a copy of Jocelyn’s e-book, click here.

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What does a leader look like today?

It’s not easy to define.  When I started out in leadership development, everyone wanted to clone Jack Welch from GE.  “If we could just clone Jack and what his folks do at Crotonville, we would have strong leadership bench strength,” the predominant thinking went.  In fact, going to Crotonville and seeing GE’s operations and methods was on every leadership development professional’s bucket list.

In the past 10-15 years:

• Industries have become incredibly specialized niches, requiring highly specific knowledge and deep networks
• Awareness of regional leadership differences has dawned on many global organizations
• Authenticity has become more acceptable, even preferred, in leaders in many companies and regions
• Business success has begun to demand ability to work across boundaries, often in culture-specific ways
• Technology and globalization have combined to require the skills and knowledge to operate virtually

Today, leaders simply cannot be cloned or borrowed from other companies or industries.  Organizations must develop their own leaders with skills and personal attributes that fit the company’s vision, mission, and values.  In other words, leaders must be molded, not cloned.

Leadership Today

Today’s leaders:

• Can dive into multiple parts of the organization with multi-disciplinary knowledge
• Have strong cultural acumen and are able to adapt to different environments and cultures
• Are asked to lead in a virtual world, which requires developing their ability to engage in meaningful virtual interactions with a variety of stakeholders, in and outside the organization

In days past, we would ask participants in a leadership course to identify someone with strong leadership skills.  Common answers would include:  Mother Teresa; Martin Luther King, Jr.; Mahatma Gandhi; and John F. Kennedy.

Today, asking this question is not as effective in identifying strong leaders.  Today, some better questions might be:

• Who in our company has strong leadership skills? (company-specific).  
• Would he or she be an effective leader in our Dubai or Pune offices? (cultural acumen)
• How does this leader provide leadership in a virtual environment? (virtual leadership)
• What knowledge of the various functions and disciplines in our organization does this person have? (multi-functional and multi-discipline knowledge)

These questions get more at the heart of molding leaders to be effective within a specific company, to develop cultural acumen (if needed), and to increase knowledge and skill in operating in a virtual and multi-functional environment.

Agent 007’s catch phrase was “shaken, not stirred.”

We’re thinking our own new catch phrase might be “molded, not cloned.”  (Okay, that’s not nearly as cool.  Let’s stick with what Bond said.)

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Voters in 10 states will head to the polls today to cast their ballots in the Republican presidential primary. Known as Super Tuesday, the 2011 Grand Old Party race features more than 400 delegates and four candidates.

As the candidates square off, we can take some lessons about good leadership from the campaign trail:

1. Don’t Be Political, but Do Know What People Care About. Like the candidates, leaders need to know the hot-button issues that people care the most about. What are the people in your company most anxious about, and what do they need direction on? Provide that direction, get those resources, but avoid posturing and manipulation—it causes trouble and mistrust. There will be politics, but, as John Bell, former CEO of Jacobs Suchard (Nabob, Kraft) said, “Deal with politics, but don’t be political.”
2. Don’t Pander, Be Authentic. Leaders don’t have to kiss babies to show that they can connect with regular people. But they do need to use emotional intelligence. It’s important to be likable, to actually listen to employees, not just act as though you are, and to show that you care. That’s how good leaders garner followers.
3. Don’t Peddle Your Influence, Align Your Interests. Politics is often about trading on quid pro quo relationships —and using one’s “influence” to get votes. In business, leaders must “lead with influence,” which Forum defines not as “influence peddling,” but as “the ability to generate results collaboratively, in a variety of contexts, without direct or positional authority.” Leaders must understand the importance of authentic relationships and actively seek to align interests with people at all levels inside and outside the organization around shared goals. If they can’t do that, they will go nowhere.

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Turning the calendar to 2012, we put the spotlight on innovation in this issue of the Forum Focus.

In his article for Harvard Business Review, Michael Schrage observes that large organizations are handing greater responsibilities and resources to smaller innovation teams – some as small as five individuals.  Building on the “less is more” theme, Schrage says that the “key performance indicator here is, ironically, slow growth. A fast-growing innovation team means either the wrong people were hired or that the wrong challenge was picked. The team delivers measurably impressive results with only marginally more members.”  Schrage cites several large organizations making this shift, including GlaxoSmithKline, who is betting that “smaller size assures faster velocity and greater agility for innovation decision.”

Read the rest of this entry »

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Seventy percent of strategic initiatives fail. They take too long and don’t achieve most of the quantifiable performance results intended. Why does this happen?

This topic was discussed by a panel sponsored by the Harvard Business School (HBS) Alumni Association. Panelists David Eaton of Global Novations, Diane Hessan of Communispace, Steve Lishansky of Optimize International  and I conversed about strategies and tactics leaders can use to accelerate execution. The panel was a great opportunity to highlight Forum’s Strategic Speed research, and the HBS people said it was one of the best events they’ve organized. (Benson Shapiro, a renowned HBS professor, attended and left with a copy of Strategic Speed.) Read the rest of this entry »

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If you’ve ever been to Boston, you know that the city has an obsession with its baseball team, The Red Sox.  Being a Boston-based company, we like to comment occasionally on regional news.  Such an occasion arose recently when Theo Epstein, longtime wunderkind General Manager of the Red Sox, left for the Chicago Cubs after a disastrous ending to the 2011 Red Sox season.   Boston instantly became abuzz regarding the leadership implications of that move.  I felt compelled to write a letter to the editor of The Chicago Tribune.   Here is the letter, in full:

Regarding Theo Epstein’s departure from the Red Sox: The fundamental questions circulating on Boston talk radio have been, “Did he abandon the Sox?”  and “What is the GM’s responsibility to clean up the mess he made?”

Those are really the wrong questions.  It’s not about Theo. Read the rest of this entry »

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