The Leading from the Heart Workshop ®

The Leading from the HeartWorkshop® SSOE

[5] values-based leaders: Recognize the Best in Others vital integrities Values-based leaders recognize that each person’s talents are unique and that a person’s best opportunity for growth is in exploiting those strengths.

Learning your ABCs Vitality Curve 20-70-10

“Some think it’s cruel or brutal to remove the bottom 10% of our people. It’s just the opposite. What is brutal is keeping people around who aren’t going to grow and prosper. There’s no cruelty like waiting and telling people late in their careers that they don’t belong—just when their job options are limited and they’re putting their children through college or paying off big mortgages.” Jack Welch Jack: Straight From the Gut

Without specific, measurable, and well-communicated ranking criteria, employees will assume the worst about how differentiation decisions are determined. WARNING

Sales Company-Wide Top 20% Bottom 10%

Sales by Department

make way for younger and Two class action lawsuits charged Ford with using the ranking system to force older, white employees out of the company in order to more culturally diverse workers. Ford paid $10.5 million to settle the suits.

Minority and female employees sued Microsoft Corporation, alleging the company’s predominantly white male managers based forced ranking decisions on their own biases rather than merit.

Conoco employees asserted the company’s ranking methods discriminated against American citizens and older workers when it laid off geophysicists and other scientists.

dangerousconsequenceof differentiation is that we take for granted our so-called B players—while management glorifies superstars, and fires and replaces the weak, it ignores the majority in the middle themost

B “What really matters in organizational success is how the company utilizes the vast bulk of ordinary people, since that is what it will always have in greatest abundance.” Adrian W. Savage

“It’s not about the top; it’s about finding the right combination of people to accomplish the mission.” Dana Beth Ardi Human Capital Partner, JP Morgan Partners

“Some of the under performers may be the jewels in the rock that you have to mine and develop. Some of those people who fall in the middle ranges of top-grading can turn out to be your breakaway ‘A’ players once you put them in the right seats.” Dana Beth Ardi

What prevents our employees from doing what they do best? Usually, our emphasis on what they do worst.

When striving for improvement, most of us do the same thing: we take our strengths for granted, and concentrate all our efforts on conquering our weaknesses. The vast majority of organizations appear to believe that the best way for individuals to grow is to eliminate their weaknesses. So they instruct workers to recognize and focus on their deficiencies.

Gallop survey question: “At work do you have the opportunity to do what you do best every day?”  Strongly Agree (20 percent)

 Strongly Agree 38 percent more likely to work in business units with higher productivity 50 percent more likely to work in business units with lower turnover 44 percent more likely to work in business units with high customer satisfaction scores Source:Now, Discover Your Strengths Marcus Buckingham and Donald Clifton

When we force our employees to strive for proficiency in everything, we miss the opportunity for them to achieve greatness or mastery in something— in the one area where they may, indeed, achieve just that.

“Geeks are different from other people. If this comes as a shocking statement to you, you’re either oblivious to others or unusually charitable with your opinion about others.”–Paul Glen,Leading Geeks: How to Manage and Lead People Who Deliver Technology

GEEKSPEAK Just when you understand the difference between a megahertz and a megapixel, geeks start talking about link rot and packet jams.

Geeks resist mainstream or official authority structures. They respect technical knowledge far more than where a person resides on the organizational chart.

As leaders, we would prefer that geeks behave like the rest of us. But our geeks’ personalities, even if grating to some, are immaterial to their productivity.

GOOD to great

mas·ter Noun. An artist or performer of great and exemplary skill; a worker qualified to teach apprentices and carry on the craft independently.

Identifying each person’s strongest talents permits everyone the opportunity to contribute what they do BEST.

In business, we tend to attribute competence—or lack thereof—to an employee’s learning capacity. We further presume that what separates proficiency from competence is individual attitude and aptitude.

But we tend toconsider mastery out of reach, a level of attainmentreserved for those few who possess natural intelligence, good fortune, or a head start.

TEACHINGMASTERY Most business organizations still use the intelligence theory approach to learning.

Using a clock to measure individual progress places all responsibility for learning on the employee.

George Leonard, Mastery Mastery “is not really a goal or a destination but rather a process, a journey. It’s available to anyone who is willing to get on the path and stay on it—regardless of age, sex, or previous experience.”

vital integrities SIX • Accept challenges and take risks • Master both listening and speaking • Live by the values they profess • Freely give away their authority • Recognize the best in others • Have a vision and convince others to share it values-based leadership

The Leading from the HeartWorkshop®

The Leading from the Heart Workshop ®