Category Archives: Human Resources

Differentiating Your Company Through Strategy and Talent

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Are you selling vanilla ice cream? Most likely you aren’t literally selling it, but do you sell a product that’s basically like your competitor’s – a plain, basic commodity?

Book summaries are our vanilla ice cream. Although we have distinguished our summaries from those of our competitors by the selection of titles, quality of writing, and thoroughness of the summary, some people still consider all book summaries alike. This is why we’ve gone further to separate ourselves from the competition.

We have brought together talented staff to help us provide subscribers greater access to the authors and their work through hosting weekly webinars with book authors, interviews with the authors to gain clearer insight into their lives and ideas, and launched our Executive Insights series to also provide video interviews with executives who are putting these new ideas into practice. In addition, we provide a customized library for each subscriber to search and use this content, while providing access through apps as well.

This is the basic concept behind Steve Van Remortel’s book Stop Selling Vanilla ice Cream. In order to differentiate yourself from the competition, you need the right talent and strategy to make it happen. Van Remortel goes so far as to say that “there is no difficulty any viable enterprise can confront that that cannot be surmounted by improving its strategy and optimizing its talent.”

He provides five fundamentals to help define an organization’s route from where they are today all the way to greater prosperity and effectiveness.

  1. Differentiation – deliver a competence that creates a clear differentiation for your organization.
  2. Tangible Value – don’t just say you’re the best – prove it.
  3. Talent Management – implement a talent management system that enables your organization to identify, select, develop and retain talent.
  4. Tactical Department Plans – develop and execute action plans that work “on” the business in each department of your organization.
  5. Plan Execution – institute a plan execution program to insure an organizational culture of discipline that focuses on accountability.

If you’re tired of selling vanilla ice cream and would like to work out a differentiation plan, please join us on April 23rd to hear Steve’s Stop Selling Vanilla Ice Cream process in detail and to ask your questions throughout the presentation. Register now for Differentiating Your Company Through Strategy and Talent.

How Business Leaders Take Charge in New Roles

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LEADERSHIP TRANSITIONS

THE TRUTH ABOUT TRANSITIONS

Despite all the literature on leadership, most leaders are ill prepared for the move to a new leadership role, write researchers Richard Elsner and Bridget Farrands in their book, Leadership Transitions. One of the major barriers to a successful transition is the set of stubborn myths that create false expectations about the process. For example, many new leaders believe that they will be given all of the information they need to succeed in their new role. In truth, there are often “undiscussables” that no one shares with the new leaders, resulting in unexpected failures or setbacks. The authors give specific cases when such undiscussables caused problems. In one case, a new sales director saw sales plummet in his first year. What no one had told this new leader, write the authors, was that “the final year of the last leader was spent frontloading sales contracts so that he could retire in glory, leaving a legacy where the next year could only yield disastrous results.” In another case, a new leader wasn’t told that his market was about to collapse.

One of the most common myths, write Elsner and Farrands, is that a new leader must decisively and immediately show the direction in which he or she wants to take the organization or function. Any kind of delay or hesitation can be seen as weakness. The best leaders, however, understand that they are entering an organization “in flow” — an organization that is not at a standstill waiting for leadership, but is moving and operating. It’s the job of a new leader to clearly understand that operation — the strategy, the people, the strengths and weaknesses — before coming in with sweeping changes.

Three Phases

According to Elsner and Farrands, the transition to a new leadership role takes place in three phases. The first phase is Arrival. This is a time when the new leader hits the unexpected barriers, complications and unknowns, and starts to doubt his or her competency. Questions that come up in this phase include: When will I ever feel competent again? Who do I talk to? Who is trustworthy? The new leaders also find out in this phase that the reality of the role on the inside is different from what was described. The core task of this phase is to meet and know the organization.

The second phase is Survival, write the authors, when new leaders clarify for themselves their core values, and then, guided by those core values, win the mandate to lead.

The third phase is Thriving, in which leaders can now use their experience to know what really matters and how to move forward. The authors carefully explain all of the issues involved in the three phases and then offer a small checklist of actions for each issue.

Tensions

Throughout the transition process, write Elsner and Farrands, leaders are going to find themselves pulled between conflicting polarities. The authors have identified eight polarities, which they call “tensions,” and offer specific advice on how to manage each of these tensions. The “mission” tension, for example, is the tension between change and stability. The “loyalty” tension requires the leader to balance loyalty to the team and loyalty to the larger organization or hierarchy. Another example is the “decision-making” tension between imposing and facilitating.

Elsner and Farrands successfully build on their decades of research, interviews and consulting practices to offer detailed, practical and specific guidance for any leader about to embark on a transition to a new role. Leadership Transitions is how-to business book writing at its finest.

Focus On Your Strengths

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We’ve all seen the typical performance appraisal. You evaluate an employee’s (or your own) strengths and weaknesses, and then note how you might improve the areas of weakness in the coming year. While it makes sense logically to focus on ways to improve our weakest areas, it may not be the most effective way to help us or the company.

Zenger and Folkman, in their latest book How to Be Exceptional, recommend a completely different plan of action: focus on an employee’s strengths and how to build them. While much has been written recently about identifying your strengths, Zenger & Folkman focus on how to dramatically improve these competencies.

“We’ve found in our research that there is a huge incentive for leaders to develop three to five traits, behaviors or competencies, so that these strengths are in the 90th percentile in comparison with the rankings for other leaders. When that happens, both the leader and the leader’s organization truly flourish.” Zenger & Folkman

Why are these great leaders so important to an organization?

  1. Great leaders attract others with talent.
  2. Great leaders discover and pull out hidden abilities in those around them.
  3. Great leaders tend to stay and build.

So it only makes sense to do what is necessary to identify and improve the strengths of your leaders. If you would like to hear more about how to build the strengths of the leaders in your organization, then please join us on January 30th to hear John (Jack) Zenger and Joseph Folkman explain the steps behind the strengthening process.

Soundview subscribers attend webinars free of charge, and for all others the price is just $59 to fill your conference room with colleagues. Register today for this Soundview Live webinar How to Be Exceptional, and bring your questions for Jack and Joseph.

Do You Have Global Leaders?

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A company can become global overnight, like when MetLife purchased Alico from AIG, or when Hewlett-Packard merged with Compaq. All of a sudden a company has people in multiple countries with various cultures, languages and ways of doing business.

Are your leaders ready for transglobal leadership? Or do you need to develop leaders that can handle this challenge in order to succeed globally? In their book Winning with Transglobal Leadership, authors Starkey, Ravi, Cooke and Barge provide a process for accessing your organization’s global capability and developing the leaders who will drive success.

They begin by listing the four classic syndromes of leaders who are not ready for transglobal leadership:

  •  The egocentric syndrome – things can be done only the way the home country does them.
  • The language syndrome – the best leaders speak my language.
  • The Western syndrome – we’re from the West and have been building business longer than you, so we know best.
  • The cultural assumption syndrome – we assume we know about the other party’s culture and what is relevant in our culture is relevant elsewhere.

If any of these ways of thinking ring true in your company, then perhaps you could use some help with assessing your transglobal leadership capabilities. To learn more about transglobal leadership, join us for our Soundview Live webinar on January 22nd. We are fortunate to have Linda Starkey, Nazneen Razi and Robert Cooke with us to explain their strategy and answer your questions.

What Does the Future Hold for HR?

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If you work in the editorial department, your focus is generally on content, deadlines and publishing the best information possible. If you’re in the marketing department, then you tend to focus on the brand, marketing strategies, and ROI. And if you’re part of human resources, you’re all about hiring and training the best.

In their extensive research, the team at RBL Group has found that this is the case with the human resources department. In their latest book HR from the Outside In, the authors from RBL point out that HR people tend to define “business” as “HR business.” But to be of greatest value to the organization, they need to radically change their inward-focused viewpoint to that of the company as a whole.

From the book: “The real business is external: the context and setting in which the business operates, the expectations of key stake­holders, and the strategies that give a company a unique competitive advantage. If HR professionals are truly to contribute to business performance, then their mindset must center on the goals of the business. They must take that outside reality and bring it into everything they do, practicing their craft with an eye to the business as a whole and not just their own department. Focusing on the business of the business enables HR profes­sionals to add meaningful and sustainable value.”

These are areas where HR needs to re-focus:

Placement and promotion from the outside in: Rather than be the employer of choice, we want to be the employer of choice of employees our customers want to work with.

Training from the outside in: Customers, suppliers, investors, and regula­tors are invited to help design the content of training to make sure that what is taught meets external expectations.

Rewards from the outside in: Customers help determine which employees are rewarded for their efforts.

Performance management from the outside in: The department gives key customers the opportunity to assess its performance review standards and tell the company if those standards are consistent with their expectations.

Leadership from the outside in: HR helps the company focus on developing a leadership brand, where external customer expectations translate to internal leadership be­haviors.

Communication from the outside in: HR makes sure that messages presented to employees are also shared with customers and investors, and vice versa.

Culture from the outside in: We like to define culture as the identity of the organization in the mind of key customers, made real to every employee every day.

If your HR department needs realignment to focus from the outside in, join us on December 18th, when co-author and RBL principal Jon Younger will be joining us for our Soundview Live webinar, The Future of Human Resources. You can invite your whole HR department to listen in on one registration.