Author Archives: Larry Janis

Great leadership teams say these six things about each other

By Evan RothEvan-Roth

Silos, egos, chest beating, throwing under the bus, misalignment and blaming each other. These descriptors top the list when I am asked to work with dysfunctional leadership teams.

It’s far more rare to hear the following six statements in the business world, but these are what winning sports teams say about one another. We can learn a lot from the world of sports as to how we can and should function as winning leadership team members.

It’s not about me, but the team.

It’s fascinating to hear this statement come out of a star player’s mouth. Are they being humble, not trying to draw attention to themselves? Or do they really believe what they are saying?

When our focus and intention is around winning as a team, we actually have a better chance of doing so. When the team is my focus, I cross the silo, embrace what’s best for the organization (vs. my own P&L), and am not satisfied until we all win. My performance is always less than the team’s performance, and I am not satisfied until the collective team wins. The last thing we would ever do is let down our team members. (more…)

Research: How a New CEO Can Make a Firm More Entrepreneurial

 

by Bastian Grühn, Steffen Strese, Malte Brettel

iStock_000015634604Medium - CopyA new face at the top brings new hopes, and often, new strategic priorities. When Target hired Brian Cornell as CEO in 2014, expectations were high that he would inject fresh energy into one of the largest U.S. retail chains. When that same year Microsoft replaced CEO Steve Ballmer with Satya Nadella, the move signaled the possibility for major change. Indeed, the company eventually announced its strategy to venture massively into cloud computing.

Each year, about 10% of the companies on the S&P 500 Index experience a CEO transition. And this transition is much more than a new nameplate on the corner office. When new CEOs take charge, they sometimes change or even reverse the entire strategic course of the company – a course that, such as in the case of Microsoft, often aligns with entrepreneurial growth opportunities. (more…)

What makes a leadership development strategy successful?

By Forbes Coaches Council

A recent Deloitte study found that 56% of executives believe their companies are not ready to meet today’s leadership needs. Many companies are responding, last year iStock_000008266083Small[1]spending $31 billion on leadership development programs, and since 2015 alone spending on such programs has increased by 10%.

Jesse Demmel, vice president of platform engineering at Under Armour, rewrites an old adage: “Some leaders are born. Many are made.”

But not all attempts to “make” leaders are created equal. Matt Norquist, CEO of Linkage, a global leadership development consultancy firm, says, “I think that, despite all the effort, a lot of the companies I see aren’t making sustainable progress.”

So, what are some key elements that make a leadership development strategy successful?

Structured Progression

One mistake organizations make when it comes to leadership development is sporadic or inconsistent development opportunities. For example, leaders take hour-long online seminars or employees only meet with managers at annual reviews. (more…)

Fear Can Stifle Collaboration, or Jumpstart It

greveby Henrich Greve

During organisational change, play the radicals against the moderates to foster collaboration.

Many firms that emerge or grow by making technological breakthroughs owe a lot – maybe everything – to their engineers, and in return give them benefits both formal (organisational power) and informal (status and gratitude). These days, however, innovations are metabolised quickly. As their technology’s wow factor fades, firms tend to shift their emphasis from engineering derring-do to improving market performance. Engineers don’t know how to do that; the marketing department does. So can firms really divert authority and prestige away from the source of their success and into a new path to success? Often the answer is no, as seen in firms applying technological innovations that ignored marketing challenges – such as Sony’s continued development of disc-based music players after flash media enabled firms to make compact players like the iPod.

But there are also successful cases, and a forthcoming article in Administrative Science Quarterly by Emily Truelove and Katherine Kellogg (of MIT Sloan School of Management) explains one mechanism. The authors followed an unnamed car-sharing company that made a strategic shift to marketing following a period of strong engineering success based on disruptive innovation. This was a classic case of a firm with a dominant engineering department that had proven track record of success and professional norms that were completely different from the rising stars in marketing. They had every opportunity to resist, which they did – until they suddenly started making compromises. What happened? (more…)

Why your ‘personality’ is getting in the way of a promotion

by Marisa Taylor

One of my “favorite” – ie just plain awful – recent stories to expose the staggering tone deafness around gender parity came courtesy of John Greenhouse, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist. He was sharing some supposedly helpful advice for women seeking equality in the business world.

In his Wall Street Journal op-ed, Greenhouse suggested that in order for women to rise above unconscious gender bias online, they ought to go by their initials and hide the fact that they’re women. Female readers weren’t so thrilled by the suggestion that they should be the ones responsible for fixing male bias against them.

For better advice, look to Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where 48% of the incoming freshmen at the School of Computer Science are women, far greater than the national average of 18%. Rather than urging women to change their behavior, the school changed the culture by launching a faculty-run mentorship group for female computer science students, which “opens doors for women across campus through networking ”, according to the college newspaper. That has attracted increasingly more women to apply to the program. (more…)