The Competencies and Constraints That Determine Leadership Success

Posted on

by Pawel Korzynski

A novel management theory looks past individual leaders to constraints that might limit their effectiveness.

As a leader, you may sense the heavy mantle of work to be done, employees to motivate, bosses to impress, organizational culture to maneuver. Most leadership theories place all these burdens squarely on your shoulders: How you handle them all is entirely up to you. Concepts such as transparent leadership neglect external factors. Although leaders may be highly talented individuals, they are constrained by their environment and their own internal conditions.

Rather than making leaders solely responsible for their own effectiveness, we can allow a balance between managerial competences and the many constraints that limit leaders. With bounded leadership, we look past the leader’s characteristics and consider the many constraints they encounter at the individual, team, organisational and stakeholder levels.

Co-written with Andrzej Krzysztof Kozminski, Anna Baczynska and Michael Haenlein, our article in the European Management Journal found that leaders’ competencies are not enough for them to be effective. Our study of middle-level managers in Poland included 97 participants, around 57 percent of whom were men. Using focused questionnaires, we found clear indicators of their competencies and constraints. When we matched certain competencies with a specific set of constraints, we cleared the path for leaders to increase their effectiveness.

Competencies

In bounded leadership, we see five distinct abilities leaders require to be effective:

  • Anticipation competence: The ability to predict market patterns and conditions, which are essential to the organisation, such as future trends or customer needs
  • Mobilisation competence: The ability to inspire employees to put an extraordinary effort into their work
  • Self-reflection competence: The ability to analyse past experiences and draw useful conclusions
  • Values-creation competence: The ability to promote a leader’s values in the organisation
  • Visionary competence: The ability to create an attractive vision of the organisation, communicate this vision to followers and empower them to implement it

Continue reading →

For CEOs, Loneliness Is Not An Option

Posted on

By Patrick Lencioni

 

You’ve got to be able to talk to someone—but who? (Hint: It shouldn’t be the board.)

 

You’ve heard it before. “Leadership is lonely.” And while few people have great sympathy for executives who get paid good money for running an organization, loneliness is still loneliness, and it causes serious harm to leaders, the organizations they serve and the people in their lives.

What is the primary cause of this? For most, it comes down to having no real source of encouragement and appreciation for what they do. Yes, CEOs are often surrounded by assistants and subordinates who provide them with gratitude and praise. Good leaders know that this kind of attention is often shallow and insincere. But what about the attention that leaders get from customers, vendors, consultants, even the media? Praise from relative strangers does not reduce loneliness, and in many cases, actually exacerbates it. Ask most celebrities.

What CEOs want and need is specific and genuine appreciation—and correction—from people they care about and admire. Unfortunately, chief executives have no manager and are deprived of this. As bad as that may be, what may be worse is that so many resort to doing what that old country music song says: looking for love in all the wrong places.

One of those places is the boardroom. Too many CEOs I’ve known seek approval and appreciation from the board of directors (often, the chairman). This makes sense because after working for managers throughout their careers, the board seems like the next best thing to a boss—but the board is not a CEO’s boss.

Turning to the board for affirmation is like the head coach of a football team wanting the team owner to approve the plays he calls on the field. Any good team owner will be more interested in the results—winning games—than in the day-to-day decisions he makes to get there. And if the team doesn’t win, the owner will still fire the coach, regardless of whether he did things the way the owner might have wanted.

Boards exist to provide high-level guidance to CEOs and to prevent them from egregious errors. They are not meant to provide the kind of affirmation, coaching or approval that a manager does. That doesn’t take away from the fact that CEOs deserve support and need to find it somewhere. Just not there.

The next most likely place a CEO looks for appreciation is at home. This makes sense. A spouse might seem a healthy place for a leader to turn for the kind of informed approval a manager would normally provide. But even the most involved spouse can’t adequately understand the depth of a CEO’s accomplishments and challenges without being part of the day-to-day activities of work. At best, they can be a sounding board or a sympathetic ear.

Which leads to the worst thing that some leaders do when they lack appreciation at work and don’t get it from their spouse: They get involved in inappropriate intimate relationships with an employee. So many affairs take place, I’m convinced, because CEOs simply want to be valued and consoled by someone who understands what he or she is going through at work. The damage of these affairs, on organizations and families, is obvious.

There is only one place where chief executives can and should go to avoid the loneliness that is a big part of their job: their leadership team. Now, I am fully aware of the problems associated with looking for support from team members who are also subordinates. It can be dangerous for a CEO to seek affirmation from the very people he or she might one day have to fire. I get that. But it’s doable, with the proper mix of vulnerability, authority and maturity.

When CEOs build real, deep, vulnerability-based trust with team members and understand the different contexts of conversations they are having, they can get the support they need while maintaining the authority their role requires. And even if it presents occasional problems and challenges along the way, it’s a far better tightrope to walk than trying to earn the approval and consent of a board chair or a lone sympathetic employee.

Source: Chief Executive

Office Not Required—Why Remote Work Is Here To Stay

Posted on

by Ashira Prossack

As the world slowly begins to reopen, companies are making decisions on what the post-Covid workplace looks like. While some organizations are itching to bring their employees back into the office, others are opting for hybrid models or sticking with full time remote work.

This isn’t to say that employees will never see each other face to face ever again, just that the 9 to 5 Monday through Friday business model is one for the history books. Remote work isn’t just good for employees – there are advantages for companies too.

Fully remote companies have access to a larger talent pool.

Fully remote workforces allow employers to tap into a much larger talent pool. They aren’t limited to employees located in their immediate geographic area, or who want to move there. A company in rural Pennsylvania can have access to the same talent as a company in San Francisco or New York City. In fact, fully remote companies will likely have the upper hand when it comes to talent, because it eliminates the cost of living burden placed on employees in major cities.

Remote work evens out the playing field.

With remote work, the company itself becomes the most important factor in attracting talent, not where it’s located. This means that a company in rural Pennsylvania can attract the same caliber of employees as a company in New York City. This gives both businesses and smaller cities an advantage.

For employees who relocated during the pandemic, especially those who left cities for the suburbs, making the choice between returning to work if it means relocating again or quitting their jobs will not be an easy one. A recent survey showed that 1 in 3 people would look for a new job if they were required to be back in the office full time, so this is something companies need to keep in mind.

Financial benefits for both companies and employees.

Commercial real estate isn’t cheap, nor are the overhead operating costs of an office building. One remote work study showed that companies save an average of $22,000 per remote employee. Even if companies need to have some of their employees working out of an office, the cost is still reduced due to needing less space.

For employees, the savings from remote work ranges from $2,000 – $5,000 per year. Perhaps even better than that is the time (and stress) saved from not commuting. No commute means no sitting in traffic or dealing with subway delays. This benefits employers too – less stressed employees are more productive and more engaged at work.

It benefits the environment.

Remote work is good for the environment. Reducing or eliminating daily office commutes lowers air pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, and carbon footprint. With the climate crisis we’re currently in, these changes would have a major impact.

We have a unique opportunity now to create a workplace that truly works for both companies and employees. It will take some time to adapt and adjust to the changes, but if the past year is any indication, anything is possible.

Source: Forbes

Ensuring culture fit when hiring remotely

Posted on

By Christina Wood

The pandemic’s push to remote work has opened up new talent pools beyond commuting distance. But hiring remotely presents challenges, causing IT leaders to rethink culture and how to assess team fit.

When his team went all remote last year, Precisely COO Eric Yau assumed hiring would stop. But as the pandemic raged on and the company grew, it needed new talent. That’s when it became clear that remote hiring was a game changer.

“When we relaxed the idea that candidates had to be within range of our offices, we got a lot of good candidates,” Yau says. “We went from uncertainty to realizing this is a huge opportunity.”

Opening the talent pool beyond commuting range makes it possible to hire great people, but hiring remotely can be a bit like dating via an app: strange and awkward, even if it’s a terrific opportunity. Identifying technical ability in a remote interview may be easy, but uncovering the elusive alchemy of a person who will bring cultural enhancement to your team is challenging.

“You could interview someone amazing,” says James Durago, hiring manager for Google, “but they won’t do well in the wrong environment. Like if you hire LeBron James and put him in a baseball game. He won’t be at his best.”

Continue reading →

Communication Is Key When Fostering An Open And Diverse Work Environment

Posted on

by Andrew Jornod

With the rapidly changing social climate, it’s important to focus on the ways in which we, as technology leaders, are coming to the table with new ideas on how to consistently improve and cultivate the social culture and approach to diversity at our companies. Salesforce research found that employees who feel their voice is heard at work are 4.6 times more likely to be empowered to do their best work. So how do you transform a business from within to encourage greater communication, support a diverse workforce and improve collaboration and productivity? I’ve outlined impactful changes all businesses should consider as they continue to evolve and reinforce company culture.

Creating A Safe And Open Environment

Last year was challenging, and most people thought that with the beginning of this new year we would see big changes. So far, only a third of the way into the year, it seems that 2021 is not to be upstaged. As the vaccine rollout continues to be a talking point, the country has also already seen some big social events: the capitol riots, the humanitarian border crisis, the shootings in Atlanta and the shooting in Boulder, Colorado.

With the world finally starting to make heads or tails of the virus and how everyone has been affected, mentally, physically and emotionally, companies really need to take the time to recognize that events like this do not happen in a vacuum. When life-changing things happen outside the workplace, especially during working hours, it’s hard to tell employees to handle their emotions outside their workday. In response to that, it may be a good time to encourage employees to talk about their feelings, concerns or conflicts in a judgment-free zone where they can rely on the support of their coworkers and managers.

One of the ways we have done this at our company has been to promote employee-led conversations that help to gauge our internal climate. Having these conversations after major events provides an outlet for employees and provides support during these emotional and trying times. These discussions can also foster honesty and education between employees and levels of management and help build trust and understanding. It is important technology leaders ensure their employees are getting the best experience at their workplace, and to make sure they are being heard, appreciated and supported.

Talking Works

Along with the social climate, we are also seeing the most diverse group of different generational backgrounds in the workforce ever. Consequently, that comes with communication errors, differences of opinion, varying experiences and differences in communication preferences. Just recently a member of our team had a conversation with two gentlemen in our company who just could not understand why younger members of the staff do not call each other to communicate.

Oftentimes the Millennial or Gen Z generations are accustomed to getting information as quickly as possible. Instead of being upset or mad if these coworkers do not have the same preferred method of communication as you do, the best way to move forward is to be mindful of the differences between employees and achieve a compromise on communication. For example, instead of always sending a message through our online collaboration tools, our company encourages employees to try to make at least one of their communications during the day a phone call or a video chat. This is especially true in a work-from-home environment where tone and expression can be just as important as the message itself, and by standardizing video calls, employees are more apt to understand the message and the “ask.” Conversely, encouraging Baby Boomers in the organization to send a chat when they need quick resolution can help improve response times and productivity.

Effective training of these tools provides better adoption on both ends and can be the root of compromise. Communication is the basis of great relationships and can only help to better the relationships people have with each other, which in turn, can make a company even stronger.

Encourage Honest Communication

People frequently underestimate the effectiveness of having an honest conversation — especially in the workplace, where employees can often feel like their coworkers or even managers are out to get them. This can, and most often will, disrupt the effective growth of a company. With everyone guarding their feelings and trying to strategically play their cards, there is an infinite number of things that could go wrong.

Generating change and creating an open, communicative workforce can start out small. Develop a program where employees in different departments can get to know each other, offer up a forum for people to discuss world events and happenings, reward employees with one-on-one time with the executive of their choice to pick their brains and ask for advice — these are all small examples to make impactful opportunities for employees to connect on a personal level. Sharing information is key to creating strong relationships. These strong relationships lead to more empathy, self-awareness and respect for others that just might stop your next conflict before it even arrives.

Summary

Improving employee engagement is crucial for creating a diverse environment of change, flexibility, open dialogue and community building. I often say that I spend more time with my work family than my real family, and to ensure that our companies are successful, we as tech leaders must encourage trust, communication and understanding, just like we do at home. Implementing these strategies within your workforce can filter down to better performance, better employee retention and better productivity. And that is a win for everyone.

 

About Andrew Jornod

Andrew JornodWith almost 25 years of experience in the energy and utilities industry, Andrew is responsible for leading the organization through transformational growth through organic growth and strategic acquisitions. During his tenure, Andrew has led the organization through many new product and solution releases, securing net new clients of VertexOne, divestiture of non-strategic assets, and securing new capital partners to drive continued growth.

Prior to joining VertexOne, Andrew directed the global energy and utilities business unit at HCL. He was instrumental in helping HCL become the fastest growing, and one of the largest utilities service providers globally. Before HCL, Andrew was a Vice President within Oracle’s Utilities Global Business Unit, with responsibilities that included product management and development, and sales and marketing. In addition, he held key roles at Indus, British Telecom, Syntegra, Control Data Systems and Microsoft.

Source: Forbes