San Francisco Bay Area Executive Coaching

Strategic Succession Planning: Assessing Competencies to Identify and Develop Future Leaders

Succession Planning

Are you working in a company or law firm where leadership consultants help leaders develop an effective competency-based succession plan?  Does your company or law firm provide executive coaching and leadership development for their valued leaders?

One of the most powerful questions you can ask is “Do we have an effective succession planning process to assess and develop future leaders?” Emotionally intelligent and socially intelligent organizations provide executive coaching and leadership development for exceptional leaders at all levels of the organization.

Identify and Develop Leaders

The quality of leadership at every level has a huge impact on everyday operations, and it determines every worker’s level of engagement.  People who have the right talent can accelerate their growth as long as each new job assignment helps them build their core capabilities and acquire new ones, provided they’re given timely and precise feedback.

The goal of Succession Planning is to identify a “talent pool” that can be developed in preparation for future responsibilities and considers not only past performance but the future potential of the individual.  Additionally succession planning anticipates changing business needs and prepares the talent pool to meet these future needs rather than replicating what the organization has right now.

Taking a pro-active approach to succession planning that incorporates these four processes is vital to an organization’s enduring success.

1. Align Competency Models with Business Strategy

What competencies must people exhibit to move the business forward today and in the foreseeable future? Competency Models define the critical behaviors needed for effective and superior individual and organizational performance. Simply defined, a competency is a set of related behaviors that (1) impact job performance; (2) can be measured against established standards; and (3) can be improved through training and development. When creating your Competency Model begin with your business strategy. As a company, what must you accomplish to be successful? What must your people accomplish?

2. Identify Critical Positions

Succession planning is not only for the top levels in the organization. In defining your succession planning strategy, identify your most important positions.

3. Assess Current Talent

Understanding the makeup of your current talent pool is critical. The goal is to evaluate the target group on a performance vs. potential matrix to pinpoint your talent pool.

4. Career Development

Many organizations create a succession plan, yet fail to develop, grow or retain the talent they have targeted. Communicate critical competencies for current and future roles. Provide growth opportunities such as job rotation, mentoring, education or skill-building activities. Identify opportunities for leaders to practice skills they will need in future roles.

Whether a company pays attention to it or not, the succession of people is often the difference in an organization’s sustainable success. Does your company have the requisite leadership bench strength to be competitive in the future?

Working with a seasoned leadership consultant and executive coach trained in developing Competency Models and Succession Planning and incorporating leadership assessments such as the Bar-On EQ-i and CPI 260 can help company leaders create an effective succession planning process. You can become a leader who models emotional intelligence and social intelligence, and who inspires people to become fully engaged with the vision and mission of your company or law firm.

I am currently accepting new succession planning and leadership coaching clients. I work with both individuals and organizations. Call 415-546-1252 or send an inquiry e-mail to [email protected].

 

Executive Coaching for Better Decision Making: Eliminate Decision Making Flaws

Executive Coaching for Better Decision Making

Are you working in a company or law firm where executive coaches help leaders make better decisions?  Does your company or law firm provide executive coaching and leadership development for their best and brightest leaders?

One of the most powerful questions you can ask yourself is “How can I make better decisions?” Emotionally intelligent and socially intelligent organizations provide executive coaching and leadership development for exemplary leaders at all levels of the organization.

Decision Making Flaws

Authors Sydney Finkelstein, Jo Whitehead and Andrew Campbell have studied how smart leaders make catastrophic decisions. In Think Again: Why Good Leaders Make Bad Decisions and How to Keep It From Happening to You (Harvard Business School Press, 2008), these experts show how the brain’s thinking processes can distort judgment

In studies of more than 83 flawed business and political decisions, the authors identify two major factors at play:
1. An individual or a group has made an error of judgment.
2. A decision process fails to correct the error.

Normally, when an influential person makes an error of judgment, the decision process will bring the error to light. Other people with different views will challenge the flawed thinking. The facts will be exposed and erroneous views corrected.

Complex decisions always involve personal interpretations and judgment. That’s what makes them difficult to get right. You need debate and consensus — but even with both, two important questions arise:
1. How do you know when you or those debating your premise are coming from a biased position?
2. How do you know when your consensus is nothing more than groupthink?

Working with a seasoned executive coach trained in emotional intelligence and incorporating leadership assessments such as the Bar-On EQ-i and CPI 260 can help company leaders learning how to become better decision makers. You can become a leader who models emotional intelligence and social intelligence, and who inspires people to become fully engaged with the vision and mission of your company or law firm.

I am currently accepting new executive coaching and career coaching clients. I work with both individuals and organizations. Call 415-546-1252 or send an inquiry e-mail to [email protected]

Executive Coaching for Decision Making: The Brain Science of Bad Decisions

Executive Coaching for Decision Making

Are you working in a company or law firm where executive coaches help leaders develop their decision making capability?  Does your company or law firm provide executive coaching and leadership development for high potentials and high performing and leaders?

One of the most powerful questions you can ask yourself is “Do I make good decisions?” Emotionally intelligent and socially intelligent organizations provide executive coaching and leadership development for decisive leaders at all levels of the organization.

Decision making is a critical function in our personal and professional lives. None of us would be in positions of authority without demonstrated abilities to discern issues and make good choices. Our reputations and livelihoods depend on it.

Each day, however, intelligent people make mistakes, with devastating consequences. Why do good leaders make bad decisions? How can we reduce our margin of error?

Our daily decisions are generally small and innocuous. Others are incredibly important, affecting people’s lives and well-being. The daunting reality is that smart people make enormously important decisions with the best information and intentions, and they sometimes go terribly wrong.

Even great leaders make bad decisions:
• President Kennedy is famous for the Bay of Pigs blunder.
• President Hoover failed to inflate the economy after the Wall Street Crash of 1929.
• Jurgen Schrempp, CEO of Daimler-Benz, led the merger of Chrysler and Daimler-Benz and was forced 10 years later to give Chrysler away in a private equity deal.
• Lee Kun-Hee, CEO of Samsung, pushed his company into a disastrous investment in automobiles.
• An Wang insisted on a proprietary operating system for his company’s personal computer, even after it was clear that the IBM PC would become the industry standard; his company is now history.

Authors Sydney Finkelstein, Jo Whitehead and Andrew Campbell have studied how smart leaders make catastrophic decisions. In Think Again: Why Good Leaders Make Bad Decisions and How to Keep It From Happening to You (Harvard Business School Press, 2008), these experts show how the brain’s thinking processes can distort judgment. Think Again identifies four errors of thinking and four safeguards to help us avoid bad decisions.

Some outcomes, of course, are the result of bad luck because we must take calculated risks. But there’s a big difference between flawed decisions based on erroneous thinking and calculated risks that turn out badly.

Neuroscientists and experts in decision making now understand more about how the brain works and how we are prone to several types of faulty thinking when faced with a set of circumstances that require a decision.

Working with a seasoned executive coach trained in emotional intelligence and incorporating leadership assessments such as the Bar-On EQ-i and CPI 260 can help company leaders learning how to become better decision makers. You can become a leader who models emotional intelligence and social intelligence, and who inspires people to become fully engaged with the vision and mission of your company or law firm.

I am currently accepting new executive coaching and career coaching clients. I work with both individuals and organizations. Call 415-546-1252 or send an inquiry e-mail to [email protected].

Executive Coaching for Ethical Leaders: The Ethical Mind

Executive Coaching for Ethical Leaders: The Ethical Mind

Are you working in a company or law firm where executive coaches help ethical leaders develop their leadership capability?  Does your company or law firm provide executive coaching and leadership development for high potentials and high performing and ethical leaders?

One of the most powerful questions you can ask yourself is “Do I have an ethical mind?” Emotionally intelligent and socially intelligent organizations provide executive coaching and leadership development for ethical leaders at all levels of the organization.

The Ethical Mind

Ethically minded individuals abstract crucial features of their roles at work and as citizens. They act consistently with these conceptualizations, striving for good work and ethical balance in micro to global environments.

Given a choice, most people would opt for life in an “ethical world,” in which everyone focused on doing “good work.” If everyone pledged to do the right thing, the world would surely be a better place. Four tools, while not sufficient for good work, are probably necessary:

1. A mission. Without a mission, you don’t know what you’re aiming to achieve. Try to develop a clear, actionable mission statement that embodies your values.

2. One or more good models.  Similarly, without models, doing the ethical thing is much harder. Of course, models can be positive (“I want to be like him”) or negative (“That’s exactly what I don’t want to be”).

3. An individual version of the “mirror test.” Look into the mirror and ask yourself if you like what you see. Do you approve of what you’re doing at work? It’s easy to deceive yourself, so get confirmation from people you respect.

4. A professional version of the mirror test. Look into the mirror and see if your colleagues are living up to their professional obligations. If not, what can you do to improve the ethical fiber of your profession?

Doing good work is easiest if you have proper support, both at home and at work. Your peers’ ethical influence is especially important. Peers should include your coworkers and demographic cohort.

Our leaders must also remind us of what it means to be a good worker. Without reminders, it’s far too easy to suffer an ethical relapse. The ethical mind is always vigilant.

Working with a seasoned executive coach trained in emotional intelligence and incorporating leadership assessments such as the Bar-On EQ-i and CPI 260 can help company leaders learning how to develop a more ethical mind. You can become a leader who models emotional intelligence and social intelligence, and who inspires people to become fully engaged with the vision and mission of your company or law firm.

I am currently accepting new executive coaching and career coaching clients. I work with both individuals and organizations. Call 415-546-1252 or send an inquiry e-mail to [email protected]

Executive Coaching for Respectful Leaders: The Respectful Mind

Executive Coaching for Respectful Leaders

Are you working in a company or law firm where executive coaches help respectful leaders develop their leadership capability?  Does your company or law firm provide executive coaching and leadership development for high potentials and high performing and respectful leaders?

One of the most powerful questions you can ask yourself is “Do I have a respectful mind?” Emotionally intelligent and socially intelligent organizations provide executive coaching and leadership development for respectful leaders at all levels of the organization.

The Respectful Mind

The respectful mind responds sympathetically and constructively to differences among individuals and groups. Those with respectful minds work beyond mere tolerance and political correctness; they develop the capacity for forgiveness.

Human beings naturally band into groups — and as soon as such groups form, members start to dislike one another. This pattern appears repeatedly in humans and other primates, for that matter.

Group members bond and define themselves relative to “outgroups,” which are typically characterized as inferior, dangerous or subhuman. Explanations for this tendency abound, with different scientific frameworks emerging over decades of exploration.

Currently, many look to evolutionary psychology for an explanation, though this sociobiological story is probably far too simple. Whatever the reason for outgroups, we must overcome our tendency to create them. With modern weapons, we make the world a dangerous place.

The solution is a relatively simple one: Cultivate respect for others. And while it does, indeed, seem like a tenet of Kindergarten 101, it is much harder to achieve. Teaching respectfulness in school is certainly a promising means of fostering tolerance, and many schools put it into practice by requiring students of various backgrounds to work on joint projects with shared goals. With this kind of foundation, students can continue to cultivate tolerance and respect when they graduate to the workplace and political realm.

Working with a seasoned executive coach trained in emotional intelligence and incorporating leadership assessments such as the Bar-On EQ-i and CPI 260 can help company leaders learning how to develop a more respectful mind. You can become a leader who models emotional intelligence and social intelligence, and who inspires people to become fully engaged with the vision and mission of your company or law firm.

I am currently accepting new executive coaching and career coaching clients. I work with both individuals and organizations. Call 415-546-1252 or send an inquiry e-mail to [email protected]

Executive Coaching for Innovative Leaders: The Creating Mind

Executive Coaching for Innovative Leaders

Are you working in a company or law firm where executive coaches help innovative leaders develop their leadership capability?  Does your company or law firm provide executive coaching and leadership development for high potentials and high performing and innovative leaders?

One of the most powerful questions you can ask is “Do I have a creative mind?” Emotionally intelligent and socially intelligent organizations provide executive coaching and leadership development for innovative leaders at all levels of the organization.

The Creating Mind

The creating mind goes beyond existing knowledge and syntheses to pose new questions, offer new solutions and configure new genres. Creation builds on one or more established disciplines. It requires an informed “field” to make quality, acceptable judgments.

Human creativity is at a premium. Businesses want employees who can develop a “new vision” and “extend existing product categories,” on top of completing their daily work.

It wasn’t always this way. In times past, society often feared or misunderstood creativity, dismissing it as a product of divine intervention or pure luck. Galileo was imprisoned during the Renaissance. Neither Johann Sebastian Bach nor Vincent Van Gogh were appreciated in their lifetimes. Freud, Darwin and Keynes received more than their share of ridicule.

Creative thinkers are no longer deemed exceptional; they’re the expected new hire. Psychologists have gained a better feel for what creativity entails and how people can develop it. Work by psychologists like Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi show that creativity is not a lone endeavor, but three elements that interact to foster lasting breakthroughs: 

1. An individual must master a discipline or area and constantly work at it.
2. Creativity requires a “cultural domain” that provides models, rules and norms to work with or against.
3. The creative individual needs opportunities to perform.

The key ingredient is a creative temperament (which need not be innate). Creative people are dissatisfied with their own work and that of others. They go against the grain; it may be painful, but the alternative is even more excruciating. They notice anomalies and try to explain them, rather than explain them away.

Generally, creative people are tough, tenacious and undeterred by hard work or failures. Even when they do succeed, they look over the horizon to find the next mountain to climb.

Working with a seasoned executive coach trained in emotional intelligence and incorporating leadership assessments such as the Bar-On EQ-i and CPI 260 can help company leaders learning how to develop a more innovative mind. You can become a leader who models emotional intelligence and social intelligence, and who inspires people to become fully engaged with the vision and mission of your company or law firm.

I am currently accepting new executive coaching and career coaching clients. I work with both individuals and organizations. Call 415-546-1252 or send an inquiry e-mail to [email protected]

Executive Coaching for Today’s Leaders: The Synthesizing Mind

Executive Coaching for Today’s Leaders

Are you working in a company or law firm where executive coaches help today’s leaders develop their leadership capability?  Does your company or law firm provide executive coaching and leadership development for high potentials and high performing leaders?

One of the most powerful questions you can ask is “Do I have a synthesizing mind?” Emotionally intelligent and socially intelligent organizations provide executive coaching and leadership development for today’ leaders at all levels of the organization.

The Synthesizing Mind

The synthesizing mind is adept at selecting crucial information from the copious amounts available, across disciplines. This requires the skill of pattern recognition. You must recognize important new information and skills and then incorporate them into your knowledge base and professional repertoire. You must discern what merits your attention and what to ignore, organizing this information in ways that make sense to yourself and others.

Great synthesizers are nothing new. Plato and Aristotle sought to organize all human knowledge, as did Augustine, Aquinas and others philosophical giants. Today, scholars like E.O. Wilson continue the tradition, which is more difficult and critical than ever before. (Human knowledge apparently doubles every few years.) Without synthesis, much of this knowledge is unusable.

The good news?

You can learn to be a better synthetic thinker. Start by understanding the different types of syntheses, such as narratives (perhaps the oldest form). Think of stories from the Bible, myths and legends, or finely crafted historical works.

Working with a seasoned executive coach trained in emotional intelligence and incorporating leadership assessments such as the Bar-On EQ-i and CPI 260 can help company leaders learning how to create a synthesizing mind. You can become a leader who models emotional intelligence and social intelligence, and who inspires people to become fully engaged with the vision and mission of your company or law firm.

I am currently accepting new executive coaching and career coaching clients. I work with both individuals and organizations. Call 415-546-1252 or send an inquiry e-mail to [email protected].