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Tag Archive for: Management

Six Keys to Leading Successfully During Transition

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By Professor Dave Ulrich, Ross School of Business

The last few months have seen noteworthy CEO appointments in South Africa and the rest of the world.  At home, MTN announced in June that Rob Shuter will replace Sifiso Dabengwa as chief executive in 2017, and in September it was announced that Sisa Ntshona will take over the reins at South African Tourism.  Internationally, Vicki Hollub became the first woman to lead US independent oil giant Occidental Petroleum, a Fortune 500 company, and Edward Bastian stepped into the corner office at Delta Airlines.

Changing a company’s top leadership can raise a lot of questions about its immediate and long-term future, and may even have a material effect on the company’s value and stock pricing. Many, both inside and outside the company, look to the CEO to set the tone in the immediate aftermath of any major change. Here are a few things that any CEO leading a company through a transition should keep in mind:

  1. Be aware of how the departures look to outsiders: Any leader is made stronger by the leaders he or she creates. Leaders should multiply others and make them better, and talk about “we” more than “I.” When an entire team leaves, it may send a signal to investors and others watching that a leader is not empowering his or her leadership team.
  2. Remind people watching, of your track record of leading people to success: An effective leader delivers results and takes personal responsibility for doing so. In high tech firms, there is often “patient” capital that will provide market value far beyond earnings—as seen in companies like Uber and Amazon—but executives need a track record of building market presence and share in clear and measurable ways. At a time when doubt runs high, a CEO should reassure those watching that he or she has a strong action plan and vision.
  3. Position the departures as an opportunity for growth: An effective leader has insight into industry trends and how to position his or her company to win. In fast-moving social media industries, it is critical to continually reinvest and create a future. For example, Google may not succeed in balloons or driverless cars, but its leaders are constantly positioning themselves to be the innovators and leaders of the future. There’s opportunity for the CEO and other company spokespeople to message the departures as a chance to propel the company forward.
  4. Hire the right talent to replace the people who have left: Good leaders surround themselves with better people. The most confident leaders are able to hire and develop very competent teams; the least confident leaders often try to make themselves look better by bringing in people who are not as effective. Whether someone has left or was asked to leave doesn’t matter, as long as the CEO takes this opportunity to replace them with someone even more closely aligned with the company’s goals. This will help propel the company forward.
  5. Stay true to the company’s mission: Effective leaders should turn customer brand promises into leadership actions in order to build trust. Walmart’s leadership team is dedicated to delivering low cost; Disney leaders are dedicated to guest experience. Twitter’s challenge is to create a clear external brand promise to customers and then use that as criteria for its leadership team.
  6. Above all, put the company and its success first: Effective leaders build cultures and HR systems that institutionalize the leadership. When the company becomes more important than the leader, it is more likely to navigate, and even thrive, through a transition.

Leadership transitions happen, especially when a company is entering a new strategic phase, and the current executive team isn’t the right one to get the company to where it needs to be. But all too often, the transition itself focuses too much on the individual people involved and not enough on the requirements and unique needs of the company. By keeping the focus where it always belongs—on how these developments can serve the greater business goals—a CEO can lead his or her company to an even stronger position.

Dave Ulrich is the Rensis Likert Professor of Business at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business and author of Leadership Capital Index. Ulrich is ranked as the #1 management guru by Business Week, has been profiled by Fast Company as one of the world’s top 10 creative people in business, and listed as a Top 5 Coach in Forbes.  Ulrich was in South Africa last week leading an ongoing series of events on Human Capital, hosted by Business Results Group and the Gordon Institute of Business Science.

CEO Advice – Jannie Mouton – “It’s What You Focus On”

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We hear often that the business environment in South Africa is prohibitively challenging. Undoubtedly much more needs to be done to unburden businesses, particularly small businesses, from the bureaucratic red tape. However a less competitive environment is a huge advantage. Jannie Mouton, founder of PSG…

“Yes, we have unbelievable challenges, but as I often tell people, we started a bank called Capitec in South Africa and it’s an unbelievable success. We don’t have a chance at starting something like that in America or Europe. It’s already been done there.”

Mouton feels there are opportunities everywhere. “For me the [RSA] environment throws up obvious opportunities in education, banking, the food sector, and now electricity.”  

Rather than seeing problems, how about we see opportunities. In fact, make a mental note of whatever you complain about next. Could that be an opportunity? If it’s not yours, it’s certainly someone else’s.  

Moutons advice “Formulate your plan, refer back often, adapt as things change and EXECUTE!”

Johannes “Jannie” Mouton, a qualified chartered accountant, is the founder and chairman of PSG Financial Services (now serving as a non-executive director). He is a renowned South African businessman with over 35 years experience in financial management and investment banking.

Where have the Leaders gone?

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Leaderex 2016 held in Johannesburg last month posed an important question some of South Africa’s top CEOs, heads of business school and executive teams; “Where have all the leaders gone?”

The question provided a great transition into discussions about the state of leadership in South Africa, and the world in general, and laid the foundation for a host of sparkling debates and frank discussions on leadership. It would seem, from popular consensus, that the demise of leadership in South Africa, whilst a real challenge, may have been somewhat exaggerated.  

A Local View

Prof. Nicola Kleyn, Dean of GIBS echoed the feelings of many at Leaderex – “leadership starts with self”. She highlighted that our own day-to-day lives often demand that we play multiple leadership roles. This message supports conventional wisdom, that no matter who we are, or what status we hold, we all have a leadership role to play. “We have passed the point where we can simply look on and shake our heads. We all need to stand up and be counted” said Kleyn.

But how do we get this right? How do we turn around the confusion to create clarity around leadership? According to Dave Duarte, founder of digital marketing company Treeshake, it’s all about direction. The void is simply because “many leaders are more worried about holding an office than about creating direction”. Duarte’s view was backed by Jonathan Foster-Pedley from Henley Business School who stated that “The point of leadership is to provide people with purpose and meaning, and a sense of integrity and value. A good leader will make you and me give every last thing we have in the service of something we would die for.”

Yes We Can

So the question is, are we even remotely capable?  “Yes!” That was the clear message from the University of Stellenbosch’s Piet Naudé.  “We do have leaders capable of providing direction”. But as events unfold in pre-election United States and post-Brexit United Kingdom, it would seem that we are simply part of a bigger challenge.  “The world is currently battling the wrong kind of leadership. Leaders who use populist language and draw people back into their nationalistic and ethnic self-enclosed lives, whilst [what we need is] more openness and cooperation in a global world,” he said. Leadership is a responsibility, and just like businesses have a responsibility to its own employees, customers and stakeholders, so too is there a responsibility toward playing a moral and socially conscious role in providing direction for people.  When there is political uncertainty, business plays an even more critical role in guiding the performance and morals of the people it chooses to serve and employ.  Yet, to fulfil this role, we all need to be open to learning, change, and trying different approaches to achieve results.

A Lifelong Lesson

There are thousands of books, podcasts, and training courses on the topic of leadership, so many that it becomes hard to know which one to read, believe, implement. But can the skill of leadership really be learned or is this something we’re born with?  For the most part, our leadership lives start out with mimicry. For many of us, leadership skills are acquired from our earliest role models, and we quickly play back the tapes once given to us by parents, guardians, managers, community leaders and professors. So it’s not really what we’re born with but rather how we’re raised as leaders.  A leadership development challenge is figuring out how to break the patterns of the past and provide leaders with a new set of skills, tools and techniques for leading effectively in the workplace. Yet the study of leadership is no more an intervention than winning an election is an overnight game. Leadership is a lifelong study. And it would seem that the earlier in life you start, the better.

Leadership is the pursuit of greatness, achieved through others – a task that mankind may never be able to definitively tick. There is no silver bullet for leadership, but the positive and conscious application of a leadership philosophy can cause an attitude shift that helps you discover some great ammunition for leading along the way.

Whichever leadership philosophy you choose to follow, be mindful that it is just for now. The lessons we need to learn as leaders will continue to evolve, and change, over time. Perhaps our original question is rhetorical.  It’s not “where have all the leaders gone?” but more a statement of fact, that “leadership is forever a work in progress” and we should all be striving to build our own leadership capacity.

The great minds that coalesced at Leaderex offered us some starting points. Ponder these daily, for some time, and see what unfolds on your journey:  Listen. Have strong values. Inspire others. Know your purpose. Be a role model. Strive to achieve the impossible. Be Visionary. Be bold. Be transparent. And, be kind.  We are all living examples of leadership, and we all have the power to make a positive and meaningful difference.   

Performance Management Faces Major Paradox

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Gone are the days of performance reviews. Dave Ulrich explains to Alan Hosking from HR Future how companies can resolve the performance management paradox by clarifying expectations, defining consequences, establishing metrics and standards, and bringing it all together through conversation. In what way is the thinking on performance management changing? A senior leader at a company recently said, “We have done away with performance appraisal because it causes so many problems.”

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Why neuroscience matters for business

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It’s imperative that business leaders can create a lasting environment in which creativity, meaning and purpose can thrive. How and why does neuroscience come into this? Harnessing neuroscience lets us embed sustainable behaviour change in existing leadership patterns, in turn leading teams to be more innovative and allowing organisations to flourish within a culture of trust.

Our brains are by no means fixed or set in adulthood: we are all capable of neuroplasticity, changing the way with think and feel about things.  If we want to make a change, say from fixed to growth mindset, we have to do it consciously and deliberately with awareness, focus and attention. In applying ourselves to a new skill or activity in this way, we can retain the capacity for the brain to change, reformat and potentially grow well into our 60s.

We can of course also help the brain by ensuring that we care for it. When working with new clients, the first thing we tackle is not just their surrounding environment, but their internal environment. Sleep is one of the key factors in neurological health that cannot be ignored. Many executives survive on far too little. What they don’t realise is that lack of sleep can have the same effect on your decision-making ability as being drunk. This is not what executives are hired and paid for. Seven to nine hours of sleep is key for the cerebrospinal fluid that sits around your brain and spinal cord to filter through the brain.  We can also help the brain by resting during the day (short naps, for example) if we want to and are able to.

What we put in our bodies as fuel also has a huge impact on how our brain works. Our body is not just a convenient vehicle for moving the brain from meeting to meeting. We receive a lot of information and input from our bodies. In the stomach and gut, you find almost all of the neurotransmitters – such as serotonin and dopamine – that are also active in the brain, and help us make decisions and function in everyday life.The gut is often referred to as the other brain. Caring for both body and brain with a healthy diet, we can improve our brain’s effectiveness at work. Good hydration is equally important; likewise, cutting back on alcohol and caffeine is ideal.

Senior leaders also need to understand the effect that stress hormones – cortisol and adrenaline – can have on our bodies and on those around us. What’s even more interesting is that cortisol can spread around an office. That’s right. It hangs around the body and can be absorbed by others through the skin; this effect is even stronger is if it is the leader that is stressed. Reducing cortisol and adrenaline are key to a happy and creative work environment. It can be sweated out through exercise. Other things that help include mindfulness, meditation, journaling and coaching – where you can release tension and worrisome thoughts onto paper or to another person.

Sometimes it’s not possible to remove the stressors from our lives. In these cases resilience, or an ability to deal with stress, is key. If we are able to use our brain plasticity to reframe and rethink the stress we’re feeling, we will be more resilient to its negative effects.

In sum, neuroscience turns out to be far more important for business than we might first imagine. Neuroscience-based coaching, and drawing on the remarkable plasticity of the brain, helps create the ideal environment and mindset in which business leaders can thrive, enjoy their work, and build happier teams too.
Tara Swart, CEO of The Unlimited Mind, is a medical doctor and neuroscientist. She will be speaking at South Africa’s only ‘Happiness-at-Work’ event this December. Learn more here.

Leading Like a Multiplier

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As the knowledge economy takes hold, companies around the world are rapidly realizing that the future value of their business no longer lies in the ownership of infrastructure and technology, but in intangible assets such as brand, intellectual property and people.  And those people all report to someone, a leader.  So how do leaders get more from their existing assets?

In 2013 Peter Bregman, a leadership development consultant writing for Forbes magazine, suggested that “there is a massive difference between what we know about leadership and what we do as leaders”, adding that “I’ve never seen a leader fail because he or she didn’t know enough about leadership”.  Yet knowing, without doing, isn’t knowing.  

Leadership development is an industry in its own right, with numerous emerging development programmes punting their own unique formula about “what to do”.  There are many to choose from, and some fail dismally, leaving companies floundering about what to do next.  Yet some leadership development techniques stick and get traction – not just at a business level, but at a global level.  Liz Wiseman’s research on “Multipliers” exemplifies this kind of traction.

Listed on Thinkers 50 as one of the top 10 leadership thinkers in the world, Wiseman reflected on her 17 years of experience at Oracle and embarked on a research project focusing on the question, “How do some leaders seem to get more out of their teams than their counterparts?”.  The global project was conducted across 4 continents and 120 companies.  The result was astonishing and yet simple: great leaders do 5 things well, so well that they double their access to their team’s intelligence than their diminishing counterparts.

Every company out there would be thrilled to get double the value from their existing assets.  Wiseman’s research demonstrates that leaders who act as “multipliers” are not only successful, but they have a resoundingly positive and profitable effect on organizations—getting more done with fewer resources, developing and attracting talent, and cultivating new ideas and energy to drive organizational change and innovation.  Most importantly, multiplier skills can be learned and developed. Quite simply, Wiseman’s Multipliers approach tells leaders what to do to get more intelligence out of their existing teams.  Here in South Africa, companies like SAB, SAsol, Atlas Copco, Old Mutual and Standard Bank are already putting multiplier theory into practice, with good effect.

5 Secrets of Leading like a Multiplier

Multiplying leaders do 5 things: they act as talent magnets, liberators, challengers, debate makers and investors.

Talent Magnets don’t have a shortage of talent, quite the opposite – people line up to work for them.  They have an innate ability to identify what Wiseman calls the “native genius” in each member of their team, naming the talent and then putting it to work for them.  They are not constrained by traditional job descriptions, but rather seek to apply the talent of their team to the job at hand.  

Liberators free people up to do their best thinking.  Instead of providing all the answers, liberators have learned the art of asking the question, facilitating conversations that encourage people to find their own answers.  Multiplying leaders encourage people to think for themselves instead; those employees quite literally report that they become smarter.

Challengers are up for precisely that – a challenge.  The have the ability to stretch people beyond their current capability, thrusting people out of their comfort zones in such a way that the “stretch is met”. As people step into their new zone, they discover a level of capability that they never knew existed.

Debate Makers create the ultimate democracy, convinced that the best answers will come from the group. Instead of setting teams up to fail and fight, Multipliers who facilitate debate give their teams time to research their position, clearly define the parameters and goals, and then “pit their wits against each other” to unleash the potential of what lies in the realm of possibility.

Investors answer the biggest question of all: how do we get people in the business to be accountable for the outcome?  Investors know that real ownership and accountability only comes when the individual or team have made the decision themselves, what Wiseman terms “giving them 51% of the vote”.  A courageous act?  Maybe, but one that will forever change the landscape of your business. 

Written by Nicola Tyler