Being A Leader Doesn't Make You One By Brian Anderson, President, BA Search Group Most leaders have the technical expertise to do their jobs effectively. In fact, that's usually the reason they were promoted to leadership positions in the first place. But technical know-how is only part of what it takes to be an effective leader. Many managers and executives may be surprised to learn that it's not even the most important part. Technical expertise and knowledge are prerequisites to good leadership; they're necessary, but not sufficient. The ability to relate with and motivate the people who report to a leader is far more important. Much research shows that when people can work in a climate of respect, caring, honesty, collaboration, cooperation and trust, they maximize their contributions to the organization. In other words, leaders simply do not succeed without people skills -- yes, that "touchy-feely stuff." Most leaders aren't born with the relationship skills they need. When it comes to dealing with people problems, newly promoted leaders too often feel like they're winging it. And when inevitable problems and conflicts arise, they feel frustrated, even helpless. Characteristics of the most effective leaders include: -decreasing the power differential between self and team members. -creating conditions for distributing the leadership function throughout the group. -showing respect for intrinsic worth of team members. -showing respect for team members as individuals who are different from the leader. -understanding that people aren't there to be used, directed or influenced to accomplish only the leader's aims. -listening with empathy. -demonstrating acceptance. -expressing his or her own beliefs, needs and ideas honestly, clearly and without blame. -working to resolve conflicts in a way that creates mutual need satisfaction. Do a quick self-check. If you lead people, you owe it to them (and to yourself) to honestly and frankly assess the current conditions in which your team members are working. The following questions, approached with an open mind, can help you identify opportunities to improve your leadership skills and to make your team more productive, more satisfied, more loyal to you, and more likely to recognize and remedy team conflicts and people problems before they get out of hand. Ask yourself: Do I really trust the capacity of the team and its individuals to solve the problems facing us? Or do I basically trust only myself? Do I create a climate in which my team can have creative discussions by being willing to hear, understand, accept and respect all input? Or do I find myself trying to influence the outcome of discussions? Do I honestly express my own beliefs and ideas without trying to control those of others? When there are problems and conflicts, do I make it possible for them to be brought out into the open, or do I subtly communicate that they should be kept hidden? Embodied in each of these questions is a different, proven, tested people skill. And just as technical expertise is learnable, so, too, are people skills. It's an endeavor that takes training and practice, practice, practice, but the payoffs in morale, productivity and energy are both measurable and immeasurable. Brian Anderson is the principal founder of BA Search Group, an executive search, coaching and consulting practice in the Naperville-Aurora, IL market.   The Seven Demands of Leadership: What Separates Great Leaders from All the Rest? By Brian Anderson President, BA Search Group Who wants to follow someone who's going nowhere? Or someone who's unreliable or untrustworthy? Organizations wrestle with these questions and many others as they confront the elusive challenge of defining effective leadership. Most people are certain that leadership is about direction, about giving people a sense of purpose that inspires and motivates them to commit and achieve. Leadership is also about a relationship between people --leaders and followers -- that is built on firm ground; enduring values build trust. Few would disagree with these views. Not everyone, however, offers the same answer to this question: What's the best way to develop talented leaders to achieve sustained high performance? Research confirms the importance of two rather obvious demands: visioning and maximizing values. What is surprising is the presence of five other important demands that are essential to the development of all great leaders. The Demands It's no great surprise that visioning is one of the seven demands. Successful leaders are able to look out, across, and beyond the organization. They have a talent for seeing and creating the future. They use highly visual language that paints pictures of the future for those they lead. As a result, they seem to attain bigger goals because they create a collective mindset that propels people to help them make their vision a reality. These leaders also recognize that through visioning, they showcase their values and core beliefs. By highlighting what is important about work, great leaders make clear what is important to them in life. They clarify how their own values -- particularly a concern for people -- relate to their work. They also communicate a sense of personal integrity and a commitment to act based on their values. As a result, employees know where they stand with these leaders. Their values, consistent and unchanging through time, operate like a buoy anchored in the ocean, holding firm against the elements while indicating the way. By galvanizing people with a clear vision and strong values, the leaders we studied were able to challenge their teams to achieve significant work goals. In fact, those leaders themselves had been assigned significant challenging experiences at key points in their careers while being given the freedom to determine how they would achieve outcomes. Confronting challenges produces beneficial effects for leaders. It accelerates their learning curve, stretches their capacity for high performance, and broadens their horizons about what is possible for an organization to achieve. As one of the leaders we studied said, "Our company had experienced three cycles of negative revenue growth, but I knew that our next cycle would give us the opportunity to turn in our best figures ever. Everyone thought I was crazy, but we did it, then did it again." But great leaders aren't simply hard charging and highly driven. They also understand the importance of personal relationships. Indeed, the leaders we studied consistently had a close relationship either with their manager or someone in the best position to advise them. This is often someone from outside their organization who serves as their mentor. These mentoring relationships are not the product of formal company-wide mentoring programs (not that these aren't helpful). Instead, these informal, yet successful, mentoring relationships enable each individual leader's needs and differences to be taken into account. Inspired by their positive experiences with mentors, the leaders we studied have become intentional mentors themselves. They selectively pick one, two, or three highly talented individuals and invest greatly in their growth and development over a significant period of time. They see the success of these "mentees" as a reflection of their own success. These leaders practice a form of succession planning that cultivates the next generation of leaders. Beyond close one-to-one relationships, leaders also create rapport at many levels across their organization and beyond. They know the benefits of building a wide constituency. One leader said, "My work forces me to have a relationship with certain people. I just think about those I don't yet work with and figure out who might be useful to know. I nearly always find that relationships built this way bring dividends." These leaders understand networks and the importance of networking. In all of their relationships, effective leaders enlighten others because they can make sense of experience. They also learn from their mistakes and their successes, and, as they seek out a range of experts across their wide constituency, they ask questions and listen. What's more, these leaders are able to deal with the complexity of business life and help those around them to make sense of it. They do this by keeping things simple and making information accessible. This way, these leaders help individuals understand what's going on so that they are better able to achieve success. As one leader put it, "There's so much happening that affects our work. I make sure, at each meeting, that we understand all the important factors and ensure that the next steps are clearly laid out." The most revealing discovery is that effective leaders have an acute sense of their own strengths and weaknesses. They know who they are…and who they are not. They don't try to be all things to all people. Their personalities and behaviors are indistinguishable between work and home. They are genuine. It is this absence of pretense that helps them connect to others so well. Organizations are struggling to build and grow leadership capacity. Research suggests that talented leaders require the very best development experiences to realize their potential. And for this potential to be converted into sustained, high organizational performance, these experiences must be framed around the seven key demands of leadership. Shaping Leadership Development: Key Questions Visioning Who contributes to, controls, or communicates the "big picture"? Are leaders encouraged to "paint pictures" of the future? What opportunities do leaders have to talk about and shape the future? Maximizing Values How do corporate values align with individual values? Are leaders encouraged to lead with their values? Are leaders asked to describe the values that are important to them? Challenging Experience Are leaders free to think outside of conventional approaches? How much latitude are leaders afforded in decision making? Are leaders given significant responsibilities with wide-ranging delegation? Mentoring Is value attached to mentoring outside of the organization? Are leaders expected to accelerate highly talented individuals through the organization to their optimum levels of performance? Building a Constituency Are leaders expected to grow networks beyond their immediate work relationships? Does your organization promote the growth of networks through measuring their business impact? Making Sense of Experience Are leaders able to meet with peers to share understanding and learning of new issues? Is there a clear leadership focus on "lean" communication? Knowing Self Is every leader clear about his or her strengths and weaknesses? Does your organization sponsor individualism in leadership through role models? Brian Anderson is the principal founder of BA Search Group, an executive search, coaching and consulting practice in the Naperville-Aurora, IL market.   Why Great Employees Quit: What You Can Do to Keep Them By Brian Anderson, President, BA Search Group So you've gone to significant expense to recruit some top talent. With recruiting expenses at about 35% or more of an employee's first year salary, any employer would want to recoup those expenses by retaining their top talent for at least a few years. How do you keep them once you've landed them? We'll look at seven reasons why employees leave, according to Leigh Brahnam who authored The 7 Hidden Reasons Employees Leave, which can also help you answer the other side of the retention equation, "How do you keep them?" According to Leigh, the seven reasons employees leave are: 1. The job or workplace was not as expected 2. Mismatch between job and the person 3. Too little coaching and feedback 4. Too few growth and advancement opportunities 5. Feeling devalued and unrecognized 6. Stress from overwork and work-life imbalance 7. Loss of trust and confidence in senior leaders 1. The job or workplace was not as expected. Too frequently in the rush to hire, employers will over sell the job and/or not talk about any challenges the company is facing. Unfortunately, it becomes painfully obvious to the new hire once they get on board that things aren't what they were touted to be and that breeds both dissatisfaction and mistrust. The question in the employee's mind will be, "What else is wrong?" "What else are they lying about?" Employers have to be confident about their company's future even with blemishes…and all companies have them. Prospective employees will self-select into companies based on the challenges and opportunities that are most congruent with their personalities. Some people like startups, some prefer more mature, secure companies, and some people love turn-arounds. Truth in packaging will help ensure the proper fit between employee and work environment, because top employees will select the companies that fit them best. 2. Mismatch between job and the person. Don't try to fit a square peg into a round hole, no matter how much you love the person or how desperate you are to fill that too-long vacant job. Be sure the person has both the competencies necessary for the job and is the right personality fit. Competency fit is the easier of the two. However, being sure the person has the right personality for your job has to be considered. For example, most introverts do not make very good external sales people in the long run. They can go through the motions but get exhausted schmoozing because they aren't energized by being around people as true extroverts. 3. Too little feedback or coaching. Busy managers easily ignore top performers. They are low maintenance employees who bosses love, because they can set them loose and forget about them. Big mistake. Just because someone appears to be self-reliant, don't make the mistake of thinking they don't need or want feedback and coaching. In my work with top performers, I frequently hear that these folks feel guilty taking up their boss' time. Therefore, they often don't ask. You need to reach out to them. 4. Too few growth and advancement opportunities. The number one reason people stay at companies has to do with developmental opportunities, not how well they are paid. Top-flight employees want and need to have growth opportunities. They will not stay very long where they don't feel challenged and where they don't feel their bosses take development seriously. Similar to reason #3, ignoring low maintenance employees is a mistake. 5. Feeling devalued and unrecognized. Again, top employees frequently don't ask for recognition…but they are human, and I haven’t met an executive who doesn't appreciate being recognized. However, more importantly, it's imperative that employees are not treated disrespectfully. Screamers and mean bosses tend to churn top-flight employees. The least competent and most fearful employees are generally the only ones who continue working for jerks. They stay because they are fearful that they can't find another job. 6. Stress from overwork and work-life imbalance. According to Leigh, "Company leaders must determine whether their organization’s culture is unhealthy, or even toxic. When you force workers into choosing between having a life or a career, your organization has a toxic culture." Hire good people, treat them respectfully, and give them latitude to act like adults. 7. Loss of trust and confidence in senior leaders. Leaders who don't provide a clear vision and understandable path for execution are at risk. Leaders who are unethical and narcissistic will chase good employees out the door. Leigh listed three things you can do to combat these impressions, to offset and reverse a loss of trust in senior leaders: -Inspire confidence with a clear vision, a workable plan and the competence to achieve it. The first ingredient of trust is competence. People will only follow someone they feel is competent. Articulate your vision, provide a workable plan and then execute. -Back up words with actions. If you don’t follow through with your commitments, you will engender "cynicism and disengagement." -Place your trust and confidence in your workforce. Demonstrate that by delegating well and not micromanaging. Jim Collins, author of Good to Great, found that the best leaders are known for "getting the right people on the bus." He didn't mention that the tougher challenge is keeping them on the bus. These seven steps should help you retain and motivate your valued employees. Brian Anderson is the principal founder of BA Search Group, an executive search, coaching and consulting practice in the Naperville-Aurora, IL market.        Whether you are looking for that veritable professional "needle in a haystack" or just need to augment your own recruitment efforts with a dedicated team at your service, BA Search Group can help.