For the past nine years, my annual presentation to students in The Ohio State University Fisher College of Business has started with the same words:
“Let me tell you why you should listen to the middle aged bald guy in front of you today.
I have personally hired over 2,000 people in my corporate career – fifty at the director or vice president level. I have coached over 100 people who have been promoted to executive roles in significant organizations. AND, I have been in the room twenty-two times when vice presidents have been fired.
What I tell you today can make a difference in whether you succeed or whether you stumble in your business career.”
After, I have scared them with these words, I go on to say, “when I was involved in firing a vice president, it was never about technical skills; it was always about one of the Five Essential Competencies of Leadership.”
So, let me share with my readers today what I share with the students. I have arrived at these Essential Five through my study of leadership research and my own common sense observations of success and failure in a variety of industries during the past thirty-three years.
The Essential Five:
- Emotional Intelligence (EI): In his landmark book (Emotional Intelligence) Daniel Goleman defines EI as self-awareness, self-regulation, self motivation, empathy and social skills. My observation: the executives I have enjoyed reporting to and working with understand themselves, their own behaviors and the impact of these behaviors on those around them. They know their dominant personality styles. They can “dial it up” or “dial it back.” They adopt a flexible style to be most productive based upon the situation at hand. They understand the emotional states of others and can motivate others to be more productive. In my executive coaching practice, I use the Birkman Method® to help executives identify their positive productive behaviors and their negative stress behaviors. Then, we work together to build a development plan that focuses on keeping them out of the stressful behaviors.
- Strategic Thinking: In the past several years, I have been engaged on several occasions to help the up and coming high potentials (HIPOs) in an organization. These individuals are often at a career point where they need to stop “doing” the work and start “thinking” about the future. My coaching questions are aimed at the basic tenets of strategic thinking: a) “What is your assessment of the current status of your marketplace?” b) “How would you assess your own company and department?” AND, of course, the most important question is: “As a leader in your organization, what is your point of view (POV)?” If a high potential leader does not have a point of view, then I really question their value to the company. True leaders think about what the future could be and have a definite point of view on how to attain that vision.
- Peer Relationships: Over the 25 years that I was directly involved in hiring and firing, I developed an informal gut check to measure leadership performance. When I mentioned the name of a current executive, I expected to hear, “I think she is doing a great job” or “I really like working with him.” If I did not hear these words, I began to question whether the leader was effective. On the flip side — when I was involved in firing an executive and no one complained — I knew we had taken the right action. The truth is this – in 20 of my 22 executive terminations, I heard these words: “it was about time.” Conclusion: people know who the team players are; they want to work with them; they want to avoid the people who are toxic. Building effective peer relationships can make or break executive success.
- Building a Productive Team: as an HR professional, I will confess a bias toward people development. I will admit that this is an important focus for me. I believe it is also an important focus for all organizations. A productive executive must be able to hire good people, provide good coaching and feedback, hold people accountable and deliver results for the organization. I want to strongly emphasize that last point. Ultimately, it is about results. I will argue that the achievement of results in the short term and the run long can be best achieved by having a good team in place. I often ask my executive coaching clients, “What skills and behaviors do you want to develop in your direct reports over the next 18 months?” I then recommend the LOMINGER Development Planner as one of the best tools to use in this process. Productive executives build good talent for their own department and they build good teams that can help the organization in the future.
- Delegation: This is most common area of struggle for busy executives; especially when they first start the climb the career ladder. Leaders cannot grow themselves unless they can give their tasks away to others; first, in pieces; then in chunks. Two years ago, I had a breakthrough with an executive during one of our coaching sessions. The executive had read the pages in the LOMINGER Development Planner on how to build delegation skills. He said to me, “the book says that executives skilled in delegation learn to give away whole projects; I tend to give away step 1 through 3 and then take the work back to do step 4 and 5 myself. I will not get better at delegation until I give away the whole project and then hold my direct reports accountable for the results. I was very proud of this executive – he “got” it. By giving away more “project” work he could take on more “strategic” work with his peers. He could develop his direct reports AND he could focus on the important work with his peers.
So, to recap: The Five Essential Competencies of Leadership are: Emotional Intelligence, Strategic Thinking, Peer Relationships, Building a Productive Team and Delegation. How do rate on these essentials? Will you be an executive who succeeds and grows? Or, will you be an executive who fails and stumbles?
Richard Needles is president of Productive People Strategies, LLC; an executive coaching and human resources consulting firm. He held executive level HR roles for over twenty years prior to founding the firm in 2006.