Getting People Into The Mix

Getting new talent on-board, oriented to the business goals and well integrated into the team requires more effort than most companies devote to these important elements of success.

Improved performance means achieving the enhanced rigor and commitment that comes from a well-integrated workforce.

38. A Cost/Benefit Talent Assessment Guide:

Tool Preview: A guide for assessing the talents of key players in your organization in reference to you company’s game plan.
Identify who can be coached and who can’t cut it in their current role. [Read Now]

39. Preparing New Hires To Hit The Ground Running

Tool Preview: Develop the ability to work with your key people to determine role responsibilities for new talent, including making sure your people understand the complexities of the roles, and how to ensure that the people you hire have the competencies to fulfill their roles and hit the ground running. [Read Now]

The “Big Sisters” Lend A Hand Story: Illustrates how including everyone who is relevant in solving a hiring crisis adds value in many ways.[Read Now]

40. Managing At The Boundaries

Tool Preview: Helps you focus your people on doing their work well, and on enhancing the flow of effort between people and across boundaries.
Success depends not only on the work of individuals, but also on the synergy that comes from reducing friction between the parts. [Read Now]

CEO as Leader and Coach:
Leading a privately held or family business is a tough job in the best of circumstances.
How one balances the complex roles of business executive, family leader and fallible human being can lead to vastly different outcomes.
The roles often have conflicting demands and may leave the CEO feeling, at the end of the day, that there’s no way to win.
While there are no easy answers, the CEO can change these circumstances with a deliberate, considered effort to lead in collaborative ways.
Leading in a way that draws others into the process as partners, rather than as dependents, optimizes your organization’s capabilities, and isn’t that what leadership is all about?
You can play the role of a player-coach productively on the company’s executive team. While it takes practice, these skills can be mastered.
Getting Oriented:
Use a simple business review process to create collaborative leadership.
Introduce collaboration with your executive team by initiating focused, ongoing conversations about their roles in the enterprise.
Emphasize dialogue and strategic listening as key conversational components.
Strategic listening, as differentiated from listening in general, occurs when you listen to conversations with an ear on more than specific content.
It involves listening to the implications of what’s said from the context of your company’s purpose.
What are the ramifications of people’s assumptions? Are you hearing hints of confusion or misaligned priorities?
These and similar questions can be addressed if you listen to the conversation within the context of your strategic intent.
These suggested dialogues strengthen the working relationships between the CEO and the executive team, and between and among the team members themselves.
They also create partnerships designed to enhance everyone’s thinking about the work.
Identifying key working relationships as thought partnerships creates opportunities to examine shared and individual thinking, understand how work products are passed across organizational boundaries, and engage in authentic conversations about the work.

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