3. 3
Fewer Leaders with Less Down-Market Experience
US Census Department
Today’s retiring leaders
Their successors
4. 4
Tomorrow’s Leadership
• Your new leaders and leaders’ successors came of age in a strong market
• These leaders number nearly 15 million fewer than those they replace
• Experienced leaders are retiring in droves
• They take with them survival skills and lessons learned from the 80s
’90 ’92 ’94 ’96 ’98 ’00 ’02 ’04 ’06 ‘07
NAHB’s Home Builders Index
Seasonally adjusted80
60
40
20
5. 5
What Are Today’s Leaders Good At?
Drive for
Results
Ethics and
Values
Problem
Solving
Decision
Quality
Approachability
Action
Oriented
Customer
Focus
Perseverance
What’s
Missing?
6. 6
Establishes clear directions; distributes appropriate workload;
brings out the best in people
Cope w/ change; shift gears comfortably; decide & act without
having the total picture; handle risk
Launch creative ideas of others; facilitate brainstorming; project
how ideas will play out
Future-oriented; accurately anticipate future
consequences/trends; broad knowledge & perspective
Communicates an inspiring vision/sense of purpose; optimistic;
rallies support; inspires and motivates
Blends people into teams; creates strong morale; fosters open
dialogue; lets people be responsible for their work
Create climate where people want to do their best; empowers;
invites input
Difficult Markets Demand Different Skills
Dealing with Ambiguity*
Innovation Management*
Strategic Agility*
Managing Vision & Purpose*
Building Effective Teams*
* One of the Top 8 Skills: most critical AND most rare
Motivating Others
Directing Others
7. 7
Gallup says don’t waste your time —
focus on selection
Lominger says it depends. Not all
behaviors are equally difficult to learn
We say…
use both
Can You Develop Behavioral Skills?
Action oriented Easy
Motivating others Moderate
Patience Harder
Understanding others Hardest
8. 8
Do Behavioral Skills Drive Performance?
• Drive for Results
• Customer Focus
• Motivating Others
• Conflict Management
• Perseverance
Yes
• Listening
• Compassion
• Approachability
• Ethics & Values
• Humor
No
Answer: Some do and some don’t
9. 99
Implications
• Hire for behavioral skills that:
– Are hardest to learn
– Correlate to performance
• Develop behavioral skills that:
– Are easiest to learn
– Correlate to performance
10. 10
“Weather-proof” Critical Roles
Utilize star retirees or outside consultants to
coach leaders and supplement their skills
Create a mentoring program to transfer
knowledge before retirement
Use retiring stars as a template for new hires
Coaching
Mentoring
Success Profiles
Whether new hires or developing leaders, there are ways to ensure success:
10
11. 11
Addressing Skill Gaps: Create “Success Profiles”
• Define combination of behaviors and skills observed in your key
high performing retirees
• Model after your best
11
14. 14
Innovative Sources for New Talent
• Internal network
• New hires
• Build a database
• Become a known quantity of excellence
• Use Monster/Career Builder as network opportunity
• Mandate a sphere of influence
15. 15
Recruiting for the Business, Not Just the Position
• Define business competencies
• Translate into functional competencies
• Utilize Interview Architect to match candidate with required
competencies
• Test for additional validation
• Define culture and correlate with candidate persona and values
16. 16
Know What You’re Looking For
• Avoid generic job descriptions that focus on price-of-entry skills
– Often based on last employee (successful or not)
• Tie strategy and culture to job description
• Consider what kind of person suits the culture
– What qualities do high performers share?
– What will it take to meet short term objectives? (6mo–1yr)
– What would excellence in this position look like?
• Build on success profiles
17. 17
Implications for Hiring
• Once you know who you’re looking for, how do you select them?
– “Gut feel” is only 2% better than flipping a coin
18. 18
Why Not Hire For Experience
• May have learned wrong attitude/behavior from an inferior
competitor. Retraining is more difficult.
• Harder to change behavior than train for experience.
19. 19
Why Not Hire For IQ
• Intelligence doesn’t predict long-term success
• IQ is the “price of entry”
20. 20
Hiring the Right People
question
What makes the difference
in high performance people?
20
21. 21
Hiring the Right People
Common sense is twice as predictive of success as IQ
answer
21
IT IS NOT
• Experience
• Technical/functional Skills
• IQ
IT IS
• Attitude/Behavior
• EQ (common sense)
22. 22
Hiring the Right People
Why Hire For Attitude
22
• Attitude & behaviors get employees in trouble – not technical/functional skills
• Behavior is harder to change/train in most cases
• Can you name a company that hires for attitude?
conclusion
24. 24
Behavioral-Event Interviewing
Sample question, Dealing with Ambiguity:
• Tell me about a time when everything was up in the air…
• Tell me about a time when you took a significant personal risk…
26. 26
of adult learning is through experience
of performance success correlates directly to behavioral skills
70%
40-60%
What Have We Learned About Developing Adults?*
Behavioral skills get people in trouble
*Center for Creative Learning studies
27. 27
How to Develop Behavioral Skills
• Focus first on honest feedback and improved self-awareness
• Adults learn by doing (experience). They must be coached to try
new behaviors during daily interactions.
– The best way is stretch assignments (reaching out of comfort zone)
• Simply imparting new knowledge changes nothing
28. 28
Challenges for Supervisors
• Tend to hold on to marginal talent too long
– Don’t like confronting direct reports or giving tough feedback
• 30% of employees are blocked learners (resist all change)
• Out of 67 leadership skills, developing direct reports is dead
last in skill level
29. 29
Developing the Individual Isn’t Enough
• Organizational processes are needed to hold leaders accountable
for upgrading their talent
30. 30
Solutions For Upgrading Your Talent
• Create “success profiles” modeled after your best people
• Create an annual talent review process that requires you to force
rank your talent on both performance and potential
• Hire for behavioral skills, not just functional/technical skills
• Include behavioral skills in performance management
• Consider a 360° confidential feedback process for high potentials.
Require written plans targeting individual development.
• Provide coaching, mentoring and follow-up for high potentials
31. 31
Conclusions
• The tactical, strategic and economic impact of people systems
can be significant
• Focusing on your staff’s performance can be profitable and drive
revenue
– Excellence as an expectation
• Aligned people systems add to the bottom line
• Hire for attitude – train for skill
Editor's Notes
A Loop! Each feeds each
BRIDGE TO BREGG, RECRUITING
A core of talent is necessary to execute strategy
Recruiting must focus not just on skills, but on the big picture, with attention to team building
2004 US Olympic basketball team’s loss to Puerto Rico: All stars rather than team players
BRIDGE TO CHUCK, HIRING
Disney example
Harvard Study Results
Ask Sharrow friend in audience the question---have them prepared to give sample answer--probe
Without follow-up, only 17% of people make any change at all.
Omnilearn, an online coaching tool, is a great example of a follow-up process that holds people accountable for developing themselves
