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

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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. Continue reading →

What makes a leadership development strategy successful?

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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. Continue reading →

Fear Can Stifle Collaboration, or Jumpstart It

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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? Continue reading →

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

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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. Continue reading →

Give Your Team More-Effective Positive Feedback

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Christine-Porath by Christine Porath

Research shows that one of the best ways to help employees thrive is to give them feedback. It’s one of the primary levers leaders have to increase a sense of learning and vitality. Giving your direct reports regular updates on personal performance, as well as on how the business is doing, helps them feel valued. Negative or directive feedback provides guidance, leading people to become, over time, more certain about their behavior and more confident in their competence.

Highlighting an employee’s strengths can help generate a sense of accomplishment and motivation. A Gallup survey found that 67% of employees whose managers focused on their strengths were fully engaged in their work, as compared to only 31% of employees whose managers focused on their weaknesses. IBM’s WorkTrends survey of over 19,000 workers in 26 countries, across industries and thousands of organizations, revealed that the engagement level of employees who receive recognition is almost three times higher than the engagement level of those who do not. The same survey showed that employees who receive recognition are also far less likely to quit. Recognition has been shown to increase happiness at work in general and is tied to cultural and business results, such as job satisfaction and retention. Continue reading →