What’s Lacking in Top Leadership?

by Carl Harshman

Having dealt with a large number of senior leaders over the last 50 years, we’ve catalogued some data on one dimension of their effectiveness:

How they construct, develop, and manage members of their leadership team.
Or don’t.

The Three Elements

Creating an effective leadership team has three key elements:

  -Hiring

  -Development

  -Performance Management

Let’s take a look at some principles and practices in each category.

Hiring

In Good to Great, Jim Collins espoused the principle: "First Who, Then What".

Collins said that it was critical to get the right people in the right seats on the bus before deciding where you were going.

If the hiring isn’t right, what follows is not likely to be either.

Myriad things can go wrong in the hiring process from (a) “trying to hire people like me” when the best thing for the organization is hiring someone who is different than you are and who complements you to (b) “letting someone else define and narrow the field” (that someone else could be a colleague, HR/Talent Management, or an external recruiting firm).

Recently, the board of the St. Louis Public Schools replaced a new superintendent after only a year of service citing financial, hiring, and administrative issues. The news reported that the Board retained an outside firm to conduct the search for a new superintendent. The question is: how did this firm decide whom to include in the final list? Then, what criteria and information did the board use to get to the final decision?

In this example and in others we could cite from different organizations, hiring was the first stage of a process that resulted in performance issues downstream.

Development

Without a doubt, effective executives keep learning (unless you hired the “smartest person in the room).

How many senior executives, however, have an ongoing, up-to-date development plan?

To paraphrase a former philosophy professor: “Learning may be a necessary, but is not a sufficient condition for development.”

Although leadership teams with which we have worked almost always fully endorse development planning for their respective organizations, most of them remain advocates for rather than models for the process.

If management and leadership development is important for their organizations, why not for them?

Performance Management

We now come to the third leg of the stool—performance management.

This element of leadership effectiveness is no less important or no less difficult to execute than the first two.

The key elements of performance management are:

  1. Setting clear and appropriate expectations (not only for output/outcomes, but also for how one achieves those outcomes)
  2. Identifying the metrics that will be used to track how well the individual is doing with respect to expectations
  3. Taking regular measures of the metrics, providing feedback on the metrics, and reinforcing good practice performance/coaching for areas of improvement
  4. Making the appropriate personnel decisions with respect to performance: recognition/rewards, performance improvement plans, or termination.

The “Sins of the Fathers (executives)” are numerous in this category including, but not limited to, the following:

  1. Performance evaluations typically involve only tactical business objectives and then often what is to be done, not what is to be accomplished from what is done.
  2. Not setting clear expectations for the “how” business objectives are to be executed or identifying the related metrics (the “how” speaks to the cultural and people-related leadership behaviors)
  3. Very few executives collect data regularly on performance expectations or have regular performance review meetings with their direct reports (unless something is going very wrong)
  4. There is often very little leadership coaching that occurs unless you count the model where the coach tells the quarterback what play to run next.

Finally, if at some point it is clear that an individual is not performing well and is not likely to do so, how many executives take appropriate action?

The question is more crucial when the individual is a member of “the Boys’ Club” or when termination is frowned upon in the organization. We’ve seen under-performing executives left in place for years. We’ve seen them moved to other positions while keeping their titles and pay. We’ve seen them get large payments to leave . . .

Sometimes, we see them put in roles where they can be effective or separated from the organization. Either case, done in a timely manner, is much better than the former (which sends a powerful, non-verbal message to the rest of the organization).

Conclusion

This is not a “how to” article. It’s more of a “why to” or perhaps “what to” (or what not to) outline.

If you plan to lead or keep leading an organization, regardless of how big or small, the three elements outlined above are all important. Consider understanding each and executing effectively . . . and have a team that does the same.

Until next time . . .