Leadership at Work

Here is a brief summary from the Boston Globe of Deciding Who Leads: How Executive Recruiters Drive, Direct, and Disrupt the Global Search for Leadership Talent by Joseph Daniel McCool: “Tips on finding the best leaders.”

You can purchase McCool’s book at Amazon.com.

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Here is a commentary from D. Quinn Mills, professor emeritus, Harvard Business School, on the question of leadership succession:

How can an organization prepare for leadership succession?

There are two ways: one is immediate, the other longer term.

For immediate action to fill a executive vacancy in a firm, or a division, or a department, management should have a succession plan. It is best if the plan is formal (that is, a written plan that covers many key positions in the firm) but the plan can be informal (known by a few top executives.)

The plan should identify who in the organization should take over in a leadership position (like CEO, or CFO, or VP, or Department head) if there is a sudden vacancy. A vacancy might occur because the incumbent gets promoted, or is fired, or leaves for another company, or gets ill or even dies in an accident or of natural causes. Whatever the reason, a key job is suddenly vacant. With a succession plan, a replacement has already been identified and steps right into the job.

Because there is a plan that has identified a replacement, that person should have been being prepared for possibly holding the higher position. A succession plan is of less value when the identified successor hasn’t been prepared through training and education for the job.

Unfortunately, lack of preparation happens often, and in major situations. For example, in the American government, few vice presidents have been prepared to take over the presidency in the event that the President is unable to continue. Vice Presidents Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson both made foreign policy mistakes when they assumed the presidency suddenly, largely because they lacked training or related experience.

So a succession plan is of limited value unless it is used to identify people who are to be trained and informed so that they are prepared to step into vacancies when the vacancies arise.

The long-term way that a company prepares for succession is to develop people for leadership within the firm. A firm knows that over time it is going to need to fill in positions which are vacated for any number of reasons. So it should be training a group of managers for promotions or transfers. Probably General Electric has done this most effectively over many decades.

The keys to General Electric’s success in training managers to become successful executives are two: first, continual attention from executives to the development of managerial talent within the organization; and, second, assignments of managers to positions of profit-loss responsibility as early in their careers as possible. The decentralized management structure and many subsidiary businesses of General Electric make assignments of this nature more readily available than in many other, more centralized, firms.

For information on MindEdge’s online self-paced “The Successful Leader:
Introduction to Leadership” course, please click here.

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Twentieth-century psychologist Kurt Lewin developed an influential three-stage model of how organizational change occurs. Lewin’s model was based on his observations of group dynamics and organizational development. This “unfreezing-change-refreeze” model focuses on how people can be motivated to accept organizational change and reject and replace the status quo with a new approach.

COMMENTARY from D. Quinn Mills, professor emeritus, Harvard Business School, on Kurt Lewin’s Change Model:

Lewin’s change model continues to be useful. More recent management insights, however, have modified the way we look at organizational change.

Recent thinking about managing change stresses the importance of the Unfreezing stage. Far too often people identify a problem then spend time and effort figuring out a solution. Finally a solution is arrived at and the people involved, usually only one or two, become very excited. They jump to what Lewin labels the Change stage. They take their solution to a broader group in the company, only to have it rejected. Yet they’re sure that the solution was the right one.

What has gone wrong? The answer is that a person should never offer a solution before others accept that there is a problem. People don’t want to fix things that they don’t think are broken. When we insist that they do, they are most likely to reject our solution. Worse, once rejected a solution is likely to be discredited for the future, even when the problem becomes apparent to all and it was in fact the best solution.

Since Unfreezing is so important, how should we go about it? The first thing is to get people close to the situation. Let them discover for themselves what the situation actually is by coming face-to-face with the problem. To get police sergeants to recognize that traditional police tactics weren’t working, the police commissioner of a large city reassigned many for a period to high crime areas. It worked. Once the sergeants realized that there was a real problem in the field, they became open to solutions that the commissioner was prepared to offer.

In the financial services industry executives who are aware of the importance of the Unfreezing stage insist that managers in their companies “manage by the facts.” What they mean is that managers should not accept explanations for results that are based on assumptions rather than on actual data. When managers look at the facts, they often get a very different picture of what is happening than before and begin looking for solutions to the new problems they perceive.

Stage Two of Lewin’s model is insightful and correct, but sketchy. Modern thinking has elaborated the Change stage into multiple steps, adding depth to it.

Stage Three, Refreezing, is misguided.

A modern manager doesn’t want to freeze anything in a rapidly changing world. This stage is better rephrased as “Consolidation” of the new so that it becomes the culture of the moment. But we want to keep it flexible so that it can be more readily unfrozen when new problems arise and when change again becomes necessary.

For information on MindEdge’s online self-paced “Leading and Managing Change” course, please click here.

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Harvard Business School professor John P. Kotter outlined an eight-stage change management process in his 1996 book, Leading Change. This framework has been embraced by many as an accurate representation of the steps needed to effect major change within an organization.

COMMENTARY from D. Quinn Mills, professor emeritus, Harvard Business School, on Kotter’s change model:

Kotter’s Eight Stage Change Management Process is a useful approach. Followed carefully, it will produce good results. That said, it requires some care in application.

The eight steps aren’t of equal importance, nor should a leader spend equal amounts of time, effort and resources on each. The first stage is crucial–people must understand that there is a problem that needs to be solved, or an opportunity that it is important to seize. They must also be helped to believe, if it is true, that they will gain, not lose, from the change.

If people don’t accept the need for a change, and if they believe they are going to suffer from it, then resistance will mount and Kotter’s eight stages will need to be extended to several more, under the heading, “Overcoming resistance to change.” But if the first of Kotter’s steps is done correctly, then resistance can be avoided, and there will be no need for an extended effort to overcome resistance to change. This is the most important observation to be made about Kotter’s model– how important it is to focus on step one and get it right before moving on.

The second stage of the process reveals it as a highly political approach–not in the negative sense of politics, but in the positive–that it involves a number of people working together to accomplish a purpose. Kotter advises us to form a guiding coalition to direct the change process. It’s a coalition because he thinks we should have the various stakeholders included.

Finally, the process Kotter describes shouldn’t really be considered a management approach, per se. Instead, it’s a process for leading, not managing, change. Managerial approaches focus on clearly defining objectives, making detailed plans, setting time tables, assigning responsibilities, and monitoring progress via supervision and metrics; and finally, intervening when things are going well.

In contrast, leadership approaches focus on energizing other people to take action. Kotter’s process is a method of energizing others around a goal. Hence once a need for change is established via the first stage, then developing and communicating a vision and empowering others to act on the vision become crucial. These are leadership activities.

Why does Kotter recommend a leadership process rather than a management approach? Presumably because he thinks it is more likely to be successful. Probably that is true. Nothing is more difficult than to achieve a change in the culture of the organization (Kotter’s final stage) by using managerial methods. People have to be brought to welcoming change via leadership; since they can rarely be put in that position by direction and orders.

For information on MindEdge’s online self-paced “Leading and Managing Change” course, please click here.

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American psychologist Bruce W. Tuckman developed an influential model of team development, first enunciated in a 1965 article “Developmental sequence in small groups,” published in Psychological Bulletin. Tuckman’s model traced the evolution of a team through four stages: forming, storming, norming and performing. Tuckman argued that these stages were necessary to build an effective team.

COMMENTARY from D. Quinn Mills, professor emeritus, Harvard Business School, on Bruce Tuckman’s team model:

Tuckman’s model has remained on target. The four states of team development that he identified are still regarded as the main stages. His emphasis on the dynamics of team progress remains valuable.

The limitation of the model is that it suggests that once the four stages are completed in the initial formation of the team, then a steady-state emerges in which the team simply performs well week after week, month after month, year after year. But many cases show that teams require continual monitoring and intervention by team leaders to keep a performance edge.

Without continual attention from team leaders, teams tend to degenerate into contending cliques in which personal animosities destroy team effectiveness.

In other words, Tuckman’s model describes the early stages of team development – the stages from which a team is launched successfully into its business mission. But there are later stages which are crucial to continuing team effectiveness which Tuckman ignores, and thereby suggests do not exist. But they do exist and they are very important to the continuing success of a team.

The challenge of building and continuing effective teams goes well beyond the development stage.

For information on MindEdge’s online self-paced “Leading Teams” course, please click here.

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Shoshana Zuboff is a former Harvard Business School professor and author of The Support Economy. From BusinessWeek, here is her article: “The Call for Epochal Leadership.”

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From CNNMoney.com, here is an article on leadership and a company’s internal succession plans: “Passing Your Firm’s Leadership Torch.”

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From Fortune magazine, here are the best practices for developing leaders from the editors’ selection for the top ten companies for leadership: “Top 10 Companies for Leaders.”

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From Fortune magazine, here is an online leadership quiz: “Are you a good leader?”

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You can read the article and biographies of these leaders at U.S. News & World Report.

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