Dr. Brad Lebo | Vital Growth Consulting Group

October 19, 2016

The Hillary Step of Leadership

The Hillary Step is the last major challenge to reaching the top of Mount Everest (via the South East route). In our work, the Hillary Step is analogous to the challenge leaders face on their way to Jim Collins’ Level 5 Leadership where the leader “build[s] enduring greatness through a paradoxical blend of personal humility and professional will.”

Time and again, we have watched very successful business owners and leaders stumble on the Hillary Step of Leadership. They cannot get past the need to let others know, subtly or not so subtly, what they think should happen or “how things are.” At worst, they need to be the “smartest guy in the room” and position themselves to get all the limelight. At best, they intermittently criticize and leave a trail of frustration (by focusing more on people’s shortcomings than on how other factors, including their own blind-spots, might contribute to poor results).

In general terms, these leaders view their role as being the key contributor and director instead of as being the catalyst for the growth of and inspirer of others. They stand in contrast to the leader who exercises an iron will at moving in the right direction with an equal intensity for putting others in a position to succeed–complete with the credit for success.

Those who push pass the “Hillary Step,” without much additional effort, ascend to the top of the leadership mountain. In the process they not only achieve great success for their organization, they setup their successors for even greater success.

Thanks for reading. If you’re interested in learning more about how to pass the Hillary Step, give us a call. We think you’ll be glad you did.

August 22, 2016September 1, 2016

The Vacation Test

August is a great time to go on vacation. If you’re a owner or a manager, it’s a ready-made test of the team you leave behind.

Can they run the place without you? For an hour, a day or maybe a couple of weeks? Will they pass the test of your being away without losing their way? Can you really take a vacation?

We’ve worked with a lot of owners who don’t feel secure leaving their organization in their team’s hands. Daily (or more frequent) calls are the antidote for this insecurity but come at the price of an interrupted vacation.

We’ve also worked with owners who leave for extended periods and don’t seek or allow interruptions, except in an emergency. These owners pass the vacation test. They combine trust in their team with a little personal sense of security to take a real vacation.

They also are in a better position should a planned or unplanned exit from the business come about.

We hope you are taking a vacation that is really time away from work!

Thanks for reading. If you’re interested in learning more about how to pass the vacation test, give us a call. We think you’ll be glad you did.

June 20, 2016September 1, 2016

The No Asshole Rule

Originally published in 2007, The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t by Robert I. Sutton, paints a compelling picture of how hiring and retaining even one asshole undermines the performance of your organization.

The decline in performance spans both the departments with an asshole in residence and those departments that have or avoid relationships with the offending department. And that decline includes increased rates of turnover, theft, and lawsuits along with decreased productivity and resilience. Not to mention the personal toll for “targets” of psychological distress and dissatisfaction.

The book does a great job of laying out how to identify assholes, how to implement the “rule,” how to reform your own “inner jerk,” and how to survive in an environment that hasn’t followed the “rule.”

None of the advice is better than the need to take strong action against assholes in the interest of improved organizational performance. Chances are you already know how to identify who there are (people who are less powerful than them report feeling, more than rarely, slighted, demeaned or downright bullied).

Perhaps the book will convince you that it’s worth your while to take action for the benefit of the non-assholes in your ranks and enforce the “rule” going forward! Perhaps you’d like to take the ARSE (Asshole Rating Self-Exam) or have a co-worker take it?

If you’d like help identifying assholes before you hire them or letting one go, give us or some other coach a call. We think you’ll be glad you did.

May 23, 2016September 1, 2016

Why Hire a Coach?

The value of coaching is established in most people’s minds. If you’re someone who is skeptical about the value, reading further is unlikely to change your mind.

If you’ll allow that coaching has value, why would you want to hire a coach? Our experience highlights three reasons:

Learning best practices. Coaches, including us, make their living reading about, studying and implementing best practices. These are activities that’s are hard to do when you’re running a business because of the pull of the day-to-day operational responsibilities. Hiring a coach can update your “toolbox” to the latest best practices without having to do all the reading and studying and experimenting yourself.
Seeking accountability. It’s usually easier to hold others accountable than it is to hold ourselves accountable. This is true in just about all cases. It’s the phenomena behind the phrase, “Do as I say, not as I do.” A coach can help you hold yourself accountable by (gently) holding your feet to the fire.
Increasing insight. Insight, in this case, is better self- and other “awareness.” That is increased understanding about why you do what you do and why others do what they do. It is also better clarity about what your strengths and weaknesses are and how best to change or compensate for them, etc. The point is that a coach can help you understand yourself and others better. When done well, this leads to increased influence (leadership) and improved outcomes.

If any of these reasons appeal to you, give us or some other coach a call. We think you’ll be glad you did.

January 19, 2016

The Gordian Knot and Family Business

A Gordian Knot is a complicated problem where bold action achieves an otherwise elusive solution. In family business, the complicate problem is how to setup a succession plan that taps one or more family members (and sometimes a “near” family member–someone who through loyalty and years of service has become like a family member).

Having had countless discussions about planning for succession, two things rise to the surface as worthy of addressing here. First, there is a tendency to unfavorably compare the successor to the one he/she is replacing. The comparison typically goes something like this: He/she is “no [insert name of leader being replaced].”

Even when one accounts for the difference between the stage of each individual’s career (one is getting ready to leave while the other is near or at a mid-point), there are other factors that make such a comparison unfair. Specifically, the business has “grown-up” reflecting the strengths and weaknesses of its leader. Of course, a successor will be a relatively poor match to what is, in essence, a custom designed business based on the profile of the current leader.

Also, there is nothing that prepares one for leadership like leading. Being in the shadow of an effective leader or even an ineffective leader, is like drafting in a bike race. The real work is at the front.

This is all to say that comparing a future leader to a current leader is a distraction, at best. Better to answer the question, “does the future leader have the potential to lead the company going forward? Giving it and the people in it what they need from now on, not what they and it needed yesterday?”

Second, there is not enough emphasis placed on getting a potential successor experience in other positions and industries than the one she/he is in line for. Such diversity of experience “seasons” a leader and provides perspective on issues and management that is impossible to get while serving in a single organization. Admittedly, it takes courage to leave the known for the unknown. But the reward is, as is said, “priceless!”

There are other lessons for improving the chances of a successful succession like independently reviewing performance, independently assessing leadership potential, interim leadership until a successor is ready, mentors or peer advisory groups for the successor, etc. But the bold action is to determine if the successor has the potential to lead going forward, early on, and then test that potential and reinforce it by having him/her take a position in another company for at least a couple of years.

December 17, 2015

Lack of Turnover Hurts Your Business – Including Your Family Business

Turnover is hard. It’s painful. It means change and loss. It is the inconsistent with the sentiment of rewarding loyalty and hard work with loyalty and longevity.

Advocating for turnover flies in the face of advocating for building trust and predictability–at least superficially. It’s akin to advocating to burn a forest with all the dangers of a forest fire.

There is a reason why it sometimes makes sense to start a forest fire, however. After such a planned fire, old growth is cleared and new growth emerges.

Turnover in a business, including a family business, can have the same effect. It can lead to new responsibilities for those that remain. It often opens the doors to new ideas and ways of doing things. New employees often bring high levels of energy and engagement and their enthusiasm can be contagious.

Perhaps most importantly, adding people from the outside can add their “different” experience to the mix. There is nothing quite like inside knowledge about how other organizations do things when figuring out how to improve. The perspective such a new employee brings is often missing when turnover is low.

We’re not quite ready to say something like, “15% of your management staff should turnover every year” or that, “anyone who’s approaching their 20th anniversary should be let go.” We are saying that there is a price to pay for low turnover and that the occasional planned “burn” has tangible benefits.

November 18, 2015

Employee Engagement (Including Millennials)

During the past several months, multiple clients and peers have raised the “millennial issue.” This issue can be summarized by the question: how do you engage employees born after 1980 (and before ~2000)?

A quick check of Gallup’s Employee Engagement webpage indicates that overall employee engagement is only around 32% and so it seems, the question of how to engage millennials might be broadened to how to engage employees of all ages?

There is clear research supporting the hypothesis that both local leaders (managers) and senior leaders (executives) have a role in the level of employee engagement of an organization. That is, the attitudes of both managers and executives at an organization directly influence the level of employee engagement.

In the organizations that we work with, it is more common than not to hear that the employees would “do anything” for the owner. The loyalty that the owner creates is vulnerable on two fronts: the attitude of the local manager (that may undermine even the strongest owner loyalty) and the withdrawal of the owner (as he/she gradually or suddenly prepares to leave the company in someone else’s hands).

Fortunately, there is a solution that addresses vulnerability on both fronts. That solution is to develop executives and local managers in the art of leadership and, specifically, “Primal Leadership,” as described in the book, Primal Leadership: Learning to Lead with Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman, Richard E. Boyatzis and Annie McKee.

Although it is beyond the scope of this piece to go into any detail about Primal Leadership, it is worth noting that in Harvard Business Review, the authors stated: “A leader’s premier task—we would even say his primal task—is emotional leadership. A leader needs to make sure that not only is he regularly in an optimistic, authentic, high-energy mood, but also that, through his chosen actions, his followers feel and act that way, too [employee engagement]. Managing for financial results [performance], then, begins with the leader managing his inner life so that the right emotional and behavioral chain reaction occurs.”

Developing leaders at all levels to be “Primal Leaders” is THE PATH to improved performance, financial results, employee engagement and successful owner exits.

With millennials in the workforce, perhaps primal leadership is more important than ever.

Contact us if you have questions, feedback or want some assistance developing your leaders/increasing employee engagement.

October 19, 2015

Hiring for Emotional Intelligence

We’ve all seen bright and technically competent people fail in managerial/leadership roles because of poor or non-existent people skills. The study of this phenomena finds that success in a leadership role is strongly correlated with above average people skills or what has come to be known as, high emotional intelligence. Indeed, at the top levels of any organization, where most people are bright and technically competent, the only variable that reliably predicts success is emotional intelligence (not book smarts or “expertise”).

The trouble is, hiring decisions are often made on the basis of cognitive ability (smarts) and technical expertise (competence). If you are hiring for a mid-level technical role, an emphasis on smarts and competence is fine. But, if you are hiring a future manager or executive, you had better be evaluating the candidate’s emotional intelligence. If you don’t, you miss a read on the most important predictor of their success.

How do you assess emotional intelligence and the leadership potential of a candidate? You focus on their self-awareness, their ability to manage their feelings, their awareness of the feelings of others AND their history of managing their relationships with others.

Ask about times when they were frustrated or angry. Why did they feel that way? What did they do about it? Ask about conflict with others. Did they deal with it or ignore it? How did they resolve the conflict if they did? What did they think about how the other person felt (the one who they had conflict with)? What did they say/do to move beyond the conflict? How do they approach motivating others? What is their primary leadership style (the way they approach the task of getting others working)?

This is just a sample of the questions you might use to assess for emotional intelligence. The idea is to evaluate how the person navigates the emotional world of self and others.

Ignoring how the person navigates this emotional world leaves you at a huge disadvantage when the time comes to judge how the candidate will lead or manage others.

September 17, 2015September 17, 2015

Smart Workers

It may be counterintuitive but Smart Workers Seek Out Advice (and are seen as more competent for doing so). Healthy organizations often include leaders who model this particular behavior.

September 16, 2015September 16, 2015

Backroom Politics

It is normal to seek support from those around us who are more likely to agree than disagree. This is the desire that fuels most backroom politics or those meetings among well-meaning but like-minded people. We all want to hear more cheers than boos when it comes to our ideas and plans.

The trouble is, vigorous debate is productive. It results in better ideas and better plans almost without exception. It is not what happens in backrooms where support and freedom from debate are what people look for.

What this means for your organization is that you should be alarmed when people don’t embrace vigorous debate and take refuge among those most likely to see things the way they do. Taking refuge reduces the quality of debate, makes for poorer ideas and planning and can be destructive if agendas hatched in backrooms (I like to say, “in the dark”) start to collide with other agendas (agendas arrived at through vigorous debate or in other backrooms).

So, fight the very human tendency to avoid vigorous debate and discourage backroom politics. Your organization’s ideas, plans and ultimately execution will be better for it.