Leadership Advisory

Are great leaders born or made? Or some combination thereof? The debate started about 2,400 years ago with philosophical reflections in Plato's Republic,  and later Plutarch's Lives, that gave rise to the "trait theory of leadership". This theory contends that leadership is based on individual attributes that are mostly innate, by opposition to modern behavioral theories. Blending the two - innate attributes versus acquired behavior - models like "transformational leadership" developed by James MacGregor Burns and Bernard Bass emphasize  a combination of distinctive abilities and skills that set great leaders apart, including creating and relentlessly pursuing a vision , inspiring and motivating others, managing execution by building superior teams and coaching them. 

Building on all this, we believe that leadership is primarily a mental attitude. Natural abilities and learned skills can be trained and developed further. However, leadership starts with a mindset that must be allowed to express itself and needs to be nurtured, consistently and continuously. Great leaders range from the charismatic and autocratic figure to the humble servant type. These are different styles that certainly shape and condition the corporate culture but do not necessarily guarantee perennial success for the enterprise. What does is the fact that all employees coalesce around a shared vision and do their utmost to help each other achieve this vision. In other words, the true gauge of success of a great leader, regardless of style, is the extent to which every employee in her/his organization, from C-level to janitor, demonstrates a leader's attitude through positive thinking for the greater good, sense of initiative, proactive action orientation, and accountability for results... because they all have been encouraged and empowered to be that way, top-down and across the organization.

Succession Planning

The advice of Marshall Goldsmith, prominent executive coach and widely published author (e.g., "What Got You Here Won't Get You There") is refreshing: call it succession development, not succession planning. Goldsmith argues that planning too often limits the succession building process to a static view whereas it should be managed as a dynamic and forward-looking activity.

Not only do we agree with this important distinction, but we also push the thinking further, encouraging our clients to embrace succession development through a more systematic and analytical process. Because it's all about people, judgment bias and subjectivity are the first pitfalls to guard against. Next are the shortsighted directions and decisions that come from the challenge of managing the complex dynamics of relationships at play in any given organization and the pressure to maximize the talent equation under multiple constraints and limitations at any point in time. 

Our process helps navigate these complexities by following a thorough and disciplined path that identifies and enables key success factors. Working from the obvious first step of leadership assessment to gauge "bench strength", we focus on the critical issue of talent deployment: Where are the gaps in the spectrum of your executives' skill sets? What processes do you have in place to groom your current and future leaders upward? Do your external recruits come on board with a clear and realistic career growth path beyond their starting position? How can you improve the groom/hire to gap-fill ratio? Next comes our analysis rooted in the concept of "high performing teams": having addressed bench strength and thoughtful deployment, how do leadership teams generate a multiplier effect that enhances collective performance? How well does the Executive Team reflect and relay the corporate culture? What are the incentives that foster innovation and creativity? This analysis allows us to develop "leadership growth" scenarios that combine multiple alternatives across key positions - from promotion and transfer to external recruitment - and contingency planning (alternative solutions for a given position). Finally, we develop a detailed implementation plan to lead the execution of the preferred scenario, usually with oversight from the Board on progress monitoring and continued adjusting. 

Executive Coaching

Coaching is growing, not training. Whether conducted individually or in group settings, executive coaching aims at providing a conducive and supportive environment where an executive can effectively explore ways to build on her/his strengths and apply mantras and methods to improve on personal impact and value contribution to her/his environment. 

Active listening and empathy are the key ingredients of good coaching. In our experience, coaching starts with creating the context of a trusted and objective sounding board for the executive. Professional skills and abilities are not the issue as much as the need to put them in perspective amidst a demanding job, strong ambition, pressure to stay on top of a successful track record, and all this often compounded by the aspiration for better life balance and a genuine, yet not necessarily clearly directed, quest for significance. Therefore, stepping back and focusing on the bigger picture is the initial and critical step to "reduce the background noise" and extract the real personal and professional drivers that the executive recognizes as the most relevant and important factors to guide her/his continued growth. Next comes engaging the executive's receptivity to feedback, from 360 degree input in the professional environment to sometimes even friends and family circles. This feedback, paired with a thoughtful interpretation of personality assessment tools, leads to meaningful awareness and re-centering insights.

The next step is to turn these insights into action. We use a framework that proceeds inside-out, from self to others. As such, we identify and gauge specific areas of improvement around knowing and growing yourself, then on managing others and making them successful, and finally on increasing personal fit and value contribution to the company's leadership and corporate culture. The resulting multi-level improvement program is then be implemented through an action plan along four main planks: strategy, organization, communication, and personal. When it comes with practical and realistic milestones to check off, such an action plan not only fuels a concrete sense of achievement but also serves as a dynamic check board to self-actualize and grow.