RealTime Leadership

Over the past year, as I visited companies and talked with leadership development professionals, I noticed a growing interest in the idea of creating a compelling Leadership Portal. The Leadership Portal usually resides on a company Intranet and is the starting point for employees looking for information on developing their leadership skills, or helping others to improve.  In most cases, companies want their Leadership Portal to be customized according to the organization’s unique values, culture, competencies and leadership behaviors.  In addition, the Leadership Portal should be dynamic, inspiring and personalized to the individual.  Here are some ideas I have collected from clients regarding Leadership Portals:

1. Dynamic Leadership Resource Guide– Typically, a Leadership Portal will list an organization’s leadership competencies and behaviors.  Accompanying each competency is an inspiring quote and description for why a particular competency is important and the implications for a leader if they fail to use the competency.  In addition, a continuously updated resource guide pointing employees to the latest books, articles, podcasts, blogs and on-the-job activities related to the competency, is extremely helpful. 
2. Personalized Leadership Development Plan – individuals visiting the Leadership Portal should have the option to create their own leadership development plan based on the recommended activities in the Leadership Resource Guide.  By selecting activities, adding resources to their plan and sharing their plan with their manager or coach, employees are taking an active role in their development.  Creating a personalized development plan with relevant and timeline activities is an important step toward improvement.
3. Executive Interview Podcasts – A Leadership Portal should be inspiring.  By adding brief executive interviews on such subjects as Integrity, Building Trust, Customer Service, Quality, Globalization, Strategy, Collaboration, Innovation, senior executives can communicate and reinforce the importance of the culture and values of the organization.  This is a valuable tool for organizations to communicate to employees the big-picture strategy and how individuals can help contribute to the success of the strategy.
4. Collaboration Tools– Generation X and Y are already adept at using social networking sites such as Facebook and Linked-In.  In the future it will be very important for organizations to have collaboration and social networking tools available to employees who are looking to grow and develop their leadership skills.  I recommend including a wiki in the Leadership Portal so that employees can edit and add to the existing Leadership Resource Guide.  In addition, I recommend a social networking tool to connect employees to other employees and leaders within their organization who can help mentor or guide their development efforts.  These kinds of collaboration and networking tools are extremely important in a global teamwork environment.
5. Assessment Tools– Employees want to know their strengths and weaknesses so they can prioritize development opportunities.  An assessment offering can be either a Self-Assessment, 180-degreee Assessment (Self & Manager) or 360-degree Assessment (Self, Manager, Direct Reports and Peers).  By including an assessment tool, the Leadership Portal can be smart in recommending activities and resources for improvement.  This in-turn enhances the user experience and streamlines the process.

What is your organizaiton doing to create a compelling and dynamic Leadership Portal?  In the not-too-distant future, the Leadership Portal will become an outward and visible symbol to your employees reflecting your organization’s level of commitment to leadership development.

Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point and Blink, and a frequent contributor to the New Yorker has a new book out this month, Outliers: The Story of Success which explores the age-old question; what separates super-successful people from the rest of us?  The mythic explanation applied to Carnegie, Morgan and other barons is that these were self-made men who relied primarily on their intelligence, personality and sheer will-power.  In a recent Fortune article, Gladwell talks about how he ultimately came to a different conclusion by doing a deep-dive investigation into more recent examples of the super-successful, like Bill Gates.   What he discovered is that hard-work and practice are important (10,000 hours is the magic number), but other factors are perhaps even more important like social context and timing:

Successful people are people who have made the most of a series of gifts that have been given to them by their culture or their history, by their generation.

This insight has very important implications for businesses intent on developing large numbers of super-successful people.  Gladwell points out that certain business cultures are much more successful than others at developing talent:

Instead of thinking about talent as something that you acquire talent should be thought of as something that you develop.  P&G is a great example of a company that does that and has prospered as a result.  Look around Wall Street, or what’s left of it today, and you’ll see lots and lots and lots of people from Goldman Sachs.  That’s not a coincidence.

But during a financial crisis, would Gladwell expect business to put soft-skill issues like Talent Management on the back-burner so they can focus on more important issues like strategy and cost-management? Gladwell’s answer:

Paradoxically, this might be the perfect time. When it’s easy to make money, you have no incentive to think about development of talent.  Now, you’re forced to.

What Gladwell is getting at here is that people are at the heart of this crisis, and it is great leadership and talent that will navigate the best companies through these difficult times.  However, I would challenge the assumption that there is no incentive to invest in talent when companies are making money.  In fact, firms like P&G and Goldman Sachs are evidence that it pays off to invest in a culture of talent development during the good times, especially because it allows them to survive the challenging times.

I was recently invited to speak to a group of mid-level managers about leadership and the speaker I followed was Dr. Izzy Justice, CEO of EQMentor who spoke to the same audience about managing the different generations in the workforce.   Izzy talked about the Top 10 Reasons Gen Xers are Unhappy at Work.  Given that I fall squarely in the Generation X fold, I was interested in this research (originally published by Tammy Erickson in her Across the Ages blog).    The list is interesting and basically rang true for me (I encourage you to read it for yourself), but I want to highlight reason number 3:

3. Most corporate career paths “narrow” at the top – the perceived range of options diminishes as individuals become increasingly specialized in specific functions or roles. X’ers crave options, which assuage your concerns about being backed into a corner.

I think this is of particular concern to many Gen Xers and it will become an even bigger challenge for Generation Y, the larger more ambitious and tech-savvy generation born after 1980.  How do companies deal with employees who want to keep their options open and constantly learn new skills?  Many such employees are not interested in joining a large bureaucratic company where the perception is that they will lose their individual creativity and flexibility.

One solution is offered in the book, Mavericks at Work, by Bill Taylor (who also writes the Practically Radical blog for HBR) and Polly LaBarre who write about how IBM is stepping up to the generational challenge.  In order to make IBM appealing to a new generation of talent that is more naturally attracted to start-ups or open source projects (where they feel they can keep options open), then to a 320,000 employee behemoth, IBM started an internship program called Extreme Blue:

To the participants, it’s a sink-or-swim immersion experience that divides highly accomplished students into small teams, assigns them to work on major problems, supplies them with barely-out-of-the-lab technology, and gives them three months to, in the words of the Extreme Blue manifesto, “start something big.”

At the end of the three months, the interns are invited to present their recommendations to IBM’s CEO Sam Palmisano and other executives.  IBM sees this program as fulfilling two goals; (1) in the short-term it helps the company attract the next generation of talent and (2) in the long-term, IBM hopes this kind of highly focused, diverse work-team will be the model for how work gets done.  Five to ten years from now, when Generation X and Y dominate the workforce, IBM will be ahead of the curve because they’re already pioneering the kind of culture and environment that will unleash the energy and creativity of its employees.

Cathy Benko, the Chief Talent Officer for Deloitte L.L.P., recently wrote an article in the New York Times about the “corporate ladder” and how it is an out-dated metaphor.  The notion of the career ladder is so ingrained in many of us that it is startling to think it just doesn’t apply the way it used to.  Cathy cites an increase of women in the workforce balancing families and careers, and a shift from baby boomers to Generation X and Y who are more willing to explore less traditional career paths.

The convergence of these talent trends is producing a huge change in behavior that’s sawing away at the corporate ladder, blurring the relationship between work and life and redefining what it means to build a career.

At Deloitte, Cathy and her colleagues have replaced the ladder metaphor with the lattice.  She says:

Lattices allow movement in many directions.  Like the literal lattices you see in gardens, these are living platforms for growth with upward momentum visible along many paths – a much closer depiction than a ladder of how today’s careers are build and talent is developed.

I love this metaphor and believe it is much more appropriate for today’s workplace.  The demographic trends driving this change are also having a major impact on how companies approach leadership development.  It used to be, leadership development was all about helping employees climb from one rung to the next.  Now, it is more important to think about what experiences and knowledge is required to move employees across, over and up their career lattice.  The moves employees make are dependent on many factors, including personal preference, family and location.  To attract and retain the best talent, we need to embrace the lattice and throw out the ladder.