Category: Exit and Transition Planning

Perhaps you already believe a coach can help you. Perhaps you know it. In this brief video [https://youtu.be/XLF90uwII1k] Bill Gates and Eric Schmidt of Microsoft and Google fame, respectively, make a pitch for hiring a coach. It’s a brief video (< 90 seconds) and it makes the important point that no matter how good at your job you are, you cannot objectively assess your own behavior–like a trained coach can. Perhaps watching the video will push you to take the step of hiring a coach. If so, give us a call. We think you’ll be glad you did.

Happy Thanksgiving,

Vital Growth Consulting Group

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.

Contact us if you have questions, feedback or want some assistance planning turnover.

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.

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.

Contact us if you have questions, feedback or want some help assessing emotional intelligence.