Essam B. is one of the best Saudi nationals I have ever had the privilege to mentor. High Potential employees, like Essam, who actually put to action what they learn. Leaders, like Essam, who transfer their experience for the development of their employees.

I first met Essam years ago. He applied to have his OJT (On the Job training) with my department. He was a young, energetic and ambitious Saudi that was overflowing with questions and willingness to listen. Like most Departments in the Bank, we treat OJT’s as employees. We don’t give them trivial tasks like making coffee or running errands. Our OJTs get to learn our business. They get to contribute to our Departments vision.

After he graduated from KFUPM (the most progressive University in Saudi Arabia at the time) he applied for and got a job in our Bank. He reported directly to me. Years later, he got the opportunity to work for a start-up telecom. It was sad to see him resign from the bank but clearly it was for his career growth.

He started rising up in the companies he works for. He moved from one company to another. Essam is currently the Chief Operating Officer of the largest Mega Recruitment agency in Middle East. They hire more than 8,000 employees for various companies all over the Kingdom.

Despite his success, he still remembers his beginnings. He sent me text yesterday asking for a few minutes of my time. As soon as I agreed, I got an international call from him.

He was at odds with a management decision. He wanted to seek my advice. He had a highly technical employee promoted to management level sometime back. Remembering that subject matter experts do not automatically become great managers, he wanted to correct the situation.

However, his superior was not convinced. His boss did not want to lose the manager in the role because of this technical capabilities.

I asked Essam for his views. Essam said that he needed someone for the job who is 80% a great manager and 20% a technical person. The existing manger was the opposite, 90% technical and 10% manager. He wanted to move the existing manager to a more technical role and at the same time keep him as a technical adviser.

Essam will then appoint another manger to take care of the department and the people. He wanted to put someone with strong management skills.

Essam was on the right track. I told him this. He just needed another opinion from someone thousands of miles away.

This is a great example of a leaders humility. This shows a strong leader acknowledging that he still needs outside advise to validate his thoughts.

This is also just one example of the power of a strong mentoring culture. A mentoring culture that was planned and executed to develop high potential employees to take on management positions.

More power to you Essam. May you continue adding great leadership value to your company.

See you soon.

Jordan

http://www.imutan.com

http://www.axelgabe.com

We have several clients that requested assistance in reviewing their strategies. They built their strategies with the guidance of a local consultant. A few things emerge when we reviewed the work they have done. A few tips to other local organizations seeking to create or update their strategies.

1. Vital few – The resulting number of strategic plans was simply a lot. How can we execute strategies supported by too many projects? Focus on the vital few that jump starts the strategy on year one. The key words being ‘vital few’.

2. Separate the projects from day to day work – A project is an initiative that has a start, an end and an output. Day to day work (or business as usual – bau) is something you do on a regular or operational basis. Sometimes these two gets mixed up and confuses people. Don’t’ confuse your employees.

3. Provide the skills – Most of the time, companies assign important initiatives to employees and yet do not provide them the necessary project management skills. The employees are later blamed when they fail. Don’t assign projects to fail.

4. Understand the roles – A project has more than one person responsible for its success. The project manager is accountable for the overall success. However, there are other important players that need to be acknowledged. Understand that sponsors, accountable executives, subject matter experts, project teams, steering committees also have an important role to play. It takes a team to succeed.

5. Keep Project Management Simple – Project Management methodology and techniques can get complicated. This is fine with professional project managers. However, 95% of projects are assigned to normal employees. They have their paying day job to worry about. Give them a simple project management process to use. Keep things simple and template driven.

6. Review for success – Another common pitfall is the lack of a review process. Out of sight, out of mind. Projects that are not reviewed tend to fade away until an executive asks about it. The matriarch of a huge logistics conglomerate commented that certain projects in her company lasted 10 years and remained uncompleted. Once they put in place a governance process, they completed two projects in the first two months. Keep the project progress in sight.

7. Measure the benefits – Most initiatives are implemented to generate business benefits. Unless the project is mandated by a regulating body, a project is implemented to generate revenue increase or loss/cost reduction.

Companies that address the seven keys mentioned above have a higher chance of having successful initiatives. Successful initiatives result in a successful strategy.

No matter how great your strategies are, if they are complicated or unimplemented then it is useless. It is not worth the paper it is printed on. The best companies have simple strategies that are implemented very well.

How does your strategy look like?

If you are interested in finding out more about having a simple approach to an effective strategy execution, drop us an email. Let us come over and present the concept to your team for free. All it takes is 90 minutes or less.

Have a great day!

Jordan

http://www.imutan.com

http://www.axelgabe.com

Companies fail to choose the candidate with the right talent for the job 82% of the time, Gallup finds

Management talent exists in every company. It’s often hiding in plain sight.

Gallup has found that one of the most important decisions companies make is simply whom they name manager. Yet our analytics suggest they usually get it wrong. In fact, Gallup finds that companies fail to choose the candidate with the right talent for the job 82% of the time.

Bad managers cost businesses billions of dollars each year, and having too many of them can bring down a company. The only defense against this problem is a good offense, because when companies get these decisions wrong, nothing fixes it. Businesses that get it right, however, and hire managers based on talent will thrive and gain a significant competitive advantage.

Managers account for at least 70% of variance in employee engagement scores across business units, Gallup estimates. This variation is in turn responsible for severely low worldwide employee engagement. Gallup reported in two large-scale studies in 2012 that only 30% of U.S. employees are engaged at work, and a staggeringly low 13% worldwide are engaged. Worse, over the past 12 years, these low numbers have barely budged, meaning that the vast majority of employees worldwide are failing to develop and contribute at work.

Gallup has studied performance at hundreds of organizations and measured the engagement of 27 million employees and more than 2.5 million work units over the past two decades. No matter the industry, size, or location, we find executives struggling to unlock the mystery of why performance varies from one workgroup to the next. Performance metrics fluctuate widely and unnecessarily in most companies, in no small part from the lack of consistency in how people are managed. This “noise” frustrates leaders because unpredictability causes great inefficiencies in execution.

Executives can cut through this noise by measuring what matters most. Gallup has discovered links between employee engagement at the business unit level and vital performance indicators, including customer metrics; higher profitability, productivity, and quality (fewer defects); lower turnover; less absenteeism and shrinkage (i.e., theft); and fewer safety incidents. When a company raises employee engagement levels consistently across every business unit, everything gets better.

To make this happen, companies should systematically demand that every team in their workforce have a great manager. After all, the root of performance variability lies within human nature itself. Teams are composed of individuals with diverging needs related to morale, motivation, and clarity — all of which lead to varying degrees of performance. Nothing less than great managers can maximize them.

But first, companies have to find those great managers.

Few managers have the talent to achieve excellence

If great managers seem scarce, it’s because the talent required to be one is rare. Gallup’s research reveals that about one in 10 people possess the talent to manage. Though many people are endowed with some of the necessary traits, few have the unique combination of talent needed to help a team achieve excellence in a way that significantly improves a company’s performance. These 10%, when put in manager roles, naturally engage team members and customers, retain top performers, and sustain a culture of high productivity.

It’s important to note that another two in 10 people exhibit some characteristics of basic managerial talent and can function at a high level if their company invests in coaching and developmental plans for them. In studying managerial talent in supervisory roles compared with the general population, we find that organizations have learned how to slightly improve the odds of finding talented managers. Nearly one in five (18%) of those currently in management roles demonstrate a high level of talent for managing others, while another two in 10 show a basic talent for it. Combined, they contribute about 48% higher profit to their companies than average managers do.

Still, companies miss the mark on high managerial talent in 82% of their hiring decisions, which is an alarming problem for employee engagement and the development of high-performing cultures in the U.S. and worldwide. Sure, every manager can learn to engage a team somewhat. But without the raw natural talent to individualize, focus on each person’s needs and strengths, boldly review his or her team members, rally people around a cause, and execute efficient processes, the day-to-day experience will burn out both the manager and his or her team. As noted earlier, this basic inefficiency in identifying talent costs companies billions of dollars annually.

Conventional selection processes are a big contributor to inefficiency in management practices; they apply little science or research to find the right person for the managerial role. When Gallup asked U.S. managers why they believed they were hired for their current role, they commonly cited their success in a previous non-managerial role or their tenure in their company or field.

These reasons don’t take into account whether the candidate has the right talent to thrive in the role. Being a successful programmer, salesperson, or engineer, for example, is no guarantee that someone will be adept at managing others.

Most companies promote workers into managerial positions because they seemingly deserve it, rather than have the talent for it. This practice doesn’t work. Experience and skills are important, but people’s talents — the naturally recurring patterns in the ways they think, feel, and behave — predict where they’ll perform at their best. Talents are innate and are the building blocks of great performance. Knowledge, experience, and skills develop our talents, but unless we possess the right innate talents for our job, no amount of training or experience will matter.

Gallup finds that great managers have the following talents:

• They motivate every single employee to take action and engage employees with a compelling mission and vision.

• They have the assertiveness to drive outcomes and the ability to overcome adversity and resistance.

• They create a culture of clear accountability.

• They build relationships that create trust, open dialogue, and full transparency.

• They make decisions based on productivity, not politics.

Very few people can pull off all five of these requirements of good management. Most managers end up with team members who, at best, are indifferent toward their work — or, at worst, are hell-bent on spreading their negativity to colleagues and customers. However, when companies can increase their number of talented managers and double the rate of engaged employees, they achieve, on average, 147% higher earnings per share than their competition.

Management talent could be hiding in plain sight

It’s important to note — especially in the current economic climate — that finding great managers doesn’t depend on market conditions or the current labor force. Large companies have approximately one manager for every 10 employees, and Gallup finds that one in 10 people possess the inherent talent to manage. When you do the math, it’s likely that someone on each team has the talent to lead — but chances are, it’s not the manager. More than likely, it’s an employee with high managerial potential waiting to be discovered.

The good news is that sufficient management talent exists in every company. It’s often hiding in plain sight. Leaders should maximize this potential by choosing the right person for the next management role using predictive analytics to guide their identification of talent.

For too long, companies have wasted time, energy, and resources hiring the wrong managers and then attempting to train them to be who they’re not. Nothing fixes the wrong pick.

A version of this article originally appeared on the HBR Blog Network.

Methodology

Gallup has a five-decade-long history of studying individuals’ talents across a broad spectrum of jobs, including numerous studies of managerial talents across a wide range of managerial positions. Talent-based assessments, consisting primarily of in-depth structured interviews and Web-based assessments, have been designed to predict performance, and large-scale meta-analyses have been conducted examining the predictive validity of the instruments. Thresholds in instrument scores are set in an effort to optimize the probability of selecting high performers. Such thresholds, examined across 341,186 applicants and 70 applicant samples from organizations using managerial assessments, were used to inform the percentage of individuals with high and basic managerial talent. These findings were then cross-validated in a random sample of Gallup panelists (n=5,157).

In estimating the percentage of variance in employee engagement that managers account for, multiple regression analysis was conducted across 11,781 work teams examining the relationship between various manager-related independent variables (team members’ perceptions of their manager, the managers’ engagement, and manager talent) and the team’s overall engagement as defined by Gallup’s Q12 instrument.

The financial value of manager talent was estimated using standard utility analysis methods that include the relationship between manager talent and financial performance, variability in financial performance across business units Gallup has studied, and the increase in manager talent from the average when an organization selects the top 10% of managers on a Gallup manager talent assessment.

Randall Beck is a former Managing Partner at Gallup.
Jim Harter, Ph.D., is Chief Scientist, Workplace Management and Wellbeing for Gallup’s workplace management practice. He is coauthor of the New York Times bestsellers 12: The Elements of Great Managing and Wellbeing: The Five Essential Elements. His research is featured in First, Break All the Rules, and he contributed the foreword to Gallup’s new edition of this groundbreaking bestseller.

March 25, 2014
Gallup http://www.gallup.com/businessjournal/167975/why-great-managers-rare.aspx
Gallup World Headquarters, 901 F Street, Washington, D.C., 20001, U.S.A
+1 202.715.3030

Traveling from Ortigas to Binangonan Rizal usually takes a little over an hour and a half. Yesterday, the trip took 45 minutes even in heavy traffic. You would need diplomatic plates to quickly navigate through Manila traffic. Our ride was better. We were picked up and brought back by an ambulance. We whizzed through crawling traffic.

That morning, I thought that this would be the highlight of a usually normal workshop. I was pleasantly mistaken.

The hospital is managed by a tandem of two very strong ladies; Dr. Conception sits as the Chairperson, Dr. Lei as the President. The two Doctors overflow with humor and were also very humble. Their leadership style is reflected on their team of nurses and doctors.

Their staff was great. So far, I have never met a group of participants that were all so friendly and nice. In our line of work, you come across groups of workshop participants composed of nice, not so nice and a few that are arrogant.

The BLH group was the exception. Every single one of them was so nice. They do not need to be told to help set-up the workshop, distribute food, print or remove the garbage. It was all voluntarily performed with a genuine smile.

We were so happy with the participants that we ‘almost’ forced them to book our FREE Power talks on Effective Execution and Dare to Believe. It was a pleasure to come back again and share our experience for free.

I pray that after our two day Leadership Development Workshop, the participants quickly gain the self-confidence and techniques on being even better managers and leaders.

If we have more service people in the country with their heart and dedication to serve, the Philippines will be a more progressive country.

Thank you once again to Dra. Conception, Dra. Lei and the team of Binangonan Lake View Hospital. Thank you Sir Joey for coordinating a successful workshop.

Looking forward to conducting our FREE sessions with them next month.

Who do you let inside the door?

Working as a consultant and executive mentor to various types of employees gives me an interesting view of human nature. Having worked with different nationalities for twenty years has been an eye opener.

We often encounter managers and executives complaining about certain individuals in their organization. In my former corporate life, this include me. We would highlight the poor work output of this person. Often, it is the behavior that we talk about. In my consulting career, I keep getting asked for suggestions on how to get rid of such employees. How can we find a better job fit for them elsewhere in the company. How about finding a better fit for them outside the company?

After the dust settles in these heated discussions, I would often say “why don’t we step back and look at the bigger picture?” The problem stems back further than the current challenges we face with them.

The problem stems all the way back to the recruitment process. Why did we let the person inside the company? Why is our selection and recruitment process so weak? We often hear reasons like; he seem like a fit at the start, we don’t have time to sift through hundreds of CVs, let’s give him more time to adopt to our culture.

Unless we inherited our problem employee, we have nobody to blame except ourselves. We assessed his CV. We were part of a meticulously designed interview schedule. We signed off to hire the person after a six-month probation.

For short, we have nobody to blame except ourselves. We let the person inside the door.

Southwest Airlines is the most profitable airlines in the U.S. When the airline started, they focused on recruiting former cheerleaders. The logic then was that “why hire demotivated people and spend a fortune trying to motivate them.” In the airline industry, the behavior of the flight attendant is a big factor. The passengers loved the energy and enthusiasm that the former cheerleading crew brought to the plane.

How does your recruitment process weed out the chaff from the grain? Do you hire people based on their behavior or their technical skills? What questions do you ask to understand how a candidate thinks of behaves? How much time do we spend trying to find the right candidate for the company?

David Jones, my forger manager and COO of NCB, keeps reminding us back then “We are only as good as our people.”

Who do you let inside your door?

I was fortunate enough to meet and consult with the owner of one of the largest shipping companies in the Philippines. The original scope of the consulting engagement was to review and improve their Account Receivables. They had so much outstanding collections that it was affecting their cash flow. This causes the company to take on loans to cover their payables. Millions of pesos loaned generates interest payments to banks.

To get an appreciation of their business, the conglomerate has over 40 companies under a holding company. These 40 company CEOs report to a group CEO. The group CEO is the child of the founder. Upon taking over the business, the group CEO had the business savvy to grow the business from one company to over 40.

Our second meeting revolved around how we will charge for our consulting service. We came in with a pricing based on estimated effort required to do the job. We charge, like most consulting firms in the world, on a per hour basis. The client proposed to pay us based on a percentage of the amount we will recover. My partners and I came back with a combination of both approaches.

In one of the meetings, the group CEO expressed frustration over their strategy and plans. Projects that were started ten years ago has not yet seen the light of day. Projects would inch forward when it had executive attention. Projects comes to a halt when the Group CEO needed to focus on more pressing matters.

The group CEO had requested that we change the focus of our consulting proposal. Their bigger challenge was the effective execution of their strategies and plans. The group CEO fully understood that success in resolving day to day challenges was largely dependent on how they execute projects designed to resolve them.

This became our scope of work for the next few months. Here is a summary of the lessons learned from the engagement:

1. When we assign projects to employees, we need to train them on project management fundaments. We trained over 40 managers on a one day program we called ‘Project Management for none Project Managers’.

2. For projects to succeed, the progress (or lack of) needs to be reviewed on a regular schedule. We requested the group CEO, COO and CFO to be part of the Steering Committee. These group of executives reviews project progress, gives guidance to the project and help resolve very difficult challenges.

3. Projects are created because there is a business benefit to it. A project will either increase revenue or reduce loss/expense.

4. Most projects fail because project managers do not spend effort identifying and preventing what can go wrong. They simply react.

There are a lot more learnings that our client picked up from the engagement. The four we listed above are just a few of them.

We always preach to our clients (or potential clients) that strategies are useless unless effectively executed. We would rather have a mediocre strategy properly implemented than a great strategy frozen in time.

If you believe that effective execution of your plans will help your company rise to the next level, feel free to reach out to us. We have a FREE 90 minute Power talk that will give you an insight on how we help companies execute their plans.

When you drop by McDonalds you will notice how quickly they serve customers. They have an automated ordering process. As soon as an order is placed, the kitchen has the order appear on a TV set that displays them in sequence. First in first out.

Quality service or product quality is pegged on consistency. If we only provide a great service every now and then, it is not really quality service. Consistent service quality is the result of many things. The people we hire, the training we provide, the quality of our management team and the process they follow.

When I was younger, I found processes to be limiting. They were boring and constraining. As I went up the corporate ladder, I started appreciating their value. This is specially more for companies that design processes to shorten the time it takes to service customers and reduce mistakes.

Processes, on it’s own, cannot survive the rigors of new employees and day to day work without the corresponding templates or visual cues.

Visual cues are powerful ways of triggering an action. For instance, an inbox and outbox on top of an employees table are visual cues. They visually tell the employees how much work they have done and how much are still pending.

Back to visual cues, I noticed this in McDonalds yesterday. I ordered a few things and the cashier thought that I was dining in. Before the food came, she placed the ketchup packs on a tray with a paper lining.

She was not sure if she asked me if I was dining in. The cashier asked me, with a little embarrassment, if I was dining in. With a smile, I told her that I ordered for take away.

Almost automatically, she removed the paper lining on top of the serving tray. I thought that it was odd. As I observed the other cashiers. I noticed the pattern. Dine in orders had paper linings on the tray. Take out orders do not have paper linings on the tray.

This way, nobody can ever make a mistake of mixing the preparation of the two types of orders. They have consistency in the way they prepare both types of orders because of visual cues.

Visual cues. How often do you use it at work or in your personal life?

Keep your mind sharp and open to new ideas, make it a point to read a book every month. It doesn’t matter if it is a novel, a biography, or a self-help book. What is important is that you develop the habit of reading. If you are one of the lucky ones who developed the habit at a young age then kudos to you. Keep it up! If not, it is never to late to start getting into reading.

If you are really not into reading books, then choose other kinds of reading material. There are many quality magazines out there with interesting articles. If you prefer to read on your tablet, there are thousands of e-books waiting to be discovered online. Why not go for audiobooks? With audiobooks you can listen on your commute to work or even while you are driving.

I personally go for self-help and motivational books. These books actually inspired me to create my own self-help book (which I hope is helping!). To make sure I remember what I read, I jot down the books’ titles on my electronic journal called Evernote. it also helps to jot down lessons learned from books I read.

As you progress in your career, never neglect to make time for reading. It is one of the best ways to “exercise” your brain and continually learn new ideas.

The gap between what an aspiring leader commits to and what he/she actually does makes a great difference in determining their success. The bigger the gap, the less likely the success. The smaller the gap, the more likely the success.

In my years mentoring both high potential employees and executives alike, successful mentees have a number of common traits for instance; great communication skills, are able to influence others, ability to execute plans, takes accountability, simplifies a complex discussion, humble and so on.

One very interesting trait of successful mentees, I noticed, is their focus on having a very small or non-existing gap between what they say they will do and what they actully do. When they commit an action to a specific date, chances are, they deliver. No need to chase them on their target dates. They take pride on delivering to their commitment.

Their superiors are able to rely on them because they deliver. They get things done. They are true to their word.

Their peers and subordinates can rely on their commitment. They will not leave you hanging. They deliver.

In this world of excuses, finger pointing and moving targets they stand out. They rise up the corporate ladder. They succeed.

How about you? How small is your gap?

Mentoring Project Managers of varying experience has shown me certain traits from highly successful ones. Project Managers are powerful agents of change. Leaders understand that success in transforming organizations is directly related to their ability to execute change programs. The rest of us call these ‘Projects’.

Projects have been given a bad rap through the years with all the failed projects that populate a company. If we look at a few successful transformation projects, we will notice a certain trend.

Great agents of change (or Project Managers) have the following competencies going for them:
1. Clear and concise communicators
2. Well organized
3. Makes sure that tasks have single accountabilities and specific deadlines
4. Great motivators
5. Holds others accountable to their deliverables
6. Focused at making timelines work
7. Holds a clear vision of the end game

On a side note, these are the same competencies we find in successful leaders. At the end of the day great project managers are great leaders. Imagine having a group of people, who do not work for you, work together and deliver a common goal.

Stepping back, most projects fail or gets delayed because Project Managers do not bother to think about what can go wrong with their project and prevent/mitigate them. Mediocre project managers, like mediocre leaders, simply react to events. They allow risks (problems that have not happened yet) to transition into issues (problems that have materialized).

With all the moving parts of a project, managing risks is probably one of the most important activity of a change agent. Regular assessment of what can go wrong and managing it before it materializes, is the mark of a truly great project manager.

It is not rocket science. It is simply listing down what can go wrong, how to prevent/mitigate it, assign a person accountable for the prevention/mitigation. If a project is important enough, a weekly assessment of project risk instantly gives the project a better chance at succeeding.

When a risk materializes into an issue, it creates a speed bump or even a road block to the project.

How about you? Do you manage the risks of projects or initiatives you own?